Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Here's where things get dicey for Hillary 2012. If she were seen by a significant portion of Democrats as not having done all she could for Obama in 2008, she'd face massive hostility in 2010 when she started making noises about running again. So she has to be active in helping him, which of course creates a sort of double paradox: she has to work hard for the very outcome that works against her own future interests, knowing that said work is the only thing that will in fact help her future interests! Got it?

. . . But then, there is one more factor, and it is crucial. Even if all the above happens, Clinton will still be in the Senate. And she needs to be a better, more aggressive, more courageous senator than she has been. . . . She could not come back to Democrats in another four years as a warmed-over version of the person who cast that cowardly Iraq vote, still drinking every potion Mark Penn places before her, and expect to be taken seriously.

-- MICHAEL TOMASKY

Milestones are news--the fifth anniversary, the 4000th death--and news shield us, as any drug does, from the pain of reality. We swallow some words and images about Iraq and turn to newer news--about Hillary and Barack, the economy, March Madness, storms and flooding, the HBO miniseries on John Adams.

"People don't actually read newspapers," Marshall McLuhan said half a century ago. "They get into them every morning like a warm bath."

This week we wash away our consciousness of the continuing dying and killing in the Mideast with soothing words from Bush and Cheney in Washington, John McCain in Baghdad and the muffled sounds of impotent anti-war Democrats.

-- ROBERT STEIN

After a week punctuated by Obama's right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton's document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car.

. . . With more than five months to the Denver Convention, the problem for the Democrats remains the crazy-quilt schedule that caused far too many to vote too soon. That is the real buyer's remorse — a front-loaded political calendar that has turned most partisan Democrats into now-irrelevant bystanders just when a real decision is needed.

-- WALTER SHAPIRO

Alex Tabarrok puts forward an explanation for why people who were against the Iraq war (and who predicted a housing crisis) haven’t gotten more of a public hearing.

The answer is media incentives. It wasn’t just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now? The public wants to hear why they weren’t idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren’t idiots than experts who also got it wrong?

-- HENRY

It has been stated with granite implacability that the bailout of the banking and finance industry - already radically taking place, hundreds of billions of public money simply tossed up to the winds without the bat of an eyeball - must of course happen, there simply couldn't be an America without crooks and swindlers laughing as they stole other people’s money. Just as the earth is round, George Bush is a felon, the sky is blue, the San Francisco Giants are not going to the playoffs, so we must bail out the bankers and financiers. . . . I went to the Hillary Hub and the Obama Town Hall this morning and there is nothing, nada, crickets, the sounds of silence, ay curumba zero on the collapse and bailout of Bear Stearns and the $200 billion unsecured revolving fund the Fed set up for the banking industry. Seriously, how is this possible?

-- PARADOX

Of the 28,000 commercial airline flights that take to the skies on an average day in the United States, fewer than 1 percent are protected by on-board, armed federal air marshals, a nationwide CNN investigation has found.

That means that a terrorist or other criminal bent on taking over an aircraft would be confronted by a trained air marshal on as few as 280 daily flights . . .

The investigation found those low numbers even as the Transportation Security Administration in recent months has conducted tests in which it has been able to smuggle guns and bomb-making materials past airport security screeners.

-- CNN

If you were looking for a front man to chair a secretive, anti-Democrat PAC that bears a suspicious resemblance to scandalous pocket-lining schemes formerly run by Linda Chavez and Christopher Gersten, would you pick someone named Gary Kreep? Just asking.

-- CHRISTOPHER ORR

Biblically correct, now that's a mouthful. A book written by many men (Ruth and Esther were tokens used to prove a point but Mary, the mother of Jesus and a major part of a world religion, gets scant mention much less her own book, why is that?) to reflect their point of view and the parts that didn't fit in, were discarded. Now some of the "believers" are conducting museum tours and explaining to the young and impressionable that thousands of years of history never happened. Oh sweet Jeebus, how much dumber is our population going to get? Tyrannosaurus Rex was a vegetarian because Adam and Eve hadn't sinned yet, so there was no death? What planet do these people come from? They most certainly didn't evolve from intelligent humans. That Bible belt is cinched a little too tight and preventing oxygen from circulating through their very little brains. No wonder there are very few "American" doctors in practice, you have to have a science education in order to understand how the body works. Praying doesn't help cure disease.

-- DEB

Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate