Zen And The Art of Presidental Campaigns

"Every time you're somewhere, that means you're not somewhere else." --Fred Thompson

Ommmmmmmmm...

UPDATE (8 PM): Also I think the good Senator has mastered dadaism:

"I'm proud to say that in January 2008 New Hampshire has passed a law facilitating civil unions here. ... What is your belief for federal civil unions to be passed?" Paul asked.

"Soviet Union?" Thompson responded.

"No, civil unions," Paul said.

"Oh. No, I would not be in support of that," Thompson said.

Either that or he has a serious Red Dawn complex.

Dumb but Friendly Freddie Thompson

ABC's blog, The Blotter, has a fun story about Fred Thompson from his days as a senator back during Watergate.  On the tapes from the Nixon Administration, we now know that Freddie was regarded as being "dumb as hell," and that the Democratic counsel on the investigation would "run circles around him" and that he was considered to be friendly which manifested itself in him leaking key information about the investigation to the White House as it was acquired.  

Other miscellany that I haven't posted recently, the Bush Administration is pushing abstinence only ads here in America and the RNC has a terrible logo for their 2008 convention.  Kari Chisolm (great guy, met with him a few times this summer), posts Markos' evaluation of it from his DailyKos posting:

Wide stance? Check.

In Minneapolis? Check.

Prison stripe-wearing? Check.

Starry eyed? Check.

As for the elephant humping the "2008"...

Are they going for a "Still screwing the country in 2008" theme, or is it a reference to hypocritical adulterers like David Vitter and just about the entire Republican presidential field?

All of the above? Check!

Apparently they ran out of space for a collapsing bridge.

 

Sometimes this stuff just writes itself

Journalist O. Kay Henderson: “How, as president, would you deal with Iran?”

Presidential Candidate Fred Thompson: "[discussion of the dangers of Islam and the inefficacy of sanctions...] I’m afraid that the Soviet Union & China are not ever going to do anything that’s going to hurt them that badly but we need to ratchet those up if at all possible."

I repeat:

Fred Thompson: "...the Soviet Union..."

What's a couple of decades between friends?

(h/t Right's Field)

Roundup -- Now With Exclamation Points! (!)

Boy oh boy has it been a rolling start here on campus -- Spring Break was all well and good, but there's nothing to get that blood pumping like good old-fashioned grey Cambridge drizzle for fucking days on end! Woo-eee! I'm so excited I'm mixing up my ironic exclamations!

Seriously, great roundup for you tonight. First a note -- to your left is the Peace Dollar, issued in the 1920s and 30s. I got one from my late grandfather last week; it's the most remarkable piece of currency I've come across (and I say this coming from a country that routinely puts beavers on its money). There's something comforting in the knowledge that, at one point, our government had no qualms about printing such hippie-ish designs; hopefully, in the next few years, we'll be able to use this wonderful image less wistfully. (And I'm sure President Kucinich would be up for a reissue.)

Meanwhile though -- to arms!

--Josh Marshall thinks that photo of John McCain in Baghdad is a latter-day Dukakis tank moment -- except way more substantial and significant. As usual Marshall's quite right. (Here's a sentence we never thought we'd find ourselves saying about John McCain: "if only they'd nominated him first...")

--In case you still need convincing that the electability argument is bullshit, Sifu Tweety of Poor Man has your back. Read it all. Then for dessert read the next post down, The Editors' hilarious demolition of Jonah Goldberg:

...in my head, I have a brain. Using this “brain”, I am able to determine that the conservative movement - meaning the people who control the White House, who until recently controlled the Congress, their political operatives, seamlessly integrated with the media apparatchiks who “work” at places like National Review - is a lot more important than what some dude I never heard of said this one time, particularly when the only reason I know this dude exists is because you douchebags won’t shut the fuck up about him. Hence my lack of interest.

--Speaking of The Corner: I guess when conservatives say "support our troops," they mean "support our troops, not the British troops, those pansies." I wish I were making this up. And I still haven't quite parsed Derbyshire's whopping statement that "whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to."

