Bush will never get my vote, since not only is he embarrassingly unprepared for the presidency but his party, with its weird congressional collection of milquetoasts, dodos and dunderheads, seems stuck in 1958. Nor can I imagine voting for Ralph Nader, the consumer-rights crusader turned flake who could no more govern than my hero Andy Warhol — another brooding, boyish, ethnic monastic.

But if the rotten-to-the-core superstructure of the Democratic Party assumes it’s got a lock on us Bradley supporters, think again. As someone who voted for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 Democratic primary (yes, I know he’s morphed into a pampered Vernon Jordan-style socialite and stagey race-baiter), I’ll use my vote where I think it’s most meaningful — and at this point, the ethical contortionist Al Gore hasn’t won it.

As a capitalist libertarian, I’ll be looking very seriously at Green Party candidates this fall to see if they’ve grown up. One whiff of creaky Marxism, however, and I’ll be gone. There’s a huge opening for smart, socially conscious, technology-savvy candidates on the left. But where are they?

Vis-`-vis McCain, Salon reader Richard D. Henkus indicts “the liberal cult of suffering”:

Have you considered the possibility that John McCain succeeded by playing the suffering card? Liberals have for very long been running the Suffering Sweepstakes, paying off to those willing to grovel and whine about how much they suffered, as if suffering were a certification of moral nobility. I suggest John McCain played the suffering card to catch the maudlin liberal imagination.

Sharp point, Mr. Henkus. The cloistered media personalities who fell head over heels for that choleric hawk McCain are a palpably p.c. lot who have no track record whatever for recognizing or respecting genuinely masculine men. There are a half dozen prominent political commentators who have totally lost my respect because of their dishonest or hysterical (take your pick) canonization of McCain, a manipulative waffler with a mediocre legislative record.

The behavior of those journalists at times crossed the line into real professional misconduct that future historians, in my view, will judge harshly. Waco didn’t go away, and neither will this. National security is at risk when reporters play kingmaker.

Another shot in the McCain wars: Paul Courtine writes from Bristol, England, to protest McCain’s easy treatment last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press”:

McCain said he would “stop all the smut and pornography on the Internet.” The presenter [host Tim Russert] did not say a single word about this incredible attack on the First Amendment. I could not believe he would let this outrageous comment pass by unchallenged. Still, when a Democratic president signs the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act into law, is it any wonder?

Yes, it’s disturbing if the reasonably non-partisan Russert let so flagrant a free-speech point pass. The Web is human imagination unleashed in all its perverse glory. Let the Puritans figure out how to jam their mealy corks (software
filters) into the dike, but they’ll never dam that raging river.

As I file this, the appalling spectacle over 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez continues, thanks to the endless blunders of the foot-dragging Clinton administration, which turned a family matter into an international confrontation. As this column maintained from the start, Elian, who had just lost his mother, should have immediately been returned to familiar surroundings and the custody of his father in Cuba. Allowing the traumatized boy to become attached to a “surrogate mother” in Miami, as predictably happened, was emotionally destructive and ethically coercive.

Kurt Schultz, writing from New Orleans, concurs:

Doesn’t anybody see the anti-dad, anti-male bias in this freak show? The mom abducted this kid without permission from the father and set out for the USA on a fucking inflatable tube! She is portrayed by the media as a freedom-loving hero who risked all to reach our shores.

In my opinion, she was a spiteful nutcase who nabbed her kid just to piss off her estranged husband. This was not a carefully planned expedition on a seaworthy boat but a foolhardy expedition that endangered her son. This was a 90-mile trip on inflatable water wings. She should have been brought up for child abuse!

If the situation were reversed — i.e., dad dead and mom left in Cuba — does anybody doubt that the child would be sent back already? We all know that mothers are more important than fathers, right?

I agree with you, Mr. Schultz. Congressman Charles B. Rangel rightly descries the double standard favoring Cuban-Americans because of their economic and electoral power: a Haitian or Jamaican refugee child would have been sent packing quick as a whistle on the overnight express.

