13 It came about the next day that Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood about Moses from the morning until the evening.

14 Now when Moses' father-in-law saw all that he was doing for the people, he said, "What is this thing that you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge and all the people stand about you from morning until evening?"

15 Moses said to his father-in-law, "Because the people come to me ^(A)to inquire of God.

16 "When they have a ^(B)dispute, it comes to me, and I judge between a man and his neighbor and make known the statutes of God and His laws."

17 Moses' father-in-law said to him, "The thing that you are doing is not good.

18 "^(C)You will surely wear out, both yourself and these people who are with you, for the task is too heavy for you; ^(D)you cannot do it alone.

19 "Now listen to me: I will give you counsel, and God be with you. You be the people's representative before God, and you ^(E)bring the disputes to God,

20 ^(F)then teach them the statutes and the laws, and make known to them ^(G)the way in which they are to walk and the work they are to do.

21 "Furthermore, you shall select out of all the people ^(H)able men ^(I)who fear God, men of truth, those who ^(J)hate dishonest gain; and you shall place these over them as leaders of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties and of tens.

22 "Let them judge the people at all times; and let it be ^(K)that every major dispute they will bring to you, but every minor dispute they themselves will judge So it will be easier for you, and ^(L)they will bear the burden with you.

23 "If you do this thing and God so commands you, then you will be able to endure, and all these people also will go to their place in peace."

24 So Moses listened to his father-in-law and did all that he had said.

-Exodus 18:13-24

If a tree falls over in a forest and nobody is present to hear it, does it make a sound?  I had never seen a matching political equivalent of that axiom - until now:

Democrat John Edwards is exiting the presidential race Wednesday, ending a scrappy underdog bid in which he steered his rivals toward progressive ideals while grappling with family hardship that roused voters' sympathies but never diverted his campaign, The Associated Press has learned.

The two-time White House candidate notified a close circle of senior advisers that he planned to make the announcement at a 1 p.m. EST event in New Orleans that had been billed as a speech on poverty, according to two of his advisers. The decision came after Edwards lost the four states to hold nominating contests so far to rivals who stole the spotlight from the beginning — Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.

The former North Carolina senator will not immediately endorse either candidate in what is now a two-person race for the Democratic nomination, said one adviser, who spoke on a condition of anonymity in advance of the announcement.

May I make a brutally frank observation?  Well, tough, I'm putting it out here anyway.  When Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer returned a year ago, any good, loving, compassionate husband in Opie's position would have set aside his own political ambitions and focused on caring for his wife.  Instead, Edwards, knowing that his would be an uphill fight for the Democrat nomination even if Mrs. Clinton wasn't in the race, chose to use his wife's medical condition as a campaign prop - playing the sympathy card, as it were.  Not, evidently, without Mrs. Edwards' consent, but it's still precisely the sort of unspeakably tacky ploy one would expect from an ambulance-chaser of Opie's bottom-feeding calibre.

Of course, it didn't work, and the one-trick silk pony has finally taken the hint.

Will it have a big impact on the Donk race?  Admiral Ed thinks so.  I'm not nearly as convinced.  Even at this point in the process, with the Rodham-Obama polls narrowing, the combined delegate count of Opie and the Kennedys' newest "adopted son" still falls short of Mrs. Clinton's total, and that's without her Michigan and Florida delegates (which, mark my words, WILL be counted and seated at their convention this summer).  True, with Edwards gone, the anti-Hillary sentiment can fully coalesce around Obama; but I don't think there's nearly as much of it as Ed believes there is, a reality that will be made garishly apparent next Tuesday.

The one thing that could make Opie's departure actually relevant is if he would endorse Obama.  That would release his handful of delegates to him and give a formal anti-Hillary direction to his campaign's suspension.  There has been a rumor this week that Edwards would do just that, allegedly in exchange for a promise of being Obama's attorney-general.  Now maybe that's crap, or maybe Obama is keeping that offer close to the vest, or maybe part of the deal is that the two men won't spring that until later in the campaign if B.O. needs it.  But as it stands now, Opie delegates can scatter wherever they wish, and I wouldn't bet against a majority of them winding up in Senator Clinton's column.

He says it's back to Habitat For Humanity for him.  And, you know, six-figure speaking gigs and working for hedge funds and making preparations to take over the Justice Department a year from now, if all goes well.  We'd probably know more about that if there was anybody around him to listen.

1 Then I saw ^(A)a new heaven and a new Earth; for ^(B)the first heaven and the first Earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.

2 And I saw ^(C)the holy city, ^(D)new Jerusalem, ^(E)coming down out of heaven from God, ^(F)made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.

3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, ^(G)the Tabernacle of God is among men, and He will ^(H)dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them^[a], 4 and He will ^(I)wipe away every tear from their eyes; and ^(J)there will no longer be any death; ^(K)there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; ^(L)the first things have passed away."

5 And ^(M)He who sits on the throne said, "Behold, I am ^(N)making all things new " And He said, "Write, for ^(O)these words are faithful and true."

6 Then He said to me, "^(P)It is done.  I am the ^(Q)Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end ^(R)I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the ^(S)water of life without cost.

7 "^(T)He who overcomes will inherit these things, and ^(U)I will be his God and he will be My son.

-Revelation 21:1-7

Or, in other words, how in the blue hell can the Benedict Arnold of the Republican Party possibly be its presumptive presidential nominee?

Call it the "perfect storm".  Let's review, shall we?

1) Rudy Giuliani and John McCain are annointed by the Enemy Media as the GOP front-runners a year ago.

2) McCain commits (apparent) political suicide with the "shamnesty" debacle and drops off the presidential radar screen.

3) Giuiliani extends his "Let's agree to disagree" social issues olive branch to evangelical voters last spring, restating his support for abortion on demand and homosexual special rights but agreeing not to make a point of contention out of it in favor of emphasizing areas of agreement like the economy and the "War on Terror".

4) By late summer/early fall evangelicals still refuse to be reconciled to Giuliani and make loud noises of bolting the GOP if Rudy is the nominee.

5) Those noises finally subside, only to metamorphize into the sudden ascension of the heretofore moribund candidacy of one ex-Arkansas Governor "Rev'rund" Mike Huckabee, whom we soon learn is the "anti-Rudy" - strongly conservative on social issues, left of center on just about everything else.

6) The Iowa Caucuses come first, and they just happen to be the perfect soil for Huck's brand of "populist" flapdoodle.  Huckles wins at the direct expense of the man who all but lived in Iowa for months and one of the two men around whom conservative support could have unified: Mitt Romney.

7) Having been upset in Iowa, the media meme of Romney's campaign being "in trouble" is born.  Which makes the "maverick" nature of the next contest - the New Hampshire Primary - the worst possible for Romney, who centered his entire stategy around winning the first two "bellweather" states.  With Huckles blocking for him in Iowa, the resurrected Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Queeg, upsets Romney in New Hampshire, giving the former Massachusetts governor an "oh-fer"

8) New Hampshire gives McCain instant credibility, and the Enemy Media's love for him guarantees that there'll be no effort to bulldoze him to the sidelines.  The meme is now that Romney "has" to win Michigan or he's "finished".

9) Romney wins Michigan, thus keeping the press sharks temporarily at bay.  But the next campaign stop (South Carolina) plays right back into Huckabee's wheelhouse, sucking away support that might have gone to Romney and once again clears the way for McCain to triumph and regain the perception advantage.

10) Florida thus became Mitt Romney's "second Michigan".  A contest in which, with Fred Thompson out of the race and Giuliani finally getting into the game to challenge McCain for Rockefelleroid "moderates," Romney should have had the upper hand.  Instead, the self-inflicted debility of Rudy's inactivity over the past month crippled him too much in his designated "firewall" state, and McCain steamrolled right over him.  That made Huck's equally unimpressive total just enough to deny Romney the "game"-tying score he needed to survive.

The net result?  To this point in the Republican primary campaign the usually dominant conservative vote has been split between Romney/Thompson and Huckabee, while the minority Rockefelleroid "moderate" vote has unified around McCain.  And now that Giuliani is effectively out of the race, there's nobody left to compete with "Sailor" for those country club blue blood votes.  Yet Huckles, despite being in the exact same circumstance as Rudy, is giving no indication that he's exiting.  Which means that as long as that remains the case, the Reagan Coalition will remain split, and McCain will have a smooth, straight, unimpeded path to the GOP nomination.

That's not to say that in a three-man race McCain could go over the top in the delegate count on his own.  By my latest estimate, the Supreme Chancellor would fall thirty delegates short of the 1,191 needed to clinch. But that's where Huckles comes in.  If he stays in the race until the combined number of his and McCain's delegates surpasses that magic number, he can then quit, endorse "Sailor," and the race is over.  In exchange, say, for the veep slot on McCain's ticket.

It'd be the ultimate backroom deal.  And it could end this race in as little as the next two weeks.

How does that grab you, my fellow conservatives?  The two biggest pariahs in the GOP field, the two-headed destroyer of the Goldwater/Reagan/Bush legacy, as your 2008 Republican presidential ticket.

Not that it'll make any difference, but I'll offer, once again, this piece of well-intentioned advice to my wayward evangelical brethren: Pull your heads out of your asses, drop Huckles like leprosy, and get behind Mitt Romney before it's too late.  Trust me, you'd rather have a Mormon in the White House than a man who hates us with a passion worthy of...well, Hillary Clinton.  To say nothing of bearing the stigmatic irony of letting the worldly temptation of identity politics inflict two bane of evangelicals on us for the price of one.  Talk about a "blue plate special" from hell.

"Too late" is next Tuesday.  Beyond that there's no getting back the immensity that is about to be lost for years and years to come.

UPDATE: My, but the McCainiacs are such gracious winners, dontcha think...?

7 As John's disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: "What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 8 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear fine clothes are in kings' palaces. 9 Then what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is the one about whom it is written: " 'I will send my messenger ahead of You, who will prepare Your way before You.'^[a] 11 I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 12 From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it. 13 For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John. 14 And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah who was to come. 15 He who has ears, let him hear.

16 "To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others: 17" 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.' 18 For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, 'He has a demon.' 19 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and "sinners." ' But wisdom is proved right by her actions."

-Matthew 11:7-19

....Well, y'see, the outcome of the Florida Republican Primary could be influenced by a few Mcmis-steps over the past couple of days.

In addition to John McCain's evidently successful smear of Mitt Romney as an anti-war agitator on Saturday, there's another indiscrete red flag about the judicial nomination thinking of a President McCain:

More recently, Mr. McCain has told conservatives he would be happy to appoint the likes of Chief Justice John Roberts to the Supreme Court. But he indicated he might draw the line on a Samuel Alito, because "he wore his conservatism on his sleeve."

First of all, that's a distinction without a difference.  I don't recall any marked differences in the expressed judicial philosophy of Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Alito at their respective confirmation hearings.  Indeed, I've never heard or read of any such distinction between the two ever being mentioned, so I have little or no idea what McCain was talking about.

Second, what on Earth would be wrong with one's own nominee "wearing on his/her sleeve" their judicial philosophy, even if Justice Alito had gone out of his way to do so?  Is that something they should be ashamed of?  Is McCain ashamed of it?  Doesn't that suggest that he wouldn't be inclined to select constitutionalists to the federal bench, even if he was inclined to disturb inter-Branch "comity" with his "good friends" across the aisle?

Asked to clarify his Alito comment, McCain told Byron York the following:

I asked about the "wore his conservatism on his sleeve" line. "I'm proud of people who wear their conservatism on their sleeves, because they have to have a clear record of strict adherence to the Constitution," McCain told me. "Remember, in all my remarks, I've said, look, we're not going to take somebody's word for it. You have to have a clear record of adherence to the Constitution, a strict interpretation of the Constitution. I have said that time after time after time."

"And maybe as an aside, why would I say anything derogatory about somebody like that? What would be the point, after working so hard to get not only those two confirmed, but the Gang of 14 ­ which I know is controversial ­ but our record of getting those judges confirmed that the president nominated, I'm still proud of."

The Admiral thinks the first paragraph is "a better explanation" even if it doesn't really explain anything.  I consider it to be pure obfuscation.  What astounds me is the second graf, where "Sailor" makes the unfathomable blunder of bringing up the Gang of 14/memo of understanding debacle unsolicited.

Upon further review, though, perhaps that second graf is explanatory of McCain's earlier remark about Justice Alito, in a "freudian slip" sense.  For me it confirms what I already believe: that a McCain White House would populate Olympus and lower courts with David Souter clones and outright judicial imperialists, and take immense pleasure in the spluttering outrage of conservatives this serial shivving would trigger.  No Samuel Alitos (or John Roberts', either, really) need apply.

Concurrently, at a Florida campaign event on Sunday, Lord Queeg was asked point-blank about Juan Hernandez, his "Hispanic Outreach Director" as well as a George Soros-connected former Mexican cabinet officer and probable designate for Homeland Security Secretary in a McCain administration.

Lest this be mere heresay, here's Hernandez's border erasure extremism in his own words:

Now here is McCain's answer to Joan, the Florida woman who asked him about Mr. Hernandez:

Sounds like more of the same obfuscatory "trust me" BS.  That was also Joan's impression in an email to Double-M:

John McCain answered that he supported Juan Hernandez because he holds the same views as he (McCain) on other issues. He says that he determines his positions and Hernandez agrees with him, not the other way around. He appeared to be unaware of the specific positions of Hernandez that I related.

I would say I got a non-answer.

Because McCain didn't want to answer, because this particular bit of "straight talk" would have been politically lethal with his Florida GOP-only audience.

So.  On two issues of purportedly critical importance to Republican voters - reconstitutionalizing the courts and border security - John McCain is, to prissify it, "out of step" with his own party.  By several parsecs.  So he's got no chance today, and Mitt Romney will win going away, right?

Um, no.  Here is my final polling composite, based on a one-week look-back:

McCain 30.1%, Romney 29.4%, Giuliani 14.7%, Huckabee 13.1%

Annnnd a one-day look-back:

McCain 32.5%, Romney 31.5%, Giuliani 13.5%, Huckabee 12.8%

No matter which way you slice it, a Republican electorate that opposes bankrupting the country over global warming hysteria, favors tax cuts, wants the borders controlled, the courts de-imperialized, and free speech restored is, in Florida, about to narrowly award all its delegates to a man who gleefully disagrees with them on all of it.

Admiral Morrissey is picking Romney by three.  I can only hope that he sees a trend I'm missing, and not just engaging in Hewittesque wishful thinking.

UPDATE: McCain's margin of victory....?

UPDATE II: Been monitoring the Admiral's live blog of the Florida results.  Unfortunately, the numbers I cited above are not lying.

And thus, conservatives' last firewall - that McCain had never won a closed primary - is now officially breached.  With Florida's fifty-seven delegates, Sailor takes the overall delegate lead over Romney 97-74.  Combined with Rudy Giuliani's imminent endorsement of the Sith Master, the latter has all the momentum going into Super-Duper Tuesday. 

John McCain is the undeniable front-runner, and almost certainly the 2008 Republican presidential nominee. 

The Republican Party as we have known it for a generation - the party of Reagan, the party of Gingrich, the party that, for a few bright, shining years was the ruling majority party in the United States of America - has, in the space of fifteen catastrophic months, returned to its pre-Goldwater rump entity irrelevance.  Because a McCain nomination will lead to an unparalleled disaster in November, as conservatives, mark my words, WILL stay home in droves.  And for the first time in my lifetime, I have been functionally disenfranchised before Groundhog's Day.

Nelson Rockefeller has finally gotten his revenge.

{sigh}

Well, there'll be plenty of time to mourn my party's unfathomable folly over the next nine months.  At least I can analyze the McCain-Rodham "race" free of the handicaps of a rooting interest (unless they can somehow BOTH lose) - if I can muster the will to give a damn, and suspend my disbelief that either outcome will be better than the other.

Or maybe I'll convert this site to a quilting blog or something....

You know, that black guy from Illinois who suddenly reminds him so much of his big brother:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy delivered a highly prized endorsement for Senator Barack Obama yesterday as well as a pointed rebuttal to the main lines of attack used against him by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, Bill Clinton.

In a clear reference to the criticism repeated by the Democratic senator from New York and the former president that Obama (D-IL) does not have the experience for the White House, Kennedy - borrowing one of the Clintons' favorite phrases - said Obama is "ready to be president on Day One."

He also rebutted their contention that Obama has been inconsistent in his opposition to the war in Iraq and said Obama represents a new era and a rejection of "old politics."

Translation: Obama isn't a Clintonoid, and thus by backing him the Massachusetts Manatee can stick it to Boris and Natasha, whom he's never forgiven for taking the Democrat Party away from him.  And, you know, Obama's black, a fact that La Clinton Nostra would be trumpeting too if he were on their payroll.

What puzzles me is why Uncle Teddy's endorsement is considered "prized".  Sure, I know, why would a conservative Republican think highly of anything coming out of ol' Tyrannosaurus Sex's mouth (besides the comedic value of his emblematic streamer of drool when he's passed out in one of his martini comas)?  But I can't figure why even rank & file Dems would care who "Mr. Kennedy" endorsed, particularly since his rivarly with the Clintons is well known.

