I mentioned in my review of “There Will Be Blood” how Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis likes to say he always felt like an outsider growing up in England because of his half-Irish and half-Jewish ancestry. Yet, his father, C. Day Lewis, the son of a Protestant minister, was the Poet Laureate of England, which is the same job Chaucer had. You can’t get much more English than that. (And Day-Lewis’s Jewish grandfather, a knight of the realm, ran the Ealing movie studio when it made such famously English comedies as “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”)

I’m working on a review of “Be Kind Rewind,” which is directed by Michel Gondry, and I found something similar:

“Much of Be Kind Rewind takes place on a rundown street corner in Passaic, N.J., with which Gondry clearly developed an affinity. … Gondry himself grew up in the Paris suburb of Versailles, and says he identifies with that feeling of detachment from the big city but also envy of its glitter and commercialism.”

Right. Passaic and Versailles — two peas in a pod, both equally obscure. (Although I’m not sure that a lack of glitter is what first comes to mind when I hear the name “Versailles.”)

I’m reminded of how much of art these days (always?) consists of preserving your adolescent emotions, such as self-pity. The Coen Bros. are living out an adolescent daydream of making an Oscar-winning movie with your brother, but at least they’ve never displayed the slightest hint that they feel sorry for themselves (or so I hope).

In a recent article I discussed the Democratic Party’s Global Presidential Primary, which was held from Feb. 5th- 12th.

This primary was designed to elect delegates to represent Democrats living abroad at the Democratic Party Convention. At the time of writing, the results had not yet been announced. But now they have .

In the Global Presidential Primary, Obama won 3 delegate votes (6 delegates) and Hillary won 1.5 delegate votes (3 delegates). As you can see, that means there are 2 delegates per vote.

Breaking that down further by regional caucuses, in the Americas Regional Caucus (Western Hemisphere) Obama and Hillary each picked up one delegate. In the Asia-Pacific Regional Caucus, Obama earned one delegate. In the Europe, Middle East and Africa Regional Caucus, Obama won 4 and Hillary won 2.

That accounts for 4.5 delegate votes (9 delegates). In April there’s a Democrats Abroad Global Convention scheduled, where they plan to assign 2.5 more votes. Plus, there are 4 superdelegate votes held by Democrats Abroad.

That makes up a total of 11 votes, and 22 delegates.

For the General Election, however, Democrat voters abroad have to request absentee ballots in the normal manner, that is, through local voting officials in their home states.

A blog item [reappropriate » Blog Archive » Did Clinton Defend a Child Rapist? ] alerted me to this Newsday story with a much more Hillary-friendly headline:, An early look at how Clinton deals with crisis, in which they describe Hillary’s “blame the victim” strategy, typical of lawyers who defend rapists:

…her defense strategy - attempting to impugn the credibility of the victim, according to a Newsday examination of court and investigative files and interviews with witnesses, law enforcement officials and the victim.

Rodham, records show, questioned the sixth grader’s honesty and claimed she had made false accusations in the past. She implied that the girl often fantasized and sought out “older men” like Taylor, according to a July 1975 affidavit signed “Hillary D. Rodham” in compact cursive.

Echoing legal experts, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson says the senator would have been committing professional misconduct if she hadn’t given Taylor the best defense possible.

“As she wrote in her book, ‘Living History‘ Senator Clinton was appointed by the Circuit Court of Washington County, Arkansas to represent Mr. Taylor in this matter,” he said. “As an attorney and an officer of the court, she had an ethical and legal obligation to defend him to the fullest extent of the law. To act otherwise would have constituted a breach of her professional responsibilities.”

Seen as an aggressive defense

Rodham, legal and child welfare experts say, did nothing unethical by attacking the child’s credibility - although they consider her defense of Taylor to be aggressive.

“She was vigorously advocating for her client. What she did was appropriate,” said Andrew Schepard, director of Hofstra Law School’s Center for Children, Families and the Law. “He was lucky to have her as a lawyer … In terms of what’s good for the little girl? It would have been hell on the victim. But that wasn’t Hillary’s problem.”

The victim, now 46, told Newsday that she was raped by Taylor, denied that she wanted any relationship with him and blamed him for contributing to three decades of severe depression and other personal problems.

