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Karl Rove tells how to prevail at a contested convention.

After the last Democratic Primary is held in early June, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will have enough votes from delegates elected in caucuses or primaries to be declared the nominee. Obama would have to win 76 percent and Clinton 98 percent of the 535 delegates that are at stake in the final eight contests. Neither will happen.

Both sides are frantically wooing the 330 uncommitted superdelegates, who will decide the race. Obama supporters emphasize that he’s ahead in the popular vote and argue that superdelegates should respect the wishes of the primary voters (except in the states he lost, of course). They suggest Obama would do better with independents and Republicans in the fall; they argue Hillary Clinton is a flawed, secretive candidate who was wrong on Iraq and dissembles about her experience. Clinton partisans point to her victories in big battleground states and say superdelegates should act in the best interests of the party. They paint Barack Obama as an inexperienced, untested, overly ambitious candidate with a thin résumé who will fall to the Republican attack machine.

It’s highly unlikely that these undecided superdelegates will tilt one way or the other before June, unless one candidate reels off a string of strong, unexpected victories. There has been talk of a “superdelegate primary” that month, whereby they’d be forced to make a decision and bring the increasingly vitriolic race to a close. But the Clinton camp in particular is talking about the “months” to come until a decision is reached, and it’s even possible the Democratic nominee won’t be decided until the Denver convention in late August.

It’s been a while since the last contested convention. So, drawing on the 180-year history of presidential nominating conventions, let me suggest a few rules for winning in Denver. …

Fox News has pictures of Jeremiah Wright’s new $1,600,000 house. Getting well, by doing good.

Peggy Noonan says everybody understands Hillary now.

I think we’ve reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don’t. There’s no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don’t. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don’t, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.

That’s what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac — and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren’t, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought — either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).

But either you get it now or you never will. That’s the importance of the Bosnia tape. …

… What struck me as the best commentary on the Bosnia story came from a poster called GI Joe who wrote in to a news blog: “Actually Mrs. Clinton was too modest. I was there and saw it all. When Mrs. Clinton got off the plane the tarmac came under mortar and machine gun fire. I was blown off my tank and exposed to enemy fire. Mrs. Clinton without regard to her own safety dragged me to safety, jumped on the tank and opened fire, killing 50 of the enemy.” Soon a suicide bomber appeared, but Mrs. Clinton stopped the guards from opening fire. “She talked to the man in his own language and got him [to] surrender. She found that he had suffered terribly as a result of policies of George Bush. She defused the bomb vest herself.” Then she turned to his wounds. “She stopped my bleeding and saved my life. Chelsea donated the blood.”

Made me laugh. It was like the voice of the people answering back. This guy knows that what Mrs. Clinton said is sort of crazy. He seems to know her reputation for untruths. He seemed to be saying, “I get it.”

Who else is turning on Hillary? How ’bout Frank Rich.

MOST politicians lie. Most people over 50, as I know all too well, misremember things. So here is the one compelling mystery still unresolved about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnia fairy tale: Why did she keep repeating this whopper for nearly three months, well after it had been publicly debunked by journalists and eyewitnesses?

In January, after Senator Clinton first inserted the threat of “sniper fire” into her stump speech, Elizabeth Sullivan of The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that the story couldn’t be true because by the time of the first lady’s visit in March 1996, “the war was over.” Meredith Vieira asked Mrs. Clinton on the “Today” show why, if she was on the front lines, she took along a U.S.O. performer like Sinbad. Earlier this month, a week before Mrs. Clinton fatefully rearmed those snipers one time too many, Sinbad himself spoke up to The Washington Post: “I think the only ‘red phone’ moment was: Do we eat here or at the next place?”

Yet Mrs. Clinton was undeterred. She dismissed Sinbad as a “comedian” and recycled her fiction once more on St. Patrick’s Day. When Michael Dobbs fact-checked it for The Post last weekend and proclaimed it worthy of “four Pinocchios,” her campaign pushed back. The Clinton camp enforcer Howard Wolfson phoned in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC Monday and truculently quoted a sheaf of news stories that he said supported her account. Only later that day, a full week after her speech, did he start to retreat, suggesting it was “possible” she “misspoke” in the “most recent instance” of her retelling of her excellent Bosnia adventure.

Since Mrs. Clinton had told a similar story in previous instances, this was misleading at best. It was also dishonest to characterize what she had done as misspeaking — or as a result of sleep deprivation, as the candidate herself would soon assert. The Bosnia anecdote was part of her prepared remarks, scripted and vetted with her staff. Not that it mattered anymore. The self-inflicted damage had been done. The debate about Barack Obama’s relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright was almost smothered in the rubble of Mrs. Clinton’s Bosnian bridge too far.

Which brings us back to our question: Why would so smart a candidate play political Russian roulette with virtually all the bullet chambers loaded? …

New Republic’s The Plank says Hillary should do a fade like Huck.

Andrew Sullivan says the dirt Clinton is flinging is sticking to her.

Politico says the Clinton campaign is not paying its bills.

Hillary Clinton’s cash-strapped presidential campaign has been putting off paying hundreds of bills for months — freeing up cash for critical media buys but also earning the campaign a reputation as something of a deadbeat in some small-business circles.

A pair of Ohio companies owed more than $25,000 by Clinton for staging events for her campaign are warning others in the tight-knit event production community — and anyone else who will listen — to get their cash upfront when doing business with her. Her campaign, say representatives of the two companies, has stopped returning phone calls and e-mails seeking payment of outstanding invoices. One even got no response from a certified letter.

Their cautionary tales, combined with published reports about similar difficulties faced by a New Hampshire landlord, an Iowa office cleaner and a New York caterer, highlight a less-obvious impact of Clinton’s inability to keep up with the staggering fundraising pace set by her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. …

Samizdata tells us about the Hillarys and the Huckabees.

As only he can do, Michael Barone bangs the numbers and drops a bombshell. Says Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote in the Dem primary season while BO will win the delegate count.

… These two projections, if they come to pass, seem likely to cause maximum pain among the superdelegates. Clinton will be able to claim a lead in popular vote. But only because of Puerto Rico—and because Puerto Rico this month replaced its caucus with a primary. Obama will be able to claim a lead in pledged delegates. But only because he gamed the caucuses better. His lead in caucus-selected delegates is currently 125, as best I can calculate it; that would mean Clinton would have a 35-delegate lead among delegates chosen in primaries. Both sides will be able to make plausible claims to be the people’s choice.

Let me add that my projections don’t leave much room for a cascade of superdelegates to Obama. On each day’s contests I have Clinton leading Obama both in delegates and popular votes (because North Carolina would be outvoted by Indiana on May 6 and Oregon outvoted by Kentucky on May 20). She would be getting closer to the nomination, not farther away.

Of course my projections could just be plain wrong. Clinton could win Pennsylvania by an unimpressive margin on April 22 and get clocked in Indiana as well as North Carolina on May 6. Then you might see a cascade of superdelegates toward Obama, and the race might effectively be over. But if all those three things don’t happen, then I am sure the contest will go on through June 3. And in that case I think my projections are within the realm of possibility.

WSJ BizTech Blog says Wikipedia hits 10,000,000 truthy entries.

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Guardian columnist says Europe needs the American defense umbrella.

… For years now, NATO nations have been committed to reach a minimum defence spending target of 2% of GDP. Yet 20 of them, including Canada, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, have fallen far short. Among the six that have reached the target, the shares of four (including Britain and France) are in decline. Inevitably, that means the US carries ever more of the load and becomes ever more sceptical about taking Europe seriously.

For years also, European nations have talked about the importance of avoiding duplication in equipment and weapons. But the talk has largely remained just that. It is barmy that Europeans have four different models of tank, compared with America’s one; 16 different types of armoured vehicles as against America’s three; or 11 types of frigate to America’s one. Once again, Europe’s failure highlights the US predominance.

The experience of Iraq, coupled with Europe’s increased role in the Balkans, has tempted some Eurocentrics to say that Nato is outmoded and that an enhanced military role for the EU should replace it. This is fantasy land. If there is one thing that would be even worse for Europe than fighting a war with the Americans as allies, it is fighting a war without them. While it is true that Europe spends too little on defence because it knows it can rely on the Americans, it does not follow that European nations would be keen to spend more if NATO broke down. …

Mark Steyn writes this week on Hillary Clinton.

… It may be that when the Democrats do settle on a candidate – which, on present form, seems likely to be about 48 hours before Election Day – the party will then do its usual thing and unite around the winner in order to slay the Republican dragon.

But it’s not unreasonable to calculate that significant elements among both the Clintonites and the Obamaniacs will be disinclined to reward the other side for what they’ll see as an act of usurpation. I have no time for Obama, and I think he’d be a disastrous president. But he’s your ticket out if you’re a Democrat who can’t face the thought of giving your party to the Clinton mob for another decade. And, evidently, quite a lot of Dems feel like that.

Why? Where did the magic go? Well, the show got miscast. I wrote a decade ago that Hillary was like Margaret Dumont to Bill’s Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar. And Hillary would stand there, seemingly oblivious to the subpoenaed dress and DNA analysis and all the rest: In double-acts, the best straight men (or women) are the ones who appear never to get the joke, and that was Hillary in the late Nineties, standing on stage alongside Bill night after night with her rictus grin and droning in the robotic cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seatbelt that “I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton.”

