Well, really, isn’t that what it is turning into, what with Her Inevitableness and The Fresh Prince of Chicago locked in a knock-down, drag-out grudge-match to the death. I can hardly wait for the showdown at the convention – this is going to get really interesting, in the sense of slow down and look at the carnage on the highway sort of interesting.

There is so much to dislike about both of them – who would have thought that a young and doe-eyed political neophyte, fresh from the mills of the Chicago political-machine could exhibit a collection of such embarrassing associates, unfortunate missteps and evidence of obvious wheeling and dealing. It’s a fascinating – in the forensic sense – collection of soiled laundry. And Her (perhaps) Inevitableness has been assembling her own vast collection for twenty years, so all hail the ambitious newcomer! Each has a spouse which may prove to be just as much of a millstone – the serial sexual harasser against the BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement and injury. Yep, the convention is going to be a cage match. I predict blood, inside and out, before and especially after the fans of whoever doesn’t get The Big Nod will be extremely resentful.

It’s too much to hope for, that the delegates wander in the way of a ration of sense and nominate a compromise third candidate. Nope, never happen, although it’s been suggested – laughingly I am sure – that the Goricle himself would nobly put himself in the way of such an effort.

All kidding aside, I don’t think that Obama himself had any idea of how swiftly and how completely the Reverend Wrights’ inflammatory sermons would percolate through the national media and the body politic, or how absolutely offensive that ordinary people outside the holy environs of his immediate circle would find them. And they are offensive; I don’t care how many ways you slice and dice it. I am a fairly devout and intermittently observant mainstream Christian; any white minister preaching the Reverend Wrights’ line from the pulpit would have been disowned from a mainstream church so fast his clerical collar would have spun around his neck like a horseshoe flung towards a stake. There’s a lot to be said for the “flip” theory – that is, reverse the colors (or the genders) involved in any controversy and see if it still seems fair to you. The Fresh Prince worshipped for twenty years and took as his mentor a racist and demagogic nut-case. Deal, ‘kay? So we’ve started a dialogue about race in America in the 21st century – not quite the one expected, but as I said – deal.

I’m not even getting into the question of Obama’s association with former Weatherman Bill Ayers, except to note that damn-it, won�t the Sixties ever die? What do we have to do, bury that low dishonest decade at the crossroads with an ash stake through its heart? This picture says about all that you have to know about Bill Ayers, except to note that the advance publicity about his memoir – from which this local story derives – got lost in all the news coverage about 9-11. Bet he cried into his Chablis for months; how dare a bunch of Islamic fundies ruin his carefully laid publicity campaign about the golden days of ‘fighting the power”?!

Yep, it’s going to be an interesting couple of months. I’m going to need a couple of hundred pounds of popcorn just to be able to deal with it all.

(Link courtesy of Rantburg, my source for all that is sarky and cynical)