Administration Policy On Iran Is An Unmitigated Disaster

Published on The New Republic (http://www.tnr.com)

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• Marty Peretz
• March 28, 2010 | 8:49 pm

And it has been that since the beginning of the Obama presidency. Obama had started out with the quaintest belief that soft diplomacy would work with a rough tyranny that had even rougher ambitions in its dealings with other countries. This was obvious to everyone except the president himself. And, of course, his satraps like Hillary Clinton whose rhetoric can never be trusted either as an intellectual proposition or an index of her sincerity.

Only last week madame secretary told AIPAC that we were pursuing "sanctions with bite" (about which talk I blogged twice) but that it was taking time to convince our United Nations "partners" to join us. We were still trying, however. Please!

On the very day I posted the last of these Spines, the Wall Street Journal came out with a detailed dispatch from Vienna, "U.S. Softens Sanction Plan Against Iran," showing that we had already given up the fight.

The U.S. has backed away from pursuing a number of tough measures against Iran in order to win the support from Russia and China for a new United Nations Security Council resolution on sanctions, according to people familiar with the matter.

Among provisions removed from the original draft resolution the U.S. sent to key allies (is this meant to include Russia and China?) last month were sanctions aimed at choking off Tehran's access to international banking services and capital markets, and closing international airspace and waters to Iran's national air cargo and shipping lines ...

What's left in the proposal is a melange of punishments so complex that they would be easy to deter. Only self-deceivers could actually believe that these remaining penalties could actually punish and punish preventively.

That Dr. A'jad has been playing us for fools is beyond doubt. And why shouldn't he have? We were fools and, being fools, our enemies calibrate us as such. Iran itself has announced steps that it has taken to improve its nuclear capacities.

Then, on Sunday, March 28, there was another dense report, this time in the New York Times, showing that "Agencies Suspect Iran Is Planning New Atomic Sites," as a previous story in the Times had proven. The newly reported atomic sites "would defy U.N. wishes." Big surprise.

Actually the news was deliberately leaked by Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, when he told Iranian Student News Agency that the president of the country "had ordered work to begin on two new plants" that "will be build inside mountains." Is this meant as a challenge to the U.S. or as a dare to Israel?

The aforesaid "previous story" about the hidden site at Qom was actually revealed by Obama in September in the hope that the news would evoke international support four more stringent sanctions. It didn't. Russia and China knew already that the president would pull back as, of course, he has.

Those of you who get hysterical about Israel allowing building on a property owned by Jews for decades (and leading to the enormous Mount Scopus campus of the Hebrew University, to a division of the Haddassah Hospital serving primarily Arabs, to the Mount of Olives which is the most sacrosanct Jewish cemetery in the country from which, if you're buried there, you will rise from your grave at the first sighting of the Messiah's coming from the east, and to the grounds of Brigham Young University whose Mormon students are not much liked by their Palestinian neighbors) but are cool as a cuke about Iran's nuclear possessions, well, you are really weird.

Death of a Saleswoman How Hillary Clinton lost me—and a generation of young voters

Death of a Saleswoman
How Hillary Clinton lost me—and a generation of young voters.
By Meghan O'Rourke
Updated Thursday, June 5, 2008, at 5:01 PM ET

Meghan O'Rourke joined fellow "XX Factor" bloggers in an online chat with readers about Hillary Clinton's feminist dilemma. See the transcript.

"That bitter cynicism of yours is something you've acquired since you left Radcliffe."

"That cynicism you refer to I acquired the day I discovered little girls were different from little boys!"

—Lloyd Richards to Karen Richards, and vice versa, All About Eve

In the coming days, as Hillary Clinton moves to the sidelines and Barack Obama takes the stage alone, many people will suggest that America just wasn't ready for a female president. This may be true. But we'll never entirely know, because Clinton did not invite us to spend much time contemplating the momentous fact that she was the first female presidential candidate with any chance of occupying that position. Her problem wasn't that she was a feminist. Her problem was that she wasn't feminist enough.

For me, at least, she wasn't—and for many young women my age. Back in the mid-1990s, as a college student, I spent an afternoon on the New Haven Green, adjacent to Yale University, waiting for Hillary Rodham Clinton to speak. There was a huge crowd of mostly young women. I found her impressive, if not entirely galvanizing. She had a girlish voice and soft, wispy bangs, as I recall, and she struck me as a real person—not merely a wife performing the role of first lady. I remember wondering if she might some day run for president. I also remember feeling that it seemed outside the realm of the imagination.

