... to shut the fuck up?
I'm pretty thick skinned when it comes to Times columnists. I can read Safire, Brooks and even Friedman without ranting, but this last one just sent me over the edge.
It was trouble from the beginning.
If Democrats want to know how to win again, they have a model. It's the British Labor Party.
...
Tony Blair and another M.P., Gordon Brown, dragged the party away from socialism, unions, nuclear disarmament and anti-Americanism. Together they created "New Labor," which aimed for the center and aggressively courted Middle Britain instead of trying to scare it. The result is that since 1997, Mr. Blair and Labor have utterly dominated Britain.
Yep, Tony Blair, craven lapdog of Bush and the model of Kistof's democratic party.
Hitting my head against my desk seemed to dull the pain.
But it got better.
As moderates from the heartland, like Tom Daschle, are picked off by the Republicans, the party's image risks being defined even more by bicoastal, tree-hugging, gun-banning, French-speaking, Bordeau-sipping, Times-toting liberals, whose solution is to veer left and galvanize the base. But firing up the base means turning off swing voters. Gov. Mike Johanns, a Nebraska Republican, told me that each time Michael Moore spoke up for John Kerry, Mr. Kerry's support in Nebraska took a dive.
thunk
Can someone please tell this man that the Republican governor of Nebraska does not have the best interests of the democratic party at heart and is probably not the best person to turn to for advice?
How can this get worse?
I wish that winning were just a matter of presentation. But it's not. It involves compromising on principles. Bill Clinton won his credibility in the heartland partly by going home to Little Rock during the 1992 campaign to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled convict named Ricky Ray Rector.
There was a moral ambiguity about Mr. Clinton's clambering to power over Mr. Rector's corpse. But unless Democrats compromise, they'll be proud and true and losers.
Hey, why don't we release the retard in the woods and have our candidate hunt him down with a rifle? We can lock up the sportsman vote as well! Two retards with one stone.
Why settle for Ricky Ray? When you get down to it, he was mentally disabled, an amateur retard at best. The rigors of a presidential campaign demand nothing less than a fully qualified professional retard.
We may have a use for Mr. Kristof after all.