. . . could be as nice as we are:

So remember: the next time you learn that your opponent's staff is spreading stories about your candidate's involvement with a satanic LSD murder cult, take a deep breath, count to ten, and let it go. Sure, you could probably respond by distributing the well-documented evidence of your opponent's long history of serial necrophilia. Sure, it might temporarily feel good, and maybe it might swing a few million votes. But you have to ask yourself: to what end? Is some cushy 6-figure job in the next presidential administration -- with a probable $5 million-per-year K Street lobbying career waiting on the back end -- really worth losing your dignity and self respect over? Trust me, when your candidate's campaign is finally destroyed by some unanswered charges, and you're back waiting tables and filling out grad school applications, you'll at least have the deep personal satisfaction of knowing that you took the high road -- even when the game was on the line, even when the other team was playing dirty, and even when a well-timed "March surprise" would have easily made all the difference.

Remember, in the Bible Jesus counsels us to "turn the other cheek." This is sound advice for all Democrats and progressives, even if it comes straight out of the right wing fundies' favorite "science" book. It's time for cooler heads to prevail, and that's why I'm calling for both camps in this squabble to pledge to bring an immediate end to this self-destructive cannibalism. And by "cannibalism" I of course mean figurative cannibalism, because I would never dignify by repeating those lurid charges of actual, literal cannibalism currently being shopped around to the media by your opponent's flaks.

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Dead.

Always. Trust content. From Ace.

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Larry Elder writes a positive article about Obama that stops just short of endorsing the divine "Mr. Cloudo."*

(Well. In a Swiftian way.)

He keeps getting richer, and he finally got his picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone . . .

* More nicknames for the transcendent Senator O.—inspired by the Rolling Stone cover—are available here, courtesy of Amelie Gilette, whom I got turned onto yesterday by Professor Reynolds.

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According to CNN, she's saying Senator Clinton didn't ask her to do so.

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Sean Hackbarth notes that National Review is "firing a warning shot" at John McCain regarding his choice of a running mate, and the signals that might send out thereby to that nebulous entity, "the base." It seems to me that McCain is in an awfully tricky spot, here, inasmuch as neither the SoCons nor the economic conservatives (much less the libertarians) are thrilled with him to begin with.

The NRO editors want to make sure that the delegates don't merely rubber-stamp a Veep candidate who is too far to the left; Hackbarth gets concrete about this:

If he picks the populist Mike Huckabee he upsets economic conservatives. If he picks a pro-abortion candidate he alienates social conservatives.

Mitt Romney would be a safe pick. He was talk radioÂ’s and many conservative activistsÂ’ last-minute non-McCain pick. The flip-flop attacks wouldnÂ’t hold as much water, but IÂ’m sure either Team Obama or Team Clinton could confront Romney with some ads he ran against McCain. But then again, voters donÂ’t choose a President because of the running mate. On the plus side, Romney could be McCainÂ’s chief economic expert. McCain will need all the help he can get during these troubled economic times.

Because of the bad blood from the primaries I canÂ’t see McCain picking Mitt.

Which is too bad; Romney would be the perfect pick to re-establish a rapport with conservatives. I'd love to see Fred Thompson back in this role, though I know he likely wouldn't take it, and he wouldn't be willing to take on the "attack dog" responsibilities that the Veep candidate is often assigned. Hackbarth concludes that "Republican base politics will play a role in McCainÂ’s pick, but I donÂ’t think it will be the most important consideration."

This is a issue for the McCain folks, since Johnny Mac doesn't have a lock on either the swing voters or the base. I do think the person has to appear like an even-tempered person who can talk Johnny Mac through the occasional black rage.

Again, though: that depends on which kind of VP this person is going to be: the traditional VP who waits around for the President to die, or the Dick Cheney type, who acts as a sort of uber-Chief of Staff, and takes an active role in advising the CIC. Campaigns never stipulate which type of Veep we're getting. (Though perhaps W.J. Clinton did, with the "two for the price of one" rhetoric, which clearly suggested that the First Lady would be the President's primary advisor.)

Hackbarth mentions the buzz about Governor Mark Sanford (South Carolina) and Tim Pawlenty (Minnesota), but points out that "if Jeb Bush had a different last name heÂ’d be the no-brainer pick (and could have been the Presidential nominee), but thatÂ’s the hand McCain and conservatives have been dealt."

Yeah, well: If Jeb can convert to Roman Catholicism and marry a Latina (which puts him in an interracial relationship from the point of view of all those who see "Hispanics" as a different race), why can't he just change his freakin' last name?

