Silvanellia Plath

I didn’t quite get my Villanelle Expirans right. Here’s another go.

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Rev. Wright’s Letter To NYT About Obama

March 11, 2007
Jodi Kantor
The New York Times
9 West 43rd Street
New York,
New York 10036-3959
Dear Jodi:
Thank you for engaging in one of the biggest misrepresentations of the truth I have ever seen in sixty-five years. You sat and shared with me for two hours. You told me you were doing a “Spiritual Biography” of Senator Barack Obama. [...]

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Poetry Friday: The Villanelle

Here’s an interesting exercise: write a 19 line poem with just two rhyming sounds, and in which about a third of the lines are refrains. The first stanza haunts every other — its first and third lines alternating as conclusions to the stanzas that follow, until they come together to end the poem as a couplet. [...]

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An Open Dear Jane Letter to Hillary Clinton

Please Sign the Petition
Dear Hillary,
I remember when I first saw you across the bar. You seduced me those experienced eyes and that raucous, sarcastic laugh. One thing led to another — too many cosmopolitans, a long conversation about solutions for America, then the uneven walk, arm-in-arm, back to my place. I vetted your credentials all [...]

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Clinton 2.0

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Clinton and the Death Throes of Identity Politics

“I’m human,” Clinton tells us, and it’s “news to some people.” We’re not told why this is so, but apparently its common knowledge that more is expected of her. What exactly the double standard here is we are not told. But if we connect all of the dots in her campaign’s narrative of victim-hood, we’re [...]

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Here’s How you Lay Someone Off

Classy. Hat-tip ACopperWire.

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McCain and the Political Mainstream: Substance is “Rhetoric,” Policies are just “Speeches”

Obama gives an extremely detailed (as well as elqouent) economic policy speech (see below) that should put McCain to shame. That doesn’t prevent the McCain campaign from engaging in the following chutzpah:
“No amount of rhetoric can hide Senator Obama’s clear record of embracing the liberal tax and spend, big government policies that hit hardworking American [...]

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Pain Trickled Up (Obama’s Cooper Union Speech)

How many people can create a refrain like “pain trickled up” (a nice crystallization of its substance) as part of a detailed economic policy speech? In his Cooper Union speech today Obama made a call for regulation and transparency and acknowledged of the role of widespread fraud (and its facilitation by Republican policies) in the [...]

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On Truth and Lie in the Extra-American Sense (Obama’s Race Speech)

On CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Candy Crowley leads off on Obama’s speech today with the caveat “whether or not you agree with what Barack Obama said,” and then launches into the staple of political discussion on American TV: whether or not the speech “worked.” And this is the theme of every show on television: Obama had [...]

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Google Searches that Lead to this Blog

Currently in the Google top ten results for:

ketchup defense (result #1)
dick sickness
oceania is at war with eastasia
the rhetorical arguments of hillary clinton
cicero rhetoric clinton obama
malt liquor fried chicken
essay of ketchup
gundon
the secret of my endurance
obama campaign suggestions
trite save the day
pious fuzziness
botargo (poor man’s caviar)
ketchup + hangover
spitzer white slaver
spitzer white slavery act

Favorite: malt liquor fried chicken

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The Only Maternal Presence in the Campaign

The only maternal presence in the campaign: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html?em&ex=1205726400&en=7c86d1bf8cf11784&ei=5087%0A
And what it produced:

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Stanley Fish: Dis-disinterested after all

After 341 comments on Stanley Fish’s last column, he felt he had to intervene with the following:
Just two points in response to readers’ questions. I do read all the comments. And I do not use words like “objective” or “impartial” or “neutral” or “disinterested” to describe what I try to do in these columns. All [...]

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Toughness Revisited (A Calm Attempt to Alleviate NYCweboy’s Frustration)

I suppose I should have made it clear that I was impressed by the sober and conciliatory tone of NYCweboy’s comment on this post, despite the fact that I disagree. (And as for my own vanity — being disagreed with is far more flattering than being ignored!) A bare assertion that other people are wrong [...]

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Obama and Clinton — Real Differences in Tone and Honesty?