But you can’t recast: You can’t put Margaret Dumont in the Groucho role. In their heyday, the Clintons ran a thuggish operation fronted by an ingratiating charmer. Now the charming facade’s gone, and the backroom thuggery is ineffective. The Clinton campaign’s letter to Nancy Pelosi suggesting that she might like to “reflect” (if you know what we mean) on her call for the superdelegates to support the winner of the popular vote (i.e., Obama) was notable not for its menace but for its clumsiness: Few sights are more forlorn than an enforcer who can no longer enforce. The Clinton letter reminded me of Elena Ceausescu still trying to pull the don’t-you-know-who-I-am routine even as the firing squad was taking aim.

But on she staggers. Even if she can’t win, she can deny victory to Obama, and to her party. As they say in show business, it’s not important for me to succeed, only for my friends to fail.

Gerard Baker on Hillary.

… Confronted with the incontrovertible evidence Mrs Clinton acknowledged this week that she “misspoke”. Misspeak is an Orwellian term deployed by politicians to describe what has happened when they have been caught in a barefaced lie.

The Clintons have a well-formed habit of misspeaking. Bill Clinton, of course, was always doing it. But his wife has also over the years mastered the art of misspeaking in what Mark Twain once described as an “experienced, industrious, ambitious and often quite picturesque” way.

She has misspoken on any number of occasions when the straight truth might have been very damaging: over her involvement in the various scandals of the early Clinton years. But alongside these instrumental whoppers, there have been some befuddlingly pointless little tiddlers too.

For no obvious reason she once claimed her parents named her after Sir Edmund Hillary, even though she was born more than five years before the mountaineer’s ascent of Everest, when he was known by almost no one outside New Zealand.

When she ran for New York senator she claimed to have been a lifelong fan of the New York Yankees even though no one could recall her ever having expressed the slightest interest in or knowledge of the baseball team.

In fact the facility with which the Clintons misspeak is so pronounced that it is quite possible they have genuinely forgotten how to tell the plain truth. There was no real need for Mrs Clinton to make the claim about landing in sniper fire. But the compulsion to embroider, to dissemble and to dissimulate is now so entrenched in the synapses of the Clinton brain that it came to her as naturally as the truth would to a slow-witted innocent.

Someone once noted that the thing about the Clintons is that they will choose a big lie when a small lie will do, and choose a small lie when the truth will do. Most of the time they get away with it. But occasionally, an inconvenient truth, like a blue dress with DNA on it, or some forgotten news footage, shows up and damns them. …

Abe Greenwald in Contentions wonders if Gen. Petraeus is amused by Hillary’s Bosnian adventure.

Doubtless General David Petraeus has more pressing things on his mind this week, but one imagines he must have indulged in some gleeful reflection upon hearing about Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian adventure.

He more than most. For it was Hillary Clinton, among all her colleagues, who dared to insinuate that General Petraeus was lying in his September 11, 2007 testimony before Congress about the progress of the troop surge. After he gave an up-to-date assessment of the situation in Iraq, Hillary said that his version of the military and political dynamic required “a willing suspension of disbelief.” Who would stoop so low as to lie to the country about their experience in a war zone!

There are at least two reasons that Hillary was the only person to challenge Petraeus in such an undignified way that day, and we can see evidence for both of them in her Bosnian fantasy. The Clintons assume that every person in a position of power lies as naturally as they do. So, when the Lewinsky scandal broke it was a web of lies, when the Iraq War got tough that was because George Bush lied her into voting for it, and when Petraeus offered his inconvenient truth that too was, naturally, a lie.

The other aspect of the Clinton M.O. that links her shoddy treatment of General Petraeus to her outlandish story about Bosnia is an irresistible impulse to gild the lily. The Clintons don’t leave well enough alone. For Bill in November 2007 it wasn’t enough to tell a crowd of Iowa supporters that he opposes the Iraq War like most other Democrats these days. Here’s how far he had to take it: “Even though I approved of Afghanistan and opposed Iraq from the beginning, I still resent that I was not asked or given the opportunity to support those soldiers,” he said, and added that he “should not have gotten” the tax cuts that deprived our fighting men and women of what they needed. A threefer! …

While in Contentions we have a series of posts on the election by Jennifer Rubin.

1. Yesterday Barack Obama said this about the prospects for an extended primary battle: “I think giving whoever the nominee is two or three months to pivot into the general election would be extremely helpful, instead of having this drag up to the convention.” Buried in that is a germ of self-awareness that Obama (unlike McCain, as I’ve commented before) will have to do some major league scrambling back to the political center if and when he captures the nomination.

Yes, he’s selling the familiar line that the liberal vs. conservative dichotomy is outmoded. But his comment indicates some recognition that he will have significant pivots ahead. (By the way, isn’t it rather old-school politics to sell your base on one message in the primary and sell the general electorate on another? How inauthentic and Clintonian.) …

 

2. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama seem to be in a contest over who can do the most damage to his or her spouse. Each reminds voters of the weaknesses of the respective candidates and gives their opponent’s supporters plenty of opportunities to say “Ah ha! See! Further evidence of . . .”

In the Clintons’ case, Bill is, of course, a walking, talking reminder that it is all about them. Their egos and their career ambitions take precedence over party and country. Self-discipline and restraint? Not from these two. And all those concerns about whether her experience is merely derivative are reignited every time voters hear the latest controversial or semi-controversial comment from him.

Michelle Obama has inadvertently emphasized the idea that she and her husband have lived a charmed and unappreciative life. …

 

3. With each new utterance on the topic of Reverend Wright, Barack Obama seems to confirm his own moral obliviousness. Worse yet, he seems to have disdain for those who are troubled by his own unwillingness, even now, to break with Wright. (Contrary to his liberal apologists who insist “leaving a church is never a simple transaction,” it is exceedingly easy–you just stand up and go.)

The latest: “I never heard him say some of the things that have people upset.” Let’s leave aside for a moment the Clintonian slipperiness of the word “some.” Let’s not dwell on the quite obvious possibility that he might have heard or read comments of Wright’s approximating those on the dozens of tapes that have now come to light. Here’s the meat of it: just “people” are upset–not him mind you, since he is operating on a higher moral plane. I suppose he would have defended Trent Lott’s single remark about Strom Thurmond with every fiber of his being.

 

4. Mickey Kaus thinks two negative themes are percolating about Barack Obama. The first: he lacks “moral courage” — “he won’t speak up against his own church’s victim mentality until he absolutely has to.” The second: he is arrogant. (Again, he cannot “even admit to the slightest mistake in the Wright affair.”)

There is plenty of evidence for both the courage problem (e.g. he really knows NAFTA didn’t cost America jobs, but couldn’t level with Ohio voters) and the arrogance (e.g. only he is above all the corruption of Washington and only through him can we achieve “change”). And John McCain is already making the case that he is the un-Obama on exactly these points.

On the courage front, McCain has two aces in the hole. The first, of course, is his personal valor and courage in war. The second, which was a liability in the primary but now a virtue in the general election, is his determination to maintain his own principled positions (e.g. on immigration and torture) to his political detriment and to tell voters “no — and I really mean it.” (He’ll tell anyone “no” – Michigan autoworkers, Florida coastal inhabitants and lots of homeowners.)

Charles Krauthammer on one big lie Obama shares with Clinton.

… As Lenin is said to have said: “A lie told often enough becomes truth.” And as this lie passes into truth, the Democrats are ready to deploy it “as the linchpin of an effort to turn McCain’s national security credentials against him,” reports David Paul Kuhn of the Politico.

Hence: A Howard Dean fundraising letter charging McCain with seeking “an endless war in Iraq.” And a Democratic National Committee press release in which Dean asserts: “McCain’s strategy is a war without end. . . . Elect John McCain and get 100 years in Iraq.”

The Annenberg Political Fact Check, a nonprofit and nonpartisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, says: “It’s a rank falsehood for the DNC to accuse McCain of wanting to wage ‘endless war’ based on his support for a presence in Iraq something like the U.S. role in South Korea.”

The Democrats are undeterred. “It’s seldom you get such a clean shot,” a senior Obama adviser told the Politico. It’s seldom that you see such a dirty lie.

Tomorrow is opening day at Wrigley Field. Stephen Moore does the honors. Says he used to skip school for opening day. Pickerhead was more honorable, he skipped work. However, never on opening day. Did not show up at Wrigley until June. The climate was not hospitable in early April, let alone March 31st. The forecast this Monday is for a high of 54 with a real feel of 46. The 8 degree difference is because the wind will be out of the east and so off the lake.

Congress might undo some of its stupidity according to the Examiner.

Rep. Michele Bachmann wants to put the brake on a national conversion from conventional incandescent light bulbs to energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, has sponsored the “Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act,” which would repeal the national phase-out of the old bulbs.

“This is about freedom, this is about consumer rights,” she said. …

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The Libertarian warning about McCain is made by Reason’s editor in a NY Times op-ed.

BEHIND any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.

The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public with frank confessions of his failings, from his hard-living flyboy days to his adulterous first marriage to the Keating Five scandal. But in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of “serving a cause greater than self-interest.”

