LT Saloon

“God Damn the Democrats!”

The Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee agreed to seat both Michigan and Florida delegates with half-votes, based on Party rules.

Under the deal, Florida will seat its delegates based on the outcome of the January primary, with 105 pledged delegates going to Clinton, and 67 going for Obama.  Each delegate will get a half vote as a penalty.  The committee was unanimous on that decision.

The big sticking point apparently was Michagan.  The Clinton camp was insisting that Obama shouldn’t get any pledged delegates in Michigan since he “chose not to put his name on the ballot”.  The Clintons felt that she should get 73 pledged delegates with 55 delegate remaining “uncommitted”.  Obama’s camp insisted that the only fair solution was to split the pledged delegates in half with 64 delegates going to each side.

The Michigan Democratic Party offered a compromise that would split the difference between the two camps.  Clinton would get 69 delegates, and Obama would get 59.  Like Florida, each will get a half vote as a penalty.

That deal passed 19-8.  It is interesting to note that out of the 27 committee members, 13 of those members support Hillary Clinton.  Instead of the vote breaking down supporter lines, it shows that some of the Hillary supporters were able to see the big picture.

None of this went over well with the Clinton supporters who came to pressure the committee into full seating for Clinton.  There were many flareups as Clinton supporters interupted committee members as they tried to explain their support of the compromise.

Harriet Christian, a Clinton supporter was thrown out of the committee meeting because she started yelling at committee members.  Here you see her just after being ejected:

Note to Harriet:

What more did you want?  Florida got the full boat of delegates that Hillary “won”.  She got the majority of delegates out of Michigan.  Are you mad that they only count for a half-vote?  Look at the party rules.  You know what RULES are, doncha?  They are the guidelines we use to keep things organized, up front, and transparent.  Would you have rather we went back to where the party bosses picked our candidates in smoke-filled rooms?  Do you think Hillary OR Obama would have had a chance under that old system?

I couldn’t believe your accusation that Obama was only in the race because a woman was running.  Why does this have to be boiled down to a misogyny issue?  If you vote for Hillary you are a racist, or if you vote for Obama you are a misogynist?  Have you bumped your head?

I was listening to John Elliot on rerun a little while ago.  I heard it the other night, but hearing it again made me want to reach through my dashboard and bitch-slap the woman who had called.  She told John — and I will paraphrase — that the black man was able to vote fifty years before women got a chance to vote and that was proof that this is a misogynist society.  She feels it is a ‘woman’s turn’.

This is what I am not getting:  Are we supposed to not judge a person based on their gender or race — unless they are running for president?

Right here in Washington, our woman governor (she is our second woman governor — we have never had a black governor), being a super delegate, decided to back Barack Obama.  Because she didn’t vote with her vagina, she is now under fire by the state’s feminists who support Hillary.

Another thing, Harriet, if Obama were behind, and we had this same battle, would you be flying off the handle like this?  Would you be arguing that all of these votes must count?

Probably not, huh?  You probably would have stayed in Manhattan, where none of this effects you anyways.  You voted, and your vote counted, didn’t it?

Obama played by the rules.  He has been winning by the rules.  He will win the general election, provided Hillary hangs it up after Tuesday.  There is no logical reason for her to be staying in any more.

The Tattlesnake — Media Mania: When Do We Draw the Line on This Nonsense? Edition

The latest overwrought BM (Big Media) guilt-by-association crapola has to do with Father Michael Pfleger making fun of Hillary as a guest speaker at Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Predictably, Obama has had to apologize for this – but why? Pfleger is a Catholic priest and Trinity UCC is Protestant, and Pfleger was just making a guest appearance in Obama’s church. What’s more, Obama wasn’t consulted about, nor was he there for, Pfleger’s You Tube star turn. Why should he have to apologize for anything Pfleger said? What’s next, will the BM, or Clinton’s campaign, demand he apologize for any errant thing that any member of his UCC congregation might say? (Pfleger, incidentally, apologized for his comments today.)

Say, whatever happened to free speech in this country – and that you and only you are responsible for what you say?

