It's damn fascinating to watch a fully matured specimen of the postmodern warrior caste - fierce, yet coddled - flare out and burn as slowly and painfully as Hillary Clinton in the closing days of her primary run.

For all her never-give-in, win-at-all-costs thunder, she's smacked into the soft reality of American democracy: Seemingly puffy and insubstantial as a Chee-to, the steely center of the system becomes apparent as the last desperate option has gone to turf. It's win or lose. And, most of the time, the quietly desperate masses, poking at their voting machines... rule.

Hillary's one, flailing shot at overturning destiny is intervention by the super delegates. If she can convince them of Obama's "inelectability", she believes, there is still an outside chance for her to become the first American President to look truly smashing in heels.

But that option's darkside is it's inescapably bust-out seaminess. If they fall her way and hand over the candidacy, this will be victory by proxy, and mom-and-pop Democrats won't be pleased that their horse is picked via backroom chumminess and deal-making. A super-delegate reversal of Obama's narrow primary win is the opposite number of his populist appeal, and few in the hinterland see the party's insiders and hacks - as well as our prostituted Congressional delegation - as adding up to anything more than a Pinkie-Ring Mafia, a clearinghouse for contract skim, hush money and whore wrangling.

This morning, both Rahm Immanuel and erstwhile candidate John Edwards called Obama the presumptive Democratic candidate. Appearing on "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, Edwards gently prodded Clinton, saying he bowed out in late January - before the much-vaunted Super Tuesday - because he felt it was good for the party.

The superdelegates are Hillary's only hope. For the rest of us, hope rests on super delegates, including the still-balky Edwards, to declare for Obama now, and end this pointless tap dance.

 

 

It's mid-spring and they're feelling the chill in Dumboland.

I apologize if someone else has posted this from today's The Politico but a few choice tidbits from a John Bresnahan story can't go unnoted: 

In a piece published in Human Events, the Republicans’ onetime captain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, warned his old colleagues that they face “real disaster” on Election Day unless they move immediately to “chart a bold course of real reform” for the country.

And in a closed-door session at the Capitol, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-Okla.) told members that the NRCC doesn’t have enough cash to “save them” in November if they don’t raise enough money or run strong campaigns themselves.

I smell write-off. The Grand Old Party is burdened with a candidate who’s in his ’70s and thoroughly bereft of anything like “hope and change”. McCain’s major misfortune is that the Mideast War Project sticks to him like bad putty on an old Chevelle. Add to that his economic recovery ideas offer crumbcake to restive peasants - and he starts walking and quacking like a loser.

Unless there is a mastodon skeleton in his closet, or some terror disaster is engineered between now and early November, this election - primary and general - belongs to Obama.

Sooo... the Big Elephant holds off, hoping the amateur will bobble the ball by 2012. Or, in a worse-case scenario, look forward to decades-long hibernation a'la 1932. At any rate, this year Bush has sunk them good. They're fresh out of ideas.

Why blow the bank on a bad deal?

Stap her to the gurney, poke her with the pin.

Time's UP!

MSNBC political analyst Chuck Todd last night noted something crucial: Even in the unlikely event Democrat insiders certify for Hillary the Michigan and Florida "victories", she would still be short 100+ assigned delegates. Added to that would be a shortfall of more than 150,000 popular votes; fundamentally, they don't count for much in the primary race, but are a prime indicator to the superdelegates of momentum, an overused term but key component in this election year.

Even if she won all of them, the remaining primaries don't entail enough delegates to overtake that count. Her only hope would be to convince the superdelegates that they should give her their votes - on the basis of her overall unsuccessful primary campaign.

Unlikely. It's over.

But it may take a spritz of Easy-Off and a spatula to scrape her out of this race. All indications are that she'll stay in at least until the last Montana voter stumbles out of a booth June 3. Hillary has the never-say-die / screw-everybody-else grit that took the family to many, many victory parties - and quite a few out-cross-the-county-line blowjobs.

But you never know. Pat Buchanan last night called her Indiana victory speech a "valedictory." And he noted something unmistakable to anyone watching: Standing behind her on the podium, going through sober motions with no discernible enthusiasm or spirit, Bill knew the end had come, too.

She could call it quits any day now.

 

 

 

One fascinating element of the election in general and last night’s primary coverage in particular is the saga of how the American press - once the standard for news-gathering institutions everywhere, once the fearless champion of social crusades and Watergate revelations – has become so ingrown, so irrelevant, so corrupt.

