Damn, I've gone and supported Obama. And Hillary is not happy with me.

Man.  I really should apologize.

Yeah, I should apologize up and down to Hillary.  She's been such a great national leader for 35 years, fighting for us every step of the way.  

She's gone out of her way to help other Democrats, and make sure that she sticks by them against the Republican agenda.    Things like the AUMF vote and Kyl-Lieberman were really good for the Democratic party!  It showed that Democrats are strong -- especially Hillary!

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This will be a short diary, especially given that I usually have trouble keeping mine down to a reasonable length.   But I mostly wanted to get this MoveOn ad out there, and hope that some friendly frontpager puts this ad up in the higher end real estate.

Though I called it an anti-McCain ad, it really is a condemnation of everyone who has kept the Iraq disaster going -- from Donald Rumsfeld (remember him?) to Tom Friedman, inventor of the infamous "Friedman Unit" (a phrase I hear the Mustached One despises).

The ad is directly below the break:

Patrick McHenry, Republican member of the house of Representatives, is a notorious chickenhawk.  He didn't serve in the U.S. military,  despite being a vocal cheerleader for the Iraq occupation at every opportunity, and he's a relentless propagandist who questions the patriotism of those who question the Iraq invasion and occupation.  

But he recently showed his true colors, and bad luck for him, it's on tape.

You see, Patrick McHenry is happy to show his contempt for soldiers who actually ARE serving in Iraq.

Please read on, for yet another tale of what Republicans really think of our troops.  And the tape to prove it!

(more below...)

This statement is from Hillary Clinton's campaign website, part of a charming list titled "Just Embellished Words: Senator Obama’s Record of Exaggerations & Misstatements," released a mere three days ago, on March 25:

Sen. Obama consistently and falsely claims that he was a law professor. The Sun-Times reported that, "Several direct-mail pieces issued for Obama's primary [Senate] campaign said he was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He is not. He is a senior lecturer (now on leave) at the school. In academia, there is a vast difference between the two titles. Details matter." In academia, there's a significant difference: professors have tenure while lecturers do not. [Hotline Blog, 4/9/07; Chicago Sun-Times, 8/8/04]

Though the allegation was relaunched a few days back, it's been part of the Clinton campaign's bill of anti-Obama particulars for a while.

Well, guess what?  It's nonsense.    (more below:)

In the five years since the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, history has been revised by many interested parties.  The myths usually involve some variation on a theme:

"Saddam Hussein was a threat, and everyone agreed that something had to be done.  We were all fooled."

...with the latter sentence applied either to Saddam, or George W. Bush, or both.  

People who were either for invading Iraq, or who were wishy-washy on the point, now claim to have been against this epic disaster because they have criticized (however mildly, however many years later) the way the war was managed.

On this 5th anniversary of the greatest foreign policy debacle of modern times, I'd like to remind us all that there were voices explicitly against this war -- people who warned us, very precisely, of the results we see today.  

(more below)

It was rough for many of us, being a Democrat yesterday.  We saw one of the more dynamic members of our party, NY governor Elliot Spitzer, revealed as someone who likes to frequent expensive prostitutes.

There have been a few diaries on the Recommended List here questioning the particulars of the case -- the political motives of all involved, the methods used to catch Spitzer, and so on.  I hope such work will continue.  As diarist eugene says, borrowing from Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake, these are the more important questions, ultimately.  If our justice system is an arm of political interests, that's a real danger to our democracy

(more below...)

The Chicago Tribune has done a pretty thorough investigation of Senator Clinton's claims of "experience," particularly in the foreign policy and crisis management arenas.

I'd say the short take on it is:  Hillary is greatly exaggerating both the scope and importance of what she has actually accomplished.  But do read it for yourself.

Excerpt:

The debate over readiness for the global arena is emerging as the flash point in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, crystallized by a dramatic Clinton campaign commercial asking who is best prepared to answer a 3 a.m. phone call to the White House during a crisis.

Clinton says she is the answer, arguing that Obama's major achievement was his early opposition to the Iraq war in 2002. Indeed, Obama doesn't have much in the way of experience managing foreign crises, nor does Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, for that matter. In fact, it is rare for any president to have that kind of experience before coming into office.

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"I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002."

-- Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton is absolutely right:  she has a Lifetime of Experience.   For her all whole life, she's been experiencing things.   She turned 60 years old this year, and for 60 of those 60 years, she has been alive and things have been happening in her life.   Do you understand?   She has been experiencing things.  

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First of all, congratulations to Hillary Clinton and her supporters here on this site.  She had a great night, and revitalized her campaign.

Second -- I'm aware that the title is presumptuous.  Outside of many dime-a-dozen rumors, we really have no idea if John Edwards is behind Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or if he is simply neutral.   So I grant that we don't know who, if anyone, John Edwards supports.  