But the Enemy Media's enthusiasm was real, and it was spectacular (h/t MRC):

The broadcast network anchors and reporters were almost as giddy as Barack Obama over liberal Democrat Ted Kennedy's endorsement of the presidential candidate. ABC, CBS and NBC all led Monday night with it and ABC's David Wright adopted campaign slogans as he enthused about how "today the audacity of hope had its rendezvous with destiny. The Kennedy clan anointed Barack Obama a son of Camelot." CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric teased, "Passing the torch: Barack Obama is tapped as the candidate to continue the Kennedy legacy." NBC's Lee Cowan, who earlier this month conceded "it's almost hard to remain objective" when covering Obama, showed he also has a soft spot for the Kennedys as he radiated over how "the endorsement brought the Kennedy mystique to this campaign, not in a whisper, but a roar." Viewers then got a soundbite of Kennedy yelling during the event at American University. Later, on Nightline, Terry Moran trumpeted the "new son of Camelot" and soon hailed how "the political world was transfixed by the spectacle of the most powerful Democratic family of the 20th century christening a new torch bearer for the 21st." David Wright championed the "merging ideals from two different eras."

....Sorry, I'm trying to picture the expression on Joe Kennedy's face if somebody had told him that a vote-hustling "Negro" from the streets of Chicago would someday be considered his adopted son.  I'm also trying to picture a "Kennedy mystique" that doesn't involve a girl, a slippery bridge, and a car at the bottom of a river.  Historically speaking, that "mystique" died forty years ago this June with big brother Robert.  Teddy's own ill-fated presidential run in 1980 ought to have made that abundantly clear.

But I guess old liberal archtypes die hard.  Although I could have sworn that the same meme was trotted out and flogged to death back in 1992 about Mr. Bill, before the Donk Old Guard EMK represents realized the Arkansas Mafia was playing for keeps.

If you're looking for a Democrat "civil war," don't follow the Rodham-Obama race, but rather the so-called "gang of four" (if you can hold your breath that long) (h/t Newmax Insider Report):

Senator Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination should come as no surprise to readers of Newsmax’s Insider Report, which has disclosed Kennedy’s membership in the so-called “Gang of Four” Hillary Clinton haters.

The Four — Kennedy, John Kerry, Howard Dean, and Al Gore — have pledged to stop Hillary from getting the nomination, and each has his own reason for detesting Clinton.

Newsmax has learned from Democratic sources that Gore is said to be waiting until after the primaries on Super Tuesday, February 5 to enter the fray with an endorsement.

Of what possible worth could Al Gore's endorsement be?  Didn't he endorse Howard Dean in 2004?  Boy, that sure propelled Dr. Demented into the Oval Office, didn't it?

Fat Albert's endorsement is irrelevant for much the same reason that he lost his White House bid in 2000 and scapegoats the Clintons for that bitter defeat: he just doesn't matter, and is tireless in proving it in perpetuity.  Ditto John Kerry and the aforementioned Chairman How, whose fingerpointing at the Clintons for campaign sabotage is at least actually justified.  Of course, so was the sabotage, since Hillary wanted to have a nationally viable platform for her own presidential run this year, which wouldn't have been the case after "Howlin' Howie" had ridden it straight into the friggin' ground.

Personal animus is the real reason for the "gang of four"'s glomming onto Obama.  They could always just come out and admit it - certainly nobody on the Right would blame them for it - but they wouldn't be what they are if they did that.  So they have to invent preposterous cover explanations:

As the Insider Report has disclosed on several occasions beginning in June 2005, Kennedy and Gore have been disgusted by Bill and Hillary Clinton’s moderate politics.

Both were disturbed by Hillary’s hawkish stance on the Iraq war. Early on in the 2008 race, Kennedy had even endorsed Kerry for the 2008 nomination....

As the Insider Report disclosed in July 2006, Dean supporters were unhappy with Clinton’s stand on Iraq and her cautious shift to the center.

"Moderate politics"?  "Hawkish stance on the Iraq war"?  "Cautious shift to the center"?  Hillary Clinton?

Ladies and gentlemen, you know they don't believe that.  And they know we know they don't believe that.  And you know they know we know they don't believe that.  These people were the Clintons' biggest cheerleaders throughout the nineties when Sick Willie was effortlessly running rings around the plodding, hopeless, hapless GOP.  And the best part is, once Mrs. Clinton clinches the Donk nomination, they'll be their biggest cheerleaders again.

You almost wonder if Obama realizes how ancillary a pawn he is in this fratricidal feud.  And that it's going to end up making him the next vice president of the United States.

Or perhaps he's ahead of all of them, secure in the knowledge that he has either a fast track (if he wins this time) or slow track (as Hillary's heir apparent) to the White House, and can sit back and watch all these uppity white people fighting over a vote-hustling "negro" from the streets of Chicago.

It'd be enough to make "Papa Joe" proud of his new favorite son.

So claims Hillary Clinton:

Well, she does ride around on a broom, after all.  We can't turn around and deny the possibility that she's got a crystal ball stashed someplace.

My guess would be in her derriere, but that'd just be an unconfirmed rumor....

10 Finally, be strong in the LORD and in His mighty power. 11 Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. 12 For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. 13 Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. 14 Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, 15 and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. 16 In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. 18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints.

-Ephesians 6:10-18

Case in point: John McCain's laughably exaggerated charge on Saturday that Mitt Romney is an anti-war zealot:

John McCain accused Mitt Romney of wanting to withdraw troops from Iraq, drawing immediate protest from his Republican presidential rival who said: "That's simply wrong and it's dishonest, and he should apologize."

I say "exaggerated" rather than "false" because the Romney statement from last April to which "Sailor" refers wasn't exactly a rousing endorsement of the Surge.  More of a preliminary bet-hedging gesture in case the Petraeus strategy didn't work.  But never did the Mittster ever call for withdrawal from Iraq, then, since, or now.

The blogospheric and media backlash against McCain's skittish attempt to change the subject from the economy (where he is at a significant, lead-eroding disadvantage leading into tomorrows pivotal Florida Primary) has been prompt and immense.

The pro-McCain Brother Meringoff:

John McCain has accused Mitt Romney of having "wanted to set a date for withdrawal [from Iraq] that would have meant disaster." McCain apparently is referring to a statement Romney made last April in which he assumed President Bush and the head of the Iraqi government might discuss timetables and troop levels in Iraq. I don't think Romney's statement fairly can be construed as advocating setting a date for our withdrawal.

The pro-McCain Bill Bennett:

Bennett's been a McCain defender, certainly more than other conservative radio-talk-show hosts. On CNN, he just called today's Iraq hit on Romney "below the belt" and said "honor has been McCain's watchword" — he should admit that was wrong to do.

Evidently Double-B hasn't still figured out the real McCain yet - though it looks like he's beginning to.

The pro-McCain New York Times:

"The charge appears to be misleading."

NRO Editor Rich Lowry:

As I've said before, McCain deserves a large part of the credit for the surge—he pushed to have it implemented both in his public advocacy and his behind-the-scenes lobbying of the Bush administration, and he has been its foremost defender. Romney wasn't as enthusiastic about it and in his body language, if nothing else seemed ready to distance himself from it if it failed. This is a perfectly legitimate issue for McCain to raise, and he has, by saying things like Romney was "looking at his shoes" while he was putting it all on the line for the surge.

But that doesn't justify the rank dishonesty of his attack on Romney over the weekend. It's so shamelessly unfair, it's the kind of thing you'd expect of Bill Clinton attacking Barack Obama. Clearly, McCain wants to change the topic from the economy. And since he's suffering from his "straight-talk" about his relative lack of knowledge of and interest in the economy, he's trying to compensate with the opposite of straight talk—blatant distortions—about Romney's record.

As Ramesh notes (citing Paul Mirengoff), McCain may feel entitled to this cheap shot given his own courage on the surge. He also might think that his press coverage is so adoring that he can get away with anything, and Romney is so firmly branded as a "flip-flopper" that any charge will stick. But I think something else is going on. McCain has always given the impression of reserving his true scorn for his enemies within his own party. I have a hard time imagining McCain making this kind of dishonest accusation against a Democrat—it would be uncivil and dishonorable. But making it against a fellow Republican running to his right? No problem. On top of this, there's the personal animosity McCain feels toward Romney. Indeed, in one of those debates in New Hampshire, McCain spoke warmly of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at the same time he was giving off waves of hatred toward Romney.

How will this play? If there's one thing we know about late-breaking events in this primary season, it's that it's impossible to know how they'll play. But I wouldn't be surprised if it back-fires on McCain. The attack succeeded in the sense that it tipped the conversation back toward Iraq, but at a potential cost to McCain. His most important political asset is his political character, his reputation for truth-telling and honorable politics. This dishonest low-blow—if it continues to get attention in the closing hours—could chip away at that asset.

CNN's Jeff Toobin:

Suffice it to say, if there were still a few days to a week left until the Florida vote, Darth Queeg would be in serious trouble.

However, that's not the case.  That election is tomorrow, and from the weekend polling trend, it appears that "the old McCain of 2000" re-emerging had just the effect the Arizona "maverick" was looking for:

1/26/08: Romney 27.0%, McCain 26.9%, Giuliani 17.3%, Huckabee 15.0%

1/27/08: McCain 28.8%, Romney 27.9%, Giuliani 15.8%, Huckabee 13.6%

That trend is also reflected in the Rasmussen poll that Praetor Hewitt cites:

1/26/08: Romney 33%, McCain 27%.

1/27/08: McCain 31%, Romney 31%

Bottom line is, McCain smeared Romney as a defeatist, and overnight he surged six points in the most accurate poll and a point in the overall composite, the Sunday and Monday newscycles are focused on this and not the economy, and despite his best efforts, Romney will have virtually no time to recover from it.

Everybody knows the term "swiftboated" from the truth about John Kerry's real Vietnam service record coming out during the 2004 general campaign.  But there really should be a term for a sucker-punch on the eve of an election; how about "DUI'd"?  Remember when the thirty-year-old DUI story came out about George W. Bush five days before the 2000 election, and his mid-single-digit lead collapsed into that infamous photo-finish - centered, appropriately enough, on Florida?  That "gotcha" caused undecideds to break three to one for Al Gore.

In close elections, it doesn't take much to swing the results one way or the other.  If John McCain pulls out the Florida Primary tomorrow and seizes the mantle of GOP front-runner, he'll have his near-perfectly timed DUI-ing of Mitt Romney to thank for it.

Will it hurt him on Super Tuesday?  C'mon, by that time the Enemy Media will have either buried McCain's smear so deep the worms won't find it, or they'll be playing it up and flogging Romney as traitor right alongside him, while playing down the economy by crediting "Hillary Clinton's stimulus idea" (that President Bush me-too'd, of course) with having saved us from a recession.

Or perhaps it will backfire and Romney will win.  I was about ready to count on it.

Sadly (and you have no idea how much, but will with a certainty find out), not anymore.

1 ^[a] Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong; 2 for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.

You know the recent reports that the abortion rate has plummetted in recent years?  And how the pro-life movement has celebrated this news?

Here's the other shoe (h/t Newsmax email insider report):

I guess in the "medical community," they can say, "We're all aborticians now!"

Here, then, is a bona fide plank of the Clinton legacy.  By taking the "middle man" out of the process - or at least drastically reducing his/her visibility - via the pushing and fast-tracking of RU-486, the Clintonoids have placed the moral onus for killing unborn children squarely on the shoulders of expectant mothers, thereby making moral condemnation of this abortion metamorphosis an even bigger PR nightmare for pro-lifers and ensuring that countless millions more defenseless children are sliced, diced, burned, and dismembered in complete and utter invisibility.

Anybody still want to make the claim that votes don't have consequences?  Take two of these and call me in the morning.

44 "No one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: 'They will all be taught by God.'^[a] Everyone who listens to the Father and learns from Him comes to Me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the One Who is from God; only He has seen the Father. 47 I tell you the truth, he who believes has everlasting life. 48 I am the Bread of life. 49 Your forefathers ate the manna in the desert, yet they died. 50 But here is the Bread that comes down from heaven, which a man may eat and not die. 51 I am the living Bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread, he will live forever. This Bread is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."

52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?"

53 Jesus said to them, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 55 For My flesh is real food and My blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me, and I in him. 57 Just as the living Father sent Me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on Me will live because of Me. 58 This is the Bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this Bread will live forever."

-John 6:44-58

1 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Now you will see what I will do to Pharaoh: Because of My mighty hand he will let them go; because of My mighty hand he will drive them out of his country."

2 God also said to Moses, "I am the LORD. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob as God Almighty, ^[a] but by My name the LORD ^[b] I did not make Myself known to them. ^[c] 4 I also established My covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, where they lived as aliens. 5 Moreover, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are enslaving, and I have remembered My covenant.

6 "Therefore, say to the Israelites: 'I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. 7 I will take you as My own people, and I will be your God. Then you will know that I am the LORD your God, Who brought you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. 8 And I will bring you to the land I swore with uplifted hand to give to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob. I will give it to you as a possession. I am the LORD.' "

9 Moses reported this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their discouragement and cruel bondage.

-Exodus 6:1-9

Just as John McCain is frantically trying to repackage himself as a faux conservative for the Florida Republican-only electorate whose votes he has to have to qualify as bona fide GOP frontrunner, the New York Times spits out this endorsement like a brick:

Senator John McCain of Arizona is the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe. With a record of working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation, he would offer a choice to a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field.

We have shuddered at Mr. McCain’s occasional, tactical pander to the right because he has demonstrated that he has the character to stand on principle. He was an early advocate for battling global warming and risked his presidential bid to uphold fundamental American values in the immigration debate.

So in the eyes of the "paper of toilet," Republicans are a "small, angry fringe" (but the anti-war left is the epitome of comportment and civility), and John McCain will continue to shaft them on behalf of his "friends across the aisle" to advance the Democrat agenda.  He has the "character" to stand on left-wing principles like using the global warming hoax to collectivize and crash the economy and "uphold the fundamental American value" of inviting Mexico to colonize the continental United States.

On these grounds, Republicans in Florida and across the country - that "small, angry fringe" - should, according to the New York Times, nominate John McCain to be the Republican nominee for president in 2008.

And I'm to understand the "Grey Hag" wants McCain to win?

If the idea wasn't preposterous, I could almost wonder if they're on Mitt Romney's payroll.

UPDATE: Double-H and J-Ger are just as incredulous.

UPDATE II: Wow, do you think Darth Queeg is prouder of his "conservative record" or the New York Times endorsement?

UPDATE III: Latest Florida polling composite: McCain 25.3%, Romney 25.2%, Giuliani 18.2%, Huckles 15.0%

That was before the NYT endorsement and Romney's clear victory in last night's debate.

Point to ponder: If this trend continues through next Tuesay, will Darth Queeg's head explode?

UPDATE IV: Romney wastes no time, and dispenses with subtlety:

It’s time for Americans to take action to fight the efforts of anti-victory groups that are undermining the twilight struggle against Islamic Fundamentalism.  Some political leaders and newspapers have mustered the courage to brave the Left's vicious demagoguery and condemn the Enemy Media, Democrat Party, and its radical liberal puppeteers in MoveOn.org and their traitorous ilk for their outrageous attacks against American military leaders; most have not. Yet America and the forces of freedom are winning, and the dhimmist Fifth Column is losing.

But with now less than a year left in the Bush presidency and the near certainty of a Hillary Clinton succession, time for victory is running out.  And I don't mean just in Iraq.

We urge you to contact your senators and representatives and demand military action against Iran to keep nuclear weapons out of the mullahgarchy's hands.  Doing so will save the lives of countless Iranians, countless Jews, and countless Americans - including our men and women in uniform.

It is important to remember the sacrifices of our brave men and women stationed throughout the world make each day to defend our lives and our freedom.  We and Freedom’s Watch are honored to support their services and say thank you.

7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give Me a drink?" 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

9 The Samaritan woman said to Him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can You ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.^[a])

10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew the Gift of God and Who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him and He would have given you Living Water."

11 "Sir," the woman said, "You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can You get this living water? 12 Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?"

13 Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the Water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the Water I give him will become in him a spring of Water welling up to eternal life."

15 The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."

-John 4:7-15

Have you ever JIP'd (joined in progress) a debate group live-blog you didn't know was scheduled as the first question was about to be asked?  Welcome to my evening.

Here's my assessment, posted at Heading Right.

~  ~  ~

Romney was smooth as cream, in command, and yes, likeable.  Even if the emphasis hadn’t been on the economy, which greatly favored him, I’d have narrowly given him the “gold”.  As it was, Mitt took the night by a comfortable margin.

McCain was sedate, but it was clear that he was laboring to try and get around that little detail of having kicked the Republican base in their happy places at every opportunity for the past seven years.  Note to Lord Queeg: Cramming every answer with several insistances of having a “conservative” record and how “proud” you are of it doesn’t make it so.  The expression, “Methink thou dost protest too much” comes to mind.  Next time try losing your temper.  At least it’d be a better diversion.

Rudy had some good moments, but my lasting impression of his performance tonight didn’t leave any lasting impression.  He seemed to be following along in Romney’s wake on the economic questions.  Given the level he had to be at tonight to reverse his Florida slide over the past month, I don’t think he got it done.  On the other hand, he might have the inside track at being Romney’s attorney-general.

Huckles?  “Dandy Don” Merideth said it best: “Turn out the lights, the party’s over….”

And what was Ron Paul doing on that stage?

Steven Stark, actually.  As pipedreams go, his fantastical scenario of Senator Thompson emerging as the consensus nominee at a brokered GOP convention this summer is not implausible, provided all its numerous pre-conditions were to fall into place.  But any Fredhead who'd actually count on such a lark is so loosely grounded in reality that they probably were never a "Thompson enthusiast" in the first place.

