The Poor Man Institute

Abandon ship:

The senior HRC aides [...] –well, “loyal” is not how I would describe them. Their candidate still has a 30% chance of winning, and they are diminishing that chance by dishing “campaign in turmoil” dirt to reporters in the hope that it will get a knife stuck in the back of one of their competitors for future White House jobs and in the hope of gaining reporter points that they can use in some way at some future date.

I’ve seen this before. There are two kinds of people who get involved in politics–those who care about the substance of policy, and those who want to get White House Mess privileges, or as a consolation prize become media celebrities. The first kind–the policy people–will be loyal to a politician as long as he or she is trying his or her best to achieve the shared policy goals. The second kind–the spinmasters–will be loyal to a politician as long as he or she is a winner who favors them. If a politician stops looking like a winner, or if a politician starts favoring others for what they hoped would be their west wing job, they will jump ship as fast as they can–and you will start seeing the “infighting” stories.

See also. Not pretty. I’m not Hillary’s number one fan, but I’m sure she’d be a perfectly adequate President. Secretly, I’ve always believed – and I have absolutely zero evidence to back this up, of course – that deep down Hillary has a strategic reserve of white-hot hatred for Republicans and all their works and pomps, and once elected, she would finally be free to shed the go-along-get-along act and take hilarious, schadenfreudious revenge, which would be horrible and undemocratic and everything, but also be just desserts, and so kind of awesome. Ah, well, not to be. And it would be too bad if her campaign should fail because of this careerist crap, but better now than in the general election.

Indeed:

[The Bush Administration] playing with a deck that’s out of aces. The only thing they have is fear. When it doesn’t work, they try to scare even more, but the obviousness of the lie forces an unprecedented backtrack.

Of course, this could all have been so much easier if the Democratic “leadership” had just draw a line in the sand from the day they took control of Congress and made it clear that they weren’t taking orders from an unpopular, lame duck, and proudly criminal administration.  Better late than never, bygones be bygones and all that, but there was nothing preventing them from taking this attitude earlier (and there is still nothing preventing the Senate from doing it, like, now.)  It would be the right thing to do, and it might make you slightly more popular than herpes, too.  More:

All of this says to me that the next President needs to open up the books on the Bush Administration, and that we cannot as a nation be truly healed until that happens. The intelligence leadership has been caught in an enormous lie, making false claims about lost surveillance gathering for purely political reasons. This cannot possibly be an isolated incident. Of coure, we KNOW it’s not an isolated incident. And indeed, many of the employees in the civil service who directed these lies and misstatements, not those at the top but the functionaries, will still be working in their same posts under a potential Democratic Administration. It needs to be extremely clear from the very beginning that they must be rooted out, expunged and turned over to the legal system for a determination. It should be a key part of the Democratic nominee’s platform. Only then can we truly “turn the page,” as our front-runner is likely to say.

It seems to me that Obama has essentially promised to do just that – though if promises were policy, we’d all be Nigerian billionaires now.  And the transparency needs to extend beyond bureaucrats. I’d like to know, for example, how close intelligence subcommittee head Jay Rockefeller has been to the various Bush era deceptions and shannanigans – partly for the health of the Republic and yada yada, but mostly so I can settle a bet as to whether he is simply the stupidest man alive, or if he is the stupidest man alive and a corrupt asshole.  I mean, seriously: how fucking stupid do you have to be to get rolled by Pat Roberts?  That’s like getting grifted by the Pepperidge Farm guy.  Jesus.

Ralph Nader is still a fucking moron.

Have at it!

Gut harness or no, Captain Kirk could kick Picard’s sissy bald Shakespearean-actor ass from here to travelocity.com world headquarters.

Discuss.  Extra points for “all your base” or Star Wars Kid references.

I am worried about you people. There has been too much fighting on this blog today. Therefore, I will relate to you a really stupid pun I came up with earlier, and in turn, you can tell me really stupid puns of your own!

A US serviceman has the watch outside Da Nang in 1968 about a month before the Tet Offensive.  He is keeping an eye on an enemy position some twenty miles distant.  All of a sudden, out of the corner of his eye, he sees something flashing through the sky, and moments later, the VC anti-aircraft guns light up the sky.  At first he thinks he must be watching a US fighter on a mission, but the silhouette is wrong — too long, and shaped strangely.  Wide-eyed, he realizes what he is looking at just in time to see the shape streak off to the horizon.  Beside him, the radio crackles to  life: air traffic control is going crazy, they spotted a bogey they don’t recognize and they are frantic trying to figure out what’s going on.  What, his commander asks him, the hell is going on out there?

“Sir,” says the grunt, “I saw commies missing Santa Claus.”

There!  Now everybody’s happy!

My laptop is 7 years old. The keyboard is missing 4 keys (kittens pulled them off for fun) and I have to use a pair of pliers to yank the prongs on the power supply into position every time I plug it in. So I’m going to get a new one.

I’ve basically got $1000 budget. My requirements aren’t too steep: I’ll use the internets, I’d like to be reasonably up-to-date with whatever people can do with computers these days. And I’d like to be able to play some of my old Windows/DOS computer games, games I still play constantly despite the fact that they are all 5-20 years old and rot my brain. I just do it to impress the ladies.

My basic question is: PC or Mac? I’ve owned PCs for the past decade or so, mostly because they’re cheaper and there’s more software, but the thought that Vista might actually suck more ass than XP has me seriously considering switching teams. I love the idea of the Mac OS – I’m comfortable with UNIX, and I’m very comfortable with not needing 2GB of memory to run a goddamned operating system – and people tell me that it’s possible to run PC software on the new OS X. But I’m pretty sure they’re lying. Also, Macs seem expensive, even when you consider how much hardware isn’t wasted by the operating system pooping on everything. So I don’t know what to do. Advice?