Such sentiment can sound stirring coming from a lone citizen freely choosing public service. But from a potential president, Mr. McCain’s exaltation of sacrifice over the private pursuit of happiness — “I did it out of patriotism, not for profit,” he snarled to Mitt Romney during the final Republican presidential debate — reflects a worryingly militaristic view of citizenship. …

McCain said yesterday we can win the hearts and minds of Islamic youth by sending them to college here. Mark Steyn thinks he needs to get out more.

… There’s plenty of evidence out there that the most extreme “extremists” are those who’ve been most exposed to the west – and western education: from Osama bin Laden (summer school at Oxford, punting on the Thames) and Mohammed Atta (Hamburg University urban planning student) to the London School of Economics graduate responsible for the beheading of Daniel Pearl. The idea that handing out college scholarships to young Saudi males and getting them hooked on Starbucks and car-chase movies will make this stuff go away is ridiculous – and unworthy of a serious presidential candidate.

Robert Samuelson says, as far as the economy goes, hold the hysteria.

… The economy, said The New York Times last week, may be on “the brink of the worst recession in a generation” — an ominous warning.

Perhaps, but so far the concrete evidence is scant. A recession is a noticeable period of declining output. Since World War II, there have been 10. On average, they’ve lasted 10 months, involved a peak monthly unemployment rate of 7.6 percent and resulted in a decline of economic output (gross domestic product) of 1.8 percent, reports Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. If the two worst recessions (those of 1981-82 and 1973-75, with peak unemployment of 10.8 percent and 9 percent) are excluded, the average peak jobless rate is about 7 percent.

No one doubts that the economy has slowed. Many economists think a recession has already started. Zandi is one. He forecasts peak unemployment of 6.1 percent (present unemployment: 4.8 percent) and a GDP drop of 0.4 percent. If that comes true, the recession of 2008 would actually be milder than the average postwar recession and milder than the last two, those of 1990-91 and 2001. …

Although much more investigating is to be done, WSJ Editors celebrate the truth telling about the real problems with Eliot Spitzer.

… And now that Governor Steamroller is Private Citizen Spitzer, leaks from the DA’s office are making clear that Mr. Spitzer was deeply involved in the smear campaign, even repeatedly calling Mr. Dopp at home to ensure that the leaks would produce a damaging story. Mr. Soares got Mr. Dopp to talk by offering him immunity from prosecution. But there’s no question that every public employee in the state — from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to the Public Integrity Commission to Mr. Soares himself — was, at a minimum, treating the question of Mr. Spitzer’s involvement with kid gloves as long as he remained Governor.

That the truth is only coming out now underscores how corrupt the political culture of Albany is, and how reluctant the political class was to question the malfeasance of a powerful and vindictive Governor. Now that he’s out, we may finally learn the truth. But New York voters can consider themselves fortunate that a sex scandal ended Mr. Spitzer’s career before his sense of righteous entitlement did far more harm to their state.

George Will says liberals are cheapskates.

Residents of Austin, Texas, home of the state’s government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming “Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All,” “Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty,” “The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion,” “Arms Are For Hugging,” “Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India),” “Jesus Is a Liberal,” “God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts,” “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,” “Republicans Are People Too — Mean, Selfish, Greedy People” and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: “The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.”

Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.” The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.

If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:

– Although liberal families’ incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

– Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood. …

Number 2 son spots Wired Science report on invention that might solve the problem of clean water. Perhaps he really saw it on Colbert Report. ‘Cause that’s where he gets the news.

There has been much buzz about the water-purifying machine that Segway inventor Dean Kamen demonstrated on the Colbert Report last week (even taking on the bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos that Colbert added). Everyone has been trying to find out more about his claim that “you stick a hose into anything that looks wet … and it comes out … as perfect distilled clean water.”

So far as I can tell however, it’s true. …

You might think this is silly, but Pickerhead thinks what Russian scientists do with styrofoam cups two miles below the surface of the ocean, is pretty cool. Yes we have pics.

Last August, as a team at the North Pole prepared to plunge more than two miles to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, some of the dozens of specialists who staged the dive engaged in a time-honored ritual: drawing on foam cups, decorating more than 100 of them.

The cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing. …

We have a complete section on Hillary’s lies. Notice it is near the humor section. That’s because Borowitz and Scrappleface want some too. Dick Morris starts us off.

The USA Today/Gallup survey clearly explains why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is losing. Asked whether the candidates were “honest and trustworthy,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won with 67 percent, with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) right behind him at 63. Hillary scored only 44 percent, the lowest rating for any candidate for any attribute in the poll.

Hillary simply cannot tell the truth. Here’s her scorecard:

Admitted Lies

• Chelsea was jogging around the Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. (She was in bed watching it on TV.)
• Hillary was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. (She admitted she was wrong. He climbed Mt. Everest five years after her birth.)
• She was under sniper fire in Bosnia. (A girl presented her with flowers at the foot of the ramp.)
• She learned in The Wall Street Journal how to make a killing in the futures market. (It didn’t cover the market back then.)

Whoppers She Won’t Confess To

• She didn’t know about the FALN pardons. …

Christopher Hitchens’ Daily Mirror blog.

… She now says she “mis-spoke”. I’m not sure that covers it. Footage shows her landing in Tuzla, then Bosnia’s most peaceful city, and strolling with a smile, her daughter in tow, to be met by flowers, children and dignitaries. In other words, there’s not a word of truth in her original assertion.

It also illustrates the question of Mrs Clinton’s respect for the truth. There is, first, her attempt to block access to her records.

 

Second, her habit of making hugely inflated claims about herself. Third, a smarminess about matters of fact, as in her recent utterance that Barack Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know”. …

Peter Wehner in Contentions.

I wanted to add my thoughts on Hillary Clinton’s fabricated story about landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996. It is a damaging, and probably deeply damaging, blow to an increasingly weak and desperate candidate. It will now become fodder for late night talk show hosts. It also builds on other false claims she has made, from her role in the Northern Ireland peace talks to S-CHIP legislation. And the sniper fire tale reinforces an existing impression about the Clintons: they cannot be counted on to tell the truth in matters small or large, about them or about others, about policy or about their personal conduct. It’s worth noting, I suppose, that Senator Clinton acknowledged the story was false only after indisputable video evidence (in this case from CBS News) emerged. Like her husband and the blue dress, the Clintons only concede their untruthfulness when they’ve been caught – on camera or via DNA – in their untruths. …

The Captain, now blogging at Hot Air.

Has Hillary Clinton’s Tuzla fantasy opened a bigger can of worms for the presidential aspirant? Jake Tapper at ABC News wonders whether the press should take a look at earlier Hillary anecdotes to determine whether a pattern of fabulism exists. Sure enough, he discovers an old chestnut from 1994 that Hillary has not bothered to dust off for the current campaign:

In light of Tuzla-gate (catchy, no?), reporters are going over past statements by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, (and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois) to see if others don’t stand more rigorous examination.

One that may get renewed scrutiny is a story she told “Women in Military Service” in 1994 — that shortly after the end of the Vietnam war, she looked into joining the Marines.

In June 1994, Clinton told an organization trying to build a memorial for women who had served in the armed forces, that while living in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 1975, “I decided that I was very interested in having some experience in serving in some capacity in the military. So I walked into our local recruiting office…”

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Today we have a detailed look at the chaos in the Dem race. New Republic’s Noam Scheiber is first in Slouching Towards Denver: The Democratic death march.

When Democrats contemplate the apocalypse these days, they have visions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slugging it out à la Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter at the 1980 convention. The campaign’s current trajectory is, in fact, alarmingly similar to the one that produced that disastrous affair. Back then, Carter had built up a delegate lead with early wins in Iowa, New Hampshire, and several Southern states. But, as the primary season dragged on, Kennedy began pocketing big states and gaining momentum. Once all the voting ended and Kennedy came up short, he eyed the New York convention as a kind of Hail Mary.

Any candidate trailing at the convention must employ divisive tactics, almost by definition. For example, much of the bitterness in 1980 arose from the floor votes Kennedy engineered to drive a wedge between Carter and his delegates. At one point, Kennedy forced a vote on whether each state’s delegation should be split equally between men and women. Carter counted many feminists among his delegates, but the campaign initially opposed the measure so as to deny Kennedy a victory. “You had women who were with Jimmy Carter who were crying on the floor,” recalls Joe Trippi, then a young Kennedy organizer.

The Kennedy strategy worked both too well and not well enough. Kennedy won many of the floor votes thanks to Carter’s unwillingness to squeeze conflicted delegates. He captivated the rank and file with his mythic “Dream shall never die” speech–a stark contrast to Carter’s ham-handed rhetorical style. (In his own speech, Carter famously confused former vice president Hubert Humphrey with Horatio Hornblower, a fictional character from a British book series.) But, for all the maneuvering, the delegate tally barely budged. Kennedy won the convention’s hearts and minds; Carter locked up the nomination. …

… If McCain winds up facing Obama, he’ll enjoy yet another advantage: a nominee weakened by attacks from a fellow Democrat. “Clinton hit a raw nerve several weeks ago when she said she had thirty-something years of experience, McCain had twenty- to thirty-something years, and Barack Obama had a speech,” says Representative Arthur Davis, an Obama supporter. The suggestion that Obama isn’t ready to be commander-in-chief is “unusually corrosive,” Davis complains. Indeed, when I asked various Republican and neutral Democratic operatives to name the most damaging twist in the primaries, most cited this same critique. “It’s very good messaging–that he’s not fit to be commander-in-chief,” crowed one Republican strategist. “When you get the Democrats saying it, that’s kind of the nuke in the whole thing.” One of his Democratic counterparts was even more blunt: “It’s one thing for John McCain to say [Obama's] not as muscular. It’s another thing to have a girl saying it. It has some influence on swing voters.” …

Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia writing in the WSJ.

