Monday, February 04, 2008
ENDORSEMENTORAMA
Barack Obama wins election-nailing endorsements from Maria Shriver, Forest Whitaker, Stevie Wonder, MoveOn.org, twenty-nine North Dakota legislators, and - most crucially of all - Garrison Keillor:
"Seven years of a failed presidency is a depressing thing, and the country is pressing for a change and looking for someone with clear vision who is determined to break through the rhetorical logjam and find sensible ways to move our country forward. That’s you, friend,” he wrote in a letter.
That’s the way to bust open a rhetorical logjam, Garrison - with a sturdy cliché chisel! Hey, aren’t Democrats meant to be uniting the nation following all these years of Bushitler divisiveness? Let’s see how that’s working out:
With Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Obama locked in a tight race before Tuesday’s voting, the campaign has turned into a gigantic family feud, with prominent and everyday Democrats splitting with spouses, siblings, parents and children.
Why, it’s an all-in wimp war! A gender-based racial/generational Obamic/Hillarian Democrisis! A mate-against-mate blue state hategate! Maybe Maureen Dowd can find some root causes here:
A more accurate snapshot of the frosty Clinton-Obama relationship came on a frosty December day ...
A day so frosty MoDo’s thesaurus was frosted shut.
... in a scorching encounter that is now known simply as “the tarmac moment.” On Dec. 13, the two senators were preparing to board their private planes parked next to each other at Reagan National Airport, to go back to Iowa for a debate.
Where, no doubt, the two jet-share refuseniks preached about global warming. Obama aims to “make the United States a leader in the global effort to combat climate change by leading a new international global warming partnership”; big words from someone who won’t even split a ride with Senator Steroid Ankles. Back to MoDo:
Hillary sent word to Obama that she wanted to talk to him. Obama’s aides figured that she wanted to make a pro forma apology for the comments of Billy Shaheen, the Clinton co-chairman in New Hampshire, who had told The Washington Post that Republicans would pounce on Obama’s confessions of cocaine and marijuana use in his late teens. Shaheen would step down the next day, but Camp Obama did not think the slam was a mere slip of the tongue.
In front of her plane, Hillary apologized to her rival about Shaheen. Obama replied that he was concerned at the pattern of insinuations and attacks from her supporters and that a message needed to be sent from the top that sharp attacks were not, as Hillary had put it, “the fun part.” He brought up another recent example: the Clinton volunteer in Iowa who had been asked to leave after forwarding sleazy e-mail falsely claiming that Obama was a Muslim.
Then, according to witnesses from the Obama camp, Hillary got very agitated and was “flapping her arms.”
Well, she was on a runway. Who needs a stupid jet?