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Saturday, June 7, 2008
Well, this ought to be interesting…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hillary Clinton is about to make her long-delayed concession speech, which will supposedly include an enthusiastic endorsement of Barack Obama. We shall see….
UPDATE I: There’s the endorsement of Obama, accompanied by some rather healthy boos from the crowd and a grim expression from Clinton. She’s saying the words, but I think it’s safe to say her heart isn’t it.
UPDATE II: She’s absolutely right about the historic impact of her campaign. She has dispelled any notion that women aren’t strong and tenacious enough to serve as president and commander in chief. Whoever our first female president might be — and it might still be Hillary — this primary season helped pave the way for that person.
UPDATE III: “A workmanlike job,” I guess you’d say. She did what she had to do, what she never wanted to do but in the end had no choice. It has to be difficult to admit that it has ended, that everything you put into the race and everything that others did on your behalf were simply not enough.
On to November — may the best man win.
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Sorry guys, no video
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For a couple of weeks now, the right-wing blogosphere has been giddily anticipating release of a secret videotape said to feature Michelle Obama that would blow the Democrat’s campaign out of the water. It allegedly features Mrs. Obama ranting and raving in anger at “whitey,” and the story was that top Republicans were holding the tape back until after Obama had secured the nomination, when it would do the most damage.
It all sounded like nonsense, but it fed into the deep, heart-felt desire of some on the right to turn Michelle Obama into evil incarnate, an object of hate, just as they did with Hillary Clinton and to a lesser degree to Teresa Heinz, wife of John Kerry. It also reflected their desperate hope that something, anything, might save them from the disaster that seems to loom come November.
One poster on the freerepublic.com site got so carried away he even rewrote the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Michelle,” coming up with this gem:
“Michelle bombshell She says words that won’t go over well That Michelle
Michelle, bombshell Once again the wife, she drops the bomb She drops the bomb,”
It gets worse from there.
Again, the story never made sense, and now Jim Geraghty of the National Review tries to kill the rumor by noting that in its narrative, the rumor rather closely matches the plot of a 2006 political thriller by Stephen Frey.
“Now. Either author Stephen Frey is clairvoyant, writing this book in 2006. Or this is one of the all time amazing coincidences. Or whoever started this rumor got the idea from a novel,” Geraghty writes, concluding that “those who prefer a president besides Obama should not go through the summer and fall convinced that a magic-bullet devastating tape is going to appear as an October surprise to save the day.”
