Because of her endorsement of Barack Obama, some are saying Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius could be a vice-president nominee for Obama. I think a better choice would be Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor running for U.S. Senate.
It’ll be a better, tougher ticket against the troglodytic McCain-Huckabee ticket.
Caroline Kennedy this week sought to bestow on Barack Obama the aura of her father’s idealism. In hindsight, despite all we know about JFK, a certain saintly glow attends to his legend now. A martyred brother, RFK, buttresses the legend.
And his brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, changed course on a wasteful life to become a champion of the poor and powerless.
And Obama, despite the taint of Rezko, still retains a certain purity, a neat trick, if I’ve ever seen one. Now, what does he make of all these endorsements?
I was traveling this past weekend when my computer got sick (a complete system failure) and died. No amount of dancing, soothsaying, or human sacrifice could coax it back to life. I finally returned home Wednesday and spoke to Toshiba (well, to the outsourced customer service desk in Bangladesh, or thereabout). The agent got frustrated with me because I couldn’t understand him so he instructed me to take my dang blank laptop to an authorized repair center in the morning for diagnosis.
I was working on a long post about my travels and that is now trapped in the consciousness of my dead computer. My notes on a different post that I promised last week are also on that computer.
I have too many applications, too many programs on the computer that I do not want to lose. But, more than that, I have been working on a redesign of this site that I want to migrate over to its own website and that, too, is on the computer.
I will, of course, continue to post in the coming days and weeks but it may be sporadic until I either get my laptop back, or buy a new one.
So long . . .
“After the revolution there will be enough for all.”
* * *
“Because legality is just the name for everything that’s not dangerous for the ruling order, because the poor starve while the rich play, because the flickering system of signs is enticing us to give up our precious interiority and join the dance and because just round the corner an insect world is waiting, so saying we must love one another or die isn’t enough, not by a long way, because there’ll come a time when any amount of love will be too late.” *
—Hari Kunzru, “My Revolutions,” a novel, Dutton. 2008
The Clintons and the national media covering the Democratic Party race for the presidential nomination have broken out a new story line regarding Barack Obama: That he’s “angry” and “frustrated.” Hillary Clinton practically taunts him with this. It does not help that the media has not only totally bought into this, they’re mischaracterizing their news coverage to turn normal or innocuous exchange with the candidate into “tense” encounters. ABC News breathlessly reported on its website that it had filmed a “testy” exchange between Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times and Obama. Their tape, however, does not match their description of the encounter.
A measured Obama was trying to both sign autographs for voters and talk to the reporters as he campaigned in South Carolina. His voice was not raised. A bemused smile played on his face, as if he recognized the trap he was in. The reporters were trying to manufacture a story where there was none and he was not about to give them one. He even tried to go off the record at one point.
It’s a singular achievement of the Clintons that and the media in this campaign that they’ve managed to turn Barack Obama into the “Angry Black Man” without any evidence of him being one.
Obama once said, in response to people (the Clintons) who said he’s in too much of a hurry to become president, that what they wanted was for him to wait until all the hope is boiled out of him.
It was a good line.
He probably did not realize that there was not going to be any waiting involved.
How sweet is this for Hillary. Send Bill out to bang Obama, then jump up and say, see, Obama can’t take the heat.
So what if the Democratic Party gets burned in the process? Who cares. Power. Corrupts. Absolutely.
A blog is a dangerous thing.
I recently smacked Harvey Silvergate for a piece in Reason Magazine that I believed was not sufficiently respectful of civil liberties.
I was wrong about Mr. Silvergate.
My post was a knee-jerk reaction to what I saw as a snide attack on the American Civil Liberties Union. A friend kindly pointed out to me that Silvergate is a member of the board of that organization.
Todd is a friend of mine. His blog is a must read for me. He recently posted to a different site. It’s a great piece, called “Gang’s All Here,” about many of the the characters that people his blog.
A friend, Jenny, sent me this today. It seems like the hard way to do it but . . .
My cold of the last several days has now abated. Replaced by a splitting headache. As Jimmy Breslin might say, beautiful.