Your face is not our problem

Just a quick note regarding this:

Several close friends and supporters of Hillary Clinton tell CNN they are pushing for a “graceful exit strategy” that would allow the Clinton and Obama camps to come together, and for the New York senator to save face should she fail to become the nominee.

It was pretty clear two months ago that HRC would not be the nominee barring a catastrophe in BHO’s campaign. She’s stayed in it for a variety of reasons, but she was taking a tremendous risk to her “face” and her place in history by rolling the dice for as many times as she’s rolled them. She lost, and quite possibly damaged the party and BHO’s presidential prospects in the bargain…and now she’s looking for a bailout?

I don’t believe she’s the strongest possible choice for VP, period. The Obama campaign should certainly help her find a graceful exit from the race, but awarding (or even offering) her the VP slot should not be part of that exit.

Religious codewords, again…

Ok, just what the heck is going on here:

“I’ve lost track of how many towns we’ve been to,” she said of herself, Bill and Chelsea’s efforts. “I’m telling you, my husband is going to visit every place where two or more people gather in North Carolina before Tuesday.”

For those of you who didn’t go to Sunday School, my guess is that HRC had a brain fart and accidentally implied that her husband is God Almighty:

“Again I say to you, that if two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven. “For where two or three have gathered together in My name, I am there in their midst.”

–Matthew 18:20

Sigh.

Uncle Vinny liveblogs the last (?) Democratic Debate

6:02 Brian Williams says: No rules! Um, wow. No time limits should be kinda interesting.  Oh dear, Tim Russert is on. Candidates are sitting down.

6:03 They’re contrasting the “I’m honored to be here with you, Barack Obama” with the “Shame on you, Barack Obama” speeches… She says by way of explanation that it’s important  to stand up for yourself. “My plan will cover everyone, and it will be affordable.” Generally saying that his attacks have been incorrect.

6:07 Uh oh, I’m forgetting to blog. Now we’re getting into the mandate. “Every individual would have to get health insurance.” He’s raising concerns about how the rubber would meet the road when it comes to mandates…. what happens in the cases where the expense really is too great? After exemptions, wouldn’t some people still be left out of health insurance?

6:10 Interesting! I didn’t know Obama’s plan mandates parents to cover their children. “Universal health care is a core Democratic principle.”

6:11 I do wish she’s reply to the core question of how to deal with the people who can’t afford her plan…. what actually happens to them? How do you enforce a mandate?

6:14 It’s such a complicated change… both of them have elaborate systems to propose. Debates rarely give enough time to get all this stuff figured out.

6:16 Obama: “People choose to buy Medicare because it’s a good deal.”

6:17 The MSNBC.com newsfeed is getting wonky.

6:18 Damn, now they’re going to talk about NAFTA. I don’t know much about NAFTA. HRC: “Why do I always get the first question?” HRC: “Some areas of our country have benefited from NAFTA, but…” She thinks we need a “trade time-out” until fair trade and environmental standards are in place.

6:22 Obama accuses Clinton of flirting with NAFTA in the past, but doesn’t really say much about it. I don’t think she was ever a huge booster, based on what I’ve heard; her husband was much more of a fan.

6:26 “It has worked in some parts of America, it has been a problem in Ohio.”

6:27  Oops, phone call interruption.

6:31 Tim Russert has another annoying question: “What happened to those 200,000 jobs you promised while campaigning in 2000?”  HRC responds: If Al Gore would have been elected, we would have had those jobs.

6:33 The MSNBC feed is kinda unusable at this point.

6:37 “Obama made a speech in 2002 about not getting involved in the Iraq War, but he didn’t have the responsibility. Since then he and I have voted exactly the same.”

6:38 These debates are kind of boring… it’s the same 26 arguments over and over again. But I do like it that the answers aren’t timed.

6:39 BHO: “I was specific about the reasons why I was against the war. Once the bus is in the ditch there are a limited number of ways to get the bus out of the ditch.”

6:42 Oooh, that’s a trap. “If the Iraqis ask us to leave, would you leave immediately?” BHO’s answer: “They are sovereign, yes we’d leave.” Hm, I wonder if hawkish people would answer differently.

6:45 damn, the MSNBC viewer got really screwed up, and I missed HRC’s answer. But now it’s fixed.

6:46 HRC: “Why hasn’t Obama had meetings to work with NATO on Afghanistan?”

6:53 Oops, they played the wrong tape

6:57 I just don’t get a warm feeling when HRC says she’s going to go “toe-to-toe” with the special interests.

