Tag: Politics

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I-oh-way

When I was picking colleges, one small factor that led to me choosing to go to school in Iowa was the Iowa caucuses; I thought it would be really cool to be there for that entire process. This was in 1989, when I was about to graduate high school; I was anticipating the 1992 caucuses.

And then, when 1992 finally rolled around, Iowa’s own Senator Tom Harkin ran for the Democratic nomination, which meant that the Iowa caucuses meant absolutely nothing and New Hampshire became the big prize.

Oh well.

My point? I don’t have one, of course.

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(Not that I would have anytime soon, anyway)

I will never, ever, ever, vote for another Republican candidate for anything, as long as I draw breath.

Why?

Ezra Klein:

Something has gone wrong on the Right. Become sick and twisted and tumorous and ugly. To visit Michelle Malkin’s cave is to see politics at its most savage, its most ferocious, its most rageful. They say they’ve spent the past week smearing a child and his family because that child was fair game — he and his family spoke of their experience receiving health care through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. For this, right wingers travel to their home, insinuate that the family is engaged in large-scale fraud, make threatening phone calls to the family, interrogate the neighbors as to the family’s character and financial state.

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he “really” needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

John Cole:

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

Oh, and for the “You guys do it too!” crowd, here’s Ezra again:

And here’s another question: Does anyone remember DailyKos launching a feeding frenzy trying to smear or discredit Ashley? Anyone hear of Markos Moulitsas camping out outside her house to see if Ashley was really grieving? His readers interviewing her teachers to see if her academic performance had actually improved as a result of the President’s hug? Did any of that happen? Or did the Left raise some questions about the political appropriateness of the ad without trying to destroy the family’s name and reputation?

There’s a difference here. And it’s not in which side elevates sympathetic stories and individuals into the public eye. They both do that. It’s in how low the other side stoops in response.

I could vomit, I really could.

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If elected, he will not serve!

I’ve been remiss in not wishing Alan Bedenko well on his run for the Erie County Legislature. So, best wishes to him, and high hopes that he wins. I’d pledge to vote for him, but I’m not in his district.

I also didn’t know that Alan grew a beard. Someone should have told him that bearded guys look shifty and evil. Of course, someone may have also pointed out that without a beard, Alan looked eerily like a dark-haired Dick Cheney….

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He must have forgotten to have his readers Google it for him.

Matthew Yglesias has yet another in a long series of utterances by Jonah Goldberg that fail to live up to facts about the world. I know, it’s not a news flash when Goldberg turns out to have his head squarely planted right around the location of his own colon, but sometimes it’s downright amusing.

Oh heck, while I’m at it, Kevin Drum’s got Glenn Reynolds being a damn moron too. Not a news flash either, since Reynolds is also a complete idiot. “If things go badly in Iraq”? By what possible intellectual gymnastics can people like Reynolds continue to convince themselves that things are going well in Iraq?

UPDATE: Well, let’s make it a Trifecta, shall we? Sadly, No has a nice quote from one of the indistinguishable idiots of Powerline:

E.J. Dionne argues that the “center” in American politics is moving towards the left. I think he’s correct, though we may be one major terrorist attack and/or recession on a Democratic president’s watch away from having to revisit that view.

Hmmmm. Sounds to me like the Right actually wants the US to get attacked, as long as a Democrat is in office when it happens! Isn’t that what that means? If what Glenn Reynolds says in his quote is fair game, why isn’t this a fair reading of Powerline?

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I hate our political discourse.

[I feel like ranting about politics a bit, so rant I shall. Move on if you don’t like it when I get in this mood.]

I don’t read Glenn Greenwald all that much anymore these days, primarily because it gets so depressing. I’m glad he delves into the cesspools of what constitutes political discourse in this country, because hey, every dirty job’s gotta get done by somebody, but still, eventually I just can’t watch anymore. So I actually followed a link from Lance Mannion to one of Mr. Greenwald’s posts, and sure enough, I wanted to vomit about halfway through it. I’m not sure if it was the quotes from actual transcriptions of “professional” journalists almost swooning over the manliness of Fred Thompson or the idea of Rush Limbaugh, he who cannot seem to make a marriage work at all, lecturing America on how they should be raising their children. (And then there’s the appalling rejoinder to Greenwald spat out by Ace of Spades, who is apparently some sort of “humorist” on the Right.)

And this comes minutes after I read this article about Antonin Scalia’s fetish for Jack Bauer, who is as completely fictional as any of Fred Thompson’s “manly” movie or TV roles. Because, you know, look how many times Jack saved the world by doing questionable things. (Hey, Scalia, there are these people in TV called writers, and stuff happens on TV shows not because someone in the show does something, but because the writers wrote it that way. That second-season moment when Jack threatens to kill the terrorist guy’s family on TV? The one that’s faked? That tactic worked because the writers wrote it that way. So if you’re wondering “What would Jack Bauer do?”, the answer is simple: he’d do whatever the f***ing script tells him to do.)

