DOOM! :)

Now that the nation's finally shitty enough that we can vote for progress, we must face the horrible aftermath of this great victory for America:


Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are

What I want in a commander-in-chief...

..is encapsulated in this speech.



Responsible. Straight forward. Balanced and cognizant of the needs and positions of people he does and does not agree with.

Xerox This, Hilldawg.

Ain't it just like a Clinton - not less than a week after bounding on 10 seconds of an Obama speech that was borrowed from a supporter and friend (and not even that well, mind you), Hillary uses key lines from a few other presidential candidates to try and pull her campaign out of a death spiral, and all the more blatently/perfectly stolen.

Witness to Madness

(this one's been in draft for 2 weeks, so please forgive - the humor remains fresh. - Ed.)The entire crazy overanalysis of this election season reminds me a lot of some other news coverage I've seen before...



But then there's the spin, including the rhetoric of the states that matter, so it sort of balances out. I mean, what would Tracy Flick say?



Still, it's great to see our man soaring ahead in the primaries and his streak through the heartland of America has driven a stake through the vampiric "black candidate" rumors the Clinton machine tried to attach to him back in South Carolina. Methinks Hillary's Guilani-like last stand will end in a similar fashion as Mr. 9/11's, and superdelegates - who are terrified of deciding the election the same way the Supreme Court did 2000's - will get on the winning team. Maybe this will all be over by late March as Howard Dean hopes. Cross your fingers, lads.

Obama: Political Abberation or Back to Basics?

You decide. Here's a good explination of my take.

Because Cory was Disappointed

Everyone knows Obama won Iowa (by 9%) last week. And by now, everyone knows that Hillary won New Hampshire yesterday (by just 2%). But does everyone know the following?

* New Hampshire traditionally votes against Iowa's results (out of spite or independance)?
* New Hampshire skews heavily towards establishment in its politics. The winners yesterday were the most politically seasoned and still electable (Clinton and McCain). Sorry, Bill Richardson, you're more seasoned but New Hampshire likes the "sure thing" (see below)
* New Hampshire's Democratic winner NEVER wins the general election (kerry in 2004, gore in 2000, tsongas in 1992, dukakis in 1988, mondale in 1984). The last time they picked a Democrat that won it all, it was Carter (1976)
* Obama's poll numbers (which showed him with a double-digit lead) did NOT include undecided voters - and 18% of NH democrats and independants said they made up their mind on Election Day.
* Hillary's win is not a "comeback" as she is now banging the gong Bill did with his second place finish in 1992 - she was up by double digits there just 2.5 weeks ago. So in the end, she's lost a significant amount of ground.

Just some food for thought. Oh, and here's the fantastic speech he gave yesterday.



Enjoy.

Bloggin' My Candidate

First off, apologies to all 5 of you who read this blog regularly for its devolution into a political screed marked by occasionally on-topic posts. Most of my "work" blogging time has been going to Crafty Games Blog or into actual manuscript work.

But I did find some new intereting numbers over on MSNBC:

"USA Today writes up the new USA Today/Gallup poll: “Clinton is backed by 45% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, up 6 percentage points from a poll taken two weeks earlier that showed her standing eroding… Obama is at 27%, up 3 points, and former North Carolina senator John Edwards is third at 15%.”

“In hypothetical matchups for the general presidential election, Clinton and Obama each led Giuliani, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and Romney, although at times narrowly. Obama was somewhat stronger, besting Giuliani by 6 points, Huckabee by 11 and Romney by 18. Clinton had an edge of 1 point over Giuliani, 9 points over Huckabee and 6 points over Romney."

I like the sound of that...

Meanwhile, the Hillary attack machine just keeps on mutating its strategies, including using resident Senate eccentric Bob Kerrey to use some tactical conversational terrorism by re-raising the spectre of "Obama the Muslim." Jesus Christ, you assholes...give it up. This does nothing but polarize the base even more...but then, drawing people into camps is Hillary's number one skill.

Lastly, I like this analysis from Howard Fineman painting Obama as something other than a pussy. I think the man's a gentleman, but I also think he's got the fire necessary to throw down and get things done and win what he wants. That's good.

Finally, there's an excellent article by David Brooks regarding Obama's advantages as a president vs. a senator. The lack of damage and weaknesses he has not already fessed up to - in addition to a lack of political baggage - might make make him nimble in the Big Show.

But enough preaching. You guys had better be coming over to Crafty Games for free stuff and previews throughout the rest of the week, and culminating on Christmas Eve! The Spycraft 2.0 PDF will be going on sale for the first time - $19.95 - for tomorrow, December 21, only, so get out and pick it up if you haven't already! And e on the lookout for World on Fire and Spycraft 2.0 in local stores - the books are confirmed out and available the world over now.

