How Hillary Clinton Wins!

Coming out of the turmoil of the sixties, the 1972 McGovern rules, as they came to be known, radically altered the way Democrats pick their presidential nominees, opening up the political process by mandating proportional inclusion of previously excluded constituencies -- African Americans, voters under 30, and women.
All of the reforms adopted then, and modified over the years, have been in play this year, including the expanded role in party proceedings of blacks, women, and the young; the required use of proportional representation; and superdelegates.
One reform stands out particularly in Obama's march to victory: the much wider use of open caucuses as a key component of the nomination process. Caucuses differ from primaries in that participants M must spend many hours in a complex rule-ridden bargaining process that determines how a precinct or ward will allocate its support among the presidential candidates.
With the existing rules in charge Hillary Clinton can not win. Therefore she has decided to change the rules in her favour. There will be no delegates count but only a count of popular votes. By Clinton’s decision 15 states are expelled and in this way Clinton wins the nomination.

15 states not counted by Hillary Clinton and 13 are won by Barack Obama

Iowa . . . . . . 57 delegates . . January 3 . . 38% - 29%
Nevada . . . . . 33 delegates . . January 8 . . 45% - 51%*
Alaska . . . . . 18 delegates . . February 5. . 75% - 25%
Am. Samoa. . . . 9 delegates . . . . . . . . . 42% - 57%
Colorado . . . . 71 delegates . . . . . . . . . 67% - 32%
Idaho. . . . . . 23 delegates . . . . . . . . . 80% - 17%
Kansas . . . . . 41 delegates . . . . . . . . . 74% - 26%
Minnesota. . . . 88 delegates . . . . . . . . . 66% - 32%
New Mexico . . . 38 delegates . . . . . . . . . 48% - 49%*
North Dakota . . 31 delegates . . . . . . . . . 61% - 37%
Nebraska . . . . 31 delegates . . February 9. . 68% - 32%
Washington . . . 97 delegates . . . . . . . . . 68% - 31%
Maine. . . . . . 34 delegates . . February 10 . 59% - 40%
Hawaii . . . . . 29 delegates . . February 19 . 76% - 24%
Wyoming. . . . . 18 delegates . . March 8 . . . 61% - 38%

Now, some 36 years after the adoption of the McGovern rules, caucuses as a vehicle for the selection of convention delegates have empowered a key Obama constituency: young and relatively well-educated social-cultural liberals -- just the class of political activists that Ickes and the Clintons came out of and made salient.
In the arcane caucus procedures, with turnout ranging from only two to eight percent of the eligible Democratic electorate (compared to voter participation rates in primaries ranging from 20 to 35 percent), smart and strategically savvy party activists make up a disproportionately large share of participants.
"The caucuses made Obama, there is no doubt about it," argues University of Wisconsin political scientist Byron Shafer, the foremost expert on changes since the 1960s in the Democratic nominating process.

"Caucuses were the preferred institution of the reformers. The argument of the reform theorists was not about the gross bulk of participation, but about the character of the participation," Shafer said. In a primary, "you could go and vote, but it was limited: you pull the lever that was it. In a caucus, it wasn't that turnout would be lower, it was the quality of the turnout was higher."
It would be difficult to overestimate the consequences for Obama of Democratic Party reforms promoting caucuses. If the caucus states were eliminated, Obama would not be the one on the verge of declaring victory.
As of June 2, according to RealClearPolitics, Obama had a 157 delegate vote lead over Clinton, 2072 to 1915.
In the 14 states that picked some or all of their delegates through caucus systems this year, Obama won 400 delegates to Clinton's 193, a 207 delegate advantage that more than accounts for his overall delegate lead.
An analysis (pdf) published on TalkLeft found that total Democratic voter participation in the caucus states amounted to 1.1 million people, compared to the 32.4 million voters in Democratic primaries, a ratio of 30 to one. Caucus participants made up 3.2 percent of the total of 33.5 million primary voters and caucus goers combined.
In contrast to the relatively close results in most primary states, Obama won many of the caucus states by huge margins, often substantially exceeding 60 percent. As a consequence, he piled up large numbers of delegates in the relatively low turnout contests.
The TalkLeft analysis noted that Clinton won 11 more delegates than Obama in the New Jersey primary, which she won by 112,128 votes, while Obama won 12 more delegates than Clinton in the Idaho caucuses which he won by 13,225 votes. Similarly, Clinton netted 12 delegates by winning the Pennsylvania primary by 214,115 votes, while Obama came out ahead by 14 delegates by winning the Kansas caucuses by 17,710 votes.
Charles Stewart III of MIT did a separate analysis of primaries and caucuses with results similar to those of the Talk Left study, finding that in primary states, Clinton won 1,557.5 delegates, 16 more delegates than Obama's 1,521.5. In caucus states, Stewart found, Obama won 366 delegates, or 191 more than Clinton's 175.
In private, a number of Clinton strategists now acknowledge that they made a disastrous, if not fatal, mistake in failing to recognize the profound impact of the caucuses on the delegate count.
"We just thought we'd win the primaries, and the caucuses would follow along," one key Clinton strategist said. "It's on the top of the list of things we'd like to do over."

