The Friday Political Thread: Special Half-Strength Edition
Quote of the Week
"You're a hot ticket now but don't you, deep down, feel like a total ingrate?"—Bob Dole, issuing a Viagra-powered beatdown to Scott McClellan.
The Week in Brief
– No primaries were held, thank God. (OK, the impact-less Idaho primary was held.)
– John McCain and Barack Obama played chicken over visiting the front in Iraq.
– Cynthia McKinney hit the delegate threshold to win the Green Party nomination. (I think she's in a stronger position than David Cobb was when he, similarly, tried to hold off Ralph Nader's lazy effort to take the party's nod.)
– Another cloth-clad Obama ally took it upon himself to yell and scream like an idiot with mere days until the next votes. (It was mostly interesting for the historical curiousity of Catholic League mullah Bill Donohue attacking a Catholic priest.)
Below the Fold
– Logical Premise does the heretical and elucidates the reasons why "Ron Paul lost."
– Barack Obama crushes John McCain in the (coming soon!) League of Democracies nations.
– Glenn Greenwald goes postal on Mike Allen for saying Scott McClellan sounds like a blogger going postal.
– Geraldine Ferraro keeps talking.
– Denis Boyles profiles Phill Kline.
I'm liking the fan-made prog videos more and more. Here's a collage of classic video games set to "Service with a Smile" by Happy the Man, which I maintain is a terrible name for a band and nearly as bad a name for a respectful tribute song by The Cure.
SUNDAY UPDATE: I mostly ignored yesterday's Democratic rules fight, learning that Michigan and Florida would be seated at half-strength by, of all people, Eugene Mirman. (At his show in Arlington, Virginia, he eyed the empty front row of seats and joked: "I'm sorry that the Rules and Bylaws Committee couldn't make it. I always put them on the list!") So after five months of brutal warfare, they've applied the solution that the Republicans applied to these primaries months and months earlier. The Republicans sucked it up; the Democrats screamed and cried about it.
The fight produced some mighty good reporting, though. At the top of the pile is Eve Fairbanks' evocative scene, with its pictures of crazed Hillary supporters accusing Obama of murder and begging signatures from a deranged tabloid C-lister who's alleged he had a night of gay sex and smooth cocaine with the candidate. (Just don't ask him to produce the evidence!)
What does the delegate split mean? If I were Clinton, I'd stop alienating Democrats with weird Harold Ickes antics and suspend my campaign next week, ready to take over in Denver if he implodes by convention time. I think Clinton's basically going to do that, but the antics aren't stopping. Ickes was on CNN today whining that only George McGovern had won the nomination without a "popular vote majority." Months ago, the Clinton campaign pushed for new, re-run Florida and Michigan primaries because they wanted a chance to beat Obama in the popular vote. When they didn't get the re-runs, they started pretending that Florida and Michigan votes counted anyway. No one with oxygen flowing to the brain believes it, and yet they keep delegitimizing Obama by harping on it.