You know that it’s going to be a very special kind of election year when one of the pre-eminent right-of-center bloggers expends over 600 words on something that he twice acknowledges is “a distraction” — the “issue” of a certain presidential candidate’s birth certificate. Come on, Ed. There’s more serious stuff to blog about like the secret meaning of fist bumps. Or why this kid’s mother let him trike without a helmet.

In the end, how we leave and what we leave behind will be more important than how we came. — AMBASSADOR RYAN CROCKER Having royally screwed up just about everything else over the past seven-plus years, George Bush’s last best hope of tying the hands of the next administration before heading back to Texas to search for his legacy among the scrub brush is a status-of-forces agreement with Iraq. The problem for Bush is that hardly anyone likes the agreement except he and Nouri al-Maliki....

(1.) Obama must continue to keep things simple, something that he did to great and historic effect during a grueling, bullet-dodging primary campaign, while reminding voters at every turn that a McCain presidency would be the Bush III edition of Nightmare on Elm Street. (2.) Obama’s strategy of campaigning hard early in red states while trying to heal intra-party wounds and selecting a running mate who is a counterbalance to his relative lack of experience makes sense. (3.) While McCain’s...

In the 20-year sweep of the last five presidential elections, two of the three Republican candidates have been old white guys and the third was the son of one of them. For reasons having everything to do with the ossification of a political brand that is toxic to many women (who make up half the population) and most minorities (who make up a quarter), the field of GOP wannabes this year was entirely old white men — a bunch of “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club,”...

A SCREWED-UP CAMPAIGN BUT AN ABSOLUTELY CLASSY FAREWELL. Photograph by Ron Edmonds/The Associated Press

Leave it to the deaf, dumb and blind president of the United States to help drive already out-of-control oil prices into the stratosphere by further upsetting the always delicate balance in the Middle East through another round of saber rattling. It is not unreasonable to conclude at this point that George Bush is so inept that he literally cannot do anything right beyond handing the grieving parents of an Iraq war casualty a medal and folded American flag without dropping them. The Iraq war has...

. . . about Michelle Obama fist bumping her husband after his primary season-ending victory speech on Tuesday night? Or is it a signal to Muslim terrorists? More here.

(1.) First and foremost, Hillary Clinton never seemed comfortable with herself in stark contrast to Barack Obama, who as one speech analyst put it, can sound rousing while being conciliatory. Clinton’s discomfort sometimes translated into a sense of phoniness and was exacerbated by her mood swings – from crying on cue early in the primary season to angrily pounding the podium as she became increasingly beleaguered. (2.) Clinton’s early and enthusiastic approval of the Iraq war dogged her throughout...

In the end, the protean Barack Obama did what was best for the Democratic Party in not declaring that it was over until he had clinched the requisite number of delegates while Hillary Clinton, smiling through gnashed teeth, refused to give the trailblazing nominee in waiting his due. Nevertheless, you can practically feel the tectonic plates of the political universal slide into alignment, and John McCain should be afraid. Very afraid. Let’s first dispose of Mrs. Clinton. Please! She blazed a...

Which of these three items is the most important and might derail a presidential campaign? * Bill Clinton continuing to chase anything in a skirt, according to a new Vanity Fair story. * Michele Obama using the word “whitey” in unknown context, according to rumors. * John McCain calling his wife a four-letter word for her vagina, according to first-hand accounts. And what does your choice say about the state of political discourse in America?

As someone who bled printers ink at newspapers for 35 years and has a second career as a blogger, the big message in former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s blockbuster of a book is not that George Bush is a resume without a man, that there was an orchestrated effort to lie to a public traumatized by the 9/11 attacks in the run-up to the Iraq war, or that Karl Rove makes Machiavelli look like a Boy Scout. It is that the mainstream news media’s march toward irrelevance is...

It sure looks that way. But as Publius notes, the big news won’t be that the DNC ’s rules committee hasn’t given Miss Shot & A Beer what she wants, which is more or less a forgone conclusion, but how she reacts.

All things considered, and that is saying an awful lot, things seem to be going pretty well in Iraq some five-plus years and hundreds of thousands of shattered lives later. But just as the faces of many a right-of-center pundit break into Alfred E. Newman-like grins, a growing number of prominent long-time war supporters are having serious second thoughts that will give John McCain chest pains. Take Byron York of National Review Online, who in a break with his peers finally acknowledges the war...

It seemed like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales barely had two brain cells to rub together on the best of days, so his defense of the Bush torture regime was simple: Na-na-na-na-na! The president can do whatever he wants. Michael Mukasey, who prepped for the job in the federal judiciary while Gonzales was the president’s lapdog, is a rocket scientist by comparison. After hoodwinking the Senate into confirming him because he promised that he’d have to look into this torture stuff, Mukasey...

