So?

You'd think that Dick would be banned from talking to the media after his "greeted as liberators" prediction, but the administration still lets him wander into a microphone and drop these gems:

Raddatz: "Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."

Cheney: "So?"

Raddatz: "So -- you don't care what the American people think?"

Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls. Think about what would have happened if Abraham Lincoln had paid attention to polls, if they had had polls during the Civil War. He never would have succeeded if he hadn't had a clear objective, a vision for where he wanted to go, and he was willing to withstand the slings and arrows of the political wars in order to get there."

Here's just something for the vice president to ponder. I'm sure at some point in his career he must have perused the Declaration of Independence:

... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So... Mr. Vice President.
So... it does matter what the American people think, since you derive your power from our consent and your resources from our paychecks.
So... it does matter if one of the 4,000 dead Americans is one of your family members. It's easy for you to be callous since you don't know the service members whole lives were lost because of your folly. But they are real people, and their families deserve more respect than a dismissive "so" and platitudes about their patriotism.
So... by every objective measurement, your policies have all failed. When you are in the dust bins of history, we will reserve our enending contempt for your incompetence.
So there!

Mission Impossible: Sell the 'misspoke' story

I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went.

I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

— Sen. Hillary Clinton, March 17, 2008

"Now let me tell you what I can remember, OK -- because what I was told was that we had to land a certain way and move quickly because of the threat of sniper fire. So I misspoke -- I didn't say that in my book or other times but if I said something that made it seem as though there was actual fire -- that's not what I was told. I was told we had to land a certain way, we had to have our bulletproof stuff on because of the threat of sniper fire. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this 8-year-old girl and I said well, I, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her -- so I greeted her, I took her stuff and then I left, Now that's my memory of it.

"... Good grief, I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. you know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things -- millions of words a day -- so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement."

— Sen. Hillary Clinton, March 25, 2008

Now I'm not saying she's lying, but...

The story was a bit too incredible to begin with. An American first lady would be asked to duck her head down and run under sniper fire? Why? Did the enemy not know how to lower their weapons? I know, the heroes on TV never get shot in those situations either.

Sinbad, who also went on the mission nailed it.

"What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

However, faced with a differing recollection than Sinbad, the Clinton camp just chose to dismiss and belittle him.

Defending Clinton's characterization of her Bosnia mission, campaign spokesman Phil Singer kindly provided experts from news stories written about the trip at the time, including a Washington Post story from May 26, 1996, that said, "This trip to Bosnia marks the first time since Roosevelt that a first lady has voyaged to a potential combat zone."

Singer also cited a Kansas City Star article from September 2000 that quoted Sinbad as describing the situation in Bosnia as "so tense. It was Crips and Bloods." (And that's how Sinbad continued to characterize the situation in our interview Monday. He said, "At the time, we didn't realize how crazy it was between the Bosnians and the Serbs. I didn't realize how much hate was going on.")

Still, defending Clinton against Sinbad the refuter, Singer said, "The sad reality of what was going on in Bosnia at the time Senator Clinton traveled there as first lady has been well documented. It appears that Sinbad's experience in Bosnia goes back further than Senator Obama's does. In fact, has Senator Obama ever been to Bosnia?"

No. And he never tried to tell us he had been there either. By the way, none of those news reports cited by Singer said anything about the first lady running in under sniper fire. I'm not sure what exactly they were supposed to prove.

The word is out now about the war story that wasn't. Her mission, should she choose to accept it, is to convince us that repeating this story three times, two of which were in prepared remarks, was an absent minded mistake.

The way I see it, you make a mistake when you forget details. To create an entire scene that didn't exist is not the kind of thing that happens naturally. The mind forgets details, it doesn't create them.

Hillary Clinton sorta reminds me of the old Commander McBragg cartoons I watched as a lad.




I'm not saying Commander McBragg is lying either, but I'm sure even the good commander wouldn't accept a mission to convince me that he misspoke.

Random thoughts on the last week's news

So I haven't had a chance to post for awhile. It's not that I haven't had anything to say. I've been itching to write as I watched all the craziness go by.

Take last week for instance. Sen. Obama invited the country to a conversation on race and then desperately wished they would shut up about it already (in his mind). Obama is everybody's favorite mutt after all. Being a part of every race means he should offend nobody, right? Not quite. Just ask the Clinton campaign and the far right, who almost seem to have formed an alliance of convenience to smear and destroy the boy wonder. Hillary doesn't mind sticking her hand into the toilet bowl to get crap to throw at Barack, and the reliable Right will always be there to cheer her on. Last week some of the crap stuck. Barack took his bobbing and weaving back to the stage where he gave speech on race that was praised or poohed, depending on which side of the aisle you perched.