I still think there would be some concrete advantages to running Condi, inasmuch as McCain's strongest card is the sense people have that he'll prosecute the War on Terror with some vigor, and won't simply withdraw from Iraq. However, I know she carries some baggage with her from the current administration, and I'm well aware that she doesn't really want to be President. Whoever takes this on has to be ready to go all the way, should there be a second McCain term.

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Hello? Now Sinbad is getting it mixed up as well. Blackface was generic. Barack Obama is a specific guy.

Via Instapundit, who has links and observations:

A reader emails: "Let me see if I've got this straight: a white man is not allowed to portray a half-white man (Barack Obama) on SNL, but a black man is? Race relations in this country are a bigger joke than anything you'll see on SNL." President Clinton wanted a national conversation on race. Looks like they've got one going now.

ANOTHER UPDATE: "Is Obama black or white? Yes." I'm well aware of the one-drop rule. What's changed, though, is who seems most interested in enforcing it.

The second update therein goes to Baldilocks, who points out correctly that the crucial issue is who gets to decide whether someone is black. True enough, but even Juliette has conjectured that people like me (white people with inexplicably full lips) may have some African ancestry. There's no way of knowing any more. And the more mixed-up we get, the more clearly people will see the irrelevance of race.

I just don't think anyone is pure-bred anything any more, and Lorne Michaels should cast the best actor for the job. In comedy, that means the most brutal and ruthless caricaturist. Politics is tough; it's supposed to be tough. And comedy is tougher, if you do it right.

By the way: Tiger Woods is all-black, too: don't you ever forget it. Black beats Asian. And a royal flush beats a straight flush, godammit.

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And it's not funny!

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Seth Graham-Smith wakes up and smells the coffee after a hard day's night with Senator Clinton:

Will she subvert the will of the voters? Will she turn Denver into a series of shady back-room deals and arm twisting? Will she dispatch her husband to pressure superdelegates into switching allegiances at the last minute? Are we in for, as one pundit put it, a good ol' fashioned "knife fight?"

And if she does manage to secure the nomination, what about the scores of disenfranchised Obama supporters (many of them young people with little loyalty to the Democratic Party)? How will she bring them back into the tent? Hillary seems confident that this can be remedied by offering Mr. Obama a spot on her ticket. Really? And what would his motivation be for accepting? Playing third-fiddle to Bill?

However, if Mr. Obama goes on to secure the nomination, she'll have handed his rival a treasure trove of sound bites. All John McCain has to do between August and November is play clips of Hillary questioning Obama's experience and belittling his platitudes. In a way, she'll have become Mr. McCain's second running mate.

She's proven that she cares more about "Hillary" than "unity." More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She's become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits -- as long as she takes everyone else with her.

On Friday, one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton "a monster" during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me -- who've watched Hillary's descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along.

Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected?

I don't know.

All I know is . . . I'm through apologizing.

Via Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom.

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Here's the latest Hillary-pimping from the crew at Saturday Night Live:

Via Hot Air, where AllahPundit remarks:

In practice it’s five and a half minutes of him [Obama] sounding like a buffoon while she [Clinton] keeps a steady hand on the wheel. The ‘Busters say it amounts to another de facto SNL ad for Hillary; I’m inclined to agree. Memo to the Messiah: Have your staff call Lorne ASAP and set up a cameo to stop the bleeding.

Instapundit also links the Inexperience-squared vid as part of a mini-roundup on the issue of experience/chops/balls, and quotes the divine Jennifer Rubin (whom I like even though she has much better clothes than I do), writing in Commentary:

So we may have reached the perfect gender dilemma: is Obama 'man enough' to be President? That, really, is the question Clinton is raising in her own way.

Yup. And yet more Jennifer, at the same link:

Now it is ObamaÂ’s turn to prove he can stand up to Clinton and McCain, to say nothing of real bad guys like Fidel Castro and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In this regard, his excessive deference to personal engagement (Deborah Tannen has something to say about that) as a tool of foreign policy and his cool, aloof demeanor work against him. Can he take a punch or throw one? Does he really understand that as President heÂ’ll face enemies utterly immune to reason, enemies beyond the conciliatory powers of even the best community organizer? Maureen Dowd and the rest of ObamaÂ’s media fans are waiting with bated breath for the answer.

Althouse also thinks they're laying it on a bit thick:

the ad really does push us to think that Hillary Clinton has a lot of experience and Barack Obama is a neophyte. The fact that we know it's an exaggeration doesn't prevent it from stimulating our anxieties about the underlying truths. And if we're disposed to look at a comedy sketch and find it funny, then our minds slip into the place where we perceive the thing that is being exaggerated. Our defenses are down.

