If the video Mark Halperin posted over at The Page is what passes for “semi-heated” these days, then John McCain’s infamous temper makes him the Incredible Hulk.

Have you guys been watching HBO’s John Adams? I had a feeling it would be kinda cheesy, but I’ve been really impressed with it so far. That is, the first two episodes. The last two have been okay, but being a biopic of John Adams makes it, by necessity, a little boring in parts. It seems like both episodes had a moment in which he gets a letter like this :

Dear John,

Totally awesome stuff is happening off-camera here in America. Like the fighting of the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention. Don’t worry about us, just hang out in Europe for another episode and try to forget you have children.

Yours,
HBO

In the next episode he’s VP and they’ve already started laying the groundwork for his rivalry with Thomas Jefferson, so it should start getting exciting again soon. If not, maybe they can find a reason to write him into the Hamilton/Burr duel or something.

I’ve been as outspoken as anyone over the last week in pointing out Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty, but The Wall Street Journal’s glee over Clinton’s emerging reputation as a serial exaggerator is incredibly disturbing :

Hillary Clinton’s been all the news this week, after she “misspoke” about Whitewater, Travelgate, missing files, suspicious pardons, Johnny Chung and cattle futures. Oh wait, after she “misspoke” about Bosnia. Oh wait, same thing.

That’s one way to make sense of the unrelenting, unforgiving, 24/7 news coverage of Mrs. Clinton’s fictional telling of Bosnian sniper fire and the subsequent debunking of her every word. In a nasty primary battle that has already featured racial slurs and Chicago slum lords, missing tax documents, and a “monster,” you might expect this slip-up to have been yet another blip in the media cycle.

But that would have been to deny the press, the pundits, Democrats, and even Barack Obama, the catharsis of finally — finally! — getting a chance to confront the Clintons’ questionable mores. Hillary’s and Bill’s scandals have been the elephant in the primary room ever since she first signaled a run. Yet up to now everyone has been too scared, or too loyal, or too weary to touch the ugly past. Her Bosnia misspeak is now serving as proxy for all the truths about the Clintons’ non-truths, allowing even liberals to break free from their Clinton dependence.

I take no pleasure in pointing out the hypocrisy of the Clinton campaign. In fact, I’ve even found myself invoking a Democratic version of Reagan’s 11th Commandment, biting my tongue instead of leveling criticism, lest I find myself in a situation in November in which I support a candidate that I’ve spent months slamming. As an Obama supporter who has written multiple posts highlighting Hillary Clinton’s dishonesty, let me go on the record as saying the characterization above is absolutely false.

There’s a big, big difference between the criticism that Clinton is receiving now and the nasty, prurient, partisan muck of the 90’s. The fact that there are people who have been breathlessly waiting for a return to the days of the Whitewater, Travelgate, and the Lewinsky scandals is a de facto admission of sleazy and trivial journalistic instincts that are better suited to write Penthouse Letters than grace the op-ed pages of the most influential media outlets in our nation. Indeed, the threat of a return to this gossipy media landscape is one of the reasons I feared a return to the Clinton years in the first place.

Having said that, with Clinton’s recent embarrassment regarding Tuzla, NAFTA, and others, she’s simply being hoisted by her own petard. Put aside the biggest difference (that these new charges are true and the older ones are almost universally false), the fact is that Hillary Clinton has based her own campaign around her (a) toughness and (b) experience. That her campaign is now being tripped up by the latest string of revelations is a good indicator that both claims are hollow.

Taking the “toughness” claim first, Hillary has spoken endlessly on the campaign trail about how she’s been sent through the ringer by the right-wing noise machine and that she questions whether or not Barack Obama is tough enough to win a general election. While this is undeniably true (see above), the implication is that Clinton isn’t easily tripped up by personal attacks. Yet here we are seven months before the general election and Clinton has been making one demonstrably untrue statement after another on the campaign trail. Considering how well documented her life has been since 1992, lying about her accomplishments is incredibly stupid. These are the kinds of mistakes you’d expect of a political rookie, not someone who claims 35 years of experience.