And, of course, FDT would have to be amenable to the deal as well.  If this rumor about him running for governor of Tennessee in 2010 is valid, it tells me that he's already planning his 2012 presidential run and wouldn't want to be offered up as a sacrificial goat on Hillary's alter.

Yes, that would be highly reminiscent of Reagan running in 1980 after losing the GOP nomination in 1976.  Something tells me if Her Nib's first term unfolds as I expect it to, and she hasn't abolished the Constitution and canceled elections indefinitely by then, Fred '12 could have a very similar result.

Remember when Jim Geraghty stepped in it with Hugh Hewitt by writing that Mitt Romney is "odd"?  Now he's crossed the biggest dog in the right-wing punditocratic yard, and on one of his - and what should be every conservative's, including J-Ger - top hot buttons:

Rush Limbaugh is the King Leonidas of the conservative movement, but I'm struck by how regularly he jokes about the concept of global warming. A lot of his radio talk show brethren are in the same boat, saying day after day, 'hey, cold weather today. So much for global warming.'  The problem is, they're only preaching skepticism to the converted. The independents and the centrists and the soccer moms and everybody whose vote is needed in the general election is already convinced that it's happening. Whenever there's a big storm or unusual weather, they buy into it. If you put the finest skeptical scientists and researchers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Enterprise Institute into a room with a couple hundred Americans, and let them talk until they're blue in the face, I'm not sure how much you would move the dials.

J-Ger sounds rather defeatist, doesn't he?  R-Lim certainly thought so:

So the argument being advanced here by Mr. Geraghty is, don't argue whether it's true or not.  Accept the Democrat premise that it is true, accept the liberal premise that it is true and come up with better ideas.  This is like telling a defense lawyer that if you know that the jury thinks your client is guilty, just accept it and bargain for a lesser sentence.  That's not what good defense lawyers do.  They try to persuade the jury that they are wrong if they think somebody's guilty.  One of the things I consider my business to be here is persuasion in a lot of ways, not just your thoughts on things, not just your opinions, but if something is genuinely a hoax, and if it's a liberal-sponsored hoax, and if its purpose is to expand the role of government at the expense of liberty, what is happening to us that we say go ahead and accept the premise and come up with better ideas to fix the problem, when some of us are saying that the problem is manufactured and false.  This helped me to understand -- I don't know where Geraghty comes down on McCain, I don't know that, but it's so foreign to what I've always thought conservatives were about. 

I mean, let's accept every Democrat premise that people already accept. Let's accept that Wal-Mart is bad for America; let's accept that oil companies are bad for America, and let's try to convince people we've got a better way of punishing them.  What is this?

It is what Rockefeller Republicans call "pragmatism".  Don't bother fighting the greenstremists on principle; we've already lost, their neoBolshevik lies have become conventional wisdom, so just accept it and move on.  That is pretty much Geraghty's conclusion:

It seems this disagreement comes down to what constitutes, "conceding the issue." Rush contends that by acknowledging that climate change is happening and that humanity has a role, the right will have more or less lost the battle before it starts, and that the fight will inevitably lead to bigger, more powerful government, controlling the use of energy in this country, and all aspects of life that go with it. I would contend that any Republican candidate who says during a general election debate, "I believe that climate change is a hoax, and thus have no policies to address what I see as a fake problem" is toast.

I would point out one thing to J-Ger that he's omitting: "Any Republican candidate" who says during a general election debate that global warming is real, and man-made, and declares that the answer is to stop using fossil fuels cold-turkey - a slick-ified version of which is what Mrs. Clinton will be saying - will still be toast.  Why?  Because he'll be me-tooing the Democrats.  The track record of Republican candidates in national campaigns over the past eighty years who opt for Donk Lite instead of unashamedly (and even defiantly) championing conservatism is, you should pardon the expression, toast at the bottom of a compost heap.

This sort of argument should be familiar to anybody who's not a johnny-come-lately to political analysis.  It is, in fact, a recurring dynamic in election cycles in which the momentum is heavily with the Dems.  Even when it isn't, really.  Republican timidity on any issue made "controversial" by the Enemy Media is legendary.  Usually it centers around social issues.  Every four years Ann Stone's "Republicans For Choice" deploy insisting that the GOP's pro-life platform plank be expunged because it'll "alienate moderates and independents".  The plank is then left in place and ends up not being the detriment they claim.  Now it appears it'll be this global warming nonsense (particularly if McCain swindles his way to the nomination).  "Sailor" gives every appearance of being a True Believer, but even if Mitt Romney can save us from the Sith plot, some sort of GOP global warming capitulation is probably inevitable.

Of course, so is GOP defeat in November.  In all this analysis and ruminating and fulminating about the Republican race, that is the proverbial, well, elephant in the birdcage.  As is becoming one of my recurring themes, the sixteen year irrationality cycle has come 'round again in 2008, and as Geraghty himself has pointed out, this year's is a "credulous electorate" willing to buy into any snake oil, no matter how preposterous, if it'll give them "hope".  Not so much hope for anything, as much as against all the ersatz, media-hyped "crises" - e.g. global warming - that they've been brainwashed through sheer repetition into believing are just around the corner if we don't "do something."  Meanwhile, real such crises like a nuclear Iran and the looming insolvency of the major entitlements programs like Social Security and Medicare are never mentioned and are forbidden topics.

Most voters evidently do not want true "straight talk," which is one of the reasons that Fred Thompson is no longer in the race and John McCain is.  They want to be fed what their itching ears have been indoctrinated to hear, and in such an anti-intellectual, symbolism-over-substance environment, no Republican is going to win, even if he shaves his head, paints half his scalp green and gets an Al Gore tattoo on the other half.

In a way, I suppose I'm conceding most of J-Ger's point.  What I'm saying is that Rudy or Romney or McCain is going to be toast no matter what they say on whatever issue.  If the public has swallowed BS like global warming whole, with all the statist implications that come along with it, they will have to learn the hard way just what it is they've bought into.

One of J-Ger's emailers expressed the lesson thusly:

[V]oters support "action on climate change" so long as it is relatively cost free. Right now, being "green" means buying biodegradable disposable cups and feeling good about yourself. When it means tax hikes across the board and higher prices for everything you buy, they may suddenly conclude that putting their child through college is more important than feeling good about themselves and being approved by Al Gore.

Those tax hikes and higher prices and bigger government and energy restrictions are coming, gentlebeings.  President Rodham will make certain of it.  And, assuming that global warming indoctrination doesn't become so thorough that people resign themselves to such collectivist misery as the only way to avoid global disaster, they will rebel, 1994-style.  If and when that happens, how exactly will a Republican Party that surrendered to the global warming hysteria back in 2008 be situated to take advantage of it?

As a rule I'm not a subscriber to the "win by losing" argument, but I think this is an exception.  It is written, "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"  How much less so for a man, and a party, that forfeits his, and its, soul and gains nothing in return?  There will be another election cycle after this one, after all (assuming the Empress allows it).  Speaking unpopular truths may be Goldwater-in-'64-esque now, but in a few years the "toast" could well be in the other toaster.

UPDATE: More of a follow-up thought, actually.  I'm assuming that the master of the Campaign Spot is being sarcastic when he suggests that a Limbaugh-aligned Republican nominee would say, "I believe that climate change is a hoax, and thus have no policies to address what I see as a fake problem."  There are ways to phrase skepticism about global warming that are eminently and entirely reasonable.  How about, "There is no true consensus amongst climatologists as to the existence and/or magnitude of global warming and mankind's role in precipitating it.  The climate models are not yet sophisticated enough to accurately predict what conditions will be decades in the future.  Considering that we have already made significant strides in limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and that emerging economic powerhouses like India and China have not chosen to follow suit, I do not believe it is prudent or justified to impose drastic, economically debilitating measures such as my opponent has proposed until such time as the preponderance of the evidence clearly indicates it is justified to do so."  That statement doesn't call global warming a "hoax" and a "fake problem"; it simply (and perhaps even eloquently) states the facts: We don't know because the evidence one way or the other is inconclusive, and that's no grounds for regulating our country back to the Stone Age.

Of course, the Dems and the Enemy Media would demogogue any such truth-telling - much like Mr. Geraghty did, actually.  Perhaps that helps explain why he believes we should reward such hysterical demogoguery by capitulating to it.

Michelle Malkin sure as heck doesn't:

After spearheading a disastrous, security-undermining, illegal-alien amnesty bill last year with Teddy Kennedy, “straight-talking” GOP Senator John McCain claims he has seen the light. In TV appearances, he vows to put immigration enforcement first. On the campaign trail, he offers a perfunctory promise to strengthen border security and emphasizes the need to restore Americans’ trust in their government’s ability to defend the homeland.

“I got the message,” he told voters in South Carolina. “We will secure the borders first.”

But how can McCain cure citizens’ distrust when his own credibility on the issue remains fatally damaged? He doesn’t believe his own election-year spin. And he knows we know it. This is cynicism on steroids with a speedball chaser.

Not all of us have forgotten how the short-fused Arizona senator cursed good-faith opponents in his own party (“Fuck you!” and “chickenshit” were the choice words he had for Texas GOP Senator John Cornyn during a spat over enforcement provisions). Not all of us have forgotten that he voted against barring felons from receiving amnesty benefits under his plan. Not all of us have forgotten the underhanded, debate-sabotaging manner in which McCain, Kennedy, Lindsey Graham, and Harry Reid conspired to ram their package down voters’ throats.

His admission of the shamnesty failure is grudging and bitter. While he now tells conservative voters what they want to hear about the need to build the southern border fence, he takes a contemptuous tone toward physical barriers when talking to businessmen. “By the way, I think the fence is least effective,” he told executives in Milwaukee, according to a recent Vanity Fair profile. “But I’ll build the Goddamned fence if they want it.” Straight talk? Try hate talk.

If that's how he really feels about building a border fence - and it is - how are we supposed to take seriously his cynical, patently insincere gestures at mending fences with the conservatives whose votes he needs to win GOP-only Florida next Tuesday?

Remember as well that "Sailor" has never, in 2000 or thus far in 2008, been the top Republican vote-getter in ANY caucus or primary.  He took New Hampshire and Michigan eight years ago, and New Hampshire and South Carolina this time, on the strength of non-Republican votes in "open" contests.  Can he really hoodwink Florida 'Pubbies into believing that he's already the front-runner and cutting him a pass?

Looks like it's gonna be a photo finish.  The latest Florida polling composite has Mitt Romney passing Rudy Giuliani to come within two points of the Sith master: McCain 24.3%, Romney 22.1%, Giuliani 19.1%, Huckles 15.4%.  If you figure that Romney should pick up most Fredheads, and appears to be doing just that, you begin to see why the Intrade betting money is shifting towards the Mittster.

Five days doesn't seem like much.  But for Darth Queeg, the next such time bloc will be practically an eternity, in which, if all goes well, he watches helplessly as the GOP nomination, so tantalizingly close, slips inexorably out of his grasp once again.

3 We always thank God, the Father of our LORD Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, 4 because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints — 5 the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the Gospel 6 that has come to you. All over the world this Gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and understood God's grace in all its truth. 7 You learned it from Epaphras, our dear fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ on our^[a] behalf, 8 and who also told us of your love in the Spirit.

9 For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you and asking God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all spiritual wisdom and understanding. 10 And we pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the LORD and may please Him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, 11 being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, Who has qualified you^[b] to share in the inheritance of the saints in the kingdom of light. 13 For He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, 14 in Whom we have redemption,^[c] the forgiveness of sins.

-Colossians 1:3-14

One of those periodic moments when I get plucked from my dichotomous obscurity has happened again - and, in a way, I actually have John McCain to thank for it.

And, of course, Ed Morrissey, whose - what's the right word? - gentle analysis of the Supreme Chancellor's candidacy and chances at hornswaggling conservatives into getting behind it inspired a counterpoint from moi that earned the accolade of being mentioned in the same "fine bloggers" breath with Powerline's Brother Meringoff.  Guess all that brownnosing on Hard Starboard Radio wasn't a complete waste of time after all.

Today the Admiral posts his rebuttal in the context of illustrating the daunting task Darth Queeg faces in trying to smooch the right-wing faces in which he's been whizzing constantly for the past seven years:

Obviously, I disagree with JASmius, but he does have a point. McCain has created much of the bad blood with conservative pundits and activists, and he hasn't tried hard to soothe the ruffled feathers over the years.

He hasn't tried at all, until now, when he needs something from us.

I don't consider McCain "weaselly" at all, and in fact, it's his allergy to pandering that has caused most of his problems. Conservatives seem to love that when it comes to his positions on the Iraq war and foreign policy - especially his hard-line rhetoric about Iran - but certainly don't appreciate it when he scornfully disagrees with conservatives rather than liberals.

I suppose that we need to tie down a definition of "pandering".  Since the topic isn't Bill Clinton, we can eliminate the prostitution references.  That leaves this one:

To cater to the lower tastes and desires of others or exploit their weaknesses.

To whom is Senator McCain pandering?  Conservatives.  What weakness is he seeking to exploit?  Our horror at a Hillary Clinton presidency.  What is his selling point?  His purported "electability".  Where does the suggestion of his purported electability come from?  Hypothetical Rodham-McCain polling.  Who comes up with those numbers?  The liberal media.

Sounds like the proverbial bill 'o goods to me.

Indeed, it is with the press, and his "good friends" on the other side of the aisle that "Sailor" has cavorted for years, all the while scorning and shafting his fellow Republicans on issue after issue.  He didn't need anything from them, so one can only conclude that that was the company he desired to keep. (I think McCain would have taken up John Kerry on his running mate offer in 2004 had he not retained presidential ambitions of his own.)  Conservatives cannot be faulted for associating McCain with that company, and balking at demands that, in response to his supposed Damacus-Road-Reaganism, they become supinely "credulous" now that he seeks to do in Florida what he has never done in either of his presidential runs: win a "closed" (i.e. Republican-only) primary. 

The Arizona "maverick" is desperately trying to tell Florida Republicans what they want to hear so that he can use them to grab the "inevitability" mantle and coast through Super-Duper-Tuesday and onto the nomination.  Once he has that mantle in hand, the cultivating of the Right will end, and the McCain of McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy, McCain-Lieberman, and the Gang of 14 will return, cackling all the way to Minneapolis.

It's too late for that.  Rudy's social liberalism has been no secret for years, but he never went out of his way to rub evangelicals' faces in it, either.  That made it relatively simple for him to "agree to disagree" on social issues like abortion and gay rights and still remain a viable candidate with the base (other than with the Huckabeeans).  McCain, by gaping contrast, has made a second career out of being the self-proclaimed spoiler of most, if not every, high-priority conservative agenda plank, then going on the Sunday shows to grinningly collect all the coifed talking heads' slobbering accollades for it.  To call him a "conservative" after the past seven years is like calling Ted Kennedy a Catholic: maybe he was long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but he's been practicing a vastly different "faith" ever since.

There's an old saying: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."  Eight years ago, John McCain tried to fool us, and we didn't bite; ever since then he's inflicted one betrayal after another upon us for our perspicacity.  And now we're going "take the blue pill" and believe whatever he wants us to believe?

I'll believe that only when I see it.

But I will never accept it.

1 Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.

2 In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat — for He grants sleep to ^[a] those He loves.

3 Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from Him.

4 Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth.

5 Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.

-Psalm 127

It's official - the true conservative in the 2008 Republican presidential race is out:

Today I have withdrawn my candidacy for President of the United States. I hope that my country and my party have benefited from our having made this effort. Jeri and I will always be grateful for the encouragement and friendship of so many wonderful people.

If the party had wanted to benefit from Fred's candidacy, it would have nominated him.  That it looks to be turning to the Dark Side dismayingly suggests that it hasn't learned a thing from his efforts, and that if it ultimately does, the lesson will be a lot longer and hellish than anybody apparently realizes.

So be it.  Fred got in too late, but the truth is his campaign was the contemporary equivalent of somewhere between Ronald Reagan's 1968 and 1976 bids.  He was the right man, but he chose about the worse election cycle imaginable to run, in which everything he brought to the table - Reaganesque conservatism (and style), serious leadership, and more genuine "straight talk" than John McCain ever dreamed of - was the antithesis of what even Republican voters appear to want.

A GOP that was energized and motivated to go out this year and win, regardless of the odds, would not be flailing around between various shades of decades-obsolete Rockefeller liberalism.  It would know what it stood for, what it wanted to accomplish, where it came from and how it got where it is, where it wanted to go,and who could best take it there.  Maybe - probably - it still wouldn't win, but there'd have been the solace of having left everything "out on the field".  We'd lose, but we'd have no regrets - and no excuses.

The GOP that is is divided, demoralized, dazed, and dizzy.  Its "brand" is in the septic tank, and it stands on the brink of nominating its own Benedict Arnold and in so doing unraveling every last smidgen of the hard-won progress it has made from irrelevant rump entity to governing majority in my lifetime.  It is about to go from unified control of the federal government all the way back to irrelevant rump entity in the space of two years.

Could nominating Fred Thompson have averted that?  Again, probably not.  But we would at least not be forgetting, and willfully abandoning, who we are and what we stand for for the electoral equivalent of three magic beans.  And the foundation would still have been there for a near-term, 1994-like comeback.  After this campaign, though?  Fughedaboudit.

Our prayers are with Fred, Jeri, and their family, and for the recovery of his ill mother, as well as our gratitude for carrying the discarded Reagan mantle as best he could in a time when it was, and is, so short-sightedly unappreciated.  FDT and the GOP deserved so much better.

How much better will become excruciatingly apparent (barring a Romney triumph) over the course of the next few months and years.

