Some of you know that I am an, er, critic of Israel, but I am a big fan of parts of its English media, especially the newspaper Ha’aretz, and not just on its Mideast coverage. Here’s an intriguing column by Bradley Burston on the US election. He’s basically written Obama off.

Take a long walk in this land of dreams and all you’ll see is Obama. Obama lawn signs, Obama bumper stickers, window placards, lapel buttons, anklets. In souvenir stores, Obama t-shirts compete successfully with longtime best-sellers touting Bourbon Street and carousing alligators.  Read more 

Very recently, this thread on Clinton Derangement Syndrome erupted into flame over Bill Clinton’s famous Sister Souljah Moment when I mentioned it as a possible cause of dissatisfaction with him felt by some people (me included) during his presidency. You know, things were different then, and we never imagined things could get this bad. Ah, the memories.  Read more 

So apparently this dude named John Edwards has had an affair, and even ran for teh presidential nomination knowing that there was this little skeleton in his closet.

Colour me shocked. Tall, telegenic politician running for national office has a secret affair? How can this be?

All jokulating aside, obviously we all know that cheating on your wife is probably not a good thing, especially when she’s recovering from cancer. But we also all know from, um, previous experience, that it’s not wise to speculate about the peculiarities of relationships between the rich and famous.

It’s also probably not wise to have an affair when running for president.  Read more 

It has been kindly pointed out to me that there is an error (in good faith, based on not checking the facts on another post and/or misreading the post) in my last post on flags. I feel obliged to correct this with another post, because I feel the content of my post still stands even after the factual error has been corrected.

Hillary Clinton did not participate in the attempt at adding a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution. She instead attempted to defuse it by proposing a non-amendment that very narrowly fit the Constitution as interpreted generally by the courts. Consequently, this paragraph,  Read more 

There are reasons to prefer Clinton to Obama. There are easily arguable reasons to be angry that Clinton is not presently likely to be a Presidential candidate in the general election. You can even make a case for not voting for Barack Obama. You can make an even better case for not voting at all.

But there are a few moderately popular reasons for preferring Clinton to Obama that disturb me. A variant of one of these is present in this post at The Confluence.  Read more 

[Much shortened version of a much longer post I accidentally destroyed by hitting a wrong key but am too lazy to rewrite.]

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was a Canadian Prime Minister named Jean Chrétien from the Liberal Party who took over when the Conservative Party was weakest and proceeded to hold his political enemies at bay for more than a decade. He did so because he had no compunction about seeing politics as war, and never accomodated his opponents for high-fallutin’ reasons of unity. No Unity Ponies for him!  Read more 

Mighty Corrente Building Manager Lambert brought something up in the comments to this post by bringiton that I thought deserved its own, entirely new thread. Maybe; it’s part of the “What To Do With The OFB” issue that I think is a fairly important matter.

Anyway, Lambert quoth:

How about they go fuck themselves?  Read more 

It’s become a political cliché in this election season that Obama and his campaign have been largely about process issues (“politics, not policy”) and that there is a large segment of the Democratic Party that is surprisingly passionate about process issues and see in Obama a way to bring process issues to the fore. This attitude towards process issues stretches back to the Dean campaign. Whether this attitude is justified is another matter, but it’s becoming clear that it’s not an issue that is likely to win a general election, and that the Obama campaign’s focus on meta issues has been at the expense of issues that matter to another important voting bloc, and this might even cost him a nomination that for a time seemed to be practically his.  Read more 

skdadl at pogge reminds us that certain parties regularly get away with spinning their regular wrongitude into a larger, more noble narrative of rightness.  And that those who were right never get the credit for it.

Look: the point is that Iggy and company may have been wrong in the observable, normal universe—-what you or I might call "reality"—-but they were wrong in a noble, beautiful way.  The kind of wrongness to which they fell victim is the kind of wrongness that allows one to cover ones eyes with the back of one’s hand, stretch out the other hand, and sigh, "Ah, me!"   Read more