"Even when Musk decided to waste a chunk of his fortune on buying Twitter, so that he could restore accounts belonging to right-wing dissemblers such as Donald Trump and Alex Jones..."

"Tesla-lovers managed to feel pretty good about themselves. Since then, however, Musk has gone full MAGA. Among the highlights: he has endorsed the antisemitic 'Great Replacement' conspiracy theory, wondered why no one tries to assassinate the Democratic nominee for president, and pledged to give Trump’s campaign $45 million a month....This past weekend, Musk showed up at a Trump rally and reiterated his belief that the country and its Constitution could not continue to exist if Trump weren’t reelected. Among my friends who drive Teslas, Musk’s name comes up a lot in conversation, like an embarrassing skin condition you wish you could ignore. Some manage ably to compartmentalize. A neighbor I see at the dog park rails against Trump voters but raves about his self-driving Model S.... Other Tesla drivers feel stigmatized and vacillate about selling their cars. One friend affixed a magnet to her Tesla that says: 'I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.'"

Writes Matt Bai, in "The left’s Elon Musk dilemma/Nothing I can think of has plunged liberal friends of mine into a kind of moral anguish quite like Tesla" (WaPo).

Oh, the struggles of Matt Bai's Tesla-driving friends! I wonder what other "moral anguish" problems roil their privileged lives.

But I had to laugh at the notion that Musk "waste[d] a chunk of his fortune on buying Twitter." Musk spent $44 billion. His net worth is $264 billion. What else could he have bought that could have provided him with anything like the satisfaction and power he gets from X? Waste?!

"... I’ve written pretty harshly about Vance.... But I thought he actually did himself and his ticket some good."

"Vance came into this debate with a mission, which was to make himself and his running mate seem more reasonable, less extreme and more respectful of women. He knew exactly what he wanted to achieve, and he was just really good at it. He calibrated his tone really shrewdly. Whereas, I don’t think Walz had an objective other than to answer the questions and talk a lot about Minnesota.... He didn’t seem to want to achieve any one main thing, and so he didn’t really achieve much of anything, other than to do no harm.... And I was very surprised that Walz didn’t... point to the pretty extreme things Vance has said about women. I guess he was waiting for the moderators to do it. But the first half-hour of a debate is when viewers are really locked in, and Vance has a serious vulnerability there. I think I would have made that my main objective. The phrase 'cat ladies' never even came up."

Says Matt Bai, in "Did Tim Walz miss a crucial moment at the VP debate? The governor didn’t seem to have a clear objective in his face-off with Republican JD Vance." That's a free-access link, so you can read the whole conversation Bai has with Megan McArdle and Gene Robinson.

At one point, Megan McArdle talks about watching the debate with the sound off. Vance looked "much more composed." What Matt Bai noticed with the sound off was "how deeply concerned Walz looked about everything, as if he feared bad news." Which is basically the same point. McArdle asks "At a visceral level, who wants a president who looks anxious?"

I did the opposite mostly. I watched without looking at them.

"I say, without evidence, that the media’s Trump qualifiers are backfiring."

A great headline — on a column by Matt Bai, in WaPo.

I know exactly what he's talking about —  even though "Trump qualifiers" is an awkward term — and I'm assuming he's going to articulate my position on the subject... but is he? The subheadline makes me wary:  "We in the news media are making him less accountable for his mendacity, rather than more so." I want you in the news media to be more accountable too. You're just throwing in "without evidence" all the time without establishing that you have honestly assessed whether there is evidence.

Now, I'll read it and make some excerpts and comments as I go:

"I recall finding it a little jarring, back in 2016, to walk the corridors of the Republican convention in Cleveland and not see more than handful of Republicans I recognized from years past."

"That’s because, when you win that many primaries as a hostile outsider, you physically replace the long-serving delegates who made up the base of the party with the alienated neophytes who supported you. In other words, Trump was not suddenly in charge of the party as it existed the year before; he actually created an entirely different party, beholden only to him. So, for Trump, pledging loyalty to the party is indistinguishable from pledging loyalty to himself...."

Writes Matt Bai, in "Trump won’t profess loyalty to his party. Neither will most Americans" (WaPo).

Bai ends with this prediction: "The age of pop-up movements and celebrity takeovers in our politics is likely just beginning, I’m afraid. And the time for loyalty oaths — to any party — is rapidly coming to an end."