I'm a former Edwards supporter who was very disappointed when he dropped out of the race, but understood his reasons for doing so.  He just couldn't have won, and he knew it.

I wanted Edwards as our nominee, and while I liked Barack Obama a lot, I had some reservations about him.  (Then again, I had some reservations about JRE too.  No candidate is perfect, and the search for The One will always end in some disappointment.)

(more below...)  

At Rifftrax.com, the minds behind the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 have done a series of mostly non-political spoofs of current political ads.

See them below, or on their blog...

********

Hillary Clinton ruins Christmas:

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People of Daily Kos,

While many of you here deny that you are a member of a cult, I freely embrace it.  I can say without hesitation that I only feel safe and happy when part of a mindless, ant-like collective that follows its leader without questions or complaints.  

I really don't know what the problem with that is.   But apparently some of you take umbrage at being called part of a cult.   Weird.

Well, let me set you straight about a few things below the fold.

Like many Edwards supporters, I'm sorry to see him leave the race.  But it's been clear for a while that this was going to be an uphill battle, and as the primaries unfolded it only got tougher.

But since I've been pretty well prepared for JRE not going the distance, I'm switching to Barack Obama without a lot of regret.    If you're interested in hearing yet another person's reasons for his political choices -- please  follow me over the break. If you'd rather fold your socks, understood.  Opinions are in no short supply these days.

Fareed Zakaria does.

Well, to be fair to Fareed, he says the war in Iraq has "largely" ended...not ended, per se.   The man is a serious Beltway pundit, and you don't get to be a serious Beltway pundit without employing convenient adverbs.  

Despite his qualifying adverb, man!... does Fareed feel sorry for those loser Democrats who are still acting all hot and bothered about Iraq!

Read and learn:

Here it is, in its entirety:

“Our country and our Party are stronger because of John’s service, and I respect his decision. When we were running against each other and on the same ticket, John and I agreed on many issues. I continue to believe that this election is about the future, not the past, and that the country needs a President who will fight aggressively to end the status quo and change the Washington system and to give voice to all of those whose voices are ignored in the corridors of power.”

The Big Dawg is embarrassing himself.  It's not pretty.

When he was running for President back in 1992, Bill Clinton was accused of having a thin resume, lacking proper experience, and being generally too much of an unknown to be trusted with the Presidency.  

But Bill Clinton soldiered forth, constantly hitting on the theme of "change," and with his often stirring oratory managed to convince enough people that he was the man for the moment.   He unseated a sitting President.

Cut to fifteen years later.  His wife is on the ropes in her fight for the Democratic nomination.  Not out, but certainly rocked by the results in Iowa, and the polling in N.H.

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I'm a marginal Edwards supporter, and I wrote a diary about it a little while back.  It's my only bona fide "candidate diary."

But really, if once this  primary season (epoch?) is over, Edwards hasn't made it...I'd be happy to support Barack Obama, and work hard to get him elected.    I'm not thrilled with any of the candidates because they've been collectively weak in getting out of Iraq, but they are all in a different moral universe than those creepy Republicans being offered up as POTUS.

Though I'd like to see Edwards last past this day -- I think his approach makes more sense right now -- I'm also a little nauseous at some of the nonsense being thrown around about all of the candidates.  I know a lot of people here feel that way, but let me point to a prime example of how candidate blindness makes people desperate, and frankly, stupid.

(below the fold)

Actor, author, former talk show host and all-around strange fellow Charles Grodin gave Sean Hannity a shellacking on his show the other night.

I've always liked Grodin as an actor, and he's an... interesting, personality in his way.   Quite the eccentric.  

But in this clip from the Hannity-and-Liberal Punching Bag Show, Grodin demonstrates that it doesn't take much to intimidate big talker Hannity, and throw him totally off his game.   He calls Hannity a "fascist" and doesn't let him run the conversation for more than two seconds at  time.  Far too many other guests -- including our ostensible progressive leaders -- act helpless in the face of blowhards like Hannity, and Grodin shows that it ain't hard to back a media punk like Seanny-boy down.

Watch below:

A Clinton campaign official expresses public concern that Barack Obama's admitted cocaine use when he was young will be seized on by the Republicans in a Presidential battle.   Worse, he hypothesizes that the GOP will demand to know if Obama used to sell drugs.

To the Clinton campaign's credit, they apologize for the remark, and the offending Clinton official resigns.  

But now we have lots of speculation "out there" in the media about Obama's cocaine use.   So it's now a story, as the Beltway solons say.

What happened here?   Was Obama's past drug use fair game?    And is this true even when he first mentioned it in a book well before running for President -- with his very clear message being "don't do drugs, since it hurt me?"