Worth noting he was nominated to NOT propose the very plan he’s now proposing.

From the WSJ.

Worth noting:

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton’s foundation has raised at least $46 million from Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments that his wife Hillary Rodham Clinton may end up negotiating with as the next secretary of state.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave $10 million to $25 million to the William J. Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit created by the former president to finance his library in Little Rock, Ark., and charitable efforts to reduce poverty and treat AIDS. Other foreign government givers include Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, Oman, Italy and Jamaica. The Dutch national lottery gave $5 million to $10 million.

The Blackwater Training Center donated $10,001 to $25,000. The State Department — to be led by Hillary Clinton if she is confirmed — will have to decide next year whether to renew Blackwater Worldwide’s contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq. Five Blackwater guards have been indicted by a U.S. grand jury on manslaughter and weapons charges stemming from a September 2007 firefight in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square in which 17 Iraqis died.

The foundation disclosed the names of its 205,000 donors on a Web site Thursday, ending a decade of resistance to identifying the sources of its money.

Read more here. Unfortunately, the news article doesn’t link to the website where the donors are listed, and I don’t have time to go hunting right now. If you find it, drop me a line.

MoDo has the scoop.

Camille Paglia puts it well:

Those 18 million votes she’s claiming (really 17) contain significant numbers of Republicans who voted satirically for her during Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos, designed to prolong the Democratic primary and damage the candidates. Furthermore, only a fraction of the legitimately Democratic votes that she won belonged to Hillary die-hards anyhow. Many voters preferred other candidates who had dropped out, or they were temporarily unsure about Obama. It’s utter nonsense for Hillary to imply that the alleged 18 million form a solid, lardlike block sworn to her, as in some fascist regime, and that if they aren’t “heard” at the convention, they will swarm like lemmings to the edge of a cliff and fling themselves off.

The Clintons and their surrogates have clearly been encouraging and fomenting resentment and rebellion, even while angelically maintaining deniability. Conventions aren’t the place for “catharsis” — how absurd. Let all those dizzy dames go off on a spa week for a bout of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy. (Remember that? John Lennon bawling for mom on the “Plastic Ono Band” album?) Hillary is setting feminism back — defining women as petulant brats driven by emotion rather than logic and fair play. This entire election wasn’t about gender and sexism — until the profligate, mismanaging Hillary began losing and grasping at straws. For Minerva’s sake, let’s move on to a fresh new generation of female leadership!

Mismanagement indeed.

Obama’s first error was to let Hillary and Bill into the convention on different days. I don’t care who wins particularly, but it would be sad to see Obama lose because of Clintonian sabotage.

Read Camille Paglia.

This is well put:

Obama also allowed Hillary supporters to insert an absurd statement into the platform suggesting that media sexism spurred her loss and that “demeaning portrayals of women … dampen the dreams of our daughters.” This, even though postmortems, including the new raft of campaign memos leaked by Clintonistas to The Atlantic — another move that undercuts Obama — finger Hillary’s horrendous management skills.[...]

It would have been better to put this language in the platform: “A woman who wildly mismanages and bankrupts a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar campaign operation, and then blames sexism in society, will dampen the dreams of our daughters.”

Read Maureen Dowd.

Joshua Green has them. A synopsis:

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Read Joshua Green. And read the unedited emails.

The Website Hillaryis44.com has been run as the dark, “unofficial” evil arm of the Hillary operation, offering smears under the guise of being run by independent supporters of Hillary (my conjecture purely). It is pretty inconceivable that she doesn’t know who runs it, if she isn’t outright involved with it’s operation. I find their reaction to Hillary’s withdrawl from the Presidential race to be very interesting:

We will also continue our series discussing why Democrats should not vote for Obama - Voting For Barack Obama.

NOvember will come soon enough and we will vote for Hillary; No one else but Hillary. We will encourage others to do the same.

We won’t be alone in that decision- vote for Hillary – Not Big Media, Not Big Media Tool Obama. We will also NOT vote for any candidate who endorsed Obama over Hillary during the primary season. We will encourage as many Democrats as possible to follow our lead.