That's no longer the case. When Clinton announced her candidacy in January 2007, she raised hopes and possibilities in the minds of young women across America. But the substance of her presidential run seems far more dismal than I would ever have imagined back in 1995. You can't be a historic first unless you act like one, and Hillary Clinton has not. In the Wellesley commencement speech that made her famous before she got to Yale Law School, she spoke about "searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living." Yet Clinton ran away from the revolutionary aspects of her own candidacy. There's been nothing of the ecstatic in her presidential bid—that mode, instead, has been embodied by Barack Obama. He appealed to voters' desire for liberation and revolution, and on the strength of that appeal won them over.

Clinton didn't trust that the message of revolution embodied in her candidacy could animate American voters, particularly male voters. And she lacked the courage of her young, ecstasy-seeking self. And so she sent the message that gender was not a factor. Presumably, she did this based on the reasonable assumption that it was politically perilous to be a woman. But the paradox is that in taking the safe tack she thought made her more electable, she actually made herself less electable. She presented herself as a hard-bitten Washington insider, running on experience when a lot of American voters, particularly young women, were looking for transformation.

Obama understood this from early on. Contrast their opening bids: Obama skillfully announced his in Springfield, Ill., with a speech that echoed Abraham Lincoln. Clinton, by contrast, announced hers in a risk-averse video recording on her Web site: "I'm in it to win," she said redundantly. As her campaign progressed, she rarely invoked the historic predecessors that made her candidacy possible—Susan B. Anthony, say, or Jeannette Rankin, a pacifist and suffragette who was the first woman to be elected to Congress (and who always had the courage of her convictions, voting against the First World War). To be sure, Clinton did praise Eleanor Roosevelt's "thick skin"—rather the way one nerd praises another's social-avoidance techniques. It was part of acting as if she were a man inoculated against the slings and arrows of sexism.

In this regard, Clinton never really was the first American matriarch. Instead, she may be best remembered as our last patriarch. The more her campaign floundered as Obama offered ecstasy and she didn't, the more masculine and hard-nosed she made herself out to be. Cannily reversing gender roles, she told Obama supporters that if he couldn't "take the heat" he should "get out of the kitchen"—a subtle put-down of her own gender aimed at working-class male voters who wanted reassurance that Clinton was manlier than the girlie men the Democrats had of late been nominating. Her supporters (among them, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana) invoked stories of steelworkers waxing enthusiastic about her "testicular fortitude." While Obama went on rhetorical flights about hope, she compared herself to the hyper-masculine Rocky Balboa—an underdog, to be sure, but a stoic one who keeps getting up. None of this was accidental, even if the source wasn't always Hillary herself. She was "manning up." Over the years, her hair had grown shorter, and her make-up thicker, like a mask. She played the men's game so well that James Carville eventually quipped, "If she gave [Obama] one of her cojones, they'd both have two."

Unfortunately, a man's rules seemed to be politics as usual. There were the researchers who planted fears that Obama had been schooled in a madrasah, the bizarre (for a Democrat) implication that McCain would make a better president than Obama, the appeal to voters' latent racism. It was these types of calculation that lost her many young women's votes. Worse, all this hardball was occasionally interrupted by cynical, strategic cries of sexism. It's indubitable that sexism infected the campaign, and the media's coverage. Of course, there's a double standard when it comes to men and women in politics—"the tyranny of high expectations," as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it in Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, a recent anthology. John McCain can call his wife a "cunt" in the earshot of reporters and get little blowback, yet Clinton can't change her hair without being called untrustworthy. But even last fall Clinton's relationship to sexism seemed schizophrenic: First she did the tough, impervious act, and then she played the dame in distress when a debate didn't go her way. In contrast to Obama's matter-of-fact relationship to race—as a subject that bore serious discussion but was hardly the be-all and end-all of American politics—Clinton's relationship to gender seemed at turns angry and deeply ambivalent.

Of course, there's some logic behind Clinton's calculation that running on gender was too politically risky. Race—however profound an issue it is in America—doesn't get in the way of the paradigm that treats ambition and leadership as masculine qualities. Gender does. Obama can still draw on the classic paradigm of leadership; Clinton would have had to create something new. To judge by all kinds of studies of women in private-sector leadership positions, this would have been a fraught battle, strewn with double standards. It's only fair to point out that many of Hillary's attributes—toughness, control, emotional distance—are qualities that are sometimes admired in men but almost never in women. We'll never know whether the traits Clinton displayed in this campaign would have drawn less animus from voters had she actually been a man.

But if ever there were a moment to have ventured that battle, this was it. If she'd run against an establishment candidate like Kerry, being the experienced woman would itself have seemed radical. In the context of Obama's transformative campaign, though, she couldn't afford to become the old-style candidate. As Obama grew more potent, Clinton grew more brittle. She allowed him to set the terms of debate—optimism, church choirs, soul music. Then she responded by tearing him down instead of defining the conversation on her own terms. At the apogee of her campaign's vicious sniping this spring, Clinton seemed to embody a travesty of feminist values—to be a cautionary emblem of what can happen to a gifted young woman embittered by the challenges she's had to face. It was as if she failed entirely to see the revolutionary nature of her achievement.

