Ezra Klein's an Athletic Supporter
I'm a fan of liberal blogger Ezra Klein, but this may be the worst sports metaphor ever:
Since all political commentary is powered by sports analogies, let's take football here. The Clinton team is playing as if this will be decided on points. But in fact, it will be decided by judges, some of them empires, some of them representatives of the crowd, some of them big donors to the stadium. And those judges are terrified of pissing off their loyal fan base. The strategy here should be making the loyal fan base like you, not trying to pummel the other team. ...
Clinton, for her part, could have scored some points with this group by forcefully defending Obama on Wright. But every time she takes a shot at one of these racially-charged controversies, she makes her own nomination less likely. She may score a point, but she turns off more fans, and thus renders more judges unable to vote for her.
Extending Klein's football analogy further, Clinton fumbled the baseball through her five hole. She may be leading by two runs after the first period, but she'll never win Lord Stanley's pennant.
Bosnia May Be Hillary Clinton's Biggest Blunder
Taylor Marsh, a vociferous pro-Hillary blogger and radio host, admits that the senator's embellished boast about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia was a huge mistake:
Hillary Clinton trying to prove her importance during her husband's presidency overreached massively and got caught in a whopper on Bosnia that includes tape. Now to be fair, the trip wasn't completely safe from danger, but no one cares now. We remember her well received foreign policy speech from last week, which included the words shown above, with the video tape evidence circulating today that blows what she said in a major foreign policy speech to smithereens. It's a self-inflicted wound that is by no means fatal, but definitely foolish.
As I've said before, Clinton should have from the start simply said she was her husband's most valued adviser. That she was there and learned through their back and forth, as well as from her many trips that span 80 countries, without claiming a war story. It was unnecessary, especially when the blowback certainly won't be worth it. Besides, no one expects a first lady to have the experience of a president. It's Clinton's lifetime of learning that she'll bring to the job that has real value. Hillary's life proves different opportunities from a man that needs no apologies and padding. Confidence in a life well lived has its own reward, especially when you've seen as much as Clinton has over decades of public policy involvement.
Hillary Clinton never should have campaigned on the premise that her experience as First Lady gave her the foreign policy credibility of John McCain. It's absurd -- she didn't have a security clearance and there's a voluminous public record of her globe-trotting, glad-handing trips that can prove they were ceremonial and largely inconsequential. Trading gifts and nice words with the first family of Uzbekistan does not make you more capable of answering the red phone.
Her biggest qualifications to be president are the Clinton record on the economy, the Democratic agenda, her vast public policy knowledge, and her ability to withstand the worst of the right-wing spin machine. If Democrats wanted to win this election on the basis of foreign policy bonafides, they should've chosen my man Joe Biden. Experience is overrated. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld brought a lifetime of it to the disastrous decision to invade and occupy Iraq.
One thing I've wondered lately is whether Clinton really believes she's got commander-in-chief cred. Her invented heroics in Bosnia have been accompanied by her comment, "there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady."
This is so baldly idiotic that you have to wonder whether anyone in her campaign gave a moment's thought to how it reflects on the Clintons. Chelsea Clinton accompanied her mother on that Bosnia trip. Does the senator genuinely believe that her husband's policy while president was to send his wife and 16-year-old daughter on diplomatic trips that were too dangerous for him?
Tay Zonday Rains on Reporter's Questions
In an interview with MSP Magazine published in January, Tay Zonday, the deep-voiced singer whose "Chocolate Rain" became a YouTube sensation, challenges every premise of the reporter questioning him.
Q: Let's talk about the art. What percentage of your success do you attribute to the William Hung factor?
A: I don't really follow William Hung. But the blunt question is, "Do I suck, and do people laugh at me because of it?" I don't know. How does any artist know that? Why would any artist worry about that? Would you worry about that?
Review: A World of Thieves by James Carlos Blake
To get into the spirit of Pulp Guns, a game product I'm testing, I went looking for current crime novels that could've been pulps -- hard-boiled stories of murder and mayhem set in the '30s and '40s. I came pretty close in A World of Thieves, a 2002 novel by James Carlos Blake that follows a family of armed robbers across Louisiana and Texas in 1928.
Blake's novel tells the tale of Sonny LaSalle, an 18-year-old amateur boxer from New Orleans who graduates with top grades and should know better than to join uncles Buck and Russell robbing banks. He doesn't, though, and quickly ends up in Angola Prison Farm, a notorious penitentiary bordered by the Mississippi River that's guarded almost entirely by inmates. Sonny accidentally killed a cop in a Baton Rouge jail brawl -- the son of "John Bones," the state's most feared and hard-assed lawman. Bones does not take the news well.