Seem like it’s the same old Clintons. Say one thing while doing another. Someone needs to ask Hillary directly about that site, to find out if she knows who is involved.

George Will writes a must read piece on why Barack Obama must not choose Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential running mate. His closer says it all:

Clinton, having risen politically in her husband’s orbit, is a moon shining with reflected light. Were Obama to hitch himself to her, he would reduce himself to a reflection of a reflection.

That just about says it.

Read George Will.

Oh, and one more thing, that’s two conservatives today who are breathing a sigh of relief and openly thanking the Democrats for not having nominated Hillary Clinton as their standard bearer. So much for Operation Chaos.

UPDATE: Related thoughts on Limbaugh from Myhraf.

Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right:

But this I believe is the truth: America dodged a bullet. That was the other meaning of the culminating events of this week.

Mrs. Clinton would have been a disaster as president. Mr. Obama may prove a disaster, and John McCain may, but she would be. Mr. Obama may lie, and Mr. McCain may lie, but she would lie. And she would have brought the whole rattling caravan of Clintonism with her—the scandal-making that is compulsive, the drama that is unending, the sheer, daily madness that is her, and him.

We have been spared this. Those who did it deserve to be thanked. May I rise in a toast to the Democratic Party.

Me too.

Read Peggy Noonan.

The polls must have looked pretty bad after her “I won’t back down” speech. I guess I’m on her mailing list now that I wrote her campaign telling her it was time to go. Here’s the email I received from her campaign today:

Dear Rob,

I wanted you to be one of the first to know: on Saturday, I will hold an event in Washington D.C. to thank everyone who has supported my campaign. Over the course of the last 16 months, I have been privileged and touched to witness the incredible dedication and sacrifice of so many people working for our campaign. Every minute you put into helping us win, every dollar you gave to keep up the fight meant more to me than I can ever possibly tell you.

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

I have said throughout the campaign that I would strongly support Senator Obama if he were the Democratic Party’s nominee, and I intend to deliver on that promise.

When I decided to run for president, I knew exactly why I was getting into this race: to work hard every day for the millions of Americans who need a voice in the White House.

I made you — and everyone who supported me — a promise: to stand up for our shared values and to never back down. I’m going to keep that promise today, tomorrow, and for the rest of my life.

I will be speaking on Saturday about how together we can rally the party behind Senator Obama. The stakes are too high and the task before us too important to do otherwise.

I know as I continue my lifelong work for a stronger America and a better world, I will turn to you for the support, the strength, and the commitment that you have shown me in the past 16 months. And I will always keep faith with the issues and causes that are important to you.

In the past few days, you have shown that support once again with hundreds of thousands of messages to the campaign, and again, I am touched by your thoughtfulness and kindness.

I can never possibly express my gratitude, so let me say simply, thank you.

Sincerely,
Hillary
Hillary Rodham Clinton

I guess she’s backing down after all.

Hillary Clinton asked for comments on her website. I decided to leave the following:

Hillary,

It’s over. It’s time to drop out. What you are doing now is totally classless, and will not ever result in you becoming President of the United States.

It’s time to concede.

-Rob Sama

It certainly feels that way [links mine]:

When the dust settles over the 2008 election, will Hillary Clinton have helped or hindered women’s advance toward the US presidency?

Right now, Hillary is in Godzilla mode, refusing to accept Barack Obama’s looming nomination and threatening to tie the Democratic party in legal knots until the August convention and beyond.

Those who think she will withdraw gracefully in a few weeks are living in cloud cuckoo land. The Clintons are ruthless scrappers who will lock their bulldog teeth in any bloody towel.

Read Camille Paglia.

Peggy Noonan takes on Hillary Clinton’s claims of being done in by sexism:

So, to address the charge that sexism did her in:

It is insulting, because it asserts that those who supported someone else this year were driven by low prejudice and mindless bias.

It is manipulative, because it asserts that if you want to be understood, both within the community and in the larger brotherhood of man, to be wholly without bias and prejudice, you must support Mrs. Clinton.

