Five Before Chaos

Well, it seems like the MSM picked up on Hillary’s Bosnian “embellishment”. Good. It’s apparently not an isolated incident. A few weeks ago, she also boasted to CNN that she “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland”, as well as “drove out the snakes”. Well, I made that second part up, but she made up the first one. According to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province, who was directly involved in the negotiatons, Hillary’s claim is “a wee bit silly”, and, according to the Telegraph:

I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.“

Hmm. Cheerleader. She certainly does like to “enhance” her accomplishments, no? And once again, just like everything else in that clusterfuck of a campaign of hers, it doesn’t appear that they really thought these things out in the beginning. They were probably drunk on the “inevitability” narrative, figured they just had to throw out a few talking points on her so-called “experience” (which, in the realm of foreign policy is wafer-thin), and hope nobody would notice, instead of focusing on her real experiences and accomplishments, which aren’t nearly as broad as she’s making them out to be.

Seems like the Irish are not too thrilled about this. In the Irish version of the Independent, Kevin Myers has a satirical look at some of Hillary’s other “accomplishments” (h/t to Mike Eldred):

Before this interview formally began,” I said, after I had recovered, “you mentioned something about bringing down the Berlin Wall: what was that?”

She smiled again, and I leapt back 30 yards. She was well into her story by the time I had recovered my seat. “So, having told Mother Teresa just how to cope with the starving children of Calcutta, I returned to the Vatican, in my one-woman yacht. For the purposes of this trip, I was named Ellen MacArthur in honour of my mother, who took the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. In the Vatican, I could tell that the Pope was clearly worried. ‘What is it, Norman?’ I asked him. ‘You look kinda stressed.’

“The Pope shook his head sadly. He knew he could hide nothing from me. He often said I was J3 — a cross between Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, and Jane Fonda. The reason for his concern? World communism: it was about to triumph.

“Well, I’m the kind of woman who never ducks a challenge. So I told the Pope never to worry his little old head, and so I left Italy and set out for Europe. I went to the shipyard town of Denmark, where I spoke to the union leader, a tribal chief known to his people as ‘Luck Will Answer’, and told him that the Pope’s homeland of Hungary would light the fire of world freedom. I guess the Solubility Movement began there and then: I got the name from thinking how we should kind of dissolve communism, rather than confront it. The next year, I got the Nobel Prize for Peace: but for political reasons, I went by the name ‘Nelson Mandela.’”

Please,sombody, make her go away. Far away.

… in that “lack of evidence” somehow constitutes “proof of existence”. Or at the very least, lack of evidence on something shouldn’t keep one  from believing in something. Huck seems pretty convinced that there were WMD’s in Iraq. From TP:

I don’t have any evidence. [Saddam] was the one who announced openly he had weapons of mass destruction. 

[snip]

Did they go some other place? We don’t know. They may not have existed. But simply saying — we didn’t find them so therefore they didn’t exist — is a bit of an overreach.

[snip]

And I’m simply saying that because when we went in we didn’t find them, everybody wants to criticize the president and say, oh, the president lied to us. The president didn’t lie to us. The president acted on information that he had, that he believed, and intelligence services believed that they were weapons of mass destruction.

I can see why he’s a young earth creationist, believing in something else that has absolutely no evidence (and plenty to the contrary). I don’t know what’s worse, that or the idea that he actually trusts Bush. Yet another Republican Hack Who Will Never Be President®. There’s just so many I can barely keep track of ‘em.

I’ve thought about this quite a bit. As much as I don’t like either of them, from a schadenfreude perspective, what two better candidates to get the far right’s chastity belts in a wad than a woman and a black man? The only thing that would possibly be better is a black woman candidate. Regardless, we have both the racists and the misogynists covered here. Their worst nightmares are soon to be reality. We can’t really underestimate how big of a deal this is. Mark Morford does some good gloating with “The Woman vs. the Black Guy”:

Because truly, while a record number of women currently serve in Congress, Washington is still very much an inbred old-boy’s network, so deeply entrenched in ancient male power structures and so drunk on stagnant machismo and so poisoned by the Christian right’s woman-in-her-place mentality, it will require a couple more decades and a few hundred more dead southern congressmen before the innate sexism finally fades to a tolerable scar.