That “experience”, upon which she’s built her entire campaign, is the trait she’s used to take out her Democratic rivals, so when it’s revealed that she’s been lying on her resume, it’s the kind of hypocrisy that’s fair game, especially in the no holds barred style of politics in which Clinton excels. The experience candidate lying about her experience is every bit as relevant as an anti-gay crusader trying to get laid in an airport men’s room or a straight-talkin’ campaign reform maverick letting lobbyists run their business from his campaign bus. Clinton’s lies aren’t merely embarrassing. They contradict the core reason for her candidacy.

So going back to the WSJ piece, let me once again “reject and denounce” (to quote Obama) the implication that the world has been waiting to relive the mainstream media, scandal-of-the-week circlejerk of the Clinton years :

Reporters have dug up every last person who accompanied her on the sedate trip to pour a little more salt in the wound. “The Audacity of Hoax,” yelled a blog posting in the liberal Nation magazine, which innocently asked: “What else is she fibbing about?” Bill Burton, Barack Obama’s spokesman, gleefully noted that Mrs. Clinton’s recent attacks on his candidate were designed to deflect attention away from her “made up” Bosnia story. Heavy emphasis on the “made up” part. No need to mention Vince Foster, Red Bone, Marc Rich or Webster Hubbell. All this will do.

Ummmm…no. I know you guys have been waiting for the opportunity to return to the tabloid-a-go-go 90’s, but you and your army of Maureen Dowds will have to find some one else to gossip with. Don’t use the “enemy of my enemy” trick to draft Obama supporters into your vast right wing conspiracy. As much as I dislike the Clinton campaign now, it’s nothing compared to the seething contempt I have for the pseudo-journalistic scum who dragged this nation through the mud in the 90’s.

Is Hillary Clinton capable of telling the truth?? We’ve already read about her “misstatements” regarding Tuzla, Northern Ireland, NAFTA, the Family & Medical Leave Act, and SCHIP, but I never thought she’d lie about something like this :

As she prepared to depart for two more campaign events in Indiana today, Mrs. Clinton was asked to comment on a remark Mr. Obama made while campaigning in Pennsylvania. He said the presidential race was akin to a good movie, which had lasted too long.

With a smile, she said simply: “I like long movies.

Oh really? You like long movies?? Well, you didn’t like long movies so much a month ago when you were interviewed by Slashfilm :

Favorite Movies: The Wizard of Oz (“When I was much younger [it] was my favorite movie. I just loved imagining myself being there with Dorothy and being part of that great adventure she had.”), Casablanca (”When I was in college and law school…””I watched it I don’t know how many times. It was always so much fun. By the time we watched it over and over again, we were actually reciting the dialogue.”) Out of Africa (recent years).

Out of Africa is the longest movie she listed and the average running time for her “favorite” movies is less than two hours. That doesn’t seem so long to me, especially compared to Barack Obama’s favorite movies :

Favorite Movies: The Godfather, The Godfather: Part II and Lawrence of Arabia

Now those are some long-ass movies.

As a contributor to the Huffington Post, I have the option of customizing the “Books by this Author” sidebar that accompanies my posts. Since I haven’t actually written any books, I decided to have a little fun instead :

Any suggestions for other books I should “write”?

No.

Hillary Clinton has been taking some well-deserved flack for essentially doing the GOP’s dirty work for them, but I had underestimated the lengths she’d go to stop Barack Obama. Over at TPM, Josh Marshall has a remarkable behind-the-scenes view of Clinton’s attempt to drag the Rev. Wright affair back into the media spotlight :

Now obviously, Hillary’s been in the political big leagues for a while. She knows how to deflect a question. But it’s actually much richer than this. This afternoon Greg Sargent and I were talking this over and one of us realized that this wasn’t just any Pittsburgh paper. It was the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the money-losing, vanity, fringe sheet of Richard Mellon Scaife, funder of the Arkansas Project, the American Spectator during its prime Clinton-hunting years and virtually every right-wing operation of note at one point or another over the last twenty years or more.

In fact, what I only discovered late this evening, when Eric Kleefeld sent me this link at National Review Online, is that not only was it Scaife’s paper. Scaife himself was there sitting just to Clinton’s right apparently taking part in the questioning.