… Why are the primaries and caucuses so different from the general election? It is for a simple, often overlooked reason. A reasonable, highly rounded estimate of all primary and caucus voters in all 50 states–projecting forward to June–might be about 40 million for the Democrats and 20 million for the Republicans. While many independents participated in the nominating contests, overwhelmingly the voters were highly partisan Democrats and Republicans. A relative handful of partisans voted in the other party’s contests.

This year, Mr. Obama has been the clear beneficiary of most of that “crossover vote”, though lately Mrs. Clinton has received a slice, too. (Some Republicans vote in the Democratic primaries because the GOP race is over; some favor one of the Democrats because they genuinely like him or her; others are trying to nominate the candidate they regard as weaker for November.)

The Democrats have at least double the GOP number of votes because there is far more enthusiasm on their side in 2008, and because the Democrats are taking longer to pick a nominee. The GOP contest was resolved early, thanks mainly to the Republican winner-take-all rule in most states and districts. This Republican practice contrasts starkly with the ever-so-fair–maybe too fair–proportional representation of the Democrats. (Isn’t it remarkable that a candidate can win a big swing state by a landslide margin, and emerge with only a half-dozen-delegate majority? Have the Democrats ever considered giving some bonus delegates to the statewide winner in each state? They ought to do so in the future.)

The total of 60 million for all the nominating contests sounds like a lot, until you consider that in November, perhaps 130 million to 135 million Americans will cast a ballot. Who are the extra 75 million voters in the fall? Some are Democrats and Republicans who did not show up for the winter and spring preliminaries, but a large chunk–40 million or so–are “swing voters” who can vote for either side. This number includes pure independents, as well as so-called weak Democrats and Republicans, who often stray from their party’s column. These 40 million swing voters will decide the contest in every single hotly contested state.

Therefore, the party nominating results tell us surprisingly little about how a state will vote in the fall. …

Walter Shapiro in Salon.

Forget buyer’s remorse — the real malady likely to be triggered by the never-ending Democratic presidential race is buyer’s confusion. It has already been seven weeks since a majority of Democrats cast their votes in the Woozy Tuesday Feb. 5 primaries, and even longer in fast-forward states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Those voters picked their candidates back in the innocent days when Bear Stearns was regarded as a pillar of Wall Street and Eliot Spitzer a pillar of rectitude.

Sixteen years ago, the last time the Democrats won back the White House, fewer than half the delegates had been selected by the end of March, with big-state primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California still on the docket. This campaign year the Democrats are already down to seeds and stems with 82 percent of the delegates having been chosen by March 11. This simple arithmetical fact — combined with the scheduling of the 2008 Democratic Convention six weeks later than in 1992 — is what gives such an air of unreality to the final installments of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton soap opera. …

… In truth, there is little that is small-d democratic about the way that the Democratic Party chooses its nominee. In some states only registered Democrats can participate; in others, the party’s primaries are open to all voters regardless of ideology, so even Rush Limbaugh’s dittoheads could have their say. And which matters more in choosing a nominee, the Texas primary or the late-night Texas caucuses that were a cacophony of chaos?

Had Michigan and Florida worked hard and played by the (Democratic Party’s) rules, it is likely that Hillary Clinton would be a lot closer to parity with Obama had these rogue states held valid primaries. This is not to argue (as the Clinton campaign has done with more loudness than logic) that the results of these outlaw January contests should be honored. Rather, Michigan and Florida serve as reminders of the built-in flaws in the Democrats’ botched version of Decision 2008.

Politics is purported to be the art of the possible. But the only possible way of achieving clarity in this Democratic race for president is a clear-cut verdict from the final burst of primaries. If Obama holds his own in states like Indiana and North Carolina (both May 6), the race would be all but officially over. If Clinton, on the other hand, sweeps Pennsylvania (April 22) and follows up with solid victories on May 6, then the rush to judgment becomes a tiptoe on cat feet.

With more than five months to the Denver Convention, the problem for the Democrats remains the crazy-quilt schedule that caused far too many to vote too soon. That is the real buyer’s remorse — a front-loaded political calendar that has turned most partisan Democrats into now-irrelevant bystanders just when a real decision is needed.

Mark Steyn with a look at today’s radical chic.

There was a sad little interview in the New York Times the other day. Carmen Peláez is a playwright and, therefore, a liberal, but she’s also a Cuban-American, and she was a little disappointed in her ideological soulmates’ reaction to her latest play. Rum & Coke examines in part the West’s cultural fascination with Castro and the revolution that time forgot. You know the sort of thing — the Che posters decorating the Obama campaign offices in Houston; Michael Moore’s paean to Cuban health care, though it doesn’t seem to have worked out so great for Fidel. The enduring sheen of revolutionary chic is in forlorn contrast to the decrepitude of the real thing. “When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,” Miss Peláez told the Times. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care. . . . They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship. I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.” …

Mike Lupica’s column today says Patterson and Hillary are talking too much. He’s telling too much truth and she’s telling too many _____ (you fill in the blank).

… Because up to now the only thing David Paterson hasn’t told us is that he had to dodge sniper fire on his way to his next girlfriend. Paterson apparently expects New York Democrats to start singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” because he’s the governor who didn’t have to pay for it, even as college kids start to think hanging with him would be a lot more fun on spring break than going to Florida.

“[Paterson] is a progressive and a decent guy,” Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, someone who knows Paterson from Albany, was saying yesterday. “But he needs to understand that the political climate in this country right now, this whole presidential election, is about character. If there’s one message that the American people are sending, it’s that. We all ought to be listening.”

Brodsky, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was asked if that includes the United States senator from New York as well as the new governor of the state. “It means all of us,” he said.

But both the governor of New York and the senator from New York get called out on character now, and judgment. Why? Because neither knows when to zip it, that’s why. Paterson keeps telling us about all the women he’s had – send up a flare if you think there aren’t more to come – and his Delta House past. And Hillary Clinton talks herself into a world of trouble by making a trip to Bosnia in 1996 sound as if it were a scene out of “Black Hawk Down” when it wasn’t anything of the kind. …

…

… It is why the new governor of New York looks more honest talking about women on the side than the woman running for President looks talking about a trip abroad. Yesterday, Clinton was still answering questions about Bosnia even as she desperately wanted to change the subject back to Barack Obama‘s pastor, saying again that she misspoke and then adding this:

“I’m human which, you know, for some people is a revelation.”

Not so much.

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Before we get into the mess of today’s politics, we get a chance to see when things work well we get someone on the supreme court like Clarence Thomas. He is featured in WSJ’s Weekend Interview.

… For a man who has been subjected to a great deal of vitriol, Mr. Thomas manifests remarkable serenity. He rejoices in life outside the Court, regaling us with stories about his travels throughout the U.S., his many encounters with ordinary Americans, and his love of sports — especially the Cornhuskers, the Dallas Cowboys and Nascar.

Mr. Thomas isn’t much bothered by his critics. “I can’t answer the cynics and the negative people. I can’t answer them because they can always be cynical about something.”

Mr. Thomas speaks movingly about the Court as an institution, and about his colleagues, both past and present. He sees them all, despite their differences, as honorable, each possessing a distinctive voice, and trying to do right as they see it. Our job, he concludes, is “to do it right. It’s no more than that. We can talk about methodology. It’s merely a methodology. It’s not a religion. It is in the approach to doing the job right. And at bottom what it comes to, is to choose to interpret this document as carefully and as accurately and as legitimately as I can, versus inflicting my personal opinion or imposing my personal opinion on the rest of the country.”

And why doesn’t he ask questions at oral argument, a question oft-posed by critics insinuating that he is intellectually lazy or worse? Mr. Thomas chuckles wryly and observes that oral advocacy was much more important in the Court’s early days. Today, cases are thoroughly briefed by the time they reach the Supreme Court, and there is just too little time to have a meaningful conversation with the lawyers. “This is my 17th term and I haven’t found it necessary to ask a bunch of questions. I would be doing it to satisfy other people, not to do my job. Most of the answers are in the briefs. This isn’t Perry Mason.”

David Brooks wonders about Hillary’s motivations.

… Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.

If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary.

Three of our favorites go after the speech. Christopher Hitchens first.

… You often hear it said, of some political or other opportunist, that he would sell his own grandmother if it would suit his interests. But you seldom, if ever, see this notorious transaction actually being performed, which is why I am slightly surprised that Obama got away with it so easily. (Yet why do I say I am surprised? He still gets away with absolutely everything.)

Looking for a moral equivalent to a professional demagogue who thinks that AIDS and drugs are the result of a conspiracy by the white man, Obama settled on an 85-year-old lady named Madelyn Dunham, who spent a good deal of her youth helping to raise him and who now lives alone and unwell in a condo in Honolulu. It would be interesting to know whether her charismatic grandson made her aware that he was about to touch her with his grace and make her famous in this way. By sheer good fortune, she, too, could be a part of it all and serve her turn in the great enhancement.