So far, no one on the right really seems to know the best way to play the race card against Obama. Not that they won’t try. Will they go after the drug thing? Paint him as a friend to scary hip-hop thug rappers? Resort to saying ‘Obama’ and ‘Osama’ in the same sentence so as to confuse the same red state knuckle-draggers who still believe Saddam orchestrated 9/11? Hard to tell. But rest assured, they’ll find a way.

Or, you know, maybe they won’t. After all, the right has its own heaping bucket of problems right now, not the least of which is the weakest and craziest and least palatable field of GOP contenders in 50 years. There’s the chipper creationist nutball who loves him some Chuck Norris, the stupefied Mormon mannequin who simply cannot believe the world is so icky and complicated, the doddering Iraq-loving war vet who seems to be getting more unstable by the minute, and the cross-dressing former New York mayor who has “9/11″ tattooed on his ego in fake blood. And oh yes, a zany old anti-choice libertarian who somehow keeps raising piles of cash and sending fascinating postcards from the edge of political reason. Cool!

Cool, indeed!

I know, some of you probably forgot he was even running – that’s okay, sometimes he did, as well. His campaigning was best summed up by David, at the Right’s Field:

So ends the laziest candidacy in American history. They’re showing b-roll of Fred “campaigning” on MSNBC and they literally can’t find anything more interesting than him eating a bowl of soup.

Don’t construe my posting of this as letting Taibbi off the hook for crossing the picket line. He’s still a great writer.

He’s recently posted over at Alternet his experiences out on the road witnessing the circus known as the election, more specifically on reporting on the election. On Clinton:

In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking “hope” amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. “Hope,” after all, is Barack Obama’s own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow’s sports headline.

He does a fantastic job at pointing out the ridiculousness of this constant reality-show horeserace narrative:

When Obama responded with a series of parries at Hillary, the press applauded. OBAMA: BYE-BYE MR. NICE GUY? gushed the Chicago Tribune. OBAMA IN IOWA: GLOVES OFF! roared ABC.com. Shit, even Rollingstone.com got into the act (OBAMA TAKES THE GLOVES OFF).

The hilarious thing is that while Obama and Huckabee were blasted for not providing the press with enough boxing-metaphor material, Clinton was getting the business for being too feisty. IS SEN. CLINTON WARM ENOUGH TO WIN? wondered Slate. Just like the others, Hillary quickly proved her willingness to eat as many worms as we could dish out, hilariously releasing a whole Web site where Friends of Hillary lined up to swear on a stack of Bibles, that despite what you might think, the candidate isn’t a crabby old battle-ax in private.

The line that really sums up for me how the media has made the election into a farce of sorts,”We did this. The press. America tried to give us a real race, and we turned it into a bag of shit, just in the nick of time.” It’s a great read.

McLatchy News has an interesting analysis of the HRC upset in NH. This part struck me as a distinct possibilty:

One possibility widely mentioned Wednesday was that white New Hampshire voters might have lied to pollsters, expressing support for black Obama, then voting against him once they were in the privacy of the polling booth.

That’s happened before, and it’s noteworthy that there was no big discrepancy on the Republican side, where all top candidates were white.

“There will be a lot of claims about what happened, about respondents who reputedly lied, about alleged difficulties polling in biracial contests,” Langer said. “That may be so. It also may be a smokescreen, a convenient foil for pollsters who’d rather fault their respondents than own up to other possibilities – such as their own failings in sampling and ‘likely voter’ modeling.”

It’s not that far-fetched, really. It’s known as the Wilder (or Bradley) effect, and it’s happened before. From Wikipedia:

The term Bradley effect or Wilder effect refers to a phenomenon which has led to inaccurate voter opinion polls in some American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate. Specifically, there have been instances in which statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either genuinely undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots. White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the non-white candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate. This reluctance to give accurate polling answers has sometimes extended to post-election exit polls as well.

Researchers who have studied the issue theorize that some white voters give inaccurate responses to polling questions because of a fear that they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. Some research has suggested that the race of the pollster conducting the interview may factor into that concern. At least one prominent researcher has suggested that with regard to pre-election polls, the discrepancy can be traced in part by the polls’ failure to account for general conservative political leanings among late-deciding voters.