UPDATE: Count me in, Dr. Shackleford.  With Fred's departure, where else but to Mitt's banner are we going to go?

UPDATE II: If Pat Ruffini's poll of Fredheads' second choices is accurate, FDT's withdrawal would transform the current Florida polling composite to: Romney 25.6%, McCain 23.9%, Giuliani 21.8%, Huckabee 17.1%.

The term "taking one for the team" comes to mind.

Believe it or not, I think E.J. Dionne has a point.  John McCain's biggest weakness is the huge reservoir of enmity and mistrust he's built up over the past seven years in the GOP base whose votes he is going to need to capture the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  He's wasted no opportunity to shaft his own party on its most valued conservative causes in no small part as retribution for being rejected eight years ago in favor of George W. Bush.  For a man of McCain's titanic (even for a U.S. senator) ego, that was an unforgiveable afront.  It was his turn, bleep it, and it was those blankety-blank right-wingers who denied it to him and handed it to that smirking, malapropositic frat boy instead.  Don't think for a moment that he's forgotten, much less forgiven, any of it.

From "Sailor's" two primary wins so far, it seems that there is a significant plurality of Republican voters who have - foolishly - forgotten and/or forgiven him.  But still not enough to relieve his dependency upon non-Republicans, who cannot ultimately skew him over the top in the preponderance of "closed" contests upcoming.  He's going to need to bamboozle more 'Pubbies to fully seize frontrunner status, and just as he needs to lurch right-ward in order to capture Florida, here comes Rudy Giuliani out of the nowhere in which he's been residing for the past two months ready to pounce on both the social issues ground McCain would be vacating (implicitly) to head off Huckabee and the economic policy ground toward which McCain is trying (explicitly) to tack.

That is a more formidable task, I think, than the Admiral thinks it is:

The major differences between McCain and the conservative base isn’t policy as much as it is tone....McCain has to make amends with the base on two policy issues, McCain-Feingold and McCain Kennedy.

Anybody paying attention to John McCain's gleeful policy heresies of the past seven years knows that policy and tone are, for him, two sides of the same coin.  And it isn't just on campaign finance reform and immigration amnesty that the "Arizona maverick" has burned down the reservation.  There's his classist opposition to the Bush tax cuts, his championing of environmental extremism while still Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, his "anti-torture" crusade that seeks to accord full constitutional rights to captured enemy combatants and kneecap efforts to gather critical intelligence needed to prevent terrorist attacks.  And dare any of us forget arguably McCain's biggest back-stab of all, the "Gang of 14" deal that nullified any attempt to terminate Senate Democrats' extra-constitutional filibusters of appellate court nominations.  In that one piece of spiteful backroom manuevering John McCain signed the death warrant for his party's Senate majority and displayed his faithlessness to the Constitution he wants to be sworn in to uphold.

And now that he needs the votes of that self-same Republican base that he has scorned for all these years, "Mr. Straight Talk" is pandering to them with all his weasely might.

Speaking for myself, it isn't so much that I don't like John McCain - though I do not have any affinity for pompous asses with volcanic tempers - as that I don't trust him.

Case in point:

Saturday night, the senator gave an uplifting and patriotic speech that highlighted America-first security and freedom against the jihadist enemy abroad and heavyhanded government at home. Focusing on conservative values and pro-growth economics, McCain defended the free market, low taxes, and small government.

In an interview McCain said he would make the Bush tax cuts permanent, cut the corporate tax, and restrain spending. On the so-called stimulus package, he said he would not support a larded up pork-barrel package. This is a well-balanced tax-and-spending-cut message. 

Nice words.  Wish I could believe them.  Wish I could believe that he has "recanted" on the McCain-Kennedy "shamnesty" that he's pushed with a zealot's fervor in consecutive congresses (the last such iconoclastic lib cause he championed so stubbornly?  McCain-Feingold).  But sorry, gentlebeings, I'm not buying it.  Seven (more than that, really) years of treacherous deeds are not outweighed by a reassuring speech and interview.  To me it is prima facie evidence of the utter, sizzling contempt in which he holds the Right that he thinks all he has to do is belch Reaganistic bromides in our direction the one time when he needs us and we'll swoon right onto his bandwagon.

We had better hope that there are still enough conservatives who haven't forgotten John McCain's chronic, deliberate, burr-up-the-saddle-ness to ensure that "Sailor"'s betrayals won't be rewarded with the prize he was rightly denied nearly a decade ago.  Otherwise we're headed for the biggest swindle of all - a general election heel (i.e. left) turn that will functionally disenfranchise the Right and delight his media pals - and one that, frankly, we'll deserve if we demonstrate, by nominating John McCain, that his contempt for us was thoroughly well-earned.

1 In you, O LORD, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame; deliver me in Your righteousness.

2 Turn Your ear to me, come quickly to my rescue; be my Rock of refuge, a strong Fortress to save me.

3 Since You are my Rock and my Fortress, for the sake of Your Name lead and guide me.

4 Free me from the trap that is set for me, for You are my refuge. 

5 Into Your hands I commit my spirit; redeem me, O LORD, the God of truth.

6 I hate those who cling to worthless idols; I trust in the LORD.

7 I will be glad and rejoice in Your love, for You saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul.

8 You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place.

-Psalm 31:1-8

Read the following quote very carefully.  Please let me know when you're finished:

Gaza hospitals will run out of drugs and fuel for generators within a few days unless Israel eases the border blockade it imposed to curb Palestinian rocket attacks, international organizations said on Monday.

You're done?  Good.  Now, does this make any sense at all to you?  Hamas maintains perpetual artillery fire into Israeli towns across the border from the Gaza Strip; the Israelis - rather than simply retake Gaza, eradicate Hamas, and be done with it, which is its own separate folly - seal off the Strip and attempt to starve Gazans into doing the IDF's fighting for them, and "international organizations" demand that Israel relent and resume subsidizing their bloodthirsty terrorist attackers.

I see head-scratching!  Excellent!  Now let's look at another quote:

Palestinian officials have warned the standoff could harm U.S.-spurred efforts with Israel to reach a peace deal this year. ...

Oh, really?  Golly, what a tragedy that would be, huh?  Without a "peace" deal with the enemy that continues to attack it militarily on a daily basis, where would the Jewish state be?  At war?

By "Palestinian officials" I assume is meant the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which, last I heard, was also an enemy of Hamas after the latter drove the former out of Gaza altogether in last summer's much-balleyhooed "civil war".  Logic would lead one to believe that Fatah, as a co-belligerent with Israel against Hamas, would have at least an obligatory level of sympathy for their "partners in peace" and direct condemnation at Hamas for provoking this "standoff".  Could it be that Fatah is not so antagonized by their Gazan counterparts as they led us to believe?  Could in fact Fatah and Hamas be playing the ultimate game of "Good Cop/Bad Cop", or the usual Palestinian "triangle offense" in order to once again manipulate the Bush Administration and the EUnuchs into bulldozing Israel into another capitulation?

Well, today the Israeli government lifted the Gaza blockade - "temporarily".  I think you can draw your own conclusions.

Please let me known when you're done.

....of things shortly to come:

President Hillary Rodham threatened on Sunday to take over farms or milk plants if owners refuse to sell their milk for domestic consumption and instead seek higher profits abroad or from cheese-makers.

With the country recently facing milk shortages, Rodham said "it's treason" if farmers deny milk to Americans while selling it across the border in Canada or for gourmet cheeses.

"In that case the farm must be expropriated," Rodham said, adding that the government could also take over milk plants and properties of beef producers.

"I'm putting you on alert," Rodham said. "If there's a producer that refuses to sell the product ... and sells it at a higher price abroad ... ministers, find me the proof so it can be expropriated."

Addressing her Cabinet, she said: "If the army must be brought in, you bring in the army."

Alright, this was Hugo Chavez' latest communistic pronouncement in Venezuela.  An equivalent directive has been issued to bankers in that country as well.  And yes, the Clinton Machine would be a lot slicker and more clever about the process in order to put it over here.

But leave no doubt that this process - the "Chavez Way" - is precisely what Mrs. Clinton has in mind for America.  It may take until her second term to begin actively implimenting it, but it's coming, one way or the other.

Is Barack Obama showing his youth and inexperience again?  It appears that he is losing sight of which Clinton he's running against:

Senator Barack Obama says the gloves are coming off against former President Clinton.

In an interview set to air Monday on Good Morning America, Obama says: "You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling. He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts -- whether it's about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.

"This has become a habit, and one of the things that we're going to have to do is to directly confront Bill Clinton when he's making statements that are not factually accurate."

Um, Senator, you just now discovered that Bill Clinton is a liar?  Son, if you're this slow on the uptake, what makes you believe you're qualified to run for dog-catcher, must less the presidency?

I can see the Clinton Machine press releases now: "Gangsta senator attacks poor, old man with weak heart; Senator Clinton weeps".

UPDATE: Hey, did you know that Senator Obama's middle name is "Hussein"?  The Clinton Machine appears to consider it awfully important:

Any Republican runs an ad like this, they'd be blistered as "Islamophobic".

Maybe Team Hillary is trying to prepare her running mate for the "Republican attack machine"'s presumed tactics in the fall.  Just remember that when the two of them are standing on stage in Denver this summer, clasped hands raised (with Mr. Bill in between raising them) and bleep-eating grins plastered on their faces.

UPDATE II: Maybe Obama is actually trying to do Sick Willie a favor in case a nearby microphone picks up his snoring:

See what happens when you deny a sex addict his intern fix?

First and foremost, let's remember that there are two other state nominating contests before next Tuesday's Florida Primary: the Louisiana and Hawaii Caucuses.  Just off the top of my head (I can't find any polling data for either one online), I'm picking Mike Huckabee to win the former and Mitt Romney to win the latter.  Assuming winner-takes-all in both, that would update the delegate count to: Romney 92, Huckles 76, McCain 38, Thompson 8, Giuliani 2.

Now, then, to my current Florida polling composite: McCain 23.3%, Giuliani 20.5%, Romney 19.2%, Huckles 16.7%, Thompson 8.7%.  So, currently, depending upon the size of the margin of error, it's either "Sailor" and Rudy, or "Sailor," Rudy, and Mitt, with the "maverick" holding the slight advantage.

RomneyIsGod's post-South Carolina spin is that Governor Romney is slightly ahead overall in the cumulative primary/caucus vote total and the Florida Republican electorate is an amalgam of all the primary/caucus states so far, so Romney should have the edge.  Plus there's one poll that bolsters this theory.  Preator Hewitt also highlights Mayor Giuliani's economic policy broadside at Senator McCain today.  And, lastly, he reminds us of what should be McCain's intractable weakness in "closed" contests with Republican-only electorates. 

I don't frequent Giuliani Central Hub much anymore, ironically in more or less direct proportion to Rudy's slow fade from the GOP presidential race up to now.  One of their number, The Dreaded Quinn Hillyer, actually threw a bone to us "Fredheads":

[H]ere is what I would do, politically, if I were Thompson: I would just lay low. Just wait. See what happens in Louisiana's caucuses tomorrow. See what happens in Florida next week. See who drops out of the race at some point. And then consider reviving my campaign, full force, once the field is narrower. The likelihood is that Thompson would win in a one-on-one contest vs. ANY of the remaining candidates, and he might even win pluralities in a three-way race. Even after Super Tuesday, there will still be nearly half of the delegates to be awarded. And, depending on what happens in Florida, the chances of a brokered convention look increasingly realistic (not yet LIKELY, but definitely more and more possible). If he enters the convention on a roll, having won several of the later contests, he could still emerge as a consensus choice.

Yeah, sure.  And if the New York Giants' charter flight crashed on the way to Arizona, my Seattle Seahawks might still get to represent the NFC in Super Bowl XLII as a "second alternate."  Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the sentiment.  But this scenario depends not just on a brokered convention, but one in which the McCainiacs and Huckabeeans haven't the delegates to strong-arm the sort of corrupt, back\-stabbing backroom deal that Darth Queeg is famous for.  More on that a little later.

And, from a quarter that has yet to pick a horse, the Admiral is tentatively picking Rudy to pull out Florida, an outcome that would leave the GOP race muddled but with Romney having a leg up delegate-wise going into the Super-Duper Tuesday "delegate hunt".

Given that I took today off, I had the time to work on my primary campaign spreadsheet and flesh out the "2008 GOP State-By-State Polls" tab with as much polling data as I could find online, and still plug ample data-less holes with educated guesses.  I also used a blanket winner-take-all assumption even though some states will have proportional delegate allocation, and kept the "Big Five" in the race for the duration.  This is a general, rule-of-thumb estimate, not a firm prediction.  Heck, I don't make those until the night before an election, and I'm not even going to be daft enough to try and call Florida before next Monday night/Tuesday morning.

Yet I still find it both intriguing and potentially very instructive in the difference the results in Florida could have on a brokered convention.

Here are the delegate totals I come up with if McCain wins Florida: McCain 658, Giuliani 555, Huckles 544, Romney 398, Thompson 211.

And if Rudy takes Florida: Giuliani 612, McCain 601, Huckles 544, Romney 398, Thompson 211.

What is the difference, you ask?  The combined McCain-Huckabee delegate total vis-a-vie the number needed to clinch the Republican presidential nomination.  Recall the possible cahootsedness between Darth Queeg and Darth Scudder.  If McCain doesn't catch fire as the "inevitable" frontrunner and his weakness in "closed" (i.e. GOP-only) primaries remains, and particularly if the twenty-two February 5th contests don't clarify anything, the likelihood of a brokered convention in Minneapolis this summer becomes an increasing certainty.  In that case, none of the candidates would have the minimum 1,191 delegates needed to claim victory.  But if McCain were to win Florida, he would not only have the biggest delegate plurality, but if Hucker threw him his support - say, in exchange for the #2 spot on McCain's ticket - "Sailor" would "soar" to 1,202.  Game, set, match.  Whereas without Florida, the two Lords of the Sith would be forty-six delegates short. 

Of course, the whole thing may be moot, since McCain is up double-digits in California and has a seven point lead over Rudy in New York.  If Giuliani's voluntary sit-out of the early contests and resulting fade becomes terminal - which you would have to figure it would be if he can't win Florida - then a lot of what had been Rudy's support would probably drift to McCain, in which case he might not need the Rev'rund's support after all, and the indebtedness to those crazy snake-handlers that'd come with it.  Which would suit a Christophobe like "Sailor" just fine.

Once again, it's about perceptions.  Rudy wins Florida, and the perception is there is no front-runner; Romney or McCain win, and one or the other is the front-runner.

Or Fred could sit around even longer and then swoop in and clean up.  And while he's at it, come up with a diet that lets me eat more, exercise less, and shed pounds like my cat sheds fur.

Thanks, Quin.

UPDATE: As regards McCain's announced opposition to "national catastrophe insurance," and the supposed backfire it's expected to cause amongst Florida GOPers, might I point out that, unlike his similar rhetoric regarding automotive industry jobs in Michigan, the electorate in Florida, unlike Michigan, is Republican-only.  And fiscal responsibility is something that the GOP grassroots has been demanding, so myopically that they helped cashier their own congressional majority fourteen months ago.

Frugality "straight talk" didn't help "Sailor" in Michigan with Dems and "Independents" (pardon the redundancy), but one would logically expect it to be what Pachyderms, in Florida and elsewhere, want to hear.  Certainly it's what McCain wants Florida Republicans to hear given Rudy's "the rest of the McCain story" disclosures.

UPDATE II: Here's some sage advice for 'Pubbies consumed with an obsessive over-focus on "electability":

So, conservatives, embrace the political reality of 2008: Either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is likely to be your next president....political history , Bush’s unpopularity, and economic wobbliness all stack the odds against the Republicans.

To those tempted by these facts to endorse a GOP candidate who dislikes and alienates key elements of the conservative coalition, remember that there are worse things than losing an election. Given the odds, such a desperate gambit will probably still result in a November loss, but with lasting collateral damage to political alliances, institutional credibility, and personal integrity.

I disagree with John Hood when he says that "we can survive a third Clinton administration".  The first two didn't have responsibility for fighting and winning a global war against WMD-wielding Islamic fanatics; indeed, their deriliction of that responsibility got us into this war, and handing it back to them would probably get us crippled or destroyed.

But with a non-fragmented Right, that window of harrowing vulnerability could be limited to four years; a party/coalition-shattering McCain usurpation would extend it for a generation.

UPDATE: Mark Levin tries again, doggedly, to get through to Republican voters what an unmitigated disaster a McCain nomination would be for the GOP and the country.  Please, read the whole thing, take it to heart, and vote accordingly.

1 David asked, "Is there anyone still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for Jonathan's sake?"

2 Now there was a servant of Saul's household named Ziba. They called him to appear before David, and the king said to him, "Are you Ziba?" "Your servant," he replied.

3 The king asked, "Is there no one still left of the house of Saul to whom I can show God's kindness?" Ziba answered the king, "There is still a son of Jonathan; he is crippled in both feet."

4 "Where is he?" the king asked. Ziba answered, "He is at the house of Makir son of Ammiel in Lo Debar."

5 So King David had him brought from Lo Debar, from the house of Makir son of Ammiel.

6 When Mephibosheth son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, came to David, he bowed down to pay him honor. David said, "Mephibosheth!" "Your servant," he replied.

7 "Don't be afraid," David said to him, "for I will surely show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan. I will restore to you all the land that belonged to your grandfather Saul, and you will always eat at my table."

