Shell game

Hillary Clinton and John McCain agree, at least to the extent that they support a gasoline tax holiday this Summer. John is pandering to families with children, saying this will help them buy school supplies. Hillary is pandering to anti-corporate sentiments by saying this will take money from the deep pockets of the Oil oligarchy. Both seem to be pandering to the " not thinking too clearly."

Alison Fitzgerald at Bloomberg.com says that economists in general aren't buying it. A projected savings of $35, spread over the tax holiday isn't going to be very useful, and particularly when acquired a buck or two at a time. The retailers aren't likely to reduce prices very much and the overall ten billion dollar tax revenue will be directed back to the refiners and must of course, reduce the general revenue; a loss that will have to be made up elsewhere. All in all, it looks like a shell game to me and an Exxon Mobil game and a BP game and even a Citgo game.

Clinton is pushing the estimate of a $70 savings to consumers, but Ethan Harris, chief U.S. economist at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., said families would save only about $18 a month. Burman estimated the total savings from Memorial Day to Labor Day at $28. Even if the savings actually materialized "it would be chump change," he said. An extra beer here and there, a couple of packs of cigarettes and there won't be much left for Johnies new backpack.

But to a nation of chumps, conditioned to slobber like Pavlov's dogs at the phrase "tax cut," it may seem like a good deal. We usually do sit up and beg when a candidate offers to put a dollar in our pocket while sending us a bill for five bucks plus interest and fees. We'll take the nickels and dimes while the roads and bridges continue to crumble and our transportation system, already about the worst in the first world, gets worse and the war grinds on and on.

Slime Time

“Hillary Clinton’s campaign hypocrisy continues to know no bounds. It is rather unbelievable that Clinton would listen in to conversations being conducted by political opponents, but refuse to allow our intelligence agencies to listen in to conversations being conducted by terrorists as they plot and plan to kill us. Team Clinton can expect to see and hear this over and over again over the course of the next year.”

If you believe that, you're probably a Republican, perhaps even the kind of Republican who defended Richard Nixon's wiretapping and insisted the charges against him were politically motivated. You'll doubtless overlook the false equivalence of legal wiretapping and illegal wiretapping and the specious assertion that Democrats don't want to investigate terrorists because they prefer to acknowledge the fourth amendment.

At any rate, the quote from an unnamed GOP official appears in Alexander Bolton's article about the book Her Way in The Hill today. Her Way, by experienced and prize winning investigative reporters Don Van Natta Jr. and Jeff Gerth asserts on the basis of information by another unnamed source that Hillary Clinton listened to recordings of cell phone calls by political opponents 15 years ago. I agree with the quote -- I can't believe it either, but my scepticism has more to do with the technical difficulty involved. Yes, analog cell phone signals of that period were easy enough to copy for anyone with a scanner that covered the 800 MHz spectrum, but receiving both sides of the conversation is not as easy and listening to that scanner waiting for an individual to make a call is, I think, likely to be futile unless you're following them around.

Of course it is possible, just as it is possible that John Kerry shot children and never was wounded in Viet Nam. It's possible that a 6 year, $60,000,000 investigation failed to uncover a Bluebeard's closet full of demonic corruption, but there's as much if not more evidence that Mother Theresa was the devil. There's enough evidence about the Bush family dealings from unassailable sources and court records to choke a jackal, but they're not Democrats.



Who knows? But evidence is never necessary for believers - innuendo and the will to believe are proof enough and although the book isn't selling very well, there will be more -- and whoever becomes the Democratic candidate is going to have to cope with enemies who can equate Al Gore with Joseph Goebbels and do it with a straight face. There is going to be an eruption of denunciation and accusation and fabrication and hysteria such as we have not seen.

It's going to be a very slimy year.

I am not a lesbian

And neither is Hillary Clinton but what's said cannot be unsaid. In our modern world, any accusation will be believed by someone and any denial will make it worse for the accused.

There is a legendary tale about Lyndon Johnson in his early political career having "leaked" the story that an opponent had made a lifelong practice of carnal intercourse with the sows he kept on his farm. When told by an adviser that nobody would believe such a story, Johnson replied that it didn't matter, he just wanted to make the guy deny being a pig-F***er. Even if there is no evidence, one reporter after another will try to gain notoriety by asking if the rumor is true and thereby validate the hoax that there is in fact a rumor. The trick is old, but the audience is always young.

