Tag: 2008 elections

If you’ve read my posts you know I’m no fan of Barack Obama, and that I have a distinct tendency to display copious amounts of Righteous Indignation.  There’s a reason for that, but there is always a danger in creating outrage fatigue, so today I’m going to try to help put it all into perspective.

Okay, first off, shame on Hillary Clinton for wrapping herself so late in the game in the latest fashion of hard-working Americans. Shame on her for pretending she had to give a damn about the working class when she was shuffling off jobs overseas and cheerleading a bankruptcy bill for the socialized rich. And a special extra deep hearted jeer to her saying she now loves guns and God like she was George Allen.

I have long watched the Clintons lie with impunity, figuring you know, that’s just what politicians do. They lie. A lot. But when another politician, say Obama this time or Perot in the 90s, finally comes up and talks to America like adults and say some inconvient truths, that’s when the liars get to lying hardcore.

Now Hillary is all about steel barrels and gunpowder, when in the 90s she lead the Million Mom March against guns.

Now Hillary is all home spun craving to appear in potato sack dresses, when she is the very product and poster child of the Baby Boomer Entitled generation and has the upper crust of lobbyists and donors carrying her train of silk and tears around.

And now Hillary is demanding to be the moral compass of the country, when she regrets every major decision she has made in the Senate, be it war or economics. When Obama said that the countryside was bitter and grasped for guns and god, he was right. Because people like Hillary, and more so Bush, has failed them, and they grab for the last few things they can believe in. The power of the gun and the glory of God.

The reason there was a mass secularization in Europe over the last 30 years is because their government was competent and put the good of the people over the good of the upper class. The people in Europe realized they did not have to look to some mythical person in the clouds for security, they could provide it themselves, either economically, politically or health-wise.

It is politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton who have stolen this from everyday Americans. If she wants to claim the 90s as her experience, then she must also claim the massive selling out of America to foreign interest of the 90s as well. If she wants to claim her time in the White House on her resume, then she must accept responsibility for the subprime crisis created under her husband. She can’t selective claim experience, she must accept accountability for Waco, the Iraq War, the Bankruptcy Bill and countless other acts during her time of “experience” which have made the countryside bitter.

That is why Hillary is screaming like a banshee about this comment by Obama, because she and her fellow upper class cronies have created the bitter environment most of the country must deal with. Hillary knows if people start connecting the economic and political dots, it will all lead back to her in one way or another. So she must yell “Elitist!”, other wise people might notice she is what she says, and that she is attacking with her greatest weakness, her sense of entitlement.

Obama told the truth, and Hillary decided to lie about it once again. But I have to give her credit, the way she has been running this campaign, I am surprised she didn’t say Obama was “uppity.”

Because that’s the racial code word Hillary is using here, “elitist” for “uppity”, and Clinton really wishes Obama would know his place, in the back of her campaign bus, or at least under it.

Reading this MyDD analysis of Obama’s rhetorical flub about rural Pennsylvania voters, which would be 100% excellent if not for the writer’s insane devotion to ignoring the apostrophe whenever trying to condense ‘it is’ — which is a shame because otherwise the piece seems well written (for that it’s earned a mere 99% for its grammatical apathy), I couldn’t help but feel that the senator supposedly representing Illinois is facing a bit of Karmic justice.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.  Yesterday MyDD reported that the Obama campaign had wiped over nine hundred delegates in California from its list of chosen representatives for the national convention in August.  Ostensibly, this was done to ensure only Obama loyalists would represent the senator from Illinois at the Democratic National Convention.  No big deal, right?  After all, Hillary Clinton’s campaign did a similar purge.

The problem is this: while Clinton trimmed only fifty or so delegates, down from an initial 950, Obama wiped roughly half of 1,700.  Furthermore, whereas Clinton appears to have carefully screened the delegates to be excluded, Obama’s purge list appeared random — activists with solid credentials and who worked tirelessly to campaign for their candidate were eliminated, while those who did little or nothing got to stay on the list to go to Denver.

But here’s where things get more ominous.  As MyDD points out, Obama campaigner Marcy Winograd — a woman with more than a few political credentials to her own name — seems to think the main targets were anti-war progressives.

By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive anti-war activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the Party web site listing the eligibles. The list of Obama delegate hopefuls in one northern California congressional district went from a robust 100 to an anemic 23, while in southern California, the list in Congressman Waxman’s district almost slipped out of sight, plunging from a high of 91 candidates to 17. Gone were strong women with independent political bases.

