The ineffable Christopher Hitchens trashes the lot of them.

Hillary Clinton & Michelle Obama: “The rage of the entitled on how they didn’t get it all, handed to them on a skewer… with a dollop of Béarnaise Sauce on it.”

Barack Obama: “If you have a candidate whose is as obviously suave and pretty coldly…well, let’s say ‘coolly’ (to be neutral) calculating, and politically as intelligent as the Senator, if he ties such a huge can to his tail, such a big, dirty, rattling can, and he can’t get rid of it, wait a minute! which is it? is he very crass or is he very suave?”

The GOP: “If the Republican Party was, what?.. a dog, it should be shot.”

Bill Clinton: “A horrible primate.”

5:02 video

Hat tip to Charles Johnson.

Steve Diamond, at Larry Johnson’s Clintonite anti-Obama No Quarter blog, waves good-bye to the latest disassociationee from Barack Obama’s life history and presidential campaign.

Easy come, easy go.

No sooner than Global Labor blogged here and here… about the role in the Obama campaign of Mike Klonsky, former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers’ longtime comrade-in-arms from their days in SDS to the Chicago School Wars they fought in the 80s and 90s alongside Barack Obama, and presto he’s gone.

As of last night, Klonsky is no longer blogging on the Barack Obama for President website.

In fact, it’s like he was never there.

Does this remind anyone of something?

Recall what would happen in Soviet Russian textbooks when a trotskyist or bukharinite got purged by Uncle Joe, as Klonsky lovingly recalls the dictator Joseph Stalin at this reunion of SDS in November of last year in Chicago: their pictures would quickly get airbrushed out of the old photographs, without any explanation.

J.R. Dunn, also at American Thinker, remarks on how the Obama left is made up of the entirety of the American left, in all its flavors.

The American left can be divided into three distinct strands, each with its own characteristics, identifiers, and methods of operation: the wimp left, the weird left, and the hard left.

The wimp left is the largest, most amorphous, and least impressive faction. These are the people who are leftists because the neighbors are. They’re the NPR listeners, the PBS watchers, the slogan repeaters. They view the left as a lifestyle choice, one that makes you a better person (as they never cease telling you). …

To many conservatives, the weird left — AKA the wacko left or the loony left, is the left, the perfect representation of left-wing thinking and behavior. The wacko left can be defined as leftism as personality disorder, the contemporary expression of Orwell’s “nudists, fruit-juice drinkers, and sandal wearers”. They tend to be obsessive single-issue types, overwhelmed with paranoia and consumed with conspiracy theories. …

The hard left is the core left, the armature without which the other factions would fall apart. They are directly descended from the communist groups (the CPUSA, Trotsyites, and so forth) of the ‘30s and ‘40s, through New Left organizations such as the SDS and the Weathermen. The hard left consists of intelligentsia and activists, people who spend their lives reading Alinsky and Gramsci and trying their damndest to put those dicta into practice. They are usually found in universities and surrounding communities, though they are also present in left-wing think tanks and lobbying outfits. Most of us will go through life without ever knowingly encountering one of them. Through their intellectual control over the much larger wimp left (who would be utterly lost without their direction), they possess influence all out of proportion to their numbers. The prototype of the American hard leftist is Tom Hayden. …

Usually, a political candidate running on a left-wing platform will be associated with one strand in particular. …

The extraordinary thing about Barack Obama is that he’s intimately connected to all these factions in a way that may never quite have been the case before. The wacko left is represented by Jeremiah Wright and James P. Meeks, with their AIDS conspiracies and related yarns, and ACORN, the leftist fringe group for which Obama served as attorney for many years. The hard left is represented by his Marxist mentor Frank Marshall Davis, who introduced Obama to left-wing politics at an early age, Fr. Michael Pfleger, an advocate of “liberation theology”, the application of Marxism to Christianity, and former Weatherman Bill Ayers, who was contending that America could be set right by a few bombs as late as September 11, 2001.

The wimp left is, obviously enough, the Obama voter.

Read the whole thing.

George Friedman, of the Stratfor subscription service, refects on the probable realities behind the headlines.

On June 20, The New York Times published a report saying that more than 100 Israeli aircrafts carried out an exercise in early June over the eastern Mediterranean Sea and Greece. The article pointed out that the distances covered were roughly the distances from Israel to Iranian nuclear sites and that the exercise was a trial run for a large-scale air strike against Iran. On June 21, the British newspaper The Times quoted Israeli military sources as saying that the exercise was a dress rehearsal for an attack on Iran. The Jerusalem Post, in covering these events, pointedly referred to an article it had published in May saying that Israeli intelligence had changed its forecast for Iran passing a nuclear threshold — whether this was simply the ability to cause an explosion under controlled conditions or the ability to produce an actual weapon was unclear — to 2008 rather than 2009.

