Click the image to see the full cartoon.

It's late, I'm going to bed.

But props to Barry Deutsch for joining Webcomics Nation with his excellent Hereville. Go read if you have not already.

UPDATE: Further props to Barry. He, too, did a cartoon responding to Gloria Steinem's op-ed column in the NY Times.

Following Iowa, voters were pummeled with the word "change." Following New Hampshire, will we be soaked with weeping candidates?

What drives me nuts about the Crying Hillary meme:

• Senator Clinton did not, in fact, cry. She got a little misty. She was verklempft.
• The woman who asked the question that everyone attributes to Clinton's New Hampshire victory did not, in fact, vote for Clinton. She voted for Obama. As she told Hear & Now this morning, Obama's passion made her cry.
• How utterly stupid it is to make a voting choice based on a candidate's perceived tear duct expression.
  
• According to the meme, women voted in huge numbers for Clinton, not because of her positions on the war or health care or something substantive, but because she "cried," evoking sisterly solidarity against Senators Obama and Edwards, who were perceived to "gang up" on her once again during Saturday's debate.

This last point seems to confirm Gloria Steinem's contention that Clinton has "no masculinity to prove" - that she has broken through the "Muskie/Shroeder" barrier inhibiting expressions of "soft" emotions. Yet Maureen Dowd has an apt rejoinder to that notion:

But Hillary did feel she needed to prove her masculinity. That was why she voted to enable W. to invade Iraq without even reading the National Intelligence Estimate and backed the White House’s bellicosity on Iran.

One could argue that Dowd is conflating "masculinity" with national security "toughness," but I think she's acknowledging a conflation that has troubled Democrats since the war in Viet Nam, to the benefit of Republicans who indulge braying machismo. John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the war, too, making the same mistakes and with the same presidential ambitions.

Which brings me to the more substantive reason to oppose Clinton's candidacy: the needle of her moral compass points wherever political expediency attracts it.

Do I then apply a double standard, letting Edwards off the hook? No. Edwards has repeatedly acknowledged that he was wrong, blames no one else for "misleading" him, maintains a consistent criticism of the war in Iraq and advocates a foreign policy that reflects the lessons learned from this gigantic mistake (e.g., no "bellicosity on Iran.")

Tom Tomorrow's "The Trouble With Hillary" neatly summarizes my feelings towards her candidacy.

However, I do like the meme that suggests that, as Rebecca Traister put it, "New Hampshire voters served up a major 'Fuck you'" to the coronation of Obama by the news media and right wing pundits.

Apropos my own cartoon on the subject, David Brooks offers his own critique of the confusion independents in New Hampshire suffer between John McCain and Barak Obama:

Both Barack Obama and John McCain attract independents. Both have a candor that appeals to voters and media-types alike. Both ask their audiences to serve a cause greater than self-interest. Both offer a politics that is grand and inspiring.

But they are very different men. Their policies obviously conflict, but their skills, world views and moral philosophies set them apart, too. One man celebrates communitarian virtues like unity, the other classical virtues like honor.

As far as broad portraits of leadership styles go, Brooks' column is not bad; not great, but not totally stupid (Carpetbagger points out the stupid parts.) But to me the big difference between Obama and McCain is that Obama is against military action against Iran and wants to pull out of Iraq as soon as possible (an admittedly vague timeline) while McCain wants to use Iraq as a launching pad for a future invasion of Iran in pursuit of "democratizing" the Middle East (read: neocon imperialist misadventure.)

Meanwhile, DailyKos has created a poll based on Brooks' own admission that he deliberately "slammed" Democrats to make himself feel better while criticizing Republicans. The choices are worth a laugh.

*UPDATE: I missed this earlier today, but Jacob Weisenberg at Slate has a much more interesting article on the McCain-Obama comparison meme; he explains better than anyone why the media are so fixated upon them, the source of much confusion among those independents who can't tell the difference between them. Even with Obama's narrow loss to Clinton, he still pulled in the lion's share of independents in New Hampshire; McCain got the rest. I hope they got it all sorted out.