If that wasn't enough, we learned that New York governor Elliot Spitzer has sexual fantasies he's willing to spend $4,300 to live out. He pays this to a high class courtesan (i.e. expensive prostitute) who, as it turns out, is just another brunette who has been giving it away for free to Girls Gone Wild and anybody else who asked, except Splitzer. His wifey stood by. I'm sure she has a good lawyer on speed dial, though. Spitzer was replaced by Lt. Gov. David Paterson, who, as it turns out, was a more frugal stud muffin. He's been getting it for free from willing women on the state payroll, taking them to the $108 Holiday Inn, and stiffing the NY tax payers with the bill. Priceless.

Kwame "the Playa Maya" Kilpatrick accused Michigan press and prosecutors of staging a witch hunt into his shenanigans. It turns out that you can't swear under oath that you weren't getting "benefits" from the staff and then send text messages confirming it. Who knew? It's a sign of the new millennium when the latest sex scandal is actually a text message. Naturally, Kwame will be fully exonerated, especially since his FWB got on the stand and rolled her eyes and gave up much attitude. This was obviously a play to elicit sympathy for sleeping with a married man, while using public funds. It's not like the court has any impact over her life, right. She was down with the Playa Maya. They must not know. Turns out they did. Now they're both indicted. LOL. Oops! Wifey OTS.

Hillary launched a red phone commercial designed to scare the parents of little blonde girls. "Who do you want answering the phone?" the announcer gravely intoned, while we all tried not to giggle about the fact that she'd have to make another call to try and find Bill, wherever he was at 3 a.m.

Of course, Hillary's ever morphing yardstick has been a constant delight. The true measurement of the winner will be delegates. No, it will be primaries won. No, it will be big states that I won...I mean...that matter to Democrats. No, it will be the popular vote. No, it will be a computer simulation of the electoral college...that I just happened to have on my laptop. That silly thing about delegates is just a guide. We have the flexibility to ply those rules to ensure true justice is served, and we elect the right candidate to her rightful position. Somebody please smack her with that yardstick.

We moved from Obama's Audacity of Hope, to Clinton's sheer audacity in offering the VP to Obama while she was still running significantly behind him. David Brooks offers in today's New York Times that things look so bleak that she is officially living the Audacity of Hopelessness.

And to this madness, I resume my blog.

Four reasons I could never vote for Hillary

I decided long ago that I could never cast a vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstance, and every day as I watch her campaign, she reaffirms my decision.

I fancy myself an independent thinker, but I must confess I've voted for the Democratic nominee in every election since I was 18. But I couldn't if Hillary Clinton was the nominee.

Here are four reasons:

1) She has exhibited tremendously bad judgement. Barack Obama likes to cast Sen. Clinton’s vote on the Iraq war as an issue of judgment. He’s right but her bad judgment doesn’t end there. It is merely one of many examples on display.

Let’s start with her campaign. As it turns out, she had no plans or money to carry her beyond Super Tuesday. She was so sure that she would have the nomination wrapped up that she didn’t prepare for an alternative scenario. What breathtakingly bad judgment? Even if she believed with all her heart that she would dispose of Obama early, competent management demands that she prepare a Plan B. That’s almost as bad as George Bush going into war without a contingency in the “unlikely” event the US was not greeted as liberators. There is no excuse for blowing your treasure chest on donut runs in Iowa and forgetting that Louisiana was coming. Bad judgment.

The health care debacle is another spectacular example. She likes to announce that she’s learned from her mistakes on health care, and she has the scars to prove it. Problem is, those scars were avoidable. She learned that it was a bad idea to try to create the plan in secret? She learned that it was a mistake to exclude all of the people from the process who would be most affected by the outcome? Why did she need to learn those simple lessons the hard way? This was Leadership 101. You have to get buy in from your stake holders. The fact that she couldn’t sell a health care bill to a Democratic congress and president (with whom she has the ultimate leverage) is not the industry lobby’s fault, it is her own incompetent sense of judgment.

2) She seems to have a penchant for operating in secrecy. I could easily point to the health care debacle to make that point, but looking at two other glaring examples will suffice: her tax records and the records from her office as first lady. Both she has refused to release for no obvious reason. Failure to release her tax records is problematic because she had to dip into her own purse to lend her campaign $5 million. That’s a lot of cheese, and if it is fueling her campaign, the public ought to know where she got it. But, she has decided not to release it until the general election. Huh? It’s an issue now, but she won’t release it now. Other candidates routinely do, to include Barack Obama. If you have nothing to hide, quit hiding.

Her records as first lady are relevant because she is using that time as her chief argument for her fitness to lead. For the life of me, I don’t understand why Barack Obama isn’t making more hay of this issue. In the eight years that she was first lady, the only thing she led was the health care issue, and we remember how she mangled that. So what else did she actually lead? She won’t say or release records to substantiate. If she claimed to be the architect of the Clinton Welfare to Work plan, we could see if her schedule supported that she was in key meetings on the subject. If she says she wasn’t involved in NAFTA, we could see if she was actually in the room. It’s called accountability and apparently she’s having none of it.

