alternative hippopotamus

Patrick McKinnion over at the Anti-PUMA notes that the HillaryIs44 blog uses a version of the Hillary Clinton speech from last night re-written to exclude any praise of Obama or any criticism of McCain.

Meanwhile, rivermalkin claims that the phrase “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” refers to a post she wrote at Kos a year ago, and not the movie “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” (whose sequel was recently released.)

Talk about your own private Idaho.

Over at Salon Tom Schaller discusses the Denver convention with Elizabeth Kamarck (one of the founders of the New Democrat movement ). The question of whether the PUMA crowd is a Republican front or not comes up:

Schaller: This brings us to the next question, which is, how much do you anticipate that Clinton supporters could be a serious problem for Obama at the Democratic convention? Are these PUMAs [Party Unity My Ass] and Just Say No Deal people a fringe element, and is it just going to be the media paying attention to them because there’s a story there but, ultimately, Hillary Clinton and her people are sitting on them? Or could this spin out of control?

Kamarck: Because I was a member of the rules committee, I’ve been bombarded by these folks for some months now. And there are two or three major groups that send out massive numbers of e-mails each day with bizarre, unsubstantiated rumors in all of them.

I will tell you they feel like Republicans to me. The whole business smells like a Republican front. I’ve been through intra-party battles, Mondale and Gary Hart and Carter and Kennedy, I was in the middle of those battles and this is not the way Democrats fight each other. And so something’s wrong here. Something’s weird here. I don’t quite believe it. Now if I get to Denver and there’s a significant Hillary revolt, I’ll have to eat my hat, but I think this is an Internet phenomenon. And it smells to me like a Republican front.

It smells to me like a Republican front, too. I don’t think it would take a substantial number of people to set something like this up, maybe a half-dozen. It’s hard to say. They could just be sore losers. Or, they could be Young Republicans posing as sore losers. A tough call.

This was from yesterday’s WaPo, but thought it was worth pointing out. While Pearlstein is talking about Central Park, he could just as easily have been talking about the Mall and environs in Our Fair City:

The first is a reminder of the importance of creating and sustaining public facilities that are accessible to everyone and nourish a sense of community. Over the past 20 years, the tendency has been for those who can to abandon public schools, public transportation, public recreation, with the result that American society has become increasingly segregated by class and polarized by political ideology. In Central Park, I found hints that Americans were eager to reverse that trend.

I can’t really say whether the growth of shared spaces has increased in my lifetime. When I go down to the Mall it appears to be a thriving metropolis of the democratic spirit. Yet, not to the extent that I saw in Belgium or London or Israel. I can certainly say in my lifetime the stratification of class in the US has increased while it has decreased in, for example, London. The rich have indeed become richer, the poorer have become poorer. It has been at the expense, I would argue, of our experiment in self-government. I am sure that this bothers not a bit those who delight in the notion that their place, materialistically speaking, is secure. Put another way, there are real people alive today who are nostalgic for the feudal system.

Anti-Semites and Larouchies and PUMAs. Oh my!

Rumproast got the jpgs from last weekends PUMA conference at lovely Dulles Airport’s Country Inn. Hillarious! Not so funny is the company they keep. Go read and try not to keep your jaw from dropping.

Next up, pumabots Murphy and Bower try to explain the notion of a club that would never want to have someone like them as a member. Club Hillary!

One of the questions about the PUMA movement has been whether they are a front group for Republican shenanigans, or at least a vehicle for said shenanigans. Today, as I was going through the rivermalkin blogroll I found a group called, misspelling in the original: Native American’s Against Obama.

It looks totally bogus.

To my ear these sound like standard issue Republican talking points:

Obama, has changed his mind over Isreal, Public Finance, the War, and just about ever other position he has even taken. Why should we think he would treat us any different?

The job of President is not on the job training……..

Native Americans have as a significant concern the Israel/Palestinian State issue? That strains credibility. If they did, you’d think they’d at least spell Israel correctly.

A few of us were out last Saturday night, and the topic came up of the alleged PUMA conference that we understood to be held nearby in DC. I tried to find out what I could, given that it was a closed-door conference, with no media allowed. This Observer article has the most detail that I’ve seen thus far. (h/t AntiPuma).

First, one of my questions concerned the size of the PUMAs. While the meowists had thrown around a figure of 250 registered for the conference, the Observer article indicates it was more like 60. While 60 is a perfectly respectable figure for a conference on the synthesis of ancient Sumerian prosody using RELP-encoded triphones, it’s a poor figure for a presidential movement. We’ve certainly had crowds bigger than that for Drinking Liberally events.

They changed the location (when? I wonder) from the Marriot to a Country Inn out at Dulles. Someone need to get out of town quickly?

