Hillary Clinton ducks from event that Palin will attend

... as reported by the Associated Press --

"WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has canceled an appearance at a New York rally next week after organizers blindsided her by inviting Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, aides to the senator said Tuesday.

"Several American Jewish groups plan a major rally outside the United Nations on Sept. 22 to protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Organizers said Tuesday that both Clinton, who nearly won the Democratic nomination for president, and Palin, Republican candidate John McCain's running mate, are expected to attend.

"That would have set up a closely scrutinized and potentially explosive pairing in the midst of a presidential campaign, one in which the New York senator is campaigning for Democratic nominee Barack Obama while Palin actively courts disappointed Clinton supporters.

"Clinton aides were furious. They first learned of the plan to have both Clinton and Palin appear when informed by reporters.

" 'Her attendance was news to us, and this was never billed to us as a partisan political event,' said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. 'Sen. Clinton will therefore not be attending.' "... (emphasis added)

Plus, Palin intimidates the hell out of Clinton ...

First stab at liveblogging, while watching Hillary Clinton speak at DNC

10:37 -- Obligatory video intro ... to different versions of "You Really Got Me" (wow, that's chutzpah) ... Lenny Kravitz ... Tom Petty's "American Girl" ... kewl!

10:40 -- Is it my imagination or is there a heck of a lot more Chelsea than Bill in this video ...?

10:42 -- Chelsea introduces "my hero," her mother ... whatever happened to "heroine"?

10:43 -- Who suggested orange pantsuit, Billy Corgan?

10:44 -- Clinton supporters go wild while Michelle Obama grits teeth and makes sound of one hand clapping

10:47 -- Fox News cutting to reactions from Biden and Michelle Obama after every second or third sentence; half dozen shots of Obama, she hasn't smiled yet (a real one anyway, like those in abundance at last night's communal hug)

10:49 -- Switching over to MSNBC ... more reaction shots from crowd

10:54 -- Five minutes in, still no reax from Biden/Mrs. O on MSNBC As if viewers don't want to see this, albeit not every 10 seconds. Over to CNN ...

10:56 -- Not a barn-burner but doing what it has to do; Clinton is relaxed, confident, poised. This could be her last big moment before such a large audience. She knows she has to nail it.

10:58 -- CNN reaction shot of stone-faced Michelle Obama.

11:01 -- "And we know that President Obama will end the war in Iraq responsibly" ... a war that's already ending, and would have been lost had the US done what Obama wanted two years ago.

11:04 -- Biden nails look of feigned reverence

11:07 -- Count me among those who think Clinton would have made a better pick for Obama than Biden, a belief that preceded her speech

11:09 -- Not many people wiping away tears, though

11:10 -- Claims progress "impossible" without Democrat in White House ... checking lower part of garment for spontaneous combustion ...

11:14 -- Plausible praise for Michelle Obama and Joe Biden

11:15 -- Enough of this for now ...

(Initially posted at my Left Wing Escapee Typepad blog)

They're baacckk .... and boy, are they ever

... and a hat tip to wavemaker for this one ...

Reviving the Bubba Doctrine

Revisiting Hillary Clinton's response to the debate question last month on how she would respond to an al-Qaeda attack on American cities -- what Clinton suggested sounded vaguely familiar, as if we'd done this before. In fact, we have, and with disastrous consequences.
First, Clinton's response:

"Well again, having been a senator during 9/11, I understand very well the extraordinary horror of that kind of an attack and the impact that it has, far beyond those who are directly affected. I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. If we are attacked, and we can determine who was behind that attack, and if there were nations that supported or gave material aid to those who attacked us, I believe we should quickly respond.

"Now that doesn't mean we go looking for other fights," Clinton went on to say. "You know, I supported President Bush when he went after al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And then when he decided to divert attention to Iraq, it was not a decision that I would have made had I been president because we still haven't found bin Laden. So let's focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them."

In other words, do exactly what Bill Clinton did in response to the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in August 1998. After quickly determining that al Qaeda was responsible, then-President Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks against al Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afghanistan two weeks after the bombings -- followed by withering criticism that Clinton was engaged in "wag the dog" chicanery to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal.

And what happened after the cruise missile attacks ...? Nothing much, at least for the remainder of Clinton's lame-duck, post-impeachment presidency. Come to think of it, Saddam Hussein booted UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq a few months after the embassy bombings, not that Iraq and al Qaeda had anything remotely to do with one another, as we've heard claimed ad infinitum ad nauseum for years now. Clinton responsed to Hussein's ouster of weapons inspectors by lobbing cruise missiles into Iraq, postponing the congressional vote on his impeachment for a day, before the status quo of American timidity was quickly restored.

Then in October 2000, al Qaeda fanatics struck at the USS Cole in Yemen, killing 17 American sailors, followed by Clinton doing ... nothing. All the while, al Qaeda grew emboldened by the specter of a paper tiger worried about looking like it was looking for a fight.

What was it that line from Trotsky? You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.

