Right Wing Nut House

My latest at Pajamas Media is up and let me tell you, it was a labor of love - or a labor anyway.

I had the piece finished around 10:00 PM when Hillary was comfortably ahead by 40,000 votes. Then came the incredible - and ominous - news that the precincts in Lake County, including the city of Gary which is 85% African American, had not reported much of their total. When the mayor of Gary said that the results might be a “shocker,” one began to wonder how close the crooks in Chicago’s neighboring metropolis and kindred machine could actually make the race.

I began a major re-write (still with Hillary the victor) and finished just a few minutes after Fox finally called the race shortly after midnight.

Here’s a sample:

The optimism exhibited the last few days by the Clinton campaign that they were finally making progress in convincing Democrats that she would be the better candidate to face John McCain in the fall came a cropper in Indiana. It vanished in the middle of the night when a comfortable lead disappeared amidst hints of ballot shenanigans in one of the most crooked cities in the United States: Gary, Indiana.

Chicago has nothing on its close neighbor Gary when it comes to playing fast and loose with the electoral process. In 1967, the white city machine was in a panic because African American candidate Richard Hatcher appeared headed for victory. Like any crooked machine, they resorted to the time tested methods of vote fraud, ballot box stuffing, purging voter lists, and ghost voter registrants. Hatcher called in the Feds and the courts and got the process cleansed just in time for him to sweep to victory.

In the end, it really didn’t matter if Gary tried to rig the vote for Obama. By not winning comfortably in a state she was expected to do very well, Hillary Clinton’s campaign suffered the ultimate defeat: she failed to meet expectations.

As you know by now, Hillary cancelled her morning show appearances. Originally, the campaign also cancelled all her appearances for the day but apparently were taken aback by the almost universal interpretation of that action as the end of the road so they added an event at noon today in West Virginia.

But really, how can she go on? The Democrats seem bound and determined to nominate a Jimmy Carter - worse, a Jimmy Carter with baggage. But in this, the worst potential election year for Republicans since 1974, it might be enough anyway.

It’s no accident that the GOP has been losing these special elections in previously safe Republican districts. The party’s message is uncoordinated and mushy, there is trouble raising money, and the caucus is hopelessly divided on what to do to fix it:

Shellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party’s message isn’t good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC’s money.

The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party’s electoral woes — brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins’ loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday — have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in “everybody for himself” mode.

“There is an attitude that, ‘I better watch out for myself, because nobody else is going to do it,’” the member said. “There are all these different factions out there, everyone is sniping at each other, and we have no real plan. We have a lot of people fighting to be the captain of the lifeboat instead of everybody pulling together.”

In a piece published in Human Events, the Republicans’ onetime captain, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, warned his old colleagues that they face “real disaster” on Election Day unless they move immediately to “chart a bold course of real reform” for the country.

But even with all of these advantages, Obama could still lose to John McCain in the fall. It appears that whatever gains he made with white voters over the months have been lost - at least temporarily - by the Wright fiasco. The party knows this but still seems unwilling to cut him loose and turn to Hillary as an alternative.

For her part, Clinton really can’t drop out immediately. She is going to win in West Virginia next week and Kentucky the following week - both by big margins. My guess is that she will trundle onwards, hobbled by a lack of money and with no rational argument to take to the Superdelegates to get them to overturn what is rapidly becoming inevitable.

Allah sums it up:

Slate’s keeping an eye on RCP’s running popular-vote totals and notes that not only will Obama widen his delegate margin tonight, he’ll erase the PV gains she made in Pennsylvania. In fact, as of this moment, even if Florida and Michigan are counted RCP gives her a popular vote lead of just 3,000+ votes — a margin of less than one-tenth of one percent. And that’s assuming that the popular vote totals from the caucuses in Iowa, Washington, Maine, and Nevada (which weren’t reported) aren’t counted at all. If you estimate for those states, he ends up with a lead of more than 100,000. Which means she has nothing left to commend her to the supers except an electabilty argument unsupported by a single key metric or even circumstantial evidence that Pastorgate has done Obama grievous damage at the polls. Are they going to take the nomination from the first serious black candidate for president without any compelling data to hang their decision on? Not a chance. It’s over. Let’s move on.

There are some - Sean Hannity for one - who have been hinting that Hillary’s oppo research on Obama has come up with some extremely damaging stuff that they have been showing privately to select party leaders in hopes of enlisting their support to carry out what would amount to a coup d’etat against the certain nominee. That sounds like Hannity passing gas. Obama has somewhat inoculated himself against further Wright outrages so it would have to be something that involved the candidate personally in Wright’s diatribes to have any effect at all.

