Gerard Baker, in the London Times, contemplates the dreadful horror that is Hillary.

As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.

Fifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as “women who stay home and bake cookies”.

Today we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance.

To grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.

And so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.

After that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic — the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you’ve established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians— to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.

Once in the Senate she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002. This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.

Now, you might say, hold on. Aren’t all politicians veined with an opportunistic streak? Why is she any different? The difference is that Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.

All politicians, sadly, lie. We can often forgive the lies as the necessary price paid to win popularity for a noble cause. But the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.

Kerry wipes an eye while speaking at Davos

Howie Carr, at the Boston Herald, pens a eulogy to a great American political career.

Do you suppose (John Kerry)’ll put in now for one final Purple Heart? He was wounded by Iraq, after all. It’s gotta hurt, knowing that he and Al Gore are in one of the world’s tiniest clubs: guys who blew an election to George W. Bush.

But here’s the difference. Al Gore has actually been nominated this year. For a couple of Academy Awards. And he may win. John Kerry, though, well, he’s about to find out whether or not the old saying is true: “Living well is the best revenge.”..

..for Kerry, this is a tragedy. He always knew he’d be president. He’s still only 63 – older than Bush, or Clinton, or even Al Gore – and it’s over.

He’ll never be president. America dodged another bullet.

And here’s the greatest irony of all: John Kerry was the absolute last person in the world to know it was all over…

A line comes to mind from F. Scott Fitzgerald, as John and Mama T leave the national scene like Tom and Daisy Buchanan at the end of “The Great Gatsby,” retreating “back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together . . . drift(ing) here and there unrestfully, wherever people played polo and were rich together.”

Good riddance.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Martin Peretz, in New Republic, contemplates the threat to Hillary’s ambition posed by Barack Obama, and the possibility of another Clinton White House.

Hillary started out in 1993 with “the politics of meaning,” that pretentious and portentous phrase that actually means nothing. She had leapt at it out of the mouth of a foolish “rabbi,” Michael Lerner, earnest and oleaginous (he the enthusiast of tikkun olam, a theology rooted nowhere so firmly as in a Peter, Paul, and Mary song). But she dropped it quickly when she discovered that the American people were on to her preacher-teacher’s banal words. Then she peddled It Takes A Village as book and slogan. It soon appeared too soft for her own entry into politics, and so she also sidetracked this theme. But now she is running for president. Tough-minded she was on Iraq, right up there with that junior senator from Massachusetts. A few days ago, she said that, had she known what she knows now, she wouldn’t have voted for the war. Then, today, she said she wished she had voted against the war, whatever. She has fumbled and disenchanted the left, and the left is not easily forgiving. Still, as a gesture to that flank of the party, Hillary has republished It Takes A Village. But what it really takes is a majority of the electoral college. Which I don’t see.

Andy Borowitz imagines a colorful twist in the race for the 2008 democrat nomination: “A Blue Dress for the Blue States.”

In a development that could drastically alter the playing field of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, former White House intern Monica Lewinsky confirmed today that she was considering making a bid for the Democratic nod in 2008.

According to those familiar with her political plans, Lewinsky plans to offer herself as an alternative to the presumptive frontrunner in the race, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

Rumors of Lewinsky’s intentions spread like wildfire this week, when the erstwhile intern made a series of stops in New Hampshire, location of the nation’s first presidential primary.

Wearing a midnight blue cocktail dress, Lewinsky drew large crowds across the state, suggesting that she could be a real threat to Clinton in a head-to-head race.

“Voters are worn out from George Bush, Iraq and the war on terror,” said Democratic voter Jayson Tenzer, who attended one of Lewinsky’s New Hampshire rallies. “Monica Lewinsky means good times.”

According to Professor Davis Logsdon of the political science department at the University of Minnesota, offering herself as an alternative to Sen. Clinton could be a successful strategy for Lewinsky: “It’s worked before.”

And while some Democratic insiders worry that Lewinsky lacks the political know-how to be president of the United States, Professor Logsdon does not share those concerns: “Monica Lewinsky has actually had more experience in the Oval Office than Hillary Clinton has.”

Elsewhere, one day after President Hugo Chavez appeared at the United Nations and called him “Satan,” President Bush said, “I think he has me mixed up with Cheney.”

The NAACP is acting as the democrat party’s proxy in pushing for restoring the right to vote to convicted felons. Doubtless, democrat strategists’ thinking has been influenced by the narrow margin of the 2000 presidential election, and the close contests in several states in 2004. Add another 98,000 brig rat democrat voters in Tennesee in the 2000 election and Gore wins 1,079,720 to 1,061,949. Now they’re playing the race card and pulling out all the stops to get those extra votes.

Jackson (Tennessee) Sun

Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser

The small number of convicted criminals who have really reformed, and who may be capable of playing a constructive role in the political process, are adequately served by existing pardon and restoration of rights programs. We have more voting fraud than we need already without the introduction of one more ethically unconstrained democrat voting base.

Should he really be deciding our elections?