“It’s not true, I never sought out older men - I was raped,” the woman said in an interview in the fall. Newsday is withholding her name as the victim of a sex crime.

With all the anguish she’d felt over the case in the years since, there was one thing she never realized - that the lawyer for the man she reviles was none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I have to understand that she was representing Taylor,” she said when interviewed in prison last fall. “I’m sure Hillary was just doing her job.”[An Early Look At How Clinton Deals With Crisis, By Glenn Thrush, February 24, 2008]

What irks me, as usual, is that there’s no mention of race. I have a feeling, from the story, that everyone involved is (a) the same race, (victim and criminal are distantly related) and (b) white, but race is the most important thing in any story like this, especially in the South, and it’s the one detail Newsday should not have withheld. You would think that Newsday had never heard of the Scottsboro Boys, the Duke Rape Hoax, or To Kill a Mockingbird.

Hillary’s book also leaves it out, but the Newsday reporters actually interviewed the victim and the accused, so they presumably were looking at them and could see what color they are.

Heather Mac Donald, talking about the “Campus Rape Industry” in which the Ivy League rape clinics, facing a shortage of rapes committed by the (mostly white and Asian) upper-middle-class overachievers who attend Harvard and Yale, have to make them up:

David Lisak, a University of Massachusetts psychology professor who lectures constantly on the antirape college circuit, acknowledged to a hall of Rutgers students this November that the “Duke case,” in which a black stripper falsely accused three white Duke lacrosse players of rape in 2006, “has raised the issue of false allegations.” But Lisak didn’t want to talk about the Duke case, he said. “I don’t know what happened at Duke. No one knows.” Actually, we do know what happened at Duke: the prosecutor ignored clearly exculpatory evidence and alibis that cleared the defendants, and was later disbarred for his misconduct. But to the campus rape industry, a lying plaintiff remains a victim of the patriarchy, and the accused remain forever under suspicion.The Campus Rape Myth by Heather Mac Donald, City Journal Winter 2008

A singer-songwriter in Canada, son of a mixed marriage himself, finds that his teenage son, in his “dramatic and perilous journey to come to grips with his mixed-race identity,” is bringing home dangerous black friends from the ghetto, who are (a) threatening, and (b) getting shot on a regular basis. Read Every parent’s nightmare, By Dan Hill, Macleans Magazine, February 14 2008. In the 1970’s Dan Hill had tried to adopt an “apolitical, what’s-all-this-race-stuff-got-to-do-with-me-anyway attitude” but found that race wouldn’t go away.

An ambitious politician in Chicago, son of a white liberal and a polygamist from Kenya, in his own “dramatic and perilous journey to come to grips with his mixed-race identity,” finds himself hobnobbing with…lethal and murderous, white liberals. That would be Barack Obama, and the liberals in question are Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, whom Obama visited in 1995.[Obama once visited '60s radicals, By Ben Smith, Politico.com, Feb 22, 2008] Ayers is the unrepentant terrorist who had an interview appear in the New York Times, with the headline No Regrets for a Love of Explosives, published on September 11, 2001.

Here’s what Peter Brimelow had to say about them, writing from New York for the London Times in 1989:

Hayden claims to have been shocked when he heard Bernadine Dohrn, a leader of the Weathermen faction, exalt the Manson cult’s murders of actress Sharon Tate and others as an example of what must be done to bourgeois society right down to pushing a fork into a victim’s stomach. Collier and Horowitz point out that this famous incident actually occurred at the ‘Michigan War Council’, the meeting at which the Weathermen prepared themselves for going underground to begin ‘military action’. And Hayden gave a rousing speech.

It is easily forgotten that people died because of the New Left and not just in Indo-China. Hayden was much closer to the edge than he admits. Years later, back above ground and living legally, Dohrn’s common-law husband gave Collier and Horowitz a summary of their lives which may be equally appropriate for Hayden: ‘Guilty as hell, free as a bird America is a great country.’

Obama is supposed to be another exemplar of post-racial, post-partisan politics–and if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. In the February, 1963 issue of Commentary Norman Podhoretz wrote a famous essay called My Negro Problem And Ours, [PDF] in which he despaired of ever solving the racial problems of America, and suggested that the only thing that would make them go away was intermarriage. “I believe that the wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone …” he suggested. But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way.