When does this GBA madness stop, or when does the media start grilling McCain on some of his unsavory pals from the past, such as Charlie Keating, and his current crop of sleazy buddies, such as lobbyist Rick Davis, his campaign manager?

A little background on Pfleger: Years ago Mad Monk Mike Pfleger made the Chicago papers with his ‘brilliant’ proposal for an anti-drug law that prevented local shops from selling pipes and cigarette papers. Yeah, if those potheads and crack addicts don’t have pipes or papers, they won’t be able to figure out how to make a pipe out of a toilet paper roll and tin foil, or just go to the suburbs and buy what they need. Pfleger’s a flaky publicity hound and it’s a mystery why Trinity ever invited him to give a guest sermon.

The biggest BS moment this week on BM TV was Ann Lewis, a Clinton supporter and DLC Dem, babbling with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC over Gerri Ferraro’s recent piece of dingbattery in the Boston Globe. Gerri’s back on her broken hobbyhorse, this time claiming that white women are afraid to criticize Obama because someone might call them a racist – Earth to Gerri: it doesn’t seem to have slowed down your candidate — or yourself. It doesn’t seem to have stopped Andrea Mitchell, either. While Lewis tried to put a good face on Gerri’s half-mad ravings, she took the time to condemn Obama’s campaign for sexist remarks about Hillary, without specifying what she was talking about. Then she deposited the cherry on top by claiming Pfleger’s ridicule of Hillary was sexist. (I saw the video; he wasn’t making fun of her sex, just her campaign style.) Follow this pretzel logic: It’s wrong to call a white woman a racist for criticizing Obama, but if an Obama supporter criticizes Hillary, they’re automatically a sexist. Ann, are you now or have you ever been a Republican?

One note about Scotty McClellan: This former POTUS potty press air freshener is still flacking for Bush, even while he tries to purge his withered soul of years of publicly spewing horsepucky for every putrid top player in the Little King’s Confederacy of Dunces. I caught him last night on Olbermann and he was ludicrously pumping the fairytale that Bush planned to be a ‘uniter’ who ached to be a good president and went awry once in power, no doubt thanks to that Major League A-hole Cheney. This is sheer bunkum: Scotty has known the Bush Boy since Texas and Junior hasn’t changed since then – he lazily and ignorantly ran the Lone Star state exactly the way he’s run the US government – give away the store to his rich cronies, take long vacations, and let the peasants crawl for the crumbs. Speaking of which, it’s deeply hilarious to hear neocon nutbags like Bill O’Reilly condemn Scotty for – gasp! – authoring books for money! What, do Billo, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity pen their fiction for free?

A Question: How long until MSNBC sells ‘news analyst’ and caucasian embarrassment Pat Buchanan’s contract to Fox News? Nixon’s former speechwriter and Southern Strategy cheerleader has increasingly been falling off the right-wing edge; he’s now barely hanging on by a thread of sanity, and it’s only a matter of time before the braying old Dixie-whistler drops the ‘N-word’ on Obama or some other dark-skinned candidate and is forced by management to take some time off from NBC to stand in the corner and knit another Confederate flag for the den.

The Tattlesnake – Charles Foster McCain Edition

The Cynicism and Contempt of John McCain
Or, Get Your Hot-Buttered Popcorn – It’s Film References Time!

“It is dangerous for a democracy when a presidential candidate can lie with impunity, change positions on a whim, and physically and verbally threaten others and virtually none of it is reported by a besotted media eagerly awaiting the next moment when he might slap their backs in friendship.”
– Cliff Schecter, author of “The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn’t,” as quoted by Robert Greenwald at AlterNet.org.

While our corporate Stay-Prest Media obsess over every detail of the Dem Party High Noon confrontation between Sen. Serial Mom (‘Annie Oakley Meets Rocky and the Amazon Woman on the Moon,’ as directed by David Lynch) and ‘The Golden Child’ (‘Native Son Goes to Washington,’ as written by Clifford Odets and starring Sidney Poitier as both Langston Hughes and ‘Mr. Tibbs’), they’ve mostly been ignoring the flip, flop and flee of the sometime rustic-ranch resident of Sedona, Arizona, the former Hellcat of the Navy lurking under the fading Republican brand, ‘John McCain Goes to War’ (as directed by Sam Fuller-Brush-Man).