It’s not quite time to write the post mortem yet. Hillary will not go quietly into that goodnight until external forces extinguish her candidacy. But the race is over - has been over as I’ve been pointing out - for a couple of months. All that’s left for Clinton is to find the right moment to exit the stage with as much grace as she can muster.

I have a new column up at PJ Media about Obama’s presser this afternoon.

If he had said the same things last month, he would not have had to come before the press today. A sample:

Jeremiah Wright’s speech on Monday at the National Press Club turned into a full blown media feeding frenzy after the pastor not only repeated his charges that the US is a terrorist state, that the country deserved 9/11, and that the US government created the AIDS virus to kill black people, but amplified his charges. Wright also intimated that Obama was forced to denounce his words because of political considerations but that at bottom, he agreed with him.

By late afternoon in North Carolina, the campaign finally realized what was happening and trotted the candidate out before the traveling press at the airport in Wilmington:

Read the whole thing.

My latest column is up at PJ Media. In it, I break down the numbers from last night’s primary win for Clinton and show why Democratic superdelegates should be worried:

Hillary Clinton received 62% of the white vote. Barack Obama received 89% of the African American vote. The question facing superdelegates is: how can they run a candidate who loses the white vote by almost 2-1 in a state they absolutely must carry to win the election? And it wasn’t just the voter’s race that made a difference. Clinton ran up astonishing majorities in the mostly white, mostly rural counties in the northeast part of the state. In Luzerne county she received 75% of the vote. She got 70% of the vote in Wyoming county. Culturally conservative but economically moderate, these blue collar voters in places like Scranton and Wilkes-Barre were considered at one time “Reagan Democrats” - reliable Democratic voters when it came to candidates on the down ballot but Republican when voting for President. In recent elections, they have returned to the Democratic party in greater numbers and have given the party a victory in the state in every election since 1988.

These are the voters Barack Obama told his rich donor friends in San Francisco were “clinging” to religion and guns rather than voting what he feels are their economic interests. Indeed, Clinton bagged 58% of gun owners in the state while taking 58% of those who attend church weekly. Obama received 56% of the votes from those who never attend religious services.

There is no evidence that Obama’s San Francisco remarks cost him any votes. But they certainly didn’t win him any, and the comments may have reinforced the image with these rural white voters that Obama does not share their core values.

The religious divide also tells a story. For the first time since 1976, Democrats won the nationwide Catholic vote in 2006. This vote is vital in several northeastern states and is important in states that lie along an arc that extends from the shores of Lake Erie in New York down through the rest of the Great Lakes, all the way to Illinois and then up through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. The Catholic vote is decisive in Pennsylvania with nearly 40% of the total vote last night made up of Catholics.

I don’t think the Democrats dare nominate Hillary now that it is a certainty that Obama will win the pledged delegate race. But it is still six weeks to the end of the primary season and Obama seems to be averaging a gaffe every couple of weeks. Perhaps he will really stick his foot in it at some point and force the supers to switch to Hillary.

But his handlers have scrapped the idea of any more debates and the candidate himself is dodging the press as if they all had ebola. Being thus shielded, all we will see of the candidate and read about are the issues he and his supporters wish to highlight.

Which “issues” are those? The adoring crowds. The spine tingling rhetoric. The fainting women. How charismatic he is.

You know…all those important issues the left was complaining weren’t covered at the ABC debate last week.

My latest column at PJ Media is up and it deals with a subject near and dear to my heart; baseball.

A sample:

The mists of time are sure to shroud some of my memories in an unrealistic haze that makes the game of my youth a little more glorious than it actually was, elevating that period in American history above the squalid, grasping cynicism of today’s spectacles. But there is little doubt that America’s love affair with baseball has cooled, and it is hard to see how it can ever be re-ignited.

They do not play softball — either the 12” or 16” variety. This isn’t “Beer Ball” or some variation of a Saturday afternoon lark by drinking buddies. They play what we used to call “league” ball or “hardball.” And I can testify to the fact that they play for keeps — games come complete with brush back pitches, head first slides, and even the occasional bench clearing “rhubarb,” where the dignity and wisdom of age is replaced with the white hot emotion of competitive ballplayers.

There’s only one thing I’d change about my life if given a chance; I’d have pursued my dream to be a sportswriter. I love writing about politics but sports is where my heart lies.