That being said, a couple hundred pumatons could certainly function as a guerilla movement to disrupt the convention in Denver. This paragraph suggests that, indeed, barring an overthrow of the DNC, they would like (nay, demand) the removal of the presumptive nominee and to replace him with the former first lady:

The mostly female collection of activists who continue to rally around the cause of a decommissioned White House bid can’t exactly be described as an organized movement. There are the wealthy donors who work within official party channels and talk calmly about reforming the party’s nominating process or protecting against gender bias in future elections. Their level of hostility toward the Obama campaign varies. And then there are the outright rejectionists: the raucous bloggers and founders of groups like PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) who plan to disrupt the convention and have declared all-out war against Mr. Obama and his supporters, who they accuse of making death threats and leaving dead bunny rabbits on doorsteps in the middle of the night.

Dead bunny rabbits? I’m guessing that’s a reference to a scene from Fatal Attraction. But really, I find this hard to believe, and resembling more Perot ‘92-style paranoia than anything I would imagine from rank and file Democrats.

I knew rivermalkin was crazy, I thought Heidi Li Feldman was more or less a regular Dem, who was upset that her candidate lost. That’s what I thought.

I mean rivermalkin came up with a theory about the Democratic primary that goes something like this: about a year ago Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Donna Brazile decided that they wanted Obama as the Dem candidate. So they manipulated the primary calendar to help him and hurt the rightful Dem nominee, Hillary Clinton. Just to make sure the fix was in, they invalidated the primaries in Michigan and Florida. Edwards wasn’t part of the actual conspiracy, but he did his part to keep HRC down by not admitting he had an affair.

This was essentially a coup against the Clinton wing of the Democratic party, so rivermalkin’s theory goes. To make the coup complete required using the race card against Bill Clinton, to destroy his legacy. Then moving the DLC to Chicago. I’m not sure why Chicago upsets the meowists, maybe it has something to do with the University of Chicago. The important thing is that this sets the stage for a totalitarian Obama administration and his evil secretary of state, Markos Moulitsas. Markos, also known as the Great Orange Satan, seeks to… oh, who knows. They just don’t like him. And the rest of the blogger boyz.

Anyway, rivermalkin is a constant source of entertainment. Like today, she is totally dumb-founded why the Atlantic email article is a big deal. Of course, the reason it’s a big deal is that it undermines the grand unified conspiracy theory that rivermalkin has been trying to sell to the meowists. The reason HRC lost the primary is because she didn’t prepare for the loss in Iowa. Far from running a positive campaign, the strategy was to attack Obama for not looking like an American- a strategy that crosses the line in terms of what Democrats will accept in a primary.

Like I say, I had put Heidi Li Feldman in a different and much more reasonable category. Then I read this from her blog. She is reacting to the idea of the Obama campaign announcing the VP choice through text messaging:

These are not democratic methods. They more closely resemble the techniques historically used by fascists determined to control and manipulate public opinion while at the same time ralllying public support or insisting on shows of them.

A bit over the top, perhaps? I mean, folks get upset when Bush gets called a fascist, and in his case the shoe kind of does fit. But calling someone a fascist for sending out text messages?

Source tells Drudge: Vince Foster not amused.

At least this gives people something to talk about this weekend. Hopefully, that will keep the crazies distracted for a while.

I wanted to give at least a vague outline of observations I’ve had concerning former Clinton supporters and their relationship to the 2008 presidential campaign. They believe they have been wronged, and that somebody needs to pay.

Just who should pay? It depends on who you ask, but it appears to be some combination of the following:

• Howard Dean
• Donna Brazille
• Obama, for the Odacity, the Obamination, and other related permutations of misspellings of his name.
• the DLC, particularly the Rules and Bylaws Committee.
• the world.
• God.

Meanwhile, I learn in my copy (ecopy?) of Ron Suskind’s book that there is an interrogation room underneath the White House where random Muslims are picked up and smacked around for suspicious use of an iPod.

I’m just saying it would be nice if the crazies would direct some of their anger towards the Bush administration, who’ve really made a most horrendous mess of things. Or just spend the rest of the campaign season in idle gossip over the Edwards affair. Either way.

I see some of us are upset that Bill Clinton felt that he needed to defend himself against charges of racism. I will argue that the question of whether Clinton, or McCain, or any of the propagandists for the Republican party are racist is a misleading one. The question is not racism, per se, but whether or not one is using a favorite Republican straw man. One that is taken out of mothballs and dusted off for each presidential election. And how that straw man is used to paint Obama as a “challenger” in the language of black politics.

The straw man I’m referring to is kind of a cross between Mandingo and Falstaff: his physical presence threatens the white folk, while it horrifies and fascinates the women folk. His licenscious ways are an affront to decency. Here, I’ll attempt to coin the term Mandingstaff to refer to such a caricature.

It’s such a mythological creature that Lynne Cheney wrote about in her acclaimed Republican porn novel Sisters:

Wilson put out a hand, a stubby filthy hand, and rubbed his fingers over the side of Sophie’s face. “Mmmm, soft,” he said. “Soft and smooth. Ain’t like mine, is it?” He fingered the suppurating scab on his cheek. “You see what that whip done? You see what your sweetheart done?” Suddenly he screamed in her face: “And last night he burned my goddamned shack!”