And the Huffington Post’s Nathaniel Bach wrote:

After completing the application process and finding my name on the official list of registered candidates, I received an email from the California Democratic Party today (Wednesday) at 4:48 p.m. informing me that the final approved lists of delegate candidates had been posted and that I should check the website. (I assume the same email went out to all the delegate candidates.) I clicked over to the website and found that, lo and behold, what had been a list of 90 candidates had been eviscerated down to only 17, and that my name was gone. I immediately checked the Obama candidate list for the 33rd District, where a friend and fellow Obama die-hard was also running for a delegate spot. His name was gone, too, and a list that formerly contained 83 names was down to a mere 20.

The ostensible rationale for the cutting of delegate candidates is to prevent “Trojan horse” delegates from making their way to the Convention floor and then switching allegiances. The vetting and removal of delegate candidates is expressly allowed by party rules. But could the 30th District really have had 73 such turncoats, and was I really one of them? I was a Precinct Captain for the Obama campaign for the California primary; I’ve donated several hundred dollars to Senator Obama’s campaign (the first politician I’ve ever supported financially); and I’ve boosted the campaign in numerous posts on this website…

It’s hard not to be cynical. Remaining on the list of approved candidates is the slate of candidates (longtime campaign volunteers) that the Obama campaign has officially endorsed, as well as several names recognizable from local politics. These delegate candidates aren’t to be faulted for being longtime political activists, but the cynic in me wonders why those names remained while the “nobodies” on the list disappeared. The Obama campaign owes those of us who were cut a fuller explanation of the decision process.

MyDD’s ‘campskunk’ clearly believes that this is not accidental, that the Obama campaign wants “people who will go to the convention and vote for Obama, no matter what.  It’s not about the issues, it’s about the candidate.  If these delegates have strong dedication to particular causes they might be persuadable, so none of those types are allowed.”

But the purge of California delegates, and the fear that anti-war activists among those sent to represent Obama in Denver come August might defect, may run even deeper than anyone suspects.  According to the New York Sun, Obama’s phony anti-occupation position stands a good chance of being exposed for the sham it is.

A key adviser to Senator Obama’s campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.

The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security*. In “Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement,” Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government “the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground).”

Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign’s working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center’s Web site as a policy brief.

If this is true, if Obama plans to back off from any and all public pledges to withdraw from the quagmire in Iraq by the end of his first term (assuming he gets a first term), then this cynical lack of faith in his own supporters exposes a far more serious crisis.  The senator from Illinois, in spite of his alleged initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq, really does support the policy of American imperialism.  And if he’s worried enough about his true position becoming widely known that it has driven him to purge half his California delegates — thus making the prospect of a brokered convention likelier, what does that say about the worth assigned to the anti-war movement by the Democratic Party?  Not much, apparently.

Fortunately, this latest outrage by the Obama campaign has a somewhat happy ending; all of the delegates purged from California’s bloc seem to have been reinstated.  But if Obama thought these devoted supporters might have harbored plans to defect to Hillary Clinton’s camp, he may have pushed his fear one step closer to realization.

According to MSNBC, McCain has erased Obama’s ten point lead over him.  If the senator from Illinois doesn’t start running like a Democrat, and stop acting like a fucking Republican, he’s going to find himself making one hell of a concession speech come November.  And that shall be bad in far more ways than one.

If Obama really wanted to win this thing, he could have distinguished himself by running to the left of Hillary Clinton — not to the right of her.  His failure to seal the deal, combined with his Republican-style attacks (not that Mrs. Clinton is innocent of following suit) and condescending dismissals of the challenges faced by minorities, indicates that he is fully prepared to blow it come November.  Consider this: Recent polls show that Ralph Nader may actually get up to five percent of the vote in November, and that a sizable number of Clinton supporters are likely to vote for McCain — twenty-eight percent, in fact.

That is how things stand at this point.  Can you imagine what shall happen if a bruised and battered Obama comes out of the Democratic National Convention, having alienated upwards of 33% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters, and with the media attacking him at every turn having smelled blood in the water?  Imagine that pathetic creature going up against McCain.  We cannot allow overconfidence to cost us this time.  There really is far too much at stake.

UPDATED @ 9:34 PM EDT

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” he said.

I said: Well, there’s so much to live for!

He said: Like what?

I said: The Bush era is almost over! Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

He said: Democrat.

I said: Me too! Are you a liberal, a moderate, or a conservative?

He said: Liberal.

I said: Me too! Would you like a president like John McCain, who will talk about global warming, but offer only a weak industry friendly approach to dealing with it, or do you agree with the Democratic candidates that we need to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050?

He said: Reduce emissions by 80%!

I said: Me too! Would you like John McCain, who wouldn’t mind if the Iraq War lasted another 10,000 years, or would you prefer the approach of the Democratic candidates, who vow to start pulling us out next year??

He said: Out of Iraq!