6:59 Was Hillary Clinton co-president? In any case, she should take both responsibility and credit, says Obama.

7:01 Now the video feed has lost the audio, too. 

7:12 It’s back…. they’re talking about anti-Semitism. “There’s a difference between denouncing and rejecting”??, says Hillary, and BHO says, “Fine, I both reject and denounce Minister Farrakhan.” Great answer from him, I think.

7:22 Cagey question from Tim Russert about the next Russian president… it would have been awesome for him to point this question to Obama. Instead, Hillary Clinton answers it first, and we all know she knows a lot about this stuff… but does Obama? I’ll be curious to see how he replies. He shows that he remembers the “looked into his soul” remark from GWB.

7:26 What votes/words would you take back? HRC would take back her Iraq war vote. Ow… she’s talking — in a way — about the costs of her vote… but she passes the responsibility for going to war off to GWB.

7:27 Terri Schiavo — BHO wishes he would have done more to stop the intervention of Congress into that situation.

7:29 Unusual statement about his enjoyment of the campaign with Clinton. “Restoring that sense of public service to the White House.”

7:31 BHO basically is given a chance to say what question HRC “must answer” to say if she’s capable, but won’t attack her. He’s “better”, he’ll say, because he can “bring people together” across religious, ethnic, regional and political boundaries.

7:34 HRC: “The question is, which one of us can actually make change happen.”

Well, that was the first debate I’ve watched this season. I guess I’m glad I didn’t watch more of ‘em.

HRC vs BHO on foreign policy….go!

K. It’s late, I’m sick and I just popped a few generic tylenol PMs, so I’m gonna bang out my thoughts on Obama and Clinton’s position on foreign policy:

• All those Democrats who are super excited about cluster bombs and land mines, please stand up. OK, thanks Hillary Clinton. Anyone else? Not many, I’d guess, because most Democrats find them repellent.
• An aggressive posture against Iran? Check, thanks in part to HRC. Obama was a no-show for that vote (don’t even start), although he says he would have voted against it; that would be in line with his tendency to prefer assertive diplomacy backed with a credible military threat instead of the perfunctory diplomacy head-fakes of the past 7 years.
• Do I use the word “perfunctory” a lot. My guess: yeah.
• Howard Dean tried to shove the party in a bit more of a “talk first” direction back in 2004… dude was pissed and righteous — if a bit of a hothead — and I was a huge fan. Obama is saying a lot of the same things, but he’s way more careful in how he says things.
• To my way of thinking, HRC hasn’t fallen into some kind of hawkish position by painting herself into a CYA corner — she’s genuinely belligerent (for a Democrat) when it comes to foreign policy. You can see this in her foreign policy staff (Albright, Holbrooke, Berger, yuck), and the contrast with BHO’s staff (Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, Samantha Power) is clear enough.

Any questions? I had a lot more thoughts in the shower, that’s all I got right now.

Oh, one more thing: For the record, I don’t expect BHO to actually be some kind of Messiah when/if he gets elected. He’s got a number of positions and political strategies that are really wrong:

• No health care mandate in his plan, and to make matters worse he’s running a pretty clear Republican line against HRC’s (better) plan: ooooh, that scary government is gonna garnish your wages, etc. This is bad policy and bad politics. (Now, it would be smarter politics if he’d casually mention the different while running against HRC and make a big deal of it while running against McCain. It’s a political strategy to win Independent votes, not a club to use against HRC.)
• The “campaigning with the anti-gay bigot” thing was pretty goddam offensive.
• Gee, I thought I had more complaints.
• Oh, of course it would be great if he ran more explicitly on his progressive agenda. It is troubling that a lot of his supporters can’t rattle off the first 5 things he wants to do when he gets in office. (Climate change, start pulling troops back, health care, ethics reform, “the economy”, possibly in that order. That’s my guess, without, ya know, going to the website. Other contenders: immigration reform and education.) Ok, after checking the doc, it looks like ethics reform is number one; all other changes have to come after that one, thus the candidate of “CHANGE”… change the system or nothing happens.
• Starting every sentence in an interview with “Look,” gets old. Change we can believe in starts there, plzkthxbai.

Whew, I’m sleepy now. That Psycho screenshot didn’t quite wake me up.

Things that collapse

Ducklings!

I logged on this afternoon to hear strange rumors in guild chat about our guild leader quitting the game. “Whaaat?”, spake I, bewildered. Only on Thursday we were very close to completing an amazing run through some difficult bosses in TK and SSC… how could we be in such dire straits on Saturday? Logged on later that night to find that it was all true: Our guild leader had sharded her gear due to unspecified “Real Life” issues and her boyfriend (also a guild officer) was quitting the game, too. The other officer didn’t feel like continuing without his friends, so the guild would be disbanding.

