Life’s Little Ironies

Today is Dick Cheney’s birthday. (Officially, anyway; I remain unconvinced that he was born in the normal sense, and isn’t just a projection of humanity’s collective capacity for evil.)

Today is also the birth anniversary of the late historian Barbara Tuchman, author of The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, a book about the most devastatingly stupid wars in history. Ms. Tuchman could write a new chapter about the debacle in Afghanistan and Iraq that would make the hubris and incompetence described in the original book seem as nothing.

The Extreme Weirdness Of The 2008 Race

Lots of moderate and liberal antiwar Americans are lining up behind John McCain, to the point where Rasmussen gives him an eight-point lead nationally over Hillary Clinton and a six-point lead over Barack Obama.

This is ironic, as John McCain is, of all the Republicans, the one most fanatically behind staying in Iraq and attacking Iran.

However, there is hope coming out of California, as Obama and Romney are now in the lead in the primaries there:

By the numbers: California’s twin presidential primaries may be much tighter than polls have suggested, with both Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama making late surges, according to new tracking data.

The numbers are part of a nightly tracking poll being done by the anti-Indian-gaming initiative campaign, which has included a question on the presidential primaries.

Separate samplings of 300 Republican voters taken Thursday and Sunday found Romney had gained five points from earlier in the week and pulled into a dead heat with John McCain. Each had about 25 percent, and those figures held up Monday night. But then that was before McCain’s big Florida win Tuesday.

On the Democratic side, the combined results of three nightly samplings of 400 different voters – for Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday – found Hillary Rodham Clinton at 36 percent, Obama at 31 percent and John Edwards at 12 percent.

But when taken alone, Sunday’s tracking – just a day after Obama’s big win in the South Carolina primary – had Obama leading Clinton, 35 percent to 32 percent, with Edwards’ share growing to 16 percent. And pretty much the same numbers came up Monday.

One caveat: A prominent political consultant following the numbers emphasizes that while a single night’s tracking isn’t considered statistically reliable, it does show movement and direction.

Any way you slice it, the source says, the presidential race here is definitely heating up.

Now, if only Edwards’ people would go en masse to Obama, I’d feel a lot better.

Wednesday Morning News Roundup

— How bad are things in Haiti under the rule of Bush-approved warlord thugs that drove out the democratically-elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide nearly four years ago? People are reduced to literally eating dirt.

— Hillary, in pushing for the Michigan and Florida delegates to count so she can unfairly claim them, is pushing for the DNC to violate a judge’s order:

[US District Judge Robert] Hinkle was not convinced. He ruled that forcing the national party to break its own primary schedule rules by seating Florida delegates would violate the party’s First Amendment right to assemble.

“There can be a schedule, there need not be a free-for-all and the entity that can set the schedule is the national party,” said Hinkle while pronouncing his ruling. “Florida has to comply with the same rules and procedures as everybody else and does not get to have its own way.

— It looks like John Edwards is out of the 2008 race. This is bad, both because he’s the guy who did the best in head-to-head matchups against McCain, and because even though he was the most progressive of the three major Democratic candidates, enough low-information conservative Democratic white voters thought otherwise to siphon off support that would have otherwise gone to Hillary.

Awwww, Pooooor Babieeez!

 Eric Boehlert of Media Matters on how FOX News (and News Corp. in general) had a sucky end of 2007 and is having an even suckier 2008.

Short version:  They’re getting killed by CNN in the ratings on primary coverage, and they’re so well-known as biased one-sided GOP shills that nobody takes their new business channel seriously, much less actually watches it. 

The one thing that’s worked out for FOX so far is the writers’ strike:  Since FOX relies the most on cheap (and writer-free) “reality TV” shows for its programming, it can run more new entertainment programming than the other networks.  (It’s been gouging advertisers, too, something I suspect those advertisers will remember.)  But with the primaries now in full swing, and with CNN dominating the primary coverage with MSNBC making a respectable showing, FOX is not going to enjoy the reality-TV advantage the way it did in the early weeks of the strike. 

No, It’s Not Really Like Date Rape

Jane Hamsher on FISA, the 15-day PAA extension, and Republican ideas of bipartisanship.