It is not true. Tough hill-country men voted for her, men so backward they’d give the lady a chair in the union hall. Tough Catholic men in the outer suburbs voted for her, men so backward they’d call a woman a lady. And all of them so naturally courteous that they’d realize, in offering the chair or addressing the lady, that they might have given offense, and awkwardly joke at themselves to take away the sting. These are great men. And Hillary got her share, more than her share, of their votes. She should be a guy and say thanks.

It is prissy. Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are now complaining about the Hillary nutcrackers sold at every airport shop. Boo hoo. If Golda Meir, a woman of not only proclaimed but actual toughness, heard about Golda nutcrackers, she would have bought them by the case and given them away as party favors.

It is sissy. It is blame-gaming, whining, a way of not taking responsibility, of not seeing your flaws and addressing them. You want to say “Girl, butch up, you are playing in the leagues, they get bruised in the leagues, they break each other’s bones, they like to hit you low and hear the crack, it’s like that for the boys and for the girls.”

And because the charge of sexism is all of the above, it is, ultimately, undermining of the position of women. Or rather it would be if its source were not someone broadly understood by friend and foe alike to be willing to say anything to gain advantage.

GO PEGGY!

Read Peggy Noonan.

This time it’s Dick Morris stating the obvious:

Bill and Hillary Clinton have always believed that they’re very different than the rest of us. Over their more than 30 years in politics together, they’ve learned one important and consistent lesson: that rules don’t matter. Rules don’t apply to them. Rules are for other people. Rules can be bent, changed, manipulated.

And that philosophy has worked very well for them.

So it’s particularly ironic that they are now turning to the Democratic Party Rules Committee to try and steal the presidential nomination that Hillary has already definitively lost to Barack Obama in the popular vote, the delegate count, and the total number of states.

Now she’ll try to get the Democratic bosses to rig it for her. If the rules don’t work, change them.

Yeah. The thing is, the rules committee is filled with her cronies, so it’s not quite as cuckoo bananas as it sounds. But it’s still nuts.

Read Dick Morris.

Observe:

Hillary Clinton, 60, Illinois native and Arkansas lawyer, became, retroactively, a lifelong Yankee fan at age 52 when, shopping for a U.S. Senate seat, she adopted New York state as home sweet home. She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of “fairness,” because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.

Unfortunately, baseball’s rules — pesky nuisances, rules — say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.

On the money.

Read George Will.

So Hillary has leaked to Drudge via Stephanopoulos that she’d be willing to accept the VP slot if offered. Given Hillary’s utter duplicitousness, one may rightly ask “What the heck is she up to?”

Well, I’ll tell you.

Hillary’s new game is to join Obama’s team, get elected as Vice President and then, kill Obama. She would be sworn in as President immediately, before all the facts could be sorted out, at which point she would immediately pardon herself for the murder of Barack Obama.

Mark my words, friend.

I don’t have much to say about it. It was relatively close. Hillary picked up a few delegates, which will be negated by the upcoming Indiana and North Carolina primaries. Obama will still be the nominee. The only question is what Hillary does with herself once that happens.

No, I didn’t watch. These debates are pretty much unwatchable, and you can get a better sense of the candidates positions by watching interviews with them or reading their positions on their websites. Nevertheless, a few articles about last night’s debate caught my eye. Apparently, the debate lived up to my craptastic expectations. Let’s start with booster David Brooks [emphasis mine]:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

Frankly, I don’t think he could have been more wrong about what the journalist’s job is. The journalists job is not to get the candidate in a “gotcha” moment or to try and embarass the candidate about some personal matter or some lack of knowledge about some trivial matter. That’s the Tim Russert/Sam Donaldson/Andy Hiller school of journalism, and it sucks.

The job of the journalist, if I may be so bold, is to ask questions so as to illuminate us as to what this candidate is likely to do once in office, particularly on issues that may be controversial, where the candidates may differ on their approaches. It would appear as if none of that occurred at last night’s debate. I’m glad I didn’t waste my time watching.