--Of course perhaps I'm just expecting too much from these people. We are talking about men whose reaction to the Iran crisis is -- quoting verbatim from Fred Barnes -- "Hey, they could use American ships!" (Kondracke later added that we should "put the whammy on them." Honestly, FOX News could just replace all its commentators with eight-year-old Hulk Hogan fans, it'd be a lot cheaper.)

--I was struck by this graph, posted by Jerome a Paris in an excellent Kos diary. Note that the last time the top few had such a large share of national income was the late 1920s, roughly 1928. History concentrators: what happened to our economy right after that? Hmm...

--Speaking of crashes, Chris Matthews has gone off the deep end. (Well... *further* off the deep end.)

--I should have known it existed: grammar blogging. Sample quote: "the understood verb phrase inside the though-clause has to mean something that does not correspond to a syntactic constituent in the antecedent main clause." I barely understand 1/3 of this blog and yet I can't stop reading it. For instance -- and here's another sentence I never expected to write -- this discussion of gerunds is hilarious.

--Over at Slate, hidden behind a sensationalistic title about Grand Theft Auto, is a thought-provoking article about liberal activist culture and the need for individual empowerment. This one will require some digesting.

--Fred Thompson's campaign is over; if he even hints at running, executives from Bravo will have to personally assassinate him. This is America, TV comes first.

--Did you know that Lee Atwater destroyed funk and invented gansta rap? Me neither! (Apparently MC Rove is just part of a long Republican tradition.)

--OK, one more shameless link to mockery of conservative bloggers -- Michelle Malkin has been reduced to delusional fantasies about Frank Capra, and it's really just too easy. HuffPo's Chris Kelly does a great job though ("Stirring words. It's like Pat Benatar wrote Braveheart").

--Apparently our generation is called "millenials," and there's a whole group of people dedicated to getting us more involved in politics. This introduction to the issues involved is worth a read, particularly in the way it (correctly) characterizes our understanding of community and and the public. More detailed writing is at Future Majority, a blog dedicated to youth-voter issues. Look forward to more from these people.

AND that's all I got. Let me close with a wonderful quote from Richard Nixon, as revealed in Henry Kissinger's secret transcripts; his wisdom still rings true today.

"Goddamn newspapers—they're a bunch of sluts," Nixon said. In another taped conversation, two weeks later, he said, "I don't give a goddamn about repression, do you?" "No," Kissinger replied.

Our President, ladies and gentlemen! (Slow clap.)

This is an open thread.

Obama and Thompson as their Party Ideals?

This Bill Kristol article was just sent over GOP-open. Kristol makes the argument that the party ideals for each party going in to 2008 are Bobby Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. While the latter is undoubtedly correct (every GOP contender is trying to position himself as the heir to the Reagan throne), is the former correct as well?

I believe it is, but I'm eager to hear what y'all think. Also, do you believe that Obama and Thompson are the proper heirs to these thrones? Again, I agree with Kristol, but also doubt that it will actually be the real matchup.

Is looking at the past a good way to judge 2008 anyway?

Finally, the question that has been on the tip of everyone's tongue: Who is the Edmund Muskie of 2008? Just kidding....

Roundup -- I Hear There's Some Kind Of Weather Thing Going On?

There's a palpable sense of terror vibrating through Cambridge, as though some kind of meteorological Armageddon might be happening. I wouldn't know; I've been here at work, minding the conveniently underground Fung Library since noon, and when I left Mather it was just a pleasant dusting of snow, no worse than my Canadian hometown gets in July. (I'm exaggerating, but not by as much as you think.) Possibly it's gotten worse this afternoon -- whatever, damned if I'm going outside. I think I'll just assume that you're all a bunch of shrinking violets who can't handle a little bit of weather. Typical Americans.

Anyway, maybe that explains our sudden blogcoma these past couple days. Or midterm season, or March Madness. I don't know. Fact is, if John McCain's ghostly bifurcated face occupies the front page much longer it's going to start haunting me at night, and nobody wants that. So here's a few links that will hopefully push him down the screen. Get thee behind me, Senator!

--If you haven't already, bookmark Planet 02138, an excellent new Harvard blog aggregator put together by Renat Lumpau. It does subject us to the opinions of Greg Mankiw, but I suppose that's a price we'll just have to pay.