Yes, but Hillary does not wait.
She has changed the rules and so she wins. Period.

How McClellan Prettifies Bush

“Ambitious, Idealistic Vision of Freedom?” Forget it!

Former Bush spokesperson Scott McClellan is accomplishing several things with his “blockbuster” book “What Happened”. He’s making a lot of easy money, as befits an opportunist of flexible morality who admittedly stuck with the Bush administration, even as its amorality and penchant for lying to the American people became clearly apparent to him. He’s earning praise from objective journalists and scholars in general. He thus partially redeems his own historical legacy as a minor figure in what will be remembered as a notorious lying administration. But he’s prettifying that administration rather than damning it.
According to the former press secretary, Bush misled the nation, hyping dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. But he did so, McClellan declares, out of a naive commitment to the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. And he didn’t deliberately lie. He was merely the victim of bad advice, his own intellectual limitations, his disinclination to ask questions and his belief that being a wartime president was his ticket to greatness. McClellan states repeatedly that he continues to feel affection for the man responsible for perhaps a million Iraqi deaths and over 4300 American and other coalition ones.
McClellan attributes Bush’s relentless push for war on “an ambitious and idealistic post-9/11 vision of transforming the Middle East through the spread of freedom.” So his worst sin was a naïve effort at do-good-ism!
He doesn’t mention the more plausible reasons for Bush’s assault on a sovereign country described by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as illegal. He doesn’t mention oil, the administration’s push for the privatization of Iraq’s oil industry (which will result in U.S. control), or the geopolitical importance of controlling the flow of oil from Iraq in future crisis situations including war. He doesn’t mention the advantages to U.S. imperialism of permanent military bases in the heart of the Middle East.
For the neocons there is no question but that the U.S. should have bases in the Middle East, and Cheney is known to favor their establishment preparatory to a future confrontation with China.
McClellan doesn’t discuss these matters.
It’s all well and good for the world for McClellan to turn on his former boss and join such insiders as Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, and Lawrence Wilkerson in documenting Bush’s mendacious pre-war use of fear-mongering. But isn’t he engaging in perverse apologetics of his own? Alluding to the passage cited above, a blogger on Oprah.com Community writes, “I guess this knocks the wind out of the sales of the Bush haters, and blows the ‘conquer Iraq for oil’ theory, doesn’t it?”
Actually, the war-for-oil-theory has always been simplistic, since it doesn’t get to the heart of the matter, which isn’t oil company profits or even U.S. consumers’ access to cheap oil. It is the enhancement of the geopolitical position of U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis any potential rivals during what the neocons call the “New American Century” and (as a corollary to that project) the enhancement of the security (regional hegemony) of Israel. In any case, the idea that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to encourage freedom in Iraq only surfaced after the fact, in August 2003, as all the earlier stated reasons for invasion had become discredited. That’s when Condoleezza Rice gave a speech in Dallas in 2003 cynically associating liberation of Iraq with the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
"But we should not," insisted the World's Most Powerful Woman, as though she were dealing with an actual problem, in a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists in Dallas August 7, "let our voice waver in speaking out on the side of people who are seeking freedom. And we must never, ever indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they're culturally just not ready for freedom or they just aren't ready for freedom's responsibilities.
We've heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East."
But National Security Adviser and former Chevron Oil board member Condoleezza Rice did not identify those who disparage Third World "freedom" and alleged U.S. efforts to impose it. She's obviously not targeting L. Paul Bremer III, civil administrator in Iraq, who told the Washington Post June 28, "Elections held too early can be destructive," adding that while there's "no blanket rule" against democracy in Iraq, and he's "not personally opposed to it," it must take place "in a way that takes care of our concerns" and "done very carefully." In fact he is saying “the Iraqis are culturally just not ready for freedom, and just aren't ready for freedom's responsibilities," at least until they learn how to say "Yes, Boss!"
Rice is not targeting Henry Kissinger, who as U.S. Secretary of State, following the democratic election of Salvador Allende in 1970, declared, "Chile shouldn't be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible," and proceeded to help organize a bloody fascist coup, producing a regime more suitable to those Latinos down there.
She is not trying to chasten Vice President Dick Cheney, who as a Wyoming representative in Congress in 1986 voted against a resolution urging the apartheid government of South Africa (which then-President Reagan pronounced America's "closest friend" in Africa) to release Nelson Mandela, freedom fighter, democrat, from prison.
No, no, no. Condi's saying: Those criticizing the U.S. occupation of Iraq are the moral equivalents of the KKK.
The suggestion that this was Bush’s priority all along just isn’t plausible. Had he been committed to democracy, he would have conceded the election to Al Gore in 2000; had he been committed to freedom, he would not have shoved the Patriot Act down the throats of Congressmen in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 nor gleefully endorsed rendition and the indefinite detention and torture of noncombatants captured or bought from bounty hunters in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the Bush supporters like the blogger quoted above will take comfort in McClellan’s book. They will think it lets their man off the hook.
Finally, McClellan damns the news media for being complicit enablers of the march to war. Having performed a central role in the dissemination of disinformation, he chastises the Fifth Estate for “covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it…” He notes accurately enough that the media neglected “their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding.”
He notes that “the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should have never come as such a surprise. The public should have been made much more aware, before the fact, of the uncertainties, doubts, and caveats that underlay the intelligence about the regime of Saddam Hussein. The administration did little to convey those nuances to the people, the press should have picked up the slack but largely failed to do so because their focus was elsewhere on covering the march to war, instead of the necessity of war. In this case, the liberal media did not live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

