Tom Hayden agrees with me that Hillary! is deliberately sabotaging Obama’s campaign.
I may have to rethink my position now.
Are all of Hillary’s negatives really already “all out there”, as Lanny Davis spins? Rich Lowry thinks not:
The problem with this (and I’m more sympathetic to Hillary than Obama at this point) is that Hillary’s negatives aren’t “all out there.” She’s perfectly capable of creating new, damaging ones, as she did with the Bosnia story. Plus, Bill is always a wild card, in terms of what he’s going to say, what is going to be revealed about his business dealings, etc.
It actually goes beyond that. We don’t have to speculate on new revelations for Hillary to have big problems if she somehow snatches the nomination from Obama.
Throughout the nineties, the classic Clinton tactical response to discussion about their corruption or criminality was to say “that’s old news.” And it often, even usually, worked, given the degree to which the press was in the tank for them. And that will surely be their response if anyone brings up Cattlegate, the White House travel office, the missing billing records, the FBI files, “who hired Craig Livingstone,” Whitewater in general, etc. And we can be assured that these things (and particularly their abuse of women) will come up, because the Slick Grope Vets for Truth have pledged to make them come up if she gets the nomination. I assume that they’ve been keeping their powder dry during the nomination process, both because they want any revelations they have to have maximum impact in the fall, when people are paying attention, and because they wouldn’t have much effect on Democrat voters.
But if she does get the nomination, and Gennifer, Kathleen et al do make an issue of their treatment at the hands of both Bill and Hill, as I’ve written before, I don’t think the “it’s old news” gambit will fly, partly because it’s become too old:
One of the tactics that the Clintons used to use to deflect bad news was to leak something on a Friday afternoon, and hope that it would die down after the weekend. Then if anyone brought it up, they’d dismiss it as “that’s old news.”
Given how ignorant much of the public remains of all the Clinton scandals that they successfully buried in the nineties, I wonder if this “old news” tactic will continue to work if things like Travelgate are brought up as issues in a 2008 campaign. I’ve already noted that Hillary will have her own “Slick Grope Vets” problem if she runs.
…It occurs to me that the “that’s old news” defense may not work, particularly with the “Slick Grope Vets For Truth,” at least based on the Kerry experience. After all, what could be older news than his congressional testimony after Vietnam? Yet it did become a potent campaign issue.
Many of today’s young voters have no memory of the Clinton scandals. An eighteen-year old was only eight years old during the Lewinsky saga, and a toddler during the early scandals and Whitewater. Even today’s twenty-somethings weren’t paying that much attention at the time, and even if they were, they always got the Clinton spin in the MSM, not the vast amount of information available via the Internet and talk radio (and to a lesser degree, Fox News). So for them, it won’t be old news, or at least, it will be a revelation of history, of which they were previously unaware.
And this time, with the blogosphere, the MSM won’t be able to help her spin her way out as it did in the nineties. No, I don’t think that Hillary’s negatives are “all out there.” We can expect a massive replay, and reminder, if she gets the nomination, and to a lot of people, the “old news” will become new news, or more simply, news.
I really don’t want to know about Eliot Spitzer’s s3xual proclivities.
I’m just glad that he’s no longer any threat to become president. And the fact that New York elected him governor (and Hillary! and Chuck Schumer Senators) is one of the many reasons that I’d never want to move to that state.
Frank J. says that too much is expected of us. I liked this comment:
Hell yea! Why do we always have to be the “reasonable” ones; for once I just want to forget about the real issues, the constitution, and logic, and just vote for someone who looks like me, or has the same plumbing.
Hey, you can do it. Just become a Democrat.
This one, too, from a “Peg C.”:
Let’s see: Blacks vote 95% – 5% for Obama, women must be voting something like 60 – 40 for Hillary (not sure but every idiot female I work with is for Hillary), white Dem men (yes, I know – oxymoron) are voting 45 – 55 for Obama…and white men are the racists and sexists?? Only in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world…
Unfortunately, a lot of people reside in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world.
Frank J. says that too much is expected of us. I liked this comment:
Hell yea! Why do we always have to be the “reasonable” ones; for once I just want to forget about the real issues, the constitution, and logic, and just vote for someone who looks like me, or has the same plumbing.
Hey, you can do it. Just become a Democrat.
This one, too, from a “Peg C.”:
Let’s see: Blacks vote 95% – 5% for Obama, women must be voting something like 60 – 40 for Hillary (not sure but every idiot female I work with is for Hillary), white Dem men (yes, I know – oxymoron) are voting 45 – 55 for Obama…and white men are the racists and sexists?? Only in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world…
Unfortunately, a lot of people reside in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world.