Oh, and on a side note, which brainiac decided it would be a good idea having George Stephanopoulos ask questions when one of the participants in the debate was a Clinton? I mean, I don’t know if Stephanopoulos loves or hates Hillary, but given his previous close working relationship with that family, shouldn’t ABC have found someone else to ask questions during the debate?

Now on to Tom Shales, who gives what sounds to me like an accurate description of last night’s “debate”:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show, Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news to begin with.

The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings, after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement. Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being competent.

Wow. I actually thought ABC did an OK job with their first Republican debate, and CNN had sucked wind there. Regardless, I think it’s time for the candidates to just debate each other in slow motion on YouTube, taking their time to answer questions from each other and perhaps from noteworthy bloggers. If they did that, say taking one question a day for a month, the people would learn far more about the candidates than they ever do now with these “televised” debates.

Gingrich was right, this is no way to choose a President.

Dick Morris provides the list.

I ask again, is she just fundamentally dishonest or cuckoo bananas? Or some combination of the two?

I’m busy and thus haven’t been blogging as much, but this is just too much:

So what is Hillary’s explanation for this false statement? Did she allow her writers to embellish and maybe let her advisors convince her this was a good idea? No. Apparently, this was the result of a faulty memory:

GREENSBURG, Pa. (AP) – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she made a mistake in claiming that she came under hostile fire when landing in Bosnia as first lady 12 years ago.

In several recent interviews, the New York senator had described a harrowing scene in Bosnia in which she and her daughter, Chelsea, had to run for cover as soon as they landed for a visit in 1996. But video footage of the day showed a peaceful reception in which Clinton greeted a young child on the tarmac.

Clinton told reporters in Pennsylvania on Tuesday: “So I made a mistake. That happens. It shows I’m human, which for some people is a revelation.”

It’s her indignant attitude at the end that gets me.

A faulty memory might be responsible for getting a time or date wrong, or perhaps for misremembering the order in which events took place. It may even be responsible for mistaking one event for another. But inventing scenarios out of whole cloth? That comes from either being patently dishonest (more likely) or being cuckoo bananas (less likely, though not out of the realm of possibility). Either way, it’s not a trait that would make her fit to be commander in chief, on day one or any other day.

UPDATE: actually, on second reading, she doesn’t detail what the “mistake” is, but it would seem as if she’s blaming a faulty memory. Maybe her mistake is something else though…

I always felt that Democrats were sore losers, but this is ridiculous:

Among Obama supporters, 20 percent said they would vote for Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee, if Clinton beats their candidate for the nomination. Among Clinton supporters, 19 percent said they would support McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic nominee.

I guess I could kind of see that among some Obama supporters, because he has crossover appeal, which Clinton does not. But what’s up with the Clinton supporters?

More here.

I didn’t fully grasp the whole controversy over the Geraldine Ferraro statements until I caught people on Fox News arguing over them last night. They didn’t get it either imo, so I thought I’d address it here.

First let’s review the comments in the newspaper article where (I believe) they first appeared [emphasis mine]:

As the only woman ever to be selected by a major political party for the position of vice president of the United States, Geraldine Ferraro is uniquely suited to comment on the political events of the day.[...]

Speaking by phone from her New York law office, the 72-year-old former Democratic congresswoman outlined the themes that will dominate her talk. She also offered pointed observations regarding the Barack Obama juggernaut and what she sees as a sexist media bias against the candidate of her choice.

“I will probably start with a personal account, drawing attention to the historic firsts of both these candidacies in our party, and point out specific, significant differences between Hillary’s campaign and mine,” said Ferraro.

“I will discuss what I think’s been going on in her campaign and the role of the media, which has been far larger than anything I’ve seen before. And I’ll get into what this bides for the future. I may also speak about the superdelegates, since I was involved with their creation.” [...]

When the subject turned to Obama, Clinton’s rival for the Democratic Party nomination, Ferraro’s comments took on a decidedly bitter edge.

