It’s Official

Irony is dead:

Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process.

R.I.P.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Eat the Rich

One congressional reaction that emerged — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) response to the rescue package — wasn’t favorable to many of K Street’s banking clients, who oppose one provision in particular: giving bankruptcy judges the power to lower mortgages for distressed homeowners.

“We are vigorously opposing that,” said Steve Verdier, a lobbyist for the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA). “If that happens, then the mortgage rates for other consumers are going to go up.”

[H/T: dday]

Well, what can I say except fuck you, Mr. Verdier and the limo you rode in on.

OK, perhaps our next president puts it more…politically:

“First, the plan must include protections to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to further reward the bad behavior of irresponsible CEOs on Wall Street. There has been talk that some CEOs may refuse to cooperate with this plan if they have to forgo multi-million-dollar salaries. I cannot imagine a position more selfish and greedy at a time of national crisis. And I would like to speak directly to those CEOs right now: Do not make that mistake. You are stewards for workers and communities all across our country who have put their trust in you. With the enormous rewards you have reaped come responsibilities, and we expect and demand that you to live up to them. This plan cannot be a welfare program for Wall Street executives.”
—Barack Obama

And don’t even try blackmail us you rich asshole (and that goes for you too Paulson), we’re in no mood and no longer care what you idiots think. Not one thin dime should be spent on this problem until every single ARM in this country is turned into a reasonable fixed-rate mortgage for every homeowner who can afford it. If that doesn’t fix the problem then you can get in line behind them. And while you’re bent over the hood of your Towncar, you can explain to me a bigger “moral hazard” that giving you corrupt traitors hundreds of billions more taxpayer-backed dollar so you can keep ripping us off and sending a mortgage for the country’s future to the Chinese.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

In Other News...

What's scarier than Alaska's neophyte Governor being anywhere near the Oval Office?

Duh! Alaska's killer bears on the loose. (Due respect to S. Colbert.)

Meanwhile, we lost one more soldier today and two yesterday in that fucking war, bringing the U.S. total casualty count up to five this week. That gets added to the 266 killed and 176 wounded Iraqis reported (plus another 9 victims of that favorite Baghdad pastime, kidnapping, in what McCain calls "A peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state that poses no threat to its neighbors and contributes to the defeat of terrorists."

Preoccupied with the horrors of yet another Global Warming denying Veep with a gun fetish, Blogtopia (ysctp!) largely ignored (at its peril) the dangers faced when we turn on the End Of The World Machine -- which might prove once and for all that the Universe was indeed designed by a Mad Magazine cartoonist during an acid trip induced fit of boredom. That would certainly explain how we could start a war based on the lies of Iranian spy/bank embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, who's deputy is now in jail accused of terrorist bombings.

Then again, we probably should rejoice, since this week spells the end of the Reagan Era coalition as well as the death of Trickle Down economics.

Who said you never should bring out a new product in August. We are at the beginning of a whole new world folks. Let's do it right this time.

So Simple

The very same people, infused with an all-consuming lust for power and money used every conceivable lie they could imagine a trusting yet detached public would buy to green-light their invasion of Iraq are now engaged in a frenzy of dishonesty aimed at electing John McCain -- to continue their rape of the nation's treasure and cover their tracks of course.

After You Win The War About The War

As we enjoy the first Hot August Night of this election year, the aroma of this last week's festival of defecation that masquerades as political theater still lingers.

The smell of his own fecal material hitting the fan may (or may not) trouble PrezNitWit Shrub and his henchmen (and women), but it smells sweet to me, like pony poo.

We came to appreciate that John McRove has opted for the tactic of throwing anything against the wall to see if it sticks -- no matter how absurd -- so the mendacious media as well as the vast wasteland of Teh Stoopid out there will be too distracted to remind everyone that Obama won the war about the war, that John Kerry was right (so was Jimmy Carter), and what a shallow opportunist McCain has always been. Unless of course the fan flings the crap back into McCain's lap.

Meanwhile the Congressional Republicans have simply lost their hold on reality. Unfortunately, understanding that much like treating a terminal patient with dementia and delusions of grandeur, Dr. Obama elected to humor them, giving in to their screams for another fix of the black crude they're addicted to, knowing that the real cure will take a bit over five months to take effect.

This weekend is as good a time as any to sit back and reflect on the idiocy, no doubt we'll be seeing a lot more of these dog-n-pony shows as November approaches.

Defining Third Parties

If "Libertarians are Republicans who want to smoke pot," are the Greens all dope smokers who can't afford SUV's?