How nice that the Washington Post, in its scathing March 28 article on Madeleine Albright (“Albright’s Influence Waning in Washington”), has finally caught on to the fact that her performance as secretary of state has been poor and at times (the Kosovo incursion) disastrous. This column, which applauded Albright’s appointment on feminist grounds, went into heavy protest mode when, at a public meeting at Ohio State University in Feb. 1998, she arrogantly treated American citizens like peons for daring to question the administration’s threatened bombing of Iraq.

Over the trestle in the Hillary Rodham Clinton department, there are a few nuggets to report. My view of Hillary’s reckless fomenting of race war against Big Chief Iron Cheeks, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was clear in my parody (yes, I wrote it) in Salon’s April Fools’ Day edition.

Whatever Giuliani’s relatively minor misjudgments in his handling of the police shooting of the unarmed Patrick Dorismond outside a midtown bar on March 16, the real problem is the New York Police Department’s over-reliance on covert sting operations in the drug war.

Despite its deplorable strong-arm tactics toward sex shops, the Giuliani administration deserves great credit for the reduction of crime and the general upgrading of quality of life in Manhattan. But undercover officers should be used very sparingly in a democracy. Systematic entrapment of citizens is a fascist exercise.

A far better deterrent to street crime, drug trafficking, and gang shootouts is more police in uniform walking a beat, mingling with the people and establishing warm relationships of mutual respect. Officers sealed off in their flashy cruisers or cantering by like Cossacks on horseback end up feeling and acting like an occupying army.

As for Hillary’s run for a Senate seat in a state where she has never lived (and where she ruthlessly drove out the hardworking, local pro-choice candidate who had earned the nomination, Rep. Nita Lowey), Brad Anderson sends this nifty contribution:

As a scholar (and fan) of decadence, I’m surprised you haven’t highlighted the kinship between Hillary Clinton and Diocletian’s horse. In his last act as emperor, Diocletian appointed his favorite horse to the Roman Senate, in the same way that Clinton is now appointing his favorite steed to our own Senate.

What a perfect way to express the contempt in which the Senate is held by the Executive! What institutional putrefaction! A Senate seat can now be doled out to a favorite with the same ease as a Third World ambassadorship! What’s worse: a senate seat in the northeast — that region whose senators constituted our House of Lords. It is the South’s revenge on the North.

Thanks, Mr. Anderson! When I saw the subject line of your message (“Hillary as Diocletian’s Horse”), I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. Let the imperial games begin!

I certainly had a chuckle at the screaming headline of the March 28 tabloid Globe: “Hillary’s List of Gay Lovers — What her rivals are threatening to expose.” Inside, amidst much heavy breathing, were butch photos of Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala and New York lawyer Susan Thomases but little else aside from an improbable tale of a female model’s in-and-out “tryst” with the first lady in a “posh L.A. home.”

As I told the New York Post two years ago when these old rumors surfaced (thanks to smarmy former White House advisor Dick Morris), my gut instinct as a lesbian is that Hillary may well have experimented a bit in college, but everything about her since then screams Refrigerator Woman, cut off at the neck except when her faithless husband plays Huck Finn penitent and turns up the heat in the sugar shack.

Like McCain with the melting, simpering, tittering reporters, Hillary does know how to work and pump the homoerotic game to bind breathless, dazzled flunkies to her breast in the political pecking order. It’s an opportunistic art as old as the buzzing court of Darius. Jennifer Wise reports an interesting epiphany about “Our Lady Hillary”:

My friends and I may have stumbled across a clue to her personality on New Year’s Day, while watching her and President Clinton offer televised New Year’s wishes to the nation. We noticed with horror that Hillary wasn’t blinking. At all.

The room erupted with cries of, “BLINK, DAMMIT, BLINK!!!” “SHE’S NOT HUMAN!!!” We’ve all voted Democratic all our lives, and not one of us would want that woman even considering a run for office in our home states, especially as she could quite possibly be an android.