Aw, but don't you see? If it's really a joke, you can say anything you want. All's fair. Life is a bowl of passive-aggressive cherries.

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. . . as fashion statement.

Why not?

Via NeoNeo.

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. . . she's putting personal gain ahead of her party's welfare. Which strikes me as odd, unless she's really trying for the Oval Office this fall.

Or unless those FBI files were such a treasure trove, she has a Hoover-like amount of leverage over the top Democrats—enough to try again in 2012.

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. . . on the audacity of Hillary's strategy for grabbing the Democratic nomination:

Clinton's path to the nomination, then, involves the following steps: kneecap an eloquent, inspiring, reform-minded young leader who happens to be the first serious African American presidential candidate (meanwhile cementing her own reputation for Nixonian ruthlessness) and then win a contested convention by persuading party elites to override the results at the polls. The plan may also involve trying to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, after having explicitly agreed that the results would not count toward delegate totals. Oh, and her campaign has periodically hinted that some of Obama's elected delegates might break off and support her. I don't think she'd be in a position to defeat Hitler's dog in November, let alone a popular war hero.

Some Clinton supporters, like my friend (and historian) David Greenberg, have been assuring us that lengthy primary fights go on all the time and that the winner doesn't necessarily suffer a mortal wound in the process. But Clinton's kamikaze mission is likely to be unusually damaging. Not only is the opportunity cost--to wrap up the nomination, and spend John McCain into the ground for four months--uniquely high, but the venue could not be less convenient. Pennsylvania is a swing state that Democrats will almost certainly need to win in November, and Clinton will spend seven weeks and millions of dollars there making the case that Obama is unfit to set foot in the White House. You couldn't create a more damaging scenario if you tried.

Yes. But where's the problem? (Actually, I'm not so sure about this, inasmuch as Hillary may be a stronger candidate than people think.)

Via Megan McArdle, who calls his analysis "masterful."

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Glenn Reynolds:

BOB KRUMM TO RUSH LIMBAUGH: Be careful what you wish for. I have to say, I question the idea that Hillary would be easier to beat than Obama. Obama's inexperience -- and considerably farther-left views -- will be a problem for him, as is becoming increasingly apparent. And his staffing isn't looking so great these days, either.

Nope.

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. . . was greatly exaggerated.

The above link is to a very nice master wrapup by James Joyner, et al. about electoral math, and where the Democrats stand now.

Via Insty, who also links to a "comeback kid" reference re: Hillary. Yeah: I had been thinking along the same lines myself: she's watched some astonishing reversals in her day, engineered by the master politician of the last century. It would have been extraordinary if she hadn't learned a thing or two.

Superdelegate city, indeed. At any rate, it's quite an achievement—whether she gets the brass ring or not.

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Bad!

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writing at the Weekly Standard blog on McCain's more aggressive rhetoric regarding the relationship between Iraq and the larger WoT:

Certainly McCain has never backed away from the decision to go to war, but I'm not sure I've heard him affirm that decision so forcefully in the past few months. Obama could beat Hillary up over her vote in support of the war because she no longer stood by it, but there is nothing to re-litigate here. McCain is for destroying Saddam--who isn't? McCain was against the failed tactics--who else was? And he's talking about honor. Obama doesn't. Americans still care about honor.

But the phrasing also reminds the public of the danger that Saddam represented. Obama wants to re-litigate the war, but the decision wasn't to go to war or not, it was to depose Saddam Hussein or leave him in power.
[my emphasis]

Maybe. To me, it sounded too much like the Nixon formulation of "peace with honor" (which of course meant dishonor for us, and nearly endless bloodshed in Southeast Asia). I'm afraid it'll resurrect the cries of "quagmire!" from the Iraq = Vietnam crowd.

On the other hand, people now know, from the rise of the Taliban, what happens when America withdraws from an area too suddenly—leaving a vacuum of power. It didn't work out too well in Afghanistan.

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It's, like, the Presidency, here. That's so heavy.

'S like, hope and change and shit. Oh, wow.

It's cosmic. You know what I mean?

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How'd you know?

My breasts are, in fact, heaving with forbidden lust.

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I thought that was a David Bowie song.

"Wham, bam; thank you, Ma'am!"

We may be making some hard choices over here in libertarian-land, but at least the Democrats are putting on a good show.

Via Memeorandum.

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. . . imitating life.

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