Last week, I e-mailed a group of young women, asking them what they thought of Hillary Clinton's campaign as it drew to a close. The women I heard from were mostly young, well-educated, upper-middle-class, and white—one of the groups that didn't flock to Hillary in numbers her campaign (and many second-generation feminists) had expected. I got one response over and over: frustration that Clinton hadn't done enough, as a historic "first," to differentiate herself from stodgy, old male Washington politics. But they also felt … ambivalent about their frustration. In that sense, you might say, nothing has changed. Women have always been ambivalent about Hillary. In another sense, though, she had been a candidate of profound change—albeit not in the way that you might think. Her own risk-aversion has given us "something to chew on," as a young film producer told me. And the media's sexism forced twenty- and thirtysomethings to recognize that feminism is not just "our mother's problem," as another young professional phrased it.

As he goes forward, Obama will undoubtedly be compared to Abraham Lincoln. But I always thought Whitman was a more apt predecessor for both candidates. Whitman embodied the ecstatic to which Hillary Clinton, at one time, linked her hopes for a better America. But she didn't make it part of her campaign. Instead, she made fun of Obama's knack for lighting a fire in the hearts of a wide swath of Americans. She preached pragmatism instead of fellow-feeling. And she scolded Obama for being starry-eyed. But her decision to turn away from the ecstatic was a great mistake, as Whitman might have understood. By stripping her campaign of its native appeal, by refusing to portray herself as part of a transcendent feminist narrative, by diluting the dynamic pleasures of mass political response, she let us down. After all, feminism need not be joyless.

The End of the Beginning - Update 1

It has been announced that on Saturday, Mrs. Clinton will formally cede the nomination to Mr. Obama and endorse him. They will have their "money shot" moment where they raise each others' hands in a show of unity, and from there, Mrs. Clinton will try to figure out a way to glom onto the Obama money machine to attempt to retire what must be a huge amount of debt, including of course the $5 million she loaned to her campaign after Super Tuesday. Would that we all could write ourselves checks for that much money. And have them clear the bank. This is obviously a welcome development, and I truly hope that those of Mrs. Clinton's supporters who may right now be disillusioned with the state of the Democratic party will, in time realize that not only did Mrs. Clinton make history by making a serious run for the Presidency - a first for a woman, a gender that could not even vote until the Constitution was amended for the 19th time, but that even more remarkable, a man of color, who, in the time before 1863 and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, would have been viewed as a piece of real estate, not even as a human being. At least white women, while certainly exploited, were human. We've come a long way, baby.

Randy Shiner

The End of the Beginning

I suppose that after the length of the Democratic primary contest and its coverage here occasionally and on TV so much that I had to turn it off, I would be remiss if I didn't make a comment or seventeen about the endgame now being played out between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton after Mr. Obama garnered the 2118 delegates necessary to capture the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States. He has been talking past Mrs. Clinton for several weeks now, directly at John McCain when it became self-evident that there was no way that she could not mathmatically catch and overtake Mr. Obama's lead in delegates. Tuesday's activity was just in some sense, anticlimactic, with the notable exception of Mrs. Clinton who last night gave a speech that made it appear as if she was trying to play Don Corleone -- "Barack Obama, you need my 18 million votes" -- an offer he supposedly couldn't refuse. But the fact is that her 18 million votes was, since they were won, were, like a new car driven off the dealer's lot, devalued significantly. We do not need to go through the litany of trash that she threw at Mr. Obama during the period after February 5 -super-Tuesday, which, sadly for Mrs. Clinton's strategy, such as it was, decided nothing. The race-baiting, the dragging up of distractions like Jeremiah Wright when it was clear that Mr. Obama did not share the thoughts of his occasionally wacko Reverend. The Bosnia affair that she turned into the first twenty minutes of "Saving Private Ryan"; the "who do you want answering the phone at 3:00 a.m." bit, and the rest of the kitchen sink strategy she pulled out when it became clear that Obama had the coal and money to power his train to victory.