"What makes [Bobby] Kennedy most like Trump, though, is the overlay of conspiracy and contempt that tinges nearly everything he says..."

"... the destructive distrust in the electorate he seeks to channel. During the rambling, nearly two-hour, Trump-like monologue in which he launched his campaign in Boston, Kennedy sketched the bleak tableau of a government wholly owned and controlled by corporations, of nefarious powers in both parties hellbent on enslaving people with bureaucratic mandates."

Writes Matt Bai in "His name is Kennedy. His campaign is pure Trump" (WaPo).

And: "Like Trump, Kennedy is given to skillful demagoguery.... ... Kennedy explained how the covid vaccine — which he seems to regard as a vast societal evil, like opioids, or the War on Christmas — utterly failed to stop transmission of the coronavirus, just as the government secretly knew it would. Of course, the main point of the vaccine wasn’t to stop us from catching variants of the virus — it was to stop those variants from killing us at intolerable rates. Which it did."

"In decades of covering campaigns, I’ve seen plenty of historical relics... But none of that prepared me for the morning last fall..."

"... when my dog was running around with her pack of neighborhood playmates, and my friend Ledge turned to me and asked a question so bizarre that for a moment I was sure I’d misheard him. 'Hey,' he said, 'did I tell you I have John Marshall’s gallstones?'... You can still visit Marshall’s house in Richmond, where any mention of a troubled urinary tract is conspicuously missing. I suppose someone who lived in a normal city, maybe Akron or Omaha, would have nervously laughed off Ledge’s question and started talking to someone else. But in Washington, where we practice what Abraham Lincoln called our 'political religion,' we cling to creepy totems, proof that the Founding Fathers and their celebrated successors once walked among the living...."

So begins "My neighbor found Lincoln’s hair in his basement. I found a mystery" by Matt Bai (WaPo).

You'll have to read the story, but it ends: "All that remained of the world of Aunt Judy and her parents was an unbearably sad legacy, and it had come to rest in his basement, where the easiest thing to do was to look away. We’re all collectors of something, whether we choose to be or not."

Matt Bai knows he "should care more about Hunter Biden," but he just doesn't.

And he's telling you why in The Washington Post:

... I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration.

At least he's noticing it and admitting it publicly and feels the need to explain it (or sees some advantage in purporting to need to explain it). Whether the reasons given are sincere, we can judge for ourselves: 

"But what Biden knows, after three-plus decades of being politically left for dead, is that nothing’s over just because a bunch of unnamed staffers who spend too much time reading polls say it’s over."

"He knows from experience that the more monolithic and reflexive the popular wisdom, the more likely it will be proved wrong. Does Biden run again? Personally, I’ve always thought he was most likely a one-term, stabilizing president, and I don’t really believe he has made up his mind to seek another term. But it’s early yet, and I’m pretty sure Biden won’t be spooked into accepting everybody else’s idea of political reality."

From "Panicked Democrats are ready to shove Biden aside. Again" by Matt Bai (WaPo).

"'I bear a very heavy burden of responsibility,' [Gary] Hart says, picking at a 'game plate' of elk, buffalo and quail at The Fort restaurant outside of Denver."

"If all that stuff had not happened and if I had been elected, there would have been no gulf war. H.W. wouldn’t have been president. W. wouldn’t have been president. Everything would have changed. I don’t say that to aggrandize myself. It’s just, history changed. And that has haunted me for thirty years. I had only one talent and it wasn’t traditional politics — I could see farther ahead than anybody."

Writes Maureen Dowd in "Trump and the Hart-less Presidency/After 30 years, Gary Hart still wonders what might have been."

I'm blogging this because I love the line "picking at a 'game plate' of elk, buffalo and quail." Somehow Hart and Dowd have found themselves at a table at this restaurant, and Hart orders the "game plate" of elk, buffalo and quail, presumably because that make him look like the guy he wants her to think he is, but then he only picks at it, because even after all these years and at his advanced age, he can't just be the person he really is.

And what a gasbag! "I could see farther ahead than anybody." You couldn't see far enough ahead to the part where the newsfolk you told to follow you around actually followed you around and discovered the tacky sex you were enjoying in contravention of your upstanding family-man image.