For those who need a reminder of who Scaife is, here’s a bit from a CNN bio published during the Lewinsky scandal :

Scaife gave to GOPAC, the political fund that helped make Newt Gingrich speaker in 1994. Gingrich says Scaife’s money laid the basis for modern conservatism. And his money still flows:

* To the Heritage Foundation alone, nearly $3.5 million from Scaife foundations in the most recent three years on record.

* $1.22 million to the American Enterprise Institute.

* $1.40 million to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

* $325,000 to the Cato Institute.

* $575,000 to the Citizens for a Sound Economy, among others.

Scaife has particular contempt for the Clintons. At a Heritage Foundation event in November 1994, Scaife said, “I think maybe Hillary and company have it figured out right. They wouldn’t be happy here.”

Scaife’s foundations shovel millions into groups hostile to Bill Clinton. The Free Congress Foundation, which runs a conservative cable channel, received $1.9 million from 1994 to 1996.

Hollywood’s Center for the Study of Public Culture, which sees liberal bias in the movies, got nearly $1.8 million. Accuracy in Media, a group still promoting the idea that Clinton aide Vince Foster may have been murdered, got $675,000.

At Scaife’s newspaper his reporter Christopher Ruddy doggedly pursues the Foster case. And when Ruddy’s book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” got a bad write-up in the American Spectator, saying Ruddy sounded like a “right-wing nut,” Scaife cut off the magazine’s money.

This is a man who literally spent millions trying to convince people that the Clintons are murderers, yet when Hillary got caught in a string of embarrassing lies that threaten to derail her presidential bid, she goes straight to heart of “the vast right wing conspiracy”.

I suppose if you’re in the business of character assassination, why not go to the best, right?

Apparently being caught lying on your resume brings out the venomous side in Sen. Clinton.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a wide-ranging interview today with Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporters and editors, said she would have left her church if her pastor made the sort of inflammatory remarks Sen. Barack Obama’s former pastor made.

“He would not have been my pastor,” Clinton said. “You don’t choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend.”
. . .
The Clinton campaign had refrained from getting involved in the Wright controversy, but Clinton herself, responding to a question this morning, denounced what she said was “hate speech.”

The problem for Hillary is that this plays into the larger metanarrative about her campaign, that she’ll do or say anything to get elected. She’s smart enough to realize that dragging the Rev. Wright matter back into the news makes her look petty and despicable, but in the end it’s probably the best option she has for two reasons.

For one, slinging mud out of sheer desperation reinforces a negative perception, but it’s a more favorable one than the emerging storyline that she’s a chronic liar whose falsehoods cut to the very notion of her campaign strategy that she’s more “experienced” (Never mind the fact that were she to be judged by her own definition of “experience”, she’ll lose to John McCain in November). Moreover, for a lot of Clinton’s supporters, her willingness to engage in character assassination is considered an asset in November. For Obama supporters, this makes her look like an asshole, but Clinton’s base (the “fight fire with fire” wing of the DNC) will see this as another example of her being “tough”.

Of course, the other upside for Clinton is that in distracting attention away from embarrassing news, she refocuses attention on the emerging right-wing meta-narrative that Barack Obama is unpatriotic. This has been the thread that unites many of the right-wing smears against Obama, from the “lapel pin” flap, to Michelle Obama’s comments about being proud of America “for the first time”, to the Obama singing the national anthem without his hand over his heart, to Rev. Wright’s “God Damn America” comments.

Now in their efforts to use the “Tonya Harding option” against Obama, the Clintons have resorted to doing the GOP’s work for them. Just last week, Bill implied that Obama, unlike McCain and Hillary, doesn’t “love this country”. Now Hillary is dragging the Wright matter back into the spotlight. These sort of attacks make perfect sense for the party that turned a yellow ribbon magnet into a form of wartime sacrifice, but are Bill and Hillary Clinton really buing into the notion that a patriot should be judged by his ostentatious and self-aware displays of nationalistic fervor? Or are they just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and hoping something sticks?

