How Much Does Dan Dislike Case?

U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye: What if Case wins Democratic race? AP photo from Bob Jones

Linda Lingle will be the Hawaii GOP candidate for U.S. senator. Will our mostly Democratic electorate vote for her?

In normal times I’d say she cannot win. These are not normal times. Gov. Neil Abercrombie’s political armor is rusted beyond saving. A vote by Democrats for Democrats is not a sure thing.

Mazie Hirono is a featherweight lawmaker and campaigner but has big union backing and Sen. Dan Inouye’s blessing. Why don’t the party bigs like Ed Case, the former congressman and a sizzling campaigner? Because Inouye cannot stand Case’s streak of independence which Hirono definitely does not have.

Lingle is very vulnerable. Her furloughs. She called George Bush the “best president ever” and campaigned with enthusiasm for Sarah Palin. Electing her also would make Hawaii an accomplice to a GOP-majority Senate.

The sensible tilt for Democrats would have been to go with Ed Case. He can match Lingle in debates and maybe draw enough fence-sitters to overcome his mushy-on-party-orthodoxy downside. But that would require Inouye to eat crow and say he’s been wrong about Case.

Ain’t gonna happen. My read is that the aged senator will mass the troops and send them in to fight for Hirono to the death, uphill, across an open field and in the face of brutal artillery.

Abraham Lincoln picked Gen. Meade over Gen. Hooker to defend at Gettysburg, and what a great choice it was. Lincoln did not like Meade one bit. But he wanted a win and Hooker had lost at Chancellorville. Hirono lost big time to Lingle for governor. You don’t double down on a loser.

Inouye is neither Lincolnesque nor a team-of-rivals guy. He’ll lose rather than pick someone he doesn’t like.

* How I wish I’d run the Feb. 12 column I’d written about Hawaii Five-O. But something more urgent came up. I’d written that Lauren German (Lori) should go because she looked like Barbie Cop. She went Feb. 20. I said the show embarrasses us and HPD because Five-O beats up suspects in that blue-shade interrogation room HPD gives the now-four-person gang. And onscene police take orders from Five-O, not their commanders.

Two weeks ago, McGarrett stopped a suspect by smashing his car into the man’s motorcycle. Note also that his car has those blue grill lights that were outlawed here years ago when a bad cop was using them to stop and assault women in cars at night.

Nice Hawaii scenery but very bad police image.

I just hope the Five-O crew won’t break down the door of my house, storm in yelling “clear” and haul me off to the blue-shade HPD interrogation room.

* Is it time to blow off Afghanistan? Acknowledge that we cannot take a country of largely uneducated people and a culture very non-Western and make it religion-tolerant and democratic? That we can’t work with inept and corrupt leaders? That the Taliban are likely to be back?

* Quote in the Wall Street Journal online, not the print edition, by Ben Cayetano:

“I didn’t want to run for mayor, but couldn’t get anybody else to run with the intent of stopping rail.”

That’s a very lame main platform for a would-be mayor of America’s 12th largest metropolitan area, roughly 2,900 sheltered and 1,300 unsheltered homeless, housing sprawl, school disfunction and no new garbage disposal plan.