a bit and a thread…………. [updated] 21 December 2007

 
      Brendan Smialowski Getty Images

“The reason she ought to be president, over and above her vision and her plans is that she has proven in every position she has ever had in life, whether it was in elected office or not, that she is a world-class genius in making positive changes in other people’s lives,” he said.

LOL – what can you do but laugh?  I have pondered this… with Obama compared to RFK as well as Lincoln – why no Eleanor for Hillary?  You know they compare her to Eleanor amongst themselves…. They musta polled and it did not do well.

Another snip:

Clinton stuck mostly to familiar themes in two hour-long appearances Thursday, describing at length what he views as the nation’s biggest challenges. Nearly 15 minutes into his first speech, he added almost as an afterthought that “everything I’m saying here is my wife’s position, not just mine.”

hmm

David Corn says with cash and a will to go on, we have – most likely – a slugfest on our hands.  Seems logical.  We KNOW we have slugs.

If he is not blown away by her in the final results, he will be able to carry on. Both Obama and Clinton have plenty of money. And campaigns tend to peter out only when the well gets dry. So Clinton and Obama will continue on to New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and Super Duper Tuesday, a.k.a February 5, when 20-plus states will have primaries or caucuses.

The race could turn into a real slugfest. (Think of one of those Rocky movies.)

I never found a good solution for slugs, not salt, not a pan of beer.  All tht worked for me was collection, gathering them up, each in a plastic baggie and into the trash.  Asphixiation, basically…

Just as a flashback, the tally in Iowa in 2004 was 36 % for Kerry, then 25 for Edwards and 18 for Dean.  I don’t remember the details of the last DMR poll prior to caucus night, but I do recall it did not indicate that was coming.  Polls schmolls.

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UPDATE, 11:03 pm – on a cold winter’s night…

I caught Harry Reid on TNH today and, as a xmas miracle, the transcrpt is up on a Friday night before the holiday:

SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), Senate Majority Leader: Thank you very much for allowing me to be on your show.

It was all downhill from there... but, in light of an essay I read at HuffPo, there is a telling passage from Reid:

It was us, the Democrats, who realized that parents shouldn’t be buying armor and sending it to Iraq for their sons and daughters, so we pushed, and we got body armor.

We’re the ones that pushed for up-armoring the Humvees and other vehicles. We are the ones that put in the budget we just passed $3.7 billion more for veterans.

Of course, being reduced to this as “accomplishments” is admission of massive failure (in anything approaching a just world, that is), of the miltary apparatus, the congress and the country.

Some telling passages from Bromwich at Huffpo:

And then? The Democrats sat, and watched, and waited. They talked about their social policies. They knew if they waited long enough, the next move on Iraq would be the president’s; and this apparently was what they wanted. They knew that his next move would be to widen the war. They had decided by February that they would not stop him.

Armor:

Those who appeared most consequential in the scene were not the real movers. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can hardly have carried as much weight in these larger deliberations as Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel. Senator Clinton outranked Senator Reid in fame, fortune, and influence; she was the apparent candidate by acclamation for the presidential race in 2008; and her desires, however conveyed, would count for more than those of an obscure and hesitant lawmaker.

Rahm Emanuel had taken credit for the winning election strategy of 2006. Ascending with the majority, he avoided the substantial issue of Iraq, and addressed the need to get the best armor for the soldiers already there. Emanuel talked about armor, and soon Pelosi was talking about armor. All the while, on the floor of the Senate and in public speeches, Hillary Clinton gave her best energies to free the president to go after Iran.

If the Clinton-Emanuel axis is indeed a more accurate clue to the workings of the party than Reid-Pelosi [oh they just wring their hands and front for the others — Mcat], one may well ask what guided the accommodation of the Bush policy through 2007 by the de facto leaders of the opposition.

 Sold down the river, and we all know it…

Four superbases, we were told in 2003, were to be built for Americans in Iraq, but now there are five or six. As Clinton and Emanuel know, those bases are meant to be permanent.

They will not be used only to secure Iraq and intimidate Iran, but to harry Russia by way of the friendly belt of former republics, and to raise a bulwark against the growing power of China. The missile interceptors we want to install in Poland and the radar station in the Czech Republic, about which Vladimir Putin was said to be unreasonably exercised, could indeed seem, to a suspicious eye, part of the same broad strategy. Camp Bondsteel, built on 955 acres in Kosovo, might also be supposed to make some contribution.

The vice president is not the only American who does not want the Cold War to be over.

To judge by the votes of the 110th Congress, and by what has and has not been said on the campaign trail, some understandings are now clearly in place. The main agreement concerns what is not to be said. If either Clinton or Obama [no need to limit the situation to just The Two  — Mcat] is the Democratic nominee, and if no new insurgency erupts, the Iraq war will drop away completely as an issue of the presidential race in 2008. 

Poor Harry… think the band on his Everlasts broke:

The only way we can get things done is working together. When we get things done, there’s credit for everybody. But I repeat what I said earlier in the show: Everything we’ve tried has been blocked.

We’ve had 62 filibusters that have stopped us from moving forward. We’ve had to work around all that. It’s very difficult to do.

And I’m glad to have Mitch [McConnell] saying that he thinks things are better. I appreciate that very much. I want to work together. I want to work with the White House; I want to work with the Republicans in the Senate.

And I hope that the things work out better next year. If it doesn’t, it certainly won’t be because I haven’t tried.

This nation talks of success, victory, power, dominion of all kinds over the world, engages in self-aggrandisement all day long, but the the reverberating echoes of the defeat, now and to come, is deafening.

I caught Barbara Lee the other day, catching her in the middle of a floorspeech, talking of “the war”, “the genocide”, “the starvation”, “the displacement” – in Darfur.  The Out of Iraq members in the house should disband and apologise for being used as a side show.

If we are not being broken in, and down, for war then we are being set up for war…

[D]ebunking the claims of a “genocide against blacks” or an “Islamic holy-war” against Christians, Darfur’s Arab and black African ethnic groups have intermarried for centuries, and nearly everyone is Muslim. The “Save Darfur” campaign is deeply aligned with Jewish and Christian faith-based organizations in the United States, Canada, Europe and Israel. These groups have relentlessly campaigned for Western military action, demonizing both Sudan and China, but they have never addressed Western military involvement—backing factions on all sides. By mobilizing constituencies sympathetic to the “genocide” label and the cries of “never again” they do a grave disservice to the cause of human rights.::snip::

      
        Nasser Nasser for the AP, via MSNBC

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