It is sometimes interesting to read the European perspective on American events.

Alexandre Adler in Le Figaro thinks the defeat of Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut Primary marks the alliance of the heirs of old-fashioned Patrician Anti-semitism with the New Left, and predicts this “slap in the face” to Jewish democrat voters may very possibly provoke the final Exodus of this key constituent of the Roosevelt-era democrat party voting bloc alliance from what is rapidly becoming something completely alien to them.

(translated by JDZ)

We know very well that over the course of a few decades in complex situations small causes can produce great effects. The defeat in the democratic primary election of the senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, seems, at first sight, a secondary episode of the political battle, primarily related to the very great number of voters absent on summer vacation rather than with the much more noted, but undoubtedly conjectural, rejection of the Iraqi policy of George W. Bush.

These perfectly logical explanations do not, however, take into account the dynamics which, even at this moment, underway as a sequel to this electoral battle, will find their conclusion at the beginning of November with the election of a third of the Senate, because Lieberman, rudely evicted from his own party, has just announced that he will run as an independent candidate with the neutrality, if not the tacit support, of the Republican Party and the White House.

Admittedly, Joe Lieberman is not simply an innocent victim who has devoted himself to following faithfully his constituent’s opinions. His very critical attitude towards the escapades of President Clinton when the latter was menaced with impeachment, argues neither in favor of his honesty, nor in favor of his authentic moral rectitude. It was, moreover, on the part of Al Gore a sign of profound baseness of character to choose Lieberman as his running-mate for the presidential race of the year 2000, so as to distance himself from outgoing president Clinton, whose job performance was still exceptionally good. However, Lieberman has not been punished for his very real sins; but, on the contrary, for his undeniable courage in the War on Terrorism, for his continued support, in the face of adverse winds and tides, of the Near-Eastern strategy of George W. Bush.

His adversary, a young billionaire leftist of the name of Lamont, very openly wanted to make this battle the crucial moment of affirmation for the new pacifist and isolationist wing of the Democratic Party, which has been triumphing little by little over the moderates. If Senator Kerry again succeeded in 2004 in containing the pacifist-populist forces whose spokesman, polemicist documentary-filmmaker Michael Moore, had become the flag-bearer, subsequent events ultimately led to the defeat of the pragmatic approach among democrats. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean since then became Chairman of the party. Kerry himself inflicted great harm in his presidential campaign upon the presidency. And now that Lieberman has been thrown out by a militant wing which uses the weapon of the blog massively, there is no taboo against noting the conspicuous Jewish Orthodox affiliation of the outgoing senator, who has not hesitated to return to the Capitol on Friday evenings, escorted by a procession of police cars obliged to drive to their steps. While the studies of some political economists rather unfortunately inspired denunciations of the excessive influence of the Jewish and Israeli lobby on the foreign policy of the Bush Administration, the winner of the recent democratic primary did not hesitate to criticize the State of Israel for its warmongering. Just like Howard Dean, and like his neighbor Hamilton Fish, Lamont has joined the party of the Protestant patriciate of the past to the extreme left, bringing with him a heritage of hostility toward Israel characteristic of his social background, in former times one loyal to the Republican Party of Eisenhower, like the grandfather of the current president, who was… also a senator from Connecticut.

It is not impossible that, if current tendencies continue, we are witnessing the last upheavals which will complete the transformation of the Democratic Party. The party which had been, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the party of union members (which Lieberman always defended without hesitation), a party overwhelmingly patriotic, in love with the military and the draft, fundamentally hostile to all forms of isolationism, and finally the party of minorities mistreated by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

What is conventionally called “neoconservatism” is nothing other than the movement, more or less quickly, by which the skilled workers, the anti-isolationists and, more and more, those closest to the people, the Catholic communities, Irish and Italian, join the Republican Party by rejecting the new democratic left. While Jewish intellectuals (of greater or lesser reputation) orchestrated this movement following the end of the war in Vietnam, they did not remain any less a minority within a community always in the majority firmly Democrat. With the election of a Republican Jewish mayor in New York, Michael Bloomberg (who very recently left the Democratic Party and succeeded the most famous of the neoconservatives, Rudy Giuliani), as with the rallying of the Californian Jewish electorate to the candidacy of Schwartzenegger, here now Connecticut’s slap in the face may cause the swing of all the great centers of Jewish votes – New York, New Jersey, Miami, Chicago – in the direction of a Republican Party which integrates the Catholics more and more, and calls in a very visible fashion to Middle Class Hispanics and blacks.

We are certainly at a turning point of both American domestic and foreign policy, but the neodemocrats have not triumphed yet. It remains to be seen, indeed, if the American people who placed their confidence in Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy will be able to identify themselves with a pacifist, anti-Zionist, and narcissistic party, whose group direction will be given the lead by the humanitarian lamentations of enthused starlets and the producers of screen spectacles who aspire to direct the State. These people do not prepare us for cold realities which many fear, but are quite simply the impulse toward frivolity of the primary world power.