Two Faces and No Brains

I wonder if the Village Gasbags will be able to figure out who is demeaning whose service?

“I can't speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar."
-- Orson Swindle, John McCain Campaign

Just in case there’s still some question what actually demeaning a war veteran’s service looks like:

Louis Letson: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury."

Van O'Dell: "John Kerry lied to get his bronze star...I know, I was there, I saw what happened."

Jack Chenoweth: "His account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day."

Admiral Roy Hoffman: "John Kerry has not been honest."

Adrian Lonsdale: "And he lacks the capacity to lead."

Larry Thurlow: "When he chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."

Bob Elder: "John Kerry is no war hero."

Grant Hibbard: "He betrayed all his shipmates...he lied before the Senate."

Joe Ponder: "He dishonored his country...he most certainly did."

Bob Hildreth: "I served with John Kerry...John Kerry cannot be trusted."

The plain fact is, the Gasbags have no moral or rational authority to judge the matter, they relinquished their credibility and responsibility to do so four years ago.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Playing by the Rules

I’ve always thought that one of the main reasons the Village Press hated the Clintons and Al Gore was because it was so obvious that Bill, Hillary and Al were much smarter people than them all. With egos at least as ginormous as any politician, that cleverness gap had to stick in their craws in a way that it never would, for obvious reasons, concerning any Republican. But, smart as they may have been, the Clintons and Vice President Gore never understood the new rules that were being invented just for them. They were playing a fool’s game – and the Clintons still managed to beat the Village at it – because they were playing as though there were still liberals in the corporate press and that reason and truth would prevail.

Which brings us to today’s campaign. Am I the only one who thinks that the Obama campaign is winning big here and that the media is being played badly? The conversation has begun – “it’s out there” as they say – does McCain’s record as a (not-very-good) fighter jock and POW more than thirty years ago in some way qualify him to be Commander-in-Chief? At the same time, Obama “rejects the statement” and “honors and respects Senator McCain’s service.” How is Obama hurt by this? How is McCain?

And now we can let the bloviators compare this honest question to what was done to John Kerry. Remember how Kerry’s record was fair game because he brought it up and Bush and Rove pretended like they had nothing to do with the SBVT? Democrats didn’t make them up but Obama seems to have learned the new rules. As Ara likes to say, if I were having any more fun, I’d have to be twins.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Poor, Stupid Joe

“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”
-- Gen. Wesley Clark

"Clark is just plain wrong when he says that "getting shot down" doesn't qualify as foreign policy experience."
-- Joe Klein

I’m not sure what to comment on here, that Joe Klein thinks that getting shot out of the sky and imprisoned in another country counts as “foreign policy experience,” or that he thinks that “experience” is the same thing as the qualification to be president.

Same result, I guess.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Ain’t Nothin’ But a…

Last week on NBC or MSNBC (or possibly even CNN – they’re practically indistinguishable at this point) someone marked the moment where – one week prior, “we learned of the death of Tim Russert”.

It struck me odd. Who receives that sort of recognition in our culture? In the past, I could remember only people of immense importance and accomplishment and often only if they had died in some tragic circumstances such as a plane crash or assassination. An FDR, a JFK, a Buddy Holly or an Elvis (though we don’t know for sure he’s actually dead).

Apparently, Gene Lyons had a similar reaction [H/T Bob Somerby]:

Few events so reveal society’s unacknowledged values as a royal funeral. So it was following the untimely death of NBC newsman and “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert. We have no formal aristocracy in the United States, but Washington has a selfappointed media peerage. Russert was a political celebrity / courtier of exalted rank. [snip] On “Hardball,” they held an Irish wake for several days. All that was missing was a bottle of Jameson’s, and that may have been under the table.

Of course, Russert was of very modest importance or accomplishment:

To his grieving colleagues and many viewers, Russert embodied the best of TV journalism. Others think very differently about his legacy.

Lyons explains why Russert’s colleagues liked him, because of his apparently genuine warmness. My son met Russert by chance one day and confirmed that widely shared impression of him. But being a nice guy is a dubious asset when your job is to reveal the truth about the politics and the powerful that surround you.