8 Mephibosheth bowed down and said, "What is your servant, that you should notice a dead dog like me?" 

9 Then the king summoned Ziba, Saul's servant, and said to him, "I have given your master's grandson everything that belonged to Saul and his family. 10 You and your sons and your servants are to farm the land for him and bring in the crops, so that your master's grandson may be provided for. And Mephibosheth, grandson of your master, will always eat at my table." (Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants.)

11 Then Ziba said to the king, "Your servant will do whatever my lord the king commands his servant to do." So Mephibosheth ate at David's ^[a] table like one of the king's sons.

12 Mephibosheth had a young son named Mica, and all the members of Ziba's household were servants of Mephibosheth. 13 And Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, because he always ate at the king's table, and he was crippled in both feet.

-2 Samuel 9

1 The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father's household and go to the land I will show you.

2 "I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.

3 I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you."

4 So Abram left, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Haran. 5 He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the great tree of Moreh at Shechem. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. 7 The LORD appeared to Abram and said, "To your offspring ^[a] I will give this land." So he built an altar there to the LORD, Who had appeared to him.

8 From there he went on toward the hills east of Bethel and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east. There he built an altar to the LORD and called on the name of the LORD. 9 Then Abram set out and continued toward the Negev.

-Genesis 12:1-9

It has always struck me as odd, curious, even bizarre, that as teflon-coated and bullet-proof as the Clinton Machine has been ever since it eructated onto the national stage sixteen years ago, as much evil as they have publicly done and not only gotten away with it all scot-free, but even gained politically from it, that they have been so hyper-secretive to the point of paranoia.  To this day they're keeping literally millions of documents from the (first) Clinton administration under lock and key at the National Archives and the Clinton "presidential library".  Now what could possibly be in those documents that would instantly carbonize any ordinary politician but which would be any worse than what the Clintons have survived time and again in the past?

Well, the Right's sometimes-friends at Judicial Watch managed to obtain a nuclear-fusion-powered jaws-of-life-and-pneumatic-wrench set from Home Depot or something and succeeded in blasting loose 13,000 of those millions of documents, centering on Mrs. Clinton's notorious, Soviet-style "health care task force," and their contents amply substantiate that the term "Soviet-style" is anything but hyperbole:

Here are the highlights of the documents released by Judicial Watch.  Listen to this.  "A June 18, 1993 internal memorandum entitled, 'A Critique of Our Plan,' authored by someone with the initials 'P.S.,' makes the startling admission that critics of Hillary's health care reform plan were correct."  Now, this is somebody in the White House who has analyzed Hillary's plan and is offering a critique of it.  "I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy. ... Is the public really ready for this? ... none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all..."  This is somebody in the administration, a task force designed to analyze their own plan.

Remember the 1992 presidential campaign?  Remember how Bill Clinton had been the head of the Democrat Leadership Council, a "centrist" organization that believed the Democrat Party had to abandon left-wing extremism and move rightward if it was going to remain politically competitive at the national level?  Recall that at that time the Democrats had lost three consecutive presidential elections; this wasn't so much a case of a heretical insurrection in Donk circles as it was a recognition that the political landscape was no longer amenable to open, high-octane liberalism.  The Dems would have to adapt their "brand" to that now-"Reaganized" landscape.  And Bill Clinton, as the world found out, was the perfect vehicle for that new marketing strategy.

But, as the world also found out, Bill Clinton, and his overbearing, totalitarianistic wife, were not, nor ever, "centrists" at all.  They weren't even of the breed of liberals that had run the Democrat Party straight into the frakking ground over the preceeding twelve years.  They were outright, avid Marxists who fully had in mind to embark on a full-scale Sovietization of the American economy, and in great, big bites - starting with the health care sector.

There was, needless to say, a divergence between the commies they were and the moderates they had pretended to be to get elected.  "P.S.", who does not come across in this memo like he isn't on board with the master (or "mistress") plan, is simply asking a practical question: "Um, Comrade Rodham, this really isn't what we advertised during the campaign.  We talked about middle class tax cuts and 'putting people first' and now you're fixing to forcibly seize hospitals and doctors and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies and literally people's lives and herd them all onto collective health care farms.  Don't you think that maybe some people might object to the biggest bait & switch since Andrew Jackson screwed the Indians?"

Now, lest you think that the "Clintonization" of the Democrat Party hadn't already gotten underway in the first days of 1993, get a load of the advice - extraneous, I assure you - that was offered to the Clinton White House by West Virginia Donk Senator Jay Rockefeller:

"A 'Confidential' May 26, 1993 Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, 'Health Care Reform Communications,' which criticizes the Task Force" -- Now, the task force is the group that said, "This is too big."  So Rockefeller, knowing of the memo in the White House, criticizes the task force "as a 'secret cabal of Washington policy "wonks"' that has engaged in 'choking off information' from the public regarding health care reform.  The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton 'use classic opposition research' to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton administration from Task Force deliberations and to 'expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists' in order to deflect criticism.  Senator Rockefeller also suggested news organizations 'are anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage,'" of the Hillary health care reform plan.

Do you get that?  Rockefeller, NeoBolshevik toady that he is, arrogantly assures Mrs. Clinton that "Of COURSE the American people want to be hearded onto health care collectives; they just don't know it yet.  Your task force has to 'educate' them about what they 'need,' and they'll realize that's what they voted for in the first place."  And anybody within the task force, or the wider administration, who tried to sound a warning that foisting a leftward lurch on a still-sovereign American public that was never sold this bill 'o goods might not be such a bright political idea (particularly alongside the other big swindle, the 1993 Clinton tax increase that replaced his promised "middle class tax cut") is to be, in public relations terms, taken to a ditch outside of town and shot in the back of the head four times, gangland execution style.

Did you also catch the amazingly candid view of the "proper" role of the mass media?  As de facto government propaganda outlets "anxious and willing" to receive "guidance" from the administration on how to spoonfeed this left-wing swindle to the public at large.

Of course, the Clintonoids didn't have to be encouraged down this Nixonian path.  It comes naturally to them.  Indeed, the term "Nixonian" is a euphemism:

Then there is "A February 5, 1993 Draft Memorandum from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux detailing the Office of Public Liaison's plan for the health care reform campaign.  The memorandum notes the development of an 'interest group data base' detailing whether or not organizations 'support(ed) us in the election.'  The database would also track personal information about interest group leaders, such as their home phone numbers, addresses, 'biographies, analysis of credibility in the media, and known relationships with Congresspeople.'"

This is far more than just "opposition research".  It borders on secret police tactics.  Or have we forgotten how the Clintons used the IRS and other regulatory agencies to harass political opponents and organizations which "didn't support them" (the NRA comes prominently to mind).  The Democrats were notorious for criminalizing politics and policy differences years before the Boris & Natasha of the Ozarks came along.  The latter simply professionalized it and raised to to a veritable art form.

And now they want back into the White House to finish what they started.

Concluded El Rushbo:

What we are treated to - and these are White House documents, by the way, that somehow Judicial Watch got, the Clinton Library and Massage Parlor -- what we are discovering is what many of us have long known/suspected that the Clinton, Inc., war room has no boundaries whatsoever and that they will use the full force and the power of the federal government against individuals who are not supporting what they want to do.  They'll do it by exposing lifestyles, threatening to do this, threatening to ruin them, harass them, find their phone numbers, their addresses, get their biographies.  Think 700 FBI files.

And put them in jail.  Think "political prisoners".

When I say that Hillary Clinton will take America down the same path Hugo Chavez has taken Venezuela, I'm not just venting.  It's only called the "Chavez path" because Hillary failed to achieve it first.

But it wasn't from lack of effort.

If she's given a second chance, I promise you, she won't make the same mistake - of even allowing opposition to exist at all.

UPDATE (1/21): As you had no reason not to expect, the Enemy Media has completely ignored these revelations into what we veteran Clintophobes already knew.  Raged Admiral Ed this morning:

Where are the media organizations that style themselves as the bulwark against governmental abuses of power? Why haven't they reported on these memos, which clearly delineate a type of attack on government opposition that hasn't been this baldly proposed since the Nixon Administration? Given Hillary Clinton's campaign for the presidency -- one on which she relies on her experience in her husband's administration for her qualifications -- isn't all of this terribly relevant to the question of how she will run the White House, and what kind of treatment her critics can expect to receive?

The silence from the Fourth Estate is deafening. It screams either cowardice or collaboration.

I was going to answer Ed's rhetorical questions a bit more "colorfully," but that will suffice. 

Hey, if Nevada is involved, the word "skin" has to be in there someplace.

But the sun rises first on the frigid (no pun intended) Bible belt, specifically South Carolina, where balloting is now already underway.  Here is how the races look on each side in the Palmetto state:

GOP:  McCain 27.0%, Huckabee 25.4%, Romney 14.3%, Thompson 13.9%, Giuliani 3.6%

McCain was surging here since his New Hampshire win, but has slid back within the margin of error in my composite.  Of the nine polls taken over the past four days, only two show "Sailor" with a statistically significant lead, and one has him (back) down to Huck by seven points.

This has to be primarily the fruits of Fred Thompson's recently discovered vigor in going after both Huckles and the Arizona "maverick."  God bless Fred for it, but I just wish he'd opened fire on McCain first.

The Admiral is picking Huck, Pat Ruffini is urging S.C. Romneylans and Fredheads to vote for "the GOP's Al Sharpton" in a last-ditch effort to slay the McCainiac beast once and for all, but I can only go with the numbers in front of me and pray the Cloverfield isn't a sneak preview of the Minneapolis convention.

Meanwhile, things have taken a turn for the better in Nevada - in the anti-Queeg sense, that is....

GOP:  Romney 25.7%, McCain 20.7%, Huckabee 12.3%, Giuliani 11.7%, Thompson 10.7%

The Brothel state's community of Mormon expatriots from neighboring Utah are said to be a significant source of strength for Romney's surge here over the past week.  This, of course, isn't terribly encouraging if you're a Romneylan as it suggests more of the same self-limiting identity politics that has kept Huckles from advancing beyond his myopic evangelical base.  But if it shafts McCain in the end, I shan't be complaining.

In the bigger picture, winning Nevada is, for the Mittster, an offset for bypassing South Carolina, at least in terms of the delegate count.  As there is no set method of allocating Nevada Republican delegates, there's no way to predict how many Romney may win if the above numbers hold (or he exceeds them), but there are thirty-four to choose from versus twenty-four in winner-take-all South Carolina, so Romney doesn't figure to lose delegate ground to either Darth Queeg or Darth Scudder.

But in the perception contest, a McCain win in South Carolina would not be a good thing.  The aforelinked Ruffini piece goes on at considerable length about the momentum it would give the "Republican Scoop Jackson".  (Pardon me for a moment while I look out my window and watch the squadron of winged pigs fly by).  Whereas, in the opinion of Jay Cost, Romney, even with his Michigan victory, needs McCain to lose today in South Carolina to even have a shot at eking out a win in Florida to truly regain any chance at national viability.

Speaking of which....

GOP: McCain 23.2%, Giuliani 20.3%, Romney 18.0%, Huckabee 17.3%, Thompson 8.5%

There's still ten days to go in the Sunshine state, and Rudy insists he's going to win there.  This would turn a triple-threat match at the top into a fatal four-way, and reel the oft-discussed scenario of a brokered convention considerably closer to becoming a realistic possibility.

On the other hand, with the February 5th "Super-Duper Tuesday" swath looming, and "retail" politics switching to the "wholesale" variety (i.e. candidates can't be in multiple states at the same time), mass media becomes a much larger factor.  And while Romney would have the resource advantage nationally (since, if all else fails, he can self-finance his campaign), guess who will have the incalculable, 527-esque advantage of a friendly Enemy Media establishment to lavish him with oodles of free, favorable publicity?  And that will do so in at least direct proportion to the savagery with which they'll bombard the other 'Pubbies, but especially Romney?

Yes, that's a rhetorical question.

The "big f'ing lizard" is coming.  Please, South Carolinians, kill it today.  Think of the barbeques you can have.

UPDATE: Oh, yes, the Donks are caucusing in Nevada today, too.  The pick:

Rodham 37.8%, Obama 33.8%, Edwards 18.0%

Ed says Obama by five, and I don't dispute that the polls haven't been all that accurate in the contests thus far, but even the Nevada composite has the Empress ahead (just) outside the margin of error, and all three polls are showing pretty close to the same result.

As I keep saying, remember the Clinton Corallary: the conventional rules of politics do not apply to them.  If any other candidate had used one of his party's big constituencies (Big Labor) to try and suppress the vote of another (African-Americans) in order to sabotage his principal rival (also an African-American), there wouldn't even be a grease spot on the floor to mark his remains.  If any other candidate's ex-presidential spouse had publicly lost his mind not once, but twice, said candidate would be a laughing stock even via reflected ignominy.

But it looks as if despite stepping on the aforementioned public relations rakes, Mrs. Clinton is going to win Nevada anyway.

And if not?  Then Obama solidifies his claim to the #2 spot on Hillary's ticket.

That's my job, ladies and gentleman: deflating the electoral suspense the rest of the blogosphere manufactures

Hey, it beats hiding under the bed in a fetal position dreading the unvoteable November horror of Medusa vs. Darth Queeg.

UPDATE II: Governor Romney and Senator Clinton have been declared the winners in Nevada.

"Toldjah" she'd get away with trying to disenfranchise Las Vegas minority Obama caucusers.  And how are the Arkansas Bonnie & Clyde celebrating Her Nib's Nevada triumph?  By accusing the very same Culinary Union workers whose votes they (by proxy) tried to suppress of vote suppression!

Gotta love that chutzpah.

Like she'll give us any choice....

UPDATE III: The anti-Hillary/pro-Obama spin has already emerged:

According to the demographics, over 70% of the caucusers are 45 years of age or older, and 59% of them are women. That looks like the caucusers have played directly into the demographic wheelhouse of Hillary Clinton....but she's only got a 6-point lead over Barack, 51%-45%. Given the strong demographics in her favor, this isn't exactly an impressive showing.

No, it isn't.  But many, including the Admiral, were predicting an Obama victory in Nevada, too.  Ditto New Hampshire, come to think of it.  So while B.O. enjoys a ten point lead over the Empress in South Carolina, don't be surprised if that gap doesn't "miraculously" shrink or disappear altogether by next Saturday.

UPDATE IV: McCain wins South Carolina.  Dammit, what the devil is wrong with South Carolinians, anyway?  Isn't anybody voting strategically instead of parochially this cycle?  The veterans vote for Lord Queeg (aided and abetted by the libs who in any other circumstances scorn them, and vice versa), evangelicals for Huckaburger, and the rest of the - there appears to be no other word for it - former Reagan coalition scatter to the four winds?  According to exit polls, illegal immigration and the economy are the top issues for Republican voters - illegal immigration!!!  McCain-Kennedy wasn't even a full year ago!  Can so many elephants have possibly forgotten that?

{sigh} I guess it wasn't like I didn't call it back on Tuesday.  Delegate-wise, Romney may well be further ahead tonight than he was this morning.  But in the primaries, as I've been saying, perception matters more than reality.  The perception will be that the first GOP candidate to get a second "major" victory is Darth Queeg.  And that'll make him the front-runner.

Dammit.  I don't know what the bigger disaster will be - losing the country to Hillary or losing the country AND my own party to the real-life "Manchurian candidate".

I wonder how Praetor Hewitt will try and spin this one.

9 Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. 10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves. 11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the LORD. 12 Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. 13 Share with God's people who are in need. Practice hospitality.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position.^[a] Do not be conceited.

17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody. 18 If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. 19 Do not take revenge, my friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: "It is Mine to avenge; I will repay,"^[b]says the LORD. 20On the contrary: "If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head."^[c] 21Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

-Romans 12:9-21

D'ya think the overcaffeinated SOB has been hanging around Keith Olbermann at the NBC commisary just a tad too much lately? (h/t: MRC)

Appearing Wednesday night on NBC's Tonight Show, MSNBC's Chris Matthews suggested Republicans are like Iraqi factions, with a "fanatics" wing, and oozed over Barack and Michelle Obama, hailing them as "really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy," insisting it's a "spiritual experience" to attend an Obama rally. When asked by Jay Leno about the uncertain Republican primary forecast, Matthews argued: "They got their Shia wing, the fanatics. They've got Huckabee. This where I get into trouble. This is just where I get into trouble. Huckabee and Thompson are the Shiites." Matthews also went into a typical swoon for his favorite presidential candidate, Barack Obama: "If you're actually in the room when he gives one of his speeches, and you don't cry, you're not an American." Matthews could not help slipping into a sales job for Barack and his wife Michelle: "They're cool people. They are really cool. They are Jack and Jackie Kennedy when you see them together. They are cool. And they're great-looking, and they're cool and they're young, and they're -- everything seems to be great. I know I'm selling them now....But the fact is, I wouldn't be an honest reporter if I didn't tell you what the spiritual experience is like of being in a Barack Obama rally."

Actually, I believe I was the first one to dub Senator Obama "the ebony JFK".  Which was not intended as a compliment, I assure you, as Jack Kennedy was manifestly unqualified to be president and never got any better in the three years he spent in that office, yet rode a cult of personality the whole way that covered up his myriad flaws, both public and private.  Chickening out on the Bay of Pigs invasion - which led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis - was all the proof necessary.  Obama is an even bigger naif, and would be a proportionately bigger disaster. Plus he wouldn't cut income tax rates like JFK did.

I'm sure Mrs. Clinton was paying attention to Matthews' embarrassingly gushing performance.  It'll be interesting to see the first interview she grants him after taking office next year.  To my knowledge I've never seen a man turned to stone on live, nationwide television.