So here we are. This morning, Mr. Obama gave a very good speech to AIPAC, the feared and oft-derided (by anti-Semites and Semites alike) heavy hitter of "the Israel Lobby" whose annual Washington conference was fortuitously scheduled during the end of these historic 2008 Democratic primaries. In a way, I have to admit some jealousy at not being in the audience for that speech, as it was, in effect, Mr. Obama's first major foriegn policy address as the Democratic nominee. He said all the right things in the right tones and made McCain's foriegn policy look like something from the Attila the Hun playbook. He sounded reasonable. Thoughtful. He sounded like the person I have admired and supported since Joe Biden got out of the race. (Secretary of State Biden?) No thoughtful Jew who has Israel's best interests at heart as well as those of their own country -- yours and mine -- the United States of America, has any business voting for McCain. There is simply no excuse for such a wasted vote unless you happen to be a lover of white sheets and fiery crosses. Or the people to whom Mrs. Clinton pandered to: white men who earn less than $50,000 per year and who have not graduated college. I would submit that these people need to realize that race is not a basis upon which to deny Mr. Obama the presidency if you happen to fall within that demographic even if you do like white sheets with holes and wood-working with kerosene. The basis for the vote is WHO HAS THE MONEY AND POWER in this country, and the answer to that question transcends all races and makes it irrelevant to all but the most wicked of bigots or the illogical and unreasonable of which, sadly, there are too many in this country.

Indeed, it is that demographic that should be most fervently in favor of the change that Mr. Obama presents precisely because they have been sold down the proverbial river for the past 14 years since the "Republican Revolution" started by Newt Gingrich and his ilk following the 1994 midterm Congressional elections. Enough with the divisive distractions that have driven this country into the toilet. Enough. Let us move to a serious discussion of the serious issues that face this country with a man, Obama, who is a serious and thoughtful man who also happens to be a spectacularly brilliant political organizer. For it was, in the end, his masterful organzational and technical skills that denied Mrs. Clinton her perceived birthright as a Clinton.

Which leads me to the end of the Clinton era in this country. Good riddance, finally. Let us not forget that it was Bill Clinton's record that made the 2000 election so close as to throw it to the Supreme Court and thence to George Bush, under whose misleadership the United States and the world, has suffered for the past seven years. If it was true that Bill Clinton was the great politician and leader that, 16 years after the 1992 elections he is portrayed as (not the pedodontia sufferer he was on behalf of his wife - pedodontia: a chronic condition commonly used by me to refer to "foot-in-mouth" disease)then do we attribute the 2000 loss to monkeyshines in Florida? Hanging Chads? Al Gore's inability to move an audience?

What we got was a guy who people liked and wouldn't have minded having a beer with. Well, several truckloads of Shiner Bock (disclosure statement: I am not a member of the ownership of Spoetzl Brewery, the brewers of Shiner Bock, which is, coincidentally located in Shiner, Texas, a town that my late grandfather Mandel Shiner (zt'l) founded in the late 1800s after running out on the Czar's Army, mistaking it for the West Side of Chicago, where he eventually did settle some years later, deciding that the junk business was more profitable more quickly than the beer business) later, we are all hung over from all the beer (and Shiner Bock is quite good) that we have swallowed, some might say waterboarded with, for the past seven years. Indeed, as someone who really should not even drink beer, I am sick with delight that I might not even want to sit down with Barack Obama to have a beer. Frankly, he seems like the sort that would appreciate a good 2000 Bordeaux. But that is another story involving different tastes, bodily orifices and functions.

Last night, Mrs. Clinton in a speech at Baruch College in New York City, which she won quite handily - congratulations -- struck a decidedly combative, some would say obstreporous tone, even as Mr. Obama went over the 2118 delegates needed to clinch the nomination. It was unbelievable that she had actually finished the Kool Aid that Terry McAuliffe, her erstwhile spinmeister, had been mixing and serving for the past month to make it seem like there was actually a chance of her winning. Mr. McAuliffe, whose floral shirt he wore for the Puerto Rico primary should tell you that he really needs a vacation - not even he could not actually believe some of the garbage and lies that had been spewing out of his mouth -- was still in there, shoveling the remains of his and Mrs. Clinton's fantasy at the 24/7 news cycle. It ended up to be a nice vacation to San Juan for the whole Clinton team, even as she "won" there quite handily -- mazal tov again.

Today, as her 18 million voter fantasy was losing air faster than the German zeppelin Hindenberg burned up in New Jersey in 1937, it is widely reported that her own staffers called Congressman Charlie Rangel to arrange what I can only describe as an "intervention" by 23 other Congressmen with Mrs. Clinton to tell her to "get with the program", as the longer she waited to do so, the worse off her position and power (and power is about perception in large measure, let us not forget) would be in the Senate. Yes, her own colleagues had to finally give her the slap in the face that so many of us have wished for her to receive for so long. And almost as instantaneously as it was received, news broke just a little while ago that a meeting has been scheduled for Friday in which she is supposed to announce the "suspension of her campaign" and her "support for Senator Obama".

