The lessons that the Clintons bring to the table are the wrong lessons.

To learn from them would be a fundamental compromise.

Smart, but not wise.

The mere fact that we allow ourselves this term, whereas the US mass media regard the mere term "working class" as "élitist," indicates the fundamentally false nature of the "inverted snobbery" presented by their favoured candidates, which contains nothing a European could regard as genuinely proletarian, at all, but rather a sort of archie bunker know-nothing anti-intellectualism, which itself probably would not appeal to any part of the US public if it wasn't framed in sentimental and grandiose hokum.

Actually, it's all over. Read between the lines of the latest campaign finance data, as reported by the WaPo:

"Campaign finance records released this week show that a growing number of Clinton's early supporters migrated to Obama in March, after he achieved 11 straight victories. Of those who had previously made maximum contributions to Clinton, 73 wrote their first checks to Obama in March. The reverse was not true: Of those who had made large contributions to Obama last year, none wrote checks to Clinton in March."

http://tinyurl.com/6xo5gt

At the margin, among the $2,300 contributors, Obama's winning 73 to nothing. Ding dong, the witch is dead; the wicked witch is dead!

Hillary's reduced to a tiresome, steatopygous sideshow. As Edwin Edwards used to say, nothing's gonna stop Obama now, unless he's caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.

Just as Bill will be best remembered for blustering "I did not have sex with that woman," Hillary ought to be forever tagged with growling "If I'm the president, we will attack Iran." This is taken out of context, of course. But that's precisely what she intended, knowing that the video loop will run over and over, soaking the Lobby's truculent message into the feeble minds of the sheeple.

"Who the hell is RWR?"

Ronald Wilson Reagan.

It's odd that the only people who positively celebrate "élitism," outside of the religious, theocratic subcultures, are the students of the political sociology of Mosca, Pareto, Michels, etc., who are mildly taboo because their ideas were among the bases of Italian Fascism. If I had to suggest a balanced introduction to this subject, I would suggest the works of A. James Gregor, who taught at UC Berkeley for decades, right through the sixties and up to at least the eighties, and survived the most turbulent periods of campus ultra-leftism without losing his scholarly detachment.

If I were a righterous non-state terrorist, I would reel my troops and bombs in for the duration of the USA election.

If I were a righteous state terrorist (both domestically and across the sea), I would scare the shit out of the potential voters, and beat every war drum in sight "in the best interest of the child."

Last night I watch Moyers interview Wright. I head most, if not all, of the G-D America speech ending with the chickens coming home to roost. Wright claimed during the speech that he was merely echoing a white ambassador about blowback, though he never used that term. His context was from old Exodus testatment right down to the present. He made sense, in the sense of history not as one would like, but as it has transpired. Nothing new, except he made it clear that his church was looking at events past and future as the saga of his victim people, with a God worth recognizing only if that God was pro-victim, not pro-oppressor. He modeled his view after the Hebrew biblical take regarding the series of oppressors from Egypt until now. It's clear Wright realizes the importance of myth. He never touched on the fringe clue around all peoples' history that the test of virtue is power. Moyers of course didn't pursue such.

Every group, like Wright's stained glass window mages, colors in its own sun. And visa versa.

If you want to right the last few centuries of past wrongs, vote for Obama. If you want the status quo, vote for Hillary or McCain. If you have a cynical view the former will merely create new equal wrongs, and the latter, will merely continue, more or less (a catch to consider) the current privileges and expenses.

The Nobel Prize-winning South African Jewish author, Nadime Gordimer, is being urged not to attend Jerusalem's International Writers Festival next month, Haaretz reports. Embarassingly, Gordimer once unsuccessfully urged the late Susan Sontag not to visit Jerusalem to receive an award. Now Gordimer is being hoisted on her own exquisitely sharpened petard.

I'm less interested in whether she goes, than in what she says. Is Gordimer willing to draw the parallels between South African and Israeli apartheid, as her countrymen Bishop Desmond Tutu and UN rapporteur John Dugard have done? Either way, the results should be instructive. Over to you, Nadine!

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/978039.html