Mr. Farley, by the way, is brilliant. If one has never seen his alternate history web comic about the invasion of Afghanistan, The Spiders, one should.
Edward Steichen, one of the great photographers, organized a group of photographers to work for the Navy during WWII. If you look at the book Steichen at War, on page 161, in a photo by Victor Jorgensen from 1944, you'll see a bunch of sailors playing basketball on a lowered deck elevator on the aircraft carrier USS Monterey. One of the players is a tall skinny kid with sandy hair who looks vaguely familiar.
That would be Ens. Gerald R. Ford.
As to Mr. Bush's wartime record... I've related this on Calpundit before, and I know Avedon's quoted it, but it bears repeating. A joke I've been told by a currently-serving Army buddy:
Q: What's the difference between Jane Fonda and George W. Bush?
A: Hey, at least Jane went to Vietnam!
I won't go through the long litany of actions this Administration has taken that shows nothing but contempt for the common soldier. My point is, even if "Ricky" doesn't know about Mr. Bush's wartime record, the Poor Bloody Infantry does.
So far as I can tell, what we've established is that Hillary Clinton is a politician with considerable national popularity and very high negatives among her opposition, whose institutional position is that of a freshman Senator, with all the limitations that entails.
No, what we've established is that I'm a terrible writer. Because I've now outlined five or six reasons why she doesn't have genuinely national popularity, to which the response has been, "Does so." I'm mostly chalking it up to my Sir Humphrey-ish way of understating things, and assuming people can connect the dots.
This seems to me a really literal-minded, civics-class approach to figuring out the behavior of politicians.
Many of my hypotheticals have been of the form, "Vote my way, or your ass is on the street next election."
My district never got the textbooks that said that's how the senate works.
As may be... I think I'm now off to take remedial writing, or something.
Some wingers are nuttily fixated on Hillary Clinton as the Source of All Evil
And some wingers from the other side of the aisle are nuttily fixated on Hillary Clinton as the Source of All Good.
Fear and loathing of Hillary Clinton is a useful fund-raising tool for the modern right
Agreed, and already mentioned by me.
Hillary Clinton has a broad base of national support, far larger than the average freshman Senator
No, she has name recognition, and some fundraising ability.
Look... Say I'm a senator in Nevada. Democratic, even. If Hillary comes up to me and says, "If you don't vote the way I want, I'll make sure you won't get X many votes next election..." Sorry. It's laughable. She just doesn't have that strong a hold on anyone. If she were to flip it, and say she would deliver those votes if I went her way -- same thing. She really can't cut off any of my funds. Maybe something like Emily's List, but I'll bet not -- if I'm a Democratic woman senator in Nevada, I'll bet that would trump any misgivings Hillary might have. About the only thing Hillary can offer is money that she's raised on her own stick -- thus, the fundraising.
What about in the chamber? Take the Medicare vote. Here's the roll call sliced a few different ways. 11 Democratic senators broke ranks and voted Yea for Medicare reform, even though Hillary voted Nay. If she had genuine power, she would either have been able to persuade those 11 senators to vote with her, and/or would be able to punish or reward them accordingly. She can't do that. Compare this with Feinstein. My take is that Landrieu, Breaux, and Wyden all flipped when Feinstein did. Baucus and Miller are virtually crypto-Repubs, anyway.
But look over the roll. Which senators do you think vote the way they do not because they're Democrats, but because they specifically want to support Hillary? Name names.
She votes like a freshman, she has the lack of influence of a freshman, she has the lack of reach outside the chamber of a freshman, she quacks and waddles like a freshman.
This means the Bush administration regards her warily and goes to some trouble to keep her in check
OK, I got that.
And, like so many other things about the White House, it doesn't mean it's accurate.
Ted Kennedy is evidence against your argument, not for it -- Kennedy was considered a credible presidential candidate during SEVERAL elections.
Where "several" = 2 -- 1976 and 1980.