We’ve seen this movie before; it was shown to the bored passengers of Kentucky Fried Airlines on flights to Political Tedium in 1980, 1988, 1996, and even, improbably, 2000 and 2004. While, according to the Big Media Handbook, a Democrat can never be a War Hero, even though he may have piloted a bomber over Europe in WWII, as George McGovern did; or saved a soldier’s life under fire, as John Kerry did; it’s ridiculously easy for any Republican to claim the status.

Although Navy Carrier Pilot Poppy Bush and the 10th Mountain Division’s Bob Dole could legitimately honk up their time in service, Army Lt. Ronald Reagan made venereal disease warnings for the military and fought The Good War from the satin-sheeted trenches of Hollywood; Air Force Lt. Junior Bush committed the ignoble offense of posing for pictures in uniform wearing medals he hadn’t earned and then ditched out entirely on his last two years of weekend-warrior physicals and stateside Champaign Squadron duty, a stunt that would have quickly deposited a poor man’s son on the flight line at an airfield near Saigon or a SAC base in Witch’s Tit, Alaska. Yet they were both, at one time or another, dubbed ‘War Heroes’ by the National Corporate Media.

John McCain can trumpet his combat time in the Navy with some validity, although the third reel of this picture shows Sen. Rambo unheroically, if understandably, breaking under North Vietnamese torture and singing his guts out, as he admitted on CBS’ “60 Minutes” nearly a decade ago. But never fear, Republicans — Democrats will not be mocking him by hopping around on jocular Ruptured Duck crutches, nor wearing ‘Traitor John’ arm slings or yellow songbirds on their shoulders at their Denver convention this year – that sort of stomach-turning street theater is strictly reserved for the degenerate Swift Boat ignorati of the GOP Fleet Enema.

Keeping with Orson Welles’ protagonist in his 1941 masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” the Arizona senator tries to portray himself as a stalwart Man of the People, a plain-spoken Maverick Reformer you can safely imbibe a Blue Collar beer with, a Harry S Truman in Republican armor out to slay the dragons of official corruption, political partisanship and perverse moral concupiscence in Washington, while carefully disguising his elite Admiral’s-boy, Annapolis-grad past; his second wife’s wealth that purchased his political career; and his cynical behind-the-scenes manipulations on behalf of campaign contributors from Charles Keating to Paxson Communications. Only recently has the Big Media noticed that he has a flock of well-paid lobbyists on his staff and the Punditrocracy apparently naively believe, as stated by political flack-turned-journalist George Stephanopoulos on his This Week program May 25, that they have now all been dismissed. The truth is, if McCain fired all of the lobbyists and ex-lobbyists on his campaign staff, he wouldn’t have any campaign staff left. It seems it will fall to the eventual Democratic candidate to point out that from McCain campaign chief Rick Davis on down, the Republican candidate’s advisors are the sort of slick-suited marketers who will gladly advertise the ‘good side’ of tyrannical and genocidal regimes, or without reservation brush up the public image of businesses that peddle toxic poisons or tainted foodstuffs to the peasantry, if the price is right. They are direct ideological descendants of Edward Bernays, figuratively sticking shiny new dimes in the palms of monsters for distribution to the public, hoping to distract the happy recipients from noticing he is getting innocent people killed in an endless war for cost-plus profit or cruelly evicting families from their homes.

It’s illustrative of the true McCain personality to closely investigate several recent blips on his Maverick Reformer War Hero radar:

Too Little, Too Late

Scott McClellan, one of President Bush’s former SpokesLiar has written a tell-all book that exposes some of the lies this administration has been telling since 2000.  He managed to distill the entire 341 page book down into twelve words that he used as the title:

 “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,”

There, you’ve gotten the gist of where this book is heading.  Here are some quotes from the book:

The Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”

No shit?

McClellan describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness”.  Most of us call that being “intellectually lazy”. 

He also admits that he was lied to by the President’s inner circle about the leak of Valarie Plame.  That would make him an “accomplice after the fact” for not reporting such an obvious crime.

McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney “the magic man” who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

Harsh words now — now that he has his book published and he stands to make some money at it.  Now he is eager to let all the secrets out, when he can make a pile of cash doing so.  Never mind that in your greed to make a buck off of all of this you let the country be seriously damaged, and allowed a theft of our Democracy.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

Uh, Scotty?  Do you not realize that the words “lie” and “deception” are interchangable?  They both describe the same act.  Haven’t you ever heard of a Thesaurus?

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

The Iraq war was not necessary.  Yet you let this fucknozzle go ahead and borrow and spend almost $1 Trillion, kill over 4000 of our soldiers, maim thousands more, and killed over a quarter million innocent civilians because what, you wanted to keep quiet so you didn’t spoil the plot in your tell-all book?

You should hang at the Hague along with the rest of them.

Responding to a request from the Washington Post, where i got this story, McClellan responds:

“Like many Americans, I am concerned about the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. I wanted to take readers inside the White House and provide them an open and honest look at how things went off course and what can be learned from it. Hopefully in some small way it will contribute to changing Washington for the better and move us beyond the hyper-partisan environment that has permeated Washington over the past 15 years.”

Too little, too late.

Stop the Press Barack Misspoke!

OMG!  OMG! O.M.G.!

This is going to be all over the radio, television, papers, and Right-Wing blogs for the next two weeks! 

Obama told an audience yesterday:

“I had an uncle who was … part of the first American troops to go into Auschwitz and liberate the concentration camps.”

The Republican National Committee quickly fired off a news release that said:

“Unless his uncle was serving in the Red Army, there’s no way Obama’s statement yesterday can be true. Obama’s frequent exaggerations and outright distortions raise questions about his judgment and his readiness to lead as commander in chief.”

Yes, it was the Soviet Red Army that liberated Auschwitz.  But Obama exaggerating?

Obviously, Obama was mistaken.  He Misspoke.  He didn’t dodge any bullets in Bosnia, and apparently the death camp that Obama’s great-Uncle, Charlie Payne helped liberate was another notorious death camp, Buchenwald.

But I expect all of the pundits to be all over it for at least the next couple of days, I am sure to find a lot of them will gloss over the fact that Charlie Payne DID in fact help liberate A death camp (just not Aushchwitz) and start saying that Obama is trying to pander to the Jewish voter by digging deeeeep into his family (obviously on the white side, ja know)

But hey, candidates misspeak.  If Hillary can do it, Obama can.

Inspection- In Memoriam

Parades, flags waving, honor the soldiers: their conflicts and the war dead…

The day before Memorial Day my green Nissan 98 was on Connecticut 190. Rural scenery breezed by when; while going around a corner, I heard a screech. My brake? My foot? Oh… was that me? Are those two cop cars blocking my way? Wondering what tragedy had befallen some quaint eastern CT town; I attempted to cut around the mess… and finally succeeded. I did notice while skirting the village that the only rational way through it had been blocked for a parade.

Deep in my mind something bothered me. I wasn’t sure just what, yet.

On Memorial Day I went to a cemetery to write a song while waiting for a movie. I often practice and write in cemeteries. No one bothers me and the dead are good listeners. When your main job in life is entertaining the very young, good listeners mean a lot. You might be surprised, but I have found that adults are often far worse listeners than children.

In the cemetery that morning I finally realized what was bothering me: Memorial Day.

Bob Barr, Spoiler

Bob Barr has accepted the nomination for the Libertarian party. I'm pretty sure he represents the saner wing of the party, the one that defends individual liberty and the free market, and not the Peikoff branch who thinks we have the right to invade "uncivilized" nations who have not had the fortune to read Atlas Shrugged.

And there goes a good 5%-10% of McCain's base. McCain is not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination, and a party desperately seeking legitimization is going to vote Barr. So who's left to vote for McCain?

Stupid people

Catholics

Burned Hillary supporters

Racists

Shit, even the fascists aren't going to go for McCain, and he can kiss the right wing Christian vote bye bye as long as Hagee, Parsley and Dobson tell them to stay home.

Oh, sweet November is almost here.

