Can you feel it?

It‘s coming ....

Here‘s why. Oh, and this, too.

Why They Hate Obama—this, and this.

Our “Thought for the Day” comes from Matt Yglesias, always a rich source of aphoristic wisdom:

“I checked out Frontline’s ‘Bush’s War’ last night. It was, to me, physically difficult to watch. The idea of seriously sitting down to interview Richard Perle about Iraq—your interviewer here, your cameraman there, etc.—is, to me, vaguely repulsive. How could you listen to him when you ought to be punching him?”

If you thought the brouhaha over Pat Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire, was major, wait until the War Party gets its hands on Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World! Due out the end of May, and I can hardly wait ....

Today, John McCain is posing as a “conservative” Republican: yesterday, he was wondering why no one in the Democratic party was asking him to switch parties—this interesting piece in this morning’s New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller details what the McCainiacs would rather not talk about.

Douglas W. Kmiec—former head of the Office of Legal Counsel (U.S. Assistant Attorney General) for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, former Dean of the law school at The Catholic University of America, and endorses Barack Obama. Along with Professor Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School, he headed the Romney for President Committee on the Courts and the Constitution.

“”

From a review by Micahel Tomasky of Bill Kauffman’s Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Anti-War Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism, in Democracy:

“The Republican Party has become, in short, a party of empire. The conservative movement is now a movement dedicated to American hegemonic dominion. And, given the lack of debate, both will likely remain that way for some time. These statements are true not only of the major presidential candidates, but of the vast majority of Republicans in Congress, most conservative foreign-policy think-tankers, and most high-level GOP operatives involved in policy-making. If the travesty that was our invasion of Iraq has not had the power to change these facts, it is difficult to imagine what set of circumstances could.”

This is why I think that the “entryist” strategy of the Ron Paul movement in the GOP—while admirable and carried out with amazing skill and persistence—is largely doomed to frustration, if not total failure. The goal of such an effort has to be a “third” party, one which will—hopefully—come to supplant the “official” GOP.

“I don’t want to run the world ...”:

A point I made in my recent interview with Antiwar.com Radio: if you go over to National Review, the spectacle of the neocons yelping and spitting out their hatred of Obama should clarify, once and for all, what this presidential election is going to be all about. As Andrew Bacevich put it in a recent issue of The American Conservative, “Give the neocons this much: they appreciate the stakes.” Now, it seems, a sliver of light has broken through the nearly unrelieved darkness over at “The Corner,” in the form of Charles Murray’s commentary on Obama’s recent speech on race:

“It’s about time that people who disagree with Obama’s politics recognize that he is genuinely different. When he talks, he sounds like a real human being, not a politician. I’m not referring to the speechifying, but to the way he comes across all the time. We’ve had lots of charming politicians. I cannot think of another politician in my lifetime who conveys so much sense of talking to individuals, and talking to them in ways that he sees as one side of a dialogue. Conservatives who insist that he’s nothing but an even slicker Bill Clinton are missing a reality about him, and at their peril.

“I can’t vote for him. He is an honest-to-God lefty. He apparently has learned nothing from the 1960s. His Supreme Court nominees would be disasters. And maybe he is too green and has lived too much of his adult life in a politically correct bubble. But the other day he talked about race in ways that no other major politician has tried to do, with a level of honesty that no other major politician has dared, and with more insight than any other major politician possesses. Not bad.”
Amen.

This interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com Radio turned out a lot better than I remembered. I’m not always at my best in the morning, and that morning in particular was, as I recall, rather rocky – yet I almost sound thoughtful, although maybe I was just tired.

Subjects covered: Have I become an Obamacon? War with Iran—is it in the cards? A good rule of thumb: whatever the neocons are pushing, push in the opposite direction (it almost never fails!). Also: the Old Right, the Ron Paul phenomenon, and the horrific onslaught of old age.