While those things sound like she's giving up and endorsing Mr. Obama, they do not sound like the words of someone who has albeit fading - faded -- hopes of being Mr. Obama's running mate. They sound like the words of someone who cannot accept reality, either due to her own arrogance, the Kool Aid, the PTSD from her trip to Bosnia in 1996, exhaustion from the long campaign or some combination of all of the foregoing. Whatever the cause, it appears that at least some of her advisors understand the present, and not alternate, reality that Mrs. and Mr. Clinton have been living in for the past six weeks or so and especially the notion that whatever "clout" (a word coined by the unique Mike Royko) she had was as of last night, fleeting, as was her potential to be an effective Senator, nevermind a national candidate.

Where are we now? Mr.McCain delivered a speech last night which was characterized by Amy Holmes, a writer for the uberconservative National Review Online as

creaky, ungracious, and unnecessary. I never understand why politicians don't take the opportunity, when so easily presented, to simply be gracious and hold their fire. Watching McCain, I couldn't help but think of the astonishing contrast Barack's triumphant speech to a massive and adoring crowd will be. It was not a comparison McCain should have invited.

And then, in a stroke of genius worthy of Rube Goldberg, Mr. McCain invited Mr. Obama to a series of "town hall style debates". Now, at first blush, given Mr. McCain's creakiness, this would appear to be inviting the fox (the young, polished and unflappable Mr. Obama) into the chicken coop that is full of old hens and roosters. (again, Mr. McCain, sorry) and that Mr. Obama would have Mr. McCain for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. And a midnight snack. And a little water at 3:00 a.m.

Not so fast. In such a setting, while Mr. Obama could run rings around Mr. McCain in a rhetorical and policymaking sense, Mr. Obama must absolutely be careful not to make Mr. McCain look bad, or even creaky. Mr. McCain is only there because he, by himself, could not possibly fathom the notion of 17,000 people turning out just to watch him by himself. That is because it would not ever happen. He will be relying on Mr. Obama's star power, not his own. Mr. McCain will be hoping that Mr. Obama says something that makes him, Mr. Obama, look like a smartass, disrespectful or somehow unappreciative of the large amount of support that thinks Mr. McCain is a better choice for President than is Mr. Obama, as difficult as that is for me to contemplate even being possible. But that is the reality, alternate or not. Mr. Obama has everything to gain and everything to lose. Mr. McCain, already judged by his peers as creaky and ungracious, has nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Let us not forget the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960, the year I spent mostly as a fetus. Though Mr. Nixon was, with his five o'clock shadow, not meant for television, he almost won that election were it not for some monkeyshines by my own political mentor, Mayor Richard J. Daley, the father of the present King of Chicago, Richard M. Daley, who made sure that he delivered Illinois for Mr. Kennedy. As it is said, those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it, and if Richard Nixon could almost beat John F.Kennedy (he of PT 109 fame in WWII, and the legendary Kennedy clan), then one is forced to the conclusion that the possibility exists that Mr. McCain could do equally as well. All I can say is that I am glad that Mr. Obama learned his political chops in Chicago. He is going to need them.

Now the news will turn to the punditocracy which will begin to chew over who each candidate will pick to be Vice President. The notion of 24/7 speculation - all day and all night -- is enough to make me appreciate that Heroditus wrote his Histories and that Mr. Obama is a fan of Philip Roth. No worries here. I'll sleep better tonight as Mrs. Clinton realizes that Mr. Obama is no human stain. He is the real deal. And he will, at long last, have a chance to show us what someone who thinks about the future can do by learning from, instead of being imprisoned, by the past.

By the way, that bit about my grandfather founding Shiner, Texas was a figment of my fertile imagination. The rest is true.

Randy Shiner

Hillary Clinton's Base of Support

THIS is MUST SEE -- Warning - don't have anything liquid in your mouth while viewing. Wait until after at least 5:41 to drink anything. RS

We Now Know Who The Candidate Will Be

My faith in the American people has been answered. People who want a future for this country like me turned out in record numbers yesterday in North Carolina and Indiana. The distractions proved to be just that - distractions, which did not move that many people away from Barack Obama who people know is telling them not necessarily what they want to hear or are or used to hearing, but what they must hear: that the future of this country is more important than even they are. As soldiers fight and often die in battle for a cause bigger than themselves, so too voters in North Carolina and Indiana (supposedly the next Pennsylvania for Hillary Clinton), this observer hopes and prays that the rest of the conscious electorate will likewise realize that they and the superdelegates are voting for something bigger than themselves in the 2008 elections - their country which still, I am tearfully grateful to say, still has at least one ray of hope for the future. We are going to take our country back. And I do not mean to the past. Let us hope that Barack Obama can and will have the wind at his back and fortitude of intestine to weather the storms of status quo that will confront and buffet him as he moves forward, hopefully to the office of President. Much will depend on how the loser loses. Think of Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter in 1980. As a child, I lived in the Promised Land. I hope to live there again.