American media is today little more than a flack operation for the power elites, selling us armed intervention abroad and gummy, obsolete, kiss-ass social programs here at home. Throughout this corrupt mutation, the mainstream media has managed to cosset itself in a snotty cocoon of arrogance, fostering in itself and attempting to instill in the rest of us the grandiose delusion that the fifth estate is the master interpreter of all reality – indeed, the fabricator of reality itself (whenever truth becomes… inconvenient).

The media’s crisis is not so much that it is detached from its audience (it has) – but that it has detached itself from the real world.

And no news outlet so epitomizes this decay more than Fox News.
 
One advantage to Rupert Murdoch and his gutter-spawn empire: If we want to know what the neoconservatives are thinking (and maybe setting us up for), we can watch Fox News. Albeit from a entry-level, wannabe-ass-kicker perspective, the network functions as a 24/7 fireside chat from the air-breathing detritus calling shots inside the Beltway.
 
Here’s the mission in three little words: fear more fear. Anytime News Corp. has the uneasy impression that Americans may regain their senses, it fills its airwaves with breathless folktales about World War V, anthrax Coke, mushroom clouds and churlish mammals in grandma’s panty drawer. When its spunky pundits aren’t hot on the trail of phantom Islamofascists – or, more likely, shoeless-joe-wino “terror cells” - we get an endless play-by-play of Britney’s awkwardness handling sippy cups.
 
And the lineup… the lineup:
 
Where the hell did they dig up Sean Hannity? He’s the Leo Gorcey of the Far Right – comical non sequiturs and stumblebum delivery soured only by a sinister, repellent nature common to brute sociopaths. His one distinguishing characteristic is that he’s the only guy in television dumber than Glenn Beck. Next up is Geraldo Rivera. Well… let’s see… Geraldo’s made a decades-long career out of mustache wax and a troublesome tendency to careen into one self-triggered catastrophe after another. He burrows into Al Capone’s vaults… then apologizes to viewers for piddling away two precious hours of their lives dredging up a mountain of rubble and some old pop bottles. He helps legitimize the hideous Satanic Ritual Abuse travesty… then makes on-air amends for his part in crushing the lives and families involved. He and Bill O’Reilly erupt in a screeching bitch-out… then kiss and make up. Through it all, Geraldo maintains his chip-on-the-shoulder, “macho de newsman” preen. He seems to invoke a kind of Universal Bedwetter’s Prerogative: As long as he apologizes for a mess he’s made, he MUST be forgiven.
 
And then there’s O’Reilly himself. Wow. What about Bill O’Reilly? If karma truly was the gentle guidepost of the cosmos, this dunderhead would be chewing up his own cardboard bedding in a lab-rat cage. Admittedly, his nightly “I, Dumb-Ass” manifestoes are bracing in a whorehouse-philosophy sort of way. But then he rips into teenage sexual abuse victims, gives his cold-reading imprimatur to every scrap of Likud Party propaganda skittering across his desk, creepily wishbones sleazy sex stories… He… exists. O’Reilly is the degraded, terminal species of TV talking head - a shriveled evolutionary vestige slipping off the ass-crack of broadcasting.
 
Fox News and its parent company helped mutate the news business into what it is today. Instead of observable fact, we get spin. Instead of reporting, we get chit-chat. We can no longer make our own decisions based on information provided us. We must be bombarded with the corrupt interpretations of self-proclaimed “experts”. Reality is, after all, whatever our masters say it is.
 
Not that Fox News lacks junk-food returns. I mean, full disclosure: If Anna Nicole’s saintly, white-trash visage appears shrine-like on a Denny’s sneeze guard, dammit, I wanna know. But news-as-propaganda is a key component of the new American Imperium that has brought this country its greatest strategic disaster abroad and disintegrating civil liberties at home. We have regressed to a politically primeval state - a spiteful banana republic gunned up with nuclear hardware. We are an international drive-by waiting to happen. How very fashionable. How very new millennium. How very… Fox News.
 
Thanks, Rupert. Thanks, guys.

I guess everything looks dark when your country's Mideast policy is stone blind and stuck in a tar pit at the bottom of a coal mine at midnight during an Arctic winter. Oh... and the sun just flared out. This from today's edition of Stars & Stripes:

"On Sunday, 5,500 sailors and Marines left San Diego on a six-ship convoy, though no one would say where they were headed, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune...

Led by the amphibious assault ship Peleliu, the convoy comprises the amphibious ships Pearl Harbor and Dubuque, the cruiser Cape St. George and the destroyers Halsey and Benfold, the paper wrote..."

