It's Time To Go

If you're nice, maybe President Obama will make you Ambassador to Bosnia.

UPDATE: Chris Bowers asks this trick question:

I have a simple question: why is it that the Democratic nomination was decided tonight? What happened tonight that hadn't happened before?

Why a trick question?

The reason is simple: the established media was never covering the Democratic nomination campaign. They were, instead, covering some form of kabuki theater where reality is ignored and liberals are ritually gutted on the public stage for the pleasure of elite, rich, white, male pundits everywhere.

Abracadabra REDUX

One more time:

Yet the mainstream media continues to promote Clinton's strategy of coup-by-superdelegate.

Even the lefty media can't quite get it right: The Nation begins an otherwise spot-on editorial with this erroneous statement:

Hillary Clinton's commanding Democratic primary victories in Ohio and Rhode Island and her narrow win in Texas....

(sigh)

Mainstream Values

While a prominent Democratic politician gets caught with his pants down, we must once again ask this question:

The man in the White House invades a nation that didn't threaten us, kills 4,000 Americans, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, destabilizes an entire region and it was all based on blatant lies and he gets to stay in office, while Spitzer wanted to have sex, admittedly in an unthinking way, and he has to resign?

Abracadabra: Loss = Win

From: Jason Guthartz
To: New York Times
Subject: correction to "Obama Wins Wyoming Caucuses"

I am writing to correct the second sentence in the above-referenced article, published on March 9, 2008:
"The [Wyoming] victory, while in a state with only 18 delegates, was welcome news for the Obama campaign as it sought to blunt any advantage Mrs. Clinton might gain from her victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday."

This statement regarding Clinton's "victory" in Texas is inaccurate. While Clinton won more delegates from the Texas primaries, neither candidate can be said to have won Texas, since -- as the Times' own "Election Guide" shows -- the state's caucus results are not final. Indeed, most informed opinion expects Obama's gain in delegates from the caucuses will give him the overall delegate "win" in Texas.

The Times is not alone in conjuring up a Texas "win" for Clinton:

Clinton scored campaign saving victories in Ohio and Texas last Tuesday after 11 straight losses to Obama.

To recap:

Last Tuesday night, mainstream media bandied about the story that Hillary Clinton had won Texas; but it wasn’t true. Responsible journalism would have necessitated qualifying the Texas call, given the partial results of Tuesday night; but they didn’t. Texas has a two step contest- a primary and a caucus- much like a few other states. And now the Texas democrats have given a preliminary account of both the primary and caucus results, which shows that overall: Obama won at least three more delegates than she did. And also, that he won at least 100,000 more votes when both contests are combined. She won the primary in the day and he won the caucus in the night. This is a fact, and yet mainstream media perpetuates the myth that Hillary won Texas. What could be their motivation here?

It seems to me that the mainstream media, having generated the conventional wisdom that they themselves have "taken it easy" on Obama, now feel obliged to prove themselves "fair and balanced" by conjuring up a false "Clinton comeback" narrative. As if this primary contest weren't dramatic enough.

Markos Moulitsas brings us back to reality:

As Clinton gears up her efforts for coup by super delegate, threatening civil war within the party, it bears noting that in her best week of the campaign since her New Hampshire victory, she actually lost ground in the race.

[It was] a +6 delegate week for Obama officially, +7 unofficially.

Keep one eye on the math, the other on the shenanigans. (see prior warning)

UPDATE by Markos:

My list was incomplete. ...officially, Obama has a 13-delegate advantage for the week even before Mississippi votes tomorrow. Throw in the unpledged delegate in Wyoming who will certainly be an Obama delegate, and unofficially, Obama notched a 14-delegate gain in this "week from hell" for him. ...

A few more "bad" weeks like this and he'll have the nomination nicely sewed up.

In any case, we need to work for every vote in the upcoming contests.

On Its Ear

Rolling Stone's Tim Dickinson on The Machinery of Hope:

...the Obama campaign has succeeded not by attracting starry-eyed followers who place their faith in hope but by motivating committed activists who are answering a call to national service. They're pouring their lifeblood into this campaign, not because they are in thrall to a cult of personality but because they're invested in the idea that politics matter, and that their participation can turn the current political system on its ear.

In reality, it already has. "We're seeing the last time a top-down campaign has a chance to win it," says [Joe] Trippi. "There won't be another campaign that makes the same mistake the Clintons made of being dependent on big donors and insiders. It's not going to work ever again."

Taibbi on "McCain Resurrected"

a new classic on the "wounded, crusading Ahab"

and something new from Robert Greenwald:

Taibbi Time

Not the first time Matt Taibbi has made the Nixon-Hillary connection. Now he elaborates:

What people forget about Clinton is that she is basically a Republican at heart. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater once upon a time and even canvassed poor neighborhoods in Chicago looking for "vote fraud" by Democrats. She was president of the College Republicans at Wellesley. In 1968, at the height of America's most intense cultural debate in a century, she only abandoned the Republican Party because it backed Dick Nixon instead of her favorite, Nelson Rockefeller.

Which is ironic, because as a presidential candidate herself, Hillary has basically run exactly Nixon's 1968 campaign. Her stump speech from the get-go was all about the "invisible Americans," a nearly word-for-word echo of Nixon's revolutionary "forgotten Americans" strategy of that year. Like Nixon, she was targeting a slice of the electorate that had chosen to stay on the sidelines during a cultural war and secretly yearned for someone in the political center to restore order; it's no accident that Hillary was on the opposite side of every issue that sent lefties to the streets in the Bush years, from the war to free trade to the Patriot Act.

F'n Tommy F.

A year after derailing the Thomas Friedman "globalization train" theory, Matt Taibbi chimes in on a new load of horseshit by that racist neoliberal apologist, whose misguided ideas about political economy are less nauseating than his compulsive habit of opening a Pandora's box of mixed-metaphorical worms and letting them run amok:

Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible....

Taibbi continues:

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?

C'mon, Matt -- of course not.