The poisonous politics of Washington turned even more toxic yesterday, when William Delahunt, democrat congressman from Massachusetts’ 10th District (Martha’s Vinyard, Nantucket, Cape Cod, and the South Shore) expressed satisfaction that Congressional Hearings on treatment of illegal combatant detainees had made Vice Presidential Chief of Staff David Addington visible to al Qaeda.

Addington declined to discuss in open hearings conversations within the administration about interrogation techniques and associated legalities, alluding to other statements by himself and by the President expressing the inadvisability of public exposure of the secret deliberations of the US Government to the enemy in time of war. “Al Qaeda may watch C-Span,” Addington concluded.

To which Delahunt responded:

“I’m sure they [al Qaeda] are watching, and I’m glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington, given your penchant for being unobtrusive.”

1:16 video

Mr. Delahunt’s disapproval of the Bush Administration’s treatment of illegal combatant prisoners, captured bearing arms against the United States or conspiring to attempt the mass murder of American civilians, is so great that he wishes for al Qaeda to avenge itself on an Administration official.

Democrats have a long record of criminalizing policy differences. The expression of an implicit invitation to foreign enemies in time of war to kill policy opponents represents a new level and a new kind of politics.

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.

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.

Not terribly funny video satire offering a democrat’s view of Republicans, which has a few moments.

Arnold Jones (posed as American Gothic farmer, in tone of belligerent stupidity): “Because all other countries are inferior to us.”

Trudy Jones (American Gothic female): “We should start as many wars as it takes to keep it that way.”

3:28 video

Barack Obama must be giving very serious consideration to Virginia Senator James Webb for his Vice Presidential running mate.

Talk about balancing the ticket.

Webb is a Southern redneck, and a former Marine Corps officer and genuine (not like John Kerry) war hero who received the Navy Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor. Webb is also a former Republican who served as Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan.

With Webb, Obama has a chance to match McCain’s war record and stronger defense policy background. He also becomes able to make a strong play for precisely the white, working class, and rural constituencies where he himself is weakest.

Selecting Webb, of course, would be fraught with ironies. It seems highly doubtful that the two men could stand each other, and the combination of their personal images would be just a tad incongruous, kind of like the late Bayard Rustin running for president with John Wayne as his running mate.

Webb has moved startlingly to the left since suddenly launching his electoral political career by running over the broken body of Republican George Allen into a Senate seat for Virginia. There is reason to wonder if Webb’s apparent ideological conversion is the result of a third marriage to a youthful wife of Asian background whose political philosophy is now in ascendance in the Webb household or whether Webb has been being cynical and insincere in pursuit of still higher office.

Webb’s Born Fighting, a history of the Scots Irish published in 2005 just as he was commencing his political career, contained enough political asides to read like a version of Mein Kampf written by Pat Buchanan.

Though he ran for the Senate as anti-war liberal, the Webb who speaks in Born Fighting is populist, nativist, and protectionist. In essence, that Webb is every bit as much an ethnically aggrieved and partisan member of some hypothetical Trinity Evangelical Church of Hillbilly Snake-Handling as the loudest and noisiest whitey-denouncing, racist-US-Government-accusing member of Barack Obama’s Trinity Evangelical Church of Black Nationalist Liberation Theology in Chicago.

If Obama goes with Webb, it will be amusing to watch, at the very least.

I mention all this, because I was noticing this morning that efforts are afoot on the political left to scuttle such a mesalliance.

David Mark, at the Politico, is waving the bloody shirt with a vigor not seen in American national politics since the time of James G. Blaine.

He is joined by Stale’s Timothy Noah, who finds Webb “awful” and clearly much too butch. (The man carries a gun. Shocking!)

McCain supporters better hope these limp-wristed lefties succeed at exposing Webb’s awfulness and arousing the ire of the democrat base. He would make Obama’s ticket a lot stronger.