Back to Russert and Washington journalism: In the sport of beagling, two bad faults can get a hound disqualified. One is “cold-trailing.” I had a beagle named Leon who’d hoot down scent trails so old the rabbits that left them were probably being digested by coyotes. Leon made so much noise about nothing that my pals dubbed him “The Journalist.” Then there’s “ghost-trailing.” Unable to keep up, a hound will sometimes invent a fictitious rabbit and make a great show of running it. Other dogs learn to ignore him. Washington courtier-journalists have done plenty of both recently. Russert was among the worst. Like most, he obsessed over Bill Clinton’s sexual sins, but handled the Bush administration’s Iraq war propaganda like the Baltimore Catechism: Memorize, regurgitate. Linda Hirshman nails it in The Nation: “The political leaders who did the best answering Tim Russert’s questions in the last seven years—Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell—are the authors of the most disastrous American foreign policy since the Vietnam War, and maybe since 1776. The Russert Test was a disaster because it rewarded people willing to lie unabashedly on TV.”

Russert’s colleagues are of course free to mourn the death of their friend - I’d bet Russert is about as good as it gets in their world – let’s just not get carried away about his “journalism”. Tim Russert was no Elvis.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

You Shall Know Them by Their Fruitcake

It takes a wingnut to take someone else’s words, say they mean something completely different from what they are saying and then castigate the person for that twisted, unstated meaning. John McCain, having nothing to offer in public policy (he's a Republican) – other than perpetual war in the Middle East (and who knows where else) and short term, ineffective gimmicks – has been running his campaign on just those sort of distortions about what Barack Obama “is saying” when he is saying nothing of the kind.

But it takes a special kind of evangelical whackjob of a wingnut to attack someone by saying essentially the same thing they are.

Evangelical whackjob James Dobson says that, “[Barack] Obama should not be referencing antiquated dietary codes and passages from the Old Testament that are no longer relevant to the teachings of the New Testament,” in response to Obama saying exactly that:

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" Obama asked in the speech. "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?"

Dobson’s Focus on the Family spokesman, Tom Minnery, gets it exactly backward when he claims, "Many people have called [Sharpton] a black racist, and [Obama] is somehow equating [Dobson] with that and racial bigotry." Actually, Obama had contrasted not equated Sharpton and Dobson:

"Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's or Al Sharpton's?"

Dobson himself claimed that it is "lowest common denominator of morality," and that it is a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution," for Obama to say:

"Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason."

Dobson can claim that reason, argument and universal values are immoral and pretend that the Establishment Clause of the Constitution doesn’t exist but that makes it pretty hard to argue that the other guy is the one who is nuts.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

What Thers Said...

Perfect.

I don't think the "New Politics" is "being civil at all costs." It means "discrediting the parasites and swine who have been poisoning our discourse."

My one overwhelming hesitation to truly get behind Barack Obama, especially early on in the primaries had absolutely nothing to do with his ideology, whether he was really progressive enough, did his proposals go far enough. No.

I was worried that he wasn't the warrior I thought we needed, the warrior that I knew John Edwards to be and that Hillary could be if and when she thought it was politically expedient and wasn't hamstrung by her dedicated enemies, her husband and her team.

Now I feel better about our choice.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

Why Yes, Yes I Will

HuffPosts Seth Colter Walls interviews some of the organizers of the Hillary Clinton supporters planning to demonstrate outside the hotel where the DNC Rules and Bylaws committee is set to meet and address what the hell to do about Michigan and Florida.

"You're not going to write that we're a bunch of hysterical women trying to create havoc, are you?"

CRY HAVOC! And Unleash The Hounds Of Protesters Pressuring Obscure Parliamentary Procedure Committee Meetings!!!

Did We Already Win?

First of, I'm not trying to be cocky. So if this sounds cocky, well ... that's just me.

All would agree that there's been a steady trickle of sentiment towards a more liberal mood in America for some years now. You could almost track it with the inexorable downward slide in our approval of the Bush regime.

There have been signposts along the way, the rejection of Harriet Miers and John Bolton's nominations, collective disgust at the political exploitation of Terri Schaivo, the 2006 election was a sobering moment for everyone.

But the clearest indication I was on to something was the nomination of John McCain. His promotion to standard bearer of the Republican Party, to me, indicated a clear rejection of the neoconservative agenda by the folks who gave it breath: the Republican Party's rank and file.

Interestingly enough folks far more clever than I, and not especially noted as flaming batshit crazy liberals susceptible to wishful thinking that probably taints my take on the situation are coming to the same conclusion -- but from a completely different perspective.

See I tend to agree with George Packer's The Fall of Conservativism at The New Yorker (via: Cho at ePluribus Media) opinion that:

"The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the
2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by
significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the
movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan
gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized,
and Bush allowed to break into pieces."

