Cool article, from the Tech column at New Scientist: Bond gadgets: Never say they will never work. 
[Obama Gets Some Advice On Race...] from arguably the last group of people who should be giving advice on race. I won't get into this too much, but I just want to say that rather than writing a memo to Obama on how to deal with "white voters" and the "race problem", Newsweek would have done better to send "white voters" a memo on how to deal with Obama and the "race problem." It was tragic to see so many interviews with folks in Kentucky and West Virginia saying point blank that they wouldn't vote for Obama because he was a colored. The conclusion always was, "Wow this is a huge problem for Obama," not "Wow. this is a huge problem for these people."Backpost finished on 2009-12-06.
I know that seems backward, but roll with me for a second: We can all agree that a presidential election is an extremely important event, arguably the most important mass event in the country. If you have voters who essentially disqualify candidates, on race alone, isn't that, like, kind of a problem for the voters? Please do not counter with "but blacks vote for Obama on race!!" As I've said before, it ain't the same dog. Blacks--because we've basically had no other choice--have a long record of voting for white people, and will continue to do so. A guy who openly says "I'm not voting for a black guy," get's no such consideration.
Anyway, my point is that this is of a piece with the widely held view that racism is basically a problem for black people, not whites, that our history of slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, housing covenants are an injury to black people, not to the larger country. We think about the Civil War, as a war to free the slaves. But here's another way to think about it: It cost us 700,000 American lives--and the near fracturing of our country--to accomplish something that the rest of the civilized world accomplished with the stroke of a pen. I'm simplifying I know, but the point is racism poisons everything and everyone. Black folks obviously pay the most obvious price, but we really aren't its only victims.
Obama also spoke about his uncle, who was part of the American brigade that helped to liberate Auschwitz. He said the family legend is that, upon returning from war, his uncle spent six months in an attic. “Now obviously, something had really affected him deeply, but at that time there just weren’t the kinds of facilities to help somebody work through that kind of pain,” Obama said. “That’s why this idea of making sure that every single veteran, when they are discharged, are screened for post-traumatic stress disorder and given the mental health services that they need – that’s why it’s so important.”Well it turns out that Mr. Barack O'Liar has lied again: it was not his uncle but his Great uncle. Liar. And it wasn't Auschwitz, it was Buchenwald! Super liar!
Buchenwald, on the other hand, while atrocious beyond normal human understanding, was merely a slave labor camp, and not historically abnormal in a time of war. The people who died there did so under the stress of work and disease, rather than as a deliberate attempt to wipe them off the planet. Which, of course, says much more about human nature and history than it does about the Nazis.It is crazy beyond comprehension. This was my commentary on BJ:
OK, I’m going to play the “Jew card” on this play. I am named after two (great) uncles who were killed in the Holocaust. I don’t know where they were killed; it could have been in Auschwitz, it could have been in their homes by a mob, it could have been in a ghetto. It does not matter.Taking it just one step further: the GOP first attacked the story, then found out it was basically true, so now they have to say that Obama's great-uncle was a weenie for suffering PTSD from seeing what was only horrific to a billionth degree and not a trillionth degree.
Seeing a pile of bodies – who for all I know contain my grandfather’s brothers – and to be told by ANYBODY that it is “merely” a slave camp is beyond obscene.
Yet, as my rational side is pulling me back, I have to say that this episode demonstrates just how much a Republican hates a Democrat: in order to attack a Democrat, a Republican will say that the Nazis weren’t so bad in Buchenwald.
Put another way, Republicans hate Democrats more than they hate Nazis.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton invoked the memory of slain Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy as she explained her persistence in the Democratic race on Friday, saying that although the media and the Barack Obama campaign have been trying to usher her from the race, "historically, that makes no sense."Wow. Yup, she did it, she said that she's staying in the race because of RFK's assassination. Nudge nudge, wink wink.*
"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," Clinton said in a meeting with the editorial board of the Argus Leader, a newspaper in South Dakota.
2:57 p.m., Yeager Airport, Charleston, W.Va.: A steep descent brings Clinton's plane to Charleston's hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane's wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.Hillary has been lying to us for a very long time (remember the planted question), but this is just so lowbrow and pathetic. Thank you Milbank for breaking the code of omerta and actually telling us facts about the farce.
From Yglesias about the new sensation, 538. He's right, because this has been my creeping criticism as well: It's really too bad that the folks behind Five Thirty Eight.com have gone and created such a compelling website based around state-by-state general election polling. It's all really well done and, as such, I can't really bring myself to look away. But this stuff is all really and truly meaningless. Six months ago, no polling showed Barack Obama winning the Democratic race, and no polling showed John McCain winning the Republican race and the general election is about six months away.
