And speaking of Hillary's uphill climb...

... I almost felt bad about pinning the failure of the whole "inevitability/establishment" strategy on Mark "Microtrends" Penn, in this post back between Iowa and New Hampshire. There's something kind of mousy and endearing about Penn. He lacks the jovial Rovian arrogance, and he believes so deeply in his pet theory. And maybe that theory is perfectly valid for trend-watching in aspects of American culture with slightly less implications for the nation than choosing our next president, especially in these truly dire times.
But the thing is, I didn't like Penn's (and McAuliffe's, et al.) strategy even back when it was working, even when it looked take-it-to-the-bank solid, because I wanted Hills to be the change candidate. In so many ways, she is. But now, I guess she's not, because no one ever said she was. How did politics get dumbed down to this embarrassingly elementary level? What did the voters do to deserve being treated like a focus group?
I guess that's the problem, and one of the reasons why we so badly needs some change.
Thanks to Mr. X for the link:
Penn ain't mightier

Someone named Rice talking sense on foreign policy.

No, it's not Condi. It's Susan, Obama's senior foreign policy adviser.

And, no, don't take this to mean I'm jumping on the Obama bandwagon just yet. Hillary has one last shot next Tuesday, and there's a chance she'll pull it off. I put my vote and a relatively generous amount of hard-earned money into her quest, and so I'm sticking with her as long as Tina "Bitch is the new black!" Fey is ;)

But I thought it was about time someone pointed out succinctly, as Ms. Rice does here, how ridiculous this "we won't negotiate with these guys until we retroactively win the negotiations" policy has been.

from Tucker Carlson's show on MSNBC today

RICE: This notion of George Bush's -- and it's really unique to him -- that somehow we are rewarding our adversaries by sitting down and engaging in tough-minded, well-prepared negotiations is one of the many products of his failed presidency.

If John McCain wants to take his foreign policy advice from the most disastrous president in our lifetime, that's his prerogative, but Barack Obama is not going to do that.

CARLSON: But doesn't a meeting with the American head of state have value? It's a commodity. It's worth something.

RICE: No, it's a means to an end.

CARLSON: But isn't it also worth something?

RICE: It is a means to an end, Tucker.

First of all, these negotiations would be well-planned. But we're not going to take the view that the Bush administration has taken, that we're only going to negotiate with our adversaries after they do what it is we seek to accomplish in negotiations.

That's the position we've taken with Iran: we won't sit down and talk to you until you've ended and suspended your nuclear program, which is, of course, what we need them to do.

That's counterproductive. That ensures that we'll never have direct dialogue with Iran, whereas they're continuing their nuclear program unabated. We're having trouble getting sanctions, which we need to push forward on. And we are therefore losing, because time is on the Iranians' side.

The Undervalued Role of Play

Not to sound too crotchety, but every time I see a DVD player in the back of an SUV, presumably lulling the kids back there either to sleep or into docile DVD-consciousness, I wonder what's going to become of the imagination in generations to come.
Apparently, Alix Spiegel of NPR's Morning Edition wondered the same thing.
Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

No End in Sight

If there's anyone left out there (and I doubt there is, outside of Dick Cheney's bedroom) who doesn't think the Iraq invasion and "reconstruction" was the most poorly planned and executed military adventure in modern history, they should watch this film, which lays it out pretty plainly.
It's both maddening and sad, because there's no way to go back and undo all the needless, thoughtless damage done, all the misery that has been caused; we can only try to clean up the mess now as best we can.

Commensurate to our capacity for wonder: Gatsby lives on for new readers.

I don't know if it's the great American novel, but it's certainly one of them, and I don't think it will lose its relevance as long as America remains America, for good or ill.

NYT Education Section: Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers

KBR vs. Saudi Arabia on justice for women.

It's even closer than I thought, with "arbitration" pretty much Halliburton lingo for "sharia," as far as sexual assault accusations go.

This is really the limit. I don't know what else to say.

And it looks like they're going to get away with it.

From Time staff writer Lisa Takeuchi Cullen's blog:

At Halliburton/KBR, sexual assault is just part of the workplace experience for women.

Related: What else do Saudi Arabia and Halliburton have in common?

Tom Lantos, RIP

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress was warmly remembered in a memorial service today, with moving tributes by colleagues from Condoleezza Rice to Joe Biden... You could tell that this was a man whose life had really touched those around him, and especially his close-knit family. I didn't agree with all of his foreign policy positions, but it's impossible not to admire this kind, generous man with such a remarkable life, such resilience, and such unflagging dedication to human rights and liberty around the world. We need more like him in this town.

When Weather Changed History

Weather Channel fans? Never mind :)

OK, so the weather didn't really change anything. Obama won all three "Chesapeake" states by a landslide, and McCain won by a respectable margin, if less than impressive for an all-but-declared nominee.

