Clinton Finally Bares Her Teeth; Unfortunately, She Bit a Democrat

Barack Obama has distilled exactly what is wrong with President Bush's policy towards terrorism: "He is fighting the war that the terrorists want us to fight. Bin Laden and his allies know they cannot defeat us on the field of battle or in a genuine battle of ideas. But they can provoke the reaction we have seen in Iraq, a misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies and ties down our military."

That should have been the headline lead, the Democratic talking point, and was, for about fifteen seconds. Both John Edwards and Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq war, although Edwards says he didn't inhale. If Obama's statement is true, and the history books sure are leaning that way, then Edwards and Clintons were Bush's dupes, and Obama wasn't. Since they can't refute him, they had to find some verbal misstep that they could jump on that would distract from and discredit everything else he said.

"As president, I would deploy at least two additional brigades [6,000 troops] to Afghanistan to reinforce our counter-terrorism operations and support NATO's efforts against the Taliban.... I would make the hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid to Pakistan conditional, and I would make our conditions clear: Pakistan must make substantial progress in closing down the training camps, evicting foreign fighters, and preventing the Taliban from using Pakistan as a staging area for attacks in Afghanistan." (As a Geography teacher, I know this one; I looked it up in October, 2001. The area Bin Laden disappeared into -- after they let him escape at Tora Bora-- covers about the same square acreage as Colorado.) "If we have actionable intelligence bout high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Nope, we're not going to talk about that either. The television analyst is a pack animal, as easily distracted as an Airedale puppy in a rubber ball factory, and they've almost all lost the scent. They are entertaining themselves now by covering the "he-said-no-he-didn't-gotcha" forays of Hillary Clinton, ignoring Obama's main points and instead calling him "irresponsible" and "reckless" for saying he'd talk-- dear God, not that!-- to unfriendly leaders like Castro and Chavez in his first year of office... not during the second year, as Hillary said she would.

The pundits were so enthralled to be covering gossip instead of ideas, that The Daily Show was able to put together a montage of self panickers calling this a "Slugfest", "Clash of the Titans", "Heavyweight Bout", topped by Wolf Blitzer's panting, "It got ugly and it got ugly fast."

No, Hillary is not the devouring dragon-witch-queen from Sleeping Beauty, as desperately portrayed by the right-- hell, if she wins the nomination, I'm going to have to hold my nose and vote for her-- but these are Republican tactics, unworthy and . Tracy Flick, your life is calling.

John Edwards Is Off the List. So Is his Hair.

John Edwards ought to have lost any credibility as a Democratic presidential candidate when he paid $400 for a haircut. There are other, more solid reasons: Edwards' vote on the war, and his inability to man up about enabling Bush and killing thousands are more serious signs of his disconnect with reality. But people understand haircuts. I have a relative who works as a "celebrity" hair stylist in a major city, doing quite nicely, thank you, and to actually experience the mental canyon between those in the upper income brackets and most Americans makes the class war a concrete reality.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, "the richest 1 percent of American households held one-third of all wealth in the U.S. economy, and took in 14 percent of the national income". The right wing economists who built this economy with Milton Friedman complain about the implied rebuke: how is that YOUR problem? Does it really harm anyone that CEOs make 400 times as much as the people on the shop floor, instead of 20 times as much? By even mentioning the income gap, are we not (gasp; pause for the image of Dick Cheney dressed as Aunt Pittypat, fanning himself and calling for his salts) fomenting class warfare? Is this not simple selfishness and resentment on the part of the poor?

Isn't it pretty to think so? Larry Bartels of Princeton actually did the numbers, counting the voting record of the Senate between 1989 and 1994. "In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes." And this was during a time when so-called Wall Street "Democrats" controlled the Congress. Work by Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota and Benjamin Page at Northwestern shows that the same income gap shapes the votes of politicians in international affairs... who loses their job, and who gets sent to war.

If bloggers are the new pamphleteers, we need to keep pestering the candidates until someone (Barack Obama, who still talks as if he's actually read the Constitution and thought about it, would seem the natural choice) starts talking about this in public, and presents the research, and doesn't let the media parrot the latest quote from the corporate candidates about "class warfare."