The Neocon Lust for Terror

FLASHBACK: It’s About A Lot More Than A "Goddamned Piece of Paper"Leo Strauss is the father of the Neo-Conservative movement, including many leaders of the current administration of the USA. Indeed, some of the main neocon players were students of Strauss at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years. Strauss, born in Germany, was an admirer of Nazi philosophers and of Machiavelli.
Strauss believed that a stable political order required an external threat and that if an external threat did not exist, one should be manufactured. Specifically, Strauss thought that:

"A political order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat . . . . Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no external threat exists then one has to be manufactured".

(quote is by one of Strauss' main biographers).

Indeed, Strauss used the analogy of Gulliver's Travels to show what a Neocon-run society would look like:

"When Lilliput [the town] was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of disrespect."

Moreover, Strauss said:

"Only a great fool would call the new political science diabolic... Nevertheless one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns."

So Strauss seems to have advocated governments letting terrorizing catastrophes happen on one's own soil to one's own people -- of "pissing" on one's own people, to use his Gulliver's travel analogy. And he advocates that government's should pretend that they did not know about such acts of mayhem: to intentionally "not know" that Rome is burning. He advocates messing with one's own people in order to save them from some "catastrophe" (perhaps to justify military efforts to monopolize middle eastern oil to keep it away from an increasingly-powerful China?).

Fast Forward a Couple of Decades to the 1990's...
Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor seemed to hint at this approach when he wrote in 1997:

"as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

Similarly, the Project For A New American Century, a think tank lobbying group with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and the other leading Neocons in its ranks, lamented that its rapacious military agenda would not be realized

"absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

Don't believe that these quotes represent anything nefarious yet?

Fast forward to today...
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Newt Gingrich recently said:
"the better they've done at making sure there isn't an attack, the easier it is to say, 'Well, there never was going to be an attack anyway.' And it's almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us."
The head of the Arkansas Republican party said:
"At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001]" so people appreciate Bush.
Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky openly called for "another 9/11" that "would help America" restore a "community of outrage and national resolve".
Lt.-Col. Doug Delaney, chair of the war studies program at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, told the Toronto Star that "The key to bolstering Western resolve is another terrorist attack like 9/11 or the London transit bombings of two years ago."
And an allegedly-leaked GOP memo touts a new terror attack as a way to reverse the party’s decline.
It's All Hot Air, Isn't It?
But isn't this all talk? They wouldn't really allow terror to happen . . . or aid and abet such attacks. Would they?
Well, President Carter recently impliedly acknowledged the risk of staged provocation in order to start a war against Iran.
A former National Security Adviser told the Senate that a terrorist act might be carried out in the U.S. and falsely blamed on Iran to justify war against that nation.
Former Senator Gary Hart warned Americans that the White House might create a "Gulf of Tonkin" or "remember the Maine" type incident to justify war against Iran (starting at 7:15 minutes)