“I think what America feels about a woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign – to a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against,” she said. “For one thing, you have the press, which has been uniquely hard on her. It’s been a very sexist media. Some just don’t like her. The others have gotten caught up in the Obama campaign.

“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she continued. “And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.” Ferraro does not buy the notion of Obama as the great reconciler.

“I was reading an article that said young Republicans are out there campaigning for Obama because they believe he’s going to be able to put an end to partisanship,” Ferraro said, clearly annoyed. “Dear God! Anyone that has worked in the Congress knows that for over 200 years this country has had partisanship – that’s the way our country is.”

This is all a part of a planned smear by the Clinton campaign. First there is the obvious lie, “He’s the choice of Republicans” when in fact recent exit polls have shown Republicans attempting to act as spoilers by voting for Hillary in Texas and now Mississippi. But that’s only ancillary to her argument.

Geraldine Ferraro was an affirmative action candidate. I remember distinctly in 1984, when Mondale had captured the nomination, the chorus of media and women’s groups all demanding that Mondale pick a woman as his running mate. And when he did, Time Magazine ran their now infamous headline “A Historic Choice” with a picture of Ferraro accepting (it should have read, “An Historic Choice”).

The essence of Ferraro’s argument is that as an affirmative action candidate, she knows what an affirmative action candidate looks like, and Barack Obama is an affirmative action candidate. She didn’t use the words “affirmative action”, but that’s what she’s saying.

It’s completely insane to attempt to dissect who would be ahead in the Democratic primary were both Hillary and Obama white men. And that’s not what she’s trying to do. She’s saying that Obama is an affirmative action candidate, that he’s been treated specially because he’s black, by the media and by some voters who ordinarily wouldn’t vote Democratic. And therefore his victories thus far are tainted.

Moreover, what she’s trying to do is taint Obama now. Affirmative action is very unpopular among white people, particularly working class white people. BY attempting to paint Obama as the beneficiary of some sort of electoral affirmative action, she’s attempting to get working class white people to sour on Obama.

And yes, the whole notion is deeply offensive. Barack Obama has not been making an issue of his race at all in this campaign. He has campaigned on policy and temperament, and at least in my opinion, he is head and shoulders above Hillary on both of those counts, and they are both good reasons to vote for him.

What’s more, Obama has not gone around on stump speeches, saying that he’s an historic candidate or that you should vote for him because he’s black. But Hillary has run around seeking female solidarity or girl power or whatever you want to call it. She ends practically every speech by pointing out how she would be the first woman president, how her candidacy is historic. It’s offensive.

And it’s straight out of the Clinton playbook: do something completely outrageous, and then accuse your opponent of doing exactly what you’re doing, and assume that those paying half-attention figure that all the candidates are equally scummy. Once you recognize the pattern, it’s easy to spot. And it’s exactly the kind of politics that so many of us want to put to bed.

Previously: Vote For Obama

She’s on fire today [emphasis mine]:

Would I want Hillary answering the red phone in the middle of the night? No, bloody not. The White House first responder should be a person of steady, consistent character and mood — which describes Obama more than Hillary. And that scare ad was produced with amazing ineptitude. If it’s 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest”? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour? A president should not be a monomaniac incapable of rest and perched on guard all night like Poe’s baleful raven. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.

On Eliot Spitzer:

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s entrapment in a sex scandal is coming at a particularly inopportune moment for the Clintons, since it simply reminds everyone again of tawdry, furtive, high-placed adultery.

True that.

And she rightly goes off on Rush Limbaugh and his encouragement of deeply cynical voting:

As a longtime listener, I was surprised and disappointed by Rush Limbaugh’s call for Republicans to vote for Hillary in the Texas and Ohio primaries to keep the Democratic campaign in costly turmoil. Rush made an analogy to the New Hampshire primary, where independents and crossover Democrats gave victory to John McCain over Republican opponents who split the conservative vote. But McCain already had a long-standing high reputation among liberal Democrats (which I’ve never shared) and may indeed attract their support in the general election. In Texas and Ohio, in contrast, Rush was asking Republicans to vote for a candidate (variously called “Hitlery” or the “Hildebeast” on the Web) who was anathema to them.

