Arthur's Wednesday Notes

I don't know as much about Barack Obama as I might. I find myself warming to him the more I see him, but I just don't know a lot about him. It is always valuable to read a negative piece, as well as the positive ones. So here is a hit piece. Harpers (online) notes there are five followup posts, which may be corrections or other views, but I did not get to see those without being a subscriber. This article is really, really long and hard to read, so I copied and pasted it and compressed it into a more readable form, but it still is thirteen pages long. Yikes.

(Bad Hat will send the compressed copy Arthur made to EPRushNet members upon request.)

You can also see it here.

If anyone has a subscription can can read the "responses or corrections" I would be glad to know what they say.

Again, I am increasingly inclined to like the guy, would vote for him before any of the GOP stiffs, but this may give us a heads up that his hopes may not be exactly the same as ours. But then again, politics is always a matter of getting the lesser or two evils.

At the same time I notice that I am reacting to the sound of Hillary Clinton's voice. Is that a male thing? Interestingly, my wife says that she has watched Hillary with the sound off and finds herself not liking her body language. It can't be a guy thing in her case, so maybe there is something odd there. And, I would vote for her before I voted for any Republican. That's going to be our choice this time. A Democrat who may not be our first or even second choice, versus a Republican who almost certainly will be our last choice.


Forgive me if everyone has already seen this. It has been my impression that this administration believes that they can lie to the press, lie to the American people, and nobody will remember of be able to prove that they did. One could argue that Bush II is drawing to a close, so what's the point? I think the point is to examine the past, understand the past, in the hope that we will not need to repeat it. The other value of this sort of project is to put future Presidents on notice that if they are less than honest with the American people they can expect to have the truth come out eventually, which at the very least will tarnish forever their personal reputations. Or worse. What I like about the looks of this is that it appears fact-based, rather than the organization simply being a left of center response to the many conservative Think Tank reports, most of which are simply editorials.

Rush Limbaugh said on the radio the other day that he may not be able to vote for a Republican in this election. I think he may be hoping that Bloomberg will enter the race. Bloomberg has become the next Fred Thompson, lurking, lurking, promising, threatening, scaring everyone in the GOP, representing, in the words of Shakespeare, "A tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing". How many conservative Republicans are going to vote for a somewhat odd New York guy who is Jewish, lives some of the time with his girlfriend and on social issues is aligned with the Democrats? And how many Democrats are likely to vote for him? Not many. My sense is that Bloomberg would peel of moderate Republicans, some independents, drive down the Republican vote to Dukakis levels, and create chaos. I think that in the same way that Thompson proved to be a spoiler by promising to run and then putting it off again and again while he dithered, Bloomberg's ongoing "study" of the feasibility of him entering the race as an independent candidate has probably served to hamper Republican fundraising.

Arthur