I don't know why he never ran...
He did run. In 1980. And got creamed. Which is why he was never "credible" again.
...but the reason that was discussed at the time was that he didn't want to give the assassins a chance at a hat trick.
That was certainly the kind of joke stockbrokers would tell, yes.
I'm reasonbly sure Kennedy himself never said so, including during his campaign.
The point is that wingers -- again, both left and right, by the look of it -- kept treating Ted like a serious contender years after it was obvious he was nothing but a senator. A strong, senior senator, yes, but still.
"Maybe Hillary isn't important as a senator, but I get email almost every day of the "send this to everyone you know!" kind, bashing Hillary. Of the other 99 senators currently serving, I hear nothing at all.
Why do you suppose this might be?"
For the same reason that 10-15 years ago, probably the only senator you ever heard about -- certainly from the right -- was Teddy Kennedy. Bogeymen are scary, bogeymen are useful, and if Karl "Pavlov" Rove can send out an e-mail villifying Ms. Clinton for things over which she has no interest or control... How much the better.
It's not unlike, say, insisting a regime disarm when you already know in advance they're not armed. Nothing they can do can fix the problem.
OK, I guess there's some equivalent of color-blindness going on here. Because I'm just not seeing what you guys are seeing.
See... When I hear something like the idea that Bush took this trip to take away the media spotlight from Hillary Clinton, and then I compare it to what I think I know about politics... it doesn't even stir a laugh in me. No, more than that, it sounds as silly as the whole "the Clintons are behind everything evil, they murdered Vince Foster" kind of thing. Both positions are a kind of conspiracy theory, and I've hardly ever found such theories to be true.
So I assess things in a way I think is objective -- what has she done, what can she do, why would the White House give a damn -- and I just don't see a justification for thinking that way. (Admittedly, I don't seem to see things the same way the White House does on damned near anything, either, as Ulrika reminds me... but still.)
Now, along come youse guys, and you're throwing around terms like "Clinton hydra", and how the filibustering on judicial nominees is somehow driven by her (even though she's not on the Judiciary committee, or in the party leadership), and polls about elections 5 years out mean something even though all the data we have suggest the electorate hardly ever makes up its mind more than 3 weeks out...
And I just don't get it. To my ear, you're sounding like some of you believe there are grains of truth to the various winger conspiracy nuts -- by which term, you may guess, I don't.
Maybe I've been inside the bubble so long I just don't see the bubble (as a metaphor, it's not like I'm in any privileged position)... But the world you're describing doesn't match the one I observe at all.
I'm not saying that's good or bad, I'm just noting my perception.
I will admit that Ms. Clinton is the first former First Lady to be elected to the Senate. And in that, she's unique.
Then again, she's the first one to have run.
Compare that to the dozens of senators who have run, and failed, for the Presidency.
If Ms. Clinton is more powerful than she appears, one should be able to name legislation she's sponsored, or bills that hung on her vote, or particularly fine speeches in the Senate, or... something, anything, that shows she does anything.
It's not like the difference in seniority between her and Chuck Schumer is all that great, but the difference in results is night and day.
Getting press is not the same as having either influence or power.
Pete Domenici has always been a pivotal senator, but contrast the ink he gets vs. what Jesse Helms used to. Or consider that no Republican senator gets equivalent coverage, even thought they have a majority in the chamber.
Hillary's a great fund-raiser. She's a spokesperson for a particular kind of True Believer. She has great name recognition. She's also become the Ted Kennedy of a new generation of conversatives -- the liberal they love to hate.
But that's about the limit of her impact.
Like Teddy, or like Joe Biden, I think she can become a power in the Senate itself.
But as far as this White House is concerned, she's pretty much a Non Player Character. Any real influence she's going to have will be years from now. This White House has shown, time and again, that they have an event horizon of 15 minutes or less.
OK, let's try this a different way.
I don't think Ms. Clinton was a consideration at all, because I can't imagine anyone in the White House giving a damn about her.
