THIS MODERN WORLD

I didn’t expect Hillary Clinton to concede and/or endorse tonight, but I certainly didn’t expect her to use her speech as a big “fuck you” to Barack Obama. It’s customary to use the final big speech of a campaign to thank supporters and reflect on the campaign’s themes and accomplishments, but tonight’s speech went beyond that. The ways Clinton used her speech tonight to further divide the Democratic party makes it seem as if my last post was written with the help of a time machine. I wrote about Clinton using rhetoric to give voters the impression that “Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate”, now take a look at her speech :

Who will be ready to take back the White House and take charge as Commander-in-Chief and lead our country to better tomorrows? People in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the territories, all had a chance to make your voices heard and on Election Day after Election Day, you came out in record numbers to cast your ballots. Nearly eighteen million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history. Even when the pundits and the naysayers proclaimed week after week that this race was over, you kept on voting.

You are the nurse on the second shift, the worker on the line, the waitress on her feet, the small business owner, the farmer, the teacher, the miner, the trucker, the soldier, the veteran, the student, the hard working men and women who don’t always make the headlines but have always written America’s story. You have voted because you wanted to take back the White House, and because of you, we won together the swing states necessary to get to 270 electoral votes.

In all of the states you voted because you wanted a leader who will stand up for the deepest values of our party. A party that believes everyone should have a fair shot at the American Dream. A party that cherishes every child, values every family, and counts every single vote.

On the very night when Barack Obama sealed the nomination, she couldn’t even be humble enough to acknowledge the fact. Instead, she used her speech to once again insist that she won the popular vote, insist that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain, and make a thinly-veiled jab about Florida and Michigan.

Even worse is that her insistence that she wouldn’t concede was just another plug for her website :

Now the question is, where do we go from here, and given how far we’ve come and where we need to go as a party, it’s a question I don’t take lightly. This has been a long campaign, and I will be making no decisions tonight. But this has always been your campaign, so to the 18 million people who voted for me and to our many other supporters out there of all ages, I want to hear from you. I hope you’ll go to my website at HillaryClinton.com and share your thoughts with me and help in any way that you can.

As Kos notes, rather than be magnanimous tonight, she chose to stir up her supporters even more and end the night with a fundraising appeal. Even as she’s laying off staff and becoming more obvious about her desire for the VP slot, she’s trying to squeeze every last dollar she can out of her supporters to pay off her campaign debts (to herself). And she has the gall to follow up the plug for her website with this :

In the coming days, I’ll be consulting with supporters and party leaders to determine how to move forward with the best interests of our party and our country guiding my way.

Yeah, and I’m sure the reminders about her “18 million” supporters aren’t implicit threats to take her voters and go home. If she truly cared about her party, rather than just HER campaign and HER supporters, she wouldn’t have picked tonight to pour salt the Democratic party’s open wounds and exploit her supporters passions (and disdain for Obama) to try to weasel her way into the VP slot and re-fill her bank account.

Embarrassing. Pathetic. Classless. Disgraceful.

John McCain: Bob Dole without the charisma, and with a scary death-rictus grin and weird Batman-villain giggle.

Hillary Clinton: this really could have, should have been her moment. Before she came on, my wife and I were talking about the possibility of an Obama/Clinton ticket, moving beyond the unpleasantness of the primary to bring the Democratic party together, acknowledging that she has earned many votes, and deserves respect for that. And if Hillary had come out and graciously conceded, we might have been able to sustain that fantasy. Instead, she gave an utterly tone-deaf speech which was All About Her, and at the end of it, I was ready personally to throw her under a bus, should one be passing by.

Barack Obama: Pitch perfect speech in front of a rock star crowd, the clear winner of the evening in every respect.

With the superdelegate endorsements coming in fast, it’s looking like even a lackluster showing tonight in Montana and South Dakota will be enough to push Obama over the delegate threshold. All eyes now seem to be on Hillary Clinton. I don’t know if she’ll concede or not, but it would be nice if she at least started the process of unifying the party by cutting out all of her bullshit rhetoric that’s had the effect of subtly implying that Barack Obama’s victory is somehow illegitimate.

