[Promoted by DHinMI: Take a little time to read this diary (that started out on the "right side of the site") and ponder blueness' ruminations about clear-eyed commitment to principles, about being honest, but also about having a sense of proportion.]

Over here on the right side of the site things feed on frenzy, and so there have been several self-immolations of late occasioned by Barack Obama's serpentine pronouncements on FISA.

As we watch these Kossacks consume themselves in flames, we hear them roar that on FISA Obama has sounded a Retreat, on a Principle, one that is Not To Be Borne. Better, they snarl, to vote for Nader, or Barr, or no one at all, than to continue to fetch, roll over, play dead for such a man. Better to die like a lion, bay they, than to live like a dog.

Since that Saturday when Senator Clinton at last acknowledged defeat, this site has become increasingly aware that Obama is, uh, Not Perfect. It is going to be a long summer, and an even longer fall. And in that time, Obama will, many times, Disappoint.

What to do, what to do . . . .    

Meteor Blades' magnificent front-page diary establishes the fact that the highest officials in our government deliberately directed that human beings be made to suffer torture.

I came to his piece from Harry Maurer's Strange Ground. With Carol Brightman, a woman who in the winter of 1972 sojourned to North Vietnam, to gather evidence establishing that the aerial bombing of that nation constituted a war crime.

After nine days of ghost-walking through the air-wracked ruins, Brightman was presented with victims of torture.

These were stories of a level of barbarity that made the air war seem like something that wasn't so serious. I'm writing this down very faithfully, "arrested, tortured," and then suddenly I wrote: "This is a farce. Probably all happened, but it doesn't matter. Bestiality is not a war crime." I think the circuits jammed at that point. It was overkill. There was too much. I didn't have any way to package it. I couldn't begin to comprehend the degree of barbarity that was involved in this, much less pass it on to others. Who would want to know? On an honest level, nobody wants to know these things. Because it's just too grotesque. This was beyond what I ever imagined, and it was if I couldn't hear any more.

Tuesday Hillary Clinton claimed the 2008 Democratic campaign for president has not been tarred by racism. In this she lies. She knows very well that the campaign has been tarred by racism, as she knows that her candidacy has managed to survive only through its deliberate appeal to racists.

I wish I could say that her acts, her words, surprise me. But they don't. Because I know something about her, and her husband, and race. For in 1992, I worked for the Clinton campaign. And though employed in a minor capacity, word filtered down even to me that Bill Clinton intended to put to death a black man, as a way to "dog-whistle" to white racists that he knew how blacks should really be treated.

And so Bill Clinton put to death a black man, so mentally impaired that, when led to the death chamber, he left behind his pie, believing that, after his execution, he would return to consume it. In putting to death this black man, Clinton committed an act that, some 10 years later, the Republican-dominated US Supreme Court would rule occurred in clear violation of the United States Constitution.

No matter. His death helped Bill Clinton become president. That was all that mattered.  

We are approaching the time when it will be necessary for Al Gore to inject himself into the 2008 Democratic campaign for the presidency.

This is because Clinton II, in her implacable quest to wrest the nomination from Barack Obama, regardless of the consequences for the Democratic Party, is beginning to marshal the argument that refusing to "count the votes" cast in Michigan and Florida is akin to the theft of the 2000 presidential election, in which the US Supreme Court declined to "count the votes" in Florida.

Gore is not required to endorse anybody. It would be appropriate, however, for him to point out, publicly, that the situation in 2008 in Michigan and Florida is precisely the opposite of that in Florida in 2000. In 2000, Gore was thwarted in his desire to see that every vote cast properly, under the rules, be counted. In 2008, Clinton II desires that every vote cast futilely, cast in contests that all knew were held in violation of the rules, be counted.

It is shameful, it is Orwellian, this attempt to wed Clinton II's desperate assault on the rules with the travesty that denied Gore the presidency. And as it is the mantle of Al Gore that Clinton II is brazenly attempting to don, it is Al Gore who should remove it.  

The sole primary next Tuesday will be in West Virginia. Due to the Appalachia effect, the state can be expected to tilt heavily towards Hillary Clinton. Because she cannot become the Democratic Party nominee, her victory in West Virginia will serve only to harm the party, to needlessly prolong a decided contest.

There is one man in West Virginia who might somewhat shift the results: Senator Robert Byrd. Like many superdelegate officeholders, Byrd has remained neutral, on the theory that his vote should follow that of the people of his state. Sometimes that is a valid position. Not this time.

Senator Byrd needs to lead. He is the last surviving relic of that shameful period in the history of the Democratic Party when it obtained and retained political power by explicitly appealing to white racist voters. He has since changed. As many of the people of his state have changed. But not enough. Senator Byrd can discharge a debt he owes to his country, to his party, to black Americans, and to himself, by bridging history. By becoming, when it matters, a one-time virulent segregationalist, who endorses for the presidency of the United States the first black man to serve in that office.    