She's a freshman senator of a minority party. Like Josh Marshall, I don't think she has any opportunities for advancement, not only because of her high negatives in polling, but because senators don't get elected to the White House. (The only senator elected directly to the White House in the 20th Cent. was JFK. Insert your own Bentsen quote here.) (This is also why I called Dean as being the odds-on favorite for the nomination months ago. Go take a look at what percentage of nominees from 1976 onwards have been sitting or former governors.) She's certainly not a factor in 2004, the only election Dubya cares about. If he cares about elections at all.
Honestly, folks... She's not a factor, except to the tin hat winger crowd. (Of either wing.)
Mr. Macdonald: Yes, me. I don't think Ms. Clinton was a factor at all.
As I posted in my LiveJournal, I see the trip as mostly having been a "screw you" from Dubya to his father, who was left cooling his heels on the ranch in Crawford. ("Mom? Dad? You mean, you're still here? No, I wasn't able to make it. I was in Iraq. You know, Dad, the country you couldn't knock over?")
But then, seen this way, I think the trip just confirms my view the whole Iraq operation is just personal therapy for Dubya vis-a-vis his father.
And, to give credit to the other coast -- I point out that CalTech also has a long history of similarly playful pranks. Re-draping the "Hollywood" sign, and getting the Rose Bowl scoreboard to display their own messages, are among the most public, but it goes back to at least the 1930's where one fellow came back to his dorm room to find his Model T Ford not only assembled in his room, but idling.
Mentioning this to Ulrika, she pointed out that in an alternate universe, where Tech'er slang came to be the more widely known term than MIT's, the perps of such events would be "stackers".
Just add a little fuel here, here's the TMRC's Dictionary, from 1959, with an early definition of "hack": "Hack -- 1) an article or project without constructive end; 2) work undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack (3)."
What's odd is that the story I'd heard about early MIT hacks is railroad related. And probably apocryphal.
Seems the lads broke in to the Kenmore Square "T" station one night. Wherein they greased the rails thoroughly.
Morning comes. As does the first train of the day. Many of the lads are standing on the platform of the station...
...to see the train slide through, braking, but unable to stop.
This would've been funny enough, and a triumph.
But the engineer decided to throw the subway train in reverse, to try to make his appointed stop after all.
Which led to everyone getting to see the train slide through the station, in reverse...
...smack into the second train of the day.
Held up the subway all day, untangling that.
As I say, I have no idea how accurate this is, or even where I heard it first. But it is my stock story about the spirit of original-sense "hacking" at MIT.
Since Krugman is saying pretty much what I've said all along, no, I don't think this is either extreme or partisan.
I predicted back in March we wouldn't find any WMD, because there were none to be found. The tendency of Los Amigos Arbusto to stall, cajole, and completely deny any obligation to provide evidence during the long build up to the war ("The burden is on Iraq to prove they've disarmed." -- a "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" question if ever there was one.) was hardly reassuring. A battle plan where our soldiers good and true were dangled in front of the Iraqis to be burned by WMD if they genuinely existed -- but, of course, were completely safe because we knew they didn't -- was also more than a hint of how real the Administration thought the threat was.
I think John McCain had it right in South Carolina: Bush consistently "twists the truth" to what suits him. I think he does that more than any president since Harding... and, yes, I know there's some stiff competition between here and there. From both parties.
Somehow, George has risen to the challenge, he said ruefully.
"Granted, you won't hear (Coulter) on Pacifica Radio or NPR..."
On an ideological basis, I'd agree about Pacifica... Although she might get quoted, as an example of her type.
But I can easily see NPR giving Coulter air time if she wanted it, in the same way they regularly broadcast Bill Kristol, and have been known to have commentaries from such liberal hotheads as Gen. Schwarzkopf's former briefing officer. (And let's not forget Schwarzkopf's pre-war opinions about the current state of the military, albeit in a different forum.)
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