This flabbergasting process, made up of glibness and ruthlessness in equal proportions, rolls on unstoppably with a phalanx of reporters and men of the cloth as its accomplices. …

… But is it “inflammatory” to say that AIDS and drugs are wrecking the black community because the white power structure wishes it? No. Nor is it “controversial.” It is wicked and stupid and false to say such a thing. And it not unimportantly negates everything that Obama says he stands for by way of advocating dignity and responsibility over the sick cults of paranoia and victimhood. …

… The consequence, which you can already feel, is an inchoate resentment among many white voters who are damned if they will be called bigots by a man who associates with Jeremiah Wright. So here we go with all that again. And this is the fresh, clean, new post-racial politics? …

Hard to follow that, but Thomas Sowell is equal to the task.

… One sign of Obama’s verbal virtuosity was his equating a passing comment by his grandmother — “a typical white person,” he says — with an organized campaign of public vilification of America in general and white America in particular, by Jeremiah Wright.

Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.

Among the many desperate gambits by defenders of Senator Obama and Jeremiah Wright is to say that Wright’s words have a “resonance” in the black community.

There was a time when the Ku Klux Klan’s words had a resonance among whites, not only in the South but in other states. Some people joined the KKK in order to advance their political careers. Did that make it OK? Is it all just a matter of whose ox is gored?

While many whites may be annoyed by Jeremiah Wright’s words, a year from now most of them will probably have forgotten about him. But many blacks who absorb his toxic message can still be paying for it, big-time, for decades to come.

Why should young blacks be expected to work to meet educational standards, or even behavioral standards, if they believe the message that all their problems are caused by whites, that the deck is stacked against them? That is ultimately a message of hopelessness, …

Victor Davis Hanson gets a turn.

The latest polls reflecting Obama’s near-collapse should serve as a morality tale of John Edwards’s two Americas — the political obtuseness of the intellectual elite juxtaposed to the common sense of the working classes.

For some bizarre reason, Obama aimed his speech at winning praise from National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Harvard, and solidifying an already 90-percent solid African-American base — while apparently insulting the intelligence of everyone else.

Indeed, the more op-eds and pundits praised the courage of Barack Obama, the more the polls showed that there was a growing distrust that the eloquent and inspirational candidate has used his great gifts, in the end, to excuse the inexcusable. …

… Over the past four days, I asked seven or eight random (Asian, Mexican-American, and working-class white) Americans in southern California what they thought of Obama’s candidacy — and framed the question with, “Don’t you think that was a good speech?” The answers, without exception, were essentially: “Forget the speech. I would never vote for Obama after listening to Wright.” In some cases, the reaction was not mild disappointment, but unprintable outrage.

The blame, such as it is, for all this goes to the Obama campaign “pros,” who, in their apparent arrogance over Obamania (a phenomenon due to the candidate’s charisma, not their own savvy), simply went to sleep and let the senator and his wife resort to their natural self-indulgence — itself the offspring of the Obamas’ privilege and insularity. Any amateur handler could have scanned that speech and taken out just 8-10 phrases, called for a tougher stance on Wright, a genuine apology, and put the issue behind them. …

Byron York answers the question of why Richardson backed Obama. He thinks it might be a couple of incredibly bad hours in front of a grand jury when some prosecutors might have been smelling fear.

Britain’s Labour government is beginning to see the problems with ethanol directives. The Guardian has the story.

Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government’s leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it.

In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said it would be wrong to introduce compulsory quotas for the use of biofuels in petrol and diesel before their effects had been properly assessed.

“If one started to use biofuels … and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane,” Watson said. “It would certainly be a perverse outcome.” …

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Easter Sunday a 74 year old man died in Zimbabwe. Times, UK with the story. See if you agree with Pickerhead that if Bill Gates wants to help Africa, he should divert some funds to create the ultimate NGO*, an army that will remove leaders like Mugabe. (*NonGovernmental Organization)

… When I arrived that afternoon, Hilton was dead. Inside his filthy bedroom, his body lay under an ancient furred brown blanket on the mattress where he and Winfildah had slept. She crouched on the floor beside the bed, her blind eyes lit with tears.

Next door in the slum dwelling’s only other room, the family sat fretting over what to do. Tendai, Hilton’s son, had just returned from the undertaker where he went to plead for time to pay the Z$300 million it would cost to take his father’s body to the mortuary.

He returned with not only a refusal but worse news yet. In three days the price had risen threefold to Z$1 billion, a mere £12 at black-market rates.

“It’s the fuel increase,” he said in despair. Their father’s body would stay where it was.

Hilton Takundwa had cheated the odds to live until yesterday, stretching his life out for a full 74 years, exactly twice the average life expectancy for a Zimbabwean male.

But as the years stretched on so the price of death rose until his family could no longer afford to send him with dignity to his grave.

This is Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe on the eve of this weekend’s historic elections; a land of empty shelves and broken hearts where annual inflation runs at 100,000 per cent, turning life into a struggle to survive and death a struggle to afford. …

The Austrian Economist posts a couple of times on the notion Wal-Mart deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Makes more sense than giving it to a PowerPoint Ranger.

… As you have probably seen on TV and elsewhere, in September 2006, Wal-Mart launched its $4 prescription program. Now, 18 months later, it reports that it has saved consumers over $1 billion (yes, billion) as a result of that program. That’s $1 billion that poorer consumers have to spend elsewhere on the things they need (or that is reducing insurance costs and premiums), not to mention they can now buy prescriptions they might not have been able to afford before or not have to cut pills in half to save money. Moreover, that program prompted Wal-Mart’s competition to create similar programs, the benefits of which can be placed on top of that $1 billion. For some strange reason, the major media didn’t cover this story when Wal-Mart’s press release went out last Friday. …

Common sense won a battle in Philly, but struggles in the war. John Fund has details.

… The Battle of the Cheesesteak Sign may be over, but the larger war over the use of English in this country rages on. Last year, California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, himself an immigrant, urged Hispanics to assimilate and said the way ahead in this country is “to turn off the Spanish TV set. It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.”

Statistics back him up. TV Azteca, Mexico’s second-largest network, has launched a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that learning English empowers Latinos. “If you live in this country, you to speak as everybody else,” Jose Martin Samano, Azteca’s U.S. anchor, told Fox News. “Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people.”

But there are powerful forces trying to make assimilation a dirty word. Consider just how much resistance Sen. Lamar Alexander is getting over his attempt to bar the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from launching “frivolous lawsuits” like the ones it filed last year against the Salvation Army and 125 other businesses for requiring workers to speak English on the job. …

While we’re in Philadelphia, how about some great background on Jeremiah Wright via Marty Peretz. Turns out Obama was not the only one slumming and earning “street cred” at the southside Chicago church. Pastor Wright was too. They both sold out to our country’s black grievance culture.

… It happens that, as a Philadelphian, I attended Central High School – the same public school Jeremiah Wright attended from 1955 to 1959. He could have gone to an integrated neighborhood school, but he chose to go to Central, a virtually all-white school. Central is the second oldest public high school in the country, which attracts the most serious academic students in the city. The school then was about 80% Jewish and 95% white. The African-American students, like all the others, were there on merit. Generally speaking, we came from lower/middle class backgrounds. Many of our parents had not received a formal education and we tended to live in row houses. In short, economically, we were roughly on par.

I attended Central a few years after Rev. Wright, so I did not know him personally. But I knew of him and I know where he used to live – in a tree-lined neighborhood of large stone houses in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. This is a lovely neighborhood to this day. Moreover, Rev. Wright’s father was a prominent pastor and his mother was a teacher and later vice-principal and disciplinarian of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, also a distinguished academic high school. Two of my acquaintances remember her as an intimidating and strict disciplinarian and excellent math teacher. In short, Rev. Wright had a comfortable upper-middle class upbringing. It was hardly the scene of poverty and indignity suggested by Senator Obama to explain what he calls Wright’s anger and what I describe as his hatred. …

It is possible to have an intelligent discussion on some of these problems. A Protestant evangelical, who is also a Harvard law prof, has more valuable things to say about race, and the things we should work to overcome, than Barack or his pastor.

… While white fears of black crime are more reasonable than Obama admits, black rage at a discriminatory justice system is more justified than most whites understand. According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.

If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished. Nationwide, police clear nearly 60% of violent crimes (meaning, they arrest the likely offender) in nearly all-white small towns and rural areas. In large cities, police clear fewer than one-third of violent crimes. (Data source here). Race-specific data are unavailable, but it’s a very good bet that black neighborhoods in every major city have clearance rates far below one-third, and most white neighborhoods see rates that are much higher. The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones. …

And Bill Kristol says the last thing we need is a conversation about race because we are doing pretty well on our own without the government coming in and screwing things up.

… Racial progress has in fact continued in America. A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years” — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren’t stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

Over the last several decades, we’ve done pretty well in overcoming racial barriers and prejudice. Problems remain. But we won’t make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify.

Luckily, Obama isn’t really interested in getting enmeshed in a national conversation on race. He had avoided race talk before the Reverend Wright controversy erupted. And despite the speech’s catnip of a promised conversation on race tossed to eager commentators, it’s clear he’s more than willing to avoid it from now on.