Current U.S. Congressman Ron Paul stated, the government "is determined to have martial law", and that the government is hoping to get the people "fearful enough that they will accept the man on the white horse"
Daniel Ellsberg, the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower, said "if there is another terror attack, "I believe the president will get what he wants", which will include a dictatorship.
A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents, stated that if there was another major attack in the U.S., it would lead to martial law. He went on to say:
"We have to be careful, if somebody does this kind of provocation, big violent explosions of some kind, we have to not take the word of the masters there in Washington that this was some terrorist event because it could well be a provocation allowing them, or seemingly to allow them to get what they want."
The former CIA analyst would not put it past the government to "play fast and loose" with terror alerts and warnings and even events themselves in order to rally people behind the flag

The former assistant secretary of treasury in the Reagan administration, called the "Father of Reaganomics", who is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service, and, said:
"Ask yourself: Would a government that has lied us into two wars and is working to lie us into an attack on Iran shrink from staging "terrorist" attacks in order to remove opposition to its agenda?"
He goes on to say:
If the Bush administration wants to continue its wars in the Middle East and to entrench the "unitary executive" at home, it will have to conduct some false flag operations that will both frighten and anger the American people and make them accept Bush's declaration of "national emergency" and the return of the draft. Alternatively, the administration could simply allow any real terrorist plot to proceed without hindrance.
A series of staged or permitted attacks would be spun by the captive media as a vindication of the neoconsevatives' Islamophobic policy, the intention of which is to destroy all Middle Eastern governments that are not American puppet states. Success would give the US control over oil, but the main purpose is to eliminate any resistance to Israel's complete absorption of Palestine into Greater Israel.
Think about it. If another 9/11-type "security failure" were not in the works, why would Homeland Security czar Chertoff go to the trouble of convincing the Chicago Tribune that Americans have become complacent about terrorist threats and that he has "a gut feeling" that America will soon be hit hard?
A member of the British Parliament stated that "there is a very real danger" that the American government will stage a false flag terror attack in order to justify war against Iran and to gain complete control domestically
And the former UN Weapons Inspector, an American, who stated before the Iraq war started that there were no weapons of mass destruction is now saying that he would not rule out staged government terror by the U.S. government.
Does that sound like the Neocons' expressions of yearning for terror are just so much talk? Or does it sound like the disciples of Leo Strauss are willing to "manufacture threats" and "fiddle while Rome burns"?
And if the it is the latter, and the same people made the expressions of yearning before 9/11, the anthrax attacks and the London bombings, what does that imply about the cause of those events?