Obama defeated Hillary by out-spending her, which he was able to do by raising staggering and stupendous mountains of money. How did he do that?

Kyle-Anne Shiver explains that Obama raised his cash using the organizing techniques of leftist Saul Alinsky with a little help from FaceBook.

During this campaign season, Barack Obama has raised such unprecedented mountains of cash that he has broken every record in the annals of political fundraising. It’s enough to make him appear a veritable money wizard. If his own “high-flying words” are being “deployed in the service of cynical aims,” his contributors don’t seem aware of it, and the cash keeps rolling in. …

But what exactly is in it for them? What is Obama selling to his contributors that causes them to open their wallets and whip out those Visa cards over and over again?

Obama has appropriated one of the most successful ad campaigns in the history of American advertising and revived it for a voting bloc that has probably never heard of it. The old Prudential tagline from the 1950s and 60s, “Own a piece of the rock,” has become “Own a piece of the Movement,” or sometimes “Own a piece of this campaign.”

This sort of clever manipulation was at the heart of Alinsky-style “community organizing” in the interest of revolutionary change. He taught, through his books and seminars for radical acolytes, how to convince the common folks that the organizer was merely their tool, willingly offering his own time and service so that they could succeed in throwing off the yoke of their masters. This, Alinsky taught, would ingratiate the organizer with the ones he needed to organize.

Alinsky showed how Marxism would take over America, not through violence, but by organizing the power of the vote. Power came from two sources in American society, Alinsky believed: Money and people. If one lacks money, one uses people. Different means, same end. In fact, it was Alinsky himself who advised ‘60s radicals to eschew violence for law degrees and politics. Writing Rules for Radicals a year after the intense riots that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Alinsky advised patience, persistence, and working within the system:

Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. — Rules for Radicals, p. xix

The last 40 years have been merely the prelude, it would seem, to Obama’s candidacy. He’s the man of whom Alinsky and his Marxist acolytes dreamed.

The leftist network within the mainstream media and the various blogs of the 527s has blared a constant message for the past eight years, bashing Bush, Bush’s war, Bush’s economy, Bush’s failures to the people, all to set the stage for the political savior, who has now emerged. The people indeed seem ready for the revolutionary “change” that Alinsky foretold.

If anyone wonders why college campuses are agog with Barack Obama, why the youth are falling all over themselves in their rush to join the movement, one need look no further than to the guru of Facebook, Chris Hughes. Hughes became a full-time member of the campaign early on, and his intimate knowledge of the social network he co-invented has helped Obama accumulate not only all that cash, but more than a million “friends” as well.

Want to get tens of thousands of people to show up at an Obama rally? Go to MyBarackObama.com and tell all your “friends” about it. What may look like magic is just an updated version of: “I’m going. Are you? Everyone who’s anyone will be there.”

Alinsky himself pioneered a non-tech form of this type of manipulation, urging his organizers to use social self-interest as a way to bolster attendance at meetings. But while the Alinsky method involved corralling the most popular community members as leverage, Facebook allows “friends” to connect with “new friends” with the touch of a button, without even having to get out of bed.

For those under 30, Facebook is the high-tech version of the burger joint and the cruising strip of earlier decades, with seemingly limitless possibilities for connecting with other like-minded folks. Using this social network for political power is an Obama first. While Howard Dean used the power of the blogs to temporarily boost his candidacy in 2004, Hughes has created a firestorm of campus support for Obama with a social network that elevates the trivial and encourages the many small contributions that add up to record-breaking numbers.

It’s all in the network; no wizardry here. Just lever-pulling.

Facebook is designed around the shallow and social. Networkers are not “commentators,” as they would be on a blog; they are “friends.” Friends do not need to agree on ideas; they just need to like the same kind of music. Friends do no need to agree on ways to improve society; they just need to like a candidate’s cadence, his body, or his clothes.