This is all for the best. With respect to having a national conversation on race, my recommendation is: Let’s not, and say we did.

Abe Greenwald notices John Kerry’s slip is showing.

ABC News’ Jake Tapper just reported on a startling interview given by Senator John Kerry:

Kerry said that a President Obama would help the US, in relations with Muslim countries, “in some cases go around their dictator leaders to the people and inspire the people in ways that we can’t otherwise.”

“He has the ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism,” Kerry said. “To maybe even give power to moderate Islam to be able to stand up against this radical misinterpretation of a legitimate religion.”

Kerry was asked what gives Obama that credibility.

“Because he’s African-American. Because he’s a black man. Who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.”

Where to begin! Have notable Democrats become so intellectually sloppy as to draw some baffling equivalence between blacks and Muslims? The last I checked, Arab Muslims were none too happy with their black countrymen in northern Africa.

Also, where is this “place of oppression and repression” in which Obama has suffered “through the years”? Hawaii? Harvard? The Senate? We should find out immediately and do something about this horrific crisis. …

Marty Peretz sees the same thing.

Don’t leave until you finish Dave Barry.

I got to thinking about the Florida primary election mess the other night when I was watching TV with my wife. Actually, she was reading a book, because she hates the way I watch TV. I follow Standard Guy Remote Control Procedure (SGRCP), which requires you go to the next channel the instant that the current channel commits one of the Deadly Channel Sins, such as showing a commercial, or people redecorating a house, or Howie Mandel.

Anyway, I was whipping through the broadcast spectrum at the rate of about four channels per second, when I came across Lewis Black, who’s a very funny man. So I stopped.

Black has a new show called Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, which tackles issues that, quite frankly, need to be tackled. When I tuned in, the issue was: which is more evil, Donald Trump or Viagra? This is not as simple as it sounds. Yes, Donald Trump is a hideously repellent human wearing what appears to be a radioactive hamster on his head. But Viagra is responsible for a TV commercial — …

New snow fall record in Ann Arbor. At least since 1880. Way to go Al Gore!

Kathryn Lopez in The Corner came up with a photo of W with an Easter Bunny and she decided to troll for captions.

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Karl Rove says the Dems have major national security problems.

One out of five is not a majority. Democrats should keep that simple fact of political life in mind as they pursue the White House.

For a party whose presidential candidates pledge they’ll remove U.S. troops from Iraq immediately upon taking office — without regard to conditions on the ground or the consequences to America’s security — a late February Gallup Poll was bad news. The Obama/Clinton vow to pull out of Iraq immediately appears to be the position of less than one-fifth of the voters.

Only 18% of those surveyed by Gallup agreed U.S. troops should be withdrawn “on a timetable as soon as possible.” And only 20% felt the surge was making things worse in Iraq. Twice as many respondents felt the surge was making conditions better.

It gets worse for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Nearly two out of every three Americans surveyed (65%) believe “the United States has an obligation to establish a reasonable level of stability and security in Iraq before withdrawing all of its troops.” The reason is self-interest. Almost the same number of Americans (63%) believe al Qaeda “would be more likely to use Iraq as a base for its terrorist operations” if the U.S. withdraws.

Just a year ago it was almost universally accepted that Iraq would wreck the GOP chances in November. Now the issue may pose a threat to the Democratic efforts to gain power. For while the American people are acknowledging the positive impact of the surge, Democratic leaders are not. ..

Mark Steyn on Obama’s speech.

“I’m sure,” said Barack Obama in that sonorous baritone that makes his drive-thru order for a Big Mac, fries and strawberry shake sound profound, “many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”

Well, yes. But not many of us have heard remarks from our pastors, priests or rabbis that are stark, staring, out-of-his-tree, flown-the-coop nuts. Unlike Bill Clinton, whose legions of “spiritual advisers” at the height of his Monica troubles outnumbered the U.S. diplomatic corps, Sen. Obama has had just one spiritual adviser his entire adult life: the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, two-decade pastor to the president presumptive. The Rev. Wright believes that AIDS was created by the government of the United States – and not as a cure for the common cold that went tragically awry and had to be covered up by Karl Rove, but for the explicit purpose of killing millions of its own citizens. The government has never come clean about this, but the Rev. Wright knows the truth. “The government lied,” he told his flock, “about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied.”

Does he really believe this? If so, he’s crazy, and no sane person would sit through his gibberish, certainly not for 20 years.

Or is he just saying it? In which case, he’s profoundly wicked. If you understand that AIDS is spread by sexual promiscuity and drug use, you’ll know that it’s within your power to protect yourself from the disease. If you’re told that it’s just whitey’s latest cunning plot to stick it to you, well, hey, it’s out of your hands, nothing to do with you or your behavior.

Before the speech, Slate’s Mickey Kaus advised Sen. Obama to give us a Sister Souljah moment: “There are plenty of potential Souljahs still around: Race preferences. Out-of-wedlock births,” he wrote. “But most of all the victim mentality that tells African Americans (in the fashion of the Rev. Wright’s most infamous sermons) that the important forces shaping their lives are the evil actions of others, of other races.” Indeed. It makes no difference to white folks when a black pastor inflicts kook genocide theories on his congregation: The victims are those in his audience who make the mistake of believing him. …

… Free societies live in truth, not in the fever swamps of Jeremiah Wright. The pastor is a fraud, a crock, a mountebank – for, if this truly were a country whose government invented a virus to kill black people, why would they leave him walking around to expose the truth? It is Barack Obama’s choice to entrust his daughters to the spiritual care of such a man for their entire lives, but in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment – to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that – what’s the word? – racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

Charles Krauthammer too.

… But Obama was supposed to be new. He flatters himself as a man of the future transcending the anger of the past as represented by his beloved pastor. Obama then waxes rhapsodic about the hope brought by the new consciousness of the young people in his campaign.

Then answer this, senator: If Wright is a man of the past, why would you expose your children to his vitriolic divisiveness? This is a man who curses America and who proclaimed moral satisfaction in the deaths of 3,000 innocents at a time when their bodies were still being sought at Ground Zero. It is not just the older congregants who stand and cheer and roar in wild approval of Wright’s rants, but young people as well. Why did you give $22,500 just two years ago to a church run by a man of the past who infects the younger generation with precisely the racial attitudes and animus you say you have come unto us to transcend?

Now, Obama wraps himself in a flag! James Taranto comments.

A New Republic writer, Dayo Olopade, says Obama’s preacher problem is not going away.

… Having lived for so long at the center of a world he built, Wright may simply not be used to restraining himself. (Indeed, during the past year, even as he had to know that Obama’s high profile could bring the press to his pews, he continued to evangelize against the government.) But it isn’t just that Wright is self-centered, although that seems to be the case; it is also that his worldview doesn’t recognize firm boundaries between religion and politics, or really between religion and anything. When Wright finally carried out his long-planned retirement at the end of February (no doubt much to Obama’s relief), his church held a two-week-long celebration honoring him as a “Theologian/ Teacher,” “Ethnomusicologist,” and “African World Visionary.” Don’t laugh; for Wright, such distinctions are necessarily fluid. The sermon I attended freely mixed faith and politics–at one point, Wright intoned, “I got to tell somebody what the Lord has done for my people. I’m gonna use my mouth! Listen to me and listen carefully: Neither Hillary, Hannity, nor Hobbes ever had a grandparent in slavery or on a slave ship beneath the decks, never had a grandparent in a slave dungeon on the coast of West Africa as a prisoner. That’s my people’s story, and if you think I’m gonna stop telling it, you got another damn thing coming!” No wonder he can’t resist sparring with Sean Hannity and The New York Times. …

Maureen Dowd recaps the Dem mess.

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she’ll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama’s wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

“It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes,” said one leading Democrat.

Hillary got a boost from the wackadoodle Jeremiah Wright. As a top pol noted, the Reverend turned Obama — in the minds of some working-class and crossover white voters — from “a Harvard law graduate into a South Side Black Panther.”

Obama blunted the ugliness of Wright’s YouTube “greatest hits” with his elegant and bold speech on race. But how will he get the genie back into the bottle?

Pressed about race on a Philly radio sports show, where he wanted to talk basketball, he called his grandmother “a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, well there’s a reaction that’s in our experiences that won’t go away and can sometimes come out in the wrong way.”

Obama might be right, but he should stay away from the phrase “typical white person” because typically white people don’t like to be reminded of their prejudices. It also undermines Obama’s feel-good appeal in which whites are allowed to transcend race because the candidate himself has transcended race. …

Jennifer Rubin liked MoDo’s column.

… So even if Dowd cannot quite admit the intellectual and moral shortcomings of a man who equates the woman who raised him with a hate-mongering preacher, she nevertheless allows that it was politically clumsy of him to bring it up. Well, that’s something.

Then she tip-toes up to an equally troubling issue for Obama:

Even swaddled in flags, Obama is vulnerable on the issue of patriotism. He’s right that you don’t have to wear a flag pin to be patriotic, and that Republicans have coarsely exploited patriotism for ideological ends while failing to do truly patriotic things, like giving our troops the right armor and the proper care at Walter Reed. But Republicans are salivating over Reverend Wright’s “God damn America” imprecation and his post-9/11 “America’s chickens coming home to roost” crack, combined with Michelle Obama’s aggrieved line about belatedly feeling really proud of her country.