The 296-page novel details LaSalle's extrication from prison and a subsequent crime spree across the two states as Bones relentlessly hunts him down. Blake's criminals are unapolegetic about their livelihood, making the jump from card sharps to con men to armed robbers to bank robbers. Sonny's uncles believe he's foolish for not using his education to better himself.
"We figured you'd end up doing your thieving with law books or account ledgers. Like that."
I wasn't sure if they were joking. They looked serious as preachers.
"World's full of thieves," Buck said, "but the ones to make the most money is the legal kind."
That's about as introspective as the book gets. Blake emphasizes carnage over character, leaving me dubious at one point about an act the LaSalles commit without hesitation or remorse. I didn't think they had it in them. They're in crime for money and thrills, killing only in the act of escaping jobs gone bad (another reviewer charitably describes this as "unintentional murder"). The whole novel's bloody and oversexed, with one particularly cringe-inducing crime of passion that leaves Buck nicknaming a part of his anatomy "Mr. Stump."
I loved the period details in the book: grimy hellish Texas boomtowns, Pierce-Arrow roadsters and Gladstone bags, revolvers, guns and pistols of wide make and utility. As a Texas native, I've been to several of the places in the book back when they still had a little frontier left in them. Blake covers the territory well.
A World of Thieves is crisply told, perhaps too spare in detail when it comes to the heads of its protagonists. I didn't see the ending coming -- a single-paragraph chapter that hits at the speed of a bullet.
Clinton Led Obama Among Black Voters
People who think that Geraldine Ferraro is right, and Barack Obama is the frontrunner in the Democratic race because of his race, have forgotten that Hillary Clinton led among black voters six months ago:
Sen. Hillary Clinton's lead over Sen. Barack Obama, her chief rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, is growing among African-American voters who are registered Democrats, and particularly among black women, a poll said Wednesday.
Among black registered Democrats overall, Clinton had a 57 percent to 33 percent lead over Obama.
That's up from 53 percent for Clinton and 36 percent for Obama in a poll carried out in April.
Clinton had the support of black voters and lost it.
Adam Rogers Failed His Wisdom Check
I've read a lot of tributes to Gary Gygax, the late Dungeons & Dragons cocreator who inspired me to spend my teen years with 20-sided dice, graph paper and painted metal half-orc prestidigitators. Although I mock myself as a former dungeon master -- and not the cool kind -- I disliked Wired editor Adam Rogers' tribute to Gygax in today's New York Times.
Decades after his own adolescence, Rogers still feels defensive about playing D&D:
Even in the heyday of Dungeons & Dragons, when his company was selling millions of copies and parents feared that the game was somehow related to Satan worship, Mr. Gygax's creation seemed like a niche product. Kids played it in basements instead of socializing. (To be fair, you needed at least three people to play -- two adventurers and one Dungeon Master to guide the game -- so Dungeons & Dragons was social. Demented and sad, but social.) Nevertheless, the game taught the right lessons to the right people.
My sons are approaching the years where peer pressure is huge, and one of the things I try to teach them is that you don't have to apologize for liking something because other people think it's uncool. The safest posture as a teen is to rag on everything. When I raised the possibility that liking [insert hobby here] didn't make you a nerd, and in point of fact the people who mock it are themselves the true nerds, the near-teens in the car retreated into their happy place. And one of them called me a nerd. I suspect this is one of the things you have to learn for yourself.
Rogers needs to attach a high-minded purpose to playing a game he liked, as if sending your ninth level elven fighter thief through the Fortress of Badabaskor wasn't an accomplishment unless it was a learning experience. When he suggests that "the realization that everyone else was engaged in role-playing all the time gave my universe rules and order," it reminds me of journalists like Bob Costas who wax poetic on the deeper meaning of baseball, lest they be taken for rubes who just like to see grown men play with their balls.
Great Political Blog: Washington Wire
If you're looking for a political blog that isn't just a bunch of bloviating and spin, the Wall Street Journal runs the excellent Washington Wire out of DC.
As the news broke yesterday of New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer paying for sex during a DC trip, Washington Wire compiled a history of sex scandals in the nation's capitol that goes all the way back to Thomas Jefferson.
My favorite:
1976 -- Rep. Wayne L. Hayes, an Ohio Democrat and chairman of the House Administration Committee, resigned after a scandal broke involving his giving a raise to his mistress, secretary Elizabeth Ray. She later told reporters "I can't type. I can't file. I can't even answer the phone.”
She must have been good at taking dictation.
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