A while back, I wrote a diary about Warren, who I met while canvassing for Obama in southern Fairfax County. Warren was well into his 70′s and white. He began our conversation by informing me, quite bluntly, that he was voting for McCain because of “the lazy coloreds on welfare”. In spite of his comment, I engaged him. We talked for an hour. He eventually said, “That Obama is smart as a whip”, asked me for a pamphlet outlining Obama’s positions on the issues, and told me he had some thinking to do. You know what several people here on DailyKos said? That I was wrong for talking to the guy after he used the word colored. That I should have given him a lecture on how negative and hurtful the term is. Some people were.. yes… outraged.. that I didn’t tell Warren then and there that he was out of line. And this would have helped then candidate Obama… how? This would have helped me… how? This would have helped my country… how?

Further, I’d like to announce the snowball fight has been schedued for this evening, just outside the red-hot iron gate.  Ice water will be served.

You can see their reasoning. Herring’s a bad guy. Why punish the police by letting a guilty man go free when they just made a simple mistake?
Except that the rest of us enjoy no such immunity. If you’re a citizen who, say, accidentally carries a gun into a designated “gun-free” zone, the Supreme Court will not say that you can escape punishment because your action was “the result of isolated negligence.” For citizens, there’s no “I forgot” defense.
Likewise, police are given a pass, under the doctrine of “good faith immunity,” from having to understand the intricacies of suspects’ constitutional rights: A right must be clearly established before an officer is liable for violating it, apparently on the theory that constitutional law is just too confusing for police.
But ordinary citizens are expected to comply with the tens of thousands of pages of federal criminal laws and regulations (and more at the state level) and are told that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” – and this is true even in cases where the prosecution’s theory of criminality is a novel one.
Cynics might be forgiven for thinking that, instead of a government of, by and for the people, we’ve got a two-tiered system in which “public servants” instead enjoy the privileges of “public masters.”
The Supreme Court might want to think again before doing more to encourage such cynicism.

John Cloud here redefines bigot. Bigot means someone who is intolerant of others opinions and actions. Seemingly unaware of the contradiction, Cloud calls Obama a “very tolerant sort of bigot.”

The reason I don’t care “California’s broke” is I know that means that the government of California is broke, not its citizens. ….

When a fellow you know comes up to you at the racetrack and says he’s lost all his money because his can’t-miss horse threw a shoe, and wants to borrow a few hundred so he can buy groceries to feed his children, you’re wise to at least consider that his kids might go hungry no matter what you do.

I think any such revolt [against Obama by Move On et al, if he continues Guantanamo and indefinite detention] will be essentially toothless and perfunctory, and that Obama’s administration will suffer no ill-effects from staying with a policy of detention that has kept the US safe since 911.

And this is because many of the “civil liberties” absolutists who sprung up in the wake of the Bush Administration’s attempts to navigate new challenges presented to traditional prisoner detention (given the nature of the enemy, and the difficulty in giving a concrete, corporeal outline to the “enemy”) were nothing more than political opportunists whose first and primary concern was regaining power.

Attacking Bush’s so-called civil liberties violations was but a means to an end.

And then there were three. Henry Allingham, 112, Harry Patch, 110 and William Stone, a mere stripling at 108, are the only ones left. They are the last three men living in Britain who served in the First World War. This morning they will assemble, for perhaps the final time, in London’s Trafalgar Square where, at 11am, 90 years to the minute since the guns fell silent, the final veterans of the Great War will lead the nation in a two minute silence that honors all the country’s war dead in all its many wars.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The Obama campaign kicked the reporters for papers that endoresed Senator McCain off the campaign’s plane, and the campaign has refused to give another interview ever again to a TV station that asked Senator Biden tough questions in an interview. The campaign and its friends has sued or threatened to sue its critics. Senator Obama has not held a press conference in ages, or even given reporters significant access. When Jack Tapper caught up with Obama on an airport tarmac just today, and asked the Senator how he would spend the $700 billion in funds now allocated to backstop the financial system, Obama refused to respond, saying it was not the time or place. When Tapper suggested that he hold a press conference. Obama said he would do so on Wednesday. Senator Obama has sat back and allowed his campaign to make it relatively easy to contribute illegally. (As I understand it, the default settings of credit card receiving software check the credit card number against the name and address. If that’s the case, the people raising money for Senator Obama, unlike those doing so for Senator McCain, turned that part of the software off.) In all these cases, Obama is being an effective politician. He is doing everything he can within the law to further his own cause. Moreover, he is good at working the system. He is, in other words, a clever lawyer and will probably be an effective bureaucrat.