While Dowd cannot resist a cheap dig at Republicans (or, apparently, distinguish between administrative ineptitude and lack of patriotism), she gets it, somehow: Obama has a patriotism problem, which will only become worse in the general election. (There is a reason why John McCain continues to remind voters of his biography.) …

Jonah Goldberg columns on Mamet.

… Mamet invokes John Maynard Keynes’s response to criticism that he changed his mind: “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”

Michael Billington might have a different response. “I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right,” wrote the Guardian’s theater critic of more than three decades. “What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.”

This response is quite simply perfect, a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa of moronic imbecility.

Mamet, a dashboard saint of angst-ridden cosmopolitan liberalism, has set out to read widely and carefully, exploring how his outdated political pose no longer tracks with reality or with his own understandings of the world, and Billington worries that Mamet is locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

Mamet has, Houdini-like, gone through the painful process of regurgitating a key to the chained-up straitjacket in which he’d been trapped, and after the required internal dislocations has emerged to think freely about the world, and this guy somehow thinks Mamet’s trapped himself. …

LA Times Op-Ed welcomes Mr. Mamet.

… So now Mamet has grasped the nettle. He will come to find out just how small-minded, exclusionary and intellectually corrupt many on the left can be. Colleagues may abandon him; theater critics will contrive to ignore and attack him; his dependable audience may turn away.

But he will also discover a right wing he never knew. He will discover thinkers who seek historical and moral truth as if it really mattered, and writers who defend liberty as if it were what in fact it is: the prerequisite of full humanity. Rather than the low and tiresome obsession of the left with the color of people’s skins, he will find people who embrace a philosophical colorblindness. He will meet women of intelligence and competence who — mirabile dictu — don’t despise men and manliness but openly admire them. …

We go to Zimbabwe, of all places, for a lesson in the importance of private property. This time it’s to protect elephants.

… Ponder the stories of two African states. Kenya banned the killing of elephants in 1979, effectively nationalising its herd. At around the same time, Rhodesia (as it still was) made elephants the property of those whose land they were on. The result? Thirty years on, Kenyan elephants have been all but wiped out, while Zimbabwe’s are as numerous as ever. …

… The foundation of capitalism is Aristotle’s observation that, that which no one owns, no one will care for. Here is proof.

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McCain at the Western Wall.

More on the fifth year of war. Power Line posts on Bush’s speech with an O’Henry twist at the end.

Fouad Ajami makes the Iraq case.

Wars have never been easy to defend. Even in “heroic” cultures, men and women applauded wars then grew weary of them. This Iraq war, too, was once a popular war. It was authorized and launched in the shadow of 9/11. During the five long years that America has been on the ground in Iraq, the war was increasingly forced to stand alone.

At a perilous moment in early 2007, when the project was in the wind and reeling, the leader who launched this war doubled down and bought time. …

Daniel Henninger notes David Mamet’s conversion.

The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the “Mamet-word”), didn’t himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: “I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: ‘Shut the [Mamet-word] up.’” Been known to happen.

Toward the end of the essay, he names names: “I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

This of course is an outrage against polite American wisdom. Isn’t Paul Krugman supposed to be our greatest living philosopher? One would have thought that David Mamet saying bye-bye to liberalism would have launched sputterings everywhere. But not a word.

As I think Groucho Marx once said, either no one reads the Village Voice anymore or my watch has stopped. …

Ann Coulter has Obama thoughts.

Obama gave a nice speech, except for everything he said about race. He apparently believes we’re not talking enough about race. This is like hearing Britney Spears say we’re not talking enough about pop-tarts with substance-abuse problems.

By now, the country has spent more time talking about race than John Kerry has talked about Vietnam, John McCain has talked about being a POW, John Edwards has talked about his dead son, and Al Franken has talked about his USO tours.

But the “post-racial candidate” thinks we need to talk yet more about race. How much more? I had had my fill by around 1974. How long must we all marinate in the angry resentment of black people? …

… Imagine a white pastor saying: “No, no, no, God damn America — that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human! God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme!”

We treat blacks like children, constantly talking about their temper tantrums right in front of them with airy phrases about black anger. I will not pat blacks on the head and say, “Isn’t that cute?” As a post-racial American, I do not believe “the legacy of slavery” gives black people the right to be permanently ill-mannered. …

Couple of posts illuminate Obama’s continued problem.

Stephen Moore adds perspective to our lives.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the state of the economy to a group of college students — almost all Barack Obama enthusiasts — who were griping about how downright awful things are in America today. As they sipped their Starbucks lattes and adjusted their designer sunglasses, they recited their grievances: The country is awash in debt “that we will have to pay off”; the middle class in shrinking; the polar ice caps are melting; and college is too expensive.

I’ve been speaking to groups like this one for more than 20 years, but I have never confronted such universal pessimism from a young audience. Its members acted as if the hardships of modern life are making it nearly impossible for them to get out of bed in the morning. So I conducted a survey of these grim youngsters. How many of you, I asked, own a laptop? A cellphone? An iPod, a DVD player, a flat-screen digital TV? To every question somewhere between two-thirds and all of the hands in the room rose. But they didn’t even get my point. “Well, duh,” one of them scoffed, “who doesn’t have an iPod these days?” I was way too embarrassed to tell them that I, for one, don’t. They thought that living without these products would be like going back to prehistoric times. …

Wonder why Easter is so early. The Corner answers.

Couple of weeks ago the NY Times wrote on kit homes sold 80 years ago by Sears Roebuck.

… what is especially notable about Sears houses, said Amy R. Pappas, co-curator of the New Castle Historical Society’s current exhibit on them, is how well they have withstood 80 years’ worth of shifts in architectural styles and tastes.

Nine houses are featured in the society’s show, but Sears, which sold them from 1908 to 1940, offered 447 architect-designed models — from “a modest little home to a mansion,” according to an ad in one catalog. Most of them were priced from about $725 to $2,500, although some of the larger models like the Verona sold for more than $4,000.

It is estimated that more than 100,000 Sears homes were sold in the United States, said Norman T. MacDonald, the president of the historical society in Ossining, which so far has documented 115. They were especially popular in the Northeast and Northern Midwest states, areas that were undergoing suburban growth at the time, according to Gray Williams, New Castle’s historian.

The houses were shipped via railroad boxcar in pieces — some 30,000 of them, not including nails and screws — then assembled on site. Often the new homeowners did the building, with help from friends and neighbors, although some hired local workers, said Nancy O’Neil, the other curator for the exhibit. …

Turns out kit homes are still available. WSJ has the details.

One hundred years after Sears, Roebuck began offering its first mail-order house, the kit home is gaining renewed attention.

Promoted by design magazines such as Dwell, these houses sold as parts have attracted a near cultlike following among style-minded home shoppers and do-it-yourselfers. The factory-fabricated houses, often in modernist designs, can bring efficiencies to a process notorious for cost overruns and delays. And fans say they are greener because they create less waste than on-site construction.

But assembling a kit house, also called a flat-pack house, can present unexpected pitfalls. From mismatched doors to missing parts, buyers’ experiences suggest there are endless ways to burn time and money on the prefab route. Custom touches tend to evaporate any cost savings — some prefabs end up being as expensive as architect-designed traditional construction. And despite the buzz, only a few hundred modernist kit houses have been sold. …

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David Warren uses Friedrich Hayek to explain how environmentalists have become stalking horses for the people who wish to command others.

It was my hero, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), economist of the “Austrian School,” and historian of ideas, who wrote the book titled Road to Serfdom. It appeared in the spring of 1944, in England, not the most convenient moment given the paper shortages of wartime, and the continuing distractions from the life of the mind offered by Herr Hitler. Nor could it have been calculated to please Keynesians and other supporters of the prevailing economic wisdom — which was that the success of centralized war production, and Roosevelt’s New Deal in America, had permanently validated “central planning” in every national economy.

More than that, the ideologues of the Left, having had to withdraw their pacifist approach to Hitler after the disintegration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, were now arguing that the Nazi Party of Germany was “capitalism’s answer to the socialism of Mother Russia,” and laying down the rhetorical notion that “capitalism equals fascism,” as a way to tarnish the people who had actually risked their lives in fighting the Nazis tooth, nail and soul.

While the idea that Hitler’s program of “National Socialism” worked on free market principles was utterly absurd, not only on its face but on every possible level of analysis, we must remember that then as now the batty ideas of the Left enjoyed a tremendous cachet in fashionable society, among people who do not so much think as preen themselves. Moreover, those were the days of “Uncle Joe” Stalin, when the western world was too busy fighting a war in which he had become an ally to remember that the socialist system in Russia was an obscene and murderous tyranny. …

A most amazing thing was overshadowed last week by Spitzer and Jeremiah Wright. David Mamet, Pickerhead’s favorite playwright and screenwriter, wrote an article for The Village Voice titled Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain Dead Liberal.’ First spotting was a Mark Steyn Corner post. Since so much else was going on, we left it for this week. That has the virtue of allowing many of our favorite blogs to comment.

Mark Hemingway Corner post offers to suspend some of the rules of the dark side Mr. Mamet has joined.