The only thing the raging ice storm changed was the number of accidents on the Beltway, some no doubt caused by people rushing home to make the polls before they closed at 8pm. I fortunately don't have a Beltway commute, but I do have what would normally be a 15-20 minute commute from work to my polling station, which was slightly delayed by the thick, unscrapable sheet of ice I found on my windshield as I left work eight minutes late due to a communications/media-related activity tangentially related to none other than John Kerry, Keith Olbermann, and Chris Matthews (ah, we meet again, John Kerry. It was raining the night I voted for you, too, only, since it was November, it wasn't freezing in thick sheets on my windshield.)

It was still too thick to attack with my trusty scraper, as you can see, at 7:30 pm. I was bored, so I took these photos while waiting for it to melt.

I made it to the polling station at 8:04 pm, but, thanks to that County Circuit Court judge who extended Maryland's voting hours until 9:30 due to inclement weather, I was given a provisional ballot. Of course, the provisional ballots won't be counted until next Tuesday. But, looking at the numbers, that doesn't really matter much, anyway. At least I did my civic duty. But I have nothing on the polling station volunteers who told me they'd arrived at 6:30 that morning, and, now, thanks to the well-meaning judge, they'd be there another hour and a half longer. They were looking pretty tired -- but still friendly -- good souls.

Oh, yeah, and I voted for Hillary, in case anyone was wondering :) No big surprise, I'm sure.

Not that she was around to cherish her hard-won votes or rue her losses here; she's already in Texas. And over the next couple months, que sera, sera. I've done my part for now, and I have to admit I'm looking forward to the next phase of this thing. Bring it on, John "10,000 years in Iraq" McCain...

It's Official: We Have Been Christened...

... "Chesapeake Tuesday," by David Gregory on MSNBC.

"Potomac Primary" (with points for alliteration) and Mark Shields' fond homage to the native crabcake, thank you for playing. A winner has been chosen. Now we can all get on the Beltway and go home.

After voting, of course. I knew I was forgetting something :-/

My Moment of Truth: The Personal is the Political

So tomorrow is the so-called Potomac/Chesapeake/"Crabcake" primary. There was a time, not so long ago, when I was looking forward to this day, but that time passed sometime after New Hampshire. I now find myself in the untenable position of supporting one candidate over another for reasons I can only justify in emotional terms.
This wasn't how I envisioned it when I first imagined a Hillary Clinton run, back before I'd even heard the name Barack Obama. When I did hear Obama's keynote speech in 2004, I felt the same enthusiasm about him that I did about Hillary: this guy will be the future of the party. But I thought that future would materialize a little later down the road.
Obama isn't as young as he looks, but he certainly has a lot of good years ahead of him. For Hillary, it's pretty much now or never. I wish that weren't so, but things are different for women in the public sphere. Which pisses me off, but it's the reality. Women above a certain age are still held to impossible standards of female beauty and modesty, and not all that much has changed since the Middle Ages when it comes to fearing and vilifying older women with wisdom and power. Which is one of the many reasons we so desperately need to see a woman in the White House -- besides Geena Davis.
But I know gender and age are skin-deep issues, as much as race is. On the latter issue, it really did break my heart to see both Clintons squander so much of the good will they had genuinely earned from the black community over the years. And for what -- politically, even, leaving morality aside? No gain at all, and possibly irreparable losses. But if it weren't race, it would have been something else. The "Clinton machine" may not play as many levels underground as the likes of Rove & co., but they're certainly willing and able to use a means to an end. And Obama's people, as close to the line as they may go to position their candidate, are not going to cross it in the way that the Clinton team will. That's just a given, and I've faced that fact.
And I know as well as anyone what America needs right now -- and it's not more fire fought with fire. What Washington need is a giant freaking fire hose. But yeah, "change," yada, yada. Even as I say the word, I wish it struck as deep a chord with me as Hillary's story does.
Her story is a woman's story, one that's different from mine but still resonates with me on a personal level. While, as a writer and an introvert, most of my battles are inner, and I wrestle on the page, her battles are outer and she wrestles in the public sphere. Her story is one of lifelong idealism, hard work, but also much complexity -- strength and weakness, courage and compromise, successes and failures. To paraphrase the ending of Carl Bernstein's bio, A Woman in Charge, she's always stood for good things, but sometimes there's a disconnect between her actions and her ideals. Sometimes short cuts are taken; patience is in short supply. Which all sounds a bit like the styles of many of her male predecessors who sought this office. Not to mention her husband, or her own ill-advised identification with Johnson, but also Truman, both Roosevelts, and all the way back to Jefferson and Adams, with everyone in between -- some theatrically flawed and some just plain pedestrian, at least a handful inexplicably devoid of charisma (well, I guess it was easier to get away with that before the age of television.) But none of these men were without inner contradictions. Should a woman be held to a higher personal standard in any of these regards?
And for all this talk of Kennedy, look at JFK's life and family background and you don't see Obama the family man. Sure, Barack did some drugs as a kid and didn't get straight A's in high school, but let's be serious here. George W. Bush was an alcoholic and cokehead for most of his life. Obama is the rare person who is impossible to smear. Whatever Hillary says about the Republican steamroller, they're going to have trouble finding anything substantial on the man himself, because he's laid everything out there, he's pretty much is who he is, and that person is someone America likes, from Iowa to Louisiana to Maine.
So does that mean I'm voting for him?
I can't say that it does. But until tomorrow, I can't absolutely say that it doesn't.
Personal angst aside, there are a few policy differences that make a difference to me. As someone who's gone years at a time without health insurance (after a melanoma scare in my late teens) and lost some sleep over it, I like the idea of at least some basic health insurance for every last person in the country. I also trust Hillary's relative foreign policy experience, her personal relationship with world leaders, and, in general, her instincts and leadership ability.
If this weren't a popularity contest, or, I should say, a personality contest, I'd have no trouble justifying a vote for her. But there's this nagging feeling that the element in Obama's personality that people gravitate toward is what will heal this dangerous divide in America, and actually bring people together, rather than just make sure the good guys beat the bad guys (by which I mean the Right-Wingers, of course ;) If that's true, then despite Obama's youth and the fact that he might have other moments, maybe America won't, if it doesn't seize this one.
On the other hand... on the other hand... Like I said, Hillary had me at hello, and she never really did anything to let me down as a supporter, except not being Barack Obama. Life sure isn't fair sometimes.
Oh well. I guess the exercise of democracy is like the exercise of anything else; if it really hurts, you know it's probably starting to work.