Yes — an android programmed with bureaucratic clichis of exquisite banality, falling like interstellar cinders on the hapless voters of New York.

One of the worst cases of campus censorship in years may have occurred last week at Georgetown University. I am grateful to the Independent Women’s Forum for alerting me immediately on the day that Robert Swope, a 21-year-old senior and government major from California, was summarily fired from his position as a columnist on the Hoya, the university newspaper.

The immediate cause was Swope’s attack on Eve Ensler’s femi-nazi extravaganza, “The Vagina Monologues,” which had just been performed on the Georgetown campus. The Hoya’s editors refused to print the column while it was still timely and gave a series of feeble excuses about why publication had to be deferred.

Swope, whom I contacted, allowed me to examine the record of his exchanges with the editors, including their contradictory and shifting responses leading to his dismissal. I conclude that the newspaper, probably reacting to multiple outside pressures, caved in to the forces of political correctness and violated Swope’s academic freedom.

While I haven’t reviewed all his prior columns, I did find Swope’s Feb. 11 critique of women’s studies on href="http://www.thehoya.com/viewpoint/021100/view3.htm">the Hoya Web site. “Women’s studies is a disaster,” he declared, calling it an “intellectually bankrupt academic fraud” that has been propped up by “cowardly”and “weak-willed” campus administrators. (Sounds right to me!) Asserting that women’s studies creates “an industry of professional victims,” Swope daringly called on alumni to protest by withholding donations from the university.

On Feb. 15, the Hoya published a lengthy rebuttal from a female associate dean, who accused Swope of purveying “misinformation” and complained that “20 inches of Hoya space” had been wasted on his views. Nothing could be clearer: The Hoya should grant ample space only to voices conforming to orthodox feminism.

Evidently, there have been voluminous other attacks on Swope, who was denounced last fall by the faculty advisor of the Women’s Center for his column questioning the political rationale of such centers on college campuses. That column, in her words, did not “represent a legitimate contribution to campus debate.” Again, nothing could be clearer: the only “legitimate” debate is one whose conclusions have been preordained by feminist overseers.

America, wake up! This incident is just the tip of the iceberg. On too many campuses, our students are in intellectual chains. How striking that at Georgetown University, a Catholic institution, the thought police and bullies are all on the left.

Indira Jacob asks what happened to “Camille Does the Oscars,” my annual camp fest for Salon since 1997. Well, after grumpily taking eight pages of notes as I yawned through last week’s boring, boring, boring Academy Awards ceremony, I said, “The hell with it!” and went to bed. I thought Chloë Sevigny and Ashley Judd looked great, as did Jane Fonda and Vanessa Williams in their own mature, seam-busting way. But that’s it.

How far Hollywood has fallen since the ecstatic evening in 1961 when a divinely radiant Elizabeth Taylor won her well-deserved Oscar for “Butterfield 8.” I will nurture those burning memories forever and try to blot out the depressing present, when a gimmicky grease monkey like Kevin Spacey (who belongs to the Daniel J. Travanti Sonorous Nosebone School of Ham Acting) takes home the gold.

Jay Cushman wonders why I have also been deafeningly silent about HBO’s lesbo polka, “If These Walls Could Talk 2,” repeatedly rebroadcast since its March 5 premiere. It’s because I’ve never gotten through the damned thing, with its lugubrious bathos, historical inaccuracies and sophomoric vulgarities.

I sampled all three parts but kept escaping to better things on other channels — such as Hurd Hatfield as Oscar Wilde’s beautiful ephebe hauntingly playing Chopin in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945), broadcast on Philadelphia’s PBS channel, WHYY. “What a relief to get back to the style, verve and class of gay men!” I trumpeted to my partner, Alison, that night, and she wholeheartedly agreed.

Now my all-star pop moments of the past three weeks. First, the smart, sexy and enchantingly luminous Jacqueline Bisset as bitchy Jackie O. in “The Greek Tycoon” (1978), broadcast on the Romance Classics channel. Second, the rampaging Tallulah Bankhead hilariously playing herself on Nickelodeon’s “Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour,” one of my most cherished episodes in TV history.