As each day of this campaign passes, it becomes more and more like 1968, with the generation gap between young and old emerging as the factor of difference between our candidates. Obama is the Facebook candidate, and he has an awful lot of folks merrily following his yellow brick road. It may lead to the White House, I fear, and Obama may become our very first Wizard in Chief.

Elizabeth Scalia explains, at PJM, how the democrats’ choice of new Obama over old Hillary tends to strike women as a painfully familiar story.

A trophy wife, of course, is the younger, less shopworn, unlined, doe-eyed, and sometimes opportunistic woman some middle-aged men marry upon achieving the measure of worldly success that puts them in more “elite” company. Mixing with a “higher caliber” of people, such men know what they wish to present to the world: energy, a tuned-in trendiness, a certain sleekness of manner, and above all, youth! If they can’t quite project all of that with their comb-overs, their sagging jowls, and their reading glasses, why, a pretty young wife and pretty young children are just the accessories to help the illusion along.

To the curb goes the first wife, who worked his way through college, raised the children, kept the house tidy, blended the families, and played hostess to the bosses and hangers-on; she made him look good. The first wife laughed at the stale jokes, refilled the glasses, endured the late nights alone, and gazed in dewy-eyed worship as he took his bows. She learned to turn a blind eye to his follies — and perhaps his fillies — in the belief that one day it would all pay off. She believed in him and all he stood for; she espoused his cause and made his arguments, only to discover that if she Botoxed herself into mummification and submitted to looking as perpetually surprised as Nancy Pelosi, she was still a middle-aged woman — a little too wise and weary to impress his new, superficial friends, or to be impressed by them, and not terribly interested in a helpmeet/sidekick do-over.

Upon taking control of Congress in 2007, the Democrats found themselves running simpatico with those terminally elite nations who sniffed with disdain at American individualism while being strangled by the tentacles of their own statism. Emboldened by these openly chummy alliances, and sensing a GOP in the mood to slit its own wrists and die, the Democrats looked across the breakfast table at Hillary Clinton in her sensible clothes and felt a little disappointed. There she sat — a hard worker, smart, always willing to do what it took to win. By and large, she’d been a good helper, delivering the pretty little votes, raising the pretty big dollars, entertaining, organizing, laughing, gazing, and lying when she had to, for the good of the family.

But in the dazzling company of the left-elites, she looked … old, and worn. She could be a little shrill, and a terror with a lamp or an ashtray. She was shrewish and nagging — forever reminding everyone that she had sacrificed. If some smiled to see her arrive at a party, the smile was perfunctory; they only listened to her tiresome policy talk until they could murmur an excuse and find a prettier, livelier corner with prettier, livelier companions.

Then they spotted — Obama! He was young, pretty, and had a pleasing voice. He looked good in jeans and had just a touch of edginess about him when he smoked. He seemed born to be looked at. Not much real experience in the hard political world — a few turns around the dance floor with glamorous-seeming men — but he appeared eager to learn, eager to get ahead, and because he stood for almost nothing, he would be easy to lead. He hadn’t accomplished much of note, but trophy wives don’t need thick resumes.

As a trophy wife, Obama would be content to let the Democrats pull out of Iraq; Hillary might actually suggest they stay. Obama would be able to sell the socialized health care Hillary couldn’t pull off. Most importantly, Obama would schmooze and photo-op with the elites for whose approval the Democrats so desperately yearned; Hillary was untrustworthy, there. She might snub Ahmadinejad and, like Bill Clinton before her, pledge to jump into a trench with a rifle to defend Israel. Obama would smile and look good while doing neither.

Putting both to the scales, light Obama rose in the balance; Hillary was judged too heavy. The Democrats threw over the tried and true to go with the trophy wife. The one they could train and show off to the world as “theirs,” who was the very image of everything they hope to project about themselves, regardless of the realities.

When Obama first came on the scene, former CBS news editor Dick Meyer called him a Rorschach test, on whom the electorate could project whatever they wished to see. Some saw — and see — those nebulous words that can mean anything. Hope! Change! Peace! My best self!