I take the ballot very seriously, because it took women so long to win it. I am very unsettled by tactical voting — that is, using one’s vote as a stratagem in what Rush describes as “gamesmanship”: “It’s all about winning,” he has repeatedly said to callers protesting the Hillary stunt. But hasn’t Rush’s massive appeal always been based on his adherence to core principles rather than to narrow partisanship? I believe that every vote one casts should be meaningful and should reflect one’s considered judgment, even when a candidate doesn’t fulfill all one’s desires. Surely tactical voting across party lines is a form of tampering, a debasement of the ballot that will inevitably weaken the democratic process and the prestige of American institutions.

Limbaugh stopped being principled some time ago. Should the Democrats finally shut him up by passing the Fairness Doctrine back into law, it’ll have been too late, his half-life having long since passed.

Read Camille Paglia.

I feel I need to say something, in light of Limbaugh telling conservatives to go vote for Hillary, and in light of what seems to be a steady stream of anti-Obama news coming from Glenn Reynolds.

Hillary Clinton would be a disaster for our country.

I strongly suspect that most readers of this blog would understand my feelings about the matter, if not agree with them. But I think it needs to be reviewed.

Regardless of policy, Hillary Clinton embodies the absolute worst qualities in a manager: closed minded certainty that she is always right, a fiery temper that frightens her subordinates, and an astonishing penchant for rank incompetence. During this campaign, she apparently insulated herself with frightened yes-women to such a degree that she had no idea that her campaign was running out of money until it was too late, and she had to loan her own money to the campaign; this after having spent some $175 million on her campaign up to that point (on who knows what). The fact that this occurred at all confirms that she really is the worst caricature of herself imaginable. She really hasn’t changed one iota since her disastrous health-care plan. And she would be a disaster for the country.

It is important to remember this because the Democratic nomination has not yet been decided. According to the math and the agreed upon rules, Obama should be the presumptive nominee by now. Yet he isn’t. And the reason why he isn’t is because observers assume that by hook or by crook, somehow the Clintons will find a way to steal the nomination. Whether it’s by one of a myriad of lawsuits they’re threatening, or by bribing super-delegates ala Tom Vilsack, or by some means not yet anticipated, Hillary will steal this nomination. As Christopher Hitchens put it in an interview:

HH: 20 seconds, who’s going to be the next president of the United States?

CH: Hillary Clinton.

HH: Oh…because of yesterday?

CH: No, no, I’ve feared it for a long time, and there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power.

HH: The Mummy is back.

CH: …people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.

Let’s review some of what they’ve already been done in pursuit of that power. Hillary Clinton injected race into the campaign in an attempt to win, appears to have released pictures of Barack Obama in traditional Somali attire to scare people out of voting for him, said Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know”, had her surrogates run around mentioning cocaine at every available opportunity at the start of this campaign, didn’t take her name off the ballot in Michigan and Florida and even actively campaigned in Florida despite agreeing to DNC party rules about their exclusion, and now threatens to sue the DNC to include the results from those states, also threatens to sue Texas for allocating delegates according to its caucus results in addition to its primary results. She also refuses to release her records from her days as first lady, to substantiate her “35 years of experience” claim. And that’s just in this election cycle.

To become senator, Hillary used her husband’s muscle as President of the United States to get primary opponents to step aside so she could run uncontested and even had her husband pardon Latino terrorists in hopes of cashing in on Latino votes. Not to even begin to mention the host of financial scandals she and her husband have been involved with during this campaign and during her entire life, including (off the top of my head): Norman Hsu, Charlie Trie, Lippo Bank, making $100k overnight in cattle futures, campaign donations from Buddhist monks, and of course, her now infamous refusal to release her tax returns, which probably indicate that her husband has basically been in the employ of the Sultan of Dubai, who made them both millionaires (and built Clinton’s presidential library).