You've seen the disgust throughout Right Wing Blogistan with McCain, running the full sequence from outright rebellion, defection to plugging their noses. I believe an appropriate concluding clause to the above quote would read ... "Bush allowed to break into pieces ... and McCain buried."

They broke their own back, much the way the Soviets fell apart largely due to ignoring the economics of their predicament while ignoring the internal inconsistencies of a faulty and poorly executed ideology. Ironic that a movement whose nadir saw the death throws of communist imperialism believed it's own hype that they defeated the "Evil Empire" as opposed to simply watching it die has succumbed to a similar fate -- hubris leading self-immolation.

No doubt there will be Democrats who will spin this as "their" (ok, our) victory, but one only need glance at the record of Congressional Democrats since losing Congress in 1996, and Bill and Hillary Clinton's rejection of the progressive agenda since then to expose the lie that any Democrat brought about the end of the extreme right wing any more than Reagn somehow "Destroyed" the Iron Curtain. They just happened to be the folks in opposition when the nutbags lost it.

Bob Burnnet's HuffPost piece takes a different view on what McCain represents, however. To him, John McCain is the epitome of conservative orthodoxy, and he makes a very persuasive case. McCain indeed advocates the traditional pillars of conservativism: "gargantuan military ... small (innefectual) government ... tax reduction ... incompetent (corporate run) management." All of it combining into the unwieldy and corrupt industrial/military complex warned against by Ike.

So which is it? What does McCain represent? The death knell of ideologically driven right wing extremism, or more of McSame? I ask this more as an intellectual exercise since the prospect of a true empirical analysis of the question would require study of a McCain administration -- which I find to be not only a remote possibility but a horror to even contemplate.

Back when the GOP was parading their fractured coalition on nationally televised debates, they entertained us all as each out-of-touch representative of various splinter groups vied for the affections of the Republican voters: the robber barons represented by Romney, the evangelicals following Huckabee, the xenophobes cheering for Hunter and Tancredo, the media wing pushing Grandpa Fred, the libertarian insurrection led by Ron Paul, the Christianist favorite Brownback, the one-percent of the party's black supporters shaking their head each time Alan Keyes opened his mouth, and the neocons's darling of course was Giuliani -- but the military wing held on and allowed McCain to survive. Even then it was clear the days of the GOP presenting a unified front were long gone.

McCain himself may represent the blandest version of Republicanism, and therefore his orthodoxy is to be expected. However, the fact that one really must describe his status as their "presumptive nominee" because he survived, he's the "last man standing" says a lot. He didn't "win" so much as he didn't lose. By no means can he be described as the "Party Favorite." He isn't. He certainly didn't overwhelm his rivals through irresistible popular support. There's no "movement" behind him propelling him to the White House.

It's just his turn. It's his time and he's been set up to be a sacrificial lamb by people who haven't had an original idea since 1968, and are still fighting those same culture wars.

The Clintons too are veterans of the Baby Boomers' battle of attrition between the hard-hats and the hippies. Hillary's failure to hold back the tide of a movement that is sweeping Obama forward is not a signal that the hippies won, but that we are declaring the war is over and moving on.

The winning move here is not to play the same old game.

That means we must not simply replace Republicans with Democrats, enact liberal policies to fix the things conservatism has broken. We must (as an Obama Administration promises to do) completely transform the culsture of Washington D.C. The people are demanding, and the country desperately requires not only new people at the helm, better managers, more responsible financial stewardship, a smaller and more flexible military, a restoration of diplomatic respect, and an end to corrupt corporate cronyism; but also a change of attitude.

We need to hope again. We need to listen to our better angels, both here and abroad. We need to remember that America is the land that helps the rest of the world rise up and improve their lot in life, not exploit the rest of the planet's people and steal their resources.

We need to actually BE the people we are so proud of being.

If we do that, everybody wins.

Hillary's RFK Brain Fart

No doubt Senator Clinton is sorry for invoking the tragic memory of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination as a reason to stay in the race. No doubt she was not thinking like some Wise Guys making a not so subtle threat. That's not what happened.

Senator Clinton said she had been attempting to point out that previous campaigns had also continued into June.

Democrat Robert Kennedy was running for his party's presidential nomination when he was shot dead in June 1968.

A spokesman for rival Democrat hopeful, Barack Obama said Mrs Clinton's comment "has no place in this campaign".

She was not making Obama on offer he can't refuse. Not really.

"My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June... We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don't understand it."