When what he truly deserves is to be cleaved in two by a lightning bolt at Governor Huckadoodle's Mosaic direction.  If, you know, that aw-shucks feller was into vengeance, and stuff like that 'dere.

Conflating evangelical Christians with Islamist mass-murderers is old hat by this time (and, admittedly, Huckles leaves himself wide open for such slurs, which is what makes it so infuriating that he inevitably ends up dragging the rest of us along with him).  Ditto broadening the brush to Republicans in general.  But I think Matthews was losing himself in the odious metaphor, or perhaps he just has Iraq on the brain.  He equated "the more moderate guys" like McCain and Giuliani to Sunni Muslims, which is odd since they were just as bloodthirsty as the Shia.  Indeed, al Qaeda is Sunni, and they don't strike me as overflowing with "moderation."  And here I thoughtI thought Matthews LIKED McCain.

Oh, and he threw Mitt Romney in with the Kurds, which is, I guess, some sort of cryptic reference to the Mormon church.

But what baffles me is why Matthews lumped Fred Thompson into the "Shia" category with Huckabee.  I thought Fred was the guy who opposes a Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, and was a one-time "abortion lobbyist," just as Huckles, once out from behind his pulpit, is the John Edwards of the Republican Party.  Indeed, FDT has been giving it to Huck with both barrels for the past week.  Wasn't the "Iraqi civil war" supposed to be between Sunni and Shia?  Just how "civil" does the Hardballer think this metaphor can get?

I guess Matthews is still sore at the dressing down Fred gave him at that recent GOP debate.  Or maybe he just doesn't like being called "Christopher".

Is it too late to have that duel between Matthews and Zell Miller?  I bet the NRA would sponsor it, if it didn't end up on pay-per-view.

Remember Hillary Clinton's recently announced plan to "stimulate" an American economy that is in no need of "stimulating," thank you very much - and not by embarking upon a second career as a lounge singer, either - via pork barrel deficit spending and economically meaningless tax rebates?  Yes, that's a rhetorical question; this is an election year, the country is drifting haplessly to the left, so what else is everybody else going to do but latch on to the same harebrained idea?

Congressional Democrats are all behind Mrs. Clinton's budget-busting scheme, of course, because they love deficit spending and they think (correctly, I'm afraid) it will aid in their re-election races.  Federal Reserve Chairman Bennie Bernanke, evidently determined to prove he's a different breed from his inflation-phobic predecessor Alan Greenspan, recommends further debasement of the dollar - oh, I'm sorry, "putting money into the hands of households and firms quickly and on a short term basis."  If you've ever read about the various and sundry economic "panics" of the nineteeth century and wondered where they came from, now you have a better idea.

Inevitably, the "DON'T JUST STAND THERE, DO SOMETHING!!!!!" urge is stampeding Pachyderms as well.  Mitt Romney, fresh from his triumphant mission to convince Michiganders that he'll make their state a ward of the federal government, has called for "immediate congressional action" (oh, joy) without specifying just exactly to what action he refers.  Ron Paul said that a recession is possible because the word isn't found in the Constitution.  And Mike Huckabee prayed for American CEOs to die en masse and bequeath their fortunes to the middle class.

It's not a total washout.  Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) seeks to take advantage of the stimulus stampede to rectify a long-overdue revenue-related injustice:

The centerpiece of Cantor’s plan is a permanent, across-the-board cut in the corporate tax rate, from 35 to 25 percent. The United States has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the developed world. The best way to keep companies from “shipping jobs overseas” is to remove incentives for them to do so, and cutting the corporate tax rate is an important first step down that road.

Cantor’s plan includes commendable tax breaks on new business equipment and other capital costs. The idea here is to keep businesses growing and expanding through any downturn, so that it is as short-lived as possible. Cantor’s plan would also expand tax credits and tax-deductible losses, reducing the burden on businesses that might otherwise resort to downsizing.

NRO suggests throwing in an expansion of the child tax credit as a "middle class tax relief" fig leaf, the better to rebut the usual classist garbage of Republicans being the "friends of Wall Street" and Donks the "friends of Main Street".  Like that's going to blunt that wheezy old canard in an election cycle that appears to be thriving on them.  But what the heck, my family and I can always use a few extra bucks in April, even if we're not "struggling," along with the vast bulk of the rest of the middle class.

The lone 'Pubbie who isn't fleeing to the "stimulating" tall grass is the one you might expect, which is another reason why I like him so much:

Republican White House hopeful Fred Thompson made light of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's call for a quick economic stimulus Thursday and said it might be best to leave the economy alone for now....

"We're all concerned about the direction of the economy," said the former Tennessee senator. "We've had a good run, but we can't take growth for granted." He said "we've got to have a potential stimulus package on the table to be discussed if it would make sense to be used in short order, but we're not quite there yet."

And doing nothing might leave the economy stronger, he said.

"There's a case to be made for that," he said. "And it just requires strong heads at the table and not snap judgments, you know, by politicians on the road trying to think of something smart to say in 30 seconds."

Worlds without end, halleluliah, amen.  This "stimulus" fiddle-faddle is simply the latest "flavor of the month" PR fad, the result, ultimately, of the Democrats' seven-year effort to talk the economy into a Second Great Depression.  Now that an indicator here and there has actually started going in the direction after which they've lusted for all this time, and with the prevailing political winds blowing in their direction since the 2006 election cycle, it's becoming the "perfect storm" of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Ready Freddie doesn't subscribe to fads.  He's a serious leader.  He's a grown-up in a field of children.  As such, he is far more qualified to be George W. Bush's successor than the rest of the field in both parties put together.

But, to modify yet another old saying, "There isn't much call for serious leaders" these days.  Peole don't want to be told what they need to hear, but what they want to hear.  It's what fueled Mitt Romney's comeback win in Michigan this week, and it makes FDT the right man at the wrong time.

So what kind of "stimulus" will we ultimately get?  Well, since Representative Cantor's plan has about as much chance as building a snowman in a furnace, and the President will (I'm assuming) veto whatever statist snake oil the Democrats enact, I'm assuming, ironically, none at all.  This would explain the White House announcing its own $145 billion proposal, which appears to focus primarily on tax rebates more than twice the size of the ones enacted in the depths of the Clinton recession of 2000-2002.  Any proposal including the words "tax cut" will be DOA in the Pelosi-Reid Congress, but one that omits any rate reduction in the outrageously exorbitant corporate income tax (i.e. "targeted" at the "middle class") will provide cover for his likely veto of the Dem alternative.

Ironic that gridlock will produce the result Ready Freddie has already suggested.  It hearkens back to one of the bedrock tenets of conservatism: "If it is not necessary to act, it is necessary not to act."  Particularly when almost all the proposed actions are doomed to failure.

And besides, Hillary doesn't need to run against a booming economy she can't credibly take credit for.  With the "stimulus" proposals now on the table, including hers, she needn't worry.

UPDATE: Sho 'nuff, Bush didn't insist on linking the one-time tax rebates to making his tax cuts permanent.  Irritating that is, since the President, with no more election campaigns to wage, is the one player in this equation best positioned to fight for precisely that linkage, and provide the party leadership necessary to hold congressional 'Pubbies in line

Maybe the imminent sunsetting of those tax cuts - i.e. a locked-in massive tax increase - is contributing to the slowing of the economy.  Anticipation, and all that.  All I can say is, if people think the economy is tanking now, just wait until that automatic tax hike hits.  For those who don't remember the last REAL recession (1981-83), it's going to come as a rude awakening and - hopefully - a hard lesson.

Will any Republican under the Hillaryian stiletto have the courage to connect these dots?  Well, she's not even to the Donk nomination yet (officially), only Fred Thompson is willing to offer such straight talk now, and he's in fourth place.

That doesn't inspire much in the way of confidence - consumer or otherwise.

Well, now, where was THIS story on the evening news or my local newspaper?:

A Chinese attack submarine and destroyer confronted the U.S. carrier Kitty Hawk and its battle group in the Taiwan Strait, sparking a tense 28-hour standoff that brought both sides to a battle-ready position.

The American ships were heading to Japan following China’s sudden cancellation of a scheduled Thanksgiving port call in Hong Kong when they encountered the Chinese vessels, according to the Navy Times, which cited a report in a Chinese-language newspaper in Taiwan.

The Times reported that the encounter caused the carrier group “to halt and ready for battle, as the Chinese vessels also stopped amid the 28-hour confrontation.”

The encounter ended without incident, however, and the U.S. ships continued on to Japan. The two Chinese vessels were also headed for a port call in Japan.

What precipitated this confrontation on the high (and international, let it be reiterated) seas?

China has expressed “grave concern” to the U.S. over the Kitty Hawk’s transit through the Taiwan Strait, the Times notes. Beijing claims Taiwan is Chinese territory.

But Admiral Timothy Keating, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told reporters Tuesday: “We don’t need China’s permission to go through the Taiwan Strait. We will exercise our free right of passage whenever and wherever we choose.”

Indeed we will - until the next naval standoff that doesn't end peacefully, or January 20, 2009, when Hillary Clinton is inaugurated the 44th president of the United States, whichever comes first.

But extra-territoriality was just the pretext for what this was really about: muscle-flexing and pre-war probing of our naval capabilities and, ultimately, national will.  Given the scope and breadth of Beijing's ongoing (and Clinton-fueled) military buildup over the past decade-plus, covering upgrades to its ICBMs, state-of-the-art warships, fighter planes and submarines from Russia, and development of a number of asymmetrical weapons such as informational warfare, anti-satellite systems, and the nano-weapons that Lev Navrozov is always warning of, it is clear to the all too few observers willing to pay attention that the ChiComms have burgeoning global ambitions to match.  Taking Taiwan would be just the first step in an eventual showdown with the United States for planetary hegemony, and they would prefer to do so without armed resistance from any but the Taiwanese themselves.  And that resistance would be less likely, and certainly less effective, if we could be bullied away from keeping our commitments to defend the island nation.

If even the geldings playing out the string in the Bush White House can't be mustered to offer meaningful resistance to a blustering Iranian mullahgarchy on the brink of nuclear weaponhood that wouldn't recognize discretion if it was a green aura, what chance is there that President Rodham wouldn't wrap up Taiwan in a colorfully-wrapped box with a big, red bow on top and shove it under the ChiComms' "holiday tree," absent any additional "confrontations," much less defend American freedom of the seas?

One thing seems certain: We won't hear about it unless there's a "next time" that ends "with incident".  And dollars gets you doughnuts our intrepid media will figure out a way to blame it on George W. Bush. 

3 For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. 4 Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, 5 so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. 6 We have different gifts, according to the grace given us. If a man's gift is prophesying, let him use it in proportion to his^[a]faith. 7 If it is serving, let him serve; if it is teaching, let him teach; 8 if it is encouraging, let him encourage; if it is contributing to the needs of others, let him give generously; if it is leadership, let him govern diligently; if it is showing mercy, let him do it cheerfully.

-Romans 12:3-8

Here's a refreshing bit of candor that you don't see every day:

Nothing worries financial advisers more than the prospect of a Democrat's being elected president in November, according to a quarterly poll by Brinker Capital Inc.

The fourth-quarter edition of the Brinker Barometer, which polled 236 advisers in December, found that 22% indicated that a "Democrat in the White House" worried them more than all other economic or geopolitical concerns.

Rounding out the list of concerns was "global unrest" (15%), "U.S. economic growth" (15%), "a terrorist attack" (13%) and "a recession" (13%).

They could actually lump "US economic growth" and "a recession" in with "Democrat in the White House," since the latter will crater the first and guarantee the second.

You know what they say about putting your money where your mouth is.  I hope they've counted the cost of opening their mouths on the incoming Rodham administration, which will undoubtedly settle this score sooner rather than later.

~  ~  ~

Another of Senator Clinton's big bankrollers covers himself in glory:

Mauricio Celis is linked to the Mexican drug trade in a search warrant the state used Friday to raid his law offices and gather computer files, according to financial documents and other business records. The warrant includes a sworn statement by a Texas Attorney General's official accusing Celis of money laundering. ...

The state searched a U.S. Treasury database and border crossing data to determine that Celis went to Mexico frequently after withdrawing large sums of cash, according to an affidavit accompanying the warrant.

"Celis is rumored to be associated with questionable criminal element (sic) possibly related to drug trafficking," the affidavit states.

The affidavit, by Captain Alex Pena of the Attorney General's Office, states that Pena "believes that Mauricio Celis has committed the felony offense of money laundering."

A document the state obtained from Frost Bank showed a joint account signed by Celis and Raul Armando Winder, a Mexican citizen and former police officer who has been employed as a pilot by individuals linked to narcotic trafficking, according to the affidavit. The account was for a business called Pegasus Air Services, which Celis owned from 2002-05, according to the Texas Secretary of State. Winder is listed as vice president on the bank application.

Do you want to say "Hsu Who?" or shall I?  How about how "Celis" rhymes with "sell us"?  And how long until he disappears down the Enemy Media midden hole just like good ol' Norm?

~  ~  ~

After making a conspicuous public showing of burying the hatchet over Barack Obama's making a mountain out of Mrs. Clinton's molehile of a comment about Martin Luther King, LBJ, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the eventual Donk vice presidential nominee learned once again that Her Nib doesn't get mad, she gets even:

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama's spiritual adviser, is the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright's daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said "truly epitomized greatness." That man is Louis Farrakhan.

Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan "epitomized greatness." For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler - "They helped him get the Third Reich on the road." His history is a rancid stew of lies.

It's important to state right off that nothing in Obama's record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama's top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.

In this column, Richard Cohen does acknowledge that Senator Obama doesn't share Reverend Wright's fanship of the infamously anti-Semitic, de facto Islamist Calypso Louis.  Which, of course, raises the question of why he writes this piece at all, if not to try and somehow hold B.O. accountable for his pastor's views.

It's also technically true that this is an(other) example of a Clintonoid lashing out at his mistress' chief rival for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination, rather than the campaign itself doing it.  But that's Clinton SOP, and follows previous examples such as....

Billy Shaheen explicitly suggest[ing] that Barack Obama may have dealt drugs without any evidence supporting that allegation. BET chief Robert Johnson allud[ing] to Obama's admitted drug use as a teenager to suggest something similar. Both of them had direct ties to Hillary's campaign, which made Hillary responsible for their behavior.

As massive retaliation goes, this salvo fizzled, to euphemize generously.  Senator Obama's designedly public criticism of Farrakhan today only underscored the proxy attack's more or less total ineffectiveness, as well as providing a small PR boon to the Generalissimo as well.

Of course, it could also be the case that this was precisely the Clintonoids' intention, in the long-term interest of grooming him as Hillary's running mate.  Given the concerns expressed by some about Muslim aspects of Obama's upbringing and how his failure to embrace Islam may generate hostility against him in the Arab world were he to eventually become president, this could have been a contrived PR "innoculation" against those potential liabilities.

A tad conspiracist, perhaps.  But with the Clintons, oftentimes convoluted plots are the only things that make explanatory sense.

~  ~  ~

In their most recent advertising campaign, Burger King stopped selling Whoppers at one of their restaurants (in Las Vegas, Nevada, I believe) for a day, and captured patrons' incredulous responses on hidden cameras.

I don't know how successful BK has been with this gimmick, but it does settle one question: the Clinton Machine is now officially the home of the whopper:

Bill Clinton, who carried Nevada in two general elections, urged voters Tuesday to buck labor endorsements for Senator Barack Obama and support his wife in Saturday's hotly contested presidential caucuses as the only Democratic candidate with the experience necessary to change the country.

The former president trumpeted New York Senator Hillary Clinton's accomplishments while painting Obama as the "establishment" candidate who would bring only the "feeling of change."

"One candidate says you should vote for me because I've not been involved at all in the struggles of the past and therefore we need to turn over a new leaf and (try) something absolutely new. And if you want the feeling of change, then that is the person you should support," Clinton said in a 75-minute speech to about 300 people in a YMCA gymnasium.

"The other candidate says vote for me because I spent a lifetime making change, raising hopes and fulfilling dreams for other people," he said about the former first lady.

Didja get all that?  Nevada Donks should vote for Hillary because she has more experience (her eight years as The Power Behind The Throne even more than her seven years in the Senate), but it's the callow rookie Barack Obama who's the "establishment" candidate.  Anybody who can follow that Byzantine "logic," stand on your head.

One could make the argument that the Queen of Mean is far more of an "establishment" candidate than the at-the-time unknown Mr. Bill was in his first White House run sixteen years ago.  One could also make the argument that, having been governor of Arkansas for a decade, he had more relevant experience for the job than either his wife or B.O. have now (a little factoid that David Broder appears to have just discovered).

On the other hand, one can make the argument, as George Neumeyr does, that both Clintons are, you should pardon the expression, pond scum:

The Clintons, having bred their own PC destroyers, now scramble to use the bluntest weapons possible against them.

The low tactics are beyond parody. For example, the Clintons' planned MLK weekend festivities include trying to disenfranchise black culinary workers by encouraging a lawsuit against them for holding caucuses at their place of business. (Noting this irony on television, the head of Nevada's Culinary Union said the suit is nothing more than payback for its endorsement of Obama.)

"Count every vote"?  Not if any of them aren't going to Hillary, it seems.  Concludes Mr. Neumeyr:

The most formative period in the Clintons' lives were the 1960s -- years of fairy tales, drug use, and empty eloquence. But at the end of their march they find before the final door an incarnation of the dream which they must destroy in order to enter it. The essential egotism of their project from the beginning is exposed for all to see: raw power, not idealistic principle, fueled it, and it is altogether fitting that these icons of a destructive generation choose as their last victim one who embodies its best hopes.

