It's time for a nice, sensible liberal to be elected to the Presidency - and we need many more level-headed liberal Democrats to be elected to Congress to help him restore some common-sense,realisticsolutions to America's challenges. I believe the country has had enough of Right-Wing Extremism, and is ready to reject the divisive, reactionary ideologues of conservatism.
GW Bush, and his card-carrying, conservative minions, have been an absolute disaster for the country. Almost every member of his administration is a known authoritarian conservative, from Dick Cheney and Condoleeza Rice's war-loving foreign policy disasters, to FEMA's poor-hating neglect of New Orleans.
The following ad is, in my humble opinion, the worst campaign ad ever run by a major campaign for any office, in the history of the United States. This sets some sort of record for out-of-touch cluelessness:
Thanks to Zell Miller, there is a rule to deal with Joe Lieberman.
Lieberman's endorsement of Republican John McCain disqualifies him as a super-delegate to the Democratic National Convention under what is informally known as the Zell Miller rule, according to Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo.
Miller, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, not only endorsed Republican George Bush four years ago, but he delivered a vitriolic attack on Democrat John Kerry at the Republican National Convention.
This is great news - not that I was particularly worried about a Lieberman vote at the convention. It's more that this is hopefully the first step (assuming a Democratic gain in the senate of any size in November) towards the Democratic Party kicking Lieberman to the curb - more exactly, ratifying Lieberman's decision to kick the party to the curb. Bye Bye, committee assignments. Joe, we hardly knew ye.
There was once a rich man - let’s call him "Dives" just for fun - who feasted every night, and wore fine clothes and lived on a large estate. On an adjacent estate there lived a poor beggar - just for fun, let’s call him "Juan Lazarus" - whose master was having a rough time, due to a combination of bad luck, some bad business decisions, and the fact that his wealthy neighbor got preferential treatment at the markets where he sold his estate’s goods.
Because Juan’s family was suffering greatly, he decided to go to Dives’ estate and seek work there.
There are things you can do to persuade me to support [Candidate's Name] in the upcoming primaries, and there are things you can do that will make it less likely that I will support [Candidate's Name].
I value the opinions of my fellow Kossaks, and the things I read here will carry a great deal of weight as I go to the booth and pull the lever in the upcoming Primary.
I'll start with the things I find most persuasive.
I have very little patience for apologists for war, especially of the weak-kneed, unimaginative, "well, it's a fallen world, and so war is as inevitable as the dawn..." sort. I'm not an absolute pacifist, in the sense that I suppose that I could conjure a situation where war is necessary: I just think of pacifism as far and away the higher, more spiritually enlightened way of resolving disputes.
Pacifism, to me, does not mean passivity or quietism in the face of evil - it means resisting evil through means other than violence.
Simple: In 2000, he was riding the crest of the longest economic boom in the history of the United States. The wars that the Clinton administration had gotten the US into had all been victorious, with US casualties well under 100.
Alan Greenspan was worried about the risks to the economy of paying off the entire national debt too soon, for cryin' out loud. A looming question in the next few years was: "If we've paid off the entire national debt, what do we do with the money when there's a surplus? Because, you know, there's surpluses 'as far as the eye can see.'?"
No, it's not because it would be the moral thing to do (although it would be moral.) Nope, not because it is the only responsible choice. And not because it is what the American People, in overwhelming numbers, want.
Nope, I'm going to argue this from a purely pragmatic, Machiavellian, amoral standpoint.
End the war on Bush's watch, force him and the Republicans to eat their defeat (and it istheir defeat.)
Step one is to outline what it would take for the United States to really, actually win in the way that gave neocons wet-dreams 4 years ago. Step two is, give Bush and the Republicans a clear, honest choice: either
This'll probably be one of those 4-comment manifestos that clutter the diary boards here, but just for the record, I thought I'd do a brain dump of where I stand on a couple of issues.
On many issues, I'm pretty far to the...well, "left" doesn't really describe it. I'm more a "just society radical idealist" than a "lefty", per se, although there are a lot of issues (most, really) where I agree with the left.
I'll just mention a couple of issues, with where I stand and why. My hope is that this will be thought-provoking. The discussion should be interesting. I'm not really sure how to tag this...
This is something that's been bugging me for awhile, and so I wanted to bring it up for discussion. To the list of categories of troll (Concern, etc.) that folks here refer to, I'd like to add a new one: The "Despair Troll." This may seem harsh, but frankly, I've had enough.
I define a Despair Troll as someone who does some version of the following:
To an action diary, they post a comment like:
"Yeah, that'll happen. Americans are too wrapped up in [Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan/American Idol/Boy Bands etc etc etc] to pay any attention to your [protest/LTE campaign/boycott etc.].
I understand feeling discouraged at times about the state of American culture and the prevailing state of political...unseriousness, shall we say.
The AP is reporting that the commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, whose troops are deployed south of Baghdad, is saying that he needs until at least spring 2008, and more probably until summer, to ensure success in his area of Iraq:
If the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq is reversed before the the middle of 2008, the military will risk giving up the security gains it has achieved at a cost of hundreds of American lives over the past six months, the commander of U.S. forces south of Baghdad said Friday.
Maj. Gen. Richard Lynch, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, mentioned none of the proposals in Congress for beginning to withdraw U.S. troops as soon as September. all. But he made clear in an interview that in his area of responsibility south of Baghdad, it will take many more months to consolidate recent gains.
"It's going to take through (this) summer, into the fall, to defeat the extremists in my battle space, and it's going to take me into next spring and summer to generate this sustained security presence," he said, referring to an Iraqi capability to hold gains made by U.S. forces.
I'm channeling Thomas Frank here (can you "channel" someone who's still alive?), but I think the Democrats' problem, which the Republicans have ridden to success since Nixon, is they have forgotten who they represent.
Successful politics, in a democracy, is not as much about what you stand for, but more who you stand with.
Think about it: who has become the Republican base? What are the economic circumstances of the average, say, Rush Limbaugh listener? Who sends those little checks most faithfully to the various right-wing religious hucksters out there? I'm asking seriously: who are these people?
The somewhat tragic answer is, "lots of former Democrats".
Let me set up a little Socratic thingie to show you what I'm talking about.
I sometimes feel ashamed of this country - and I'm not talking (this diary, anyway...) about the leadership, I'm talking about the masses, and the class of pimps that cater to their basest..."instincts" is the wrong word, because it implies that cheap thrills, vicarious rage-expression masquerading as "justice" (*cough* Nancy Grace cough) and pornographically violent spectacle are intrinsically, deeply human, and not just an abberation that has been nurtured into a thriving, culture-destroying monster by people who worship Power over Goodness.
About 50 years ago, someone way smarter than me described Television as a "vast wasteland" (as I recall it was someone who was fabulously enriched by helping form and create said wasteland, but I digress) but television has moved so far down the depravity slope that people are actually nostalgic for the sentimentality-opium-softened wasteland he was describing.
I work in phone-based tech support/customer service for a company that makes, among other things, custom-printed books that some people use as mementos for weddings.
Every once in awhile, I get a call from some newly-married woman who is having...well, "a fit" doesn't adequately capture the flavor of the rant directed at me and my company. Her memory book has some sort of problem with the binding, or one or more of the photos came out slightly dark...and now her perfect wedding is ruined!!!
I usually hit the "mute" button on my phone at that point, and tell Jessica, the woman sitting in the cubicle next to mine, "If I ever get engaged, I'm gonna tell my fiance that, if she ever starts acting like this harpy, I'm gonna tell her the wedding is off."
My co-worker once said, "But you've got to understand, it's Her Day To Be A Princess."
One of my favorite movies is "The Mission" with Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro.
It is the story of a group of missionaries who establish the titular "Mission" in the Jungles of Paraguay, among the Guarani people.
A notorious Portuguese mercenary and slave-trader, Rodrigo Mendoza, kills his brother early in the film, and feels near-suicidal remorse, and is starving himself in an asylum. He is met there by a Spanish Jesuit priest, Father Gabriel.
Gabriel offers a dubious Mendoza a chance to redeem himself: he must travel with the missionaries up the river to their nascent mission in the jungle, and must drag a heavy bundle containing the armor and weapons he used in his life as a mercenary. There is a scene where one of the missionaries, out of pity, cuts the rope by which Mendoza is dragging his burden, but Mendoza retrieves his bundle, re-ties the rope to it.
In my last dispatch, I told you about the (still continuing) huge Citizens' Action in Washington, DC. In this addtion, I thought I would give you some of the reasons I think the current protests are having such an effect.
Your universe, where the war continues and congress has surrendered and activists hearts feel such despair, is incredibly close to our universe, where the end of the war is in sight, and people are exercising their power. The differences are minor, but we have come to realize that those small differences are the key.
Hello, residents of Universe 15g-55891. We have just invented technology to peer into your universe, which, like all the other universes, closely parallels our own. Like us, you too will soon discover this capability - after all, our universes are parallel.
Yes, you will soon have this capability yourselves - even now, there is a graduate student working diligently at the University of California, Berkeley, and I can tell you that, as I write, he is about 6 months behind the corresponding researcher in our universe.
We have also discovered something intriguing: we and you were in the same universe up until mid-November of last year, but then our Universe split from yours.
I thought I would begin this first dispatch by bringing you up to date on recent events here.