Observers say the remarks could be damaging if people were to interpret them as an indication that Mrs Clinton believes the assassination of her rival would benefit her campaign.

Throughout this campaign, the memories of JFK, RFK and MLK have been invoked to describe the inspiration and agendas of Barack Obama and John Edwards, but not Hillary Clinton. Maybe she was feeling left out.

Unfortunately, Hillary did not talk about Robert Kennedy today as an icon of the progressive movement, a man whose leadership stands as a cornerstone of what it means to be a Democrat to a generation. She spoke of him as just another politician doing what it takes to win, and she didn't even get that right.

Here's a hint. Don't use seminal historical figures to justify your hacktakularness. Say that you want to be like them, not that your sorry-ass behavior wasn't anything worse than they did -- unless of course you're a Republican making your own icons look bad by association with you.

Just leave our heroes alone.

Mississippi: A Blue State?

3 out of 4 House seats are now in the Democratic Party's hands!

With 89% of the precincts reporting Democrat Travis Childers won Mississippi's 1st District 52% to 48% in this traditional GOP stronghold. This is the third Republican district to embrace the Democrats in as many months, Robo-calls by the President and Laura Bush or John McCain couldn't save it, a surprise appearance by Dick Cheney couldn't save it.

Not even race baiting comparisons to Barack Obama worked there, unlike what seems to have happened in West By God -- which evidently still prides itself on it's bigotry despite owing its very existence to a rejection of the break-away slave-owning Confederacy.

If I were an aid to a Republican politician, one thing I'd set aside time to do this summer is updating my resume. It's going to be bleak for these folks.

I Did Not Know That

From WaPo's Dana Milbank:

As a Republican candidate for the House in 1994, he rose to national
attention when reports alleged that he had licked whipped cream off the
breasts of two women at a charity event.

Run Bobby Run! Now that scene from Borat makes sense.

Barr returned to the public eye when, appearing in the film "Borat," he
made a pinched expression after being told that the cheese he had just
sampled came from a woman's breast milk.

Surely these next several months are going to be filled with gold from the ongoing Conservative Comedy Capers. Target rich environment indeed.

Dividing The (Other) Party

Because really, there's nothing much more to write about in Versailes on the Potomac I guess. We've see story after story interpreting the gulf between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in this demographic or that regional group. Is Hillary's persistence hurting the Democratic Party? Has Obama's rhetoric alienated parts of the consituency he needs for the Fall? Has Hillary been too divisive? Are the traditional "big" states Obama needs hopelessly out of his reach?

Folks, this is nothing, I mean nothing compared to the divide on the right. This division is not between candidates or factions, but between the GOP nominee and the people who, you know, vote for the GOP candidates, uh ... religiously.

There of course is the continual insurgency by the Ron Paul Blimpies, the third party campaign of former Clinton witch-hunter Bob Barr, and the polls that show the vast majority of Americans, including a majority of self-identified Republicans have had it, just f*cking had it with the way things are going. I was of course going to link all these separate developments but John Cole's "Double Heh" with a twisting "Indeed" dismount beat me to it.

A five gallon drum of popcorn won't be enough to satisfy the schadenfreudeliciousness of documenting the GOP's dismal prospects for the White House or Congress -- where the Democratic House majority should expand dramatically and we even have a shot at the elusive filibuster-proof 60 seat Senate(or 59 plus LIEberman).

But the funniest thing I saw out there in Wingnuttistan today after noting Michelle Malkin and the gang pissing themselves over the prospect of Huckabee as McCain's VP (a.k.a. Sgt. Carter/Gomer Pyle 2008), was that the GOP's bid to re-brand themselves has run smack up against Karma -- their new slogan "Change You Deserve" is the registered slogan for the anti-depressant Effexor, a drug used to combat the very strategems utilized by the Republican Party ever since Khrushchev was the boogieman in charge of the Red Menace that Goldwater and the Nixonites used to scare their bed-wetting followers.

See, the Republicans try to create and exploit while Effexor is the cure for "depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder." However, the side effects of both, "nausea, apathy, constipation, fatigue, vertigo, sexual dysfunction, sweating, memory loss," may be enough to decide the cure dubbed the "Change You Deserve" is worse than the Republican inspired disease.

Even more delicious is the slogan was deemed inappropriate for it's "unsubstantiated superiority claims" by the FDA. Heh, indeedy doody!

Bottom Line On Spending Bills

The War Funding Bill

"However, President Bush has announced his opposition to any bill that contains veterans' benefits and unemployment insurance in addition to the war funds."