The records are also important because nobody from the Clinton administration is volunteering to corroborate her alibi that she was influential in a helpful way. You’d think if she was so involved in every major decision, the secretary of the treasury would be happy to give us details of how Hillary Clinton helped to muscle through the agenda that led to the budget surplus. How she showed steely resolve on the Kosovo issue. But to my knowledge NOT ONE Clinton cabinet member has stepped forward to volunteer how Hillary Clinton contributed in a positive way to any of the administration’s accomplishments. Not one. You learn just as much from what people don’t say as from what they say.

3) Character. This is really the main reason I couldn’t cast a ballot for the senator. She continues to prove herself to be less than honest and forthright on a host of issues. Take the vote to authorize the war. She wants us to believe that she was authorizing diplomacy. That she had no idea the president intended on waging war. She’s clearly not that naive and neither am I. She voted that way because that reflected the mood of the country, and she didn’t want to be out of step with the herd. When popular sentiment swings the other way, she pivoted with it. If you want to pander, fine. Just be honest about it.

Her willingness to say or do anything to win is showcased in her behavior on the Michigan and Florida primary issue. She set up and agreed to a rule that she would not campaign or accept delegates from those states and then put her name on the ballot. She then tries to make the argument that the votes should be counted. It’s grossly unfair, and she knows it. Just because Howard Dean is too much of a ninny to call her on it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t. One of the first tenets of any honor code is that you keep your word. To blatantly circumvent your own commitments is a reflection of a person’s character.

4) Her attempt to marginalize Barack Obama because of his race. The South Carolina stain was the straw that did it for me. We winced when her campaign chair tried to paint Barack Obama as a drug dealer. He left the campaign, although for that she should have been fired. (It’s a distinction that would not have been lost had she done it.) But when Bubba was down south and persisted in using racial codes to dismiss Barack Obama, that really pissed me off. Anyone who grew up in the south knew exactly what Bill Clinton was doing. We’d seen it a million times before. (ask Harold Ford) And through all that time, she expressed not one word of remorse. Instead, she tried to convince us that Bob Johnson wasn’t talking about drugs or Bill Clinton meant nothing about Dr. King. Or we didn’t really understand the Jesse Jackson statement. We understood it all perfectly. It’s the reason Black people went for Obama in droves after that. She did more to shore up Obama’s standing with Black people than he could have probably done on his own. It’s bad enough to play the white card, but to do it while holding out the novelty of your being female, adds a a new layer to your hypocrisy.

There you have it. Bad judgment. Poor character. Secretive nature. Cowardly in the face of injustice. Any one of them by themselves could disqualify her but all four? Never could I pull the lever in her support. Never.

And he wins the name game, too...

Just when you thought she'd lost enough, this just in.

Barack has been crowned name of the year for 2008 from the web site that tracks the popularity of names. Barack means blessing in Arabic and Swahili, but it seems parents who speak English want some of that namely charm.

The name Hillary was ranked 982.

I feel for Hillary Clinton. Pity, that is.

Pity.

That's what I feel for Hillary Clinton now.

Think back just a few months when Hillary Clinton, wearing the sheen of her so-called inevitability, crowed that all the guys were attacking her because she was ahead.

Contrast that with the grasping during the last week. First there is the angry, "shame on you" rant. Then there was the sarcastic mocking of his speaking style. Then to the strident tone. In none did she look presidential. She looked petty, silly, and desperate.

I pity her because in some respects she really didn't have much of a choice. Having exhausted every possible rationale for her presidency and been rejected by voters in 11 straight outings, she has no choice but to villainize her opponent.

Negative politics is not a new thing, and it's not news for someone to use that strategy when they are behind (as Hillary once instructed us), but she's attacking over silly things. Plagiarizing your campaign co-chair? Change you can Xerox? He gives good speeches? He's scared to debate me -- in Wisconsin? Shame on you?! If she has all the so-called experience and judgment, is that the best you can find to use against a supposed neophyte?

Hillary is up against the wall, and everyone knows it. Her husband even announced that if she doesn't win Texas, she can't win the nomination. If she loses Texas, how often will we have to hear that sound byte replayed?

That's a real possibility that Hillary will have to face that outcome and her husband's words because the polls in Texas have tightened to a statistical tie. She's gotta do something. I can understand why she'd be upset, but I don't feel bad for her. Just pity.

Beyond day one

We've all heard Hillary Clinton's oft-repeated mantra: ready to lead on day one. Last night, Barack finally offered a response: right on day one. I'd offer a different one: beyond day one.

The crux of Hillary Clinton's campaign message betrays a reactive leadership style. She reminds us there will be a stack of problems on the desk of the oval office when the new president arrives, and that she is best suited to delve into them. However she offers no higher principles of leadership or governing other than that she's "been there" before.

Leadership is about more then responding to the challenges of the day, it is about creating the world of tomorrow.

Barak Obama's appeal is beyond the desk. The lofty ideal of changing the way we view our government and the world views us. I'd suggest this is the time to look upward, beyond the desk, beyond day one.

Some people see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not?
George Bernard Shaw