The problem here is that, once again, we see hawks not understanding what diplomacy is. But think of diplomacy as a kind of bargaining. Like you might do at a yard sale or something. Diplomacy doesn't exist at one end of a spectrum of coercive measures -- we try war, we try sanctions, we try diplomacy -- any more than bargaining operates on a smooth continuum with robbery. The point of bargaining with a vendor is to see whether or not it's possible to find mutually acceptable terms that improve both parties' positions. In terms of diplomacy with Iran, the idea isn't that Obama's steely gaze would force concessions out of the Iranians, the idea is that we might be able to give Iran something Iran deems more valuable than weapons-grade nuclear material, and in exchange we would get verifiable disarmament.And just in case Yglesias is too much of a squishy leftie to truly understand things, here are two recent examples of (sane) Republicans who agree, Sen. Specter (from Yglesias) and James Baker III (from Sullivan):
The "something" here would presumably be some form of security assurances plus an accommodation to Iranian interests in Iraq, along with Teheran and Washington laying out a pathway to gradual normalization of relations in exchange for an end to Iranian support for terrorism and Palestinian rejectionist groups. Would it be possible to strike such a deal? Maybe, maybe not. But the purpose of a negotiating session would be to find out by attempting to do the bargaining rather than having five more years of back-and-forth blog posts speculating about the possibility. The general theory of diplomacy is that rational actors should, through negotiations, be able to achieve positive-sum settlements rather than negative-sum conflicts. It's always possible that your would-be negotiating partner will prove irrational (as George W. Bush did when he rejected Iranian peace overtures several years back) and the process will fail, but it's worth attempting in good faith.
FiveThirtyEight.com has a good post (defined as 'agreeing with The Styx') called "Five Reasons why 2012 is a No-Go for Clinton" about why Hillary can't conceivably run in 2012. My biggest counterargument is that since she has shown absolutely no shame or good judgment this year, why would she learn it in 4 years? Ah well. But this is the key paragraph: 3. She has burned too many bridges within the party leadership.Again, if she didn't understand that now, why would she get that in the future?
If Clinton's goal is to become the new Ted Kennedy, that is harder to accomplish when Ted Kennedy is still alive and kicking, and happens to hate your guts. Calling Bill Richardson 'Judas', or saying that that John Kerry is 'dead to us': these are not the sort of actions that a political franchise takes when it is concerned about its long-term future. Clinton's comments to USA Today, which triggered the Kennedy outburst, may ultimately be remembered as the moment that her campaign, having committed the crime, jumped into the White Ford Bronco and tried to make the best of it. If superdelegates are still around in 2012, she is not likely to have the head start with them that she did in this cycle.
Citing an Associated Press analysis "that found how Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me," she went on to say: "There's a pattern emerging here."Conason, by aligning himself with the loopy Wilentz, shows that he doesn't entirely get the depravity of Hillary... yet even he recognizes the George Wallace-ness of Hillary. It's as if she's completed the transformation of Nixon and is pursuing her own Southern Strategy.
There is indeed a pattern emerging -- and it is a pattern that must dismay everyone who admires the Clintons and has defended them against the charge that they are exploiting racial divisions.
As Sean Wilentz and others have argued, there was no ugly subtext to her innocuous remark about the different roles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baines Johnson in the civil rights crusade, although several prominent Obama supporters promoted that smear. And if Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama and Jesse Jackson was badly timed and clumsy, that too fell within the bounds of acceptable commentary. Indeed, the discussion of ethnic and racial voting preferences is not only fair but unavoidable and utterly mundane in American politics.
But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?
... The Democratic Party can't celebrate the triumph of Barack Obama because the Democratic Party is busy having a breakdown. You could call it a breakdown over the issues of race and gender, but its real source is simply Hillary Clinton. Whose entire campaign at this point is about exploiting race and gender.There's more.
Here's the first place an outsider could see the tensions that have taken hold: on CNN Tuesday night, in the famous Brazile-Begala smackdown. Paul Begala wore the smile of the 1990s, the one in which there is no connection between the shape of the mouth and what the mouth says. All is mask. Donna Brazile was having none of it.
Mr. Begala more or less accused the Obama people of not caring about white voters: "[If] there's a new Democratic Party that somehow doesn't need or want white working-class people and Latinos, well, count me out." And: "We cannot win with eggheads and African Americans." That, he said, was the old, losing, Dukakis coalition.