  NYC weboy writes (in reponse to this):
There’s an awful lot going on here, and a lot of conclusions about what I might mean, at least by implication, in saying “toughen up” (I can’t speak for Wolcott, nor would I try). Just to be clear, I think you can find people on both sides to complain [...]

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Ferraro, Part II

One more word about Geraldine Ferraro: her bluntness and tenacity are admirable. And that Obama’s campaign benefits from a guilty white constituency because he is African American is probably right (as I have argued before). And certainly she is not racist, and really she’s not a representative of the Clinton campaign.
Yet Ferraro is just wrong.
First, [...]

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The Right Approach

The right approach:
“Part of what I think Geraldine Ferraro is doing, and I respect the fact that she was a trailblazer, is to participate in the kind of slice and dice politics that’s about race and about gender and about this and that, and that’s what Americans are tired of because they recognize that [...]

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The Banality of Mamet

Mamet’s “Why I am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal‘”: A long, boring, unedited piece, and what do we get at the end?
at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler
(A great way to brand the Rwandan or any other genocide, e.g.: “Hutus: the same folks we Tutsis [...]

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A Conspiracy of Old Women: Geraldine Ferraro and Identity Envy

We know that old women are Clinton’s demographic.
The question is whether we want them ruling the country.
I think that’s the deeper subtext of the recent stupidity of Geraldine Ferraro: it’s not so much racism and as competing identity politics: victim-status-envy. Old women who are so close to vindication they can taste it, flush with [...]

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Humanizing Spitzer

Cramer breaks up.
As always, we’re shocked–shocked!–that someone’s sexual impulses run deeper than their public persona.

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The Third Variable Problem, the Red Phone, and the Sham Science of Polling

We get more speculation on the effectiveness of the red phone ad.
Did it work, the way pundits assume it worked in Texas and Ohio?
There’s no way to know. Ever. There are too many other variables. That’s a classic problem of causal explanation — and at the very least “analysis,” even political analysis, should try to [...]

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Monitor Thyselves

If you’re one of those people who waits for tragic self-destruction and then cozies up to it in self-righteous revulsion, then ….

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Obama Trades Nomination for Malt Liquor and Fried Chicken

I have the sense that Clinton thinks she can take the nomination from Obama the way Manhattan was taken from the Indians. He is a black man after all.

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Spitzer Violates the White Slave Traffic Act

The only part of this that interests me, from Scott Horton:
The prosecution is opened under the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910. You read that correctly. The statute itself is highly disreputable, and most of the high-profile cases brought under it were politically motivated and grossly abusive. Here are a few:

Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson [...]

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Stanley Fish, The Unmoved Blogger

Sigh, yawn. I’m Stanley Fish, the academic, and having an opinion would require about 75 footnotes.

What I’m here to do is help you regular folk — those unsophisticated enough not to have qualified your feelings with a hundred indecisions — to reason properly. I don’t have arguments about the world — that would be gauche, [...]

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Toughen Up?

James Wolcott and NYCweboy tell the Hillary haters to “toughen up”–politics is a rough game. The corollary here is that Clinton and Obama aren’t really different; they “both” played rough. It’s all the same.
Nonsense. Calling for decency and intellectual honesty in politics is not a matter of lack of toughness. If you don’t make that [...]

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Obama and the Art of Political Self-Defense

Dick Morris has a new bit about the need for Obama to attack Hillary via surrogates. I don’t entirely agree, although I made a similar call in this post.
Here’s the difference: if the Obama campaign were to bring up Norman Hsu (or Whitewater for that matter), it should only do so to compare Rezko-attacks on [...]

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The Deaning of Obama (Almost)

What’s happening to Obama in the press, incidentally, is remarkably similar to what happened to Howard Dean (with the exception that Obama is less vulnerable to negative coverage). Dean, like Obama, initially received positive press–not directly, but as a by-product of being acknowledged as a phenomenon. After this coverage peaked, there was a serious attempt [...]

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How they’re Preparing us for NObama (is it time for a third-party threat?)

The tenor of current political discussion suggests that the masters our preparing us for the possibility of undoing Obama’s win:

The superdelegate freeze (why not decide this now and spare us the pain?); claims by Gov Rendell and others that party officials need not respect the pledged delegate count; superdelegate claims in a New York Times [...]

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Bill! It’s for you!

