Black Box Report

With only five days until Super Tuesday, when New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will have their say when it comes to our next president, it's time for me to get off the fence and stand behind my presidential picks.

On the Democratic side, voters have not been forced to pick a lesser of two evils.

Obama's abilities are obvious and his inexperience exaggerated. If elected, I believe he would more than make history, he would restore competency and leadership to the White House.

He, however, is not the best candidate. Hillary Clinton is.

While she cannot match his gift for speechmaking, or even inspiration, she is the most able and equipped candidate we have seen in years.

As a father of three young children, I choose my leaders with the future in mind as much as the present. The future worries me. Our next president inherits spiraling debt and major economic problems. We are a nation at war and our standing in the world is at its lowest in recent memory. Global warming, terrorism and a laundry list of challenges requiring leadership, innovation and, yes, compromise face our next Commander in Chief, and we don't have the luxury of on the job training.

I have covered Hillary as first a candidate then a senator, and she has made even skeptics converts with hard work and results. She will hit the ground running, knows how D.C. works and has been battle-tested. More than ever we need an adult sitting behind the big desk in the most important office in the world. Hillary Clinton is the right person at the right time.

On the Republican side, the options are less appealing. But one candidate at least has the conviction to say and stand behind what he believes in. That person is John McCain.

On many issues, including the war, I do not agree with the Arizona senator, but at least I know where he stands today and tommorow.

His courageous positions on immigration and campaign finance reform, despite the political consequences, and his record for putting principal above poll numbers is a constant with a person who has faced more than lifetime of adversity.

In a weak republican field, he is the best of the lot.

There's a new political disease afflicting the GOP base and rightwing pundits, and a Republican you know may be suffering from it - McCain Derangement Syndrome. Its symptoms include an inability to accept that John McCain is now the prohibitive GOP frontrunner:

Assuming there is no shocking revelation or health issue, the GOP nomination is over. Conservatives need to start practicing the phrase "Nominee presumptive John McCa....."

Sorry, I can't say it. Not yet...

Florida has launched the one ship that Romney's money and Rush Limbaugh cannot stop: The U.S.S. Inevitable. It's gonna happen. Even if there were a realistic pathway to stop him, the media have seized control of the process now and are declaring him inevitable. He is, after all, the favorite son of the New York Times.

So it is over. Finished...And the worst part for the Right is that McCain will have won the nomination while ignoring, insulting and, as of this weekend, shamelessly lying about conservatives and conservatism.

Other symptoms include incoherant rage and and a willingness to shoot their party in the foot, sacrificing a Republican White House for ideological purity (something previously rumoured to only affect Democrats):

If McCain gets the nomination, I would work towards his defeat in November before I'd vote for him...The best thing for the future of conservatism in America, would be a McCain loss in the general. And we need to start tearing the Republican Party apart and re-building, from the ground up.

The causes of MDS appear to be exposure to John McCain's positions on immigration, Bush's tax cuts, campaign finance reform and other conservative issues, but new studies show that those with hyperinflated egos and an over-developed sense of self-importance may also be at risk:

The anti-McCain contingent of the GOP, at least at first blush, looks like it should be a force to be reckoned with. Rush Limbaugh, Tom DeLay, Rick Santorum, most of the Fox News crowd, most of the right’s talk-radio hosts, and nearly all of the leading conservative bloggers consider John McCain completely unacceptable...
......
Except, with McCain's ascendancy, these guys look like a paper tiger, who wavering GOP lawmakers may take a little less seriously in the future.

Initial treatment of threatening victims of MDS with a Hillary Clinton presidency has proved futile:

GLENN: Michelle Malkin, I've got 30 seconds. If it's John McCain, Hillary Clinton, do you pull the lever for John McCain?

MALKIN: Not at this moment I don't. I'm running a poll right now on my site and you can see that there are a majority of my own readers who are going to sit home. And I think it's a big warning to the conservative movement out there. We still have time to fix this.

The man for whom this debilitating disease is named is hoping new treatments, in the form of endorsements from Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani, will help MDS victims to recover, but even that seems unlikely:

Now that I think about it, a McCain/Giuliani ticket might be the first Republican ticket without any actual Republicans on it.

Making the search for a cure even more complicated is a new theory, advanced by certain knowledgable analysts, saying the disease may have been misdiagnosed as primarily affecting conservatives:

The thing that needs to be said, over and over, though, is that Rush Limbaugh and those guys simply aren’t conservatives. They just aren’t. Radically restructuring government to create an unaccountable executive is not conservative. Building a security apparatus that is designed to spy on citizens is not a conservative principle. Runaway spending and bloated budgets are not conservative ideas. Torture and permanent aggressive wars are not conservative principles. Fearmongering and keeping the electorate scared is not a conservative principle. And on and on.

The fact of the matter is the self-styled loud-mouth conservatives just aren’t very conservative.

But whether this malady threatens conservatives, Republicans, or both, the suffering is real. Sadly, there is no known cure at this time, as Republicans continue to cut research funding, deny insurance and generally tell victims to suck it up and live with it.

UPDATE: Coulter: If McCain’s the nominee, I’ll campaign for Hillary

So sad.

There are many mysteries of the universe we may never be able to explain, like how the Egyptian pyramids were built; the disappearance of the ancient Mayan civilization; and how did John Bolton ever get a job as a diplomat? The moustache that roared is at it again, telling FOX News, naturally, that the mullahs in Iran are hankering for a Democratic president so they can freely pursue a nuclear weapons program and DESTROY THE WORLD!!!!...or something. Surprisingly enough, one diarist at Daily Kos agrees, but for different reasons:

After seven years of watching Bush and the neo-cons push for war with Iran I'd be hoping for a Democratic President too. It must have been nerve-racking for them to hear the administration use claims they knew to be false as justification for an attack. Iran knew they had no WMDs but until the NIE was leaked not a lot of other people did. The NIE concluded they had abandoned their nuclear program several years ago. The Bush Administration had had this report for a while now. They buried it, ready to lie their way into yet another war in the middle east. Now why would Iran not want another eight years of that?

That argument aside - and it's not a bad one - Bolton's comments don't make a lick of sense when you consider that it was a result of the current Republican foreign policy that Iran's position in the Middle East has been strengthened:

Yeah, i'm sure that (Iran) would rather have someone who is likely to do something in the WH rather than Bush who has played into their hands from day one.

For a party that prides itself (or used to) on being "the party of ideas," they haven't had an original idea, much less campaign strategy, for the last quarter-century. And Bolton's latest example of Yosemite Sam rhetoric is just the same stuff, different election:

Bolton's fearmongering on Iran mirrors the conservative strategy around the 2006 elections. At the time, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Dick Cheney, and the White House all suggested al Qaeda was hoping for a Democratic Congress.

Back then we were told if Democrats took control of Congress, we'd lose Iraq and terrorists would invade your kitchen! So, how did those predictions work out?

The prevailing talking point before the 2006 election was that if Democrats became the majority in Congress, we'd fail in Iraq and terrorists would be everywhere here at home. However, now you can't hear a Republican speak without mentioning that we're winning the war in Iraq, and there hasn't been a major attack on American Soil since a Republican ran the White House! So given that predictions are dubious but results are rock solid, it stands to reason that Bolton's suggestion will have the opposite effect - Tehran is as good as destroyed once a Democrat gets the presidency.

John Bolton. Always wrong. Still on TV.