Third, the volcanic Eric Roberts brilliantly capturing a real-life homicidal slimeball in Bob Fosse’s unnerving “Star 80″ (1983), broadcast on Bravo. Finally, blond-maned Melody Thomas Scott (willful, voracious Nikki for 20 wonderful years on “The Young and the Restless”) regally and enigmatically presiding over the nation’s grocery check-out lines from the cover of the March 28-April 11 issue of CBS Soaps in Depth, a pagan bible for our time.

“If there’s a team, no one has asked me to join. As a conservative, I normally write more favorably about Republicans than Democrats and I routinely treat conservative ideas as superior to liberal ones. But I’ve never been part of a discussion with conservative writers about how we could most help the Republican or the conservative team.”

This assertion of political purity struck me as false, coming from a journalist who has appeared repeatedly as a speaker at Republican Party events across the country — a breach of the political boundaries of “traditional journalism” that few, if any, of the writers on Journolist, for example, would ever contemplate.

Nevertheless, it is true that Barnes has enjoyed greater credibility than other journalists on the partisan right throughout his career. After all, he is a former reporter for such publications as the Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the New Republic. He was once a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and served as one of three panelists for the first nationally televised debate between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale in 1984.

Now, however, there is further evidence that Barnes not only routinely helped Republicans raise money as a banquet speaker, but accepted tens of thousands of dollars from party organizations as well:

• In February 2006, Barnes was paid $10,000 plus travel expenses by Oregon’s Lane County Republican Central Committee to deliver the keynote address at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner. (Thanks to Carla Axtman for research assistance.) These payments, recorded in filings with the Oregon secretary of state, were evidently made through the Premier Speakers Bureau of Franklin, Tenn., which represents other Fox personalities including Sean Hannity, Dick Morris and Mike Huckabee. Barnes is no longer listed on the Premier website, but the company did not respond to phone or e-mail inquiries about its relationship with him.

• In February 2007, Barnes spoke at the annual  Lincoln-Reagan Dinner held by the Republican Party of Fort Bend County, Texas — home of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who purchased a ticket to the event. The party organization’s filing with the Texas Ethics Commission shows two payments of $5,000 each on April 26, 2007, to Premiere Speakers Bureau (with the notation “LRD 2007 Speaker – Fred Barnes”) and travel expenses of $1,823. Photos of a smiling Barnes with various local dignitaries at the event, which netted a reported $70,000 for the party, can be viewed  here.

• In early March 2008, Barnes served as the keynote speaker for the Republican Party of Palm Beach County at its annual Lincoln Day Dinner. Whether he received the customary $10,000 is not clear because the party’s  filing with the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections show only a single payment of $5,500 to Premiere Speakers Bureau on Feb. 18. The committee reported net $120,000 in net proceeds from the event.

Barnes didn’t return a call seeking comment. Neither did a Fox News spokeswoman. The question they avoided answering is whether accepting money from party organizations is appropriate for any political journalist, and whether such payments fall within the ethical guidelines of Fox News. Whatever Fox might say, the Murdoch network’s  long history of excessive coziness with Republican politicians and organizations offers little reassurance.

I hoped to ask Barnes whether he agrees that being on the team payroll means he is indeed “on the team” — the Republican Party team. Understandably, he may prefer not to respond. But he ought to reflect on his standing to criticize the behavior of other journalists, left or right, before he mounts his high horse again.

Exactly what is so disturbing about the Upper West Side? As Joan Walsh notes, it is a place renowned as liberal in politics, Jewish in ethnicity, and therefore, according to Kyl’s implication, foreign to the nation’s heartland. Never mind that some of the greatest American authors, musicians, actors and artists — including very many who happened not to be Jews — lived and worked in that special slice of urban landscape over the past century or so, including Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, Humphrey Bogart, Harry Belafonte and George M. Cohan, an Irish Catholic who won the Congressional Gold Medal in 1936 for composing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” among other achievements. (Rush Limbaugh used to live there, too. And Joe Scarborough says he “loves” living there with his family today.)