Here's the idiotic photograph that destroyed him:



And here's Hugh Jackman dressed up to play Gary Hart in a movie based on his ridiculous debacle:



The movie comes from the 2014 book "All the Truth Is Out" by Matt Bai, which I've read and blogged a couple times. Dowd tracks what Bai has written:

Before Hart, we had F.D.R., L.B.J. and J.F.K., who did not suffer politically for dalliances because the mostly male press corps had a bro-code and a blind eye. After Hart, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump got through frenzies about sexual transgressions by enduring the ridicule, enlisting their wives to defend them on TV, and attacking their accusers.

But the scratchy Hart wasn’t made that way. The adultery story enhanced the sense that he was an enigma, a story line that developed when the press learned that he had changed his name from Hartpence and fudged his age by a year....

Dowd questions Hart about whether he should have done something different. Should he have fought back, like Clinton and Trump?

In 1998, in the midst of the Clinton-Lewinsky uproar, Hart told me that he thought America might be getting more European about pols and sex, “growing up, finding out there is not a Santa Claus.” I am not sure that’s true. We have not reached any consensus on the issue, except that most strategists know better than to publicly trash the women at the center of such scandals....

But last year, in the midst of the #Metoo reckoning, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand criticized Al Franken after he was accused of groping and faux-groping for a joke picture, and told The Times that Bill Clinton should have resigned over the Lewinsky matter. The standards remain subjective, inconsistently applied and partisan....

Not sure... no consensus... subjective... Dowd is vague. And Hart must have been vague too, since there's no answer from him, other than the idea that "America might be getting more European," which seems laughably tone-deaf about how Americans feel and hopelessly far from understanding why people embrace Trump. Weren't Americans supposed to be prudes — so un-European?

Dowd began the column with an admission that she can't understand her own country:

As we fantasize about a parallel universe, where America is not a joke and our president cares about other human beings, the same questions keep swirling in our heads. What has happened to this country? Can he be stopped? When will it end? How the hell did we get here?

As we fantasize... We? "We" must mean We, the People of the more European part of America.

The incoherent notion that the GOP convention must pick Trump or Cruz.

On "Meet the Press" today, Chuck Todd interviewed Glenn Beck. Beck, a Cruz supporter, was there to argue that if there's an open convention, the delegates should be limited to choosing between Trump and Cruz (and should pick Cruz). Todd does enough to show Beck's incoherence but doesn't really nail him down:

CHUCK TODD: Let me start with this concern. We've heard it from many people that are Cruz supporters and that Trump supporters over the airwaves, who are concerned that somehow the party establishment may deny both of them. What would happen do you think to, what would your listeners, how would they react?

GLENN BECK: I think it would be the end of the G.O.P. ...

CHUCK TODD: So you think if Paul Ryan is somehow plucked as the Republican nominee, that it would be the end of the G.O.P. --

GLENN BECK: -- I think it would be very bad. You can't disenfranchise people. We've all gone out. We've been passionate about it. We've all been going back and forth and voted on the people that we believe. I really think it has to be one of the two frontrunners. I just think people would feel very betrayed....

I know he wants Cruz, but he's mischaracterizing what the people are doing. We were enfranchised when we voted in a primary and our vote was given the effect that we were told it would have toward selecting delegates who would vote on our behalf at a convention. And let's be clear about where the passion is and is not. Many of us in Wisconsin who voted for Cruz were voting to stop Trump and to get to an open convention where we hope to see Paul Ryan selected. Don't imagine some passion on our part that augments that passion of yours. If the GOP convention picks Paul Ryan, I wouldn't feel betrayed. I'd feel vindicated.

Maybe she said "Oh, Todd."

But it's in the "Meet the Press" transcript as "Oh God."

[Former press secretary to Hillary Clinton] KAREN FINNEY: It's crazy, you just can't imagine. The real problem, it's not the letter, it's whom it was addressed to. You don't send a letter to the Ayatollah...

CHUCK TODD: All right, I'm going to hit the pause button there, because we're going to have more fireworks, I have a feeling.

KAREN FINNEY: Oh God.

Finney is a former Hillary Clinton press secretary. It was only 2 weeks ago that the Democratic Party strategist Maria Cardona blurted out "Jesus!" on "Face the Nation." I'm keeping an eye on these female Democratic Party spokespersons. I think they are being misprepped for these Sunday shows. They're making a terrible impression... and not just for the fleeting expletives. Emotive emptiness like "It's crazy, you just can't imagine" is crazy. I just can't imagine why I am listening to her.

Finney was on the show to interact with Matt Bai, who was lively, articulate, and substantive:

CHUCK TODD: Matt Bai... [y]ou wrote something interesting this week.

MATT BAI: For once

See that's funny... silly, self-deprecating. It sets Todd up to be a little funny too:

CHUCK TODD: It was literally the only reason I brought you on. I'll set you up a little bit. You wrote, "It wasn't that [Hillary Clinton] couldn't answer the questions coming at her, it was that she didn't think she should have to. If I'm a Clinton advisor, that's a problem for me because this isn't 1992, when politics could be staged for the evening news. Transparency and authenticity are paramount in the social media culture and a lack of them is fatal, ask Mitt Romney."...

MATT BAI: ... Look, there are great advantages to being in the public arena as long as the Clintons have been. Organization, allies, experience, all of it. The disadvantage I think is that when you're there that long, you can miss changes in the political culture. You can fight the same battle you fought 20 or 30 years ago. But by the way, this happens to reporters too. I mean, we are not immune to missing changes... and you don't see what's in front of your face, somebody younger comes along and gets it. So I think she needs to change as a candidate and change her perspective in order to be successful, especially if you're running against a Jeb Bush, who makes openness obviously such a theme, a Rand Paul, who talks about civil liberties and secrecy in government. That's a sharp contrast with her approach.

Now, it's Finney's turn, and she's there to defend Hillary, but she's not flexible enough to pick up on any the things Bai just threw out (even though she'd obviously had the chance to read what Bai had written).

CHUCK TODD: Go over to Matt's point here a little bit. You know, did Secretary Clinton have "been there, done that" disease, where she assumed it was the '90s all over again and maybe was overly defensive?

KAREN FINNEY: You know, I don't think so. I thought she was trying to be sarcastic with her first answer. 

We had to pause the recording there. Sarcastic??!! Hillary was being sarcastic?!! Talk about unimaginable craziness! But what was Hillary's "first answer"? Finney doesn't remind us. I'm checking the transcript. I think it was her response to the question: "if you were a man today, would all this fuss being made be made?" Her answer was "Well, I will — I will leave that to others to answer." Is that what Finney was referring to? Did Finney really mean "sarcastic," implying that Hillary was mocking and contemptuous? Why throw that out first after the interesting things Bai said? And wouldn't sarcasm at the first question be "overly defensive," which would mean that her answer to Todd should have been "yes," not "You know, I don't think so"? Maybe Finney's first answer was intended to be sarcastic. I don't know.

Finney continues:

And I think also the fact that she went out there and did it, and also said, "Look, if I had it in hindsight, I would've done it differently." 

Also the fact what? This is Hillary's spokesperson?!  Not even speaking in sentences!

For all of those who criticized how slow she was, I think she also deserves credit that she went out there and did it.

We should give Hillary credit for showing up at all?! Also, what's with the "also"? What was the other thing she deserves credit for? Finney is a terrible spokesperson!

Because that's been the other criticism, right, that you wanted to see her come out. I don't think she in any way, shape, or form thought, and I think given your interview with Trey Gowdy it's quite obvious, this is not going away. This was not intended to end the conversation. 

So... the point is, I think, that Hillary did come out and speak and she wasn't trying to lay the controversy to rest? She's just beginning a conversation?!

After that less-than-worthless filler, Finney addresses what Matt Bai had written:

But I also thought, you know, Matt made an interesting point in his piece, also more broadly, about Hillary and this sort of thematic about Hillary in terms of the time at which she became first lady.

That sentence is a monument to stalling for time. Look at that phrase: "this sort of thematic about Hillary in terms of"! Is "thematic" even a noun? Yes, it means "a body of topics for study or discussion." Yeesh! Again with the endless conversation. I feel a sense of dread. This is what we'll get for 8 years with President Hillary — a sort of thematic about Hillary in terms of a conversation that never approaches the answer to the question we want answered (until it's gone on so long that it becomes possible to say we've already talked about it so long that you think you can look at us and say this has gone on too long and it's nothing but a partisan attack).

Finney continues:

And when that narrative about her and the Clintons were set...

The verb should be "was" and who are "her and the Clintons"? Finney is babbling.

