Will Perry is the son of Bob Perry, a major funder of the Swift Boat Vets and the G.O.P. Will is also a G.O.P. donor, although he gives less than his father. From the Fort Bend Star:

I don’t like to write about divorces. There’s seldom a happy ending and it is such nasty, personal business. But when egregious actions occur…I reserve the right to expose those actions to the public…Under questioning by Laura Perry’s attorney, Will Perry admitted he has been a sexual addict for many years, but had quit attending Sex Addicts Anonymous in January, 2008. He said he had sex with “probably” 20 prostitutes since his marriage. During this testimony, Mrs. Perry left the courtroom and her uncontrollable sobs in the hall could be heard inside. A chart in Will Perry’s handwriting that he had drawn several years ago tracing his sexual addiction blamed his sexual addiction problems on his father who he claimed was an alcoholic and verbally abusive.

A number of readers complained to me or to Harper’s about that delightful Hillary-as-Hitler video I posted the other day, which was created by comedian James Adomian. But the public has spoken (or rather, clicked), and the critics appear to be in the minority:

First uploaded to YouTube May 7, “Hillary’s Downfall” has tallied more than 300,000 views. The bump in views skyrocketed Adomian’s account to the sixth-most-viewed comedian slot this week, into the realm of YouTube web comedy staples like Michael Buckley and College Humor’s video channel…”I don’t have the resources to release my complaints in real time, like on a talk show,” said Adomian. “So I thought it was cathartic to imagine what it would be like in Hillary’s bunker when they got the bad news [that she’d lost the nomination].”

That’s the question raised by this terrific Wall Street Journal story. The firm is GlobalOptions, an extremely well-connected company run by, among others, former FBI and CIA officials. The Kazakh government apparently retained GlobalOptions to monitor, and possibly seek to derail, a Justice Department investigation into James Giffen, an American oilman who is suspected of paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to President Nursultan Nazarbayev.

Dariga Nazarbayeva, the Kazakh president’s powerful daughter, reportedly lined up the services of the private-security firm. (I met Dariga a few years ago at a reception at the Washington offices of GlobalOptions. She invited me to visit Kazakhstan and told me that if I took her up on the invitation I was certain to meet some beautiful local women. Quite a strange encounter.) In addition to being extremely “murky” in its operations, GlobalOptions was also (as I reported a few years ago) an Iraq war profiteer.

I know Hillary Clinton is hard up for dough, but should her campaign really have taken money from a suspected (and subsequently convicted) kickback conspirator? In June of 2007, attorney Melvyn Weiss donated $4,600 to Clinton’s campaign, the legal maximum. By then Weiss was reportedly under investigation for paying kickbacks to people who served as lead plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits that netted his New York law firm hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.

Weiss was indicted on those charges three months later. He agreed to plead guilty this March and did so formally in April. According to a story at cbsnews.com, the “kickback scheme allowed the firm’s attorneys to be among the first to file litigation and secure the lucrative position as lead plaintiffs’ counsel.” The story said that Weiss’s firm “made an estimated $250 million over two decades by filing legal actions on behalf of professional plaintiffs who received $11.3 million in kickbacks,” and that Weiss was ordered to “pay nearly $10 million in fines and forfeiture penalties, and could be sentenced to up to 33 months in prison at a later hearing.” [MORE . . .]

Some readers of Martin Amis’s new collection of essays, The Second Plane: Terror and Boredom (Alfred A. Knopf), have found the marriage of nouns in its subtitle a consternation, an inglorious instance of Martin Aimless. “[H]e repeatedly draws a nonsensical analogy between terrorism and boredom,” wrote Michiko Kakutani, [MORE . . .]

From: Gary McCardell

Subject: Exclusive Video: Hillary in the Führerbunker, by Ken Silverstein, May 12, 2008

On your website, Ken Silverstein posted a link to a video political parody showing a movie portrayal of Hitler in his bunker raging insanely at his defeat with subtitles as though it were Hillary Clinton reacting to the primary results in Indiana and North Carolina. [MORE . . .]