Randy Shiner

Baracky Obama

Stakes High for Democrats in Philly Debate

I've been in shul most of the past few days and haven't gotten around to blogging anything on the so-called debate of last Tuesday night. Now that I think about it, I've actually avoided it. Because the reality was that I turned it off after the first 45 minutes and put some Coltrane on and tried to forget what those two clowns from ABC - Walt Disney Entertainment were doing: talking about exactly the things that thinking Americans, concerned for the future, could not give a damn about. The first half was strictly about ratings and sensationalism to rank with that of the National Enquirer's lower competition. Being an avid watcher of "This Week" since it was David Brinkley, I was most disappointed, nay, disturbed with the obvious bias that was being shown against not only Obama, but against the intelligence of the American voter. Stephanopoulous, who owes his professional life to the Clintons, should have known to recuse himself from "moderating" this "debate". There was nothing moderate about what I saw.

At the first, they were talking still, still, still, talking about Jeremiah Wright. I thought: "aren't we past this?" and "why are they still talking about this BS?" I was in more or less a state of shock that this could be happening, right here in the so-called bastion of freedom in the world where the press is free to do pretty much whatever they want or (according to this morning's New York Times), what the government wants, at least from former military who are connected with the military contracting business somehow. Of all the issues faced by this country at this moment in its history, immediately prior to a potentially pivotal primary vote in Pennsylvania, these two, whose elevators stop at their pockets, not their journalistic integrity center in their brains, decide to talk about trash. Where did they find the ONE voter in this country who "is concerned" with Mr. Obama's patriotism because he doesn't wear a lapel pin? Why are we talking about this "because I know X, therefore I think like X" business? It's almost beyond words and is the reason why I turned it off.

If Obama was pissed off, I don't blame him one bit. If he looked irritated, he had a right to be so. I was irritated. If he would have overreacted, people would have found a way to get on his case about his "temperament" or some nonsense. Having spent the better part of four years studying political science in college, loving politics, this was the equivalent of florid syphillis. Painful and disgusting.

I very briefly perused some of the comments on the ABC website after reading Frank Rich's column in the Times, having just come back from seder at Rav Menashe East's home, where he hosted 45 people. if you have not read that column, you should. If you didn't see the "debate", allow me to tell you that I will not deem it appropriate to remove the quotation marks from that word, as what happened, at least from the half that I saw, was more of a hatchet or axe job on Obama. I have mentioned this to several people, and I invariably hear "oh well, he needed to be tested!" Tested on what? Whether he wears a lapel pin? To vouch for the opinions and statements of people that he happens to know? This is just like the Communist witch hunters headed by the Senator from Appleton, Wisconsin in the 1950s. Nothing less. They used guilt by association then, and Obama's opponents, including and especially Mrs. Clinton, are doing the exact same thing now. The below was an example of a particularly well-done comment that I thought was worthy of attention here:


I love reading the comments of people who think that the moderators did a good job because they "tested" Obama with questions that might be used against him later by Republicans. Is that really the job of moderators of a Presidential debate? Did they tell Obama that they were going to do that when they invited him to a "debate?" It would be like taking your car in to get an oil change and the guy picks up a hammer and smashes your windshield in. And then his buddy excuses his behavior by telling you that the guy did it to "test" you, in case somebody smashes your windshirld in sometime in the future. I'm sure we would all accept that. Let's put this as straight as possible. The moderators of a debate are supposed to be moderating a debate between the candidates, not attacking one of the two candidates incessantly in order to "test" that candidate. That's just a nice little fake excuse you can use if you want to attack somebody, just like the guy with the hammer who was just supposed to change your oil. Stop with all the excuses, already. These guys were supposed to be objectively moderating a DEBATE between candidates who were running for the highest office in the land. Instead they chose to use the time to attack the candidate that they obviously want to lose the contest. Think up all the stupid excuses you want. They don't work. We know a hatchet job when we see it. This was a hatchet job, pure and simple.


I agree and endorse wholeheartedly the sentiments and their expression. There are over 19,000 comments on the debate story on ABC.com. From reports from people who get paid to review those commentary boards, the trend is overwhelmingly in favor of the views I hold and share here. Let us hope that most Pennsylvania voters on Tuesday April 22 see the so-called "race" for what it is: over.

Chag kasher v' sameach....