Probably just out to grab a few phonecam snaps in Costa Rica... maybe romp on a Diego Rivera beach in taupe bikinis and sunblock. But, dammit, you never know. That second aircraft carrier task force arrived last week in the Persian Gulp - I mean, GULF! And Adm. Mullen is talkin' smack.

Are we soup yet?

Meanwhile, the essential Glenn Greenwald over at Salon.com totes up just how odious turncoat Joe Lieberman's Congressional footprint has become:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

Have a wonderful day!

 

 

Now, I’m willing to admit that a McCain-Rumsfeld ticket may not look good on paper. Or parchment, wax tabula… child’s slate. Soapstone. But you must admit – it’s the kind of brainless, ballsy stunt that attracts Americans like blow-flies to a dog pile.

Rumsfeld, for Ford on through two-thirds of Bush II, was a dependable yes-man, the chronically in-character gunfighter who, in reality, was the biggest bobble-head on any President’s trophy shelf - little more than a keg-party conversation piece in a well-tailored suit, however gruff and flinty his pronouncements. But make no mistake, sock-puppet or not, his violent geopolitical strategy was simple: Just do it. And with that, he was a good fit for our American battleware industry, an attribute that’s always popular in the halls of power. When he backhanded a front-line soldier with the cut-off, “you go to war with the army you have” – he didn’t mean that the administration had cheaped-out on military spending. It’s just that the multi-billion-dollar spending hadn’t added up to much military building.

In summary: He’s PERFECT for a millennial GOP second banana.

But such hyper-reaction may be unnecessary. Remember: the GOP is facing the Democratic Party, which over the past four decades has habitually reasserted itself as a kind of anti-Midas: Everything it touches turns to crap. Oddly, this bumbling nature is rarely due to incompetent initiatives of its own, but more to the party’s inability to engage entrenched power, and thereby provide an alternative to the GOP’s traditional politicking for high-octane “special interests”.

For instance, neither of our dominant parties can afford to monkey around with the status quo where money is concerned. We Americans have slept while over the past two decades a new paradigm has crept into the American mechanism – one which guarantees the financial industry win-win providence. Those tricky little corkscrews have sent the balance of national wealth gushing ever upward, while the rest of us are left with trickle-down refuse of an increasingly asymmetrical economy. Straight talk about the details – like adjustable interest rates – is avoided, since it might shine light on these features’ more loansharkish origins.

Another dread trip-wire – in fact the biggest in this election season – is our emergent empire, and how to evade its relentless appetites. Support for the war hasn’t bubbled above thirty percent for years now, but that doesn’t stop the battlewagon sailing on.

Within our crusades, there are some uncomfortable truths of which we dare not speak.

With the exception of some third tier warfare in Afghanistan, America has spent much of its post-9/11 passions battling or harassing Israel’s enemies, and the diversion that took our soldiers’ lives and taxpayers’ treasure to that place is the real legacy of the Iraq War, and the basis for our relentless hostility toward Iran and Syria.

The impending war with Iran is the lurking menace just beyond the horizon, and because its execution has the imprimatur of our establishment lobbies and elites, it continues to be relentlessly overlooked by our degraded media. But there is a growing, uneasy realization that if we continue to deliberately ignore him sitting restively in the parlor, this particular 800-pound silverback gorilla soon might mistake us for a used tire.

Nevertheless, the Democrats are constrained proposing remedies to our current debacle because of their own tight affiliation with the interests relentless driving our “democracy-building” or “war on terror” or… whatever it’s being called this week. In fact, for some Democrats, there isn’t enough damn saber-rattling.

Hillary, stuck with that Clintonian, loosey-goosey approach to the truth, couples fealty to the Israel Lobby with foreign-policy proposals reflecting all the temperament and self-restraint of Lizzie Borden. “Realists” would say her threat to “annihilate” Iran lacks nuance… and sophistication; the rest of us see a screeching banshee’s finger hovering over the big red Strangelove button… and gravity is weak.

On the economic front, her scattershot proposals so far provoke little confidence. As an example, her plagiarized gas-tax holiday idea provides little more than snack-food reprovisions for a bulimic economy now chucking its way though a formidable, scary purge cycle.

The only elective to warlike, feudal America – an alternate choice craved by the “everyday” voter – is Barack Obama, who’s hope and change message has resonated in this crisis-weary nation. He has answered every silly provocation with measured, thoughtful responses that throw off-balance a media accustomed to sound-bite summation. (Both Hillary and Obama come off as the studious types, who even stayed to do homework Friday nights.) And if calmness is a virtue, Obama is a saint. Calling him unflappable is gross understatement: If he were any more mellow, he’d be Camembert.