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that Sheldon Adlelson, a major donor to the G.O.P., has been questioned by police as part of a corruption probe. S. Daniel Abraham of Slim-Fast, a big Democratic donor, is also being questioned. Worth reading.

The Washington Post reports today that Barack Obama and John McCain are both working to

freeze out “527″ groups—named after a provision in the tax code—which are not allowed to openly support a candidate but have helped define recent elections through negative advertising.

[MORE . . .]

Josiah Mitchell Morse

Josiah Mitchell Morse was blessed, by birth, with a beautiful American name, but such luck hasn’t been enough to ensure him and his work a place in the cultural memory. As of this morning, for example, a Wikipedia search assures us of Morse’s insignificance, offering only a grim ‘there is no page titled…’ alert. Using an earlier measure of a culture’s indifference to the strenuous exertions of its members, we might gauge Morse’s irrelevance, thus: none of his serious, funny, learned, angry, angering books has remained in print. [MORE . . .]

Sidney Blumenthal has written for The New Republic, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and most recently served as Washington editor to Salon.com and as a contributor to The Guardian. He is one of America’s foremost political commentators, and also has a noteworthy track-record of political engagement. He served as an assistant and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and is currently a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. He was also executive producer for the Oscar Award-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Blumenthal has just published a collection of essays entitled The Strange Death of Republican America. I put six questions to him on the subject of his current book.

1. You have modeled your book, at least to a degree, on George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, the 1935 classic of modern political historiography that linked the demise of the Liberal Party to dramatic external changes–the political ascendancy of trade unionism, the civil war in Ireland, and so forth. But there’s a difference, isn’t there? When Dangerfield wrote the Liberal Party really was on the verge of extinction. But today you’re effectively forecasting doom for the Republicans. Not only do the Republicans cling to power in the Executive Branch, they have arguably succeeded in a sweeping reallocation of power from the other branches to the Executive. And they have greatly consolidated their control of the Judicial branch. Only in the legislature have the Democrats staged a comeback, and even there the margins are narrow and they rest on a single election in 2006. Admittedly George W. Bush has emerged as the most unpopular president of modern times, but America has developed a very stable two-party system, and part of that stability comes from a party’s rejection of its failed leaders. In the 2008 presidential race, the Republicans rejected the two candidates who positioned themselves as Bush’s heirs (Romney and Giuliani) in favor of John McCain, the man who was Bush’s nemesis in 2000. Don’t the signs point to an internal realignment within the G.O.P. that positions the party to hold on to the only part of the government that seems to matter, the Executive? Doesn’t that make your prognosis premature? [MORE . . .]

Barack Obama recently severed all links with Robert Malley, an informal Middle East policy adviser, after the latter “confessed” that he had met with the Palestinian group Hamas. And in a recent interview, Obama said, “We don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy…It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, ‘This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,’ and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.”

This prompted Luca Menato, my favorite correspondent from overseas, to write: [MORE . . .]

Caught in the Web, 1860.

U.S. military reports on the interrogation of four captured Shia militia members concluded that Hezbollah was training small groups of Iraqi insurgents in Iran. John Bolton, ex-ambassador to the United Nations, said that attacking Iran was “really the most prudent thing to do”; the Iraqi government said that it would conduct its own inquiry. “We do not want to start a conflict with Iran,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. “We need our own government documentation of this interference, not from the Americans, not from the media.” The U.S.-backed government of Lebanon tried to dismantle Hezbollah's extensive telecommunications network there, and Hezbollah temporarily seized half of Beirut. “The hand that touches the weapons of the resistance,” said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “will be cut off.” One Wing, a bald eagle that lost its other wing in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, died of a heart tumor, shortly after the death of its mate, The Old Witch; three northern elephant seals were found shot in the head, lying in pools of blood, in San Simeon, California, near the Hearst castle. Oil exceeded $125 a barrel. Refined french-fry grease was 32 cents per pound, up 20 cents from 2006. [MORE . . .]