The Tattlesnake – The Great White Wail of the Wide Deceiver Edition

This Week in Rovian Rubbish, Especially on the Don Siegelman Case

“According to the most recent surveys, President Bush’s current second-term debacle exceeds any other White House calamity in modern times. Yet the man who made it all possible, the ‘brains’ behind the president who has become ‘radioactive’ inside his own party, is toasted in the press as a political wise man.”
– Eric Boehlert, “If Congress Slaps Rove with Contempt, How Will His Bosses at Fox and Newsweek Deal with It?” Media Matters, May 22, 2008.

“Rove is a proven liar who cannot be trusted to tell the truth even when he is under oath, unless and until he is directly threatened with the prospect of prison time.”
– Joe Conason, Salon.com, March, 2007.

Karl Rove doesn’t look good these days; although he still exudes a smugly smiling aura of the polite ‘good’ little boy who knows he’ll never get caught for stealing that bicycle, he’s added weight and an unhealthy pastiness to his moon face, and his porcine blue eyes dart nervously from side to side as if seeking cover when the questions hit too close to home.

Those who have followed Rove’s fetid bottom-feeder career in politics, from his youthful College Republican days as a Nixon dirty trickster to his shoehorning the affably inept George W. Bush into the Texas governor’s mansion and the White House on 3″ X 5″ index cards of tested talking points and a willingness to hit lower below the belt and lie more continuously than most previous political handlers, know that no fly’s wing is safe near this man and, seeing him strut his stuff on ABC’s This Week Sunday morning, that even in supposed retirement from party politics, he is still in the business of regurgitating king-sized crapola for the GOP with the worst of them.

I reached for something to throw at the TV as he discussed Barack Obama’s supposed lack of any kind of record in the US Senate and his alleged failure to ‘reach across the aisle’ to Republicans to get things done. Either Rove is as ignorant as the body that hosted his political brain, or he’s lying through his teeth, and my bet’s on the latter. Here’s what someone more honest and objective had to say concerning Obama’s record:

“Obama has been accused of being all flash, and of not having done much in the Senate. His record in the three and a half years he has been there suggests someone serious about the job: he worked on a nuclear nonproliferation bill that passed and backed a number of policy changes to help veterans, including more medical care for those with post-traumatic stress disorder, assistance for homeless veterans, and the extension of tax credits for military families. He pushed through the Senate a major bill on ethics reform; and introduced legislation in January 2007 to stop, or if that failed, limit funds for the surge. He also worked with the conservative Republican Tom Coburn in a successful effort to get Congress to impose transparency on government expenditures so that anyone can look them up. The criticism that he hasn’t done more also overlooks the fact that during his first two years in the Senate, he was ninety-ninth in seniority and in the minority party.”
– Elizabeth Drew, “Molehill Politics,” The New York Review of Books, March 30, 2008.

No wonder Karl thinks Obama has done nothing – all of the things he’s accomplished are what Rove despises – ethics, government transparency, nuclear nonproliferation, increased help for veterans and their families.

Then Rove did a little riff praising Hillary Clinton’s experience and one has to wonder with a double-dealing sleazebag like Karl if he wants Hillary to stay in the race or actually wants Democrats to hate Hillary since he’s praising her. (Sadly, she recently accepted Rove’s New Math to pump up her chances at the Dem nomination. This is the same math that said Republicans would retain the majority in Congress in 2006. Oops.)

But the stench of the sewer really overflowed the pipe when George Stephanopoulos asked Karl about the Don Siegelman matter. Here’s a transcript, with your Tattlesnake’s remarks interspersed:

My Spare Time

For the past seven years I have been working on political websites.  The person that initially got me interested in political websites was none other than my good friend Misha, of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. 

I met a couple of you from my earliest site, The Political Pulpit.  That site morphed into a ‘blog, The Political Puzzle, with the naive thought of maybe having a place for civil debate between the Right and the Left.  Out of that, Grouchy thought he would like to have his own site, so Liberaltopia was born.

Political Pulpit and Political Puzzle have long gone on to that cyber-junkyard.  Liberaltopia has hung around, even though the daily readership is low and I don’t spend all that much time here — it pretty much runs itself, and besides, I enjoy reading what the regular writers have to say.

