Category: Meta

Booman:

The non-stop shilling for Clinton continues at Talk Left where Armando is at it full-time.

Have whatever opinion of the actual Bill Clinton Presidency, but you have to deal with the fact that Bill Clinton remains extremely popular and his Presidency remembered fondly.

It's funny, but I don't remember Bill Clinton's presidency all that fondly. The first two years could only be described as a total disaster.

Funny, I do not recall writing that BOOMAN remembered the Clinton Presidency fondly. I cited an article which stated:

Bill Clinton enjoys a 66 percent approval rating in a Washington Post/ABC News Poll released last month.

Booman's hatred of Hillary is so blinding that he denies the obvious – Bill Clinton is popular, whether Booman likes Bill or not. He sounds like a Republican now. Denying obvious facts. That is quintessential Hillary Hate. Makes people idiots.

What should the “Netroots” do with rerard to pressuring candidates and the Democratic Party? Booman endorses a “We Hate Hillary” strategy:

Why We Don’t Have Her Back

by BooMan

Tue Nov 13th, 2007 at 12:36:49 PM EST

For a Democratic presidential campaign to go into the general election without the Netroots is to fight with one hand behind your back. Yet, that is what the Clinton campaign intends to do. Their contempt for the progressive blogosphere is manifest and comes in comments from people as diverse as Al From and Paul Begala.

. . . You think the Netroots is going to go to war for you when you do this shit? After you basically called us all ‘assholes from Vermont’? No way.

But, if we bring up what a dishonest, loathsome campaign the Clintons are running, all of a sudden we are Hillary haters. That’s backwards. Hillary hates us. And she treats us with the same contempt that she treats those audiences to in Iowa. . . .

Um, ok. Nice to see how Booman’s “Netroots” has been getting all that love and respect from the other campaigns. As usual, it is all personality and “personal respect” for some of them. Me I want ISSUE respect. Respect my issues. Thus, on Obama, I wrote:

Now that Senator Barack Obama has regained his footing in the Presidential race, it is time for him to go for the win – by demonstrating leadership on the issues NOW! Obama has shrewdly allowed John Edwards to take the path of self immolating personal attacks on Clinton (now he won’t say he will support Hillary if she is the nominee, he is self destructing), while reaping the political benefits of those attacks. But Obama has a chance to do more now. He has a chance to define the terms of this contest. He can lead now on the issues. Particularly ending the war in Iraq by not funding it.

Unlike Booman, I do not care if he and his buddies get “respect.” I care about the issues I care about. Booman’s is the path to irrelevance, unless you want to be a “player.” Then it is a path to ridicule.

If only the NYTimes Editorial Board could have had Major Danby explain to them how HAAAARD it is on poor Harry Reid. They never would have written this:

Abdicate and Capitulate

It is extraordinary how President Bush has streamlined the Senate confirmation process. As we have seen most recently with the vote to confirm Michael Mukasey as attorney general, about all that is left of “advice and consent” is the “consent” part.

. . . In less than seven years, Mr. Bush has managed to boil that list down to its least common denominator: the president should get his choices. At first, Mr. Bush was abetted by a slavish Republican majority that balked at only one major appointment – Harriet Miers for Supreme Court justice, and then only because of doubts that she was far enough to the right.

The Democrats, however, also deserve a large measure of blame. They did almost nothing while they were in the minority to demand better nominees than Mr. Bush was sending up. And now that they have attained the majority, they are not doing any better.

On Thursday, the Senate voted by 53 to 40 to confirm Mr. Mukasey even though he would not answer a simple question: does he think waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning used to extract information from a prisoner, is torture and therefore illegal?

Democrats offer excuses for their sorry record, starting with their razor-thin majority. But it is often said that any vote in the Senate requires more than 60 votes – enough to overcome a filibuster. So why did Mr. Mukasey get by with only 53 votes? Given the success the Republicans have had in blocking action when the Democrats cannot muster 60 votes, the main culprit appears to be the Democratic leadership, which seems uninterested in or incapable of standing up to Mr. Bush.

Senator Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat who turned the tide for this nomination, said that if the Senate did not approve Mr. Mukasey, the president would get by with an interim appointment who would be under the sway of “the extreme ideology of Vice President Dick Cheney.” He argued that Mr. Mukasey could be counted on to reverse the politicization of the Justice Department that occurred under Alberto Gonzales, and that Mr. Mukasey’s reticence about calling waterboarding illegal might well become moot, because the Senate was considering a law making clear that it is illegal.

