Is Red State not up right now?

ALL HAIL VICE PRESIDENT HYPNOTOAD.

He'll pick her, and I think he made up his mind some weeks ago, before her expanded role in the convention.  

I've never been his fan, and won't be likely to become a fan until we're out of Iraq and have a more sensible plan for Afghanistan, but I don't underestimate his intelligence.  

His whole message is compromise for consensus, listen to the bottom.  If that doesn't means listening to half the voters and making a big consensus unity move, then I really don't know him, and I've been following him pretty closely.  

Trust him to be a man of his word. Anyone listening to him called this one long ago.  

Ah, Seattle.

You know what they say, don't like the weather, wait a half-hour and it will change.

Rainy and gray this AM, Blue skies and Be-u-t-ful this PM....

are very new and refreshing.  I am so glad you've said these things that nobody here has ever said before.

Please, if you are going to take from June 5th till now to post another diary, at least come up with some original material. We all know we are "DOOMED" if Obama picks anybody else, but Hillary.

ps.  I'm fine with it if he does or doesn't.

Well he has done wonders with his polling numbers.
Now leading in Weisbaden and most of the Ruhr valley. Sadly not in the Ohio valley. Sorry I can't find a more original way to say we picked the wrong
person. And that this person will likely pick the wrong person in turn. I think Michelle doesn't Hillary anywhere near the administation that wasn't.

Has MYDD also become an echo chamber? Seems to have been taken over by the Borg!

I've not commented on any blog since the DNC and the United States News Media jointly anointed Senator Obama as the Democratic nominee, lo so many months ago.

I harbor no ill will towards the Obama fans.  They believe what the rest of us cannot.  They see reality and substance whereas the rest of us see illusion and a novice searching for meaning behind his rhetoric.

My fifty-five years has seen many a political figure rise and fall.  And I well recollect presidential campaigns that were riding high in the polls very late in the process, only to fail miserably.

I remember my mother shaking hands with JFK as his presidential motorcade wended its way through my northeast Ohio city in the fall of 1960.  JFK was a far more handsome figure in real life than he was on the small screen.  My father captured my mother's and JFK's handshake very vividly with his Bell & Howell camera.  The magic of JFK still comes off on that celluloid, forty-eight years afterwards.

Alas, unlike JFK's daughter Caroline, who was all of six at the time of her father's passing, I have never seen anything of JFK in Senator Obama.  JFK was a genuine war hero--a rich man's son who was "to the manner born," and yet constantly tried to prove himself more worthy than his political pedigree.

Even with so prominent a figure as LBJ on his ticket, were it not for his Chicago political machine and an immense effort at solidifying diverse regions of the Democratic base, still, JFK would not have prevailed.  But, LBJ was absolutely mandatory toward JFK having any chance to prevail at all.

The JFK years were unmistakably glamorous--owed much more to Jackie than Jack--but the Kennedy presidency was short-lived indeed, and it is now nearly impossible to acurately and realistically measure how his legacy would have been documented were it not for his assassination.

Sadly, LBJ, who was otherwise the most progressive Democrat since FDR, will always be viewed in the mirror of the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Richard Nixon, who, despite his foibles, was not in fact an ideologue, and had many forward-looking proposals advanced--such as his opening up of China to the West, will also always suffer in the light of the Watergate scandal.

Gerald Ford was also not an idelogue, but his presidency, borne out of the Nixon pardon, was unremarkable.

Jimmy Carter was a powerful peace-broker, and he may be viewed as one of the most extraordinary of former presidents, deserving indeed of his Nobel Peace Prize. But as a President, he was also lackluster, presiding over high inflation, gasoline-lines, and an imbroglio in the Middle East which in fact ultimately doomed his presidency.

As JFK was a media-driven President, Ronald Reagan was something more--a media CREATED President.  Aside from his popular avuncular intonation, Reagan's was a truly disastrous presidency.  

He was not, as his great advocates continue to insist, the catalyst by which the Soviet Union fell--in fact, the Soviet Union imploded, unable to endure soaring debt and internal instability (rather the position in which the United States finds itself in now).  

And Ronald Reagan permitted Iran-Contra and fostered a lawlessness in foreign affairs.  Ultimately, his age of credit card borrowing ("Don't worry, be happy" was the signature song) left the United States in debtor shambles.

Which was then not ameliorated by the elder George W. Bush.  Although also not an ideologue, he himself was so bored with the political process, that his viewing his wrist-watch in a 1992 presidential debate, may well have also defined the view of his presidency.

And then came Bill Clinton.  Yes, by way of the third party insurgency of Ross Perot.  But Bill Clinton was in a class all by himself.  

He could come in third in New Hampshire and call himself "the comeback kid."  He could weather all manner of charges of sexual and other personal peccadilloes and still emerge triumphant.  

He was style AND substance; brilliance AND charm; he was a native Southerner who transcended his region and regional prejudices.  I knew from the very first time he seriously challenged for the presidency, well behind both Perot and the elder Bush, that he would be victorious.