————-
Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

Thomas B. Edsall, in New Republic, discusses the negative influence of liberal elites.

The Lieberman-Lamont primary is a study, writ small, in what has ailed the Democratic Party over the last few decades. Simply put, Democratic presidential primary electorates continue to be dominated by an upscale, socially (and culturally) liberal elite. Democrats must first win the approval of this elite before they can compete in the general election. It’s a trap that no Democrat other than Bill Clinton has found a way to escape, and Lamont’s victory shows why.

In a quick and dirty analysis of the difference between the Lamont and Lieberman voters based on income, education, and other demographic data from across Connecticut, Ken Strasma of Strategic Telemetry found that Lamont’s strongest support came from areas with high housing values, voters with college or graduate degrees, and parents with children in private schools. Lieberman’s votes, in contrast, came from the cities, renters, blue-collar and service-sector workers, and those receiving Social Security benefits.

There is nothing wrong with upscale liberals or downscale renters; a vote is a vote. The problem for the Democrats is (and has been for more than a quarter century) that liberal elites are disproportionately powerful in primaries–where they turn out in much higher numbers–and in the operations of the party itself. In presidential campaigns, these voters have nominated a succession of losers, including George McGovern, Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. The power of this wing of the party is easy to see in battles against Republican Supreme Court nominees, when Democratic opposition concentrates on such issues as abortion and sexual privacy to the virtual exclusion of questions of business versus labor, tort law, and the power of the state to regulate corporate activity.

For the Democrats, the influence of the upscale left has increased the party’s vulnerability to charges that it is weak on threats to the nation’s security and that its candidates are far from mainstream on social issues. Although the public has lost faith in President Bush and the GOP on a wide range of issues, the GOP continues to hold one trump card: terrorism. A May 10 New York Times/CBS News poll showed voters preferring Republicans to Democrats on terrorism by a margin of 40-35 percent. A more telling finding was in an Associated Press/Ipsos survey released July 14. It found that voters may not be thrilled with the way Republicans in Congress are dealing with terrorism (54 percent unfavorable, 43 favorable), but they are downright hostile to the Democrats’ approach (62 percent negative, 33 positive).

John McCain tells Don Imus:

I would rather have a clean government than one where First Amendment rights were being respected which has become corrupt.

video

Some of us don’t share Senator McCain’s point of view that any particular problem justifies the abrogation of major provisions of the Bill of Rights.

Stephen Green has some fun reflecting on democrat electoral prospects.

In the space of 48 hours, the three top Democrats for 2008 proved themselves to have all the staying power of a nervous virgin on the set of a porn shoot.

If this is how the Democrats play when not much seems to be going well for Bush, then they’re toast. It’s too soon to predict exactly what will happen in 2008. But if today is any indication, then I can make a confident prediction about this year’s midterm election: The Republicans will gain a seat or two in the Senate, and at the very least hold even in the House.

Year Six of any administration is usually poison for the party. If we had something like a loyal opposition in this country, that would be as true in 2006 as it was in 1986.

But it isn’t. And it won’t be. Mark my words.

Right Wing News emailed more than 230 “right of center” bloggers and asked for a 1 to 5 list of candidates they would most like to see being the Republican nominee for President in 2008 and the list of candidates they’d least like to see nominated.

(Votes were weighted as follows:
1) Worth 2 points
2 or 3) Worth 1.5 points
4 or 5) Worth 1 point)

Results:

Top Most Desired:

1) Condoleeza Rice (65.5)
2) Rudy Giuliani (58.0)
3) George Allen (42.0)
4) Newt Gingrich (32.0)
5) Dick Cheney (26.0)

Top Least Desired:

1) John McCain (74.5)
2) Chuck Hagel (55.5)
3) Bill Frist (43.5)
4) George Pataki (33.0)
5) Jeb Bush (22.0)

—————————————————————-

Frankly, I do not see how anybody who claims to be conservative could consider supporting Guiliani in the remotest of circumstances. My own list would look like:

Most Desired:

1) Dick Cheney
2) Newt Gingrich
3) Is there anybody else genuinely conservative, articulate, and reasonably intelligent?

Least Desired:

1) I wouldn’t have thought of Chuck Hagel as a potential Republican choice, but if he’s on the list, he gets my number 1 vote
2) John McCain
3) Rudy Giuliani
4) George Pataki

Radio Blogger reveals that Joe Biden is more than a little conflicted about Princeton.

The pro-Princeton statements: It’s an honor to be here. It would have even been a greater honor to have gone here. &c. were from February 23, 2004.

The anti-Princeton statements: I didn’t even like Princeton…No, I mean I really didn’t like Princeton. &c. are from yesterday’s Alito hearing.

————————————
Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

John Kerry is boasting that he is in the best position of democrat contenders to run in 2008, because he has an email list of more than 3 million unsound souls. Some members of the Blogosphere left are not eager to repeat the experience of 2004, and are suggesting that left-wingers should do something about this, and let John Kerry know just how they feel about him. I love it.

Hat tip to Mickey Kaus.