Beyond the narrow and ignorant parochialism of such remarks by Kyl and others, what is most galling is their absolute phoniness. Scarcely anyone on the Republican right ever suggests that Weekly Standard editor William Kristol ought to shut up because he was raised on the un-American Upper West Side, a few blocks from Ms. Kagan. Anyone who does so is rightly rebuked for appealing to prejudice. Are Kristol and all the other neoconservatives who have inhabited that neighborhood, beginning with those named Podhoretz, to be tarred as “un-American” too? In May, Commentary editor John Podhoretz published a timely, quasi-nostalgic essay about his family’s half-century in the neighborhood, candidly dismissing the right-wing stereotypes:

Conservatives sometimes invoke the Upper West Side in their lists of petri-dish-like leftist enclaves along with Cambridge and Berkeley, but despite its homogeneous radicalism, it didn’t then and doesn’t now offer much in the way of interesting, unexpected, or comical ideological excess.

Podhoretz goes on to mention that it was anything but sociologically monolithic or elite:

It might have been the most integrated area in the United States. According to a 1966 study, out of 150,000 residents, 105,000 were white (of whom 40,000 were Jews); 26,000 came from Spanish-speaking homes; and 18,000 were black. “Only in Honolulu,” wrote the journalist Joseph P. Lyford, “is there a greater confusion of blood, ancestry, language, and culture in as small a space.” But though there were racial and ethnic tensions aplenty, and these would grow exponentially as the years passed, the division in the neighborhood was primarily one of class — a division between the middle class and the lower class. (There weren’t many rich people on the Upper West Side then, a situation much altered today.)

Let’s not forget Dick Morris, cousin of Roy Cohn and Upper West Side native, who earned his political spurs in the neighborhood’s Democratic clubhouses. Will Fox News dump the voice of Fox Nation as an Upper West Sider and potential crypto-socialist? Of course not. He’s a Republican now, and those nasty ethnogeographical snarks are reserved for Democrats only.

The spurious resentments encouraged by Republicans only begin with Kagan’s home turf. Moving on to her legal education, they sought to demean the memory of Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked — and for whom she expresses unreserved admiration, despite the fact that he called her “Shorty.” The late justice was best known for his life’s work ending legal discrimination in America, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down “separate but equal” education in public schools. This is a topic that Republicans might wish to avoid, considering their recent embarrassment when Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul started a debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act and its violation of his “freedom” to discriminate in public accommodations. But Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, along with several of his colleagues, could not resist a gratuitous assault on Marshall as a “judicial activist.”

Coming from Sessions, this sounded like a dog-whistle appeal to segregationist nostalgia. But even if that isn’t what he meant, the “activism” complaint is bogus. Republicans endorse activist decisions whenever they like the result. The most notorious example is still Bush v. Gore, but the current Supreme Court majority is just as eager to overturn precedent and engineer society from the bench, as they proved this year in the Citizens United decision. Reversing more than a century of the jurisprudence that upheld congressional authority to regulate corporate political speech, the conservative justices overturned basic precedent to make a sweeping and ominous change in law. Indeed they seized an opportunity to venture far beyond the issues at hand in that case to free corporations from any restriction and corrupt our politics even further.

How did Chief Justice John Roberts justify that outrage, after repeatedly and falsely promising during his nomination hearings to respect precedent? He cited Brown v. Board of Ed, writing that had the court observed precedent in 1954, “segregation would be legal.” Many legal scholars would quarrel with that claim, but the point is plain enough: Activism is fine, as long as we like the outcome.

It is probably a forlorn hope, but before these hearings conclude the Republicans should stop pandering to their dimmest constituencies and instead try to elicit the actual views of this accomplished American woman, who is almost certain to join the high court next fall.

Such hysterics must be expected from every carnival barker in Fox Nation, especially a featured player like Morris – and the shrill rhetoric surely helps to separate the rubes from their money, in this case through donations to the League of American Voters, sponsor of this morning’s e-mail and many more from him.