DISBANDING?! Do you know, humble reader, how difficult it is to get 25 people to accomplish anything simultaneously in a video game?! If you’re still reading this without having died of a heart attack, you surely don’t. All my WoW-knowledgable readers… I killed them with paragraph #1.

I’m guildless, and my Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday nights are now completely free and blemishless. Surely this will revive my dating life, whee.

Excuse me a sec, I need to start drinking a liter of water to counteract the booze. Ah, much better.

So tonight, after muddling through some confusing, aimless and solution-free guild chat banter, I went out for drinks with a friend. We talked politics and WoW, coming to a few not-so-surprising conclusions:

• It’s unlikely that voters would ever have responded well to John Edward’s news that his wife has terminal cancer. Although it’s potentially a heroic underdog story where good triumphs over despair, in real life this is not a winning electoral arc. Bartenders with degrees in Communication Theory can tell you that was a loser, and that dropping out post-diagnosis was the only logical choice. Whatever sympathy one might have for Edwards — and we swim in those waters — is sucked down the drainspout of cold reality of the nature of the American electorate.
• Pear martinis — they can be good!
• Success at the 25-man level in Warcraft is an utter crapshoot. Skill, organization and gear — all are difficult to crystallize. When it all comes together, it can be fantastically fun, but you never know when it’s all going to collapse.
• “Mike Huckabee” — goddam but that’s funnier to say drunk than sober.
• Mitt Romney is certainly more likely to win the Republican nomination than anyone else. Republican voters aren’t crazy enough to vote for someone so clearly doomed at a national level (Huckles) nor can they conscience voting for someone they can’t stand (McCain) because of past betrayals. Giuliani has a barely plausible recovery strategy(2nd in Florida, stupid media bump), but only because the whole field is in such appalling disarray.
• The Hillary vs McCain race is the least interesting of the bunch. For fun, juiciness and excitement all us kids are clamoring for Huckabee vs Obama, ‘tho we expect to have our pony-wishes punished pretty dam’ hard behind the woodshed any minute now.

The new strategy — forged on the anvil of the hydroxyl group — is to reroll Horde toons on some barren unwelcoming server, wherein I fulfill my cradle-born dream of playing a tauren resto druid with the fabled and dizzying +5% stamina racial bonus. Fear my warstomp, puny Alliance!

Bloggingheads: Glen Loury and John McWhorter

One of the things I’ll have less time to do when I’m working is watch Bloggingheads.tv. That’s too bad –I’ve learned a lot by watching these things, but I probably won’t have the hours to spare and/or I’ll use my time differently when I have less of it.

In any case, I hope you’ll watch a few minutes of a recent debate here. I’ve watched several Bloggingheads with these guys, they’re completely fascinating.

Glenn Loury — As a brilliant young economist in the late 70’s and 80’s he was adored by conservatives for his contrarian opinions on affirmative action and entrepreneurial (not governmental) solutions to endemic poverty among inner city blacks. He enjoyed being a “thorn in the side of the civil rights establishment”, and did pretty well as a “token” black conservative, but after going through several startling personal crises he came out the other side more liberal, more friendly to Jesse Jackson, and far less likely to blame blacks for their predicament. The full NYT bio on him is here, and it’s one of the most interesting things I read all year.

John McWhorter — John writes for the NY Sun and has think-tank spot at the Manhattan Institute, and now and then gets tagged as a token conservative black, a label he’s pretty good at fighting off. He’s definitely more conservative than Glenn is these days, though, and dialog between the two of them is sometimes like Glenn arguing with himself from 25 years ago. I don’t know as much about John’s history, but their conversations have been enlightening.

In this clip they’re discussing their Democratic nominee choices. Glenn likes Hillary, John’s a fan of Obama — for some of the same reasons I like him, as it happens. Obama to me represents something “new”, a fresh start to our politics, a chance to rethink the way we see each other and the rest of the world. I understand why people have concerns about his experience, but I don’t worry about that myself; I’d much rather have someone in the office whose judgement, personality, charisma and political instincts are more to my liking than a experienced, mainstream centrist like Hillary Clinton.

In part 2 of the diavlog, to be posted next week, they’ll talk about Bill Cosby’s Come On People, a book that I’m guessing made Glenn pretty mad.

PS: I really wish I could embed the bloggingheads player in my blog, but I can’t figure out how to do that yet.