Up until about two months ago, I spent a lot of time over at Misha’s site — because I enjoyed a good argument.  But lately I have grown tired of constantly having to repeat the same thing, correct the same false talking points, and almost diagram sentences in order for the same people to get something through their heads.  Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great people over there, and while we seldom see eye-to-eye on some political things, there are a lot of other areas we do agree on.

I like to deal in facts.  I like to look at things subjectively.  I tend to call things as I see them.  I see the holes in the Right-wing talking points I hear on the radio, and I see the holes in the Left-wing talking points that I hear on the radio.

Lately I have noticed that we seem to be talking past each other.  We’ve been split into two sides — the Obama and the Hillary teams — and it is like we are playing this cyber version of dodgeball.  It is getting tedious, to say the least.

Many of you know my background.  I spent eighteen years in radio, and almost five crazy years as a sound engineer for a very famous “Grunge” band, (then spent a few years cleaning up from that)  So you know that I have a love for music.

Lately, I have stayed away from the politics for the most part.  Instead, I have been tinkering with my other website, Fueled by Coffee.  Most of the postings there are music that runs through my head on a daily basis.  I try to pick a song or an artist each day and post something about them along with the song that pops into my head.  Some of these songs are forgotten oldies by most of you, or you might never have heard them up until now.

What I find amazing about it is that unlike this site and all of the other sites that I’ve invested a lot of time and energy into, the Fueled by Coffee site gets an average of 8,300 hits per day!  My RSS Music Pick Feed gets an additional 3,400 hits.  All for me just posting a song or two each day, or some other bit of oddity.

I decided to post a Music Pick Feed in the right column of this site.  That way you can see what the daily pick is, and go check it out. 

So, if you don’t see me around here all that often, you will know where I am at.

Who is making the most out of it?

Okay, I understand that if your candidate is behind, and a minor scandal comes along that makes people notice you, then you will try to portray yourself as the victim and try to get as much traction out of it as you can.

Hillary gets a little careless in a statement concerning the reason why she is staying in the primary against all odds of winning.  She points out that the RFK assassination took place in June, and there hadn’t been a clear winner then either.

The Obama campaign, sensitive to the very real possibility of assassination of their candidate, interprets the statement as being a veiled prediction that maybe Barack Obama might get assassinated, so she is sticking around just in case. 

Keith Olbermann makes the issue part of his nightly rant, and Obama supporters spread Olbermann’s rant throughout the InterTubes.

Hillary makes the following statement, understanding that she made a serious gaffe:

“I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family, was in any way offensive.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, — a Clinton supporter — comes forward and says that she didn’t mean it that way.

Barack Obama comes forward and says that he knows how hectic campaigning is, and it is easy to get careless and say something that you  didn’t mean.  Obama gives her the benefit of the doubt.

It should be water under the bridge, a dead story, move on, nothing to see here.

But wait.

Now the Clinton camp is stoking the fire by accusing the Obama camp of fanning the flames.

“The Obama campaign … tried to take these words out of context,” Clinton campaign chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said on “Fox News Sunday.” “She was making a point merely about the time line.”

Yes, you gas bag.  We got the point — way back when.  She said, he said, they said.  It should be over now.  Why are we still talking about all of this?

Obama senior strategist David Axelrod dodged questions about why the campaign was still circulating commentaries criticizing Clinton even after suggesting it wants to move beyond the controversy.

“We’re beyond that issue now, so certainly we’re not trying to stir the issue up,” Axelrod said.

Dodged a question like, “When did you stop beating your wife?”  We know that they originally started circulating commentaries — the Clinton campaign would have done the same thing.  But I have serious doubts that the campaign would continue to circulate them after their candidate came out to say he thought is was all a big mistake.

Besides, strategically, it benefits the Obama camp to let it die quickly and not give the Clinton camp something to hold on to.  In short, the less publicity, the better.

Asked if Clinton has personally called Obama to apologize for the reference, McAuliffe said she has not, “nor should she.” He added, “Let’s be clear. This had nothing to with Senator Obama or his campaign.”

And he’s right, it isn’t important any more — so why keep harping on it?