HOW RALPH NADER WON THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY IN PENNSYLVANIA (and John McCain came in a close second)

Hillary Clinton can not win the presidency. She has less of a chance than Al Gore (deadlocked convention turns to dead wood), Ted Kennedy (deadlocked convention turns to Gore who is immediately indicted in a puppet porn sting, convention turns again), Mike Huckabee (all the centrist Republicans decline the VP post, then McCain runs off to join World Wrestling Federation).

Hillary has only the slightest more likelihood of being elected president than I do, and I'm barred until the Republicans remove that "born in a different country" clause in their efforts to finally realize their fullest inner desires and run Arnold the Barbarian. Hillary has way less chance of being the next president than Oprah Winfrey or Pat Robertson or Bruce Springsteen's wife, and only the slightest more likelihood than Johnny Thunders, who has tragically been dead these past nearly 20 years.

Why? Well, it's pretty fucking obvious. She has the highest negative ratings of any candidate in modern history. The deeper and more poetic reality is that the people who like her don't generally like her very much. They like that she's a woman, or that she's very businesslike in her spectacular incompetence, or that she's not black. Love for Hillary is generally no deeper than the grey water in the front yard of a trailer park, and disgust deeper than the Rio Grande . Any claim to affection that she has is flimsy, and that includes her husband. (I would also like to think that comment to be beneath me, but I have this pathological love of the truth. Bill's obvious contempt for his wife has become quite nearly the first thing that I like about him).

McCain has done a much better job of bringing the conservative wing of his party into line behind him (I have no idea what the problem was, he's a classic conservative of an admirable stripe, to those of us who concede the existence of such a thing) than the media blabbermouths previously imagined in their blathering. Quite frankly, Republicans are always better about rallying around their candidate, and this warrior candidate has not upset that equation.

Still, if there's anyone who can help McCain recruit wavering conservatives, it's Hillary Clinton. Sure as George W. Bush is the all-time registration champion of al-Qaeda recruits.

This campaign has been marked by the spectacular ability of Barack Hussein Obama to register new voters: the lost and disenfranchised and screwed, the ones Tricky Dick Nixon famously referred to as "the doomed." You think the fucking doomed see any prayer in Lady Hillary?

Mr Obama has also done a spectacular job of re-engaging well-educated but previous abstinents into the political process. See, for example, every poll ever that shows that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote for Barack and the less likely you are to vote for the Hildebeast. It wasn't even a category before.

You think anyone with a decent grade school education and a functional brain in their head is going to believe that the Hildebeast is going to significantly change anything, for the better? The brightest and best educated Americans will once again flee the Democratic party like a Mensa convention in the path of an oncoming cattle dung spreading contest.

So a McCain vs. Hillary election is going to totally reverse the spectacular gains that the Democratic Party has seen in registration to date, and at the same time catalyze Republican registration. Wow, I wonder how that will turn out, given that McCain already beats Hillary head-to-head (but trails Obama).

If the election's close and Nader's at less than 4%, I'll very seriously consider voting for McCain. His record on campaign finance reform is admirable, and he's not full of shit as a professional stratagem.

Hillary only talks about electability because she's desperate and doesn't have a real issue. If Hillary is the Democratic nominee (God save us, but I believe that any decent oddsmaker would put it at even odds right now), the doomed will go back to Oprah, and the informed liberal intelligentsia will move en masse towards Nader though many will drop off along the way. Better things to do, you see. Course work, opera practice. Same as it always was.

The legacy of a Hillary candidacy might well be a historic one: Nader's third party with matching funds for 2012 and a chance to build an authentic challenge to what would have then reconfirmed itself as a two-headed one-party system. That could be a lot of fun, I remember enjoying but not participating in (though I was invited) the haggling over the Perot legacy in Oregon in the mid 90s. It's hope at best and fresh air at worst.

The legacy of a Hillary candidacy would more likely be a lasting one: millions of naturally Democratic voters not voting for a long, long time. And for damn good reason.

Florida and Michigan

Hillary did win the pointless primaries in Florida and Michigan; primaries that all of the candidates and party officials agreed wouldn't count (Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan , where you might expect him to do very well. Ever heard of Detroit ? It rocks, funks, rocks…it's a badass muthah, which ain't Hillary's natural constituency, incidentally. Her natural constituencies is are somnambulist party loyalist and elderly and illiterate ladies knitting circles).

We can expect Hillary and her associated political deviants to shrill on about these, and in increasing tones. They're not entirely wrong. This kind of nonsense should have never happened. It was the national Democratic party playing power politics against recalcitrant state parties. Recalcitrant state parties lost, surprise to them if to anyone. They bought it. Done, unless they can do something better and different.

It's really a shame, and the only, the ONLY way to set it right is to have new primaries. Anything else is a sham. Hildebeast beat no one on the Michigan ballot and she wants a couple hundred delegates for it?! That doesn't strike her as Stalinist? Apparently not, and it doesn't surprise me. Hell, Saddam Hussein used to win by margins nearly 30 points higher than the Hildebeast did.

The only thing that the faux results from Florida and Michigan prove is that Hillary supporters are more inclined to engage in pointless activities than we are.

Of course that's always been evident, by definition.

Springsteen, JFK, Oprah, and YOU AND ME

If you would have told me 18 months ago that we would be sitting here, today, with this great of a shot at loosening corporate hegemony in the world's only superpower (unless you consider the massive and ever-increasing loose confederations of the appalled)…I woulda took it in a heartbeat.

Back in the heady days of the 1992 Brown Campaign, well actually before the campaign even started, we had overtures from the Grateful Dead. Later in the campaign we had overtures from R.E.M. We respectfully moved on without them, it was a people's campaign. These were philosophically commendable but grievous errors.

The politics of the early 21st century (and anywhere else I see looking forward) are too complex for any one man, even if he's an absolute genius like Barack. Politicians need advisors, specialists, need serious brains they can rely on. The rest of us need the guts and passion of the empathetic souls that have made our lives a little bit better. We need to make common cause with the people whose ideas we value.

Bruce Springsteen AND Oprah Winfrey have endorsed Obama and they're not on the ground in Indiana (a tricky state, I remember) or Oregon and North Carolina (potential landslides for the forces of Light) workin' crowds of 100,000?!!!!

C'mon, man, this isn't just some jackass presidential election, this is THE ONE!!!!! This is where we fight back for the injustices done to every working person making less than half million a year, injustices at every turn for the past 27 years. This is where we fight back for Gaia, for Mother Nature. This is where we stop the flow of body bags. This is where we stop pretending that corporations have free speech rights that individuals don't. This is where we quit pretending that cash is more important than people. This is where the big-business bullshit masquerading as patriotism hits the fan and we smack it back. This is our historic moment. This is where we give ourselves another chance.

Even odds. Better than JFK had against Nixon. Obama has proven himself as a candidate. He said that he'd compete by registering millions of new voters. It has come to pass. He said that guts and grit and honesty can take down the faceless monolith of a system that takes what is ours and redistributes it to fictitious business entities, and we've proven him right. It's time.

politics schmolitics, I want to go home

No, this is fun, back to the political page