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The Weekend Wrapper

As we approach Thermador, the party conventions, things, as Alice in Wonderland once observed, become curiouser and curiouser.

In a Freudian slip, Democrat Party chairman Howard Dean called the Republican Party the “white party.”

Mr. Dean is white.

Democrat Party Central has opened on former Governor of Massachussetts Mitt Romney an aggressive assault reminiscent of the attack launched by former Russian President and string puller Vladimer Putin against Georgia, a U.S. ally in the Iraq war that in the near past and may again, assuming Putin has his way, become a prisoner in chains of Moscow.

“He is the most intellectually inconsistent politician in the history of politics. I have never seen anyone so completely without any commitment to any particular principle and so willing to say whatever he thinks will help him win the next election," said Rep. Barney Frank of Mr. Romney.

In a story that includes the above quote, Mr. Lee Davidson of Deseret news reminds us that Rep. Frank “has long been a vocal critic of Romney and has been a controversial figure himself. He is an openly gay member of Congress who was formally reprimanded by Congress in 1990 for his relationship with a male prostitute who claimed to run an escort service out of Frank's apartment when he was not home.”

A student of irony, Mr. Davidson notes archly, “Ironically, Republican Larry Craig of Idaho at that time pushed for more severe penalties for Frank, such as expulsion or censure. Craig, now a senator, is involved in his own scandal after pleading guilty to lewd conduct in a Minneapolis airport restroom.”

Such is the sad state of the U.S Congress.

Mr. Frank , it is presumed, has no ambitions for the Vice Presidential nomination. He has not yet said how Romney fares in a comparison with the presumptive Democrat nominee for president, Sen. Barack Obama, now in the process of driving the energetic left wing of his party bomkers by shifting positions on a variety of issues.

Markos Moulitsas of the arch-progressive Daily Kos website has warned darkly, “There is a line between 'moving to the center' and stabbing your allies in the back out of fear of being criticized. And, of late, he's been doing a lot of unnecessary stabbing, betraying his claims of being a new kind of politician. Not that I ever bought it, but Obama is now clearly not looking much different than every other Democratic politician who has ever turned his or her back on the base in order to prove centrist bona fides."

Mr. Michael Goodwin of the Daily News has compared Sen. Hillary Clinton’s political machine to Putin’s war machine: “Russia rolls over Georgia, Hillary Clinton does the same to Barack Obama. Now we know who's boss. Obama blinked and stands guilty of appeasing Clinton by agreeing to a roll call vote for her nomination. That he might not have had much choice if he wanted peace only proves the point that he's playing defense at his own convention.”

Every Democrat’s nightmare just now is a run-away nominating convention in which a majority of aroused delegates spurn the mercurial Obama and turn to Mrs. Clinton as their redeemer and savior.

According to a news report from the International Herald Tribune, Hillary’s folk have been successful in convincing Obama’s folk to put her name in nomination as a “tribute” to her failed run for the presidency: “Many backers of Clinton have been vigorously pushing for her candidacy to be validated through a roll-call vote. The proceedings could take place on the same night that former President Bill Clinton is to deliver his convention speech.”

These portents have caused some Obama devotees to warn everyone of the Ides of March, even though the convention will occur well beyond that date.

The thinking is that co-presidents Bill and Hillary are clever and slippery. Some in the Obama camp recall Sen. Clinton’s airy dismissal of their hero during the primaries: Hillary complimented Sen. McCain’s foreign policy experience profusely and said that Obama’s foreign policy experience was limited to a speech he had given during the last Democrat convention.

The Republican convention, by comparison, promises to be uneventful, provided the anarchists that thus far have dogged the GOP are kept at arms length by the police from the convention floor. The Democrat Party, it would appear, once again has fallen into the bad habit of inviting anarchists into its bosom.

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