Vice President Clinton?

By nicholas

Why would a smart woman like Hillary Clinton continue her campaign when the odds are against her? In her public appearances as a newly cast woman of the people she says she is doing it for us. If so, thanks but no thanks.

Speculation assigns her pertinacity to other motives. Some are guessing that she is continuing to campaign as a means of crowbarring herself into being chosen as the vice-presidential candidate. According to this line of thought, the longer she campaigns the more she binds white women of a certain age to her and can argue that unless she is on the ballot they will be so disaffected that they will stay home on election day.

Others whisper that she hopes by soldiering on to make a deal with the Obama campaign that, in return for a.) her withdrawal and b.) her promise to stump for him against McCain, her campaign debts will be taken care of and she will be repaid the money she loaned herself. She does have a reputation for grasping for a buck.

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May 8, 2008

An Unwatchable Debate

By nicholas

Of what was likely the last and certainly the most unwatchable of the Obama-Clinton debates, Tom Shales of the Washington Post had this to say: "It was another step downward for network news--in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances."

"For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with."

In the course of Shales' astute appraisal of the two-hour parade of idiocy he wrote,

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April 17, 2008

Another Story the Times Shouldn't Have Published

By nicholas

Evidently the editors of the New York Times have taken leave of their senses. There can be no other explanation for putting a story on the front page of their newspaper speculating about Barack Obama's being assassinated.

The Times is beginning to make it a practice of running news-free stories on its front page. Most of them are harmless, but this one is sickening.

A thumb-sucking cogitation about the possible murder of anybody, much less a presidential candidate, is out of bounds even on the obituary page. For the Old Gray Lady to print such a story on its front page is an unforgivable lapse of judgment.

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February 25, 2008

Where Did All the Money Go?

By nicholas

Protestations of competence notwithstanding, Hillary Clinton is failing the test as a manager. After starting her campaign with tens of millions of dollars, she was jolted to learn that she was out of money, the mother's milk of politics, as California's late Jesse Unruh called it.

The suddenly milkless Clinton was forced to make the campaign a $5 million loan. Apparently, she knew nothing about the campaign's financial situation until it had gone broke. And today the New York Times reports her major donors are beginning to question what's been done with their money.

Did this campaign have a budget? If not, why not? If it did, was it poorly constructed? Or did people running the campaign simply overspend? Anyway you slice it, the money mess throws into serious question her ready-on-day-one executive ability.

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February 22, 2008

Hillary's Teeth

By nicholas

Hillary Clinton showed her teeth the other day. They are sharp.

In her running spit-ball spat with Barak Obama, her sardonic side popped out on the CNN /YouTube debate when she asked in that cutting voice of hers, "Whatever happened to the politics of hope?" She was referring to Obama's calling for what he says is a new, better, happier brand of politics in which hope takes the place of fear.

This is part of a larger spat over Hillary's foreign affairs claim to be the deeply experienced senior person compared to Obama, the junior person, who lacks seasoning and judgment. This sounds good but how much experience making critical decisions does Hillary have? Her one big public responsibility as First Lady was to get a health care program up and through Congress. She botched that one so badly that her failure on health insurance and not being like Tammy Wynette are the two things she is most famous for, if you do not count Bill.

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July 30, 2007

Where Is the Anger?

By nicholas

The other night Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, was on the PBS NewsHour to debate the Iraq mess with Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island. She wiped up the floor with him. Cleaned the man's clock.

She stuck him with the "cut and run" epithet; he took it and did not fight back. Call him a perfect gentleman or call him a perfect wuss. The guy is a West Point graduate, he served with 82nd Airborne Division and was an Army Ranger. With a resumé like that the Senator ought to give as good as he gets, but he was defenseless against Hutchison's charges that he was playing politics with the war. She administered a total smackdown on this weaponless Democrat.

It was a typical of Democratic performances in the face of Republican onslaughts. When Bush and the Republicans pour on accusations of cowardice, weakness, softness toward the enemy, irresponsibility, isolationism and defeatism, they don't answer. They just take it.

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July 16, 2007

Ann Coulter, Out of Control

By nicholas

We can't expect TV news to have standards, but it should have limits. Not many, but a few. At least one limit. When a guest on Good Morning America urges the murder of one of our leading presidential candidates, somebody has exceeded the limit. A person who does that needs to be, should be, ought to be, must be kicked off the air permanently. Please look at this:

On another occasion, this time on CSPAN, Ms. Coulter had suggested her targeted politician is a "faggot."

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June 27, 2007

Hot Air from the G-8

By nicholas

The headline on the BBC story read, "G-8 Leaders Agree to Climate Deal," but nobody asked Mother Nature if she would go along. It was all smiles and ain't-we-great-friends between Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and George Bush, the American president, at the meeting of Russia plus the world's seven most "advanced" nations--although you can't always tell that by the seven's behavior.

It was decided that in about fifty years, give or take, that greenhouse gas emissions would be cut in half, if the G-8 countries went ahead and actually did some serious cutting, if China did ditto, if India did ditto, too, and if they would all go the United Nations and hash the subject over some more and have some more meetings, and if a lot of other "ifs" eventuated.

"I'm both surprised and very pleased at how far we have come forward," said the Tony Blair, the UK's outgoing prime minister, who poodled up for the American president for perhaps the last time.

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June 8, 2007

Hot Air from the White House

By nicholas

President Bush dialed up the air conditioner and gave a speech about global warming the other day, something he clearly does not put in the major menace category. His "new initiative" for taking care of the difficulty boils to spending the next fifty years talking about the subject. That's his "new" initiative. What his old initiative may have been he did not say and nobody else can recall his having had one.

With his well-known resistance to specific objectives, benchmarks or timetables any goals which might come out of whatever it is the President is proposing will be strictly "aspirational" to quote the term used by James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, whose additional official duties include teaching the White House staff ballroom dancing.

As we have seen in Iraq setting precise targets drive President Bush crackers. You can imagine what he must be saying about Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, behind her back because she is holding out for "for limiting the worldwide temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050," according to the Washington Post.

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June 1, 2007

Back to the Future

By nicholas

To wiggle out from under the memory of her vote in favor of the Iraq war, Hillary Clinton is trying a back-to-the-future maneuver. She is sponsoring a resolution to rescind the original resolution to go to war in Iraq. This new resolution wipes out the old resolution and she no longer has to keep explaining why she cast that cursed vote.

For her sake, let's hope it works. There is something unfair about constantly going back and looking at what somebody said or did in the past. How is a poor politician to lighten all the luggage she's dragging around?

In that pile of baggage, there is a very heavy duffle bag wherein husband Bill is kept out of sight. He is, of course, unzipped and let out of his canvas confinement at private fundraisers and in front of African American groups. Using Bill for black groups spares us having to listen when Hillary puts on that gawdawful southern accent. The girls at Wellesley were not taught how to speak ethnic when Hillary went there and learned to become young and radical.

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May 9, 2007