Discussions, Discussions, Discussions

CORAL GABLES, Florida. — A day after Senator Barack Obama gathered a majority of pledged delegates in the Democratic presidential nominating contest, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton defiantly sent out new signals Wednesday that she might take her fight for the nomination all the way to the party’s convention in August.
Indeed, she will never stop.
Mrs. Clinton stumped across South Florida, scene of the 2000 election debacle, pressing her case for including delegates from Florida and Michigan in the final delegate tally. On the trail and in interviews, she raised a new battle cry of determination, likening her struggle for these delegates to the nation’s historic struggles to free the slaves and grant women the right to vote.
But behind the scenes, the campaigns were working with the Democratic National Committee to resolve the dispute over the delegates before May 31, when the party’s rules committee is to decide the matter. Mrs. Clinton has said she wants all delegates counted and apportioned based on the popular vote of the two candidates in both states, although Mr. Obama did not appear on the ballot in Michigan.
Mr. Obama has said he wants the delegates seated but has not said how or in what proportion. David Axelrod, his chief strategist, said in an interview Wednesday that the campaign was willing to go beyond halfway in the apportionment.
That’s changing the rules during the competition. If it has been known before, Barack Obama could have campaigned in the two states and his name – by then unknown – should have been on the ballot in Michigan. The well-known name of Mrs. Clinton was an advantage, but Mr. Obama has proven to campaign very effectively.
“If that means we have to make some sacrifices,” Mr. Axelrod said, “we are open to do so, within reason. Our sense is the folks in Florida and Michigan want to resolve this. They’re not looking to prolong this.”
Mrs. Clinton called this offensive… how, why?
The outcome on the Florida and Michigan delegates may be only symbolic anyway. Winning extra delegates, even under her rosiest scenario, would not help Mrs. Clinton catch Mr. Obama’s lead on that score.
The point is that she does not want the delegates to be counted, but only the popular votes and also not the caucuses. In that way she can win, only counting the states she wins and the winner takes all, because she is the best nominee the worlds has ever seen. It’s a good plan and in November she wants only the Democrats votes counted, because she is the best president the world has ever seen. Only her campaign was acting poor and the fundraising and the organisation and the strategic plan and the judgement and the Democratic members were not loyal enough, but look, she was already eight years in the White House and she is the best, right?
Both need superdelegates to get over the finish line. But winning additional delegates from Florida and Michigan might be Mrs. Clinton’s last glimmer of hope in bolstering her case to superdelegates that she would be the stronger candidate in November. In her victory speech Tuesday in Kentucky, she noted that the primary race was one of the closest in history.
Of course that’s true, one of the 50 closest.
Florida and Michigan have emerged as central to Mrs. Clinton’s effort to keep her candidacy alive. Both states jumped ahead in the primary calendar in January in violation of party rules. As punishment, the party stripped them of their delegates, leaving them excluded from a primary process that has galvanized the rest of the country.
Mrs. Clinton agreed by then with that punishment, else Mr. Obama should have run in those states and perhaps won them, because he is much better campaigning.
Mrs. Clinton told The Associated Press on Wednesday that she would support those states if they had to carry their fight to the convention.
Then she has a pseudo-legal motive to attack Obama still saying that Senator McCain should be a better president than Senator Obama… And then there comes the bullet what will make Senator Clinton the nominee.
“Yes, I will,” she said. “I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”
God has chosen her…right? You have to believe it and it will be. What kind of president will that make? Who’s giving her God’s messages?
And Geoff Garin, her pollster, told MSNBC that she could campaign beyond the primaries because “there are enough uncommitted delegates left for either candidate to earn a majority.”
And also those committed delegates are not committed. They all can change their votes, according to Clinton’s statement: “there are no rules for delegates!”
Mr. Obama crossed the threshold of amassing a majority of pledged delegates on Tuesday with his victory in Oregon.
Come on! Do we count votes for a black man because he is black? Are we racists? Do we count votes for a man because he is a man? Are we sexists? What is wrong with a poor hard working non-elitist beer drinking white woman, who carries a gun, spits on the ground, shooting dugs after church in the weekends?
Mr. Garin added that at some point, one of the candidates would have enough total delegates to win the nomination, “but we have not reached that point yet; we probably won’t reach that point on June 3.” Mrs. Clinton has signalled that she intends to stay in the race at least through the final primaries on June 3.
At least, but you have never enough delegates because, according to Senator Clinton, the delegates can change their votes anytime at random. Remember, there are no rules for delegates, right?
Mr. Obama ignored Mrs. Clinton’s arguments about the delegates in an effort, his aides said, not to legitimize her point of view.
Nah…
“I know there are some people worried about the Democratic Party being divided,” Mr. Obama said. “We will be united.”
But than has Senator Clinton te be the nominee. Otherwise: forget it! The Billary-crowd will vote for their appointed better president McCain.
That strategists are working behind the scenes on the matter raised the possibility that Mrs. Clinton’s newfound fervour was an effort to make sure her apportioning method prevails.
You see, out ruling the caucus-states counting Florida and Michigan, changing pledged delegates voices commanding superdelegates to vote for unity and Hillary Clinton for president.
It also raised the possibility that her campaign was split over how to handle the end game of what some have admitted privately is a lost cause. Some Clinton aides said that she was well aware of her uphill climb and that she was making a symbolic point. They said she was hesitant about declaring that she could overcome Mr. Obama’s lead, but at the same time did not want to be seen as surrendering.
Just like Senator McCain, you only leave the theatre with victory, never surrender. There is a war and the enemy has to be eliminated at 2.30 a.m. Phone me when it is done.
Her swing across South Florida on Wednesday seemed essentially to be a campaign-within-a-campaign, one that is about process and is directed chiefly at the party’s rules committee.
If there are no rules, why the heck there is a party rules committee?
“I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I say that not counting Florida and Michigan is changing a central governing rule of this country.”
But not counting caucus-states acting within the rules and did nothing wrong?
She also sought to whip up populist sentiment, telling voters in Boca Raton, where the 2000 election played out vividly, “You didn’t break a single rule, and you should not be punished for matters beyond your control.”
Lies, they broke the rules.
She argued with fervour that the nomination should be determined by popular vote. She has claimed to have the lead in the popular vote by including Florida and Michigan in her tally.
O, no single vote for Senator Obama from Florida and Michigan?
“The outcome of our elections should be determined by the will of the people, nothing more, nothing less,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will.”
Yes, next chance for the people to vote is in November. Don't try to do it in July or August because that does not count.
“The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear,” she said. “If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people isn’t realized and our democracy is diminished.”
She should have made that statement before the rules and the punishment were established and she admitted the case.
She generally avoided mentioning Mr. Obama all day, but concluded a rally in Coral Gables on Wednesday by declaring: “Look at the states I’ve won. Look at the states I’m leading in. Look at the electoral map. It is clear I’m the stronger candidate.”
And she can’t even manage her campaign?
As her voice was drowned out with cheers, she added: “Stay with me. Let’s make history together.”
No, thanks. Let all the delegates of Florida and Michigan sit at the convention with a half vote each and free to vote for who they want, furthermore stick by the rules, removing the Clintons from the party. Out! The Democratic Party is no anarchistic community.
Pointer:
She makes herself a pariah in the party.