Well, I may be soft on Hillary, but this is very funny. (Not safe for work or for the easily offended.)

Doug Goodyear, who had been picked by John McCain’s campaign to run the G.O.P. convention this summer, resigned over the weekend after Newsweek reported that a lobbying firm he heads once represented Burma. The DCI Group–Goodyear is its CEO–“was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today,” said Newsweek.

Some of McCain’s allies, the magazine added, worried that Goodyear’s selection to run the convention “could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists.” (Since McCain is, in fact, surrounded by lobbyists, it’s easy to see the source of that “perception.”) [MORE . . .]

Saturday May 10th 2:30PM: You are invited to a free screening of the 2008 Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side at Princeton University, 100 Robertson Hall, Princeton, New Jersey. The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

Roger Clark–Professor of Law, Rutgers University-Camden [MORE . . .]

A number of readers emailed about yesterday’s post on why, for reasons I myself find baffling, I’ve started feeling sympathetic toward Hillary Clinton. None of the emails were friendly, but they raised a lot of good points. (I would note here that I said I sympathized with Hillary for certain reasons—mostly because the media, in general, hate her. I didn’t say I preferred her to Obama. Even though I’m not sold on Obama, his politics are far more interesting than Hillary’s, and the latter’s 2002 vote on Iraq was unforgivable, as I’ve written before. Beyond that, the idea of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton is too much to bear.) Below, I include a particularly interesting note, from a reader who wished to remain anonymous, that makes a strong case against Clinton and for Obama.

I think, as is often the case with political leaders, people are using Hillary Clinton as a random “projection field” for their own read on how the system should work. That is to say—as I think I’ve mentioned to you before—the strongest segment of Clinton’s base seems to me to be the people who want to re-fight the battles of the 90s: to punish the Republicans at the polls, to strong-arm them in Congress, to dilate on all the noble liberal motives that were thwarted by Gingrich and company. While I sympathize with and in some ways share these impulses, I also think they’re spectacularly ill-suited to this political moment, when even stout conservative partisans concede that they’re likely to lose ground in both the House and Senate, and the Democrats have the wind at their backs.

Put in simplest terms, I think Obama understands this moment in a way that Hillary doesn’t (and cannot afford to) understand. Hillary’s skill set, like that of her husband, works only when she can present herself as beleaguered, hemmed in by irrational opponents who deride her personally. It’s true that I find such politics distasteful—both the dumb-ass pursuit of centrist Democrats pushing a Republican agenda in power as though they were some kind of violent cohort of secular socialist revolutionaries, and the no-less-oafish effort to depict conservative political power as a dark mystical force that can be defeated only by an authentic battle-tested victim of the right’s predations (or a bloodthirsty monster, if you will).

What’s frustrating in all this is that it seems almost beside the point to object to Hillary’s candidacy—which I most emphatically do—on grounds of her policy positions. There’s her purist posturing on the health-care mandate she all but single-handedly destroyed in 1993; her pandering on the “gas tax holiday”; and—worst of all in my book—her hollow symbolic pose as a fire-breathing populist when she actively backed all sorts of worker-damaging policies in the White House, from the ratification of NAFTA to the repeal of Glass–Steagall.

A lesser but still baleful strain of her ideology is what a friend of mine calls “pedo-centric liberalism”: the effort to define liberal governance as an extended exercise in kiddie protection. Hence, her epically time-wasting hearings in the Senate (abetted by that equally self-regarding thug Lieberman) on the graphic content of videogames; hence, her long tutelage at the child-fetishizing feet of Marion Wright Edelman. I’ve got nothing against kids per se, mind you—it’s just that their recruitment as “poster children” in the effort to resuscitate liberal politics diminishes both them and whatever remains of liberal thinking and legislating in these dark times. It’s also empirically untrue that this generation of children is in some grave moral peril thanks to the digital gadgets they covet. There’s no shortage of real problems—like trade, energy policy, the real costs of environmental upgrades, a national industrial policy—that the Dems haven’t even started to address in any elementary fashion. As Roger Waters said, leave those kids alone.

