Skip the Song, See the Video

Hillary Clinton may or may not make a good president, but there’s near unanimity in opinionland that you shouldn’t let her DJ your next party. The selection of Celine Dion’s “You and I” as the winner of Sen. Clinton’s online campaign-song contest has received denunciation across the political spectrum.

Mother Jones’s Jonathan Stein presents the leftist critique: “great if you like shrieking Canadians and awful if you have taste.” The New Republic’s Michael Crowley advances the unconventional neoliberal/neocon slant: “pretty lame.” And National Review’s Jonah Goldberg adheres to the conservative line: “really bad.”

The “Sopranos” spoof starring both Clintons ­and Johnny Sack that the campaign uses to introduce the choice, on the other hand, garners nearly unanimous praise. (Although this Ron Paul supporter/blogger, who must embrace the Tony-was-shot school of “Sopranos” exegesis, dislikes what he perceives as the “foreshadowing of the Clintons’ political assassination.”)

Some commenters are playfully jabbing Sen. Clinton for “outsourcing her campaign theme song,” in the words of The Chicago Tribune’s Frank James, because she picked a Canadian singer. More damning, however, is the Joe McGinnis-like discovery by TPM Cafe’s Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld: “The song was originally written for…an ad campaign for Air Canada.” Who says presidential politics is indistinguishable from marketing?

Chris Suellentrop

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True Believers

Iraq is a conflict between warring bands of true believers: The evangelical atheism of Christopher Hitchens includes an intellectual orientation that is not unlike that of militant jihadism, argues Villanova humanities professor Eugene McCarraher in a review in Commonweal of Hitchens’ book “God Is Not Great.”

“Hitchens’s uplifting predictions about the God-less future are most savagely belied by the catastrophe in Iraq, where the bogus distinction between religious and secular violence can be seen in all its ideological duplicity,” McCarraher says. Hitchens sees the war’s Iraqi victims as merely “the collateral damage of enlightenment,” McCarraher suggests. He writes:

While pointing to the sanguinary unreason of “fundamentalists,” the war’s advocates have offered up the lives of thousands in sacrifice to a future of Market and Democracy. An Iraqi killed by a U.S. Marine is just as dead as if she were dispatched by a jihadist. Both Hitchens and the jihadist would contend that her death is part of a larger struggle between the forces of light and darkness.

National Journal columnist Jonathan Rauch has a theory for why the immigration bill is going nowhere: “The most basic decision any immigration bill needs to make is this: How many immigrants does the country need and want? Bizarrely, this was the one question that the debate over the Senate bill did not seem to concern itself with.”

Chris Suellentrop