Arianna Huffington: Scotty Come Lately

Pointer wrote: this book is not a must read, but this article of Arianne Huffington about it has its own quality.
Scotty Come Lately
By Arianna Huffington
Seven takes on Scott McClellan's new book:

Take One: What Took You So Long?
In What Happened, Scott McClellan offers withering portraits of George Bush, Karl Rove, Condi Rice, and Scooter Libby, confirms that we went to war in Iraq under false pretenses, and that we were serially lied to about the outing of Valerie Plame.
Interesting stuff, Scott. But about five years too late.
It's George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands -- and add a chunk of change to his bank account -- by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?
McClellan told the Washington Post that he wrote the book to "provide an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it." And he told Cox News Service, "My job was to advocate and defend [Bush's] policies and speak on his behalf. This is an opportunity for me now to share my own views and perspective on things."
Great. We need all the openness and honesty we can get. But it would have been a lot more helpful if he had taken the "opportunity" when it really mattered -- say before the 2004 election, when it could have potentially saved thousands of lives.
What Happened is page-turning reading. What Didn't Happen -- namely McClellan telling the truth in service to his country rather than in service to his book sales -- is a stomach-turning disappointment.

Take Two: The Rationale for Iraq is Even Worse Than We Thought
McClellan really lets it rip on Iraq. He says that Bush led a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" to sell the war, was not "open and forthright on Iraq," managed the runup to war "in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option," "largely ignored or simply disregarded" contradictory intelligence on the war, and as the war went poorly responded by "never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising."
McClellan's scathing conclusion: "History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided: that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder. No one, including me, can know with absolute certainty how the war will be viewed decades from now when we can more fully understand its impact. What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."
Perhaps the most damning revelation regarding Iraq is McClellan's assertion that the real reason Bush wanted to invade Iraq was the "opportunity to create a legacy of greatness" by transforming the Middle East into a land of peace and brotherhood. Over 4,000 dead U.S. soldiers sacrificed for a neo-con wet dream of democratic dominoes across the region. How chilling is that?
McClellan also tosses in a pinch of Oedipal subtext: "The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office. And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating."
Such is the stuff foreign policy nightmares are made of.

Take Three: The Press Secretary Presses the Press
McClellan points an accusatory finger at the mainstream media -- he calls them "enablers" and says they were too easy on the administration during the selling of the war:
"The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."
Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.
It's such a great point, it caused Karl Rove to act like something nefarious has happened to McClellan, transforming him from the lie-spouting sock puppet he has "known for a long time" into somebody who "sounds like a left-wing blogger." Have anyone specific in mind, Karl?

