23 February 2008

Boredom


OK, I'll admit it. I am bored. I have no idea how I am going to fill up the endless hours until November. Oh, the Chinese irritation about the successful satellite shoot-down is entertaining, but that is really a matter for the next President to deal with.

The cause of my malaise is the fact that the election is over. What with my chronic ADD, it is going to be a heck of a summer. Senator Clinton is done, and I think she knows it. She cannot attack her confident young opponent without playing to all the glaring weaknesses in her past, she cannot use her husband to any great effect.

The desperation is reflected in the number of calls from the campaign organization to Bill Richardson, who is horseback riding and attending gallery openings in New Mexico. He is relaxed. He has grown a beard.

Senator Obama has no sense of urgency. He checks in once a week or so. He knows Bill is going to do the right thing and support him, It is only a question of time.

The desperation from the Clinton campaign is palpable. The former President was down in New Mexico himself on a last-ditch rescue mission, to see if Bill could pump up the Hispanic voters in Texas and forestall the inevitable folding of the Clinton tent.

The encounter must have been kind of uncomfortable, but I can see the Bills looking at one another, wily veterans both. The former President leaning on the favors he had done for the former Congressman: Ambassador to the UN, Energy Secretary, all that stuff.

In my mind's eye I can see the Governor looked right back at him, his eyes merry and dark. “Sorry, Mr. President, the tide has turned. No can do.”

I was with the Gov when he was getting a ration of crap from a senior SLORC official in Rangoon a few years back, and I can tell you that the man can be decisive. He got up, told the startled little Admiral that the meeting was over, and gestured for his little entourage to follow him out of the old Colonial building.

The Governor is going to be decisive in this matter, too, in his seeming indecisiveness, and he will help the next President bring in the Brown Vote.

It is all over. It is President Obama,

I know we are going to have to go through the formalities, but all the Senator from Illinois has to do is play rope-a-dope. Senator Clinton can't touch him any more, and she has to get out of the way or hurt the party. She should also be thinking about how she wants to redecorate the State Department, if she chooses to be gracious. She does not know how to hold down a real job in the private sector, after all, and State is about as good a deal as she is going to get.

If she is nasty, she will be sent to the outer darkness, or languish in the Senate like the brilliant-but-flawed Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan, whose seat she was given.

Poor John McCain. He is a man of honor, in his way, and he has learned some painful lessons that make me admire him greatly. Senator Obama is going to tell us that, too, and that we should honor past times, even as we march forward to a glittering, if undefined, future.

He can say anything he wants about the future, since he has so little past to encumber him. We are not going to like his instinctive reaction to the issues, once he is in place. He is a doctrinaire liberal, if the scant record is to be trusted. But that is completely irrelevant.

Senator McCain is stuck with telling the truth. The world is a nasty place, brutish, and it takes toughness, commitment and no small amount of pain to do the right thing. He knows that from his heart, and from painful experience that is all on the public record. That is one of the reasons I like him.

That is not going to sell. Taken with the fact that the pygmies on the right have him in their sights for his lack of slavish obedience to cant and dogma, the Republican base will not knock themselves senseless to support him.

Like I said, I'm bored already.

I am curious about whether the Office of the Vice President is going to keep some of the grandeur that it had under Mr. Cheney. I think I am going to like working there, if I can get the Governor to return my calls.

Of course, things could change. For example, those loons in Hezbollah are going to respond to what the Israelis did last week, whacking Imad Mughniyeh with that car bomb.

The Israelis are not bored, and they are stuck in the neighborhood. They have been looking for Mughniyeh for more than a decades, and he was a piece of work. I would have been pleased if we had done the deed, since he is rumored to have been the mastermind of the Marin Barracks bombing in Beirut. That is only the most spectacular of his operations, and I am pleased that he is dead.

But that means that the Party of God is going to strike back. They have a global reach, and there are plenty of their adherents right here, from Dearborn Michigan to High Point North Carolina.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell mentioned the threat the other day, and he was echoed by Director Mueller at the FBI. It will probably be somewhere else that the loons respond.

They could not possibly be stupid enough to do it here, could they? Think what is at stake.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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