Hasn’t that been the whole point of Clinton’s campaign over the past few months? There was the insistence that caucuses are “undemocratic” and that Obama’s wins were in small states that “don’t count” and the insistence that Obama was trying to “disenfranchise” voters in Florida and Michigan and finally their long-standing obsession with the popular vote. The clear impression here is that Barack Obama may have technically won the nomination, but that Hillary Clinton is the true choice of the American people.

Which is a load of crap. If caucuses didn’t count, the Obama campaign would have diverted their organizational energy into other contests. If the small states didn’t count, they would have concentrated their resources in large states like Clinton did. If Michigan counted, Obama wouldn’t have removed his name from the ballot like many of his fellow candidates. And if the popular vote was the metric by which the Democratic party chose its nominee, both candidates would have completely ignored sparsely populated states (like SD & MT). Obama’s campaign has been about accruing delegates wherever he can get them, not winning the race according to some hypothetical rules that come out of the Clinton campaign.

By insisting that there’s something unfair about the way the Democratic party is choosing its nominee, Clinton has undermined Obama’s victory and has done more to weaken the party going into the convention than McCain could dream of. While I happen to agree with many of the points the Clintons make (caucuses are undemocratic, popular vote better metric than delegates), the relative unfairness of these particular points is trumped by something that’s even more unfair, changing the rules mid-game. In order to make her case to undeclared superdelegates, Clinton has exploited some of the legitimate grievances that some have about the nominating process (grievances that she only seems to have found religion on when their outcomes prove to be politically expedient), and in the process has fanned the flames of division within her party.

So if Hillary is truly serious about bringing the party together, it’s not enough to simply concede the race, but to reiterate to her supporters that the Democratic nomination is decided by delegate count alone and, more importantly, that Barack Obama won a fair fight to gain the nomination. In other words, she needs to have the humility to put her party ahead of her own ambitions.

Holy crap.

From Tom Engelhardt at Tomdispatch:

[F]ormer commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez…got next to no attention for a presidential outburst he recorded in his memoir, Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story, so bloodthirsty and cartoonish that it should have caught the attention of the nation — and so eerily in character, given the last years of presidential behavior, that you know it has to be on the money.

Let me briefly set the scene, as Sanchez tells it on pages 349-350 of Wiser in Battle. It’s April 6, 2004. L. Paul Bremer III, head of the occupation’s Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as the President’s colonial viceroy in Baghdad, and Gen. Sanchez were in Iraq in video teleconference with the President, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Assumedly, the event was recorded and so revisitable by a note-taking Sanchez.) The first full-scale American offensive against the resistant Sunni city of Fallujah was just being launched, while, in Iraq’s Shiite south, the U.S. military was preparing for a campaign against cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

According to Sanchez, Powell was talking tough that day: “We’ve got to smash somebody’s ass quickly,” the general reports him saying. “There has to be a total victory somewhere. We must have a brute demonstration of power.” (And indeed, by the end of April, parts of Fallujah would be in ruins, as, by August, would expanses of the oldest parts of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. Sadr himself would, however, escape to fight another day; and, in order to declare Powell’s “total victory,” the U.S. military would have to return to Fallujah that November, after the U.S. presidential election, and reduce three-quarters of it to virtual rubble.) Bush then turned to the subject of al-Sadr: “At the end of this campaign al-Sadr must be gone,” he insisted to his top advisors. “At a minimum, he will be arrested. It is essential he be wiped out.”

Not long after that, the President “launched” what an evidently bewildered Sanchez politely describes as “a kind of confused pep talk regarding both Fallujah and our upcoming southern campaign [against the Mahdi Army]”…

“Kick ass!” [Bush] said, echoing Colin Powell’s tough talk. “If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can’t send that message. It’s an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal.

“There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!”

The rest.

The UN mandate allowing US troops to occupy Iraq expires on December 31, 2008. So the Bush administration desperately wants to sign a bilateral agreement with the Iraqi government before that happens. Without one our presence will be blatantly illegal, without even a figleaf of international legitimacy, creating all kinds of trouble.

The problem for Bush is there’s more and more Iraqi resistance to signing anything, even among Nouri al-Maliki’s main supporters. Bob Fertik looks at the evidence here.