No one is more authoritarian than a successful revolutionary, to which this most corrupt couple in American political history provides vivid proof, displaying an ugliness greater than that of the establishment figures they overthrew.

Which, in turn, makes the unaccustomedly meager results of their trademark "ugly tactics" that much more remarkable.  I mean, for heaven's sake, Sick Willie - Mr. Donk Rock Star himself - actually lost his audience at a recent campaign appearance, and even drew a smattering of boos.  If he's jumping the shark, what's that say for his wife's PR viability?

But then again, she doesn't need viability, because she's already got power.  The Clintons own the Democrat Party, lock, stock, and barrel.  Sure, they purchased it with everybody else's money, but they own it nonetheless.  And besides, Barack Obama isn't really any different from them; he's demanding that they turn the whole shebang over to him like the proverbial passing of the baton.  She's just trying to beat him over the head with it like an old lady trying to swat a bee with a broomhandle.

Gotta make sure the lad knows his place before bequeathing him the privileged role of heir apparent, after all.

~  ~  ~

And yet the Empress, running functionally unopposed in Michigan, outpolled "Uncommitted" by only 56%-41%, underperforming across the demographic board according to exit polls.  It's probably no coincidence that Obama (and Opie Edwards) poured a lot of resources into the "Uncommitted" campaign to drive down Senator Clinton's numbers and embarrass her.

Will that, plus the fallout from the Clinton Machine's minority-vote suppression (and anti-union!) efforts damage her chances in Nevada this Saturday?  The current polling composite is Rodham 32.5%, Obama 32.0%, Edwards 27.0%, versus Rodham 39.5%, Obama 22.0%, Edwards 11.5% a month ago.  Sixteen and a half points in a month could certainly be considered a "collapse."  In South Carolina she trails B.O. 42.3%-32.8%, but in Florida it's still a Hillary blowout (48.6%-30.2%).  And she figures to have the advantage in most of the February 5th states.

Bottom line?  Just what I've been saying: Obama can't beat Mrs. Clinton, but he can fight her all the way to Denver this summer and signficantly weaken her.  Given the weakness she's already showing amongst minority voters (70% of black voters in Michigan chose "Uncommitted"), it will become abundantly clear (I'm sure it already has behind the scenes) that she'll be far stronger in the fall with Obama on the ticket than snubbed and sniping from the sidelines.  Or, as another old saying goes, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Not that Hillary wouldn't blow out whichever poor bastard emerges from the Republican side in November in any case.  But anybody who thinks that this woman is going to leave anything about her lifelong ambition to chance simply has not been paying attention.

UPDATE: Speaking of Sick Willie jumping the shark, did you ever think you'd see the day that the media master himself would go postal on a reporter?:

During a campaign stop for his wife in Oakland a day earlier, Clinton became visibly annoyed when KGO-TV reporter Mark Mathews asked him whether Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign should take a stronger stand against a union's lawsuit to keep casino workers from caucusing at special precincts in Nevada.

"I had nothing to do with that lawsuit and you know it," said Bill Clinton, who had been in the Bay Area talking to residents and real estate professionals about home foreclosures.

"Get on your television station and say, 'I don't care about the home mortgage crisis,'" he berated Mathews.

My, my, my.  Talk about a Freudian slip.  The axiom "Methinks thou dost protest too much" comes to mind.  It's so unlike Mr. Bill to answer a question that hasn't been asked.  It is, however, completely like him to assume that every question has to be about him.  In this case, it has produced a sardonic convergence that must have the Clintonoids ordering several additional pallets of Tums and Alka-Seltzer.

The fact that a Nevada judge today threw out the anti-worker, minority-vote-supressing lawsuit probably isn't doing much for Boris & Natasha's dyspepsia, either.

Maybe we should start a pool to estimate how long it will be before some Clintonoid, or the campaign, or even the power-mad couple themselves, slips and utters the "n-word" in the same vicinity as the name "Barack Obama".  If the ebony JFK takes Nevada and South Carolina, that betting line may move toward even money.

That's what Rush Limbaugh suspects, according to Newsmax Insider Report:

Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh suspects that John McCain may have cut a deal with GOP presidential rival Mike Huckabee to have Huckabee siphon off votes from Mitt Romney.

Rush said that on the day after McCain’s victory in the New Hampshire primary, McCain told reporters that Christian conservatives should back him, saying: “A very large portion of the evangelical community is becoming more and more concerned about climate change because of our biblical obligation to be good stewards of our planet. That clearly is an issue that I’m in complete sync with the evangelical community on.”

Noting that Huckabee was thought to control the evangelical vote, Rush told listeners: “Governor Huckabee, at this stage, in my opinion, is in the race to take Romney out of the way for McCain…

McCain also reminded reporters that he has voted the anti-abortion line during his entire career.

Said Limbaugh: “In that way he’s going to take out Rudy [Giuliani, who has expressed support for abortion rights],” Rush said.

“So he’s going to try to get the Huckabee vote with the global warming route and try to get the evangelicals. He’s going to try to take Rudy out with his consistent abortion stand, which he is not fabricating.”

Judging by the results in Michigan on Tuesday, this deal didn't work out quite as intended, as Mitt Romney won the evangelical vote there by five points over Huckles and eleven points over McCain.  It probably wasn't the brightest idea to push environmentalist paganism in a state that is already in a long-term recession and would be economically decimated by "Sailor's" mythical "global warming" nonsense.  Nor was it evincing of Christian charity for the Arizona senator to tell Michiganders distressed at the decline of the US automotive industry, in essence, "Sorry, guess it sucks to be you, go apply at McDonalds," a most illiberal stand for a left-leaning Rockefeller Republican to take, and one that Governor Romney wasted no time in (shamelessly) exploiting.

I guess the Sith Master really does consider evangelicals to be sheep if he thought that the greenstremist apostasies of a few "mainline" CINO (Christians In Name Only) leaders would drag the rest of us along with them.  Leave it to an Australian Catholic Cardinal to lay down the facts that Lord Queeg (among infamous others) doesn't want to hear:

A cardinal in the Catholic Church says the hysteria over man-made climate change is akin to a “new religion” and a symptom of “pagan emptiness.”

Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia, has been the target of criticism in his country for expressing doubts about the validity of man-made global warming.

In an interview that appeared in the Catholic World Report, he said: “Right now, the mass media, politicians, many church figures, and the public generally seem to have embraced even the wilder claims about man-made climate change as if they constituted a new religion.

“These days, for any public figure to question the basis of what amounts to green fundamentalist faith is tantamount to heresy.”...

He said some of the more “hysterical and extreme” claims about impending climate change “appear symptomatic of a pagan emptiness, of a Western fear when confronted by the immense and basically uncontrollable forces of nature…

“It’s almost as though people without religion, who don’t belong to any of the great religious traditions, have got to be frightened of something. Perhaps they’re looking for a cause that is almost a substitute for religion.”

Well, now, that would suit "Maverick" John McCain just fine, wouldn't it?  Maybe followers of Jesus Christ are not the "evangelicals" he's courting after all.  Unfortunately for him, the breed he seeks tends to inhabit the other party, and while Democrats may someday dictate the Republican presidential nomination, that day is not today.

As to the genuine article, if Michigan is any indication, they're beginning to drift away from his Sith apprentice, Darth Scudder, as well.

Looks like Darth Queeg has a ways to go before mastering the Dark Side of the Force after all.

Thank God.

31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. 32 Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God — 33 even as I try to please everybody in every way. For I am not seeking my own good but the good of many, so that they may be saved.

1 Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.

-1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1

Couldn't put it any better myself (and LORD knows I've tried):

When I first predicted a year or so ago that Bush would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities once he had played out the futile diplomatic string, the obstacles that stood in his way were great but they did not strike me as insurmountable. Now, thanks in large part to the new NIE, they have grown so formidable that I can only stick by my prediction with what the NIE itself would describe as “low-to-moderate confidence.” For Bush is right about the resemblance between 2008 and 1938. In 1938, as Winston Churchill later said, Hitler could still have been stopped at a relatively low price and many millions of lives could have been saved if England and France had not deceived themselves about the realities of their situation. Mutatis mutandis, it is the same in 2008, when Iran can still be stopped from getting the bomb and even more millions of lives can be saved—but only provided that we summon up the courage to see what is staring us in the face and then act on what we see.

Unless we do, the forces that are blindly working to ensure that Iran will get the bomb are likely to prevail even against the clear-sighted determination of George W. Bush, just as the forces of appeasement did against Churchill in 1938. In which case, we had all better pray that there will be enough time for the next President to discharge the responsibility that Bush will have been forced to pass on, and that this successor will also have the clarity and the courage to discharge it. If not — God help us all — the stage will have been set for the outbreak of a nuclear war that will become as inescapable then as it is avoidable now.

Or, as the old Autolite commercial used to say, "You can pay me a little now, or a lot later."

[h/t: Double-H]

Some verrrrry interesting details in Mitt Romney's nine-point victory over John McCain in the Michigan Primary last night:

Did Romney family nostalgia play a role? Not among those voters old enough to remember George Romney. McCain won voters over 65 by 39-38%.

Other highlights of Romney’s impressive, broad-based win:

• Romney won conservatives 41-23%, with 20% for Huckabee.
• Romney won Republicans 41-27%.
• Romney won Evangelicals 34-29% for Huckabee. McCain took just 23%.
• Romney won with those satisfied with President Bush 45-24%. Yes, Republicans are split 50-50 on this, but it’s easier to message around support for the party’s leader rather than opposition to him. McCain always has to tread gingerly on this to avoid angering what institutional support he has.

Once again I have to gnash my teeth in irritation at the "Republican vote" actually being a demographical stat in a Republican primary.  What is so bloody difficult to understand about a party primary being limited to voters who belong to that party?

That said (again), it is indicative of what the coming primaries, the vast majority of which are "closed" (as they damn well should be), will look like.  Not surprising, especially given the only areas of McCainian strength:

• McCain won Democrats 41-33%.
• McCain won pro-choice voters 39-35%.
• He won among those who never attend church by 11 points — 39-28.
• The “architect of the surge” won with Iraq war disapprovers 36-29.

As eight years ago, McCain, who is basically Joe Lieberman's evil twin, is a de facto Democrat running for the GOP presidential nomination.  In his two attempts at tilting that windmill he has relied upon early success in high-profile "open" contests to glom the "frontrunner" perception in the public consciousness and, with the help of his Enemy Media pals, bulldoze and any all Republican opposition from the field before the later, big "closed" primaries could take place.  He failed in 2000 because of his runaway Christophobia on the eve of the South Carolina Primary, and his principal rival, George W. Bush, was the, well, principal beneficiary.  This time I feared that with two (or three, if you count Rudy) "traditional Republican" opponents, and no repeat religious bigotry meltdown, the "end-around" strategy might succeed.

Blessedly, it did not. "Sailor" got some help from his true friends on the other side of the aisle, but not enough, and not as much as he did eight years ago, despite the fact that the Donk side of the primary was uncontested and functionally nullified.  Now if only Fred Thompson could run down both McCain and Mike Huckaplucka in South Carolina, perhaps a stake could be driven through Darth Queeg's black political heart once and for all.  But things are looking much brighter than they were forty-eight hours ago.

All the moreso given that Romney actually beat Huckles in his base demographic.  I don't know what differences there might be between Iowa evangelicals and their Michigan counterparts.  The economy was a bigger issue in Michigan, so that may have weighed heavier than pure cultural issues.  Plus Romney essentially out-populisted Huck with his "I'll fight for every job" schtick, leaving the Rev'rund with little or nothing to say.

That being said, here's the latest South Carolina polling composite: McCain 27.8%, Huckles 20.5%, Romney 15.0%, Thompson 11.8%, Giuliani 4.5%.

We're not out of the woods yet, folks.  But like Winston Churchill once said of another epic struggle, "It isn't the beginning of the end, but perhaps it is the end of the beginning."

Seems like a long time ago now that Mike F'ing Huckabumpkin won the Iowa Caucuses, doesn't it?  After finishing a distant third in New Hampshire last week and Michigan tonight, South Carolina looks as if it could be his last hurrah.

I also recall from a few weeks ago that Huckles' biggest problem was that, for {ahem} God only knows what reason, he suddenly shot up in the GOP polls in December based more on what he was - a former Baptist preacher - than any inherent abilities as a national candidate, or a Reaganian issues stances.  Indeed, his penchant for gaffes made his soaring past Mitt Romney to take Iowa all the more perplexing.  How could a man who appeared to be so mentally undisciplined in his off-the-cuff choice of words possibly have the stamina to remain a front-runner all the way to Minneapolis?

The answer is he probably can't, even if he does hold on in the Palmetto state this Saturday.  Tonight provided one more stunning example:

[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Let's reiterate for the record that I am adamantly opposed to the Huck candidacy because he is left of center on pretty much every issue other than moral issues.  He's a single-issue, identity-group candidate; he's either, depending upon how you look at it, the John Edwards or the Jesse Jackson of the Republican Party.  He's sitting atop the evangelical vote, which is enough to keep him in the GOP nomination race but not enough to enable him to win it.  That close identification, and unwillingness to reach out to the rest of the Reagan coalition, guarantees that while he's found his floor, he's also found his ceiling, and there's not a lot of clearance between the two.

But even narrowing the context to moral issues, I still have this against Huckles (to employ the LORD's rhetorical device from Revelation 2 and 3): He appears incapable of phrasing his rejoinders in any way that doesn't feed right into the liberal stereotype of conservative Christians.  I am a conservative Christian, and his statement above has me wailing and gnashing my teeth right along with the denizens of the Corner.

I understand what Huckleberry was trying to say - basically what Peter told the Sanhedrin in Acts 4:19-20:

"Judge for yourselves whether it is right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard."

Pagans are trying to use the courts to eviscerate the sanctity of life and divinely ordained institutions that have existed across the world for thousands of years.  It's a shame that it's come to the place where we have to contemplate amending the U.S. Constitution in order to protect the unborn and formally define marriage as what God created it "in the beginning" - between a man and a woman.  That is simply the arena that the godless have chosen and if societal virtue is to be restored, that's the venue in which the battle will take place.

That is, of course, not to say that it won't be a very, very long battle, and that the brethren don't need to pace themselves for it, a point that John Mark Reynolds was making yesterday.  Part of that patience is understanding the need to build, or maintain, coalitions that make it possible to win elections, even if our candidate isn't just a religious conservative.  I think that moral issues would get as much attention from Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson as they would Mike Hucksaplenty; as, indeed, they have gotten from George W. Bush.

The difference between the latter three and Huckles is that they are nationally electable figures (probably not this year, given the viscerally anti-GOP tides, but work with me here).  The reasons for that is that they are more broadly acceptable to the electorate as a whole, and they - even Dubya - are able to communicate their views on "controversial" issues without making themselves look like complete asses.

In the quote above, Huck is fine through, "...what we need to do is to amend the Constitution...."  That's reasonable, even if you disagree with his policy stance on abortion and marriage; it's using the means the Founders gave us to effect a change he seeks to make.

It's his choice of words AFTER that point that is so amateurish, and make him sound like the knuckle-dragging hayseed he is: "....so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards."  Leave aside that God's standards are immutable, and any nation that flouts them long enough will come under God's judgment.  That's God's business; our duty as believers is to pray for our country and its leaders (whoever they are) and try to be "salt and light," including in the public square.

But we won't be in the public square for long if we don't listen to how we come across to the lost.  Case in point:

What do you think God's standard is on anchor babies and birthright citizenship? (Manger!) Does Huckabee's God believe in borders? What is God's monetary policy? Is Jesus a capitalist? How much economic disparity will he tolerate? Wouldn't God want us all to have health care? Nice shoes?

What about rendering unto Ceaser that which is Ceaser's, and unto God that which is God's? Mike Huckabee is going to force those of us who have wanted more religion in the town square to reexamine the merits of strict separation of church and state. He is the best advertisement ever for the ACLU.

I don't actually know Lisa Schiffren's spritual condition.  Ditto Andy McCarthy's....:

Huckabee is made to order for the Left:  his rhetoric embodies their heretofore lunatic indictment that we're no better that what we're fighting against.  Let's "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards"?  Who needs to spin when the script speaks for itself?  Where has Huck been for the last seven years?  Does he not get that our enemies — the people who want to end our way of life — believe they are simply imposing God's standards?

....but if neither of them is saved, they can at least be assumed to be somewhat sympathetic to evangelical causes.  And yet look at the volcanic reaction (some might say overreaction) they had to Huck's verbal turd!  Goodness gracious, he was speaking of amending the Constitution, a process that is excruciatingly democratic, not "imposing God's standards" like the Islamists strive to do (i.e. by acts of war).  If either a Human Life Amendment or a Marriage Amendment ever do pass, it won't be any time soon, if ever.  Yet for simple want of rhetorical circumspection, Rev'rund Huck has sent two NROids scurrying to reconsider purchasing time-share condos in hell (politically speaking).

But remember to whom Huck is speaking: evangelicals, and no one BUT evangelicals.

He's got his niche in the same sense of a car battery collector paying a nocturnal visit to pit row at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway the day before Memorial Day.  His collection will swell impressively, but the cars won't go anywhere - and neither will he.

God willing, though, the "batteries" will stop following this Sawyeresque pied piper and return from whence they foolishly came, before they end up flat as pancakes, in more ways than one.

