Before I Forget…

Funny.

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Karl Rove was impressed with Barack Obama when he first met him.  But now he sees him as a “coolly arrogant” elitist…..“Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”  Actually, that sounds more like W.  The cheap populism is really rich coming from Karl Rove…..Rove is trying to spin his myths, as he used to do with such devastating effect, but it won’t work this time.  The absurd spectacle of rich white conservatives trying to paint Obama as a watercress sandwich with the crust cut off seems ugly and fake.  Obama can be aloof and dismissive at times, and he’s certainly self-regarding, carrying the aura of the Ivy faculty club.  But isn’t that better than the aura of the country clubs that tried to keep out blacks?  It’s ironic, and maybe inevitable, that the first African-American nominee comes across as a prince of privilege.  He is, as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic wrote, not the seed but the flower of the civil rights movement.  Unlike W., Obama doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder and he doesn’t make a lot of snarky remarks.  He tries to stay on a positive keel and see things from the other person’s point of view.  He’s not Richie Rich, saved time and again by Daddy’s influence and Daddy’s friends, the one who got waved into Yale and Harvard and cushy business deals, who drank too much and snickered at the intellectuals and gave them snide nicknames.  Obama is the outsider who never really knew his dad and who grew up in modest circumstances, the kid who had to work hard to charm whites and build a life with blacks and step up to the smarty-pants set.  He might be smoking, but it would be at a cafe, hunched over a New York Times, an Atlantic magazine, his MacBook and some organic fruit-flavored tea, listening to Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” on his iPod…..

Haven’t we had enough of this hypocritical comedy of people in the elite disowning their social status for political purposes?  The Bushes had to move all the way to Texas from Greenwich to make their blue blood appear more red.  Everyone who ever became president was in the elite one way or another, including Andrew Jackson.  Rove and Co. are nervous because they see that Obama, in rejecting public financing, is not going to be a chump, like some past Democratic candidates.  For some of Obama’s critics, it’s a breathtaking bit of fungible principles, as though Gandhi suddenly donned a Dolce & Gabbana, or Dolce & Mahatma, loincloth…..Charlie Black crassly argued in Fortune that a terrorist attack would “be a big advantage” for John McCain.  And what’s scary is, Black is the smartest adviser McCain’s got.  It’s hard to believe that if Americans get attacked after all these years of getting strip-searched at the airport, they’re going to be filled with confidence at the performance of the Republicans on national security.  And at least Obama wants to catch Osama and doesn’t think he’s getting his directions on war from “a higher Father.”  Rove’s mythmaking about Obama won’t fly.  If he means that Obama has brains, what’s wrong with that?  If he means that Obama is successful, what’s wrong with that?  If he means that Obama has education and intellectual sophistication, what’s wrong with that?  Many of Obama’s traits are the traits that people in the population aspire to.  It looks as if Rove is on the verge of realizing his dream of creating a permanent position for the Republicans.  Unfortunately for him, it’s in the minority.

…..In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do.  The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.  Even as the Supreme Court slapped him back for the third time on the suffocation of civil liberties at Guantánamo, President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty.  He celebrated European unity at the very instant it was falling apart, thanks to an Irish donnybrook.  Paris responded with a yawn.  (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.)  A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV.  The image of the U.S. abroad has improved slightly, according to a new Pew poll, but only in anticipation of seeing the back of this president…..“Your Eminence,” he told the pope, “you’re looking good.”

…..On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.  He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”  The Bushes have a hard time with the connective tissue between words and actions.  In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem.  The actions were the problem.  W. was really anxious for war.  He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.  A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered.  “I will never do that to them,” 43 said.  Sounds like Oedipal déjà vu all over again.

This was the cartoon in last weekend’s Financial Times.  It wasn’t Ingram Pinn and it certainly was racist.  Note the obvious gorilla-like depiction of Robert Mugabe - the slopping hands, the menacing look, the hunched shoulders.  Absolutely outrageous.  61 years on and imperialist racism is alive and well. 

Shame, shame !!

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The boys are holding her back.  And the worst part is, they’re her own boys.  Fresh from pushing the preposterous Mark Penn to the rear of her leaky boat, Hillary has to deal with Bill making waves again.  He spent the week taking the fun out of dysfunction, putting the “I” in id, and getting flaky just when Hillary has to be flawless.  In a mystifying burst of nuttiness, right in time for the Sunday talk shows, Bill twice dredged up Hillary’s rococo story about sniper fire in Bosnia.  He defended his wife on confusing her facts by confusing his facts — a disconcerting reminder about what climbing back on a presidency-built-for-two would be like…..He’s absolutely crazed, and not just because he feels that he never got the sort of incandescent press coverage that Obama gets — except maybe when he and Al Gore were on that bus, hailed as “Heartthrobs of the Heartland.”  Bill is also crazed about the ineluctable fact that he isn’t Obama.  “He can’t compute that he’s not the new kid on the block,” said a former Clinton adviser.  “It’s about his mortality — and immortality.  He needs her to win because if she doesn’t become president, he goes down as a minor president.  If she wins, it’s the Adamses and the Roosevelts and the Clintons.”  But he knows it’s going down the drain, and that Obama is the hot new thing and they’re the establishment retreads…..Bill’s horse whisperer, Doug Sosnik, a former White House aide who was dispatched to keep him calm and play Hearts and Oh Hell with him, has been out of the country recently.  His other personable aide, Matt McKenna, left to manage Hillary’s Montana campaign.  The Big Dog was unguarded.  Hillary started telling her tall tale about Bosnia as early as January and continued until her Iraq speech on March 17 at George Washington University.  Bill mistakenly asserted that she had told the story only once, at 11 p.m. when she was tired, and “immediately” admitted her mistake.  “And, oh, they acted like she was practically Mata Hari, you know? Just making up all this stuff,” he said, adding: “And you would’ve thought, you know, that she’d robbed a bank the way they all carried on about this.”  Given her 3 a.m. ads — (that has got to be her hedge fund manager on the phone) — it was not very flattering for Bill to rant on and suggest that her 60-year-old brain was fuzzy…..

Just as Mark Penn got Hillary into trouble with a conflict of interest on the Colombia free trade agreement, so did her husband.  “In the trade deal, your husband received $800,000 for four speaking engagements essentially for the trade deal or by a group that supports the trade deal,” a reporter said to Hillary in Pennsylvania.  “You’ve given your money to your campaign. Is that a conflict of interest?”  Hillary responded with that mirthless don’t-go-there laugh.  “I mean,” she said dismissively, “and how many angels dance on the head of a pin?”  But the dubious deals of her husband, a seven-diamond influence peddler, do provide an unsavory contrast with some of the candidate’s positions.  The larger point of last week’s imbroglio about Bosnia is that Hillary’s stretcher offers an interesting insight into her thinking.  After the health care disaster, she retreated into traditional first lady duties, teas and hospital openings, traveling around the world on good-will missions…..But after she got knocked back as co-president, Hillary felt trapped in the East Wing, ineffectual and marginalized, which is probably why she felt the need to retroactively add some heft to her travelogue in Bosnia and Ireland.  You can’t go from being a self-loathing first lady to self-aggrandizing about being first lady.

Reference : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13dowd.html