archives

An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's new book Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Myths of Republican Politics (Huffington Post):

If one examines America's presidential elections beginning in 1980 to the present, what one finds is a consistent and unchanging pattern. The Republican Party dresses up its leaders in all sorts of virtuous personality costumes. The establishment press, driven by the vapid dynamics of high school personality complexes, digests and then promotes that iconography. National elections are dominated by personality imagery and smears and are almost completely bereft of consideration of substantive issues. Worst of all, the personality images that dictate our election outcomes are not just petty, but entirely false, grounded in pure myth.

In every one of these critical aspects, John McCain is perfectly illustrative of the same twisted process that has infected our political discourse and converted our national elections into, using the words of John Harris and Mark Halperin,

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Paul Rolly in the Salt Lake Tribune:

The Utah Republican Party seems to be in a battle for its political soul.

Fifteen Republican incumbents in the state House of Representatives are facing stiff challenges from within their own party. Of the nine Republican incumbents who are up for re-election in the State Senate, five are being challenged by fellow Republicans.

For the first time in memory, all 75 House seats are contested, while in the Senate, only President John Valentine, R-Provo, escaped with no challenger at all. [...]

One telling feature of this year's political climate is that while many Republicans have GOP opponents, the most outspoken anti-voucher Republicans — Reps. Sheryl Allen, Kory Holdaway, Steve Mascaro, Mel Brown and Kay McIff — have no Republican opponent. That is a shift from past years when moderate Republicans were the ones being targeted in GOP conventions by the armies of the right.

Getting more Democrats in the legislature would be great, but replacing the extremist conservatives with more moderate Republicans wouldn't be bad either.

Markos Moulitsas (of Daily Kos) in Newsweek:

Hillary Clinton has proved during the past few months that she is a fighter, that she is tenacious, and that she is in the race to win. There's just one problem. She's already lost.

No matter how you define victory, Barack Obama holds an insurmountable lead in the race to earn the Democratic nomination. He leads in the one metric that matters most: the pledged delegates chosen directly by Democratic voters. But he also leads in the popular vote, the number of states won and money raised. Still, Obama's advantages aren't large enough to allow him an outright victory. He needs the 20 percent of party delegates who aren't bound to a candidate. It's with these superdelegates that Clinton has staked her ephemeral chances. [...]

No one can persuade Clinton to get out of the primary race. But by any metric imaginable, Obama has already won. The superdelegates aren't self-destructive enough to change that, and the sooner they line up behind Obama, the sooner Democrats can focus their fire on the real target: John McCain. Clinton can stick around, but the rest of the party will move on without her.

MissLaura at Daily Kos adds:

In two months, she's lost two superdelegates while Obama has gained 69. But two more months is going to turn the math around for her?

This thing is over. All that's left is for her to admit that.