1 O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You, my body longs for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

2 I have seen You in the sanctuary and beheld Your power and Your glory.

3 Because Your love is better than life, my lips will glorify You.

4 I will praise You as long as I live, and in Your Name I will lift up my hands.

5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise You.

6 On my bed I remember You; I think of You through the watches of the night.

7 Because You are my help, I sing in the shadow of Your wings.

8 My soul clings to You; Your right hand upholds me.

-Psalm 63:1-8

The Mittster has been declared the winner of the Michigan Primary.  Conservatives can exhale now, at least FOR now.  Neither our guy (Fred Thompson) nor the guy we'd settle for (Romney) nor the guy we could tolerate (Giuliani) has any forward momentum, but the two pariahs (Huckabee, McCain) have had their early legs-up cut off at the knees.  Romney has done what he had to do, and "Sailor" has had done to him what needed to be done.  Now it's on to McCainian Nevada and Huckabeean South Carolina on Saturday, where right-wing hyperventilating can start up all over again.

If you want a little head start on that nervous huffing & puffing, take a gander at what fueled Romney's comeback:

Romney’s proposals might not be music to the ears of free-market conservatives who believe Detroit made its own problems and needs to fix itself. But it’s what a lot of people in Michigan want to hear. Later in the evening, Romney goes to his hometown suburb of Bloomfield, to the Shenandoah Country Club, to address the Oakland County Republican Party. The people there are Romney supporters, and they especially admire his business background. They feel Romney was right to go after John McCain over McCain’s comment that some lost auto industry jobs won’t come back. “He’s hitting it hard because McCain said those jobs are lost,” Greg Every, a businessman who owns three sports equipment stores in the Detroit area, tells me. “As a Republican, I was always taught to be a fighter, not a quitter. And I think Romney is hitting home hard with, ‘I’m going to fight for every one of these jobs.’ And I think you can. My dad worked for Ford for thirty years, and every year they’re cutting something out of his pension. And that’s because it’s not a level playing field, the Japanese pay less for their cars to come here, and Ford pays more. We have all this retired work force, and they don’t. The tables are not level, and it’s not fair for Michigan.”

In plain, non-Vulcan English, Romney tacked to McCain's left on economic policy (a remarkably difficult feat of PR maneuvering, that, albeit in very specific, local terms) and it put him over the top.  Observed J-Ger:

If we’ve seen anything from the Hillary comeback in New Hampshire and the Obama surprise victory in Iowa, it’s that emotional connections matter in presidential primaries in 2008, a lot. Maybe nostalgia is the right move on Romney’s part. Voters haven’t been shooting down the most pie-in-the-sky talk of energy independence, all of the troops out of Iraq by next week, free government-run health care, etc., with withering skepticism. So far, judging by the swaths turning out for Hillary and Obama, it's a credulous electorate willing to vote on the basis of amorphous "hope," or the one who claims to care the most and sheds the tears to show it. [emphases added]

It is, in short, 1992 all over again: a time of prosperity that the public at large, in its pampered, facile, relentlessly self-indulgent solipsism, has been brainwashed by the Enemy Media into perceiving as a time of amorphous poverty and despair.  There not being any genuine "crisis" - at least not economically - to confront, presidential candidates don't really have to do much more than spout soothing generalities and abstractions to tickle the ears of the "credulous electorate," all the while pointedly ignoring the actual crises looming on the near horizon (the entitlements collapse, the nuclear mullahgarchy in Iran and its bid for global power, and never forget the Sino-Russian axis).

I guess it's not quite 1992 all over again, come to think of it.  Sixteen years ago the Cold War was over and people felt free to take a lark and get sucked in by a con man.  The "holiday from history" and all that.  Which leaves the "credulous electorate" of 2008 with that much less of an excuse for its suicidal folly in exchanging a serious and frank assessment of real problems for phony touchy-feely bloviating about fictitious, ill-defined anxieties placed in the public subconsciousness almost like hypnotic suggestions.  No wonder Ready Freddie isn't doing any better than he is.  He's running four years too soon.

It does seem to be a sixteen-year cycle.  In 1992 came the Sick Willie phenomenon.  In 1976 we inflicted Jimmy Carter on ourselves.  And in 1960 Americans gambled on the "New Frontier," never dreaming where that wager would take the country.

This time it'll be Hillary Clinton, who won a rafter of delegates tonight that will not be seated at the Donk convention, and has been programmed to cry on command.  No Republican is going to stand astride anything yelling "STOP!" and stop that pendulum.

But in the battle for the soul of the GOP, the forces of Reagan struck back tonight, even if our "champion" is a recent and not entirely convincing convert.

For now.

Fred gives Darth Queeg both barrels, in his own debonair fashion:

It's about friggin' time.  Only tweak I'd add is to be considerably less debonair about it.

[h/t: Powerline]

Even if you're a lot less cynical than I am, rants like this one from MSNBC's notorious nutter Keith Olbermann (with whom NBC just HAD to pollute their Sunday night NFL broadcasts this season) have to make you wonder about whether he ever thinks through the implications of his Bushophobic diatribes (h/t Media Research Center):

A transcript of the relevant portion of Olbermann's regular "Worst Person in the World" segment from the Monday, January 14 Countdown show on MSNBC: 

"Our winner, your friendly U.S. government, epitomized here by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mullen. This is about the little thing in the Straits of Hormuz, which the Administration tried to sell as a near act of war by Iranian patrol boats against three giant U.S. warships, complete with provocative maneuvers and somebody radioing the U.S. ships, quote, 'I am coming to you. You will explode after minutes.' Admiral Mullen, it was, who said of the video of the incident, 'To my knowledge, I have not seen one as both provocative and dramatic as this.' Five minutes later, though, he added: 'First of all, I haven't seen the full video myself.'

"Now, the Navy Times newspaper echoes a lot of online reporting saying that the threatening radio message may have come from a well-known marine heckler whose radio abuse is legendary around the Persian Gulf. Oh, and that the only Iranian boat that actually came close to one of the U.S. warships was unarmed. So you guys tried to fake another Gulf of Tonkin incident using some clown with a CB radio and the lethal threat posed by the S.S. Minnow? Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, on behalf of the Bush Administration, today's Worst Person in the World!"

This would be the same Admiral Mike Mullen who will be a seamless fit in the incoming Rodham administration, who just the other day called for Guantanamo Bay to be closed and the interred bloodthirsty jihadis turned loose, on the usual feckless grounds that it's "damaged our international image".  Sentiments so idiotic Keith can't help but concur with them.

As to the Gilligan's Island aphorism, let's consult the results of a wargame the Navy conducted a few years back in this very same scenario (h/t Strategic Forecasting):

The New York Times carried a story January 12, clearly leaked to it by the Pentagon, giving some context for U.S. concerns. According to the story, the United States had carried out war games attempting to assess the consequences of a swarming attack by large numbers of speedboats carrying explosives and suicide crews. The results of the war games were devastating. In a game carried out in 2002, the U.S. Navy lost 16 major warships, including an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious ships — all in attacks lasting 5-10 minutes. Fleet defenses were overwhelmed by large numbers of small, agile speedboats, some armed with rockets and other weapons, but we assume most operated as manned torpedoes. [emphasis added] 

It would appear that the Caliphate's Skippers and Gilligans are bigger badasses than Keith Olbermann is giving them credit for.  Unless, of course, he's deliberately downplaying Iranian suicide attackers in the gleeful hope that the enemy can successfully pull off multiple USS Cole-type attacks, crippling our own Navy, blocking a critical global choke point through which a significant quantity of our imported oil is transported, and providing a fresh talking point for still more Bush-bashing.  All of these are cherished left-wing objectives that make traitors like KO positively drool with orgasmic lust.

And yet our warships in the Persian Gulf did not open fire.  One could argue that they damn well should have - I have - but the fact is they did not.  Which suggests that if this was an attempted "fake" reprise of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, it was botched with equal measures of timidity and incompetence.

The true concern is, indeed, that we held our fire.  It is of a piece with the Bush White House's meek acceptance of the bogus National Intelligence Estimate putting over the rank fiction that Iran isn't pursuing nukes, despite an avalanche of contrary evidence, and his pathetic multilateralist entreaties to Gulf sheikdoms to join us in an anti-Iran "coalition" that they have healthy reason to believe won't last past the end of the Bush presidency as any sort of practical proposition, which would leave them holding the bag with a nuclear-armed mullahgarchy not half a planet away but right in their grills.  In reality, the Bushies appear to be doing everything humanly possible to duck a confrontation with Iran whatever the pretext, and in so doing are making one on Tehran's terms more and more inevitable.

Which evidently is just ducky to K-Olb, who already has it blamed on Dubya and is doubtless angling for the blockbuster, ass-kissing, Dan-Rather-going-fishing-with-Saddam-Hussein-caliber interview with Adolph Ahmadinejad himself as we speak.

Does that make Olbermann the Worst Person In The World?  Hardly.  Biggest Asshole?  Now you're talking.

As day dawns on the peninsular state, the final polling composite projects this result for the Michigan Primary:

Romney 28.9%, McCain 27.9%, Huckabee 18.3%, Giuliani 6.4%, Thompson 5.7%

Are Michiganders "coming home" to Mitt?  Is the message of the McCain Menace reaching GOP ears there and motivating an alarmed turnout swell to counter the expected horde of Donk mischief-makers with nothing to vote for on their side of the contest since only Hillary's name is on its ballot?  Is Kos' ill-considered advice being followed?

Or will these polls whiff as badly as the ones in New Hampshire?

It's up to you, Plasticman.  The fate of the party as a viable political (to say nothing of philosophically conservative) entity may well rest on your Sam Malonesque countenance.

No pressure.  Just keep repeating, "There is no strawberry, there is no strawberry..."  If that doesn't keep Darth Queeg distracted, nothing will.

UPDATE: Wanna know why the stakes are that high?  Take a look ahead (current polling composites):

Nevada - McCain 22%, Giuliani 18%, Huckles 16%, Romney 15%, Thompson 11%

South Carolina - Huckles 27%, McCain 23%, Romney 17%, Thompson 11%, Giuliani 7%

Florida - McCain 21%, Giuliani 21%, Huckles 18%, Romney 17%, Thompson 9%

California - McCain 27%, Giuliani 16%, Romney 15%, Huckles 14%, Thompson 8%

New Jersey - Giuliani 30%, McCain 24%, Romney 10%, Huckles 10%, Thompson 4%

Gentlebeings, if Darth Queeg is up double-digits in California and within six points of Rudy in his own backyard, the GOP as we have known it for a generation (i.e. the party of Ronald Reagan) is in serious, grievous, calamitous trouble.  There can only be one reason for such polling numbers: the perception of John McCain as the Republican frontrunner - or, in other words, the very reason why Mitt Romney focused like a laser beam on winning Iowa and New Hampshire in the first place.  And the only way to disturb that disturbing miasma of political calculus is for Romney to knock off McCain in Michigan today and at the very least restore the muddle in order to open the door for himself, Rudy, or Fred to score big in Florida and the Super Tuesday states.

I can only go by the numbers.  And as they currently stand (and could, of course, still change in any which direction), if "Sailor" takes Michigan, with the momentum he's already got from New Hampshire....

Let's just say that Nelson Rockefeller is smiling from hell right about now.

1 "To the angel^[a] of the church in Ephesus write: These are the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for My name, and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. 5 Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. 6 But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate. 7 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.

-Revelation 2:1-7

Somebody please help me understand this:

President Bush said Sunday that Iran is threatening the security of the world, and that the United States and Arab allies must join together to confront the danger "before it's too late."

Bush said Iran funds terrorist extremists, undermines peace in Lebanon, sends arms to the Taliban, seeks to intimidate its neighbors with alarming rhetoric, defies the United Nations and destabilizes the entire region by refusing to be open about its nuclear program.

"Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror," Bush said in a speech he delivered about mid-way through his eight-day Mideast trip that began with a renewed push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace pact _ an accord he said whose "time has come."

"Iran's actions threaten the security of nations everywhere," Bush said. "So the United States is strengthening our long-standing security commitments with our friends in the Gulf, and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it is too late."

Okay, first: Why does the AP headline read, "Bush Insists Iran Biggest Terror Sponsor"?  That suggests that the AP believes Iran isn't a terror sponsor at all, indeed that they think it's obvious that the mullahgarchy is the veritable dove of peace coming down out of heaven to alight upon Adolph Ahmadenijad's windjacketed shoulder with the voice of Allah saying, "This is my beloved Neanderthal, in whom I am well pleased; bow down to him (or else)," and the President is some desperate, warmongering crank still trying to "smear" Tehran as "terror masters".  Which is akin to "insisting" that the sky is green on Tuesdays and Thursdays, orange on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Argyle on the weekends.  And yet I have to wonder how much of the public has been taken in by this brazen pro-Iranian propagandizing from our own media.  "After all," they can claim, "'Bush's own' intelligence agencies say Iran gave up nukes five years ago."  All of which means they're in the same quisling boat with the Enemy Media.  But if you don't pay attention to such things on an ongoing basis, how discerning can you really be?

Until an Iranian nuke goes off in Tel Aviv or Paris or Manhattan.  But that'll be Bush's fault, of course.  And even then, will he do anything about it?  What does "confronting this danger" that is more obvious than Michael Moore from orbit really mean?  Piling ineffective sanctions atop more ineffective sanctions isn't going to accomplish anything, other perhaps than to hasten the mullahgarchy's rush towards all-out war. "Strengthening long-standing security arrangements with friends in the Gulf" in practice means selling more arms to the Saudis. And as the dismal events of the past couple of years in the Palestinian Territories have amply demonstrated, "advancing democracy" in the Muslim world only advances freedom, even tangentially, if there are several hundred thousand heavily armed American troops present to make sure that far-from-natural linkage sticks.

So, once again, we have Dubya's lofty, vaguely bellicose rhetoric flitting about the rhetorical ether looking for a policy to support that he has no intention of promulgating.  As I consult my dictionary, I see the term "confront" exposited as "to face in hostility or defiance; oppose".  Is there any signal, any hint whatsoever, that the Bush Administration intends to "confront" Iran in the true sense of that term over its drive for nukes, its support of global terrorism, the nexus thereof, or anything else?

Not beyond words.  Which get emptier every time he utters them, a desultory match for the collective national stomachlessness for the war with Iran that is inevitably coming, whether we want it or not.

Thanks for your help.  I think I understand it now.  I'm off to do what I always have to do after swallowing a bunch of air.

It's cosmically appropriate, somehow.

I always wondered what would happen if the knee-jerk compulsion of liberals to play the race card ever turned cannibalistic.  I guess now we have our answer: sheer head-scraching incoherence:

Both New York Senator Clinton and her husband, the former president, have engaged in damage control this week after black leaders criticized their comments shortly before the New Hampshire primary last Tuesday.

The senator was quoted as saying King's dream of racial equality was realized only when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while Bill Clinton said Illinois Senator Obama was telling a "fairy tale" about his opposition to the Iraq war.

Far be it from me to ever come to the defense of the Clintons on anything.  Let me instead suggest that I don't have the foggiest idea what about either Clinton comment was the remotest bit "racially insensitive."  What Mrs. Clinton said was, believe it or not, absolutely spot-on factual; probably a lot more factual than she intended, since by declaring that racial equality was realized in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she's implicitly acknowledging that Affirmative Action and the whole crazy-quilt of racial preferences and set-asides that have arisen since are both unnecessary and even, yes, racist themselves.  I sure hope the RNC was paying attention and grabs that video clip for near-future use when Her Nib wields her own race cards down the line.

Saying that Dr. King's dream was realized in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in no way minimizes or diminishes the role of him and the civil rights movement in making the CRA possible.  It's fair to say that the CRA wouldn't have happened without MLK, and I can't imagine the Empress was attempting to communicate anything else but that.

As to Sick Willie's "fairy tale" comment, trying to make something racial out of that by cutting and pasting a different context around it is beyond the pale of silliness.  Even sillier is the gusto with which B.O. and Opie Edwards have climbed their moral high horses and launched finger-wagging barrages in Hillary's direction.  If I didn't know better I could almost believe that the whole thing is a sting operation designed to make Senator Clinton look sympathetic to the center-right.  Triangulation, anyone?

I wonder if anyone will be surprised when, several months from now, Rodham and Obama are standing together on stage at the Donk convention, raised hands clasped, and proceed to launch their "If you don't vote for us, you're a racist and a sexist" barnstorming campaign from sea to somnolent sea.

Given the high unlikelihood of that ticket losing in November, I guess I'll have my answer.

UPDATE - More silliness:

As Obama and his wife Michelle walked triumphantly into his victory party following his surprising win over Hillary in the Iowa caucuses, the sound system blared rapper Jay-Z’s song 99 Problems, the Huffington Post reported.

The song contains the lyrics: “I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one.”

I can only shake my head in cynical wonderment.  If a Republican campaign had done that (yeah, yeah, I know, rap music at a GOP event?), the media outrage would be deafening.  Yet I can't help but notice that the Clintonoids haven't said anything about this, even as they've tried to go after B.O.'s alleged childhood drug use.  Maybe that's why they launched into the vicious attacks on Martin Luther King and his spiritual son, Hillary's future manserv....um, vice president.

Whatever.

Well, I guess that settles it.  I've been holding back my ultimate Hillary Clinton update theme, but darn it, if the Generalissimo can use the "b" word, so can I.  Log in to Hard Starboard Radio this Saturday and catch the debut!

UPDATE II: Hear's my [*AHEM*] warmup act: