Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

It's not just race, gender, identity politics, and mutual verbal annihilation between the campaigns that are making a hash of the Democratic Party's chances in November. This week, with the war in Iraq entering its sixth year, Clinton and Obama both repeated their promises to end it, if not exactly on January 20, 2009 then as soon as possible thereafter. They're outdoing each other in the effort to tell Democratic voters what they want to hear and simultaneously accuse the other candidate of being less than absolutely zealous in wanting to obliterate the past five tragic years from the public's memory.

-- GEORGE PACKER

It is a tribute to Hillary Clinton that even though, rationally, political soothsayers think she can no longer win, irrationally, they wonder how she will pull it off.

It’s impossible to imagine The Terminator, as a former aide calls her, giving up. Unless every circuit is out, she'll regenerate enough to claw her way out of the grave, crawl through the Rezko Memorial Lawn and up Obama's wall, hurl her torso into the house and brutally haunt his dreams.

"It’s like one of those movies where you think you know the end, but then you watch with your fingers over your eyes," said one leading Democrat.

-- MAUREEN DOWD

The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.

-- MICHAEL TOMASKY

Or does anyone else think the Barrack Obama campaign (directly and indirectly) has done more to poison political discourse in this country than anything since the Clinton impeachment or, just maybe, the Watergate scandal? We've got charges of racism against a former President and a former candidate for Vice-President; charges of anti-Semitism, religious bigotry, lying, cheating, sexism, class warfare, liberal guilt, dandyism, and good old fashioned stupidity; claims of opportunism, resume padding, plagiarism, character assassination, incompetence, favoritism, cronyism, fraud, and demagoguery. Hell, there is even the claim that a candidate trashed an elderly relative for political gain.

And that's just among the Democrats.

This "new" tone stinks.

-- THE ICONIC MIDWESTERNER

[W]hat a huge relief it is to learn that Florida will not be conducting a do-over primary. It's akin to getting the news that the lunatic distant cousin in your family will not be coming for Thanksgiving after all. Now we can eat in peace.

-- DICK POLMAN

As Barack Obama stands at the crossroads of race in America and offers himself as an agent of healing, he is a symbol of both the fears and hopes aroused by an ugly word, miscegenation.

When he was born in 1961, his parents' marriage was illegal in 17 states of the Union. It was six years later that the Supreme Court struck down a Virginia statute against racially mixed marriages as unconstitutional and ended anti-miscegenation laws in America.

Such unions have always been denounced by both black and white extremists. Louis Farrakhan, who received last year's Jeremiah Wright A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award as a man "who truly epitomized greatness" from Obama's church, has always opposed intermarriage and called it "unnatural." In doing so, he was echoing the classic sneer of white bigots, "Would you want your sister to marry one?"

-- ROBERT STEIN

Mr. Richardson’s endorsement [of Obama] came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic.

-- JAMES CARVILLE

I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn't it? I live in an eastern state almost exactly on the fabled Mason-Dixon line. Every day I see young black males wearing tee shirts down to their knees -- and jeans belted just above their knees. I'm an old guy. I want to smack them. All of them. They are egregious stereotypes. It's impossible not to think the unthinkable N-Word when they roll up beside you at a stoplight in their trashed old Hondas with 19-inch spinner wheels and rap recordings that shake the foundations of the buildings. . . .

-- INSTAPUNK

Cartoon by Walt Handelsman/Newsday