Now, as much as we like to think that America is by-and-large past all that, the cynic in me thinks we’re not even close. I thought that at the beginning of the campaign, and I still think so now.

UPDATE: Editor and Publisher also has some on this:

“Anytime you’ve got white undecided voters pulling the lever choosing between a white and a black candidate, that is when the race issue is most important,” Drew Westen of Emory University told Tom Edsall, the former Washington Post reporter now writing for Huffington Post. “Both campaigns’ internal polls showed a 10 to 12 point Obama lead; to see that evaporate into a three-point loss, when he didn’t have any gaffes, that has a ring to it.”

Also, an interesting take (but different angle) from Stoller, who reports that perhaps Obama’s “unity” message didn’t resonate with people who are really pissed at Bush. People like me:

Did Obama’s message of conciliatory unity cost him the New Hampshire primary? Sure looks like it. According to exit polls, 30% of Democrats identified themselves as “dissatisfied” with the Bush administration. Obama narrowly won those voters, 39%-38%. However, among the 62% of participants in the Democratic primary who described themselves as “angry” with the Bush administration, Clinton won 39%-34%. And thus, we have Clinton’s 2.6% margin of victory almost precisely.

Last month, I did a bit on Mike Huckabee in regards to his creationist beliefs and how they reflect on his overall judgement, and how important it is that we require that our next President be one grounded in reality. Over at the Chimp, Steven Pizzo reflects on the questions that really must be asked of Huckabee and Romney, the two GOP candidates most stricken with the God virus:

For example, does he really believe, as the BoM states, that that American Indians (“Lamanites” as described in the BoM,) were one of the lost tribes of Israel, and were direct descendants of pre-Columbian Judeo-Israelite colonists who fled to the American continent around 400 AD? Does he believe this central tenet of the Mormon faith? And if so, how can he believe it since DNA testing has proven beyond doubt that America Indians actually descended, not from Semitic lines ,but rather Asian and Eurasian linage? I want to hear him reason that one through.

I’d eat my shoes to hear someone ask that one. But it’s important. Real important:

Why is that important? Because it tells us a lot about a person’s critical thinking and reasoning. And since the American presidency is an office that is often faced with reasoning through some of mankind’s most potentially deadly matters, wouldn’t you like to know how Mitt’s mind works? Wouldn’t you like to know how he navigates the world or real things with the spirit world he inhabits as a devote Mormon. I sure would like to know.

At the very least I would not want a fellow as president who actually believes that the ancestors of American Indians were, at any time in their history, a part of a worldwide Jewish Diaspora. I sure as hell don’t want someone that gullible and — let’s not mince words — stupid, mucking around in Middle East politics. And I sure don’t think we want someone who defend or otherwise rationalizes the absurd and entirely fictional version of human history making decisions about how we educate our children. (So, call me picky.)

But of course, no one will ask that question or anything similar, because it’s just so rude to ask a candidate a tough question about their faith. The fact that they continually bring it up at every opportunity is just so darn genteel, I suppose.

…or yet another Right-wing Idiot Who Will Never Be President. Mike Huckabee, Baptist minister, wingnut extraordinaire. Jump below for the goods…

I try not to pay too much attention to the GOP roster.. it’s continuously a panderfest to the lowest common denominator and all of the ugly things about our nation. But last week, Charity at “She’s Right” posted (and not surprisingly, admired) this YouTube clip of Huckabee from a recent debate:

Now, Charity was lamenting the idea that this is some sort of ‘religious test’, in that Huckabee was asked if he believed in the literal interpretation of Biblical creation. Sorry gal, that is an important question. Now, Huckabee kinda tiptoed around the answer, but anyone who would answer an unequivocal “yes” is most certainly not up to the job of being President. It’s bad enough we have a president that embarrasses us the world over for his many thoughts and actions. To have another president whose beliefs are so detached from reality (such as the creation myth) with a viewpoint that would yet again make us the laughing stock of much of the civilized world, is something we should be moving away from, not towards. We have already seen the perils of a leader who ignores science, whether it be stem cell research, global warming, or a host of other issues. Do we want yet another one?