Yesterday I listened with interest to a Democracy Now piece on the links between foreign policy advisers of presidential candidates in both parties to human rights atrocities in the past. Amy Goodman interviewed Allain Nairn, a blogger and Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, a freelance journalist who wrote "War Whisperers" for American Conservative to discuss, quoting Vlahos, the "establishment clique" of "so-called liberal interventionists on the Democratic side or your war hawks on the Republican side." What caught my ear was the yardstick used by Nairn to measure the men and women advising the candidates:

Well, I think one thing you could say about the advisers for all the candidates who have a chance is that the presence of these advisers makes it clear that these candidates aren’t serious about enforcing the murder laws and that they’re willing to kill civilians, foreign civilians, en masse in order to advance US policy. And they’re not serious about law and order. They’re soft on crime.

Nairn goes into some detail about the atrocities associated with Clinton advisors such as Madelein Albright, Richard Holbrooke, and General Wesley Clarke; Obama advisors General Merrill McPeak, Anthony Lake, Dennis Ross and Zbigniew Brzezinski; and speculations about Edwards:

The list of his foreign advisers is not as complete, so it’s not as clear exactly where they may be coming from, but it’s interesting. Last night on TV, one of the top Edwards advisers, “Mudcat” Saunders, was complaining about the fact that there are 35,000 lobbyists in Washington. And it appears, from the Edwards list, that many of the military lobbyists are working on the Edwards foreign policy team, because the names that—the Edwards names that are out there mainly come from the Army and the Air Force and the Navy Material Command. Those are the portions of the Pentagon that do the Defense contracts, that do the deals with the big companies like Raytheon and Boeing, etc. One of those listed on the Edwards team is the lobbyist for the big military contractor EADS. So, although Edwards talks about going after lobbyists, if he tries to go after the military lobbyists, he may get a little blowback from his own advisers.

As discussed by Nairn, the atrocity links of advisers to Democrats arise more from the devastating effects of sanctions, political calculation and globalization than from outright violence, though there is plenty of that, too. It reminds me of the old Woody Guthrie line about "some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen."

The advisers to Republican candidates are simply outright violent: Henry Kissinger (whose behind the bombings of Cambodia and Laos, and the coup that installed Pinochet), Al Haig (who backed the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala), Norman Podhoretz (who advocates bombing Iran with no restraint), Bud McFarlane (the Contras in Nicaragua), and Max Boot:

McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today.

Makes ya wanna vomit. Anyhoo, my question is this: Can we anticipate the real world effects of the foreign policies favored by the candidates based on the source of their advice? I don't think the answer can be affirmed or denied absolutely. Granted, I completely dismiss the Republican candidates, whose rhetoric is filled blood lust and chest beating; so the presence of so many architects of violence and oppression in their camp doesn't surprise me (nor, sadly, the fact that so many of them roam free in civil society.) I am more interested in what is to be made of the advisers to the Democrats. Nairn offers this bit of "fuzzy math" (to quote another human rights violator):

Well, fundamentally, there’s no difference on the basic principle of, are you against the killing of civilians and are you willing to enforce the murder laws. If we were willing to enforce the murder laws, the headquarters of each of these candidates could be raided, and various advisers and many candidates could be hauled away by the cops, because they have backed various actions that, under established principles like the Nuremberg Principles, like the principles set up in the Rwanda tribunals, the Bosnia tribunals, things that are unacceptable, like aggressive war, like the killing of civilians for political purposes. So, in a basic sense, there is no choice.

But there is a difference in this sense: the US is so vastly powerful, the US influences and has the potential to end so many millions of lives around the world, that if, let’s say, you have two candidates that are 99% the same—there’s only 1% difference between them—if you’re talking about decisions that affect a million lives—1% of a million is 10,000—that’s 10,000 lives. So, even though it’s a bitter choice, if you choose the one who is going to kill 10,000 fewer people, well, then you’ve saved 10,000 lives. We shouldn’t be limited to that choice. It’s unacceptable. And Americans should start to realize that it’s unacceptable.