John McCain has showed himself to be a welter of contradictions, but nowhere is this more apparent – and troubling – in how he repeatedly invokes his prisoner of war past to validate his righteousness while at the same time selling out today’s veterans. This sell-out has taken several forms: Voting against increased funding for health care and education benefits, being absent for key votes on veterans’ issues, and working to undercut the progress the Veterans Administration has made...

Richard Nixon was the last politician whom I hated, but I got over that not long after he slunk out of Washington when I figured out that hating someone — especially a public figure — was drag energy, to use the term of the day. But Joe Lieberman is causing me to reconsider. Where to begin? That this sniveling Uriah Heep of an obfuscating sack of excrement parading as a John McCain penis extension dishonors Jews, Democrats, veterans . . . I could go on and on. Well, not to outdo himself,...

It is Memorial Day (Observed) today in the U.S. If you don’t already know, “Observed” is a euphemism for pulling up our national holidays by their roots and plopping them down into three-day weekends that have nothing to do with why they are supposed to be celebrated. This one originally was called Decoration Day. It was a day of remembrance for Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. After World War I, it was expanded to include soldiers who died in any war. Nowadays it is called...

DONNA THE BUFFALO I have come to see American roots music — blues and bluegrass, jazz, funk, Cajun and zydeco — as branches of one big tree. And I’ve been around the planet long enough to appreciate that long before there was MTV, satellite radio and the iPod, there was an aspect of selflessness in music that seems as archaic as the eight-track tape in the detachedness of our high-tech age. Performers always have been ego driven, of course, but there is an element of sharing in...

Whether a president or presidential candidate should make their complete medical records available is a non issue. Voters have a right to know whether they are physically and emotionally fit. That is why the release today of a carefully redacted and relatively small portion of the medical records of John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, is many days late and many dollars short. Two Associated Press reporters who were allowed to look at 1,173 pages of medical documents spanning 2000...

See? Dust. Just like the rest of ‘em. I don’t know what’s coming next, but I do know it’s gonna be just like this. Hard. Painful. But in the end it’s gonna be us. If we all do our parts, believe it, we’ll be the ones left standing. Here endeth the lesson. – BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER Mark it on your calendars: June 3, 2008 is Judgment Day for Hillary Clinton. This is the end of the Democratic primary season with votes in South Dakota, Montana and Puerto Rico and the...

One can forgive Florida’s substantial Jewish population for being confused these days. One day George Bush hints in a speech to the Knesset that Barack Obama is a Neville Chamberlain-like appeaser who would talk to enemies of Israel and the next day Israel is talking to its enemy Syria. Were it only that simple. A New York Times story today reveals that Sunshine State Jews — and predominately older ones — to be not only confused, but conflicted, paranoid and in some instances bigoted...

I happen to believe that history will judge the Bush administration’s embrace of torture as the darkest of the dark marks against it. But history is something happening now that we will look back on in the future, so I have been beating the anti-torture drum pretty hard over at my own blog, Kiko’s House. If you share the views of daveinboca, an uber patriot and TMV troll who exalts in his government embracing Nazi-like interrogation techniques, then read no further. (Just one question,...

IF APPALACHIA WAS A COUNTRY, HILLARY CLINTON COULD BE PRESIDENT — RON REAGAN Exit polls from Oregon punch a big hole in the theory that Barack Obama’s problem with working class whites is generic. As the former president’s son alludes to in his quip on MSNBC last night, Obama’s real problem appears to be with Appalachian whites as is reflected in how Hillary Clinton creamed him in Kentucky and West Virginia. But Oregon exit polls show that Obama beat Clinton by sizable margins...

OBAMA AND CLINTON AFTER LATEST PRIMARY VICTORIES. MORE HERE. There are a lot of bruised egos and hurt feelings abroad in the land today among Hillary Clinton supporters now that the primary race is technically if not literally over, so I acknowledge that I’m a bit premature on this: But it is time for any and all of us for whom the disastrous George Bush presidency cannot end soon enough to unite behind Barack Obama. I know that it will take a while for those bruises to heal and those feelings...

Riding the first wave of the inevitable post-mortems about what went wrong for Hillary Clinton is an important question: To what extent did sexism play a role in her extraordinary crash and burn? That begs another question without which the first cannot be addressed: To what extent did racism impede Barack Obama’s nevertheless triumphant march from obscurity to the verge of nomination? The answers are that these twin isms certainly played significant roles in deflecting support from each candidate....