That is precisely the sort of cozy rationalization that Mr. Schumer and his colleagues have used so many times to back down from a confrontation with Mr. Bush. The truth is, Mr. Mukasey is already in the grip of that “extreme ideology.” If he were not, he could have answered the question about waterboarding.

. . . The rationales that accompanied the vote in favor of Mr. Mukasey were not reassuring. The promise of a law banning waterboarding is no comfort. It is unnecessary, and even if it passes, Mr. Bush seems certain to veto it. In fact, it would play into the administration’s hands by allowing it to argue that torture is not currently illegal.

The claim that Mr. Mukasey will depoliticize the Justice Department loses its allure when you consider that he would not commit himself to enforcing Congressional subpoenas in the United States attorneys scandal.

All of this leaves us wondering whether Mr. Schumer and other Democratic leaders were more focused on the 2008 elections than on doing their constitutional duty. Certainly, being made to look weak on terrorism might make it harder for them to expand their majority.

. . .

Shame on the NYTimes for not understanding the tribulations of our Dem leadership. If only Danby were there to explain it.

One of the breed of bonkers, I wouldn’t dare to lecture
I don’t know how to lead, there’s got to be somebody better
Weak in the kneesy species, dreaming of future faded
Seen where the suture stiches nitted, slipped? I’m with you baby,
Let’s get obnoxious with it, I wanna know what brave is
I’m tired of sitting here pretending I’m not fucking dangerous!

~El-P, Run the Numbers

What luck for rulers that men do not think.

~Adolf Hitler

Most of us can agree that all signs point to coming electoral success at every level of the Federal government for the Democratic Party in 2008.  The polls are there, the Republican incumbents are stepping down, and the money edge is nearly insurmountable.

At the same time, the current Democratic Congress, holding narrow majorities, is expected to confirm Michael Mukasey as Attorney General.  This is after the nominee suggested he did not know what waterboarding entailed, that the President has the power to disobey the direct language of Federal statues, and that the Office of the Legal Counsel can advise that Executive Branch employees to disobey a Congressional subpoena and the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia should refuse to obey a citation for contempt.

This compels us all to contemplate that no matter what the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party, many dire threats to our liberty will persist.

Matt Yglesias sparks the retrospective.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Digby on Abraham Lincoln.

Kid Oakland on Being a Fighting Democrat.

Me on Richard Hofstadter, Lincoln, FDR and Obama.

List some of your picks and include one of your own so I look less of an egomaniac.

If anything defines the thrust of my postings here, it is a repeated exhortation both to myself and to others to think about things differently.  To me, this is of upmost importance.  Far too often, we are limited in our thinking by predefined boundaries or conceptions.  This has the result of limiting our answer set to the various questions we ask ourselves, often without our even knowing it.

This is not an original thought on my part: what is more a cliché of our times than to “think outside the box”?  Yet, we do not think outside the box very often at all, and no place less than in the political arena.  Take, for example, the issue of public education in American politics.  What are the major political issues relating to this subject?  Vouchers, class size, teachers’ unions, merit pay, increased spending per student, standardized testing, and charter schools.  These issues have been the major political issues regarding public education for at least the last decade, the period of time that I have been a voting citizen in the US.  And the sides in the debate are fairly static; Democrats are good for reducing class size, higher spending per student, and supporting teachers’ unions, Republicans are good for vouchers, charter schools, and supporters of merit pay and standardized testing.  We are left with both a supposed “crisis” in public education which is persistent (and in many ways mythical) as well as with a static debate, with political impasse allowing for these issues to remain dominant and no theoretical reforms ever fully implemented.  Ideas outside of this spectrum, such as the expansion of either the school day or school year, tend to lack partisan support from either side and languish, undebated and unimplemented.
 

First, let me start off by saying I dislike the word “Manifesto,” it sounds, oh I don’t know, just too grand and at the same time really ambiguous.

But that’s the word we have and the high zen dictator has spoken, so I’ll diss the term no further.

I have read some of pfiore8’s ramblings on how “might makes right” has to be turned on its head, that we have to begin realizing that we do have our own power, that we are not powerless even in the face of such strong oppression and “might” directed against us.

I have also rambled a lot myself speaking of thinking “outside the box.”

Well that’s all well and good, lots of rambling, and now I’m getting tired of that word, too!  Bleh.

Folks have said they’ll work on various issues of this marvelous Manifesto.  And here’s where my meta comes in.  If you are interested … there’s more!