Frank J. says that too much is expected of us. I liked this comment:
Hell yea! Why do we always have to be the “reasonable” ones; for once I just want to forget about the real issues, the constitution, and logic, and just vote for someone who looks like me, or has the same plumbing.
Hey, you can do it. Just become a Democrat.
This one, too, from a “Peg C.”:
Let’s see: Blacks vote 95% – 5% for Obama, women must be voting something like 60 – 40 for Hillary (not sure but every idiot female I work with is for Hillary), white Dem men (yes, I know – oxymoron) are voting 45 – 55 for Obama…and white men are the racists and sexists?? Only in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world…
Unfortunately, a lot of people reside in Nora Ephron’s fantasy world.
Do the superdelegates mind if Obama loses? If not, then it makes Hillary!’s uphill battle even steeper.
Here’s more on Barack Obama’s crazy uncle and aunt, whom he couldn’t choose.
Right? I mean, you can’t choose your relatives.
What? They’re not relatives? He chose them?
Well, so what?
Stop asking questions, and let me eat my waffle.
[Update after 10 PM EDT]
Here is a link roundup about Obama’s terrorist friends.
Which is quite ironic, given that Obama’s entry in the race will now almost certainly presage a repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention, except that it will instead be in the mile-high city.
[Thursday morning update]
Is Obama’s “official campaign blogger” a Marxist?
I certainly wouldn’t be shocked. It’s all of a pattern. It’s that new politics, doncha know?
The day after her decisive win in Pennsylvania, Hillary! has picked up a previously uncommitted superdelegate.
We’ll see if this is just a single event, or the start of a tipping point. As Victor Davis Hanson notes (and I’ve been pointing out for months), the Dems are in horrid position for November (one in which they put themselves, largely because of dumb primary rules, an idiotic decision by Howard Dean to not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates, and their decades-long indulgence and encouragement of identity politics).
The Democrats are tottering at the edge of the abyss. They are about to nominate someone who cannot win, despite vastly out-spending his opponent, any of the key large states — CA, NJ, NY, OH, PENN, TX, etc. — that will determine the fall election. And yet not to nominate him will cause the sort of implosion they saw in 1968 or the sort of mess we saw in November 2000.
Hillary won’t quit, since she knows that Obama, when pressure mounts, is starting to show a weird sort of petulance, and drops the “new politics” for snideness. And at any given second, a Rev. Wright outburst, an Ayers reappearance, another Michelle ‘never been proud’ moment, or another condescending Obamism can cause him to nose dive and become even more snappy.
They won’t be able to force Hillary out since she still has strong arguments — the popular vote may end up dead even, or even in her favor; while he won caucuses and out-of-play states, she won the critical fall battlegrounds — and by plebiscites; she is the more experienced and more likely to run a steady national campaign; she wins the Reagan Democrats that will determine the fall election; and by other, more logical nomination rules (like the Republicans’ fewer caucuses, winner-take-all elections) she would have already wrapped it up. There seems something unfair, after all, for someone to win these mega-states and end up only with a few extra delegates for the effort. The more this drags out, the more Obama and Hillary get nastier and more estranged from each other — at precisely the time one must take the VP nomination to unite the party.
If Obama is perceived to have been denied the nomination by the party elders because he is “unelectable” (which his followers will interpret to mean, too black, too “progressive,” etc.) there will be days of rage in Denver, and lot of potential Democrat votes sitting at home in the fall. The best hope that they have at this point is for Obama to continue to lose the rest of the primaries, in which case Hillary can at least claim that he has “lost momentum” and that she has gained it, and will be the stronger candidate. If the perception is that Obama was thrown under the bus because of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, and the fact that not everyone agrees with the left about Obama’s theories of false consciousness of the embittered, batten down the hatches. It will be an(other) ugly year for Democrats, and this time there will be no Nixon to save them.
Are you ready for a new glacial advance?
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.
It didn’t happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth’s climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon’s Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
It might be a PITA to dike Florida and Bangladesh, but it would be a lot easier than staving off half a mile of encroaching ice in the upper midwest and Europe. Crank up your SUV and build some new coal plants before it’s too late!
[Update later afternoon]
Well, it’s good news in the near term at least, for those living out west, which has had a drought for the past few years. This year was the biggest snow pack in this millennium.
[Thursday morning update]
The criticism begins.