Hillary won the popular vote in the democrat primaries by a margin of 300,000. She was behind only 130 votes of “pledged delegates,” but Obama was awarded 29 and a half Michgan votes from a primary in which he did not run by the DNC Rules Committee. Hillary had plenty of time before the August Convention to challenge that arbitrary allocation of votes, voiding the will of Michigan’s actual voters, in court.

If she won, Obama loses 29 and and a half and she gains 29 and a half for a total difference of 59. Now, Obama’s up by 71 pledged delegates, and Hillary and Bill need to move only 36 votes to her column.

Is it possible to believe there weren’t 36 superdelegates that a smooth talking guy like Bill Clinton couldn’t persuade, or induce with promised appointments to ambassadorships in sunny resort locations, federal pardons, or other considerations?

It strikes me that Bill would never have given up. When he lost Congress, when they had him dead to rights for perjury, whenever his political situation looked hopeless, you have to give Bill Clinton credit, he just picked himself up, dusted himself off, and counterattacked brilliantly. Bill understood a key fact of any conflict: you’re never beaten until you give up.

It was still in Hillary’s power to fight for the nomination, but she allowed democrat political leaders to persuade her to abandon the fight “for the good of the party.” Rush Limbaugh and I are certainly disappointed in her. We wanted to see Hillary and Obama slugging it out right through the convention.

But, even from a democrat perspective, I don’t think it’s at all clear that Hillary bowing to will of the media, and declining to fight really is good for her party. Obama is a moonbat from the extreme leftist fringe of that party. Sure, he’s as popular as a new pair of Calvin Klein blue jeans in the community of fashion, but he is never going to win the support of the blue collar democrats essential to that party’s ever winning.

Obama is a mostly unknown quantity, highly liable to destruction under intense scrutiny. He has no record of political accomplishment (beyond getting elected to the Senate by a fluke) whatsoever. Ideologically, Tom Delay was perfectly correct, Obama seems to be downright Marxist. He’ll do great in Berkeley and Brookline, and he’ll get slaughtered in the heartland.

Didn’t Hillary have an obligation to fight on, not only for herself, but to save her party from dashing over the cliff all over again? I think she did.

Hillary gave up when she didn’t have to, because she was too conventional, too conformist, too lacking in independent judgment to keep fighting.

Ann Coulter remarks in Human Events on the irony of media’s “Shut-up-and-go-away!” approach to Hillary’s primary popular vote victory.

When Gore won the popular vote in the 2000 election by half a percentage point, but lost the Electoral College — or, for short, “the constitutionally prescribed method for choosing presidents” — anyone who denied the sacred importance of the popular vote was either an idiot or a dangerous partisan.

But now Hillary has won the popular vote in a Democratic primary, while Obambi has won under the rules. In a spectacular turnabout, media commentators are heaping sarcasm on our plucky Hillary for imagining the “popular vote” has any relevance whatsoever. …

After nearly eight years of having to listen to liberals crow that Bush was “selected, not elected,” this is a shocking about-face. Apparently unaware of the new party line that the popular vote amounts to nothing more than warm spit, just last week HBO ran its movie “Recount,” about the 2000 Florida election, the premise of which is that sneaky Republicans stole the presidency from popular vote champion Al Gore. (Despite massive publicity, the movie bombed, with only about 1 million viewers, so now HBO is demanding a “recount.”)

So where is Kevin Spacey from HBO’s “Recount,” to defend Hillary, shouting: “WHO WON THIS PRIMARY?”

Results:

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by over 300,000 votes. Barack Obama has 130 more pledged delegates.

POPULAR VOTE (all primaries and caucuses)
Hillary Clinton: 17,785,009
Barack Obama: 17,479,990

PLEDGED DELEGATES
Barack Obama: 1766.5
Hillary Clinton: 1639.5

And, on that basis, Hillary is reported “by informed sources” to be planning to drop out of the race and concede on Friday or Saturday.