…

He kissed her, forced her lips open with his mouth. She could taste the whiskey he had been drinking, feel his whiskers and the scab on his face. A wave of revulsion swept over her, and she pushed him away. As he fell back, the white bulldog moved toward her, his growl becoming louder.

“Ah, feisty, ain’t she, Luper?” Wilson stroked the dog. “Well, sometimes that kind’s the most fun.”

Like the figure of the werewolf or vampire, Mandingstaff takes on the essence of his particular time and place. In Nixon’s time this was known as the Southern Strategy. In the Dukakis campaign it took the form of Willie Horton. In this campaign, Rev. Wright has that honor. It may be argued that this was one meaning of Clinton’s Sista Soulja Moment, that he would keep the white folks safe from Mandingstaff.

My argument is that this straw man is the cartoon version of what Shelby Steele refers to as a challenger. Steele distinguishes between bargainers and challengers on Bill Moyers Journal:

BILL MOYERS: Yeah. You say in here, white people like Barack Obama a little too much for the comfort of many blacks.

SHELBY STEELE: Yes. Yes.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

SHELBY STEELE: Well, the black American identity, certainly black American politics are grounded in what I call challenging. It’s basically, they look at white America and say we’re going to presume that you’re a racist until you prove otherwise. The whole concept is you keep whites on the hook. You keep the leverage. You keep the pressure. Here’s a guy who’s what I call a bargainer who’s giving whites the benefit of the doubt.

BILL MOYERS: Give me a simple definition of what you call a bargainer. And a simple definition of what you call a challenger.

SHELBY STEELE: A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I’m not going to rub the shame of American history in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Whites then respond with enormous gratitude. And bargainers are usually extremely popular people. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier back in the Sixties and so forth. Because they give whites this benefit of the doubt. That you can be with these people and not feel that you’re going to be charged with racism at any instant. And so they tend to be very successful, very popular.

Challengers on the other hand say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference.

I can’t say whether or not WJC was invoking language to paint Obama as a “challenger” when he compared him to Jesse Jackson after the South Carolina primary. I would argue that it has that effect, but indeed it’s unfair to say that this was Clinton’s objective.

McCain’s campaign, however, is a different matter. They are quite aware of what Steele is describing, and will likely tailor their language to fit the notion of a “challenger.” And if this provokes a reaction from the Obama campaign, even better, as one of the characteristics of challengers is that they believe that white people are racists. Q.E.D., Obama is a “challenger”, according to this logic, because he thinks that calling him “presumptuous” is racist.

Now, back to WJC for a minute. As I said previously, it’s unfair to call him a racist for his remarks. I would argue, though, that he knew getting into this race that he would be put in an awkward situation. He has a role as an elder statesman which, while not being a role of entire partiality, puts him in a position where he needs to be above the fray. Yet, he can’t do that while actively arguing for his wife as candidate. Put another way, it’s not fair for him to use his role as elder statesman to create a family presidential dynasty. That there would be fall-out from that should have been expected.

In PUMAs: Acknowledge the sexism in the party, media Cap’n “Special” Ed writes:

When the primaries ground to a halt in June, Hillary’s supporters complained bitterly not just about sexism from the media, but also from Obama’s campaign. The Sweetiegate story provided a glimpse of it, but Obama did a lot more damage after Hillary suspended her campaign by suggesting that women needed to “get over it” and that he didn’t have time to pander to them. The dress suggestions for women in his media entourage probably didn’t help much, either.

In trying to correlate the title with the text one might, as Ed does, assume that the PUMAs are former supporters of HRC in the Democratic primary. I’d say the jury is still out on that. We suspect that some of them might be HRC supporters, and some of them may be Democratic party voters. It’s an educated guess though, that there are Republicans of various stripes mixed in with them as well. I know that PUMAs have spots, not stripes, but just as sure as they’re not real Democrats, they’re not real pumas.

This much I can say: if these folks are Democrats (then Michelle Malkin is a furry kitten) they are unlike any group of Democrats I’m familiar with. They’re not interested in any of the issues that I usually hear brought up by Democrats when they congregate. They don’t talk about the concentration of wealth, or jobs, or unions, or health care, or Iraq, or the Bush Justice Department, or impeachment. They only thing they talk about is how sexist the Obama people are, and how the DNC stole HRC’s Michigan and Florida votes.

Take this nugget from the rivermalkin comment section. It’s a classic conversion story, with a fascinating twist. The DNC worker, having learned the “truth” about Hoho and Nancypie vows to quit his job and get a job at Walmart. By the way, does the DNC even go door-to-door? Phone banking, sure, but I’m not aware of door knock campaigns supporting the DNC. Anyway, my point is that how many former DNC employees are going to work for Walmart as their back-up plan?

You mean this Walmart? The one that warns employees against voting for the Democratic party? The one that’s used strong-arm tactics to keep out unions? The one that violates minimum wage laws by requiring unpaid overtime?

Anyway, here’s the full meowist anecdote for your amusement:

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