... the country was not ready for someone like her. 

Like it's our fault?!

And so I think she's being held to a different standard. 

Oh, here it seems as if she's back to that first question about which Hillary was supposedly sarcastic — whether Hillary is being treated differently because she's a woman. I only understand that now because I looked up the press conference transcript. Anyone watching "Meet the Press" is thinking about whether they want to make the effort to extract the answer to the original question about whether Hillary can meet the transparency and authenticity demands of our social media culture.

Ironically, Finney's inane blabbing is answering the question. The answer is: no.

And I'm saying that from my little outpost in the social media culture.

As of 1978, there were only 3 presidential candidates — known to Theodore White — who had not succumbed to sexual adventures with women who were not their wives.

"In his 1978 memoir, Theodore White, the most prolific and influential chronicler of presidential politics in the last half of the twentieth century, made John Kennedy and most of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour. 'What was later written about Kennedy and women bothered White but little,' he wrote. 'He knew that Kennedy loved his wife — but that Kennedy, the politician, exuded that musk odor of power which acts as an aphrodisiac to of the other candidates he’d known sound like the Rolling Stones gathering up groupies on a North American tour. White was reasonably sure that only three presidential candidates he had ever met had denied themselves the pleasures invited by that aphrodisiac — Harry Truman, George Romney and Jimmy Carter. He was reasonably sure that all the others he had met had, at one time or another, on the campaign trail, accepted casual partners.” (Yes, White wrote his memoir in the reportorial third-person voice, and he used terms like 'musk odor.' It was a different time.)"

From the new book by Matt Bai, "All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid." That book is about how reporting on presidential candidates changed in 1987, when, for various reasons, the reporters who followed the candidates suddenly broke their conspiracy of silence and destroyed Gary Hart.

Yesterday, I watched one episode of "The Daily Show" and one episode of "The Colbert Report," and immediately afterwards bought the new books of the 2 authors I'd seen interviewed.

That was weird, although I see the connection to my long-time habit of feeling the need to buy 2 things if I'm going to buy 1 thing. I don't have a problem buying nothing, but 1 seems to require 2.

Here's the video of Matt Bai on "The Daily Show," pushing "All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid."

Here's the video of Walter Isaacson on "The Colbert Report," pushing "The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution."

I'm paraphrased by Rush Limbaugh.

On the show today:

A lot of people in the media and some left-wing bloggers are starting to scratch their heads about the inability of Obama and other members of the campaign and the regime to stop talking about how badly he did in the debate.  "Okay, you had a bad night. Forget it; move on.  Why keep talking about it?  Why keep reminding people how badly Obama did?"  Ann Althouse in Michigan has an interesting theory about this, and I'll paraphrase her.

Paraphrasing me all the way to Michigan.

She said, essentially, that the reason the campaign will not let go of how poorly Obama did is that they want everybody to think that's what happened.  It wasn't that Romney was good; it wasn't that Romney was anything special. The reason that debate happened the way it did is because Obama had an off night. Obama was the shock and surprise. Obama was off his game. Obama was pathetic. Obama was pitiful.

You keep repeating it over and over and over again because you don't want people to realize how great Romney was.  That's her theory, and I like it.  It's unique. It's great thinking.

Here's the post, de-paraphrased. I got Rush Limbaugh's "great thinking" stamp of approval, which might get me in trouble out here in the vicinity of Lake Michigan.

My post was also linked in James Taranto's Best of the Web today. He says:

Saying that Obama had a stinkeroo of a night is a way of avoiding the possibility that Romney is simply the better candidate.

If the remaining debates make the latter conclusion inescapable, watch lefties shift their focus to what a stinkeroo of a politician Obama turned out to be (now they tell us!). This, too, would entail a degree of wishful thinking. If Obama is undone, it will be not only because his political skills are lacking, but also because his record is poor.

And his record is poor because his ideas are bad. But as Matt Bai observes in the forthcoming issue of the New York Times magazine: "Political partisans will go to extraordinary lengths to blame the messenger rather than question the orthodoxies of their message."

Here's the Matt Bai piece, which I haven't read yet but will.

"Even allies backpedal from Walker's extremism" says a headline in the Madison newspaper The Capital Times.

