Bent Corner

If you were watching the mainstream news media tonight, you would have thought Hillary Clinton placed the bloody head of a dead race horse in Barack Obama’s bed. Continue Reading »

Pretend you are a candidate for the Democratic nomination and you just lost the Kentucky primary by 35 points. What do you do? If you are Barack Obama, you fly to Iowa and announce that you have just achieved a pretend milestone. You announce that you have won an absolute majority of pledged delegates.

Think of it as Barack Obama’s very own MISSION ACCOMPLISHED moment. The only thing lacking was a flight suit and an aircraft carrier.

From Larry Johnson’s superb blog NO QUARTER:

How does winning a majority of pledged delegates qualify as a “major milestone”? It doesn’t, because winning the majority of pledged delegates does not make Obama the nominee. Period.

Under the Democratic Party’s un-democratic rules, super-delegates can vote for whomever they want (and they can switch), regardless of the pledged-delegate totals or popular-vote count.

Facts aside, some media have given air time to Obama’s surrogates to create potentially misleading headlines and sound bites about the pretend “milestone.”

I often wonder if Obama supporters even know that superdelegates don’t actually cast their superdelegate vote until the Democratic National Convention in August. From reading many of their posts on Daily Kos or Democratic Underground, I’m guessing not. Otherwise I’m not sure they would be so visceral and arrogant about their favorite candidate.

The superdelegates will have a choice to make in August. Will they simply go with the candidate that has a slight lead in the pledged delegates or will they go with the candidate that has a slight lead in the popular vote?

Obama might regain his lead in the popular vote in the remaining contests, but he seems to have all but decided to start campaigning for the general election against John McCain. He seems confident that he will be given the nomination no matter what happens in the remaining contests.

Larry Johnson of No Quarter links to an article in the Washington Post that details conditions troops being treated at Walter Reed Army Center as out-patients. It’s pretty disgusting.

Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.

Call me a liberal, but I don’t think our troops injured in Iraq should ever have to live someplace where phrases such as “mouse droppings” or “black mold” are used to describe the living conditions.

At a bare minimum, American service members injured in Iraq receiving out-patient medical treatment should be treated no worse then the Bush twins. If Jenna and Barbara were receiving medical treatment on an out-patient basis. Not that they would ever be caught serving their country. They might be caught using fake ID’s so they can illegally drink, but you won’t ever see these two doing anything even remotely associated with patriotism. Even the fake kind that is popular with so many Republicans.

This is one of the results of waging war on the cheap.