And before that, I read Rudy Giuliani blathering on about how when he’s President, we’re going to “stay on offense” in the “War on Terror”, as if the geopolitics of terrorism and fundamentalism can be reduced to the sides of a sporting event (and heaven forbid he actually spell out what “staying on offense” actually means, since I don’t think anybody can seriously maintain that we’ve spent the last six years doing nothing but playing defense, and to less than encouraging results, either). And don’t get me started on my confusion about just where Giuliani’s national security gravitas came from, because I’m damned if I can figure that out.

And way back when we had the “Why didn’t the men rush the guy! After all, I certainly would have!” crap over the Virginia Tech shooter. And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum.

I am so staggeringly tired of macho fantasy masquerading as serious political discussion these days.

OK, rant’s done. Back to more mild-mannered stuff.

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I’d forgotten what reason sounds like

A few key passages from Fareed Zakaria’s article in Newsweek:

Today, by almost all objective measures, the United States sits on top of the world. But the atmosphere in Washington could not be more different from 1982. We have become a nation consumed by fear, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans, foreign companies and free trade, immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world, we see ourselves besieged and overwhelmed. While the Bush administration has contributed mightily to this state of affairs, at this point it has reversed itself on many of its most egregious policies—from global warming to North Korea to Iraq.

In any event, it is time to stop bashing George W. Bush. We must begin to think about life after Bush—a cheering prospect for his foes, a dismaying one for his fans (however few there may be at the moment). In 19 months he will be a private citizen, giving speeches to insurance executives. America, however, will have to move on and restore its place in the world. To do this we must first tackle the consequences of our foreign policy of fear. Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

In a global survey released last week, most countries polled believed that China would act more responsibly in the world than the United States. How does a Leninist dictatorship come across more sympathetically than the oldest constitutional democracy in the world?

…

Though Democrats sound more sensible on many of these issues, the party remains consumed by the fear that it will not come across as tough. Its presidential candidates vie with one another to prove that they are going to be just as macho and militant as the fiercest Republican. In the South Carolina presidential debate, when candidates were asked how they would respond to another terror strike, they promptly vowed to attack, retaliate and blast the hell out of, well, somebody. Barack Obama, the only one to answer differently, quickly realized his political vulnerability and dutifully threatened retaliation as well. After the debate, his opponents leaked furiously that his original response proved he didn’t have the fortitude to be president.

In fact, Obama’s initial response was the right one. He said that the first thing he would do was make sure that the emergency response was effective, then ensure we had the best intelligence possible to figure out who had caused the attack, and then move with allies to dismantle the network responsible.

We will never be able to prevent a small group of misfits from planning some terrible act of terror. No matter how far-seeing and competent our intelligence and law-enforcement officials, people will always be able to slip through the cracks in a large, open and diverse country. The real test of American leadership is not whether we can make 100 percent sure we prevent the attack, but rather how we respond to it.

Read the whole thing. This is what America needs to hear, not more tough-guy “Bomb Mecca and Tehran and Damascus! Double Gitmo! Close our borders and full cavity searches at every county border, because they all want to KILL YOU!” crap from the Rudy Giuliani’s and Mitt Romney’s of the world.

(via)

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Let’s not let this become a quadrennial event.

May 1, four years ago:

Today: Al Qaeda is getting stronger. The “surge” isn’t working yet. Four years into the War on Terror, terrorist attacks are sharply up. More than 100 soldiers in Iraq dead this month alone. Setting self-defense and self-policing aside, Iraqis are increasingly unable to reconstruct their own country. Four years after we “ousted” the Taliban, we’re still launching major offensives against them. American dead in Iraq outnumber American dead in the attacks on 9-11-01, with no end in sight.

Four years. There’s your legacy, Mr. President: a stunt flight, a banner, bombs, death, and failure.

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The “Straight Talk Express”?!

Senator John McCain goes to Iraq and comes back saying all the standard right-wing stuff about how safe things really are over there, and how hyped up the reports of violence are, yada yada yada. You know, “we’re just not getting the whole picture”.

So I’m perfectly happy to get the “full picture” from a guy who went for his stroll around Baghdad while wearing a bullet-proof vest, surrounded by a hundred armed US soldiers, and overflown by three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships.

Matthew Yglesias also makes an interesting point about McCain and war-related pork spending for Arizona:

War, in short, is good for business in Arizona. And yet, Saint John McCain’s strident militarism never gets discussed on these terms — is never seen as something on a par with how Carl Levin loves cars and Joe Biden loves credits cards.

John McCain has become an absolute joke who will say anything in hopes of being President. It’s almost sad to behold, really.

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