Feb 09 2008
Let’s start here…
Main Entry:
vin·dic·tive
1 a: disposed to seek revenge : vengeful b: intended for or involving revenge
And then go here…
To Republicans: Conservatism Has Failed. Deal With It, by bonddad
And then I will try to explain what kind of revenge I want, and what I mean by “destroying Republicans” And why I think that that is a necessary part of the new world that Obama wants in one way, with post-partisanship….and that and Pfiore8 wants in another way with post-Democratship.
Feb 08 2008
November 2008:
After months of hammering on the Republican candidates obvious weaknesses the time has finally arrived for the voters to decide: John McCain versus Barack Obama.
After nearly two years on the campaign trail a tired and old looking McCain is limping into the general election, out of cash, out of ideas, and resigned to defeat at the hands of the young and vibrant Senator from Illinois.
The events surrounding the campaign have been reminiscent of the movie A Perfect Storm.
Feb 07 2008
Not long after the 2006 election, I came to the realization that the Republican party needed to go, and so I wrote a piece explaining my reasoning and an overview of how I thought it could be accomplished. But for various reasons (primarily I still lacked the self-confidence), I never posted it anywhere and eventually forgot about it completely.
Then buhdy posted his essay Good Thing They Don’t Believe In Evolution and I saw this line:
DESTROY THE REPUBLICAN PARTY.
“Holy shit,” I thought! “I wrote something saying exactly that about a year ago! Wonder if I ever finished it….” So I went off in search of it, and lo and behold, there it was, still sitting on my hard drive. And it was completed, too!
I wasn’t sure if I should post it in it’s original form or edit it to reflect my current outlook. I was naive enough at the time to believe the Dems might actually start working for us, and I had done very little research into voting systems, laws, etc. I might also have worded some parts a bit differently, now. But after looking at it and wavering back and forth, I finally decided to leave it as is. (Okay, I admit laziness played a part. I don’t feel like rewriting it.)
I wrote this a little over half a year after I beat my depression. (Took me about 15 years to do it, and it’s been about two years since, but that’s another essay.) In a comment I wrote, I said that it can take me a long time to decide on something, but once I decide, I don’t mess around. This is a case in point. Once I decided to become politically engaged (around mid to late summer in ’06, I think; first comment I ever made on DK was in August), from that point to when I wrote this piece, I went from being completely clueless about politics to someone who was engaged and actually knew more in some cases than the rest of my immediate family (who aren’t exactly political slouches). I became the family political geek. So for me, this is not just an essay about destroying the Republican party, it’s also a look back at a milestone in my personal growth.
The only editing I’ve done is some formatting so it looks perty.
Jan 31 2008
Well, now that JE has dropped out, on the Democratic side we’re down to HRC, BO and MG (!) (yes, he even outlasted JE). So, I guess we do really have a choice amongst the Democrats right now, but I’ll continue on the basis that Mike is not going to get the nomination. On the Republican side, we’re pretty much down to MR, JMcC and MH (unless RP does much better next week, which he probably won’t), with McCain holding the mantle of front runner, which he probably will be able to manage to win the nomination from.
Jan 28 2008
Are you f-ing kidding me?
coburn article
http://online.wsj.com/public/a…
diaries
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
background noise’s diary on medicaid cuts
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
fuck you, I got mine
Ratzinger on exorcism
huckabee on bhutto and muslims
giuliani aide on muslims, bhutto “caves”
Jan 28 2008
News Flash: Republicans are hypocrites!
George Bush
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…
Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical
show photos of Karla Faye Tucker, Iraq
robokos’ story on brawling priests
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
Jan 28 2008
“I was never a Republican”
maccabee;s diary on Frank Rich’s column
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
You borke it, you bought it
No one likes to admit they bought a lemon – twice.
Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd
http://www.google.com/search?n…
The Graf said that he had no personal hard feelings; German leadership at the top had been tragically incompetent and Germany had been defeated in a war which it had foolishly started. “As you know, Herr Budd, I was never a Nazi.”
It was the formula you heard all over Germany now. You heard it from the great industrialist who was trying to get back control of his plant. You heard it from the proprietor of the cafe and the waiter, and from the bootblack who sought your patronage outside. You might travel all over Germany and have difficulty in finding a single ex-Nazi.
leni riefenstahl
http://www.filmreference.com/D…
“If an artist dedicates himself totally to his work, he cannot think politically,” Riefenstahl says. Even in the late 1930s, she chose not to leave Germany because, as she observes, “I loved my homeland.” She claims that she hoped that reports of anti-Semitism were “isolated events.” And her image of Hitler was “shattered much too late. . . . My life fell apart because I believed in Hitler. People say of me, ‘She doesn’t want to know. She’ll always be a Nazi.’ [But] I was never a Nazi.”
