Kevin Drum pronounces himself bitter:

Am I feeling bitter? You bet. Not because Hillary Clinton seems more likely than not to lose — I can live with that pretty easily — but because of how she’s likely to lose. Because the press doesn’t like her. Because any time a woman raises her voice half a decibel she instantly becomes shrill. Because we insist on an idiotic nominating system that gives a bunch of Iowa corn farmers 20x the influence of any Democratic voter in any urban area in the country. Because the fever swamp, in the end, is getting the last laugh.

As Troy Aikman just said to Joe Buck about an unrelated issue, “I agree with that to a point.” But consider the alternative — had Hillary Clinton won because she’d been able to coerce the support of a large number of elected officials, union leaders, donors, and other elites on the basis of the idea that she was inevitable and retribution would be dealt out to those who failed to support her and because we insist on an idiotic nominating system that gives wildly disproportionate influence to lily-white Iowa that would have sucked, too. We have a screwed-up political process in this country, and political outcomes naturally reflect that fact.

I agree that Clinton gets a bad rap from many in the press, but at the end of the day there are limits to my sympathy for the ill-treatment she and her husband have received over the years. Or, rather, there aren’t limits to the sympathy, but there are limits to what the sympathy can buy you. Resentment at the inanity of the media isn’t a good reason to make one particular person President. If she loses, Hillary Clinton will still be a multimillionaire US Senator, so there are people out there who I’ll feel sorrier for. Meanwhile, it’s not as if Clinton had some visionary plan to fix these problems; it’s Obama with the ambitious media reform program, and Clinton who’s benefitting from Murdoch-hosted fundraisers.

On top of all that: Getting good press is part of being an effective candidate and part of being an effective president. Will Obama continue to get this kind of worshipful coverage in the general election campaign? Probably not, especially if he has to run against Saint John of Arizona. But will he get better coverage than Clinton or Edwards would? Almost certainly. And I don’t think it makes sense to let resentment be the governing consideration here.

Nice article by ex-colleague Nick Confessore, noting that if you judge by issue positions Michael Bloomberg just seems like a standard-issue Democrat. Quite so. He could, of course, adopt some new, more right-wing views to make himself more centrist, but doing that strategically would only further demonstrate the vacuity of the enterprise.

I noted yesterday that Mike Huckabee seemed to me to be the only Republican in touch with the mood of the country. I should have added Ron Paul to that list. Paul, to his credit, talks about the existence of problems in the economy and sells himself as a person who would implement policies to alleviate ordinary people’s economic situation.

When I first heard anecdotal evidence and then saw some Iowa entrance poll data that indicated that some folks are backing Paul on economic grounds, I was a bit mystified. But as with Huckabee, it goes back to the vacuousness and weirdness of the mainstream campaigns. Paul gets up there onstage and suggests that fiat money is the cause of high oil prices because we’re devaluing our currency. This is flat-out wrong and suggests a strange ignorance on the part of a monetary policy obsessive (to make a long story short, there’s a reason we distinguish between “real” and “nominal” prices and the “real” ones are the real ones that matter; meanwhile, international oil transactions are conducted in dollars anyway). But for that matter, he also thinks the gold standard would reign in health care inflation.

It’s all hollow and absurd, even more so than Huckabee’s populist case for a 30 percent national retail sales tax that he’ll pretend is only a 23 percent tax. But the point is that both Paul and Huckabee try to connect to people feeling economic pain while Rudy McRomney seem to be living on a weird planet where none of these problems exist. Certainly, they don’t deign to try to expose Paul and Huckabee as selling snake oil and propose something more constructive; they’re just ignoring it.

In the Republican debate I watched, John McCain repeatedly savaged Mitt Romney. McCain almost never questioned the merits of any of Romney’s policy positions, but rather repeatedly slagged on Romney’s character suggesting, accurately, that Romney is a liar who’s changed his positions repeatedly on a whole variety of issues in a manner that suggests he’s basically a bad person. But of course whatever happens is good for John McCain so the way Mark Halperin reports it is that “To his advantage, he stayed above the fray.”

As Lemieux says the striking thing here is that just sentences later Halperin acknowledges that this is BS and McCain “seemed to relish his engagement with Romney over immigration, slipping in a sharp jab over his rival’s fortune, and got in another zinger by twisting Romney’s message of change into a glib attack on the governor’s flipflopping history.”

The Powers of Straight Talk are, indeed, great.

To me the very strange thing about this is that while McCain’s attacks on Romney were mostly accurate, the overall approach was ludicrously unfair. McCain, like Mitt Romney, drifted pretty far left for a Republican during the 2002-2003 period and McCain, like Mitt Romney, started furiously backpedaling during 2006-2007 in a desperate bid to become President of the United States. The idea of the one attacking the other as a flip-flopper is ludicrous and the fact that McCain did it while wearing a vicious snarl that he’d then transform into a disingenuous grin after unleashing a zinger didn’t strike me as especially endearing. Then again, I guess you just can’t make it as a real big-time pundit until you fall spell to the Lure of the Straight Talk and see that when McCain changes his views or spouts nonsense or whatever that that’s just all part of the Higher Straight Talk.

Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said it “would be fine with” him if the U.S. military stayed in Iraq for “a hundred years” or even a “million years.”

Fifty-nine percent say the U.S. should “stick to a withdrawal timetable” instead of keeping “a significant number of troops in Iraq until the situation there gets better, even if that takes many years.”

But on CBS’s Face the Nation, McCain claimed that Americans would not be “concerned” if the U.S. spends “10,000 years” in Iraq:

The point is it’s American casualties. We’ve go to get American’s off the frontlines, have the Iraqis as part of the strategy, take over more and more of the responsibilities, and then I don’t think Americans are concerned if we’re there for one hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years.

Watch it:

As Crooks and Liars notes, on NBC’s Meet the Press, McCain further expressed his desire for a permanent Iraq occupation, going as far as to suggest that he supports “permanent bases” in the country:

RUSSERT: Would you have permanent bases?

McCAIN: If that seems to be necessary in some respects. It depends on the threat.

Not long ago, McCain felt very differently about occupying Iraq. In November, he told Charlie Rose that arguing that a South Korea-like presence is not an “analogy” he would use for Iraq. On June 10, 2007, McCain told George Stephanopolous that he opposes permanent bases:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no permanent bases?

McCAIN: No, not forever, but certainly, we would be there for a long period of time in a support role, in many ways.

But by McCain’s logic, 10,000 or even one million years is not “forever.”

In today’s Washington Post, former presidential candidate George McGovern calls for Bush and Cheney’s impeachment:

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice. [...]

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?