Yes, (West) Virginia …

Democratic voters in West Virginia will today elect 28 delegates by some method or other. I can’t be bothered looking into it because the New York Post reports that Hillary Clinton is “toast”, and papa says, “if you see it in the Post, it’s so”.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,725 comments on “Yes, (West) Virginia …”

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  1. Thinking more, on the question of pre-emption, I think he’s won the point. Under Bush, America has claimed and then exercised a right to go to war even if the grounds are specious and the consequences appalling, and get away with it. Regardless of the suffering of the Iraqis, and the loss of American lives, and the damage to the Treasury, Bush has created a new doctrine: the doctrine of “Stuff You All. We’ll do whatever we want and you can’t stop us!” It is a cruel thing.

  4. Andrew @ 1552, I think pre-emption is a huge problem for non-Americans. But I think in America it is pretty well accepted now that war is a reasonable first choice and that American power should not be checked by the UN or any notion of law. Clinton certainly thinks it’s reasonable. I don’t think Obama has ever been asked. The right think it is pretty well beyond argument.

  5. GG #1542 ‘Yes Hillary voted for the war based on information that was available to her at the time.’
    No, she voted for the war based on POLLS that were available to her at the time. Do you seriously think she was stupider than the millions of ordinary people who took to the streets in the biggest display of anti-war protest in history? They didn’t accept the b/s about weapons of mass destruction or about the supposed links betwen Islamist Al Qaida and secular Hussein.
    Now she accepts the fantasy that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, when anyone who has broadband and a brain can work out that this is nonsense and that the Iranian’s best friends in Iraq are the puppet government the US are fighting to support.
    Maybe she’s just a fool (she’s certainly ran a foolish campaign). If so she’s not fit to be President. If, however, she has been knowingly culpable in allowing a war to begin – one that has laid waste a country, murdered 100s of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of GIs, then…
    Regarding Obama, you say: “Obama made a speech about not supporting the war. ” This is a deliberately deceiful understatement. He made a speech at an anti-war rally. What else do you want – that he lies across the tracks in front of a troop train? You can try all you like to spin that there is a difference between someone who voted for a war and someone who gave a speech at a rally to try and stop it. Spin is all it is.

  7. HRC says she was “misled” about the pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Iraq. If she had any integrity, the junior senator from NY should have declared her outrage, demanded BushCo be held accountable and used her position to help get US Forces out pronto. But HRC did no such thing. She sought to weasel every last bit of political advantage she could from the carnage and triangulated her butt off.

    Over two thirds of Americans, a thumping majority in any democracy, and most of the world are sick of her war-mongering support for the MIC and the biospherically insane imperatives of Big Carbon.
    Senator Clinton struck her Faustian bargain with Beltway lobbyists a long time ago. As is now clear to (almost) everyone after her stupid, hubristic and disastrous campaign is kaput. She will be doomed to the upmarket rubber chicken circuit and will henceforth remain a peripheral.

    Good bloody riddance!

  8. There is also another level to this argument. Let’s take Andrew’s position that Obama opposed the war but would have supported it if he too had been in Congress. Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, that it’s true. Even then, it wouldn’t change the fact that Obama has stood as the clear anti-war candidate, that he has drawn support on the basis that he has always opposed the war and that he is less of a hawk, even now, on issues such as Iran than “obliterator” Clinton. Even if you don’t trust him, if you belive that no US politician, let alone POTUS, can be trusted in office to do anything but the biding of the Military Industrial Complex. Even then, his defeat of Clinton and his subsequent victory over McCain, will serve a powerful notice to the MIC that the American people are pissed off and they will have to pull their heads in, as they did for a decade after Vietnam or risk a domestic explosion. That’s gotta be better than Hillary winning because the “bitters” don’t like the black candidate or Bomb Bomb winning because his Bob Bomb.
    Otherwise you may as well argue that, because LBJ presented himself as the “peace” candidate in 1964 and then went on (in Tom Lehrer’s immortal phrase) to play escalatio on the Vietnamese, that it wouldn’t have mattered if Goldwater and Le May had won.

  9. The world according to California Republicans:

    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/05/18/MNI410LK62.DTL

    ‘Republican brand is terrible’

    Some Republicans agreed that McCain’s work is required in an election year where challenges loom for the GOP.
    “The Republican brand is terrible right now,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “It’s been damaged by a weak presidency … and the various legs on which the Republican platform rests have been kicked away.”
    Among them, Whalen said, has been fiscal discipline – crumbling along with the $1 trillion-plus deficit – and family values, a victim of corruption and scandals involving a cast of characters from lobbyist Jack Abramoff to jailed former San Diego Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
    “McCain runs at a time when the party itself is ill-defined, and that means McCain has to turn the election on personality – and that ties into being a political maverick….”

  10. If Hillary was going to be the nominee, I’d wholeheartedly support her!
    I have respect for the lady, she’s a hard worker, a good contributor to the Democratic Party. So, although I’m an Obama man, I don’t hate her opponent.
    However, it’s a shame Hillary has stooped to using tactics out of the Republican playbook!

  11. HA HA I meant to say I don’t hate HIS opponent: sorry for the typo LOL

    Best wishes to Ted Kennedy, I hope he has a speedy recovery!

    And Kirribilli Removals: mate, you rock!