"Paul, baby," Ms. Brazile, who is undeclared, began her response, "we need to not divide and polarize the Democratic Party. . . . So stop the divisions. Stop trying to split us into these groups, Paul, because you and I know . . . how Democrats win, and to simply suggest that Hillary's coalition is better than Obama's, Obama's is better than Hillary's -- no. We have a big party, Paul." And: "Just don't divide me and tell me I cannot stand in Hillary's camp because I'm black, and I can't stand in Obama's camp because I'm female. Because I'm both. . . . Don't start with me, baby." Finally: "It's our party, Paul. Don't say my party. It's our party. Because it's time that we bring the party back together, Paul."
In case you didn't get what was behind that exchange, Mrs. Clinton spent this week making it clear. In a jaw-dropping interview in USA Today on Thursday, she said, "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on." As evidence she cited an Associated Press report that, she said, "found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? "Even Richard Nixon didn't say white," an Obama supporter said, "even with the Southern strategy."
If John McCain said, "I got the white vote, baby!" his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party.
To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical "the black guy can't win but the white girl can" is -- well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.
"She has unleashed the gates of hell," a longtime party leader told me. "She's saying, 'He's not one of us.'"
Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters — including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.Let's see an instant replay? "Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."
"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.
Clinton's blunt remarks about race came a day after primaries in Indiana and North Carolina dealt symbolic and mathematical blows to her White House ambitions.
After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton,... will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two,...Will shows he's smart because he recognizes that Obama is consistently underestimated - which people may do less since he has just defeated the most talented political couple since FDR-Eleanor - and that he is very much like a liberal Reagan. Go-bama! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted, by counting each African-American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).
"We," says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, "don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric." Mere numbers? Heaven forefend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that every military defeat can be explained by two words: "too late." Too late in anticipating danger, too late in preparing for it, too late in taking action. Clinton's political defeat can be similarly explained -- too late in recognizing that the electorate does not acknowledge her entitlement to the presidency, too late in understanding that she had a serious challenger, too late in anticipating that she would not dispatch Barack Obama by Super Tuesday (Feb. 5), too late in planning for the special challenges of caucus states, too late in channeling her inner shot-and-a-beer hard hat.
Most of all, she was too late in understanding how much the Democratic Party's mania for "fairness," as mandated by liberals like her, has, by forbidding winner-take-all primaries, made it nearly impossible for her to overcome Obama's early lead in delegates.
...
Tuesday night must have been almost as much fun for John McCain as for Obama. The Republican brand has been badly smudged by recent foreign and domestic policies, which are the only kinds there are, so McCain's hopes rest on the still-unattached cohort called "Reagan Democrats," who still seem somewhat resistant to Obama.
McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.
From the estimable Rabbi Gil Student over at Hirhurim; he uploaded two books on Zionist Halakha: As a followup to Virtue pt 1, here's a point from Time Magazine via TPM (emphasis mine): Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates.Backpost finished 2009-12-06.
Picture of Celebration from the Jerusalem Post.
At any rate, I feel a profound sense of relief the whole nomination process is finally over.The Styx is saving relief for when Hillary finally walks off the stage or Obama goes over 2025.
I guess I am just not used to the messy way you all do things here in the Democratic party, but these past few months have been excruciating. The primary, for me at least, was over after March 5th, when she failed to blow him out in the firewall state of Texas, but as a new member of the party I guess I am in the wing where "firewall" and "math" still mean things.Just to emphasize, this was a new experience for many Democrats and a singular product of Hillary Clinton's psyche. I don't remember anyone quite as disgusting, empty and narcissistic in the party since, uh, since Woodrow Wilson? William Jennigs Bryan? Hmph.
So I endured another month of listening to certain wings of a party (that, again, I am a newcomer to) do their best NRO and Weekly Standard impressions and talk about electability, stealth Muslims, lapel pins, patriotism, new new delegate math, Rev. Wright, and whatever else they could dream up.Well done. And, play ball!
Whatever. She threw everything she had at him. He weathered the storm. Consider him vetted. Consider Rev. Wright kicked in the junk. Consider me relieved. Now, can we get to the very serious business of dismantling the GOP? I have a very serious axe to grind, and it is deeply, deeply personal for me. There are a bunch of frauds, crooks, and phonies with whom I have a serious grudge that I want to settle. You see, I still have my “Peace Through Strength” button from when I campaigned for Reagan. I believed in limited government, I believed in a strong national defense, I believed in fiscal restraint and balanced budgets and I believed in personal integrity and individual liberty and personal freedom.
