Glad I took Friday off the day job to plant stuff, since today has turned out crap for weather. Now I've got about 18 tomatoes, three eggplants a dozen hot peppers, and a couple dozen sweet peppers in the ground. It looks like I'm growing a crop of milk cartons thanks to all the "hats" I've got over the plants as mini-greenhouses.
The goal was to plant corn, too, but since the actual farmers aren't getting that done I'm not feeling too bad. I also transplanted some mint that I'd left at Bohemian Paradise.
Link fest:
It all came down to a hard-to-pinpoint, rarely discussed, but desperately important matter: the personal authenticity of two human beings.
Clinton's ultimate gift, among many, to Obama was obviously the Gas Tax Holiday. It nailed down her credentials as a Wooden Soldier -- the epitome of the old-fashioned, say-anything, 20th-century politician. She went once too often to the voters-are-dullards well, and it finally pissed them off.
It's a mistake McCain will make, too, because like Clinton he just can't help it. Part of it is generational. Clinton and McCain came of age in a Nixonian universe -- and there has never been a more Wooden Soldier than Nixon. (In my own personal dictionary, when you look up Wooden Soldier, there's a photo of Nixon doing his ghoulish two-handed V-For-Victory salute.) And part of it is a choice, based on an outmoded belief that voters want an Impregnable Persona instead of a genuine human being.
What doomed the Clinton candidacy is of course, her vote in favor of the Iraq war.... Why is no establishment writer pointing to that as the reason why she lost? Because they are all complicit in the original sin of supporting the invasion of Iraq.
How did a minor American politician, a mere State Senator in Illinois, get it right when all these towering giants did not? It is not that Barack Obama had better information. It is not even because he was smarter. He simply had the courage to say what he knew to be true. He would, strangely, trust that the people he was addressing were adults.
Thus circling back to the same point Eskow made. Although, actually, I've been talking about the war vote forever, though I'm hardly a major-league pundit, I'm more of a Cedar Rapids Kernels level pundit. But on NC/Indy night, Chris Matthews made the same point.
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