Contrasting the two dominant meta-narratives, it seems that Obama is the one with the upper hand here. After all, unlike Hillary Clinton’s weasely admission that she merely “misspoke” in her tall tales on the stump, Obama has already addressed the Wright matter in a straightforward manner (as more than 3 million YouTube viewers can attest). Bringing this up again runs the risk of making Hillary look foolish, like in the Ohio debate when she criticized Obama for “denouncing”, but not “rejecting”, Louis Farrakhan. Rather than get caught up in Hillary’s silly word games, Obama just pithily insisted that he would “reject and denounce”. It was a moment in which a nation’s eyes rolled in unison. Whatever, Hillary.

While the “Obama isn’t patriotic” storyline will have some staying power (if only to give the bobbleheads a way to burn-up airtime between commercials until November), the notion that Obama doesn’t sufficiently love his country is pretty stupid on its face and will only really have legs with voters who would never vote for him in the first place. Like the Farrakhan exchange, it’s a narrative so childish that it can only be rejected through mockery. “Sure,” I can imagine Obama saying, “I hate America so much…I’m running for President.”

Yet, here we are, in the tail end of a primary season in which the losing challenger for the Democratic nomination has sunk to reinforcing right-wing smears against her party’s likely nominee in a transparent attempt to distract the media from the fact that she’s been caught in multiple lies about her experience. Granted, Hillary Clinton lost her chance to win my vote long ago, but I can’t help but wonder how favorably superdelegates will look upon a former frontrunner cutting off her nose to spite her face.

Do you want to know how McCain beats Hillary in November? In short, the same way George Bush beat Al Gore (minus the Supreme Court coup). As Rolling Stone explained in 2001 :

Last year, a review conducted by two nonpartisan groups, Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Research Center, found that a stunning seventy-six percent of the Gore campaign coverage in early 2000 centered around two negative themes: that he lies and exaggerates, and that he’s tarred by scandal. “We call it the metanarrative,” says Tom Rosenstiel, director of Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Journalists are looking for a story line, a narrative device, that plays out over weeks and months, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is if they let the narrative overwhelm the facts, then it becomes a distorting lens. It can lead journalists to ignore and mischaracterize facts as they try to fit them into the story.”

For those whose memories of Bush are cloudy pre-9/11 or forget how much the press despised Al Gore prior to his public resurrection as a party elder and environmental evangelist, Google the words “invented the internet” to get an idea of how the zombie lies of media narratives refuse to die. All it takes is a few quotes out of context and a few dashes of hyperbole to turn someone into a “serial fibber” with a “Pinocchio problem”.

It’s pretty clear that this is the same sort of tactic that would be used to defeat Hillary Clinton in the fall if she were to become the Democratic nominee. Over the past week, she’s been contradicted on a number of claims that she uses to bolster her “experience” over her rival. The first being her Ohio primary-motivated insistence that she opposed NAFTA, which Jake Tapper has been debunking at length :

I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA.

Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA tooth and nail because she opposed the substance of the bill.The campaign claims over and over that she did not support NAFTA. That may be emotionally and intellectually true — but actions speak louder than misgivings.

For the Clinton campaign, we’re not supposed to pay attention to what she did (which, according to her recently released schedules, included a handful of pro-NAFTA meetings) but what she said about NAFTA (but only privately, at least, until it was politically convenient).

The even bigger, and more embarrassing, fib is Clinton’s fictional account of her dangerous flight into Tuzla, Boznia which is becoming her campaign-killing YouTube moment. (via nitpicker)

Clinton’s foreign policy credentials have also been questioned recently in regards to her role (or lack therof) in the Northern Ireland peace process :

Mrs Clinton’s version of events has been challenged by Peter King, an Ulster Unionist Party negotiator at the Good Friday talks in 1998, who said: “Hillary Clinton was totally invisible at the actual negotiations.

“As far as I am concerned, Mrs Clinton was as relevant to peace in Northern Ireland as Tony Blair’s wife or the ex-wife of Bertie Ahern [the Irish prime minister].”

Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with John Hume of the nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party in 1998, told The Daily Telegraph last week that Mrs Clinton’s claims were a “wee bit silly”.

This month, Terry McAuliffe, Mrs Clinton’s campaign chairman, told CNN: “We would not have peace today had it not for Hillary’s hard work in Northern Ireland.”