Russ Roberts in Cafe Hayek with what amounts to a Hayek tribute.

David Mamet has written an extraordinary confessional for the Village Voice (I’ve edited this link, ht: Drudge) where he describes his philosophical change of heart from being an anti-American, anti-market believer in man’s perfectibility to something different. An excerpt:

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. …

The libertarians at Samizdata post twice.

Jonathan Adler in Volokh Conspiracy.

… David Mamet, long one of my favorite living playwrights, thinks Thomas Sowell is “out greatest contemporary philosopher. Go figure.

Roger Simon.

Here is Mr. Mamet.

… I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f–k up. “?” she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as “a brain-dead liberal,” and to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” …

… I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. …

… I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism. …

Since Mr. Mamet is a fan, we have Thomas Sowell‘s comments on the pastor disaster.

… The bad news is that Barack Obama has been leading as much of a double life as Eliot Spitzer.

While talking about bringing us together and deploring “divisive” actions, Senator Obama has for 20 years been a member of a church whose minister, Jeremiah Wright, has said that “God Bless America” should be replaced by “God damn America” — among many other wild and even obscene denunciations of American society, including blanket racist attacks on whites.

Nor was this an isolated example. Fox News Channel has played tapes of various sermons of Jeremiah Wright, and says that it has tapes with hours of more of the same.

Wright’s actions matched his words. He went with Louis Farrakhan to Libya and Farrakhan received an award from his church.

Sean Hannity began reporting on Jeremiah Wright back in April of 2007. But the mainstream media saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.

Now that the facts have come out in a number of places, and can no longer be suppressed, many in the media are trying to spin these facts out of existence. ….

American Thinker thinks Obama might be the new Jimmy Carter.

… Barack Obama seems cut of identical cloth. Carefully scripted, Obama quickly corrects statements which show how he truly feels. He rejects anti-Semitic, anti-American supporters only when nudged to do so. His wife “misstates” when she says that she has never been proud of America until now, but Michelle corrects the error only belatedly and without apparent concern for misinterpretation.

It certainly seems as if Obama feels that the problems of America have been her moral shortcomings, which is very much what Jimmy Carter thought. It seems as if Obama feels himself morally superior to those in politics today, much like Carter did thirty years ago. Obama, like Carter, invites Americans to trust him with the most beguiling claims of spiritual elevation. Obama, like Carter was an utter and complete Democrat partisan, although he promised to be just the opposite.

Jimmy Carter never tried to “govern from the center” or “seek bipartisanship.” He could easily have passed tax cuts or defense spending increases. He did not want to. Barack Obama has never sought bipartisanship. He embraces Leftism completely. They are the same: Barack Obama is our next Jimmy Carter.

Robert Samuelson reports how this financial crisis is different.

… Previous financial crises so weakened the banks and savings and loans that they lost their primacy. As recently as 1980, they supplied almost half of all lending — to companies, consumers and home buyers. Now their share is less than 30 percent. The gap has been filled by “securitization”: the bundling of mortgages, credit card debt and other loans into bond-like instruments that are sold to all manner of investors (banks themselves, pension funds, hedge funds, insurance companies).

As a result, the nature of financial crises changed. With a traditional “bank run,” the object was to reassure the public. The central bank — the Federal Reserve in the United States — lent cash to solvent banks so that they could repay worried depositors and preempt a panic that would spread to more and more banks and would ultimately deprive the economy of credit. But now the fear and uncertainty center on the value of highly complex, opaque securities and the myriad financial institutions that hold them. …

John Stossel with more on the unintended consequences of sex-offender laws.

… Too often, American criminal law is a blunt instrument designed to make it look as if politicians are protecting us. I think the politicians usually protect themselves, at our expense.

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On the fifth anniversary Slate asked proponents of the Iraq War what they got wrong. Chris Hitchens says – nothing.

An “anniversary” of a “war” is in many ways the least useful occasion on which to take stock of something like the Anglo-American intervention in Iraq, if only because any such formal observance involves the assumption that a) this is, in fact, a war and b) it is by that definition an exception from the rest of our engagement with that country and that region. I am one of those who, for example, believes that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of “fragile truces,” until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. This is not at all to redefine warfare and still less to contextualize it out of existence. But when I wrote the essays that go to make up A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq, I was expressing an impatience with those who thought that hostilities had not really “begun” until George W. Bush gave a certain order in the spring of 2003.

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party to power. …

John Burns on our five years in Iraq.

… American hopes are that Iraqis, with enough American troops still present to stiffen the new Iraqi forces and prevent a slide backward toward all-out civil war, will ultimately tire of the violence in the way of other peoples who have been plunged into communal violence, as many Lebanese did during their 15-year civil war. Those hopes have been buoyed by a reduction in violence in the last year that can been traced to the American troop increase and to the cooperation or quiescence of some previously militant groups, both Sunni and Shiite.

They are hopes shared by many ordinary Iraqis. Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.

That sentiment is not one that many critics of the war in the United States seem willing to accept, but neither does it offer the glimmer of cheer that it might seem to offer to many supporters of the war. For it would be passing strange, after the years of unrelenting bloodshed, if Iraqis demanded anything else. It is small credit to the invasion, after all it has cost, that Iraqis should arrive at a point when all they want from America is a return to something, stability, that they had under Saddam. For America, too, it is a deeply dispiriting prospect, promising no early end to the bleeding in Iraq.

David Brooks asks and answers seven questions about the financial crisis.

What’s the most underdiscussed issue of this presidential campaign?

Housing. Housing prices are off about 10 percent from their peak, and experts expect them to drop another 20 percent or so. Without policy changes, several million households will default on their mortgages over the next few years. Roughly 14 million homeowners will owe more than their houses are worth. Uncertainty about mortgage-backed securities will continue to whack at the foundations of the banking system.

Who’s to blame?

Who’s not to blame? The mortgage brokers were out of control. Regulators were asleep. Home buyers thought they were entitled to Corian counters and a two-story great room. Everybody from Norwegian town elders to financial geniuses decided that house prices would always go up. This was an episode of mass idiocy.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks Wright is a strange biblical scholar.

… Any middle-of-the-road Democratic voter who sampled five or six of Wright’s sermons, juxtaposed them with Obama’s references to him as not particularly controversial, an uncle, a scholar, etc., wouldn’t vote for Obama in a million years.

VDH also thinks Obama’s morphing into Nixon.

Wrightgate is more and more becoming Nixonian.

Now we hear that Rev. Wright considers Israel a “dirty word”. I don’t want to sound like a broken-record, but we are back to 1973-4 when almost every day a new disclosure helped doom the stonewalling Nixon.

The gamut of Wright’s hatred is amazingly extensive—Israel, whites, rich people, the United States, the American conduct of World War II, moderate blacks, middleclassness, Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice—to such a degree that he seems consumed with hatred and simply fills in the target spontaneously at any given moment. …

Bill Kristol thinks maybe it’s not time for Obama. He doesn’t say it, but Pickerhead wonders if Obama’s time will ever come – what with the Wright Reverend and the increasingly tiresome wife.

… Obama seems to have seen, early in his career, the utility of joining a prominent church that would help him establish political roots in the community in which he lives. Now he sees the utility of distancing himself from that church. Obama’s behavior in dealing with Wright is consistent with that of a politician who often voted “present” in the Illinois State Legislature for the sake of his future political viability.

The more you learn about him, the more Obama seems to be a conventionally opportunistic politician, impressively smart and disciplined, who has put together a good political career and a terrific presidential campaign. But there’s not much audacity of hope there. There’s the calculation of ambition, and the construction of artifice, mixed in with a dash of deceit — all covered over with the great conceit that this campaign, and this candidate, are different. …

Roger Simon thinks Obama’s turning into an ordinary narcissistic political creep. And, McCain is attracting attention.

John Derbyshire says Obama is …

… toast. He may yet get the Democratic nomination, but tens of millions of Americans who are neither (a) black nor (b) guilty white liberals are simply appalled that Obama would revere a guy like Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, whatever the particularities of which services he did and didn’t attend. It defies belief that Obama knew this man for all that time, intimately enough to have him supervise at the Obama wedding and the children’s baptisms, yet did not know that Wright is a white-hating, America-hating crank. Who on earth believes this?

The MSM can’t smother this, not in the age of the web, though they are trying mightily.

Jennifer Rubin posts on Wright.

Juan Williams hit the nail on the head during his appearance on Fox News Sunday. He explained the importance of the Reverend Wright issue . (It is worth watching just for the reaction shots of the other Fox commentators, who can only observe in awe and stifle the urge to interrupt while Williams is on his roll). This goes to “character and judgment,” Williams explains, because we now can see that Obama was playing games on the race question. He exploited, in other words, his connection to Reverend Wright when it was to his advantage in the past, but is now playing to the public’s yearning for racial unity, since it better serves his presidential ambitions. For bonus points, Williams explains how the brand of noxious black nationalism and paranoia exemplified in Wright’s sermons leads to statements like Michelle Obama’s. …

Does Owl Gore know England will have a white Easter?

… Conditions will be worst in Scotland and northern England but below-freezing temperatures and a sprinkling of snow are possible even in the South East – alongside strong winds and driving rain. Western regions, especially the South West, should have clearer skies but freezing conditions at night. …

Or that Montreal is about to set a snow record?