The Ministry of Truth announced today that the glorious armed forces of Oceania killed Emmanuel Goldstein when warplanes obliterated his house, located near the central Eastasia town of Dusamareeb.

Goldstein, this time traveling under the rubric Aden Hashi Ayro, had previously been killed or captured several times in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he had each time been identified as "the number-two man in Al Qaeda." As Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar, however, Goldstein remains at large.

While Oceania has not declared war on Somalia, the Ministry of Truth declared that Oceanic warplanes are nonetheless empowered to bomb that nation, under the functionally limitless powers granted Big Brother via the AUMF, approved by the former legislative branch of Oceania on September 18, 2001, with but one dissenting vote. That dissenter, Barbara Lee, also remains at large, Ministry of Truth spokesmouths complained.

The United States Senator formerly known as Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged from an Indiana courthouse Friday afternoon to announce that she had legally changed her name to Jesus H. Clinton.

"My opponent claims that people 'cling' to religion when times get tough," Ms. Clinton said, speaking with some difficulty from the weight of the enormous cross laid across her back. "Nothing could be further from the truth. That is why, after winning the Pennsylvania primary and thereby becoming the Democratic nominee for president, I have today legally changed my name to 'Jesus H. Clinton'--as proof that the good people of the United States of America actually embrace their faith when things go well.

"I will leave it to my opponent to explain why he continues to cling to the name 'Hussein'," Senator Clinton continued, downing a shot of Crown Royal and placing in her craw a wad of Red Man chewing tobacco.

Senator Clinton apologized for appearing 15 minutes late, but claimed she had been delayed by sniper fire in the courthouse. "Don't worry," she expectorated, expelling a shell from the rifle tucked under her arm. "I got 'em both."

Those conversant with the Tanakh (also known, when shuffled, as the Old Testament) might have expected that a pastor with the name of "Jeremiah" could prove to be something of a human fumarole, expelling harsh and unpalatable truths from the pulpit.

For the original Jeremiah--one of the three major "latter prophets" of Hebrew scripture--was an unrepentant hardcase so given to scalding screeds that his very name has entered the language as a synonym for "one who is pessimistic about the present and foresees a calamitous future." He has even become a second noun--"jeremiad," denoting "a prolonged lamentation or complaint," "a cautionary or angry harangue."

Below the fold are alternated passages from the Book of Jeremiah with those Fox-propagated clips of the sermons of Jeremiah Wright. After perusing the ceaselessly inflammatory words of Reverend Wright's namesake, I expect that all those who so piously urged Barack Obama to reject and denounce his pastor's words, to even leave his church, will similarly reject and denounce the words of the prophet Jeremiah, demand that their own pastors vow to forever abstain from quoting his words, and, indeed, swear to work to ensure that the Book of Jeremiah, in its entirety, be stripped from scripture.  

though i speak with the tongues of men and of angels
and have not charity
i am become as sounding brass
or a tinkling cymbal

and though i have the gift of prophecy
and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge
and though i have all faith
so that i could remove mountains
and have not charity

i am nothing

From this site's FAQ:

This is a Democratic blog, a partisan blog. One that recognizes that Democrats run from left to right on the ideological spectrum, and yet we're all still in this fight together . . . It's a Democratic blog with one goal in mind: electoral victory.

From Hillary Clinton:

"[John McCain]’s never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002."

As I have long suspected, there are actually three major political parties in America: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Clinton Party. And now, the putative nominee of the Clinton Party has stated, in witheringly disparaging words, that the Republican nominee is superior, on the issue of "experience," to the Democratic nominee. Today, in essence, Hillary Clinton, by the terms of this site, outed herself as a troll.

At around 11 p.m. EST Tuesday night, there flashed through the Borg hive-mind that is the rightwing noise machine a recognition that that night's debate marked the effective end of the Clinton II candidacy. Thus, in the as above/so below cosmos of the Publican Party, Wednesday saw all hands setting about preparing a grave for Barack Obama. From the Olympian heights of the Wall Street Journal, down to that yapping street cur Sean Hannity, all good GOoPers, great and small, went digging in the dirt.

That ignorant bigot Hannity, useful-idiot extraordinaire, devoted almost all of his three-hour radio show to a hebephrenic diatribe that cobbled together nearly every slur yet unearthed against Obama, culminating in an explicitly racist denunciation of his patriotism.

But that was just for the rubes. The Wall Street Journal, in its lead editorial, also questioned Obama's patriotism, but on the only ground that really matters to the predatory capitalists who actually run the Publican Party. Obama, decreed the Journal, lacks patriotism, because he is some sort of heretical leveller who is after their money. In the world according to the Journal, you see, "patriotism" is predatory profit.  

Again I open this site to find people rushing around with their hair on fire, shrieking that the 2008 Democratic National Convention is doomed to surpass in naked electoral thievery, brazen contemptuous betrayal, violent head-cracking street turmoil, and general all-around ugliness, that infamous convention of Democrats in Chicago in 1968.