“What am I guilty of?” Riefenstahl asks. “I regret [that I was alive during that period]. But I was never anti-Semitic. I never dropped any bombs.”
archbishop calls art “degenerate”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wor…
not gay and never have been gay –
Larry craig
founder of swiftboat veterans on Thom Hartmann Ocober 3
said he made a mistake voting for bush
Jan 25 2008
One of the key buzzwords of this Presidential race is change. The voices of change cumulated in a Democratic victory in 2006, and since then, the voices of change have only gotten louder and louder. Supposedly. And yet, when we look at the front-runners for the election, we see that the conventional candidates — Hillary Clinton and John McCain — are poised to take the nomination starting with Super Tuesday. A showing below 15% in South Carolina could doom John Edwards, while both Hillary and John McCain are leading by substantial margins in California. While the Republican primary is a lot messier than the Democratic primary, it seems that with his wins in South Carolina and Louisiana, Mike Huckabee’s home turf, it seems that McCain is an odds-on favorite to take over the Republican nomination.
This brings us to the question of change — do we really want change? The buzzword of this election has been change, yet we see the two establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, establishing themselves as frontrunners in the primary. It seems that people on both parties say that they want change, yet saying that they want change and actually having the courage to vote for change are two different things. It is a lot like a bad relationship — we say that we want to break up, yet when it comes time to actually do it, it is much more comfortable to stay in the relationship than it is to make a clean break and start over. We say that we don’t like where we are and want to move and make a fresh start; however, when it comes down to do it, we are more afraid of the unknown than we are of staying in a bad situation.
Jan 23 2008
The neo-Bushit continues.
As Recruiting Number Dwindle, Podhoretz Bangs His Drum
And even the Pentagon has been saying that the Surge failed, and the relative “quiet” right now had nothing to do with it:
From the Pentagon: The Surge didn’t work.
That’s one reason you keep hearing them talk about their legacy, while others try desperately to spin it — they are attempting to pre-fabricate a success out of the worst Presidency in history, and to ideally obscure the complicit role played by the Congressional Republicans and their associated pundits.
The Democrats aren’t playing smart, either, and by pushing their luck that the public will hate the Republicans more as election time approaches, they endanger themselves and the nation further by failing to act ~now~, before the summer campaign season and before BushCo can initiate (directly or indirectly) a nuclear conflict in Iran.
And things need not be this way.
Jan 23 2008
Via PrgrsvArchitect on a comment over in a DailyKos Open Thread, here:
Just out from the Center for Public Integrity
http://www.publicintegrity.org/…
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war.
President Bush, for example, made 231 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and another 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Secretary of State Powell had the second-highest total in the two-year period, with 244 false statements about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and 10 about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld and Fleischer each made 109 false statements, followed by Wolfowitz (with 85), Rice (with 56), Cheney (with 48), and McClellan (with 14).
The massive database at the heart of this project juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis. This fully searchable database includes the public statements, drawn from both primary sources (such as official transcripts) and secondary sources (chiefly major news organizations) over the two years beginning on September 11, 2001. It also interlaces relevant information from more than 25 government reports, books, articles, speeches, and interviews.
Heh. Right from the horses ass mouth primary oratory orifice.
Jan 22 2008
Raw Story now reports on its front page that Rush Limbaugh may not support any of the Republican presidential candidates. It seems that the right-wing political movement is now in its last throes, seeing that there is no clear favorite in the race and none of the current candidates can unite them like Ronald Reagan did.
And Limbaugh is hardly the only gatekeeper who may sit out this race. The Republican Party is controlled by many gatekeepers, including Dobson, Norquist, and many others. Dobson, for instance, has refused to give his blessing to Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, or Fred Thompson. The fact of the matter is that the social conservatives who provide the boots on the ground only have one candidate — Ron Paul, who meets their purity tests on abortion, gays, gun control, immigration, and taxes. Paul does not have the blessing of one of the key wings of the Republican Party — the defense hawks and neocons, given his opposition to Iraq. However, the fact that he is the only antiwar voice in the GOP and 34% or so of Republicans do not approve of Bush’s handling of Iraq means that he is competitive.
Jan 16 2008
The conventional wisdom is that the GOP base is looking for a Reagan clone, and is having trouble deciding on a candidate because none of the candidates on offer does a sufficiently good “Dutch.” The conventional wisdom is that the GOP base wants such a Reagan clone to bring together the fiscal, religious, and foreign policy conservatives under a single cult-of-personality tent.
The fact that the GOP base has quite visibly refused to fall for any Reagan impression has thrown GOP watchers into a tailspin of conflicting interpretations as to what the typical conservative voter wants, this year. But few of these watchers have drawn the obvious, if counter-intuitive, conclusion: that the GOP base is not looking for a new Reagan.
This thought is probably too Earth-shattering to contemplate for the GOP elite. Lacking an old model, they would have to invent a new one. And they are nowhere near equipped to do so.
Romney’s win in Michigan provides a window into this puzzle. I’d like to muse on it for a while.