Or, you know, start another post that's really just a series of actual opinions followed by your half-ass commentary.

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That doesn't sound like a rape scene to me. It is unbelievably shitty writing however.

Obama must choose a running mate who does not serve as a lightning rod. That means no Webb, no Hillary, no Biden, no Nunn, no Daschle. He should choose someone (by which I mean a male, truth be told, because running with a non-Hillary female would create too many unmanageable cross-currents) with executive or military experience for whom nothing bad or uncomfortable turns up in the vetting process. This may mean Clark, Jones, Kaine, or Strickland. Or, he could run with an eminence grise, like George Mitchell (too bad John Danforth is a Republican)--the Lloyd Bentsen gambit. Or he could run with Al Gore, as James Carville suggested.

Personally, I would welcome a kick-ass figure from the business world with a liberal social bent, so as to better hammer away at the drunken-soldier fiscal habits of every GOP administration since Ronald Reagan, which John McCain pledges to continue. A Bob Rubin or Jon Corzine type, but without the Wall Street baggage.

Charitably stated, they are not a force and whether a VP candidate appeals to them or not should be given no consideration whatsoever.

Strick has issued numerous Sherman statements about the veepship. Don't think that's going anywhere.

ECB -- Your frantic, throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach to arguing against Senator Webb reminds me of the Bush administration's tactic to gain support for the war.

The Confederate sympathy line in specific has no merit if you put the comments in the context mentioned in the Politico article -- he is honoring the spirit of his ancestors. Is it really so unconscionable to suggest that Confederates, largely too poor to be slaveholders, were patriots too? Or to suggest that states have a right to secede from the Union?

"If drafted I will not run, nominated I will not accept and if elected I will not serve."

Why do that? Why ruin an otherwise plausible argument by throwing in a couple of bad examples just for the hell of it? It's a recurring theme in your posts, like the laundry-list-of-Hillary-sexism-quotes one.

Before the ink was dry on the Constitution, the original drafters were arguing over its interpretation. Nothing in the Constitution gives an express right to secession. An activist interpretation--normally anathema to State's Rightists--could lead one to such a conclusion. But that would make it an opinion, not a constitutional fact. And if the Constitution was merely a contract between the States, what right do any signers after the original thirteen have to break it? (Excepting, possibly, the former Republic of Texas.) Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi were territories before they joined the United States. They signed up after the original document was approved.

Just because Johnny Reb was too poor to own a slave, it doesn't mean he didn't benefit from them. The real question is how many white Southern families owned slaves. A family of 5 may own one slave, equally a 20% ownership, but 100% of the family benefits. And being too poor to own a human slave didn't mean one didn't want to be or expect to become a slaveowner. Southern society was rocked in the 1850's by the class struggle between wealthier slave-owning whites and their poorer brethren. Editorials were rife with calls to expand the international slave trade in order to increase the supply and lower the price. North Carolina white supremacist Hinton R. Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South, published in 1857, is a great place to start.

Did you not go to college? Hell, I learned this in high school.

I can remember when I thought Lieberman was an awesome choice. He'd sew up that right-wing-jewish vote! w00t! And then there was Edwards -- he'd pull in the good ol' southern vote! Double w00t!

Bah! The best VP candidate is the one who is irrelevant because the P candidate can run the table.

Not that I think Webb is a good choice, though.

For instance, we know that Dr. Suess liked green eggs and ham or he could not have written a character that did.

Yea, what an ass. We should be locking everyone up and throwing away the key. Erica, please show us the light!