Nothing screams “anti-science” more than the belief that the Sky Fairy created the world in 6 days, about 6.000 years ago. So it certainly does matter. I want to know how far my president’s head is up his ass. Being a Biblical literalist is usually a solid indicator. And as far as religious tests go, how many righties would vote for an atheist? Huckabee is full of shit when he says ‘we have plenty of choices to vote for if we want someone who doesn’t believe in God’. Really? Who? Did I wake up in some alternate reality where things actually make sense? But it gets worse. Huck’s been the subject lately over at my New Favorite Blog, The Right’s Field. He’s taken the lying to a new level…

During the Republican debate, Mike Huckabee said he believes one of the defining issues facing the country is the sanctity of human life. Arguing that the issue is of historical importance, he invoked the Declaration of Independence’s rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and said that most of the signers of the declaration were clergymen.

Not even close.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

This is part of that whole “America is a Christian nation” zombie lie, and any argument they can use to further that is fair game. In fact, a good portion of the Founders were deists, believing vaguely in a spiritual being on a philosophical level but not identifying with a specific sect, and CERTAINLY not as clergy.

Of course, as we all know, the kinds of people who would be receptive to that kind of statement aren’t exactly up with checking facts and other pleasantries that involve Things That Actually Happened. And speaking of logically challenged, well, Huck somehow manages to tie abortion, illegal immigration and the Holocaust into one tidy package. From Krugman:

“I gather that the press corps really likes Mike Huckabee. This in itself should scare you: in 2000 they really liked George W. Bush, too (and hated Al Gore.) But if that doesn’t scare you, this should:

Speaking before a gathering of Christian conservative voters, GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said legalized abortion in the United States was a holocaust.
Sometimes we talk about why we’re importing so many people in our workforce,” the former Arkansas governor said. “It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973.”

Aside from the equivalence between abortion and Nazi death camps, the idea that Roe v. Wade is responsible for immigration – the mind boggles.

Boggling, indeed.

Now I will say that Huckabee deserves some credit for actually talking about poverty. Unlike most in the GOP, he probably doesn’t step on the homeless, he steps over them. But that’s not enough to undo the holy B.S. that comes spewing forth every time he opens his mouth. Hey, at least washed-up action star and wingnut WorldNut Daily columnist Chuck Norris thinks Huck is the real deal. Huck very might well draw the diehard fundie votes away from Giuliani, but it’s not really going to matter. Most of them wil be crapping their pants at the idea of Hillary in the White House, so you know they’ll fall in line with the GOP when it comes down to it. Problem is (for them), when that happens, it’s going to show how they matter less and less as time goes on and society continues to be more liberal, and they take on the ‘crazy uncle’ role of the GOP.

Matt Taibbi’s latest about the pathetic excuse of a candidate known as John McCain is a must read. It’s interesting how foar McCain has fallen, because if you asked me a few years ago who the GOP frontrunner was, I would have thought it was him. But I guess having your public persona being that of a constant dweller of Bush’s nether-cavities has probably taken quite a bit of sheen off of that rose. You can only milk that Nam thng so much before many start waking up to the fact that there’s something really wrong with you if you lived through something like that and are continuously promoting something similar, or worse. Leap below the jump to witness the atrocities…

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Continuing my theme this week of the impending slide of the religious right to the margins of irrelevancy where they belong (and that’s being kind), there was a NYT article yesterday that reiterated some of the points I’ve been touching on. Let’s hear it for the scholars:

Scholars who study the role of religion in politics now say it is possible that the Bush years were an anomaly and that evangelicals, of whom religious conservatives are only a subset, could find themselves back where they were before – divided among themselves and just one of many interest groups vying for attention.

One can certainly hope, eh? And a dimly lit light goes on in one of the brain cavities of one of the faithful:

“Beyond their cowardice, there’s an arrogance on the part of these candidates,” said Janet L. Folger, the president of Faith2Action, who helped organize the debate. “The arrogance is this: ‘We are just taking your votes for granted. You have nowhere else to go.’ “

The sad part is that it’s been this way from day one, even with St. Reagan, and these people are just too stupid to figure that part out. And the fact that they have nowhere else to go just makes me giddy, to be honest. And it closes with some words from radical cleric Rick Scarborough:

“It’s not about winning elections. It’s about honoring Christ.”

Good. If it’s really about honoring Christ, shut the hell up and stay home on election day. I can’t think of a better way, considering how so many of you have perverted the message of love into one of intolerance.