Mrs. Clinton has been studying under that great teacher of experience for a long time and is no stranger to the slinging of the slime. "People will say what they want to say," was the perfect answer and the complete truth and it avoided the dilemma of confirming by denial or confirming by refusal to comment. If the Meth-addled Ann can call John Edwards gay and get away with it, the GOP skunk works has little to lose and may have a few votes to gain by trying it on Clinton.

Cross posted at TheImpolitic

Path to nowhere

You remember that ABC mini-series The Path to 9/11 that caused much controversy last year because it invented dialog, invented meetings between people, invented events and slanted history to blame Bill Clinton for the attack on New York. The ratings turned out not to be so good for what they had to call "docudrama" since it wasn't historical enough to be called a documentary and "historical fiction" was too close to the truth to be good for sales. Had anyone heard the term docudrama before? I hadn't.

Apparently sales of any possible DVD aren't expected to be very good either because ABC has expressed no interest in releasing it, but the Iranian refugee who wrote and directed this tedious and tendentious program is making the circuit drumming up right wing rage with the story that the Clintons are trying to block the video. As with the series itself that contained much fiction and fantasy masquerading as fact, his claim has no verifiable factual basis.

Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose family fled Iran after the fall of the US installed Shah and thus has a likely motivation for hating Democrats, has claimed in the Los Angeles Times and on Fox News and through Rush Limbaugh, that an unnamed ABC executive gave him a vague warning that the Clintons were trying to block the video release. Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer denies even hearing about the DVD until he read about it in the paper. ABC, who along with their parent company Disney received an enormous negative response in advance of the series and decided to edit out the most egregious inventions denies that it has any plans to release it on disc.

Nowrasteh would of course like to have it out in time to slander Hillary Clinton by proxy and profit by the sleaze that is sure to be launched against her. His supporters see the absence of a DVD as a violation of his "artistic freedom" but it's impossible not to consider that having had their reputation tarnished once already, ABC would just as soon forget about being involved in or seen supporting a party whose integrity is harder to locate than Osama bin Laden.

Can we talk?

Obama blew it. That headline and other rather overblown readings of Senator Obama's response that he would be ready to hold talks with the bad guys are everywhere today and sadly Senator Clinton's website seems to be one of those places.

"irresponsible and frankly naive" said Mrs. Clinton to an Iowa Newspaper today, adding that such a meeting should only be attempted after lower level diplomatic exchanges had been exhausted. Obama's response was to raise the question of her responsibility and naivete in voting for Bush's war along with pointing our her self serving interpretation of his answer.

"What she's somehow maintaining is my statement could be construed as not having asked what the meeting was about. I didn't say these guys were going to come over for a cup of coffee some afternoon,"

Sometimes I wonder if we're listening to adults here, but Obama was, in my opinion, right in calling this a manufactured controversy. There was nothing in his response that indicated he would try some reckless act nor am I sure the kind of diplomatic dance that she advocates would really be a reflection of her greater foreign policy know-how rather than just an opportunity to pose as a wise statesman. Obama never said he'd ignore diplomatic channels.

Is this attempt at differentiation another example of Freud's narcissism of small differences, or is it just childish political ritual of the type that has given us so much formally stupid discourse over the years?

Katrina Vanden Heuvel in her blog at The Nation, writes that

"In signaling that he was willing to meet with the leaders of these countries, Obama was signaling that the United States has the confidence in its values to meet with anyone. But he also signaled a certain humility that reflects the understanding that the next president must reach out to the rest of the world and not merely issue conditions from the White House and threaten military force if it does not get its way."

I agree and perhaps it would also be a signal that the traditional formality of ignoring everyone who disagrees with us, that has brought us this traditional hostility, can be set aside. The Viet Nam era policy of negotiating only from "strength" and never having a discussion without a predetermined outcome has proved to be a great system for eliminating constructive conversation as well as for losing conflicts.

I don't know if Hillary Clinton really represents the same old, same old, or whether she's doing what her same old strategists tell her, but if the country ever wanted a change in the way it's affairs are conducted more than it does now, I'm not aware of it. The idea of cutting through the BS, bluster and bravado and sitting down to talk may just be the kind of refreshment this weary electorate wants.