Small children and the excitable--and no, I don't intend that personally--turn your heads. Joe Wilson has torn into Barack Obama, and it ain't pretty.

The subject of Wilson's diatribe is what a former President has referred to as "a fairy tale." I refer, of course, to the yeoman service Senator Obama has gotten out of his eloquent 2002 speech in opposition to the future Iraq War. Senator Obama, who also looks very nice in a suit, spoke well and presciently that day, and in my mind deserves to reap substantial benefit from having said the right thing at the right time.

I've got to start out with an apology because my mouth (or typing fingers) has/have been writing checks I might not be able to cash. I promised a big diary on this subject earlier in the week, and here it is Saturday, three days before Super Tuesday, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through.

At this point, it looks like the way to go is to publish what I've got and describe the rest. Whether I'll ever finish this puppy I can't say at the moment but I do want to get something out there.

**

Even though it’s starting to look like this year is going to top 1998 for Clinton-bashing, nothing has surprised me quite as much as the virulent and virtually universal reaction to Hillary Clinton’s recent announcement that she would ask her delegates to vote to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations. You know, I would have some choice adjectives for this, but apparently I would tick off everybody in the world if I let ‘em fly, so I’ll try and stick pretty close to the facts.

In my recent "lying" diary, I got off to what might have been a somewhat tangential start, as I acknowledged to Hobbesist, when I opened the discussion by distinguishing between "lies" and "spin."

I mention this now because this diary is about the nature of spin, fair spin, and unfair spin, but it's not really meant as a commentary on the other diary, as much as it might seem to be. Nor, despite the fact that I'm going to spend a fair bit of time discussing how Obama and Clinton spin a certain issue, is this diary intended to follow in the highly partisan vein I have been writing in this week, and to which I plan to return.

And by the way, as a sidethought, there was a meaningless Democratic primary contest yesterday in a state where all the candidates had campaigned the same amount, except for Obama, who ran national TV that played in the state while nobody else did.

In this meaningless contest in the nation's most important electoral swing state, 1.7 million Florida Democrats cast meaningless Presidential ballots yesterday, with Hillary Clinton receiving just over 50% of the meaningless vote. Clinton received over 850,000 meaningless Florida votes herself, which is a little over 78% of the total number of votes Obama has received in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and Florida combined.

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings recently wrote a piece called “Lies and Democracy.” “Lies and Democracy” purports to be a piece about how folks are forced to become experts in order to deal with lying politicians, but the bulk of it is focused on the “lies” of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

I don’t think the Clintons are “liars.” I do think they are “spinners.” I also think that every other successful politician is a “spinner,” and that most politicians do not stick to the truth so well as do the Clintons. To take a stab at showing that, I want to take Hilzoy’s piece, which is the very best and most detailed piece I have run across in either the blogosphere or the MSM, take on the “lies” that Hilzoy writes about, and show that in each instance the same kind of statements, and worse, come from Obama and his camp.

I choose Obama for mostly obvious reasons.  First, if as I posit, all successful politicians take similar liberties with the truth, then it is meaningless in and of itself to show that any particular politician spins/lies, and the only thing that matters is whether politician X spins/lies more/worse than his/her opponent.  In other words, the spin of either Clinton and Obama is most usefully looked at as a comparison to the other, as opposed to as an absolute.

Really, I'm not seeing a there there, even though prominent middle-of-the-party Democrats like Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum are hyper-ventilating over the Clintons' so-called racist campaign to the point where they appear to be just about ready to start a third party.

But not only do I not see a "pattern" of racism, I don't see any racism at all.

I had thought that the Cuomo remark had a racist tinge, until today when I got a chance to look at a partial transcript and saw that he clearly wasn't talking about Obama at all, but simply about the difference between retail and wholesale politics. His words could've been just as well referring to George Bush, and truly, the phrase "shuck and jive" is not in and of itself off-limits.

I'm not crazy about the idea of taking on Matt Stoller, a hard fighter for Democrats from whose writings I have derived a lot of value and knowledge for some time now. But I feel compelled to comment on one of Stoller's latest anti-Clinton pieces, a March 30, 2007 blog entry entitled "The Tacky Clintonista-CBC-Fox News Backstory."

I don't claim any kind of expertise or knowledge on the facts underlying Stoller's story. All I can tell you is that the sources Stoller cites in the piece not only don't support the conclusions Stoller draws, but in fact reveal that there's an entire other side to the story that Stoller doesn't mention.

Assuming that the House and Senate can reconcile a few differences in committee, it looks like the Democrats really are going to send the President an Iraq funding bill with a timetable attached. The passage of similar bills in the House and Senate was an important accomplishment and one that really didn't look much like it was going to happen until it suddenly did. It sends an important signal to the world, the sending of which was very strongly suggested by the American electorate last November and has been virtually demanded by a large and powerful chunk of the majority's base.

Having sent the signal, the majority should now stop fighting. I think it will.

MSNBC just ran an interview between NBC's Pete Williams and Alberto Gonzales. I can only think that Gonzales thought that Williams, a Bush I Pentagon spokesperson, would somehow find a way to make the whole thing smell like a rose.

Didn't work that way. Williams softballed it a bit but was tough enough to keep his journalist's bona fides. Which was, in turn, plenty tough to force Gonzales to launch into extended and ridiculous lies.

Portions of the transcript follow. Text in italics are my comments.

TRANSCRIPT

Pete Williams: Mr. Attorney General, what is it that you would like people to know about this controversy?

Up til now, the White House has insisted that the idea for sacking the U.S. Attorneys came from White House Counsel Harriet Miers in February 2005, and that the idea was "immediately rejected" by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Not so fast. According to ABC News, a new document dump will be made as soon as tomorrow (Friday), contradicting both those stories.