The Farm Bill

"House and Senate negotiators yesterday reached final agreement on a new farm bill that will spend close to $300 billion on nutrition, conservation, energy and farm subsidy programs over the next five years, but administration officials immediately announced that President Bush will veto it."

What perplexes me is not that the C+ Augustus in the White House hates anything rational or that helps anyone on a personal level -- like tuition in exchange for years spent in a combat zone or increasing nutritional programs for poor kids, or funding alternative fuel programs so someday we won't have to send our emaciated children to fight for oil.

No, what perplexes me is that our so-called representatives would go along with someone 71% of the nation can no longer stand and not laugh at his puny veto threats -- even those dastardly "Blue-Dogs" are still doing Bush's his bidding.

Ugh!

Fat Lady Dress Rehearsal Report

Clinton vows to stay in race "until there's a nominee."

Which apparently will be in about two weeks.

"Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

"And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it.

"It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race."

Democracy is a great thing, and generally that's that's what we participate in when selecting a nominee for a major political party. However, by now even those who didn't pay attention to your social studies teachers understand that the primaries are only an exercise in representative democracy in a pro forma way.

What with "Super Delegates," rules made and broken behind closed doors, campaign finance laws thwarted, "street money," and the inordinate influence of the corporate media, you can't miss the fact that there's a lot more afoot than simply one-person, one-vote.

And that's okay. It's all good because it all moves towards something more important that which candidate "wins." It builds a consensus.

As in most things in America, it starts and ends with money. It takes millions to even get a foothold in the early primary states, and the first major contest that the media reports on is months before any straw polls are taken. The end of the first quarter financial reporting deadline is examined with a fine tooth comb -- even to the point of documenting just how much a candidate spends on combing his or her hair -- much to John Edwards chagrin.

Until we found out about $400 hair cuts, we also assumed that Hillary Clinton had an enormous if not insurmountable advantage in cash, especially since she was able to transfer millions from her Senate campaign to her presidential run. But when the numbers came out the narrative changed when Obama proved what a formidable fund-raiser he was.

The chattering class chattered, the donors took note, the Clinton machine was vulnerable! At this point many of the super delegates who weren't with Hillary from the start froze and we all watched the back and forth as momentum built for Obama. He won Iowa, Hillary a distant third, and the chattering class chattered about momentum and polls that would crown a new inevitability in New Hampshire.

And they were wrong, and they were burned, and the supers remained frozen, and the battle was on because the people hadn't made up their minds. Burned once, the media discounted Obama's huge South Carolina win. Looking for trends, examining demographics in exit polls for an explanation, not trusting conventional or unconventional wisdom and astonished at how evenly matched the talking heads sounded to each other when they talked to themselves, they froze.

The supers hid, the money flowed, and after Tsunami Tuesday, with only a slight lead in states won and delegates awarded, nobody was ready to come close to declaring an advantage even though half the nation had spoken. By then both Obama and McCain had only won two more states than their second-place rivals. But where Obama only edged Clinton out by 12 delegates that day, McCain claimed 401 more delegates in a Party that only has about half as many at stake as the Democrats select via popular vote. (Oh yeah, they have super delegates too.)

Then as now, with Obama's win-streak prior to their tie in Texas and Hillary's win in Ohio -- a win big enough to freeze the narrative once again about anything being "clear" although even then Obama's lead was formidable enough that we knew she needed a miracle -- there was no consensus among Democrats who we would (or should) get behind.

"Winning" the primaries does not equate to a winning candidate in the fall. A united party is what it takes. If it were simply just about winning and not building a consensus, conventions would still be free-for-alls and not marketing devices. Stage one was the media declaring a victor, giving the supers cover upon coming out even if deciding against the indications of their own constituents.

Now, with more undeclared super delegates than pledged delegates at stake in the coming weeks, the dog and pony shows staged for the benefit of us riff-raff who's only power is our vote, is over. The democratic nomination now lies in the hands of those who always controlled things -- the media (who made up their minds as soon as their Grand Poobah Tim Russert declared Obama a winner), the politicians and the big money folks who are as influential as ever.

The party leaders' new roll, including all of the winning and losing candidates, is to form a narrative that will rally us around the winner and bring the losers back into the fold, to wean the media off the horse-race coverage to a more thematic story before they go back to covering this fall's horse race.

For the rest of us, much as you may hate the process that is so far removed from what they taught you about in grammar school, opting out is not an option.

[You can read more of Mark Adams' work at his blog, Dispassionate Liberal]