--You may have heard about Hillary's weird response to a question about homosexuality -- apparently, whether or not being gay is immoral is "for others to conclude." Which is a fair answer, but also a shitty one, for obvious reasons. Barack had a similar non-response after Newsday asked him three times -- first he discussed the Joint Chiefs, second he commended military sacrifice, and third:

Signed autograph, posed for snapshot, jumped athletically into town car.

Ouch. After a day, both issued statements to the effect that no, they don't think homosexuality is immoral, please go away. Terrible showing by all concerned; this really ought to be something we fundamentally believe and are willing to say openly.

--So I was going to write about how Governor Patrick's first couple months have been a colossal fuckup, marked by amateur mistakes / borderline-tonedeaf imaging, and he really needs to get his act together. Unfortunately, the Crimson editorialized about this on Wednesday, and as we all know the Crimson is wrong about everything. Thus I'm forced to defend the Governor -- so BRAVO, Deval, for shaking up your staff and eliminating that stupid $72,000 job for your wife's assistant! This definitely indicates that you're back on the right track, and not likely to keep bumbling around and wasting money like a drunk guy at a hotel minibar! Woohoo!

--Zogby reports that 97% of conservatives think the media has a liberal bias. This is incredible. You can't get 97% of conservatives to agree that the earth is round, for crying out loud, yet they all seem to think that CNN has it in for them. Even 17% of Democrats perceive a liberal bias. Can somebody show me this bias? I honestly don't see it. Kos has a liberal bias, not the goddamn mainstream media. (Caveat: this is one of those Zogby Interactive polls, which historically have the same accuracy rate as your horoscope.)

--"Egad! The game is afoot!"

--"Political Insider" (a spinoff of the normally respectable Political Wire) has a helpful guide on becoming a "Political Junkie", which details the reading habits of your average respectable Washington observer. Apparently this involves sucking in massive amounts of Drudge, Novak, and even -- dear God -- ABC News' "The Note". Do read the whole thing if you want to fully appreciate the magnitude of the head-up-assedness. And then we wonder why our Washington journalists all seem so dopey... no wonder they call them "junkies," this is the political equivalent of sniffing glue.

--It's been brought to my attention, somewhat belatedly, that Gilbert Arenas has a blog.

And let’s talk about "Mister 50." Can you believe that crap? Mister 50 ain’t had more than 30 points in one game yet, but he’s Mister 50. I’m not paying attention to a proclaimed Mister 50. If he was Mister 50, why did he lose to a one-armed man? Tell that to Mister 50. If he ain’t scoring 29 points a game, he can’t talk to me. I’m Mister 29... Forget that, I don’t need to be Mister 29. I’m Agent Zero, son.

You need to see this. It's like something out of McSweeney's, only real.

--More and more buzz is building, thanks in part to Josh Downer on GOP-Open, about the potential Republican candidacy of fmr. Sen. Fred Thompson. I agree with Paul of Alien & Sedition (which, again, everyone should be reading): if we're going to have a "Law & Order" President, seriously, it'd have to be Sam Waterston.

--You know what? I can't top that. Have a good weekend, everybody, up to and including St. Patrick's Day. This is an open thread.

Update (7:32 PM): OK, I admit it, the weather sucks. Objectively. It's the fucking Day After Tomorrow out there. Anyhow, I can't believe I missed this -- here's John "Tears Of Blood" McCain delivering his traditional direct, honest, unvarnished "straight talk":

Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.”

Q: “So no contraception, no counseling on contraception. Just abstinence. Do you think contraceptives help stop the spread of HIV?”

Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “You’ve stumped me.”

Q: “I mean, I think you’d probably agree it probably does help stop it?”

Mr. McCain: (Laughs) “Are we on the Straight Talk express? I’m not informed enough on it. Let me find out. You know, I’m sure I’ve taken a position on it on the past. I have to find out what my position was. Brian, would you find out what my position is on contraception – I’m sure I’m opposed to government spending on it, I’m sure I support the president’s policies on it.”

He's a maverick, all right!