Both Unionist and Nationalist negotiators told this newspaper that while Mrs Clinton’s work with women’s groups was positive her overall role was peripheral and she played no part in the gruelling negotiations that took years.

These incidents taken individually wouldn’t necessarily be enough to derail a campaign, but how they play into the “metanarrative” speaks volumes about how her campaign might fare in the fall. For Gore in 2000, mentioning “Love Canal” and “invented the internet” were all it took to remind voters of the media storyline that Gore was a serial exaggerator. In the months between now and the general election, it’s hard to imagine that the same wouldn’t happen to Hillary Clinton, with scattered references to “Northern Ireland”, “NAFTA”, and “Tuzla” making their way into unrelated campaign coverage and subtly undermining her campaign.

In fact, that narrative is already being shaped to a lesser extent as the Obama campaign capitalizes on recent polls showing that a majority of Americans don’t believe that Clinton is trustworthy :

This honesty gap that separates Clinton from her two opponents will ultimately end her campaign, either in the primary or general elections. Whether or not any subsequent claims about Clinton are valid would be irrelevant (as Gore could attest) as long as they play into the preconceived notions that people have about the candidate. With a public already distrusts her, getting frequently caught misspeaking (to use the Clinton campaign’s preferred euphemism) only reinforces the media narrative that Hillary Clinton is a liar who will say anything it takes to become president.

When driving home last night, I saw a small group of people holding signs that said “Healthcare, Not Warfare”. Quite a bold stance to take in Southern California five years after the war started. Now if only President Bush would take the Lake Ave offramp from the 210 East, then we might get closer to ending the war. If the war

Then again, while I’m on the subject, the futility of righteous protests is nothing compared to the self-congratulatory horseshit that came from former war supporters all week. I had to look at my calendar just to make sure there wasn’t a “My Bad!” holiday or something. It goes to show you that the rot of incompetence is so complete within the punditry that five years after helping push the country into war, the egomaniacs in the media spent a week congratulating themselves for finally figuring out that invading Iraq was a bad idea. I’d think that being right when it really mattered would eventually been seen as a good thing, but apparently they’re grading on a curve.

Politico :

Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.

People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
. . .
The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.
Story Behind the Story

The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics.

Journalists have become partners with the Clinton campaign in pretending that the contest is closer than it really is. Most coverage breathlessly portrays the race as a down-to-the-wire sprint between two well-matched candidates, one only slightly better situated than the other to win in August at the national convention in Denver.

Slate :

Clinton can win only by overturning Obama’s pledged delegate lead—a truism that still has not gotten the traction it deserves. Ominous warnings about 1968-like riots aside, the prospect that Clinton would accept the nomination over the head of the people is fundamentally at odds with everything the party represents. She talks about wanting to enfranchise the people of Florida and Michigan. But then, inevitably, she would turn around and seek to revert the people’s decision, expressed through the pledged delegate count. Call me naive, but I find it inconceivable that the party would want this to happen, or that a candidate would want to win that way.

All this being a long way of saying, Hillary’s path to the nomination is not “narrow.” It’s barricaded. Yet still there seems to be a hesitation among the media to declare Clinton dead.

Hans Christian Andersen :

The emperor marched in the procession under the beautiful canopy, and all who saw him in the street and out of the windows exclaimed: “Indeed, the emperor’s new suit is incomparable! What a long train he has! How well it fits him!” Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor’s clothes were more admired.

“But he has nothing on at all,” said a little child at last. “Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child,” said the father, and one whispered to the other what the child had said. “But he has nothing on at all,” cried at last the whole people. That made a deep impression upon the emperor, for it seemed to him that they were right; but he thought to himself, “Now I must bear up to the end.” And the chamberlains walked with still greater dignity, as if they carried the train which did not exist.

In response to Barack Obama’s remarkable speech about racism in America, one of the neanderthals at The Corner couldn’t resist printing an email referring to Obama as a “race hustler” and making this Hillary Clinton-inspired claim :

I’ve always known that Obama was a con artist because when you don’t offer up ANY specifics during a campaign it’s usually because you either don’t have any core beliefs or your core beliefs are nutty.