His presidency was absolutely dazzling--made the more inspiring by fellow young and vibrant and highly educated peers like Al and Tipper Gore, and of course Hillary Rodham Clinton.  

After the Somalia incursion--fully inherited but concerning which the media cut him no slack--not a single American soldier died in a battle in the eight years under his watch.

Whereas there were soaring deficits when he entered office, he left his presidency with America basking in huge surpluses.  

There was welfare reform; free trade (NAFTA was a plus; only liberal ideologues yet cannot see why); the Brady gun-law (despite the best efforts of NRA radicals; indeed, in the end, many an NRA member could not argue against its merits); and a an effort to curtail at last the influences of Big Tobacco.  

And on the world stage, from the Middle East to Ireland, his peace initiatives were superb and enduring.  And nobody could better address Americans, from all financial and social strata.

Bill Clinton was a natural.  As gifted as the Robert Redford baseball player of the cinema version of the Bernard Malamud novella--that baseball player who was magic with a bat.  Bill Clinton was a magic politician.  The best of my lifetime, I am absolutely certain--including JFK.

As to George Walker Bush, I never viewed him as being anything more than an amiable would-be baseball commissioner sadly thrust into the presidency by virture of his own political pedigree and the Right Wing's desperate need to supplant Bill Clinton.

But Bill Clinton had the eternal enmity of the American Press.  He was the one that got away.  The one who survived Ken Starr and impeachment; the American Press' extreme dislike of him, his wife, and indeed all things Clinton.  

Yet Bill Clinton never needed the press to advance his image. Alone on a barren stage before a huge crowd, rather like Willy Stark in ALL THE KING'S MEN, Clinton could leave an audience spellbound.  He was, hands down, the best American politician of the past half century.

That golden era--pre George Walker Bush--is what many Americans longed for in this campaign cycle.  Hillary Rodham Clinton was its natural heir.

Alas, Senator Barack Obama was only a filler--the empty vessel, flashy, well-spoken and Harvard educated--by which the American media in collusion with liberal blogger ideologues--could create an "anti-Clinton."  T

he Democratic Party would need to split in two; disavow its most successful President and First Lady since Frankln and Eleanor Roosevelt, and in the process turn the reigns of Democratic Party power over to the Party relics--Ted Kennedy and niece Caroline, Nancy Pelosi, Robert Byrd--for the long-ago irrelevant wanted the power back.

Thus, the Kennedys went out in droves arguing for Obama, although from California to Florida, and most embarrassingly to JFK-base Massachusetts itself--Democratic rank-and-file consistently preferred the Clintons.

Yet, in the end, when not even the cross-over Republicans and Independents were enough to put Obama over the top, when in fact Senator Clinton had been winning decisively in most of the key battleground states from Ohio onward--it was necessary for the Super-delegates themselves to pull a "2000 Florida" and shut down the voting process.  

The heart and soul of most lifelong Democrats--as opposed to the cross-over neophytes--alas, were still with the Clintons, not Barack Obama.

It was at that moment that our allegiance to the Democratic Party ended for my family of lifelong Democrats--some sixty years of inveterate voting for Democrats even when those candidates were doomed to lose.

The eighteen-million Clinton primary voters--representing the highest number of primary voters for any politician in United States history--were shut out of their own party.

The American media had triumphed at last.  At last they presumed, they had destroyed the Clintons.

And yet now Senator Obama's forces face dwindling poll numbers; several tepid if respectable choices for vice-president.

Yet in the end, I believe whomever he chooses will not matter--no, not even Senator Clinton should he be brave enough to select her.

It would only punctuate the fact that the ticket would be badly turned around; the names Clinton and Obama would be labeled incorrectly.

The de facto Cheney presidency wouldn't do for Senator Clinton.

And that would be assuming that even an Obama/Clinton ticket would prevail.

In truth, Americans vote for the top of the ticket.  Always.  Neither Eagleton nor Shriver could help McGovern. Ferraro couldn't bolster Mondale.  Bentson couldn't ameliorate Dukakis.  Lieberman hardly buttressed Gore.  Edwards little augmented Kerry.

For me, the Democratic Party ceased to be democratic in 2008.  Obama was pre-selected, by both the anti-Clinton Press and the anti-Clinton pro-Kennedy DNC.  Now they are stuck with him.

I doubt that Obama has a prayer of prevailing in either my own Ohio or Florida.  Where those lost electorals will come from, Lord knows.

But maybe the Obama crowd can magically send him to the White House. Magic, in the end, is what the Obama camp is all about.

Oh, I could name a lot of non-Hillary choices that wouldn't be yawns ...

Al Gore
Colin Powell
Chuck Hagel
Gen. Anthony Zinni

Too bad he can't double-down on celebrity power and tap Schwarzenegger.  

Generally, I take an Allen Iverson attitude when it comes to the Veep ("we're talkin bout VICE President.")  But those names would cause a bigger stir than Hillary.

Wow, our party must suck ass if we have only one good member.

But HYPNOTOAD made it worthwhile!