I'm feelin a little fired up today and I wanted to use this space to take some people to task. Over at TNR, Noam Scheiber has a post up about how Obama should refuse Mccain's offer for  open debates and joint town halls. Noam's main line of reasoning is that unmoderated debates before a large audience will undermine the effort to tie  Mccain to Bush by allowing him to showcase his more moderate side. While I can understand his concern, I think what Noam is missing here is that to the extent the debates will show that Mccain is not a crazy, senile chicken-hawk, they will also show that Obama is not a scary, socialist crypto-muslim. It works both ways.

Barack Obama has won the Democratic Party nomination and the Republican establishment is scared.

I can say this confidence. Why, you ask? Well, don't worry, this is not gonna be a rehash of electability arguments, or who or what played the race card, or what kind of shoes Barack's campaign bus driver wears. No, my metric is a simple one. Ratf***ing.

The urban dictionary defines ratf***ing as thus:

Politics: Formerly known as "the double-cross," it refers to infiltration and sabotage of the opposition party, particuarly during (but not limited to) an election campaign. The second half of "All the President's Men" describes ratfucking done to 1972 Democratic presidential candidates by employees of the Committee to Re-Elect Nixon.

Ken Clawson, Nixon's communications director, confessed to a ratfuck when he told how he forged a letter making it look like a Democratic candidate was a racist.

I asked a Clinton supporter tonight for a metric to calculate popular vote numbers from caucuses because I don't think the popular vote is a legitimate metric unless you can incorporate the caucus totals somehow. Anyway, this is what they said:

Alright. I've seen a lot of diaries since last night. People are pissed about the debate. I'm pissed too. And there's been a lot of diaries saying that people like me who are a little red in the face need to "buck up." And there are still more from Hillary supporters which amounted to "I told you so." And then there are new accusations, charges of conspiracy, ridiculous flaps about which finger Obama uses to scratch his nose, etc.

I admit it.

Jake Tapper pushes all my buttons. He makes me shout and want to throw my monitor out the window. He makes me frothing at the mouth angry at the reality that he has a "blog" and a position as "chief political correspondent" at a supposedly professional trad media organization like ABC

I really can't wrap my head around it anymore.

Watching Hillary Clinton these past few weeks, you have to wonder whether or not she's mistaken the Onion for a real newspaper. For someone who has a reputation as calculating, brilliant, and unbeatable, she has, to take a stab at understatement, made a lot of obvious missteps. But worse, and unlike Obama, these were not mere gaffes, they were errors in strategy. Pre-conceived, possibly debated, and in retrospect gob-smackingly short-sighted. You don't need me to reprint the reel here.

John Mccain likes to talk about Japan, especially lately. He'd like to cast his presidential run as the chance Mccarthur wanted and never got. And why not? The parallels between the occupation of Iraq and the reconstruction of Japan after World War II are obvious to everybody, right? It makes sense to keep troops in Iraq for 100 hundred years, after all noone's clamoring for us to leave Japan right?

Now. I hate to get all Lloyd Bentsen on ya, but I am from Texas after all so here goes: John Mccain, I live in Japan. My wife is Japanese. You, John Mccain, know next to nothing about Japan.

I did a quick search and it seems like this hasn't been diaried yet, so...

In case nobody noticed, the writer's strike seems to have quietly ended. We've started seeing Hillary supporters post again in small numbers, I suspect it will be a trickle effect.

Geraldine Ferraro's remarks are just one in a series of attacks the Clinton Campaign has made, all revolving around a single point. No, not race. Legitimacy.

It seems that Geraldine Ferraro's comments are now devolving into an all too predictable and racially charged war about whether or not what she said was actually racist. But if everyone would back up and look at the big picture, I think you'll see that the internal logic behind her comments, regardless of whether you consider them race-baiting or not, is dangerous and extremely counter productive.

I'm not liking what I'm seeing from the Obama camp today. They seem to have taken the "veiled threat" approach that some of you were advocating on here.  That kind of approach may work with the super-delegates but it won't work with the general populace.

Up till now, Obama's general election argument has been that "the democratic party can only win by offering a clear contrast with John Mccain." Now that the race is sure to go on, I think he should shift this a little.

She's at it again. Just like she smeared Kerry, just like she printed the Obama/Muslim rumors, Nedra Pickler was the first to publish the contents of the Canadian memo in "Nafta/Gate."

http://news.yahoo.com/...

The Obama campaign can't be seen attacking Bill on this because people will hammer them for using the race card. We have to have everyday Americans hitting back at what Bill said. Not campaign surrogates, but viewers.

This is an opinion piece. I do not claim any special expertise or inside information. I am merely stating what seems to me to be the situation before us.

These are strange times.

In the past two days, the rec list has contained no less than three diaries pointing to some prominent Republican endorsing one of our two candidates. Everyone has by now seen the Ann Coulter clip so I won't bother to repost it here. If you've managed the stomach to sit through Joe Scarborough lately, you've more than likely seen something like this:  

First off, let me get it out of the way and say that I am an Obama supporter. I am ALSO 99% sure that I will vote for Hillary in the general election if she is the nominee. There is, however, one nagging doubt (hence the 1 percent) that I have and with that in mind, I thought I'd try something new and give Hillary supporters a chance to defend their candidate before making my final conclusions.

The issue has to do with Hillary and her relationship with the Neocon front line. Any of us who have opposed this war and lost sleep pouring over the facts to find Bush's real motivation in fighting are bound to know the following two names: The American Enterprise Institute and The Project for the New American Century. They are more than likely able to recite in rote how the PFNAC wrote a letter to the President in 1998, long before the collapse of the two towers and the collective soul searching that would be manipulated and orchestrated into a nationwide penchant for blood, advising, nay begging him to take action against Saddam Hussein before "the world's safety was put at risk." They will know the names that signed that letter, names like Rumsfled, Cheney, Bolton.  And they will know who the letter was addressed to: sitting president William Jefferson Clinton.