This line of attack really annoys me. Obama doesn’t offer any specifics? Barack Obama’s website has a 64 page “Blueprint for Change” and has twenty sub-sections that cover a host of additional issues. If that’s not enough, there’s also Obama’s 384 page book “The Audacity of Hope”. It’s amazing to me that so many of Barack Obama’s detractors seem to be too foolish to find the policy details they claim to be searching for.

I can’t decide which pop culture analogy from Slate for the race between Obama and Clinton I like better. Monopoly :

Player 1 (Obama) holds virtually all the properties, railroads, and money. But Player 2 (Clinton) has Boardwalk and Park Place, with a tony little neighborhood of hotels and houses. Player 1 consistently amasses money, bit by bit, from Player 2 but can’t close the deal because he lands on Boardwalk or Park Place every three or four times around the board, thus prolonging the agony. “The other four players who started the game but went bankrupt four hours ago,” explains e-mailer Daniel Fiore, “lie on the couch yelling, ‘Come on, end it already!’ “

…or Looney Tunes :

You can give more or less weight to Obama’s political magnetism, the tactical and strategic miscalculations of the Clinton campaign, the delegate-allocation rules that weakened the punch of Clinton’s big-state wins, the crucial difficulty of a former first lady who embodies Restoration competing in an election in which change is the watchword. And here’s another explanation for this remarkable reversal of fortune, one that represents for me one of the few really reliable rules of presidential political warfare: Bugs Bunny always beats Daffy Duck.

As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones—he didn’t create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities—Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He’s onto the cons of his adversaries. Sometimes he is glimpsed with his elbow on the fireplace mantel of his remarkably well-appointed lair, clad in a smoking jacket. (Jones once said Cary Grant was his inspiration for Bugs. Today it would be George Clooney.) Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor.
. . .
Is there any doubt about who is Bugs and who is Daffy between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply “denounce” Louis Farrakhan but “reject him,” Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don’t really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination.

Then again, maybe the better metaphor is Clinton is Microsoft and Obama is Google? Or Friendster vs. Facebook? Or The Eagles vs. a band that doesn’t really, really suck?

As someone who believes every bit of campaign sludge that is thrown against Barack Obama, I’m starting to get a little confused.

I thought I was supposed to hate Barack Obama because he’s a secret Muslim. So if he’s just pretending to be a Christian, can we automatically assume that Obama rejects what his Christian pastor says? If so, why bring it up at all?

If Obama is not black enough and his church is apparently too black, does this mean that they cancel each other out and are just the right amount of black?

Obama’s pastor says God should “Damn America” for “treating our citizens as less than human”, but I thought God hated American because of its acceptance of homosexuality. So which is it? Does God hate America for being too compassionate or not compassionate enough?

If Barack Obama is, as Geraldine Ferraro has implied, nothing more than a “lucky”, affirmative action candidate who only got to where he is because of the color of his skin, then why has it taken more than 200 years for an African-American candidate to capitalize on all these advantages?

If Barack Obama’s middle name is Hussein, does that make him and Saddam cousins or something?

If Obama is the anti-Christ and the anti-Christ is in league with the Whore of Babylon and the Catholic Church is (according to McCain supporter John Hagee) “The Great Whore”, does this mean Obama is actually a Catholic pretending to be a Muslim pretending to be a Christian?

I love this. Not only is it hilarious, but it slices through the core argument being made by the Clinton campaign. I get a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of Sinbad over the next few weeks :

Finally, the Barack Obama campaign has found a big gun to help shoot down Hillary Rodham Clinton’s self-proclaimed foreign policy experience. And he may be the wackiest gun of all: Sinbad, the actor, who has come out from under a rock to defend Obama in the war over foreign policy credentials.

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she’s taking much grief on the campaign trail.

Harrowing? Not that Sinbad recalls. He just remembers it being a USO tour to buck up the troops amid a much worse situation than he had imagined between the Bosnians and Serbs.

In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the “scariest” part of the trip was wondering where he’d eat next. “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’”

If Barack Obama can make Sinbad funny, then universal healthcare should be a breeze.