Merry Christmas, you marvelous bastards - it's good knowing you.

Dear Barack

I can't believe I'm saying this, but....please listen to Karl Rove. You lead by a hair in Iowa. This may be Hillary's last stutter-step. You're playing your cards right. Rove's evil as fuck, but if he can put the current moron in the big seat,a guy as sharp as you sure as hell can do the same thing.

Go get her, big guy. We're rooting for you.

Hillary and the School of Hard Knocks

Since the Times tends to strip its articles out of circulation pretty quick, I'm going to steal this for posterity. In short, I wonder this - if she can't learn from something she categorized as a "mistake" (authorizing W's war in Iraq) and she thinks Cheney doesn't have the time or guts to abuse an opportunity to attack Iran, how can she call Barack Obama naive?

October 10, 2007
Bomb, Bomb Iran
By MAUREEN DOWD

Up until now, she has displayed remarkable imperturbability — gliding along with the help of good lighting, a hearty guffaw and a clever husband.

But on Sunday in New Hampton, Iowa, Hillary lost her cool at last. Sparring with a voter on Iran, she sounded defensive and paranoid.

A Democrat, Randall Rolph, asked Senator Clinton why he should back her when she did not learn her lesson after voting to authorize W. to use force in Iraq. He did not understand how she could have voted yea to urge W. to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization, possibly setting the stage for more Cheney chicanery.

Hillary said that “labeling them a terrorist organization gives us the authority to impose sanctions on their leadership. ...I consider that part of a very robust diplomatic effort.”

Fearful that her questioner was an enemy spy creeping into her perfect little world, she suggested that he had been put up to the question and did not have his information right.

“I take exception,” Mr. Rolph insisted. “This is my own research. ... I’m offended that you would suggest that.”

Hillary apologized and said that she had been asked “the very same question in three other places.” She explained that she had signed on to a rewritten version of the amendment that did not, as he claimed, give a green light for combat.

In the original “sense of Senate on Iran” document, sponsored by Joe Lieberman and the Republican Jon Kyl last month, there was a paragraph that supported “the prudent and calibrated use of all instruments of United States national power in Iraq, including diplomatic, economic, intelligence and military instruments, in support of the policy with respect to” Iran. That original draft, called “tantamount to a declaration of war” and “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream” by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, was softened.

Even so, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted no, and Barack Obama would have voted no if he had voted.

If you know the dingbat vice president is agitating for a conflict with Iran, if you know that Condi is chasing after Cheney with a butterfly net on Iran and Syria, if you know you can’t believe anything this administration says, why vote to give them more backing on their dysfunctional Middle East policy?

The schism in the administration is deepening in a way that should alarm Hillary. Mark Mazzetti and Helene Cooper report in today’s Times that Cheney and his hawks are arguing that the Israeli intelligence about Syria’s nascent nuclear capabilities that led to last month’s Israeli strike on Syria was credible and should dictate a harsher policy toward Syria and North Korea, while Condi, Bob Gates and calmer heads “did not believe the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.”

Hillary’s hawkish Iran vote was an ill-advised move, especially given her private view that Cheney is untrustworthy and given Sy Hersh’s New Yorker report claiming that Cheney had pushed to devise a plan to attack the Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

She made a course correction on Oct. 1, co-sponsoring legislation introduced by Mr. Webb to prohibit the use of funds for military operations against Iran without explicit Congressional authorization.

Her opponents have sounded the fool-me-once-shame-on-you, fool-me-twice-shame-on-me drumbeat. Obama chided Hillary for her willingness “to once again extend to the president the benefit of the doubt.” John Edwards wondered if in “six months from now he goes to war in Iran, are we going to hear her once again say if only I had known then what I know now?”

When Hillary voted to let W. use force in Iraq, she didn’t even read the intelligence estimate. She wasn’t trying to do the right thing. She was trying to do the opportunistic thing. She felt she could not run for president, as a woman, if she played the peacenik.

By throwing in with Joe Lieberman and the conservative hawks on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard issue, she once more overcompensated in a cynical way. She’d like to paint Obama as the weak reed who wants to cozy up to dictators, while she’s the one who will play tough. It was odd, given her success in the debates conveying the sense that she is the manliest candidate among the Democrats, that she felt the need to man-up on Iran.

But maybe she knows that Rudy will hurl thunderbolts at her, as he did in the debate yesterday, suggesting that she doesn’t have the guts to use a military option to stop Iran from going nuclear.

Voters seem more concerned with Hillary’s political expediency — which the vote underscored — than with her ability to be manly.

Her camp seems to think her vote was a safe one because W. and Cheney do not have the time or support to bomb Iran, and that Bob Gates can stop it. But she may be underestimating W. and Cheney. She should be at least as paranoid about that pair as she was about an Iowa Democrat.