Take Four: Rove More Turd Blossom Than Boy Genius
Speaking of Rove, McClellan's tome continues the obliteration of the Rove mystique, reminding us what an out-and-out liar Rove was and is -- more than willing to assure McClellan that he wasn't involved in the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity when, in fact, he was up to his Turd Blossom in the sordid affair, having discussed Plame with Matt Cooper and Bob Novak in an effort to discredit Joe Wilson.
McClellan also makes it clear that the indelible, says-all-you-need-to-know-about-this-administration photo of Bush looking out the window of Air Force One during his too-busy-to-stop flyover of New Orleans in the wake of Katrina was a Rove special: "Karl was convinced we needed to do it -- and the president agreed."

Take Five: Truthiness in Government
Stephen Colbert satirized the Bush approach when he coined the concept of "truthiness": the truth we want, in our gut, to exist, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
McClellan reveals how much the joke matched the reality, saying that Bush's "leadership style is based more on instinct than deep intellectual debate." Citing Bush's assertion that he honestly couldn't remember if he'd ever done cocaine, McClellan says he felt he "was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true, and that, deep down, he knew was not true."
But who needs reality when you have faith? Who needs truth when you have truthiness? As George Costanza put it on Seinfeld: "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it."
A fantastic philosophy for a sit-com character. A disastrous philosophy for a sitting president.

Take Six: Truth in Government
According to McClellan, the Secret Service code name for the White House press secretary was "Matrix."
As any Keanu Reaves fan will tell you, the Matrix is a simulated reality used to pacify and subdue the human population in a dystopian future.
Who knew Secret Service agents have such an arch sense of humor?
Take Seven: Heckuva Job, Scotty!
On the day McClellan resigned as press secretary, Bush pictured a time down the road when he and his former aide would "be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you, I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, 'Job well done.'"
Maybe not. Although, since, according to McClellan, Bush "has a way of falling back on the hazy memory to protect himself from potential political embarrassment," who knows?
I can already see the blurb on the back of the paperback edition of What Happened: "Heckuva job, Scotty!" - George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States

Who Said What And When?

In January during an appearance in Dover, New Hampshire, Clinton was introduced by a woman named Francine Torge who said the following, according to the New York Times' "Caucus" blog: "Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually" passed landmark civil rights legislation. The Clinton campaign called those comments "totally inappropriate."
OK, totally inappropriate, but very useful for later when things go wrong in the Billarygang.
This was Francine Torge, a Clinton-backer from New Hampshire, right?
More recently, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee (R) -- after his speech to the National Rifle Association was interrupted by a noise from off stage -- joked: "That was Barack Obama. He just tripped off a chair. He's getting ready to speak and somebody aimed a gun at him and he -- he dove for the floor."
Also the Suckebee from Arkansas can not be called a Obamaniac.
The Republican version is somewhat thoughtless but the Hillary statement was not new and she used it in interviews with the writing press on March 6, totally incorrect because the primaries of 1968 just started in March and she used it on May 2 again, feeling good te repeat it the same day. You get used to it, but on television live it makes a difference:
"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right?," Clinton said in explaining why she remained in the race to the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader editorial board. "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."
That's not out of the context, because the question was why she stays in the race as she can't win by the regular voting in the primaries. The votings can not bring her ahead of Obama, so, there must be somwhat else. What is it?
That long stay in the primaries is unprecedented. Also Bill Clinton started in February, a month later than this year, and he was in May as the frontrunner in the same position as Obama now. That's far different than Clinton is by now. There is no simularity on behalf of the length of time and her position not te be able to win.
In 1992 she thought end of May: only a bullet can prevent Bill to become President. Of course, she did not say that and nobody had said that.
But your days and nights are filled with fear and she had that experience, right?
There is no sign that the billarygang will step out the race before the general election. They want to prove that Barack Obama can't win over McCain. She said already so "McCain is should be a better president than Obama, but I'ám the best qualified for the job." She can say something to win votes, but change, no, that's not where she goes for and not what the Billary Democrats want. They want a past century back. That there's a war going on? O yeah, but that's far away, right? Let's vote for McCain, he is old, so he knows how it was in the past. Even Vietnam was not that bad as they say, right? We killed far more of them than they killed us. McCain knows how to win a war. Never surrender, that's the spirit of Hillary Clinton.