Everybody say, "Wha?" Put your hands in the air like you went mad with despair. But seriously, I sympathize with Nairn's principle regarding the killing of civilians, and his "bitter choice" plays to the cynic within me. But does that truly encapsulate an Obama or an Edwards? What if they are better than that? What if they offer foreign policy alternatives that transcend the backgrounds of their advisers and help reconstruct the damage done by both war and globalization? Nairn is right about the size of American economic and military influence in the world, that it can be disproportionately harmful to the billions of poor people in the world by either direct violence or through economic policies that perpetuate their poverty through exploitation, neglect and corruption. Indeed, even a well-intentioned misstep could have painful, deadly consequences.

Yet we live in a world run by elites. And I mean "world"— America is not the only powerful player with imperialist ambitions. A candidate like Obama or Edwards (more so Edwards) offers the promise of whittling away at the disproportionate power systemically granted to these political and economic elites shaping our lives. But I don't think it ends there, nor should it. It really depends on how willing people are to disempower corporatist and imperialist ideologues in both parties. We may be seeing signs of such in the successes of Obama, Edwards, Huckabee and Paul last night. Or maybe that's just a mirage.

The Guardian reports that the Obama people and the Clinton people are fighting over a possible character "slur" that columnist Robert Novak claims the Clinton people have leaked to him about Barak Obama.

What if - and I'm just putting this out there, so don't think there might be any basis for this speculation - what if Robert Novak is just being a dick?

Based on an analysis of bill co-sponsorship, GovTrack labels Senator Hillary Clinton as a "radical Democrat" and Senator Barak Obama as a "rank and file Democrat."

Am I the only one doing a spit take here? Part of the explanation is the difficulty in keeping track of changes to bill cosponsorship - a matter of monitoring THOMAS voluntarily, because Congress doesn't keep track of such things. Yet the author confesses that his label assignments are "somewhat arbitrary."

For me it simply begs the question, what do you mean by "radical"? Ask any self-described political radical, and they will likely cite the Latin root term, radicis or radix, which means, of course, "root." The root is "root." So a political radical seeks to bring about fundamental changes to society by identify root problems and proposing root solutions. Here's a decent example of radical politics in action regarding the debate over "gay marriage" as documented in Clamor (July/August, 2004):

Mainstream organizations such as Marriage Equality and the Human Rights Campaign argue that only marriage will provide real equality. But Blint, Thuma, and Duggan all agreed that the potential for a much further reaching politics exists in efforts to expand and diversify the assortment of alternate statuses such as civil unions, reciprocal beneficiaries, and domestic partnerships that exist or have been proposed in numerous states.

Progressive and radical activists, they insisted, should argue for the separation of church and state, that marriage should be a private and religious institution, and that the state should offer a flexible range of benefits and recognitions for various kinds of households. Furthermore, access to resources such as health care and retirement benefits should not be tied to households or partnerships at all, but should be universal provisions instead. 

At first glance, Senator Clinton's recent health care plan proposal would seem to answer the call for "universal provisions." Yet as The Agonist notes, "This isn't a universal health care plan -- it's a universal insurance plan." Mind you, the Agonist goes on to favorably review the plan, while also raising some important questions about rates, coverage, eligibility and so on. In my view, this is not a radical proposal, as a single-payer system would be, but a reform that aims to prevent fewer people from losing out on health care while keeping the health insurance industry intact. The radical question remains, "Why is the health insurance industry more important than the health care needs of society?"

Just to circle this square, Senator Obama's plan is no more "radical" than Clinton's. Indeed, I'd say they are both more or less "rank-and-file" to use The GovTrack contributor's use of these terms - a usage that concedes to sloppy mainstream conceptions equating "radical" with "extreme" or "far" ends of the political spectrum. It's a personal bugaboo for me, because I don't view "radicalism" as a lifestyle choice or a way to look cool, but as a method of skepticism and scrutiny that demands that political proposals address fundamental problems. If your solutions ignore the fundamentals, then you're just delaying inevitable social disruptions that will come more violently and chaotically in the future.