Randy Shiner

The Fools of Spring Available for Comment: a Snapshot of Impressions of Madness at Dawn

Robbie Baitz is spot on with his assessment not nutty to feel that if Obama is not elected, this country will have made a horrible choice to turn away from the future in retreat to the past. Hope will be gone. The talking heads have a commercial stake in keeping the Democrats' gutter-sniping alive; I don't view this as Sysyphean. Sysyphus rolled that boulder up the hill and his curse was that it could never be rolled OVER the hill; it would just come back down, and he would have to start all over again. The people that you see as Sysyphean are not. They have choices to make: they can continue to talk about the same old same old or they can, in line with Obama's challenge of last week, roll that boulder over the hill and discuss real issues that are of real importance to Americans. There is, sadly, more money in dirt than issues. I do not watch MSNBC all day long any more; it was driving me mad, too, just exactly for the same reasons it was him. I know on a gut level what is right and wrong and what the issues are that are facing America. And we get Olbermann talking about bed-bugs at Fox News and who called whom Judas Iscariot or something other than a patriot. THAT is madness. WE are not mad. We have been through a civil war and we have been through McCarthyism. It seems that the thirst for hate and pettiness knows no bounds in this country any more, so much so that if there is anyone to blame, we need collectively only look in a mirror.

Randy




The Fools of Spring Available for Comment: a Snapshot of Impressions of Madness at Dawn
Posted March 24, 2008 | 08:30 PM (EST)


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Read More: Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Chris Matthews, Hardball, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, James Carville, Joe Scarborough, John McCain, John Ridley, Msnbc, Pat Buchanan, Breaking Media News


Turn on MSNBC at dawn. Invite Babel into your home at six a.m. It's hallucinatory. It might be Pat Buchanan in his last act, to offer a shrill diorama of white rage. It might be Joe Scarborough, a good boy, honest injun', trying for reason, trying for something contemporary, something "now" something hip -- but still, aswirl in the miasma of tit-for-tat politics most of the time.

It might be someone marvelous, like the elegant Jonathan Capehart, or someone totally wiggy and weirdly watchable as John Ridley. Scarborough is oddly sympathetic, posing as buffoon in a fleece sweater thing, but really smart. His honor peeks through in the weirdest way. But it diminishes to keep the very stupidest stories alive. I can't get enough of that show. It's America itself; arguing, bitching, brothers and sisters going at it, always coming back the next day -- leaving their grudges behind. It might be Ms. Brezinski, smarter than anyone in the room, but still endlessly playing tape of the good Reverend Wright. They talk and they talk and they talk and they captivate and guide the national conversation, along with Anderson, and Wolf, et al, but they all remind me of the thing I don't like about Hillary Clinton -- there is a patina of condescension in every last bit of discourse, in every last analysis and in every last precis sentence they offer up for "debate".

And they are stoked, fueled, enlivened by the theatrics of the surrogates for both candidates. Oh the surrogates. Carville as Sancho Panza, Reverend Wright as some sort of Farrakhan manque as it is written. (I've heard the same things he said at the most diverse dinner parties on both coasts, except the speaker wasn't black and wasn't yelling.)

As the day goes on, you start to feel insane, if you keep MSNBC on. Bill Clinton implied or didn't imply that Obama was not a patriot. Discuss. Discuss some more. ( I think "who is getting paid for this debate?") Because the same stuff is rehashed in a sisyphusian cacophony from dawn to midnight, with some breaks for shows about prisoners and their tattoos. On MSNBC I think the vice president of the United States just shrugged again about the dead children of America. You can see the blood slowing and thickening in his arteries, occluding and blocking all the impulses that are responsible for decency.

Everybody has something to say. All of us. Me. You. We yell and fight and roar and score points.

(Pause.)

Okay. There are two candidates for the Democratic nomination. They have to talk about the millions of uninsured, the children of this country who have been bypassed by life itself, by opportunity and by hope. They have to talk about the economy and the war and our absurd financial indiscipline -- but all they can do is take defensive positions on the endless babel spewed out by their surrogates.

By eleven, one is exhausted, and feels poisoned. The commercials alone -- atop the presidential panoply -- make one feel like it's a bad smog day in L.A. No matter where you are.

It's seven p.m. There's Hardball with Chris Matthews, who seems also like the last honorable schoolboy, but somewhat....compromised by the sheer concretizing effort of putting on that show day after day. Everybody wears a tie and has a haircut. The women, passionate and committed, go out and sell it. Whatever it is. Katrina Vanden Huevel is on as I write, promoting Richardson as VP for Obama (of course), while Ron Brownstien (author of a perfect book about Hollywood's intersection with Washington) shrugs and plays cool. Buchanan is back with his inability to ever, ever see the shade of gray.

Chris bemoans the soap opera of the Democratic war, while never mentioning that he's one of the guys stoking it on and on and on.

THERE ARE FOUR THOUSAND SOLDIERS DEAD TODAY. It is used as the anchor for a "discussion of the surge".