Well, I'm with Markos. I think Clinton II is going to get thumped in Texas, and that will be that. She will go, gently, into that good night, and we rest will go about electing Barack Obama President of the United States.

But, in the meantime, this calling up of the ghosts of Chicago--it bothers me. It is first the same sort of silly hyperbole that previously beset this site in the form of "Bush Is Hitler" formulations. Worse, at a time when something is really happening out there, it drags us back to those days that marked the nadir of this party, when, for millions of good Democrats, and for very good reason, the "detestation of politics attained an almost religious passion."  

The UK continues to pay for timorous Tony Blair's white-livered decision to debase his nation as George II's quivering lapdog.

One debt will be collected by Lofti Raissi, a British resident who last week won the right to seek monetary damages from the UK, as compensation for his groundless arrest and incarceration, on American orders, during the disgraceful Anglo-American overreaction to the attacks of September 11.

Three senior British judges held that the British government impermissibly used "unsubstantiated allegations" in a US extradition warrant "as a device to circumvent the rule of English law."

Raissi, wholly innocent, was held in maximum-security confinement for six months, where he was twice stabbed by other inmates, while his name was foamingly bruited about in the shrieking British tabloids as a slavering 9/11 arch-fiend.

The court concluded that, to poodle up to the Americans, British police and prosecutors abused the legal process, filed false allegations, and concealed evidence, and thus Raissi may seek up to 2 million pounds in damages.

"I always say Britain is a civilised country with beautiful people," Raissi said. "I really cherish the customs, the way of life here. But after 9/11, things changed."

Raissi's ordeal, below the divide.

The rough beast that is George W. Bush--gaze blank and pitiless as the sun--is today slouching towards the continent of Africa, decreeing that henceforth the peoples of Africa must, for the greater good of global capital, be pitchforked into The New World Order. In Africa, so sayeth the beast, "joint venturing with good, capable people is what the future is all about."

Fantastically, the people who put the words into George II's mouth have, with the text of his African address, admitted that the interests of the people of Africa must be subsumed in those of global capital (headquartered, natch, in the USA). They are echoing, in Bushspeak, what the exiled Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o so artfully expressed two years ago in his work The Wizard of the Crow.

Side-by-side comparisons of the words of the wizard, and of the beast, below.

The nation has shuddered, over these past too many years, as MSNBC goofball Chris Matthews has repeatedly declared his manly love for George W. Bush, he of that "sunny nobility," a man "who has a little swagger, who's physical," who's "really nonverbal," but who "looks great in that cowboy costume," "looks great in a military uniform," like "a high-flying jet star."

Peering into the bleakness of a Bush-less future, Matthews has in recent months bemoaned a Democratic presidential field bereft of "a big, beefy," and "every-way big guy."

But now, it seems, Matthews has found himself a new man. Last night, Matthews gushed that, in listening to a speech by Barack Obama, "I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often."

Oh. My. God.

Hey. Clenis here. How ya'll doin'? Sure been awhile. Yeah, used to be you couldn't look at a TV, pass a radio, or pick up a newspaper, without runnin' into me. Then, I was on everybody's lips, back during that Publican stage-directed soap opera, 17th-Century style, where my havin' gone on walkabout was used to try to whip ol' Bill, like some latter-day Hester Prynne, from out the Oval Office.

No, I couldn't believe it, either. No more than could the rest of the world--out there they were first amused, then bewildered, and finally pretty scared. Would have locked their doors to us, if they could. As it is, in the histories, when the Clenis impeachment comes 'round, it will go down writ large, as one of the most embarrassing American spectacles of the century, right alongside the WWII internment camps, and that imperial war on Spain phonied up by an excitable asthmatic and a dour newspaperman.

But that was then. These days, it ain't me that's gettin' Bill into trouble. Nope: this time the offending organ is his mouth. Course they're gettin' it all wrong about his mouth, now, just like they once got it all wrong about me. Jump over the great divide there, and I'll tell you about it.

This will be quick. And not pretty.

It seems that Mark Twain, among his many other gifts, may have been something of a seer.

While perusing a collection titled The Bible According To Mark Twain (a tome primarily devoted to excoriating the god of Abraham), I came across an unpublished piece of Twain's, written in 1901, that seems, at least from a certain bleak perspective, to perfectly encapsulate the state of the nation, as we prepare to ease from the reigns of George I, Clinton I, and George II, into that of Clinton II.

Twain's text below the fold:

As I wander these days through the campaign diaries and comments on this blog, I increasingly feel an eerie kinship with Winston Smith--chewing black bread and guzzling warm gin there in the cafeteria of the Ministry of Truth, hearing human beings devolve into gabbling brain-erased quackmasters of duckspeak.

In his "Appendix" to 1984, George Orwell referenced "duckspeak" as follows:

Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck." Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided that the opinions which were quacked out were orthodox ones, it implied nothing but praise, and when the Times referred to one of the orators of the Party as a doubleplusgood duckspeaker it was paying a warm and valued compliment.

In the body of the novel, Smith experienced duckspeak this way: