CHEATER

CHEATER 

Hillary Clinton just lost my vote. 

Mrs. Clinton went to Florida last night to celebrate a victory that wasn't. More importantly, she went to Florida last night to proclaim a victory that she had no right to proclaim and should be embarrassed to assert. But that didn't stop her. 

Hillary is a cheater, pure and simple. I grew up on the streets and neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Cheating was not tolerated, not even by six year olds. We had no umpires or referees in our choose up stickball, punchball and touch football games. So if you were out on a close play at second or clearly caught a pass out of bounds (which was the sidewalk), you admitted it. Maybe, just to save a little face, you argued the call a bit or on a close play sought a second opinion from the shortstop (especially if he was your best friend, or better, a relative). But you didn't just stand on second base and assert your claim oblvious to the rules we had all agreed upon. You didn't try to move the line of scrimmage up to the place where you caught the out of bounds pass. 

But that's not Hillary. The rules for her apparently changed last Tuesday when Obama walloped her in the South Carolina primary. Desperation set in. She had to find a venue for victory to erase the sting of defeat. And she had to do it before Super Tuesday. So she chose Florida's faux primary and then imported an ersatz crowd to a ballroom off the interstate for a pseudo-victory speech. 

Although Hillary's face was straight, that was all that was straight about her performance last night. Months ago, she and the other Democratic candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida after that state changed its scheduled primary election date in violation of the calendar set by the Democratic National Committee and agreed to by all the candidates. Because of this conduct, none of Florida's would be delegates will be counted in the presidential balloting at the national convention this coming summer in Denver. Thus, the voting that occurred yesterday was for naught. Not a single delegate was chosen. There also was no campaign in Florida. No direct mail, no stump speeches, no debates, no rallies. No CNN, MSNBC, Fox, media hordes or other media big feet. And no delegates, the coin of the realm in nominating presidential candidates. Hell, the best evidence that there was absolutely no campaign in Florida is that Bill Clinton -- a human GPS when it comes to injecting himself into one of his wife's political contests -- was never anywhere near the place. 

But Hillary appeared last night anyway, a sort of political Caesar crossing an ethical Rubicon. She claimed that she was not violating the rules because she showed up after the election had ended and thus had not "campaigned" in the state in violation of her agreement not to do so. So what? The point is not that she showed up at a rally in Florida. It's that she claims to have won a contest that never existed and that she promised not to undertake. It's also that she now plans to have Florida delegates seated at the Democratic National Convention, presumably to vote for her. If she thinks either of those boneheaded plays do not amount to a broken promise, maybe it's because she is being advised by the master hairsplitter himself, the conjugator-in-chief. 

Given the obvious backdrop of dishonesty, Hillary's "victory" rally was itself a flop. The crowd was bussed in. The speech was flat. Even her thank you didn't cut it, probably because, as one voter remarked after the fact, the "vote" might well have come out differently had there been a real election campaign. She touts her four victories to date as evidence of strength going into next week's "national" primary. But two of them, Michigan and now Florida, were in contests that didn't count against either no-shows (in Florida) or uncommitted (in Michigan). Her answer to the politics of hope is the politics of hype. 

Unfortunately, however, the fact that Hillary struck out last night is only part of her problem, and the far less important part. On the streets of my youth, cheaters suffered a fate worse than death. 

They never got another game.

BENAZIR AND BEYOND

BENAZIR AND BEYOND

Less than a week later, it is difficult to determine the full impact of the tragic assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto.

The list of those potentially responsible seems to grow by the day, from the Taliban and Al Qaeda to her political opponents in the Pakistani military and the Musharraf administration. Initial reports that she was killed by an assassin's bullet now compete with a supposed medical finding that she died from a fractured skull as she fell back into her SUV from the force of either shrapnel or the suicide bomber's blast. We will probably never know. The motives of those who investigate political assassinations in Pakistan are, to a man, suspect; much of the forensic evidence has been destroyed as a consequence of the immediate clean up by local fire officials; and the Pakistani government has in the past refused foreign forensic help from qualified scientists. That Benazir Bhutto is the latest victim of terrorism cannot be questioned. But who or what groups or individuals are actually responsible will probably never be answered.

The tragedy of her untimely demise is matched only by the complexity of her courage. She was a conscious (and quite willful) paradox in action. Her western education (at Harvard and Oxford) was a counterpoint to her cultural moorings in a South Asian and thoroughly Islamic world. Her feminist commitment was as fervent as her commitment to an arranged marriage to a man she barley knew. Her inherited land based wealth stood in stark contrast to the poverty of her countrymen and women.

She preached on behalf of the rule of law in Pakistan but was held by a Swiss court to have violated the law on her own behalf. Though twice removed from office under questionable circumstances, the charge of corruption was not entirely without basis. She was imprisoned with her mother and father and in jail while authorities hanged her father. Her two brothers were themselves killed under questionable circumstances. And the day she returned from an eight year exile, she herself was nearly assassinated by a suicide bomber that killed over 100 of her supporters. That terrorist missed. Last week's, unfortunately, did not.

She did not plan a political career and did not want her children ever to have one at all. She wanted for them a safety she never demanded or expected for herself. She became a politician by accident and thus acquired that ineffable quality all non-accidental politicians covet -- what we, on this side of the world, in our media driven culture, call authenticity.

She would not have used that word. Her politics was complicated and complex. She truly respected the cultural and religious traditions of her land, which were her own as well, even as she led Pakistan through its own modernist emergence. On the occasion of her arranged marriage, she told reporters that she did not expect westerners to understand. I do not think she expected us to understand her politics either. It bridged the contradictions she lived and witnessed.

At the time of her death, the Bush administration was still trying to fashion an unlikely coalition, marrying her democratic bona fides to Musharraf's militaristic stability. The likelihood that such a marriage would ever work was probably always remote. It is now remoter still.

At some level, the US is still MIA in that part of the world. Our Iraqi mis-adventure poisons many wells, but none more than the well of democracy, such as it is, in a place called Pakistan. We had legitimacy, buckets of it, in the wake of 9/11. No one, not even the Pakistanis, questioned our right to go into Afghanistan and clean it out of AL Qaeda and Taliban, and had we remained focused there, we might have succeeded. We certainly might have captured bin Laden, and we would have been able to stop the Taliban from re-emerging and taking refuge in the remote tribal areas of both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But we didn't. Instead, we fought a war that needed no fighting, against an enemy that did not exist, in a country that was neither attacking us nor funding those who would. We fought a war planned at the desks of a handful of neo-cons long ago, and long before 9/11. And we fought a war that those same neo-cons did an abysmal job of planning. It's usually a bad sign when you declare victory before it has been won, but that happened in Iraq too.

The list of mistakes in Mesopatamia is long and painful. Unilateralism. No WMD. A silly coalition of the willing that was always small and has grown even smaller still over time. Insufficient troops. An inept Coalition Provisional Authority. De-baathification, which destroyed Iraq's administrative apparatus, and torture, which destroyed our own integrity. Ignored or minimized sectarian conflict. Until recently, not even a reasonable counter-insurgency strategy . And even today, an unwillingness to level with the American people.

Now we can add Pakistan and Benazir Bhutto to the list. Our Iraqi mistake did not kill her. But it sure did not help either.