John McCain is Out Of Touch

Every time John McCain aims low in his increasingly belligerent campaign rhetoric, I think about an item Time’s Joe Klein wrote about a month ago. Klein, a McCain admirer, predicted that McCain would avoid the cheap and pathetic style of campaigning we’re seeing now. McCain, Klein said, “sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — as unworthy.” If he doesn’t, “McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose expediency over honor. That’s probably not the way he wants to be remembered.”
Klein’s optimism is looking shaky. Consider how John McCain chose to honor Memorial Day.

“Barack Obama really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,” the Arizona senator added. “If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn’t had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly.” […]
The Iraq war, which polls have shown that most of the country opposes, is shaping up to be a defining issue in the November presidential election. McCain, who wrapped up the GOP nomination in March, supports continued military involvement in Iraq; Obama, who has all but clinched the Democratic nomination, has called for withdrawing U.S. troops.
“For him to talk about dates for withdrawal, which basically is surrender in Iraq after we’re succeeding so well is, I think, really inexcusable,” said McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times, most recently in March.

Now, I’ve come to expect cheap rhetoric from John McCain, but “surrender” talk is generally more the province of right-wing blogs, not respected presidential candidates. Most Americans believe withdrawal from Iraq best serves American interests. Is McCain prepared to smear a majority of the country?
But that’s hardly the most nonsensical aspect of McCain’s attack. First, McCain decided to lash out at Obama for taking a sensible approach to Iraq on Memorial Day. This is a holiday for a reason — it’s about paying respect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Can McCain — you know, the one who vowed to make this an “honorable” campaign — not see how wildly inappropriate this is?

Second, in what universe does McCain feel justified arguing that Obama’s “knowledge” and “judgment” on Iraq are lacking? Obama’s the one who’s been right about the war from the start, while McCain was the one who a) said the war would be short and easy; b) said Sunnis and Shi’ia would get along fine; c) insisted that the war was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from giving WMD to al Qaeda; d) said we had to “stay the course” with the Rumsfeld strategy; e) is still confused about Sunni, Shi’ia, al Qaeda, and Iran; and f) continues to believe the “surge” policy has brought about the non-existent political progress it was intended to create.
McCain may be too foolish to recognize his mistake, and too blinded by crass partisanship to approach his humiliating record with humility, but to lash out at Obama for being right is demonstrably ridiculous.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, who, exactly, does McCain think we would “surrender” to in Iraq were we to leave? I realize McCain isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, but he does realize the nature of the conflict in Iraq, doesn’t he?
My hunch, reading over McCain’s obtuse and inarticulate assessments of the war, is that he’s deluded himself into thinking that the war in Iraq is with al Qaeda. That the Republican presidential candidate is confused about the source of violence in Iraq with the war in its sixth year doesn’t speak well of his competence, but with some regularity, McCain has said that “al Qaeda will then have won” if we withdraw U.S. troops.
Regrettably, McCain doesn’t have the foggiest idea what he’s talking about.

Some students of the insurgency say Mr. McCain is making a dangerous generalization. “The U.S. has not been fighting Al Qaeda, it’s been fighting Iraqis,” said Juan Cole, a fierce critic of the war who is the author of “Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi’ite Islam” and a professor of history at the University of Michigan. A member of Al Qaeda “is technically defined as someone who pledges fealty to Osama bin Laden and is given a terror operation to carry out. It’s kind of like the Mafia,” Mr. Cole said. “You make your bones, and you’re loyal to a capo. And I don’t know if anyone in Iraq quite fits that technical definition.”
Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is just one group, though a very lethal one, in the stew of competing Sunni insurgents, Shiite militias, Iranian-backed groups, criminal gangs and others that make up the insurgency in Iraq. That was vividly illustrated last month when the Iraqi Army’s unsuccessful effort to wrest control of Basra from the Shiite militia groups that hold sway there led to an explosion of violence.
The current situation in Iraq should properly be described as “a multifactional civil war” in which “the government is composed of rival Shia factions” and “they are embattled with an outside Shia group, the Mahdi Army,” Ira M. Lapidus, a co-author of “Islam, Politics and Social Movements” and a professor of history at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an e-mail message. “The Sunni forces are equally hard to assess,” he added, and “it is an open question as to whether Al Qaeda is a unified operating organization at all.”

Before McCain starts irresponsibly throwing around painfully stupid rhetoric about “surrender,” maybe he could take a moment to learn something about the war he helped create more than five years ago. While he’s at it, if could also pause to consider why it’s crass and disrespectful to make these kinds of attacks on Memorial Day, I’m sure we’d all appreciate it.