My latest article is up at Pajamas Media. It’s about the Tuzla Affair - Hillary’s fib about how she had to dodge sniper fire on a 1996 trip to Bosnia and why the incident will remind Democratic voters about what they hate about the Clintons.

A sample:

The reason why we might indeed inquire about a lack of curiosity about the story from the press is because this is not the first time that Hillary Clinton or her surrogates have told the story of the First Lady parachuting into Bosnia…er, that is, coming under sniper fire.

According to the Obama campaign, Clinton made the exact same claim on December 29th in Iowa and again on February 29th in Waco, Texas with retired General Wesley Clark. Not a peep from our vaunted press corps who apparently don’t have as much curiosity as a stand up comedian about the incident. They just swallowed this fish story hook, line, and sinker.

Maybe Hillary should have really gone to town in recalling the incident. She could have told the press that she rappelled down a line dangling from a hovering Huey with an M-16 slung across her chest, a knife in her teeth and Chelsea on her back. Such a story told to our incurious press corps and dutifully printed as the truth would have been worth 100,000 votes at least.

This story has some legs as it is ricocheting around the blogosphere again today. I think it will damage Clinton because everyone wants to get beyond the last 16 years of partisan strife and Hillary’s easy way with the lie reminds us all of how things were during the 8 years of the Clinton Administration.

And here’s another reminder; Clintonian ruthlessness:

The delegate math is difficult for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, the official said. But it’s not a question of CAN she achieve it. Of course she can, the official said.

The question is — what will Clinton have to do in order to achieve it?

What will she have to do to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, in order to eke out her improbable victory?

She will have to “break his back,” the official said. She will have to destroy Obama, make Obama completely unacceptable.

“Her securing the nomination is certainly possible - but it will require exercising the ‘Tonya Harding option.’” the official said. “Is that really what we Democrats want?”

Democrats are jumping all over her this morning for her remarks yesterday about Pastor Wright in which she said that she would have left her church if her pastor had made remarks similar to those made by Obama’s racist preacher:

Clinton’s decision to question Obama’s choice of church is a bigger problem than her personal tastelessness. Her decision is an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the black community. It is one of the worst acts of public betrayal I have ever seen committed by a Democratic politician in my lifetime, and the most shortsighted and toxic decision I can recall.

White Americans may be surprised by their introduction to the style of black sermonizing in the figure of Rev. Wright, but the black community sees nothing particularly out of place in his rhetoric. This may or may not be a political vulnerability in the general election, but a far greater vulnerability is opened up by telling the black church-going community that Rev. Wright is the equivalent of Don Imus and his ‘nappy-headed hos’. The suggestion that Rev. Wright was engaged in ‘hate speech’ of a kind so loathsome as to require leaving his church is deeply offensive. The black community is feeling besieged by the national spotlight on Rev. Wright and the ensuing white backlash. They are looking around for allies, and find Hillary Clinton piling on and throwing them under the bus.

Note two things: First, Clinton has obviously written off the Black vote and feels free to pile on with regard to Wright. Second, also note how the left feels perfectly at ease defending Wright now that the controversy has faded into the background. The revulsion to his racist, anti-American comments is now consigned to being nothing more than “white backlash” - code words for white racism. In other words, criticizing racist talk from a Black preacher is in and of itself racist.

This is the kind of “conversation on race” the left wishes to have. They define the parameters. They define what is suitable to discuss. They define who transgresses and steps over the line. They are the final arbiters in this so-called “conversation” and woe betide the luckless conservative who strays from their rigid, illiberal, orthodoxy on race.

In other words, if you don’t accept their construct of anything and everything having to do with race, you are de facto, a racist.

Obama would be proud of you.

We’re still a month away from the Pennsylvania primary and Hillary Clinton is beginning to throw everything at Obama within reach. Whether anything sticks is not the point. By tossing so much dirt up in the air, she obscures the fact of her own minuscule chances to win the nomination based on most delegates pledged and the popular vote while making it appear Obama is unelectable.

“Tonya Harding?” More like Gozen the Gozarian from Ghostbusters who wants to destroy the earth and rule over a wasteland.

My latest column is up at Pajamas Media. I take a look at Hillary Clinton’s surprising showing last night and wonder what happened to Obama.