Some shit has gone down in Detroit with the mayor and perjury over sex. The distractions are like bubble gum to bad breath; a temporary relief at best. Now it's Olbermann, the bastard love child of Howard Beale and Hamlet, and I watch him tell us about bedbugs(!!!) at Fox-news - I watch, feeling a bit like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, when the lens does something unknowable, stretching, elongating, bending...

And yet there is real life. It remains ever present. We can not avoid it. Journalism is insufficient to the task, and art seems to have lost a certain metaphoric elegance -- it doesn't draw people in.

I send money every month to the Children's Defense Fund. I think about the things I can do.

It is no secret that I am madly in love with Obama and everything he stands for. I talk to my shrink about an America that does not elect him. I think it will be the end of some hope, some dream for the realization of everything that Martin Luther King stood for.

If it doesn't happen, I will retreat. Into the small and the quiet. My friends, my family, my work. No public hope. I worry that my anger at Hillary Clinton is muddy, but then I think about the impression of falsity and the condescension she exudes. To me. I know she doesn't hit everybody the same way. I think about my friends who keep asking me not to slam her anymore.

MSNBC in the background. Iraq. In the background? How do we get out? Matthews is speaking to Richardson about Carville and the Clintionian sense of entitlement (only within their staff -- I disagree).

I know I will do anything I can for her if she is the nominee, but my dreams for this country will have died. I wish Senator Clinton and Senator Obama could silence the gutter-sniping and solely talk to the issues of what it means to be an American circa 2008.

I am terribly angry over the Clinton's praise for John McCain; so craven, so vicious, so cynical and so wrong. In the background, Richardson is passionately extolling the virtues of his guy
and the night goes on, the talk goes on, unabated and I watch, I judge, I scribble, my passions agitated. What next?

What Happened Last Night - Clinton Nets A Gain of Four Delegates

Maureen Dowd, in today's NYT, observes that it was "shoulder pad feminism" whose tone was "if you don't vote for a woman, you're a traitor to the cause" that played the key role in Hillary Clinton's popular vote victories last night in three of four states which held primaries. As my dear departed mother (zt'l) used to say, "if you throw enough s**t on the wall, some is bound to stick". And indeed, in addition to the kitchen sink, she trotted out the feminists of yore and others who played to the traditional bias against women in America as a basis for rejecting Obama and supporting her. "People will have to choose which of America’s sins are greater, and which stain will have to be removed first. Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?"

It's a pity that the people of Ohio and Texas could not see past this shameless yet ultimately successful attempt by the Clinton campaign to divide traditional liberals like this. Aren't we past identifying people's ideas by the color of their skin or what equipment is between their legs? I believe, in the end, in the power of ideas and in turn, their power to motivate people. And all you need to do is look at who is best able to articlulate those ideas, propose changes based on them and motivate people to implement them. I am more interested, as I have written in this space, in what is between their ears; nothing more and nothing less.

For all the horn-blowing and drumbeat of "Clinton Comeback" after last night, she gained a net total of FOUR delegates. FOUR. Repeat a third time: FOUR. She still trails in the delegate count by plenty, and as long as like-thinking Americans show up and vote their conscience and not their sex or race, there is only one candidate: Obama.

Meanwhile, we are stuck in a primary that will see both candidates go after each other, giving John "Grampa Munster" McCain all the ammunition he needs for the general election. He can dismiss 65% of his staff right now, and just sit back in his Arizona Barcalounger and watch the fun and games as the Democratic candidates rip each other to shreds.

In THAT battle, I am glad that Obama came of age politically in Chicago. He is going to need every bit of that experience in the coming weeks to fend off the Clinton attack machine and hopefully address those women voters who, in Wisconsin at least, had the shmarts to see past Obama's skin and Clinton's pantsuits and bra to the ideas that they offer the Country to get us back to where we need to be.

This is an awful situation to be in and, in the end, Hillary is doomed to failure, a fact which someone in the Demcractic National Committee needs to tell her before we hand the Republicans another victory. Do they have the cajones to tell her what she NEEDS to hear as opposed to what she WANTS to hear? I doubt it, but at the same time, the Obama campaign rolls on with an almost insurmountable lead in delegates.

What will be interesting, if it comes to this, is when Hillary starts to argue about popular vote being more important than the delegate count, the exact opposite of what she was saying only a month or two ago. You can bet her whining will get tiresome and someone, finally fed up, will tell her to go back to her seat in the Senate, sit down and read a copy of Vogue. She's forgotten how to be a real lady and at the same time command respect and admiration. (see, e.g., Barbara Boxer, Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, the late Barbara Jordan, and the list goes on and on) All I see is political maneuvering and hacksterism from someone who will say or do ANYTHING to get herself elected President. At this point, she can only want the election for the thrill of power; her campaign right now is leading her party to ITS doom.

RS