It would be incredibly naive to think that crossing party lines to vote for Hillary would assure a McCain presidency. All of those corrupting methods used to secure the nomination for Hillary would also be used against McCain in a general election, with the added hardship of a media machine who simply wouldn’t report on any of it because it’s a Democrat against a Republican, as opposed to a Democrat/Democrat race. Trying to get Hillary nominated to spoil the Democratic election is playing with fire. No, make that playing with fissile material. You should really put it down now and walk away.

And not just because Hillary might actually get elected under such a scenario. But because even if she didn’t, her effect upon the Democratic party is extremely corrupting. She endangers the health of the Democratic party and therefore the American two-party system itself. The American polity desperately needs candidates who can discuss issues rationally, and without demagoguery. Barack Obama and John McCain are clearly capable of that (well, McCain on a good day). But Hillary is not. Should Obama win or lose, his mere presence is a positive effect upon the Democrats, and thus upon the country. If you support McCain, Obama may be tougher to beat, but the campaign will lead America forward in its debate about the issues. No such thing will happen with a Hillary candidacy. A general election victory over Hillary will be an empty victory.

And should the Democrat get elected, which all trends would seem to indicate is a likely possibility, then America desperately needs a President who can keep his cool, maintain his wits, and above all else, be a consummate manager. Obama is that manager. Obama would be a President who would make nobody cringe or be embarrassed, even those who disagree with his policies. We’re overdue for a President like that. But even more importantly, we’re overdue for a choice between two candidates who espouse those positive qualities. To deny Americans that choice, to deny the Democrats a candidate of quality, prolongs our national sickness.

Put your country ahead of your party. If you live in Pennsylvania, you have until March 24th to register as a Democrat and vote for Obama. Be sure you do so.

Further Reading:
Peggy Noonan
Andrew Sullivan
Bob Krumm
Classical Values
(last two links via Glenn Reynolds)

This is too rich:

But we’ve learned something important these past couple of weeks.

Clinton is a terrible manager of people. Coming into a campaign she had been planning for, what, two decades, she was so not ready on Day One, or even Day 300. Her White House, if we can glean anything from the campaign, would be a secretive nest of well-fed yes-people, an uncontrollable egomaniac spouse able and willing to bigfoot anyone if he wants to, a phalanx of flunkies who cannot tell the boss when things are wrong, and a drizzle of dreary hacks like Mark Penn. Her only genuine skill is pivoting off the Limbaugh machine (which is now as played out as its enemies). Her new weapon is apparently bursting into tears. I mean: really. [...]

It seems obvious to me that the Clintons blew this because they never for a second imagined they could. So they never planned to fight it. Once put in a fair contest, they turned out to be terrible campaigners, terrible politicians, bad managers, useless executives, wooden public speakers. If you’re a Democrat, that’s good to know, isn’t it? All that bullshit about Day One and experience? In retrospect: laughable.

Whatever happens in this campaign, if it finally puts the Clintons in our rear-view mirror, it will have been worth a great deal. We’re not quite there yet, and the moment you feel any sympathy for a Clinton, they will use it to their own ends. But I’m enjoying the backward glance, however long it lasts. We’re nearly free of them. Nearly.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

Read Andrew Sullivan.

The chorus begins its song.

Robert Novak:

Even before Sen. Barack Obama won his ninth-straight contest against Sen. Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin last Tuesday, wise old heads in the Democratic Party were asking this question: Who will tell her that it’s over, that she cannot win the presidential nomination and the sooner she leaves the race the more it will improve chances of defeating Sen. John McCain in November?

Jonathan Alter:

If Hillary Clinton wanted a graceful exit, she’d drop out now—before the March 4 Texas and Ohio primaries—and endorse Barack Obama. This would be terrible for people like me who have been dreaming of a brokered convention for decades. For selfish reasons, I want the story to stay compelling for as long as possible, which means I’m hoping for a battle into June for every last delegate and a bloody floor fight in late August in Denver. But to withdraw this week would be the best thing imaginable for Hillary’s political career. She won’t, of course, and for reasons that help explain why she’s in so much trouble in the first place.

This chorus will grow louder in the coming days, and will be deafening by March 5th.