This is a political analysis piece written by the newspaper's editor Paul Fanlund, and I just can't figure out how the headline is justified. The piece begins with a cite to the NYT Magazine's profile of Chris Christie, which got me running over there to find out what Christie said about Walker. The author of that piece — Matt Bai — discusses Walker:

Now a new class of governors from both parties is promising to revisit union contracts in order to put their states on firmer fiscal ground. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker, an aggressive new Republican governor, just proposed legislation that would limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain. “You can’t have one group who are the haves,” Walker told me recently, meaning government workers, “and one group, the private-sector workers, who are the have-nots.” Walker’s move led to protests in Madison, drawing President Obama into the debate and raising the prospect of French-style labor uprisings among public workers across America.

In part, the viral movement against public-sector unions is a result of political necessity. In states all over the country, balancing the budget has become an annual exercise in Copperfield-like illusion...

I don't see Christie backing away from Walker.

(And as for Matt Bai's "drawing President Obama into the debate" — I think Obama is keeping his distance!)

Matt Bai identifies "the central theme of Mr. Obama’s presidency: America’s faltering confidence in the ability of government to make things work."

He begins with the example of the the new get-naked-or-groped TSA policy and goes on:

From stimulus spending and the health care law to the federal response to oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Obama has continually stumbled...

I add my longtime blog tag "Obama stumbles" to this post.

... blindly, it seems — into some version of the same debate, which is about whether we can trust federal bureaucracies to expand their reach without harming citizens or industry....

Bai notes that during the Reagan and Clinton years, America turned away from "the era of big government," but then:

[T]he unraveling of the second Bush administration and the 2008 election... persuaded a lot of long-dispirited liberals that their philosophy, and not simply their party, had been restored. 

What a delusion!

"Is Obama the End of Black Politics?"

Asks Matt Bai in the NYT Magazine.

"You may have seen that some Hillary Clinton 'sock puppets' were recently outed on a New Hampshire blog, to the campaign’s great embarrassment."

Thanks, Matt Bai, NYT Magazine writer who is now also blogging on the NYT website. I'm extremely interested in that story, which I missed. I see you have created a link on those words "a New Hampshire blog," but when I click on it, I just get the whole blog! If you're going to blog, Matt, you have to link to the relevant posts. And he's written a book on blogging. Come on, Matt, links are key. Now, I'm forced to Google for the damned story myself, which is not a very bloggy experience.

Easiest to find is this, from the WaPo:

[R]eaders of Blue Hampshire -- about 800 a day, a relatively small but consequential group that includes party activists and state Democratic leaders -- recommend "diaries" that visitors should read. Yesterday, four readers who created new accounts and recommended pro-Clinton postings were traced back to Clinton's campaign. And those readers, Blue Hampshire noted, didn't disclose their relationship with Clinton. In the blogosphere, there's a word for this frowned-upon behavior: "sock-puppeting."

WaPo links to the relevant post at Blue Hampshire, which shows the ineptitude of the puppetry:

Recently, we admins noticed this comment thread on a recommended diary, and the oddities it posed made us look a little deeper than we normally would.

As the comment thread revealed, users pinballwizard, elf, shley24, MTAY all registered in succession to recommend the diary. A further look by us revealed that:

* they had registered within minutes of each other, including another user a bit later, janbaby, who was not among the recommenders,

* the same IP address was used by all of them, and is registered to the Clinton campaign,

* two other recommenders, blues and kmeisje, also registered from the same IP address.

Surely, there must be much more puppetry that escapes attention if this is how dumb it is when it's caught.

Meanwhile, here's how Matt Bai begins his most recent post: "I’m still trying to get used to blogging...." Please. Spare me the neophyte posing. You wrote a whole book about blogging! You should be demonstrating the art of master blogging.

ADDED: Speaking of Matt Bai not linking, I was just reading (and linking to) this essay he wrote about Stephen Gilliard — who died this past year. Look at how it ends (with my boldfacing):

[T]he few dozen mostly white bloggers who came to Harlem for the funeral saw for the first time the stark urban setting of Gilliard’s childhood, while his parents and relatives groped to understand what kind of work he had been doing at that computer and why scores of people had come so far to see him off. They must have been confused when Gilly’s online pals, sickened by the way some right-wing bloggers were gloating over his death, advised them not to disclose where he was buried, out of fear that someone might deface the site. The grave, like Gilliard himself, is known only to a few.

