Author: Greg Saunders

John McCain challenging Barack Obama to go to Iraq is pretty childish. It’s not like a Senator’s meticulously-planned stroll through Baghdad is going to give them an accurate view of what’s going on in Iraq. Here’s McCain’s most well-known trip to the Green Zone, in which little shopping trip needed little more than a bullet-proof vest, “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships” :

And here’s a photo from McCain’s most recent trip :



If McCain thinks challenging Obama to go to Iraq will teach him something beyond “American troops get annoyed when they get pulled from the field and put on ‘babysit a Sentor’ duty”, then maybe Barack can return the favor and challenge “Maverick” to visit a place where he could learn something. Like a junior college where he can take an Econ 101 class or a temp agency where he can learn what life is like for us who haven’t spent the last three decades in Washington D.C. married to a multi-millionaire or to a bookstore to read about how things are really going in Iraq…

This morning, I was all set to link to a post over at The Carpetbagger Report, noting that Hillary Clinton’s campaign has taken the high road lately and that Obama supporters would be better off chilling out and letting Hillary step aside on her own terms. Then I saw that Clinton compared her cynical and self-serving crusade to get the Florida and Michigan votes counted to the struggles of the civil rights era and I remember why I’ve found her campaign so damned infuriating.

It’s stunning to me that Hillary Clinton supporters would have the audacity to claim that the popular vote is a metric that we should be using to determine who should get the Democratic nomination while at the same time insisting that Obama shouldn’t receive a single vote for Michigan. I’m ambivalent about whether or how the MI and FL delegates should be seated, but if you’re going to hold yourself up as a champion of voting rights and insist that the popular vote is a more legitimate way to gauge voter intent, then it’s pretty craven to chase a strategy whose only purpose is to cut into Obama’s lead with the implicit conclusion that not a single person in Michigan supports Barack OBama.

But, you might argue, Obama chose to take his name off the ballot and therefore his lack of support is just the result of his own choices. Well, if we’re going to follow the rules to the letter and punish candidates for their choices, then it bears repeating that the rules state that Michigan and Florida don’t count and that the Clinton campaign made the choice to agree to the DNC sanctions against these states. If you’re only going to recognize the rules that help Hillary Clinton win, just drop the self-righteous bullshit about your sterling commitment to democracy and be honest enough to admit that you’re only interested in Florida and Michigan because you think Clinton is a better candidate.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all of the other Democratic candidates competed under the same rules and Clinton lost. Now she’s trying to work the refs and is trying to change any rules that might keep her from winning. That’s understandable, but when you wrap your attempts to move the goalposts in a veneer of moral superiority and question the values of your opponents (specifically, questioning whether or not Obama supporters believe in voting rights), don’t be surprised if you piss a lot of people off.

So for all the talk about how much work the Obama campaign has ahead of itself trying to court alienated Clinton supporters, it’s worth pointing out the alienation works both ways.

If John McCain was hoping to use his speech at the Republican convention in September to try to woo working class voters away from Obama, he might have hit a snag. It seems that McCain’s speech (which traditionally happens on the final night of the convention) will be happening at the same time of the NFL season opener between the Superbowl champs NY Giants and the Washington Redskins. Whoops. I wonder how many people are going to want to skip the big game just to hear an old man give a patronizing speech about war?

This is funny. In a story about Hillary Clinton challenging Barack Obama to a “Lincoln/Douglas style debate”, the geniuses at Fox News accidentally used a photo of Frederick Douglas :

Maybe if Obama challenges Clinton to a Burr-Hamilton style duel, they can use this photo :

Hillary Clinton has been taking some well-deserved flack for essentially doing the GOP’s dirty work for them, but I had underestimated the lengths she’d go to stop Barack Obama. Over at TPM, Josh Marshall has a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of Clinton’s attempt to drag the Rev. Wright affair back into the media spotlight :

Now obviously, Hillary’s been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it’s actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.

In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.

For those who need a reminder of who Scaife is, here’s a bit from a CNN bio published during the Lewinsky scandal :

Scaife gave to GOPAC, the political fund that helped make Newt Gingrich speaker in 1994. Gingrich says Scaife’s money laid the basis for modern conservatism. And his money still flows:

* To the Heritage Foundation alone, nearly $3.5 million from Scaife foundations in the most recent three years on record.

* $1.22 million to the American Enterprise Institute.

* $1.40 million to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

* $325,000 to the Cato Institute.

* $575,000 to the Citizens for a Sound Economy, among others.

Scaife has particular contempt for the Clintons. At a Heritage Foundation event in November 1994, Scaife said, “I think maybe Hillary and company have it figured out right. They wouldn’t be happy here.”

Scaife’s foundations shovel millions into groups hostile to Bill Clinton. The Free Congress Foundation, which runs a conservative cable channel, received $1.9 million from 1994 to 1996.

Hollywood’s Center for the Study of Public Culture, which sees liberal bias in the movies, got nearly $1.8 million. Accuracy in Media, a group still promoting the idea that Clinton aide Vince Foster may have been murdered, got $675,000.

At Scaife’s newspaper his reporter Christopher Ruddy doggedly pursues the Foster case. And when Ruddy’s book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” got a bad write-up in the American Spectator, saying Ruddy sounded like a “right-wing nut,” Scaife cut off the magazine’s money.

This is a man who literally spent millions trying to convince people that the Clintons are murderers, yet when Hillary got caught in a string of embarrassing lies that threaten to derail her presidential bid, she goes straight to heart of “the vast right wing conspiracy”.

I suppose if you’re in the business of character assassination, why not go to the best, right?