….

Regarding legislation, is his comment about using the tax system to make coal power impossible a sign? It would be a good way to kill the industry without seeming to. Is that what he really wants to do, or was that what he said to please the audience of a liberals? In foreign policy, recall this bit from the debates, discussing sitting down with Ahmadinejad without preconditions: “So we sit down with Iran and they say they’ll wipe Israel off the face of the map and we say ’No you won’t’?” How would a President Obama respond to such a situation? McCain gave a fair summary of what Obama seemed to be saying. Presumably there is more to Obama’s position, but what is it? We don’t know. And, given Obama’s professed hope to bring us all together, will he regard those who oppose his plans with the good will he has often displayed in his manner? Or will he try to shut them up as his campaign has tried to do? (An extension of his litigation against his political opponants in the past?) (Does he agree with his friend Cass Sunstein that the government must regulate speech and the press in order to re-unify our culture in the age of talk radio and the internet.) All these questions remain unanswered as we go to the polls.— Richard Adams

Here’s what happened. In October of ’67 McCain was himself still a Young Voter and was flying his 26th Vietnam combat mission and his A-4 Skyhawk plane got shot down over Hanoi, and he had to eject, which basically means setting off an explosive charge that blows your seat out of the plane, which ejection broke both McCain’s arms and one leg and gave him a concussion and he started falling out of the skies over Hanoi. Try to imagine for a second how much this would hurt and how scared you’d be, three limbs broken and falling toward the enemy capital you just tried to bomb. His chute opened late and he landed hard in a little lake in a park right in the middle of downtown Hanoi. (There is still an N.V. statue of McCain by this lake today, showing him on his knees with his hands up and eyes scared and on the pediment the inscription “McCan — famous air pirate” [sic].) Imagine treading water with broken arms and trying to pull the lifevest’s toggle with your teeth as a crowd of North Vietnamese men swim out toward you (there’s film of this, somebody had a home-movie camera and the N.V. government released it, though it’s grainy and McCain’s face is hard to see). The crowd pulled him out and then just about killed him. U.S. bomber pilots were especially hated, for obvious reasons. McCain got bayoneted in the groin; a soldier broke his shoulder apart with a rifle butt. Plus by this time his right knee was bent 90º to the side with the bone sticking out. This is all public record. Try to imagine it. He finally got tossed on a Jeep and taken only like five blocks to the infamous Hoa Lo prison — a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton, of much movie fame — where they made him beg a week for a doctor and finally set a couple of the fractures without anesthetic and let two other fractures and the groin wound (imagine: groin wound) stay like they were. Then they threw him in a cell. Try for a moment to feel this. The media profiles all talk about how McCain still can’t lift his arms over his head to comb his hair, which is true. But try to imagine it at the time, yourself in his place, because it’s important. Think about how diametrically opposed to your own self-interest getting knifed in the balls and having fractures set without a general would be, and then about getting thrown in a cell to just lie there and hurt, which is what happened. He was mostly delirious with pain for weeks, and his weight dropped to 100, and the other POWs were sure he would die; and then, after he’d hung on like like that for several months and his bones had mostly knitted and he could sort of stand up, they brought him to the prison commandant’s office and closed the door and out of nowhere offered to let him go. They said he could just… leave. It turned out that U.S. Admiral John S. McCain II had just been made head of all naval forces in the Pacific, meaning also Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese wanted the PR coup of mercifully releasing his son, the baby-killer. And John S. McCain III, 100 lbs and barely able to stand, refused the offer. The U.S. military’s Code of Conduct for Prisoners of War apparently said that POWs had to be released in the order