Things that just aren't cool, in any culture...

... in my opinion. And I consider myself pretty darn tolerant.

Frying dolphins that have been inhumanely slaughtered. And frying dolphins, in general.

Countries having more than one set of laws. It seems like a slippery slope to me.

And I would say that even if sharia law didn't consider the testimony of two women equivalent to that of one man in a rape case.

Darfur: Out of the Headlines; Still Really Messed Up

U.N. special envoy to Darfur Jan Eliasson is taking questions, on PBS's NewsHour website, on the current situation there, which, after five years of unalleviated misery, isn't getting much better, and could get worse due to problems next door in Chad.
Answers will be posted on February 13.

How about them Giants?

And here it looked like Boston (I mean New England) was unstoppable, and it was a merely a manner of them showing up in Arizona and accepting the crown. Like destiny, almost... But New York showed some heart, after all, in the end.
All kinds of last-minute upsets happening these days :)

Quote du Jour: James Joyce

“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

I just heard Charles Krauthammer assert on Inside Washington that Bill Clinton was an "inconsequential president" because he happened to govern during a "holiday from history."

Do those who hold this view believe this was merely coincidental, that all eight years flowed blissfully by because of the groundwork laid by one-term president Bush the First? I'll give him and his predecessor the credit for tearing down that wall, but what about the economy? It wouldn't look so grim again until... now, I guess.

Of course, it didn't flow along entirely blissfully. Stuff happened, some of it very bad stuff, particularly in Africa, and at least one chance was missed to nip Al Qaida in the bud. However, 9/11 didn't happen on Bill's watch, and I doubt the infamous "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States" memo would have been ignored by his national security adviser.)

But to argue that the fact the 90s were a relatively smooth epoch diminishes Clinton's legacy, and conversely that all the messes Bush the Second has been trying to clean up (while in the process making more and more) means he is a more consequential and courageous president seems like some kind of crazy nocturnal fantasy to me.

Wake me up when it's 2009.

But I guess that would mean I'd be shirking my responsibility as a voter. In that regard, I've kind of been wishing I could just get with the program and jump on the Obama bandwagon. It seems like the easiest thing to do.

But I've been wanting to see Hillary in the White House since before she ran for the Senate. I liked her even in the early, pre-makeover, pre-cookie-endorsing days. Basically, she had me at hello, hard as that is to believe. It's not like I think she's the sort of woman I'd want to be friends with. Her life isn't very much like mine, on the surface. But I think she's the rare woman in politics who has the unmitigated gall to break through the White House glass ceiling, as well as being one of the several that would do a fine (and consequential) job once there. And even though, at times lately, she's almost lost me, it feels somehow fickle to abandon her now, even if it's only one measly post-Super Tuesday vote.

But I haven't set that in stone. I need to sleep on it some more. (And maybe I'll have another dream like I did the other night, where it was revealed that all the stupid race-baiting tactics and thoughtless remarks in South Carolina were just part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.) Oh, Mr. Sandman...

From the SF Gate: Study Says Many Studies Suck

It's about time someone published a "study" like this ;)

Recommended Viewing: Persepolis

We'd been trying to see this movie, about a young girl growing up in and away from Iran in the wake of the revolution and war, since sometime in November, I think, but two advanced showings at two separate theaters were canceled, and then technical difficulties of a sort interrupted us half way through our third attempted viewing. We finally saw it in its entirety last night, and it was actually worth the wait.
Now that it's up for the animation Oscar, it should be around for a while, and I highly recommend it.
Original, sweet, funny, sad, quirky, and genuine. I'm actually going to go buy the graphic novel, too.