The mystery is why “pledged delegates” are assumed to be set in stone.

Suppose Patrick Fitzgerald follows up his recent conviction of prominent Obama supporter (and real estate subsidizer) Antoin Rezko with a pre-August indictment of B. Hussein himself?

Suppose the Michelle Obama “Whitey” tape is produced pre-August, and provokes scrutiny revealing intimate ties on the part of the media’s preferred candidate to Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam?

Barack Obama has been a national figure for a very short time, his relatively obscure career in Illinois politics is only now gradually becoming known, and there is a real possibility that the microscopic and intense attention inevitable in a presidential campaign might any day pop open one of his personal closet doors revealing a deal-breaking skeleton.

Short-circuiting the convention process and conducting a media-led instant coronation doubtless gratifies the infantile democrat party base, which can happily worship, and fantasize over the New Age and Socialist Utopia soon to be created by the arrival of their redeemer and god/king, but wasn’t the whole idea of having superdelegates supposed to be preventing these kinds of democrat party swoons? Weren’t superdelegates supposed to be wiser, more politically astute party leaders who would stop the crazies from charging over the cliff and nominating George McGovern II?

So here we are, and they’re apparently ready to line up behind the most leftwing democrat in the Senate, a candidate with no record of meaningful political accomplishment beyond miraculously getting elected to the Senate, who lost the popular vote in the democrat party primaries, and who already seems to have a great deal of disadvantageous personal baggage against a war hero with strong cross-party-lines appeal. Those democrats obviously have a death wish.

Conventional Liberal Republican versus wacky leftwing democrat who opposes national defense, it’s 1972 all over again. Quick, somebody hand B. Hussein a shovel, he’s going to need it to dig himself out from underneath the landslide come November.

Kathy Grimes say Giuliani has it.

The word is that one of the Republican candidates no longer in the race (Rudy) acquired the tape. Republicans will most likely hold the tape until the fall. Because if Hillary had it, she’d let it out now to get rid of Obama.

Things will only get more interesting. Either way, Michelle Obama has using her own mouth, put her husband’s foot in it.

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From JET Magazine, July 26, 2004

Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Holds 33rd Annual Conference In Chicago

CAPTION: Picture 11, Rev. Willie T. Barrow, chairman emerita, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, enjoys the Women’s Luncheon with Michelle Obama, wife of U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama of Illinois and executive director of community affairs, University of Chicago Hospital, Shoshana Johnson, the nation’s first Black female POW and former Iraqi captive, and Mrs. Jamell Meeks, wife of the Rev. James Meeks, vice president, Rainbow/PUSH, and Rev. Dr. Barbara King, Mother Khadijah Farrakhan, wife of Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Judge Arnette Hubbard.

HillBuzz suggests the devastating tape containing Michelle Obama’s “Whitey” speech wasn’t terribly hard to lay hands on. Trinity Church was selling it on DVD up until this last March!

Here’s what’s known so far:

The Michelle Obama Rant Tape was filmed between June 26th – July 1st 2004 in Chicago, IL at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Conference at Trinity United Church: specifically the Women’s Event.

Michelle Obama appeared as a panelist alongside Mrs. Khadijah Farrakhan and Mrs. James Meeks.

Bill Clinton spoke during the Conference, as did Bill Cosby and other speakers, but not at the panel Michelle attended.

Michelle Obama spoke at the Women’s Event, but referenced Bill Clinton in her rant — his presence at the conference was the impetus for her raving, it seems.

For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on “whitey”, and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America. Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that’s when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who’s seen this.

The “tape” is a DVD that Trinity United sold on its website, and possibly offered free for download up until March 2008 when Trinity’s site was scrubbed and the DVDs were no longer offered for sale.

This outburst happened just one month before the 2004 Democratic Convention, when Barack Obama delivered the keynote address.

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