The New York Times article, positioned on the front page, captured the attention of everyone from oil traders to Iran, which claimed that this was entirely psychological warfare on the part of the Israelis and that Israel could not carry out such an attack. It was not clear why the Iranians thought an attack was impossible, but they were surely right in saying that the exercise was psychological warfare. The Israelis did everything they could to publicize the exercise, and American officials, who obviously knew about the exercise but had not publicized it, backed them up.

This Obama Girl 2008 Poster Unintentionally Does a Good Job of Illustrating Karl Rove’s Metaphor

Jake Tapper, at his ABC News Political Punch blog first recounts an amusing Karl Rove story I had not heard.

ABC News’ Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as “coolly arrogant.”

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Rove said, . “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.”

Rove said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., “needs to come right at him.”

And then Tapper goes after Rove.

How dare that Karl Rove speak ill of the Obamessiah! Criticizing Obama in any way, shape, or form is racism. After all, Obama is “the first major party African-American presidential candidate.” All you can decently do is vote for him and shut up.

Tapper will show Karl Rove.

Thereupon, the Dartmouth-educated Mr. Tapper climbs into his raggedy-peasant Halloween outfit, and goes all class warrior on poor Karl Rove, playing the bogus stereotype card, beloved of all liars and phonies working for the MSM.

Interesting that Mr. Rove would use a country club metaphor to describe the first major party African-American presidential candidate, whom I’m sure wouldn’t be admitted into many
country clubs that members of the Capitol Hill Club frequent.

Yeah, right! Oh, sure. It’s so difficult today for Harvard-educated Presidential nominees to get into country clubs. And we hear all the time about Tiger Woods being refused entry, too.

What a lot of hooey! The toniest country clubs started actively looking for black members, precisely in order to avoid these kinds of accusations, around forty years ago. But it’s true that Obama probably couldn’t join the Capitol Hill Club though. (It’s real name is the National Republican Club of Capitol Hill.)

Obama suit worn by typical Obama voter

Donatella Versace is dedicating her Spring/Summer Collection to the person she calls “the man of the moment,” none other than that popular fashionista B. Hussein Obama himself. The collection is intended to express the style of “a relaxed man who doesn’t need to flex muscles to show he has power.” In other words, a fellow not like Bush, the kind of guy who won’t go around invading hostile countries to show off (just because they’re trying to develop WMD and acting as state sponsors of terrorism), but who will happily go to Iran to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without conditions.” The kind of man who cooks, supports Gay Rights, and isn’t afraid to cry at chick flicks.

In order to assure Obama’s electoral success, Versace was offering some advice, according to the news agency which-is-not-to-be-named: he should get rid of his tie, and “jazz up” his shirt.

Twitters of joy can be heard in San Francisco, but HillBuzz shakes her head, and scoldingly declares that this development is really a very ominous sign of electoral doom to come. They don’t vote for pastels in the Heartland.

Because Democrats don’t win elections when they are too adored by Hollywood or high profile Euro characters like Versace…regular Americans pick up on it, working class blue collar Americans, and they reject the kind of Democrat who inspires things like Versace’s new Spring/Summer line.

Especially when it’s heavy on the pastels.

Why?

Because, it emasculates a candidate and puts him in the realm of the frivolous, which is dangerous ground for someone like Obama, who doesn’t deal in substance to begin with. The image that’s being reinforced by him, and by things like the Versace line, is an elite, too-cute-by-half, far left liberal.

The voters he needs to win in the fall don’t give a damn about Versace or arugula, but about jobs and security.

Meanwhile, they’re laughing their asses off over at McCain campaign headquarters.

James Webb campaigning vigorously

Barack Obama has pop star appeal in the urban community of fashion, but his exotic background, his far-left liberalism, and his glib and polished Ivy League diction win few admirers in rural and working class America. Running as a peacenik against a war hero like John McCain also leaves Obama with deep vulnerabilities on national defense.

First-term Virginia Senator James Webb is bound to seem like a godsend to democrat strategists. A redneck, Marine war hero, and former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, Webb has everything Obama lacks from Southern appeal to obvious masculinity.

The Wall Street Journal seems to be the venue selected for a serious “Webb for VP” trial balloon.

There’s not much doubt that Webb would do a lot to strengthen an Obama ticket, but the Webb ploy also raises serious questions: Would the democrat party activist nutroots base actually put up with it, or would they openly revolt? Even as a turncoat democrat and antiwar Senator, Webb’s personality, lifestyle, and very being represent everything calculated to offend your typical urbanista liberal.