I am pissed. I want the frothing nutters, the fraudulent hucksters, the race-baiters, the anti-science frauds, the anti-intellectuals, the gay-bashers, the big-money cheats, the torture fetishists, the religious nuts, the tax and spenders, the xenophobes, and the phonies to pay. I want payback. I want the people who ruined my former party relegated to permanent minority status. I know I am a newly minted Democrat, and, as such, it is ballsy for me to start telling you what I want from the party, but this is my website and you are just going to have to deal with my opinion.
I am under no illusion I will buy into everything Barack Obama puts forward, but I am damned sure convinced he is a decent man who, at the very least, will restore a sense of competence to the national stage. I am willing to meet most Democrats half-way, and I am already doing everything I can to get this man elected. I think Obama will act in good faith for this nation, and I am responding in kind. His policies are not outlandish or crazy or uber-left- they reflect a rational, and I would argue, a decent and progressive way forward out of the mess I helped to create. I won’t like all of them, and I will not agree with all of them, but there is no chance that I will ever be President, so perfect agreement is never a possibility.
And don’t get me wrong- I am not for Obama because of what I am against. I am for Obama because he is a decent man, a break from the past, and really a once in a lifetime opportunity. He has treated us like adults throughout this primary, and it is time to act like adults. There will be times we feel he lets us all down, but we are not electing a deity. We are electing a leader, and Obama is that leader. It is time to get past the bullshit of the last 20 years, the battles I am really tired of fighting, and time to turn our attention to the really important issues of the day- the economy, the budget, our international presence, our crumbling infrastructure, our military, medicare and medicaid and social security, and on and on and on.
If Barack Obama was not your your preferred candidate, I am sorry that person did not win, but it is time to remember that the target is John McCain and the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. If you can not accept that and help move us forward, please at least get out of the way.
"It has become popular in conservative circles these days to suggest that "you just gotta admire her tenacity," a sentiment that is advanced at her campaign rallies...
But what is there to admire about this so-called "tenacity"? Clinton began this campaign with a financial edge, the support of a popular former Democratic president, a built-in political apparatus, a consistent lead of more than 20 points in national polls, and more than a hundred superdelegates.
If a candidate starts off with all of those advantages and is too stubborn to drop out of the race, it's no surprise that she is still hanging on.
There is absolutely nothing admirable about a politician so narcissistic and hungry for power that she is willing to say or do whatever suits her political interests at any given moment. If the Republican Party has declined to the point where conservatives are so worried about defeating a freshman Senator that they are rooting for Clinton to do their dirty work for them, it is simply pathetic,"
One of Sullivan's readers points out why making the SAT analogy of Obama:Clinton = JFK:LBJ isn't true (emphasis/bold mine): Kennedy/Johnson and Obama/Clinton don't compare. Johnson was not a serious contender for the presidency against Kennedy in the way that Clinton is against Obama. The "hatred" between Kennedy and Johnson was ideological and political but not formed in battle, so to speak, as is the case with Obama and Clinton. Kennedy's major opponent was not Lyndon Johnson. It was Hubert Humphrey. And even then, one has to use "major opponent" loosely. Kennedy steamrolled everyone in the primaries. Kennedy racked up 85 percent of the vote in NH, 64 percent in IL, 92 percent in MA, 71 percent in PA, 81 percent in IN, 88 percent in NB, and 70 percent in MD. Another thing is that Humphrey wasn't even a consistent second place contender for the presidency. He ran second to Kennedy only in Wisconsin (Kennedy 56.5/Humphrey 43.5) and West Virginia (Kennedy 60.8/Humphrey 39.2). The only contests Humphrey won were DC and South Dakota where Kennedy, apparently, was not on the ballot. Johnson's biggest vote total in the 1960 primaries was 3.9 percent.I haven't checked the facts, but it sounds plausible.
Humphrey's totals in the other primaries was usually in the low single digits. When Humphrey dropped out Lyndon Johnson was considered the only serious contender but again "serious" has to be used loosely. In the primaries, Johnson was a statistical nothing. The only reason that Humphrey and Johnson were favored is because, in spite of the primaries, the smoke-filled room was still the way things were done and party bosses really chose the nominee and that's where I see a comparison between the election 1960 and election 2008. The party bosses could not ignore Kennedy's impressive primary wins much as the superdelegates will not be able to ignore Obama's admittedly less impressive pledged delegate and popular vote lead.