Romney-Rice in '08

A winning Republican ticket -- here's how and why:

The political pendulum still swings toward the Democrats as the '08 election approaches, favoring the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. All three of the top-tier Republican candidates -- Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain -- fall short within the spectrum of conservative voters, to say nothing of the electorate as a whole. Those in the second tier -- Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, etc., are seen as not ready for prime time.

With these dynamics in mind, as well as his own health, Dick Cheney resigns. President Bush appoints Condi Rice to succeed Cheney, which isn't such a stretch because as Secretary of State she's next in the line of succession after Speaker of the House (mental note: check with Al Haig about that). Likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney picks Rice as his running mate, citing the fact she's vice president anyway.

Rice's presence on the Republican ticket undercuts two core Democratic constituencies -- women and blacks -- in a year with a Dem ticket of Clinton-Obama.
Skeptics will counter that Rice doesn't want to be president, nor presumably, vice president. This is true to some extent, at least from what I've read and heard.

But anyone who doubts that Rice is ambitious hasn't been paying attention. And while Rice is not now seeking higher office, something tells me her disdain for that is exceeded by her opposition to Hillary Clinton getting elected president.

That's why Bubba calls her 'Sarge'

Great cover story by Michael Crowley in this week's The New Republic titled, "Hillary and the War: The Real Reason She Won't Apologize." An eyebrow raiser of an excerpt:

"Sifting through Hillary's life, a portrait begins to emerge of a woman who's always been more confortable with the military than many of her liberal peers," Crowley writes. "I found that Clinton had aggressively pushed her husband to use force when he was president; that one of her most influential new advisers was a former senior aide to hawkish Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia; and that, although she opposed President Bush's Iraq 'surge,' she has consulted regularly with one of its prime architects. I even found that, in her late twenties, Hillary Rodman Clinton briefly attempted to enlist in the U.S. Marines." (emphasis added)

Then again, is this really such a shock, Clinton's rhetorical contortions on Iraq aside?
The timing of Clinton's attempt to become a grunt is illuminating. The war in Vietnam "apparently didn't imbue Hillary with a loathing for the military," Crowley writes. "In 1975, just months after the last U.S. troops returned home, Hillary was living in Arkansas with Bill, who had mounted a failed bid for Congress the previous year. The young couple, who would marry later that year, were both teaching law at the University of Arkansas, when Hillary, for reasons never made entirely clear, decided to enlist in the Marines.

"When she walked into a recruiting office in Little Rock and inquired about joining, the recruiter on duty was unenthusiastic about the 27-year-old law professor in thick, goggle glasses. 'You're too old, you can't see, and you're a woman',' Clinton recalled him saying. 'Maybe the dogs' - Marine slang for Army - 'would take you.' Deflated, Clinton said she decided to 'look another way to serve my country.' "

Crowley doesn't attribute where Clinton recounted the episode, but my guess is that it appears in Clinton's memoirs, "Living History."

Unable to see past caricature

In that Feb. 25 column of Garrison Keillor's I quoted a few posts back, Keiller claimed that the Republican Party "is the captive of people who believe that most of us are destined to spend eternity in hellfire ..." -- count me among those who believe it is "many," not "most," and not limited to non-Republicans -- " ... and when you believe that, you will inevitably find it hard to persuade the damned to vote for you.

"You take a Republican to lunch and he is obligated to bring out a big black book ..." - uh, the Bible? -- " ... and open it to Revelations ..." -- sure enough -- " ...and tell you that the beast with 10 horns is Hillary Clinton" -- while the multi-horned beast in question is clearly another New Yorker, George Steinbrenner ...

Who you callin' ho?

From the March 5 issue of Time -- the photo alone makes subscribing worthwhile.

Obama to Clinton: back of the bus is thataway

How about that, looks like Barack Obama might be running for president after all -- and not vice president.

Still, eternities to go before this thing is decided and the Obama-Clinton dust-up over David Geffen is one of many we're sure to see.

I'm not surprised in the least that Billary reacted the way they did -- without Hollywood, they're toast!

Clinton's the One!

Reading the news accounts in recent days of Senator Hillary Clinton vowing to end the war in Iraq ("It takes more than a village idiot," Clinton was heard to mutter under her breath after the announcement), I was seized with a sense of deja vu. A vow to end the war ... where had I heard that before ...?

Then it came to me -- Clinton is taking her cue from .... drum roll, please -- Richard Nixon. Yes! Richard F. Nixon, or Nick Dixon as Dwight Eisenhower is said to have called him (OK, it was Richard M., as in Milhous, his mother's maiden name if I recall, but I'm trying to be subtly vulgar).

A crucial difference, however -- Nixon was unwilling to turn tail from Vietnam in a hurry, thereby hastening the bloodbath that eventually followed there and in neighboring Cambodia when the communists seized control in 1975.

No, what's most important to Democrats, and Clinton exemplifies this, is that the war in Iraq be remembered as Bush's War, and that it not be remembered as a success. That's not the same as saying Democrats want us to lose -- we didn't "win" or "lose" the Korean War either, for that matter (and speaking of Eisenhower, Clinton and others in the presidential race have him as precedent here, with Nixon as Ike's VP).

But from this observer's perspective, it's clear that Democrats want this war to end in a draw rather than American victory.