  12. The Republican “brand” – thanks to an unpopular president, a war, gas prices, foreclosures and deficit – has become such damaged goods that GOP Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia groused last week that “if we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf.”

    Yes!!

  14. rb, you make good sense. There is a clear difference between Clinton and Obama when it comes to Iraq. HRC is for, BHO is against the war in Iraq. There is no position inbetween.

  15. Apres, McCarthy had a category of people deserving persecution: “Premature ant-fascists” (referring of course to those suspicious pinkos who opposed Hitler before 1941). A similar category today might be termed “premature opponents of Iraq”.

  16. Enjoyable, in a perverse sort of way, to watch Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert interview (if that’s the appropriate term), members of the extreme right, like Douglas Feith from Neocon central, and Colbert’s harangue of Grover Norquist.

    I mentioned Feith yesterday, a bumbling apologist for his previous boss, Rumsfeld, and tonight I watched Colbert and Norquist. When a guy claims that ‘taxation is theft’ you wonder if he just mistranslated his Marx! But in this bizarre logic, government should not exist except maybe to provide a police force and an army, and so you’d probably end up looking like Zimbabwe. What’s scary is that this nutter has been the bagman for the Republicans (with the likes of Jack Abromoff) and is endorsed by all the usual dropkicks like Karl Rove and the clones of Reagan.

    If, as has been suggested by senior Republicans, the rats leaving the ship are the moderate ones, then the party is sure to lurch even harder to the right with these lead soldiers as ballast.

    Good on Stewart and Colbert for dragging these types out into the light for some scrutiny (as they cravenly try to sell their Bush years’ experiences in book form), because they sure look and smell funny to me.

  18. KR, if my memory serves me, “Taxation is theft” was coined by Proudhon, the French anarchist. He would be at home in Zimbabwe too, I expect.

  21. Harry, I shall now go to sleep with the image of a nutcase being opened by a blossoming turd. And it’s all your fault.
    Night Bludgers.

  24. 1569
    Robert Bollard

    yes, of course you are both right, but it struck me that Marx’s “property is theft” was the model, and Norquist is as mad an ideologue as anyone who believed in the literal reading of Das Kapital.

  26. 1575
    elitebutterfly

    No, Grover’s not going on my reading list anytime soon either. Colbert kind of spoiled him for me, you might say! LOL

    But if these creeps are the level of political philosophers for the GOP they are in very serious trouble, because this is the end of the line for Reaganism, and they these guys just don’t seem to realise how out of touch with reality they sound.

    Of course Macca endorses Norquist (you don’t survive in the GOP if you disagree!), so he’s stuck in this model of blindingly obvious contradictions ie you can run a war or two for a hundred years by just borrowing the money from strangers!

    It’s madness. Sheer utter madness.

  27. KR, I agree: madness. The Republicans are going the way of the Liberals here and Labour in the UK – down the gurgler. Deceit – and conceit – got em in the end.

  32. 579
    elitebutterfly

    This election campaign is going to be something to watch, eh?

    On that note, this little butterfly had better wing off to slumber land.

    night

  33. for the omen punters out there.

    Big Brown, after winning the Kentucky Derby while the filly Hillary picked ran second and then got put down, just won the second leg of the Triple Crown races by 5 lengths hard held.

    No horse has won the triple crown in 30 years. That horse was Affirmed.

    Tis the year of the Big Brown.

  34. 1581
    Catrina

    ya hippy! And here’s me thinking you’d use butterflies for kickboxing practice! LOL

  35. Why thanks Catrina. It’s my new suit. Stitched with chirps, sleazy lapels, deals in the pockets, no moral outrage though…:)

  36. 1585
    elitebutterfly

    And not a r/Ron in sight! So peaceful, except for the kiddies having a bit of a muck up earlier.

  40. KR at 1586

    And not a r/Ron in sight!

    I believe Ron has morphed into an alter-ego. I have identified at least three data points with positive matches.

  42. Sun May 18: GOP Johnny Bomb-Bomb, doubleplusgood duckspeaker.
    http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/edstein;_ylt=AqzaQAELCTGT53JWUn.W4GJJ_b4F

    Despite recent reports that Crawford George glows in the dark, spends an inordinate amount of time brush-cuttin’, bike-ridin’ and pattin’ Barney (although out of respect for mince-meated and pink-misted US forces in Iraq he no longer golfs), the Deciderer-In-Chief is in constant communication with the GOP nominee.

    It is widely understood that the Republican “base” like their leaders and prospective leaders to keep things strictly on a K.I.S.S. basis.
    You betcha! No point makin’ loyal supporters’ brains hurt more than necessary is there?

    So grab yer partners, hit that floor
    It’s the sucker-play square dance
    Fer lots more war!

    Yeeeehaaarrr!

    (Chorus)
    The Imbecile: “Gobble, gobble.”
    McBombster: “Quack, quack.”
    Beltway (ensemble): “Oink,oink.”
    MIC: “Ka-ching!”

  50. Diogenes@1528- what can I say.
    i know that you are as appalled as I am at what the US government has done in our name.
    That’s why I am confounded by the non-sence that we get caught up in here.
    They got it Wrong. Full Stop.
    So do we continue to support those who got it wrong, because they didn’t meant, it or do we o[t for someone who said it was wrong in the first place, hoping he can do a better job.
    And btw- my heart goes out to Colin Powell.

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