What right-wing bloggers? What did they say? Were "Gilly's online pals" correct in their characterization, or were they out of line? This just hangs there. NYT readers are left to think ill of the right wing of the blogosphere. Why, they're a bunch of monsters who want to piss on a young man's grave! Did any significant blogger gloat over Gillard's death?

AND: Speaking of inadequate linking at the NYT... Glenn Reynolds notes a NYT book review that has a hyperlink on N.R.A., where the reference is to Roosevelt's National Recovery Administration, that takes us to a list of articles about the National Rifle Association. The mistake is still there 2 hours after Glenn conspicuously shamed them about it. The NYT should be making a conspicuous show of its professionalism and superior resources on the web, but instead it is making mistakes that would mortify me — in my little one-person operation.

"Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?"

The Bill and Hillary psychodrama.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?

Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well....

Hillary advisers noted that when Bill was asked by a supporter in South Carolina what his wife’s No. 1 priority would be, he replied: C’est moi! “The first thing she intends to do is to send me ...” he began.

He got so agitated with Charlie Rose — ranting that reporters were “stenographers” for Obama — that his aides tried to stop the interview...

Maureen Dowd sounds absolutely right to me. I note that she's reacting to the Matt Bai article that appears in this week's NYT Magazine. I reacted to it on Wednesday and said something similar:

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

This too. (About that priceless quote: "Everything I'm saying here is my wife's position, not just mine.")

So: Loyal spouse? Subconscious saboteur? Frankly, I think he's too smart for it to be subconscious. I think he's devoted to her, but he's a dominant male, and the situation is inherently complex. Perhaps he wants conflicting things, but he must primarily want her to win, and assuming that's so, he needs to get control of himself in public so that we never see the part of him that wants her to lose.

Exploiting Bill Clinton.

How can Hillary exploit Bill's popularity without opening up all the complexities of judging his Presidency? Matt Bai writes in the NYT Magazine:

When I asked Bill Clinton about this issue, during an informal meeting in South Carolina, he readily agreed to sit down for a longer interview on his legacy’s role in the campaign. A few weeks later, however, and at the last minute, Hillary’s aides canceled the interview. Famously controlling, they would not even allow the former president to talk about his record.

Interesting. You know, I was just watching the Charlie Rose interview with Bill Clinton, and I thought Bill Clinton seemed really angry about something. I had the impression that something was nagging at him that he couldn't talk about. I also noticed that he used the words "she" and "her" to great excess and rarely voiced his wife's name.

Here's Bai:

On those rare ocasions when the former president hasn’t been able to resist defending his wife or burnishing his own record, the results haven’t been especially helpful. Unlike Hillary Clinton and her team of advisers, who are relentlessly on message and disciplined, Bill Clinton is a more instinctual politician, given to improvisational moments that must torment his wife’s obsessive-compulsive aides. In November, Clinton suddenly asserted during a campaign appearance in Iowa that he opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning — an aside that he needn’t have offered and that clearly contradicted not only his wife’s Congressional vote but his own statements in the build-up to the war.

If you were writing a novel about the 2008 presidential campaign, wouldn't you want Bill Clinton as your main character? What a complex situation he is in. He stands to gain power, but his time is also over. He can help his wife, but he can also hurt her. He is supposed to fight for her, but he's continually tempted to justify himself. He has the more creative mind, but he cannot outshine her.

ADDED: You know, things like this — "Elder Bush nixes Clinton trip idea" — make me think Bill secretly wants Hillary to lose:

Former President George H.W. Bush has shot down his successor Bill Clinton’s idea of a diplomatic mission under a Hillary Clinton presidency that would send him and other notables abroad to assure other nations that “America is open for business and cooperation again.”

The move came one day after Bill Clinton made the suggestion on the campaign trail in South Carolina, in response to a question from a supporter about his wife’s “number-one priority” upon reaching the White House.

Why did Bill say that? It enlisted Bush 41 in what sounded like a plain insult to Bush 43.

MORE: Bill's way of talking about Hillary reminds me a bit of the way George Bush talked about Harriet Miers just before she withdrew:

Harriet Miers is -- is an extraordinary woman. She was a legal pioneer in Texas. She was ranked one of the top 50 women lawyers in the United States on a consistent basis....

Harriet Miers is a fine person....