As much as I loathe Dick Morris, this is a really succinct dose of reality and it ends with a great suggestion:
The next time Hillary uses the recycled red phone ad, counter with one of your own. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, have a woman’s voice, with a flat [...]

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Hillary Must Reads

I rest my case (for now):

http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/9271?in=00:34:15
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/breaking-the-final-rule_b_90420.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-david/on-the-red-phone_b_90338.html
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=ba30ff16-a5af-4035-a883-cf15ffee406c

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Poetry Friday: The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

My weekly guest post on The Well Read Child:
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth, I wear a tourist’s shirt with “Nantucket” printed on the front. A nurse who had already done several embarrassing things to me saw the shirt and asked me if I had been there, and I [...]

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Obama Campaign Strategy Suggestions (it’s time to take off the gloves)

Hang McCain around Clinton’s neck the way Bush will be hung around McCain’s. If she thinks that after her, McCain is the next best commander-in-chief, then she ought to bear the burden of that view. Run ads showing her and McCain together. Point out similarities in their voting records and views–especially on Iraq, Iran, and NAFTA. Call her McCain Light. Show her with Liebermann as well, just for texture.

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Once a Young Republican, Always … (Hillary Clinton Endorses McCain)

The latest from the Clinton campaign:

 McCain and she are read to be commander in chief, Obama isn’t
“I won’t accept a caucus” in Florida (Hillary)–meaning, she would be comfortable seating delegates in a state where there was no campaigning (not to mention Michigan, where Obama was not on the ballot)
The Obama campaign’s request for Clinton to [...]

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Why Math will not be undone by Momentum Ex Machina

From Jonathan Alter, one of the few journalists who hasn’t tucked tail as a response to Hillary’s victim gambit: even do-overs in Michigan and Florida will not catch her up in the popular vote or pledged delegate count, and superdelegates will not overturn both.

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The Intellectually Vacuity of New York Times Political Analyses

Here’s the New York Times, an “analysis”:
After Tuesday’s primary victories for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, her focus is momentum; for her Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, it is math.
Math vs. Momentum: it’s a simple opposition, and it alliterates. That’s why it’s been the conventional wisdom of the TV and the Web for more than 24 [...]

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Hillary Contra Obama – In Five Acts (unabridged version)

Hillary Contra Obama – In Five Acts
Act I, Scene I: Enter Clinton, stage right, wearing coronation robes—grand, radiant, inevitable. In the beginning the thought of not winning no more occurs to her than the thought of being a peasant occurs to a queen. The audience knows as soon as she walks onto stage how brittle [...]

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The Momentum Fetish — taking entirely predictable results and pretending they’re shocking

Momentum: the idea is that if a candidate wins in one state, he or she will win in others. It is premised on the idea that voters are lemmings.
It is a really dumb idea, and one that the press keeps resurrecting after rumors of its death: Obama had momentum after Iowa; it went away in [...]

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Pundit Shamanism

One small not on the press and pundits: part of their pseudoscience of political strategy is to assign causes to events. They do this with a disregard for analysis that amounts to superstition. Hillary won last night because of her 3-am ad, because of Obama’s negative press coverage, and so on. They quickly forget that [...]

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Rescuing Maiden Hillary

This will sound like sour grapes, but here goes.
It’s a measure of the delusion of the press that they treat Clinton’s comeback as a resurgence. That’s largely a function of a taste for drama, no matter what the realities–the desire to tell a story of ups and downs, wins and comebacks. It’s also a function [...]

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Obama “Screamed” at Him

Here’s some unedited blather premised more on the vanity of knowing Obama (and his flaws) than on newsworthiness; just to summarize: a local reporter does a fluff piece on Obama, feels some remorse, writes something less flattering based on other lawmakers envious of Obama’s success, in a piece that starts out talking about how painful [...]

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Stanley Fish Tries to arouse us from our Obagmatic slumber

“Hey, I’m Stanley Fish! The enemy of the conventional wisdom is my friend, regardless of the facts.” [Incidentally, this is the way that the sequence of counterintuitive fads that is humanities academia functions.] “So Obama’s political machine has proven itself to be much more well-organized and formidable than McCain’s? So what. So Obama will raise [...]

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