Oy:

LAHORE: Criticising the Bush administration’s reliance on President Pervez Musharraf’s role in the war on terror, United States presidential hopeful Barack Obama has vowed to go after Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

News One TV channel on Friday quoted him as saying in a CNN Democratic presidential debate in Austin, Texas, that the US had made a mistake by putting all its “eggs in the Musharraf basket”. He said the US should go after Al Qaeda and make sure that Pakistan was serious about hunting down terrorists and expanding democratic rule.

Promising that he would do everything to keep America safe if he were to become president, Obama said, “I will do whatever is required to accomplish that. I will not hesitate to act against those that would do America harm.”

I’m sure Obama will be a fine President – I voted for him, it looks like I’m going to vote for him again, and John McCain seems to be doing everything in his power to make ensure that I’ll have a lot of company. That said, he has said the two fucking stupidest things I’ve heard a candidate say all year – first, that he’d increase the size of the army/marines by 100,000 (a promise which, I must note, remains on his foreign policy short list, and still seems like a solution in search of a problem, one I’m afraid it will find); and second, that he’s totally committed to bombing the friendly nation of Pakistan. This go-around is certainly better than last time, when he and Hillary were getting into the grisly details of what particular ordnance they might use when attacking our allies, but it’s still pretty bellicose. Like, I get that this signals to the important soccer/NASCAR/whatever demographic that you aren’t some hippy peace fag and you’ll totally go Chuck Norris on any foreigners who look at you wrong, and I understand the rhetorical value of that. But the thing is, when you say ‘Pakistan’ – as opposed to ‘any country’, for example – it probably doesn’t go over the same way with people in, say, Pakistan. It sounds kind of hostile, I’d imagine, kind of provocative, particularly when coming from a country which has shown such an appetite for bombing the fuck out of countries in your region, with or without much reason. Full disclosure: if I knew for sure that Osama bin Laden was hanging out on your couch, I’d blow your whole fucking living room to hell without a second thought – Pakistan, Poughkeepsie, wherever. So wouldn’t anybody. But I sure wouldn’t keep talking about it out of the clear blue sky and expect you to be cool with it. This is why politicians don’t do hypotheticals (well, that, or because they’re full of shit.)

Maybe not the biggest deal in the world, maybe, but pointlessly stupid. And if you intend to coexist peacefully with very large nuclear nations, this sort of rhetoric is counterproductive in the long run. Unless you’re working on a fiendishly cunning can’t-possibly-fail plan of waging a 10,000-year-long land war in Asia, of course, in which case: mission accomplished.

Kosovo is free, and peace engulfs the land.  Tim Judah (whose “War And Revenge” is a suitably depressing primer on the war in the 1990′s, in my not-remotely-expert opinion) looks at who’ll be voting themselves off Yugoslavian Survivor next week.  Can’t wait.

Matt Yglesias has a rather odd retrospective on the American involvement, which begins:

With Kosovo’s formal declaration of independence from Serbia on Monday, and the United States’ decision to extend recognition to the planet’s newest country, the time has come for a look back on the approximately 10 years of intense U.S. involvement in that conflict. Kosovo is a tiny, seemingly worthless patch of land lacking in all natural resources, but it plays a strangely large role in our foreign-policy debates. During arguments about the Iraq War, in particular, liberal hawks had a habit of wielding the poor Kosovar Albanians as a cudgel: If you supported Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing campaign, the argument went, then surely you could support a war against Saddam Hussein.

“If you’ll eat filet mignon, then surely you’ll eat this maggoty cow shit” is an argument with similar persuasive power.  Unfortunately, Matt doesn’t provide any actual examples of this argument in the wild – I recall Tim Russert saying something along these lines at a Democratic debate in 2004, but I’m long past being surprised at Russert’s idiocy.  One can think of any number of objections to the thrust of the article, the fundamental point is that it doesn’t seem particularly useful to look back at Kosovo primarily as the source of specious arguments possibly deployed by Americans with no influence on policy.  Some shit isn’t about your office politics.

Later, in a related blog post:

At the end of the day, the only just solution for Canada, or for the former Yugoslavia, or for Iraq or Lebanon or anyone else necessarily involves the creation of tolerably liberal rights-respecting governments or else intolerably illiberal population transfers and ethnic cleansing. There’s no administrative fix whereby simply drawing the boundaries in just such a way solves the problem. To create really adequate solutions, the international community will have to find a way to create liberal regimes. And this, of course, is precisely what we don’t know how to do.

We don’t know how to do it because it can’t be done.  You can’t impose liberal political solutions from the outside.  The best you can do is stay engaged, try to manage, contain, and prevent these trivial things in boring, resource-poor, politically Byzantine backwoods from getting out of hand.  You can regard examples of this as “modest successes” or unmitigated disasters - and you can carry Rwanda like a rugged cross or a potential disaster averted - but these are different descriptions of the same sobering realities.  After the SSRI-overdose fairyworld of neocon foriegn policy, it might be worth returning to these things.

I’m no professional political strategist, but I think I’m beginning to have an inkling that one way to run a successful campaign is not to hire strategists who will bleed you dry while torpedoing your chances. Am I going out on a limb? I don’t think so:

The high-priced senior consultants to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, have emerged as particular targets of complaints, given that they conceived and executed a political strategy that has thus far proved unsuccessful.
The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

Mark Penn’s firm charged Hillary’s campaign 3.8 million dollars in January? Really? That’s one month! One month in which her campaign basically augered into the ground! In exchange for crappy spin and inept campaigning she paid this man the equivalent of a middle-of-the-line private airplane? What an amazing gig this guy has. Never won anything, terrible at his job, gets paid truly exorbitant amounts of money for the privilege. He should be appointed head of FEMA.