Scamming aside, however, a prediction is a prediction, and Democratic legislators preparing to vote yea on reform should be comforted whenever Morris prognosticates their demise, because he is dead wrong with almost perfect consistency.

Only two months ago, following the election of Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate special election, the excitable Morris looked into his crystal ball and  told Fox listeners that he had seen the effective end of Obama’s presidency. “Let’s just stop for a second and understand the magnitude of the earthquake that hit Massachusetts … ultimately, this is the end of the Obama ascendancy, he will never get another major piece of legislation passed,” he pronounced. (Which must mean that the healthcare bill is almost certain to pass next weekend.)

During the 2008 election cycle, Morris offered many forecasts, none of which were right. Early on he picked Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani as almost certain nominees of their respective parties and trashed John McCain as a sure loser. In January 2007, he told an audience of conservative journalists: “I think what’s going to happen in the world is that Hillary’s going to be the next president.” Not too long after that, he and wife Eileen McGann wrote a column for the New York Post headlined “It’s Now a Rudy Romp.” A year later, he was predicting that Clinton would crash and burn in the New Hampshire primary, right up to the evening before that election. Her tears had proved to voters that she was unfit to serve as president, he explained. When she won the following night, he overreacted again by predicting that she would surely go on to secure the nomination. (Back when Clinton was running for the U.S. Senate from New York in the 2000 cycle, Morris similarly made one delusional prediction after another, claiming that she would never run, withdraw, falter, lose, and so on. She ran and won, of course.)

Among Dick’s wackiest blunders in recent years was his confident assertion — on the eve of the 2006 midterm election — that North Korea would become the overriding issue in that campaign, eclipsing taxes, the war in Iraq, and Republican corruption. As Glenn Greenwald observed back then in a mordant post: “It’s just not possible to be more wrong than this.”

By Election Day, Dick had forgotten about North Korea and could no longer ignore the unanimity of polls showing that the Republicans were on the verge of a historic defeat. (He occasionally gets it right, if he waits until moments before the polls close to place his bet.)

Part of Dick’s problem, in the years since he sold out completely to the Republicans, is his irrepressible urge to spin rather than analyze. This has led him to some fantastically stupid conjectures, captured on video. One of my favorites came in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when President Dubya made a desultory speech in New Orleans.

On Fox News, Morris rated the weak speech as “fantastic!” Building up a head of steam, he cruelly raised Republican hopes. “The people who said this storm is going to hurt Bush’s presidency,” he declared, “are just wrong.” Defying polls that showed the president’s public approval scraping bottom, he went on to assure listeners that the Katrina fiasco would be nothing more than “a distant memory,” while the city’s recovery would prove to be “a huge positive for Bush. That will be a second term legacy … [Bush] can get all the money he wants out of Congress ’cause of this disaster, the people will be solidly behind him, the media will cover it like crazy and he’s gonna look like Santa Claus.”

Obviously he pulls a lot of these prognostications straight out of his butt, with no polling or expertise required. Certainly there are plenty of polls showing that the Democrats will face serious trouble come fall (although there are also surveys showing a hint of daylight now, too). But when someone like Morris warns of catastrophe, there just may be reason for optimism. 

Fortunately for Romney, the good news is very good: Given Morris’ recent history of prognostication, it’s probably best to now consider Romney the front-runner for the nomination, if not a lock to win in the general.

Most people have probably forgotten by now — or, at least, that’s probably what Morris is hoping — but the former strategist for Bill Clinton turned professional Clinton-hater was the author of a book, published in 2005, titled “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.” In it, he and his wife, Eileen McGann, wrote:

[A]s of this moment, there is no doubt that Hillary Clinton is on a virtually uncontested trajectory to win the Democratic nomination and, very likely, the 2008 presidential election ….

But her victory is not inevitable. There is one, and only one, figure in America who can stop Hillary Clinton: Secretary of State Condoleezza “Condi” Rice.