Globe endorsements

The Boston Globe's twin endorsements on Sunday are probably more influential than my own by dint of vastly more readers, but they're still not very important in the modern political world.

Endorsing Obama is a slight departure from the conventional. Hillary of course is the safe candidate. The problem I have with Obama is his very lack of a confrontational approach to our completely broken political culture. It's not his fault that he can't risk visibly acting on his true outsider status to speak to that; maybe if he gets elected he will prove to have more steel than I've seen so far.

Hill has plenty of steel, but she's thoroughly compromised and utterly pro-establishment. Her collegial cozying up to Lindsey Graham after the impeachment fiasco is akin to John McCain's willingness to kiss Duhbya's exceedingly hairy ass after what Rove did to McCain in South Carolina in 2000.

The Globe's endorsement of McCain is of course completely soft-headed and conventional. They don't agree with him about anything, but he has a reputation - ill-deserved - as a straight talker. Oh, and he's mythically bipartisan, not toxic.

Please, what we need is not to transcend partisanship, but to severely punish the party that screwed us. A real stand from the Globe for something other than the conventional narrative would have gone like this:

We're willing to endorse the lesser of evils. That's the way politics is. But we're not willing to endorse anyone from the Republican Party, even in a primary. The GOP has seriously damaged this country, and no one bearing its standard deserves election to any nationally significant position.

Yeah, never happen. Too partisan.