American flag lapel pins had been distributed to members before the president spoke to Congress on April 2, 1917, requesting a declaration of war. It took a certain obdurate courage to refuse to wear the colors; Senator La Follette was among the refusers, as was the Mississippi senator Vardaman. (Wilson had called for “stern repression” of disloyalty in his speech of April 2–a Prussian formulation that ought to have set American throats to gagging.)It's possible the story is true but it sounds almost mythic. I don't have Kaufmann's book and I don't know his ultimate source, but since it's a new book, it's not inconceivable that he is trying to apply current events to earlier times.
I vehemently disagree with the sentiment of reader "RP" in the mega-meta post, especially in light of David Kurtz' MSNBC clip. First of all, the whole "Hillary as fighter" canard doesn't play in reality. Her fighting may have gotten her a few-popular-vote pushes every few days before critical primaries, but she is still losing. Bottom line, her fighting can't even get her to win Democrats, so how is she going to get independents. It's a Hillary-supporter myth that her fightingness is an asset.Update: Menendez tries to ratchet down the crazy here.
But the MSNBC clip shows something more sobering which is that the press does not give Democrats the same free-ride that was given to Bush (and now to McCain). We saw this under Bill Clinton; the press was all over everything he did. In fact, I'd assume one reason why you started your blog was because of the lack of scrutiny given to what Bush did in the recount (and for the whole primary/general in 2000).
Hillary (and Obama) will be given heavy crazy scrutiny. Her bellicosity and dirty tricks won't get any traction against McCain because the rules are different. But just as she didn't understand the rules for the primaries, she - or her supporters - don't understand the rules for the general either.
The demagogic pandering prompted the Clinton campaign to create another ad to tout her ridiculous idea — the second commercial this week — and bash Barack Obama for taking reality seriously. The ad, which started airing in Indiana yesterday, says Clinton’s proposal would “save families $8 billion,” adding, “Barack Obama says that’s just pennies.” The ad concludes that Obama would “make you keep paying that tax, instead of big oil.”h/t link and pic JC,BJ
The irony, of course, is that Clinton’s plan would ensure that the oil companies “end up the biggest beneficiaries.” Everything about Clinton’s idea is backwards — consumers lose, the environment loses, conservation loses, Big Oil wins. Clinton knows all of this — she’s far too smart to believe otherwise — but she insists on shamelessly pandering anyway.
The new ad, as it turns out, was only part of yesterday’s offensive display.
On Thursday, the Clinton campaign said policy experts no longer matter, and added a Bush-like ultimatum to congressional Democrats: “Do they stand with the hard-pressed Americans who are trying to pay their gas bills at the gas station or do they once again stand with the oil companies? I want to know where people stand and I want them to tell us, are they with us or against us when it comes to taking on the oil companies?” (Remember, the biggest beneficiaries of her plan are the oil companies.)
On Friday, the Clinton campaign actually managed to make an insulting situation even more offensive by accusing those who care about reality of being elitist: “Clinton strategist Geoff Garin deployed [the elitism card] on a conference call with reporters, and Clinton used the tactic on the trail: ‘I find it, frankly, a little offensive that people who don’t have to worry about filling up their gas tank or what they buy when they go to the supermarket think it’s somehow illegitimate to provide relief for … millions and millions of Americans.’”
To press her point, Clinton adopted one of the Republicans’ favorite tactics: she announced she would go forward with her idea of introducing legislation, forcing Democrats to either vote against a popular-but-ridiculous idea in an election year, or vote for a policy that would boost oil company profits and undermine the environment.
She must be so proud.But no new respect has been quite so peculiar as that given by some on the right to Hillary Clinton--since 1992 their ultimate nightmare--whose possible triumph in this year's election has been the source of their most intense fear. Lately, however, a strange thing has happened: A tactical hope to see her campaign flourish--to keep the brawl going and knock dents in Obama--has changed to, at least in some cases, a grudging respect for the lady herself. Actually, they may not have changed quite so much as she has (who knows, perhaps merely changed in her image and tactics), but the Hillary of May 2008 is radically different from the Hillary of two months ago, much less the one of last year, or of eight years back. And this one (at least till the nomination is settled) has some traits the right wing can love.Backpost finished 2009-12-06.
First of all, she is tough. Boy, is she tough. Next to John McCain's torture and FDR's polio (or John Kennedy's terrible health and PT-109 put together), she has arguably been through more harrowing times than any major contender in history. Hillary may not have been tortured for six years by the North Vietnamese, but her marriage to Bill could have seemed the equivalent....{JC: Charming, eh. Oh they do go on}