they were captured, and there were others who’d been in Hoa Lo a way longer time, and McCain refused to violate the Code. The prison commandant, not pleased, right there in the office had guards break McCain’s ribs, rebreak his arm, knock his teeth out. McCain still refused to leave without the other POWs. Forget how many movies stuff like this happens in and try to imagine it as real. Refusing release. He spent four more years in Hoa Lo like this, much of the time in solitary, in the dark, in a special closet-sized box called a “punishment cell.” Maybe you’ve heard all this before; it’s been in umpteen different profiles of McCain this year. It’s overexposed, true. Still though, take a second or two to do some creative visualization and imagine the moment between McCain getting offered early release and his turning it down. Try to imagine it was you. Imagine how loudly your most basic, primal self-interest would have cried out to you in that moment, and all the ways you could rationalize accepting the offer: What difference would one less POW make? Plus maybe it’d give the other POWs hope and keep them going, and I mean 100 pounds and expected to die and surely the Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to you if you need a real doctor or else you’re going to die, plus if you could stay alive by getting out you could make a promise to God to do nothing but Total Good from now on and make the world better and so your accepting would be better for the world than your refusing, and maybe if Dad wasn’t worried about the Vietnamese retaliating against you here in prison he could prosecute the war more aggressively and end it sooner and actually save lives so you could actually save lives if you took the offer and got out versus what real purpose gets served by you staying here in a box and getting beaten to death, and by the way oh Jesus imagine it a real doctor and real surgery and painkillers and clean sheets and a chance to heal and not be in agony and to see your kids again, your wife, to smell your wife’s hair… can you hear it? What would be happening in your head? Would you have refused the offer? Could you have? You can’t know for sure. None of us can. It’s hard even to imagine the levels of pain and fear and want in that moment, much less to know how you’d react. None of us can know.

But, see, we do know how this man reacted. That he chose to spend four more years there, mostly in a dark box, alone, tapping code on the walls to the others, rather than violate a Code. Maybe he was nuts. But the point is that with McCain it feels like we know, for a proven fact, that he is capable of devotion to something other, more, than his own self-interest. So that when he says the line in speeches now you can feel like maybe it’s not just more candidate bullshit, that with this guy it’s maybe the truth. Or maybe both the truth and bullshit: McCain does want your vote, after all.

But that moment in the Hoa Lo office in ’68 — right before he refused, with all his basic normal human self-interest howling at him — that moment is hard to blow off…

Got that?

And John S. McCain III, 100 lbs and barely able to stand, refused the offer.

After thousands of years of crawling up from the swamp of totalitarianism we can see, at last, in the distance a world where this ancient nightmare is removed from the world. But we cannot get there if America does not stand.

Again. The world cannot rid itself of the terror of totalitarianism if America does not stand.

For that to happen we need to have a leader — man or woman — who possesses real, demonstrated courage. For that to become true we need to have a leader who has — man or woman — real manliness.

Obama is intelligent, charming, good-looking, stylish, well-educated and slick. He’s everything that other people who value such surfaces look for… not in a leader, but in an icon. And that’s what they’re buying by buying Obama, an icon. A glowing plastic post-modern Jesus for the dashboard of their Prius. They know, as we all know by now, that he can talk the talk. He just can’t walk the walk. He’s soft talk and no stick.

I keep coming back to the one indisputable fact first spoken in Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech: “There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you … in places where winning means survival and defeat means death.”

One of those places where defeat means death is in the Oval Office on a very bad day.