The crazed kewpie doll

       

In the Baghdad market… aren’t they sweet in their little blue shirts?

Just catching him on the MTP repeat… 3 am in the Western night…

oh I cheerfully admit to disliking the man for years…. One of my few political joys (you see a hopeful landscape?  Maazeltov! Don’t go in for an eye exam!) is that his face is literally falling off, every day.  Wilfred mentioned that on HD TV it is painfully obvious…

Other than that I am reading the Heileman articles in NY Mag… one very short, one long.

Some snips from the long one…

Almost a year ago, the top strategists of the big-three Democratic candidates appeared at an event at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In response to a question from a student about how the Democrats could avoid being Swift-Boated in 2008, Clinton’s chief savant, Mark Penn, argued that his boss had a proven adeptness at hand-to-hand combat against “the Republican machine.” “She knows how they think, she knows how they act, she knows how to defeat them,” Penn maintained. “And I think that experience is absolutely critical to actually winning this White House.”

Seated across from Penn, Obama’s guru, David Axelrod, mournfully shook his head. “Let me just say that I think our aspirations should be, at the end of the day, not to defeat the Republican machine but to rebuild the American community.” Soon enough, Penn, clearly annoyed by Axelrod’s piety, was contending that the records of Obama and Clinton on Iraq were essentially indistinguishable—which, in turn, brought forth a stern rebuke from Axelrod. “I really think it’s important,” he said, “if we are going to run the kind of campaign that will unify our party and move this country forward, that we do it in an honest way, and that was not an honest tactic.”

At the time, it was impossible to know that you were witnessing a crystalline preview of the campaign ahead, illuminating the thematic and substantive contrasts the candidates would draw. It also hinted unmistakably at the potential that the race could turn radioactive at the drop of a hat.

And a peek at Axelrod. always good to be introduced to the handlers…

 As Clinton was stumbling in Iowa, Obama was on the rise. Far more than Penn, Axelrod, a former Chicago Tribune reporter with thinning hair and a mingy mustache, grasped that the yearning to turn the page would be the central dynamic in 2008—and that this presented an opening for as unconventional a candidate as Obama. Sure, Axelrod allowed, Obama’s CV was meager by traditional standards compared with Clinton’s. But as he explained to me last summer, “The real question is, do we accept this broken paradigm of Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats? That’s why people are so disillusioned with our politics.”

Axelrod, who once worked not only for Hillary but for Bill Clinton (the phrase “bridge to the 21st century” from WJC’s 1996 campaign was his confection), first met Obama more than fifteen years ago and has been by his side all throughout his meteoric ascent. Axelrod believed that Obama could be the sort of transformational candidate he described, for a number of reasons. Although many of Obama’s positions were conventionally liberal, his pragmatism and incrementalism placed him outside any old-school ideological box. His signature accomplishments—death-penalty reform in Illinois, ethics reform in Washington—reflected a yen for cross-party cooperation. And in Obama’s post-racialism, the whole Kenyan-Kansan thing, Axelrod discerned the makings of a brand with enormous selling power. “Barack is the personification of his own message for this country,” he told the Times. “That we get past the things that divide us and focus on the things that unite us. He is his own vision.”

Other other other than that, the earth must have frozen on its axis, I agree with something David Byron wrote…

[B]ut yeah you see fucking idiots all the time saying to themselves that candidate X is only pretending to be a Reagan loving right-wing corporate bitch.  It’s insane but there it is.

I think people think that politicians pretend to be more corporate than they “really” are because they have to be to fit in.  That’s naive.  The corporations don’t look for people who are rabid lefties and try to bribe them.  They look for people who are rabid rightwingers but who can pretend to be sane or compassionate long enough to get elected.  It would be stupid for corporations to back someone who they thought was only on-side because of bribery since obviously once elected they might turn upon the hand that fed them.  The result is that in reality politicians tend to pretend to be more left wing than they really are.  Look at George Bush and his “compassionate conservatism” and his “more humble foreign policy”.  Rightwingers know that the people hate them and hate their so-called “ideas”.

Apparently lefties never figured it out. ::snip::

Bingo, they don’t get there unless fully vetted.  And arrive strung tightly like a trussed bird for the oven, so they can be yanked back should they get even slightly LEFTISCHER ideas…

Oh what a laugh it all is.  Pity the nasty joke is on us.  It should be on them.

last, sorry to be rude to Bob Herbert but the close of this opinion piece is such rhetorical slop:

What kind of people are the Clintons? What role will Bill Clinton play in a new Clinton White House? Can they look beyond winning to a wounded nation’s need for healing and unifying?

These are questions that need to be answered. Stay tuned.

The Clintons are the same as they were in the WH – with a couple of added twists, but fundamentally, the very same.  Bob Herbert has been at his post since 93… whatever did he write about them then – and all their troubles in office, so many, many of them of their own divising!

Bill and Hill have barely hidden what his role will be. I posted many months ago when I caught a segment of an ABC interview with Bill in Malia (Kate Snow), he clearly said (and ABC did not further comment, but ABC surely ran it, a few times): 

Of course I would not be President full time. 

The frightening thing is that so many of the electorate are just fine with it.  Yikes!

And last, America as wounded nation?  Oh GMAFB.  There are wounded, degraded and otherwise shamed people in America – and treating people that way is part of the bidness of America…  but let’s not paint America as the victim.

Kumbaya, Row The Boat Ashore… and kiss America’s boo boos… etc.

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