And, even if Obama and the party backroom mechanics can successfully get the MoveOn.org wing to shut up and sit still for Webb, they have to ask themselves: Can they really control a person as willful and belligerent as Webb? Is Webb liable to challenge President Obama one fine day on foreign or domestic policy?

Even more frightening a question for democrats ought to be, will they have perhaps created their own Nemesis if they make James H. Webb into a national figure, and logical presidential candidate?

The post-1968 democrat party has had very limited national success, being a captive of its leftwing radical activist base, whose politics are simply unsalable at a national level. What would be the consequences of the rise of very different kind of democrat leader, one with a lot more resemblance to Andrew Jackson than to Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton? If I were a leftwing democrat, I’d find it all pretty scary.

Brooks wittily identifies the cunning opportunist lurking underneath the pious liberal. He even rates the Obamanation as slicker than Bill Clinton.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

I suspect myself that there is also a wimp and a coward (much like JFK) underneath it all in there, who can be relied upon to back down and cover his own ass in the face of any challenge or tough decision. That’s how I read his 130 “Present” votes.

Read the whole thing.

Rightwing blogs are generally ignoring it. Leftwing, pro-Obama blogs are dismissive. The best snarky response I’ve read is by Seth Colter Walls on HuffPo.

The event began less than auspiciously for Mr. Sinclair — who has gained Internet notoriety by spreading wild accusations regarding gay sex, drugs and possible murder committed by Barack Obama — as National Press Club staff took pains to remove the association’s logo from behind the podium where Sinclair was set to speak.

Hostile-to-Obama Larry Johnson isn’t climbing aboard the Sinclair circus train, but Larry did clearly feel that he had a duty to mankind to publish Mr. Sinclair’s statement and provide a 9:24 video excerpt.

An unsavory individual named Larry Sinclair posted a video on YouTube last January (which has been since removed), accusing Senator Barack Obama of illegal and indecent acts in the back of a limousine in November 1999 while a serving Illinois State Senator. Sinclair alleges that Obama did cocaine with him and also accepted oral sex from Sinclair.

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January 18, 2008 YouTube 1:42 video

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Sinclair is reported to have volunteered to take a polygraph test last year to confirm his veracity, and to have failed the test.

——————————————-

Today, Larry Sinclair appeared at the National Press Club to repeat his story, presenting a journalistic quandary about whether to report another quite unsubstantiated rumor about Barack Obama.

Larry Sinclair web-site

Ben Smith (who won’t even mention the substance of the Sinclair allegations) exposes Larry Sinclair as a criminal and all-around low life.

———————————-

I had decided to give this one a miss, but coverage broke out widely today, after police arrived at the Press Club to arrest Larry Sinclair at the conclusion of his National Press Club news conference. Apparently, the arrest warrant was from Delaware.

Here’s an anti-Obama attack video, featuring a nice assortment of Obama’s gaffes and misstatements, made by disgruntled Hillary supporters.

9:46 video

who describe themselves as “a coalition of millions” (possibly a slight overstatement), and have a web-site and logo:

Right on. You go, girls.

Hat tip to SusanUnPC.

The Chicago Tribune is attempting to innoculate readers against the possibility that the rumor published by Larry Johnson of a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about “Whitey” may turn out to be true.

It’s hard to come up with an ethnic slur that has less of a sting than “whitey.”

A prevalent yet unsubstantiated Internet rumor has it that Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, used this term at some point in a speech, and the Obama campaign is concerned enough to have posted an online rebuttal.

I’ve got to ask, though. Are there really white people out there so ignorant of history, so unaware of the nuances of language and so threatened by minority grievances that they take genuine umbrage at the term “whitey”?

More a taunt than a threat, the word has no ugly history and hints at no particular stereotypes. It may have been hurled in a menacing fashion in ugly personal confrontations from time to time, but it’s never been used to keep a people down, to put them in their place, to rank them as subhuman.

To be truly offensive, a derogatory term needs to have an ominous context that “whitey” lacks.

Those who take offense are confusing prejudice—which is making negative assumptions about people based solely on external characteristics, of which all races and ethnicities are guilty—with racism, which is prejudice in action.

It requires them to imagine that “whitey” marginalizes, diminishes and therefore harms white people.

And if they’re really that dumb, then I guess they deserve to be insulted.

So there!

They really lit Jeff Goldstein‘s fuse with this one. Jeff retorts:

So yeah. It looks like an Obama presidency will give us a frank discussion on the issue of race. If by “frank” we mean, “shut up and quit you’re bitching, whitey. We’ll tell you what racism is.”

Read his whole Don’t call me nigger, Whitey.