He has so far weathered the storms wrought by his own occasional verbal missteps, and the embarrassing jackass Jeremiah Wright is more and more identifiable as everyman’s crazy uncle, raving at invisible termites in the basement. Has Obama taken the best shots? Really: It’s not as if he's been busted with a carload of kiddie porn, or has connections to Mexican dogfight rings.

But he the serious fire he faces is over his inability to close the deal, because he seemingly refuses to take out Hillary for her war-hawking and nuclear jive talk. Doing so, Obama in danger of being this year’s Ned Lamont, discovering to his sorrow that by softening his stance on what brought him to prominence in the first place – a dead-set opposition to the Iraq War in particular and our country’s corrupt Mideast Project in general – he guarantees himself irrelevance during his campaign and rejection come election day.

With voter attention skimmed off by the Indiana / North Carolina primaries this week, things are momentarily quiet in Camp McCain, but that placid, self-confident facade may be deceptive. If there’s any juice at all in his brain trust, anxiety is afoot on the Smack Talk Express.

The GOP candidate-in-waiting will be the oldest president to date if elected. His personal comportment leaves much to be desired. Dressed up in macho sweetness and chubby-cheeked smiles, he comes off instead as an angry, confrontational chipmunk, blowing his stack at the slightest provocation. Few who witnessed it can forget him slicing into Maria Shriver on the night he threw in the towel in 2000.

On the economy, his fix-its entail mere duct-tape patchwork, and his understanding is directed by a base that likes its real jobs offshore and its degraded domestic workforce straight through the fence. Foreign policy? …Schmoreign policy! Land the jarheads and smoke the ragheads... Let God sort it out. And if Russia makes a peep over Backassistan joining NATO – we’ll beach some units in Putin’s front yard. Simple.

Since poll after poll indicate Americans are kinda, shucks, fed up with this eight-year-old garbage, Republicans will have a fight on their hands in the general election regardless of who emerges intact from the Democrats’ cannibal luau.

And this is the one year in which McCain’s mythic standing with the press may not be enough to squeeze him through. Reporters have a habit of turning themselves into dinner whores for a few of his in-flight table scraps, and even outwardly lefty outfits like NPR are capable of falling prey to McCain's apparent shoot-from-the-hip charm – submitting the kind of fawning puff pieces usually reserved for EU essays on Islam. But press credibility is at an all-time low, and there are indications that media endorsement may indeed backfire, turning a fully vetted favorite into a dead-fish pariah in the space of a blog column.

Sooner or later, he’s going to be hit in the face with that immigration amnesty cow-pie, and he can’t reveal before election day that his seeming flip-flop to border tough-guy is as tattered as our Sonoran chain-link. After all, his constituency favors a kind of universal job orientation that would take our new employables from car trunk to rudimentary ESL chalk talk to 12-hour workday within one rotation of the earth. Profit lines must be steep and wage rates cheap – and no “feedback” from public-service toadies.  (Anyone else suggesting we may live to regret mammoth-scale immigration-without-assimilation can always be shut up with the all-purpose charge of “racism.”)

He also has problems on the supporter front. He’s slumming for endorsements from some real specimens, including Texas pulpiteer John Hagee, a gay-baiting, Islam-hating “reverend” who makes Jeremiah Wright look like Father Damien of Molokai. His “church” is little more than a half-baked cult of self-worshipers pining for the day they can look down from Glory on the wretched “left-behinds” blistering in the fires of damnation. This creepy dogma took its backwoods, snake-handler hoodoo to demographic big-ticket on ingress of a bestseller series that tapped into readers’ self-righteous desire to disdain sin while sadistically envisioning unspeakable torments for sinners. If hypocrisy could be jugged raw and sold, this would be it.

Truth be known, McCain is probably kicking himself in his left-behind for ever hooking up with this honkey witch doctor.

If the GOP can’t upset the elites, and if they’re left fronting a candidate with more defects than a ’73 Pinto, there is only one realistic option: Bite the bullet and go for it! Toss all reason aside and plant itself as what the balance of its members envision it to be anyway: the party of Full Martial Aristocrats. We rule and conquer, and grant you peasants only penny trinkets in our exclusive prosperity. Be happy or be gone!

It’s just crazy-stupid enough to work. And with such a desperate swerve into the land of pure dumb luck, there’s only one real candidate for running mate who comes to mind. In pure Nixonian terms - he’s tanned, he’s fit and he’s ready: Donald Rumsfeld.

Yep. That’s right. Say it!

He’ll be BACK!

Part II:  Finding Our Inner Curley