A sample:

Americans admire bulldog tenacity in their politicians. And they hate quitters. If you can say nothing else about Hillary Clinton’s night, it is that she rose to a very steep challenge and fought through to victories in Rhode Island and Ohio, breaking the spell Obama had on the voters, stifling his momentum, and at least slowing his march to the nomination that seemed so inevitable just a few days ago.

And then there was “the ad.” It’s now infamous portrayal of a phone ringing in the White House at 3:00 AM while showing pictures of cute kids fast asleep and a voice over asking who the voter wants answering that phone may have been a clumsy evocation of Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad (a child counting petals she is pulling off a flower morphing into a countdown to launch a nuclear missile), but nevertheless appears to have had an impact. This is especially true in hawkish Texas where Clinton arrested a slide and clawed her way back into the race. (As of midnight Eastern time, Texas is still too close to call).

Yes, it was a very late night indeed.

My latest column at Pajamas Media is up and it’s a doozy.

Basically, it’s a primer for those who don’t know as much as they’d like about the relationship between Barack Obama and Tony Rezko, the Chicago “Fixer” who has been indicted on 24 counts of fraud.

It is by no means a complete history. This is a very complex relationship with many threads interwoven in the story. I had to leave out some sidebars that may or may not prove significant - such as Obama’s relationship with the former Iraqi Minister of Electricity who is being investigated for stealing perhaps some of the $2 billion in US taxpayer reconstruction funds that have gone missing. Did Obama intervene to get a contract for Rezko with the Iraqi government to train power plant workers in Illinois?

It is issues like this that continue to feed the notion that there is much more to this story than a simple transaction involving Rezko’s wife and Obama’s house. Just as Whitewater was not just about a failed real estate deal, there are aspects to this relationship that investigators and journalists are looking at as I write this that may prove to be extremely troubling.

Here’s a small sample from a very long and detailed piece:

WHO IS TONY REZKO

Antoin “Tony” Rezko is a Syrian born businessman who was known in Chicago political circles as “a fixer.” Need to get a waiver of some kind of regulation to close a real estate deal? Call Tony. Want your kid to intern in the office of a United States senator? Call Tony. Are the wheels of government turning too slowly and need to have a legislator or two goose the bureaucracy? Call Tony.

He was also, according to Sun Times political reporter Carol Marin, a “staggeringly talented shakedown artist”:

My latest PJ Media column in is up. I parse the results from last night’s Wisconsin primary and show that the Hillary Clinton campaign is dead in the water with not much hope and and no ray of sunshine they can glimpse that can bring them out of the darkness.

A sample:

Nine in a row. Every primary and caucus since Super Tuesday 2 weeks ago. The Barack Obama campaign juggernaut rolled into frigid Wisconsin and emerged with another double digit win under its belt, leaving Hillary Clinton to ponder the question of what she can possibly do to slow down Obama’s momentum and get back in the race.

Super Delegates who are interested in winning a general election probably shudder at the thought of a Democratic candidate who does so poorly among men.

My latest Pajamas Media column is on the suddenly narrowing options open to Hillary Clinton’s faltering campaign.

Hillary isn’t just losing these primaries. She is getting slaughtered. But she still has one last card to play; her ability to carry Democratic strongholds:

If Obama has a knock against him during this brilliant run of victories beginning on Super Tuesday when he won 13 states to Clinton’s 8, and continuing on through his last 8 straight wins since then, it is that the Illinois senator has failed to win any of the 10 largest states in the union save his home state of Illinois. This is significant because traditional Democratic general election strategy relies on the huge electoral vote harvest available in those states to be competitive with Republicans on election day.

It is a compelling argument and probably the only one she has left. But Obama will have his own counter-argument. It is he who will have won the large majority of primaries and primary votes. It would be undemocratic, he will say, to choose a candidate who finished second when the people spoke but was handed the nomination by a quirk in party rules.

For the rest, go here.

My latest Pajamas Media column is up and I guarantee controversy.

I take a look at Barack Obama’s candidacy and place it in some historical perspective:

An extraordinary statistic jumped out of the jumble of numbers and percentages that pulled me up short and caused me to reflect on the past as well as the future. In the exit polls from the Democratic party primary in Georgia, nestled in with indicators of age, income, and religion was the vote cast by white males. When you think about it, this is startling:

I suppose it’s no big thing for many younger Americans who weren’t born and raised with the idea that there were limits inherent in the American political system that would prevent a black man from achieving what Mr. Obama has achieved. It is a shameful thing to believe in those limits – bred to it by history and circumstance as we of my generation were.

Read it all before commenting please.