Stupid reply system. That was supposed to be a reply to the Missouri voter @ 9.33.

Posted at August 24, 2008 10:32 AM in response to New McCain Ad Hits Obama For Not Picking Hillary As Veep

That's a lucid breakdown. My first thought when I saw the ad was of the people you're calling group 3; they are actually trying to make a good decision, and they'll be able to see what a mockery this transparent ad makes of their emotions and their deeply-held convictions. If there are persuadable Hillary holdouts, this kind of patronizing use of her image can't very well endear McCain to them.

Posted at August 24, 2008 10:31 AM in response to New McCain Ad Hits Obama For Not Picking Hillary As Veep

Those who are perennially unable to tell the difference between real life and a John le Carre novel?

Posted at August 9, 2008 8:16 PM in response to McCain Camp: Obama "Bizarrely In Sync With Moscow"

In case anyone in the press needs a little help with their reporting, I just read that in his ABC interview on Sunday, McCain said: "I know of no Pentagon regulation that would have prevented him from going there, without the media and the press and all of the associated people." Now McCain himself has been the subject of inquiries about campaigning on military property, and is on record knowing that there are regulations governing campaign-related appearances that have nothing to do with "the media and the press." In that case, "the Navy declined a McCain campaign request to speak at the Naval Aviation Museum at the naval base in Pensacola, Florida, because it is a military owned installation and is located on the base." I haven't heard about any seismic events in Florida lately...anyone?

Posted at July 28, 2008 12:46 PM in response to McCain Campaign Again Unleashes Misleading Attack Over Canceled Troop Visit

"No regime should ignore the will of its own people and calls from the international community without consequences."

Leave the guy alone. Obviously, he meant "no regime that isn't advanced enough to have a Supreme Court that can overturn the will of its own people and is pathetic enough that it actually cares about the international community."

Posted at July 25, 2008 2:31 PM in response to White House: Leaders Should Listen To Public And International Opinion

Goofy, I think they Republicans clearly bear the lions' share of the responsibility for the impeachment mess, and I agree that the charges were complete and utter bullshit. But a president without the character flaw you describe wouldn't have given them the material he did to do the damage that they did with it.

And he wouldn't have left the Democratic party in such a shambles. I'm really not interested in throwing blame at Bill Clinton for the sake of the historical record. But I think there's a lesson to be learned from the way he played the game. It was the original take-no-prisoners, for-us-or-against-us strategy, and in his absence it left the party without a cause to rally around. He'd been our cause, and he was happy to be it despite the fact that there was no legacy for the party in it. Despite the number of words I've spent on it, I don't think the perjury stuff was such a big deal except for as an example of the way in which Bill Clinton always fought on the side of Himself; I think that example is apropos now because it's the way Hillary has run her own campaign. And I'm not interested in blaming her either. I'm interested in making sure that we don't forget what was toxic about his leadership so we can get our own house in order, avoid the self-destructive impulses that followed in his wake as it seems possible now they might follow in Hillary's. The Republicans will always be to blame for the dogfights they like to get us into. But it's up to us to stay out of dogfights; that's not our game, and we always get the worst of it.

Posted at June 3, 2008 6:43 PM in response to Take Personal Responsibility

It's reductive to say that any objection to Bill Clinton's conduct during the Starr investigation is a Republican one; I happen to think it's a profoundly Democratic objection to say that he squandered the opportunities of his second term by insisting on fighting this fight. There is no way you can say that the impeachment proceedings didn't affect his ability to govern effectively. Sure, they were brought about by right-wing zealots. But if he hadn't lied, they wouldn't have been possible.

This is not a partisan division. It's a belief that our leaders be held accountable to us not for their private behavior but for their conduct in matters in which the public has a vested interest, such as the integrity of the grand jury process. I haven't mentioned Obama once during this thread, and my disappointment in Clinton predates the first time I ever heard his name. I don't think there's anything ironic at all about remembering the rancorous divisions that his leadership promoted; I think it's absolutely appropriate at a moment when a more self-aware reaction to such tactics than the one we managed then will be absolutely necessary to getting to the white House in the fall.

Posted at June 3, 2008 5:27 PM in response to Take Personal Responsibility

It's a fine point, but I still disagree, because the logic of Clinton's (supposed) misreading of the definition of "sexual relations" is built into its grammatical structure; there's no way to believe it except for by inferring that the definition's construction demands that "a person" always refers to the deponent and "another person" never does. Because this reading and any in which the "persons" are interchangeable would be mutually exclusive, you can't really argue that it's one of several possible meanings. Either it's the only one, or there's no basis on which to conclude that it's possible at all.

As Clinton said in his grand jury testimony: "when I read it, I thought it was a rather strange definition. But it was the one the judge decided on, and I was bound by it, so I took it." If Clinton honestly believed that he was "bound by" this incredibly strange idea of what the definition said, then he didn't commit perjury. But if he didn't, if he just believed that one could read the definition that way, among others, then the above statement is untrue. Which is perjury. Unprovable and in any case committed during a monstrous abuse of the independent counsel's power next to which it pales, but still perjury.

Posted at June 3, 2008 5:17 PM in response to Take Personal Responsibility

Sorry, I think I started it. But I did so in the spirit of your post: to me, the fact that the (Bill) Clinton camp so often conflates "it was never proven!" with "he didn't do it!" is an illustration of exactly the dearth of personal responsibility you're talking about. Displaying the attitude that "I'll take responsibility only for what is imposed upon me by law" is what ultimately soured me on Clinton; that he wasted not just a ton of public money but also one of the few Democratic presidential terms we've managed to get in recent years because of his inability to admit his wrongdoing seems echoed now in his wife's willingness to waste a ton of the public's money as well as to risk losing another Democratic presidency because of her inability to see it go to someone other than her.

Posted at June 3, 2008 4:14 PM in response to Take Personal Responsibility

That's not the case, because the charge brought against him wasn't for what he said in the Jones case, it was for how he explained what he said to the Starr grand jury. In explaining the answers he had given, he said that he had believed himself to be telling the truth. So he actually has to have believed it to be innocent of perjury.

The argument we're having here seems to be over whether or not he should have been found guilty of perjury. I don't think he should have, for the reasons he wasn't: the evidence in the case isn't close to persuasive. To conclude that he is guilty, I have to make inferences about what he must actually have been thinking, which is no basis on which to convict someone of a crime. But the difference between an unprosecutable crime and a prosecutable one isn't equivalent to the difference between innocence and guilt.

Posted at June 3, 2008 3:57 PM in response to Take Personal Responsibility