It’s one thing to continue to divide the party to sincerely support a candidacy that can go nowhere. It’s another thing to further the most insidious, misleading, destructive, and Orwellian right-wing lies for your own failure-desitned short-term gain in supporting such a candidacy. That’s why Clinton surrogate Lanny Davis has to be the most myopically cynical person I can think of.
On TPM TV yesterday at Talkingpointsmemo.com, the episode was about Davis being on Fox News, talking about how fair they had been while the other networks had been biased towards Obama.
http://www.veracifier.com/...
The spokesbimbo of the minute and he agree, on this Fox clip, that Republicans have been right that the media except for Fox has a liberal agenda. They actually have the unbelievable gall to say the media has been biased towards Obama because he is the more liberal of the two Democratic presidential candidates. Lanny actually says that now he knows how Republicans feel, with so much media bias against them. The cynicism and layers of dishonesty here are flabbergasting.
First of all I didn’t realize that constant loops of Reverend Wright’s most controversial lines, and constant discussion of how Obama can’t win "regular" people constituted a bias TOWARDS Obama. And as an intelligent person Lanny knows which corporations control the media, and what the general content of the media is. Including who got the negative coverage versus the regular-guy-meme kid gloves in the last two presidential elections.
And if he is smart at all he should know how the false "liberal media" meme (and its ability to obviously distract people from figuring out corporate media's real conservative bias) has been a very distructive and frustrating force for Democrats. Certainly a glass ceiling of sorts (the glass of a TV screen?) in presidential elections. Yet he disingenuously and insultingly furthers this lie anyway because he wants to encourage Fox’s anti-Obama jihad for the sake of his pride and/or Hillary's slim-to-none chances. Even though he knows that they would turn on Hillary as soon as she became the nominee if she did. And that he’d be accountable for his statement that they are so fair, every time they attacked her. And every time they attack any other Democrat and tell horrid lies between now and the end of time.
And I thought Zell and Lie-berman were disloyal and cynical.
I think when he said he knows how Repubs feel, he really meant he knows how relieving it is to see the media swiftboat your otherwise viable opponent. Not the exact fricking opposite of that, as he was implying.
Like Hillary’s meeting with Richard Mellon Scaife, this is the depths to which the Clinton camp has sunk in their hatemongering, dishonesty, desperation, and enabling of all the worst and meanest forces that have slandered all Democrats and demonized everything good. It’s like McCain’s sycophantic support for Bush after what Bush did to him in 2000, except that is at least understandable due to their ideological similarity and shared party.
The ironic part is that much of Hillary’s base is super-liberal women who understandably just finally want a woman President (middle class educated women who'd be being called elitists if they supported Obama and have always been otherwise called elitists in the media, but I digress). I live on the east side of Portland, Oregon, and I see more support for Obama than anyone (yay, we won Tuesday. But whenever I see a Hillary sticker it’s usually not a working class person. It's usually on a Prius or VW or Volvo driven by a hippiesh or professional looking middle-aged woman with lots of environmental, anti-bigotry, and genuinely and rightfully far left bumper stickers. Woman or no woman, how can they stay with a campaign that has the candidate and surrogates bedding down with the lying, biased, bigoted hatemongers that have consistently and viciously demonized gays, feminists, liberals, Portlanders/San Franciscans/Massachusettsians/whatever, and everything else they are/stand for for so long. How can they stay with a campaign that furthers the most insidious and misleading right-wing talking points that this base knows are not true and very destructive to the good liberal agenda? And how can Hillary be so mean to this base? The layers of irony and self-destructiveness are enough to make my head explode.
It’s one thing to see Republicans be sick, twisted, disloyal to people of their own demographic, and illogical all the time. And it’s one thing to see media-believing moderates fall for Republican illogic and Republican candidates. It all seems par for the slanted course of American politics. But I hold my own party to a higher standard. It’s just so disheartening to one’s sense of hope to see Clintonite DLC Dems further the most vicious, Orwellian lies that destroy all Dems, and to see genuinely progressive Dems support Clinton’s campaign despite this, simply because of gender or any other one issue.
But I do have hope, because of the wonderful people in the Obama campaign. Let’s keep it up and make sure these Lanny Davis types and DLC types never have enough power to drag our party down to the level of pandering sycophants to corporate media liars again. We are becoming a truth-to-power party again, not a party that pretends MSM lies are true in order to impress the cool kids at the expense of our own long-term electoral success.
All the way with the Obama/other-non-DLCer ticket '08!!!!