At the end of the day, I don’t give a shit whether candidate A or candidate B has a self-image as a fighter, a reformer, a hope-pusher, or what have you. I just care about their ability to deliver some semblance of economic equity while forthrightly acknowledging that imperialism in the service of daft efforts to re-engineer parts of the world and systems of belief we know nothing about is a really, really bad idea. (Don’t get me started on Hillary’s mind-bending efforts to reel back her 2002 vote on the Iraq use of force resolution without conceding it was a mistake.) Obama, while no angel himself, stands a far better chance of delivering on some of these basic agenda items, by virtue of record, temperament and—most of all, I think—his salutary impatience with the dorm-room tenor of Boomer politics. Also—no small thing, this—he’s shown a striking ability to bring more people into the party. Hillary at best mobilizes a pre-existing Dem base that is, in all sorts of demographic measures, shrinking. If you cleave to the sentimental notion that the Dems should be the party of the ordinary people’s interests, counterposed to the G.O.P.’s standing as the party of money and business, then you want candidates at the top of the ticket who can use a broader voting base to fight the influence of today’s robber-baron class.

Anyway, this is all pretty much academic, since Obama’s going to be the nominee, barring a Michigan-Florida floor fight that would basically destroy the party. I have no doubt that Clinton, bloodthirsty monster that she may be, is contemplating such a measure—just as I have no doubt that, should she go through with it, John McCain would have the presidency locked down by the time the Democrats leave Denver.

I’ve received quite a few complaints in recent months from readers who think I’m pro–Hillary Clinton and anti–Barack Obama. In fact, I believe Obama has better politics than Clinton, is personally more honorable, and that his victory would represent an important generational shift in American politics.

That said, there are a few things that make me like Hillary. First, she’s a bloodthirsty monster who’ll stop at nothing in her quest for power. That is refreshing, given that the Democrats’ default presidential-campaign strategy is to whine about how rough the Republicans play and to get trounced. Another thing that warms me to Clinton is that the media (in general) hates her and loves Obama, which makes me sympathetic toward her and suspicious toward him. [MORE . . .]

The most honest and insightful piece yet on the media’s love affair with Obama:

But of course, I don’t know many of those fierce Clinton supporters, because most of my friends and acquaintances are writers and editors and cultural impresarios of one kind or another—members of “the media”—and there are precious few Clintonites among them. Because almost as much as geography is dispositive in spectator sports—if you live in New England, you’re bound to love the Red Sox and hate the Yankees—demography is dispositive in this year’s Democratic race. And the great majority of media people are members of the same (white) demographic cohort that has rejected Hillary and voted for Barack—educated, more-affluent-than-average residents of cities and suburbs. [T]he media and their fellow upscale Americans are now disposed to like Obama precisely because he resembles them in so many ways. The difference is he’s relatively unsullied, an exquisite, idealized version of themselves: educated, thoughtful, twigged to nuance, a lovely writer, well-traveled, witty, cool, dignified, candid, a little quixotic, a clued-in grown-up but not yet ruined by the ugly facts of Washington life.

[MORE . . .]

The situation in Zimbabwe is an outrage and I can understand why the Bush Administration, and the entire Western world, is appalled by President Robert Mugabe’s anti-democratic depredations. As has been widely reported by the American media, opposition parties won control of the national assembly in a March balloting, and Mugabe finished second behind an opposition leader in presidential voting, triggering a run-off as neither candidate won an absolute majority. The opposition is threatening to boycott the run-off, since it says that its candidate won the first-round election outright and “has ended Mugabe’s 28-year rule over the once prosperous country whose economy is in ruins.”

Does the world really think that President Bush will stand for this assault on democracy? Even now, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl is surely recruiting a pundits’ brigade to bombard the nation’s op-ed pages with stirring denunciations of Mugabe’s assault on the administration’s “freedom agenda.” [MORE . . .]