SECOND A2K STRAW POLL White House 2008

This piece by Pollitt at The Nation is pretty close to the way I perceive this question...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071022/pollitt

very good Bernie
Vote early
Vote often
Vote Kucinich.

Can't. With Lola, my 'support short people' quota is filled to underflowing.

There's always Barbara Boxer.

Barb Boxer...the US navy's Helen of Troy.

George:

I usually enjoy reading your posts. You have a definitive grasp of logic, reason and usually stand above the rhetoric and hype consistent with a large number of posts.

I refer specifically to your 10Oct07 5:48pm Nr. 2893378.

I am duly impressed and being the cynical old curmudgeon that I am, it takes a lot to impress me. :wink:

Me chapeau is off to ya!

Halfback

george

The person who has written the previous post is mistaken.


Halfback

The person of whom you are writing is not really a person at all. He is (we aren't yet certain) either an algorithm or a performance art piece.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/

Halfback,

Thanks very much for the kind words. Coming from you they do mean a great deal. My reaction to your posts is very much the same. They are both unusual here and refreshing in their content, rationality, insight, and lack of cant.

I enjoy the exchange of views and ideas here, but, like you, don't see much reason for or value in the argumentation and name-calling that too often accompanies them. Indeed, considering that we don't really affect each other's lives, merely exchanging words and views on these forums, the motivation for this stuff is at best perplexing.

Blatham is a restless, displaced Canadian who might otherwise have grown up in in Berkeley Calif. or Boulder Co. He is a nice guy, well-read and gifted with a very good sense of humor, but on political matters, given to the various mantras of the self-appointed cognoscenti of contemporary political correctitude. He deserves our kind consideration. I certainly always give him mine.

Well one reason the Navy pulled out of the San Francisco Bay entirely (two shipyards; two Air Stations, one carrier base, plus numerous support & logistic facilities) was Barbara Boxer.

However, I think your metaphor is misplaced, She is no Helen of Troy (or Marin) for anyone. Instead, she is living proof that, in most cases, short, stupid, vain people should be shot.

I'm all for shooting short people. A smaller target challenges a man. It's why I aim at the republican mind.

But I've decided to change my tact with you, george. I think I ought to go a bit easier. Our dollar is at par, American power in the world is on the wane, the party of Ronald Reagan and George Bush is about to be electorally decimated, Gore won the Nobel and an Oscar, the Navy will soon be under the command of a President who is a female and a Clinton, Roger Ailes taste for young arab boys is about to be revealed, and the moral legitimacy which America once had but which was so disastrously wasted through the psychoses of Cheney and Bolton might in the future be re-established.

The flowers will be arriving on your doorstep, george. I hope you like them. You can tell visitors they are from your buddy up north.

Who is Roger Ailes?

I think the game of the realtive power of currencies and nations is far from over, though I do agree that a Democrat winter of some duration lies before us. (I'm getting my affairs ready now for 40% marginal Federal tax rates and 25% capital gains/dividend rates (if they survive at all). I have ample confidence in the folly of human nature generally, and the fecklessness of our would be critics in Europe in particular, to throw away whatever transient advantage may have accrued to them, given the time and opportunity.

Meanwhile the world's various unresolved conflicts will find a way to continue manifesting themselves despite the passing of the U.S. Administration that is now so vociferously blamed for all of them. The post-colonial conflict with an aroused Moslem world, still without a suitable model for governance able to get it into the modern world, will continue. Russia will expand its intimidation of a not-so-solid Europe. China will face the issues of internal political development to match their so far astounding economic progress, while both China and India will increasingly come under the scrutiny of the modern secular Calvinists of Europe and Al Gore-dom for their wanton pursuit of material progress. We will all discover that solar power and new light bulbs will not be sufficient to solve the CO2 problem. Who knows what might come of all that?

Ailes is the president of Fox News. It's a continuation of the media consultancy work he did for Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr and Guiliani. Unfortunately, I was lying about the arab boys thing. You take out Boxer and I'll put this sleeze through a cuisinart.

Well Boxer at least provides some comic relief. Even jeff Skilling made her look like a fool during her public questioning.

Brownback has bowed out, or will tomorrow morning. No money; no traction.

http://tpmelectioncentral.com/

I'm still terrified of the following scenario:

Republicans sit back and put up little to no resistance to Hillary's nomination, licking their chops all the while.

Hillary gets the nomination.

THEN the **** hits the fan. Way more **** hitting a way bigger fan than would be possible with any other candidate.

Eh. I am increasingly moving from the position I shared with you towards Blatham's -- well, not quite to Blatham's, who, here at least, parries all criticism of Clinton with references to how thats just what the big bad media machine wants you to think - but to a more relativating position, at least.

I mean, the big **** is going to hit the big fan any which way. That Blatham is right on - the conservative machine will make sure of that. It would be naive to think that with Obama or Edwards they would not pull out all the stops.

So the question is re what you're saying here: that Clinton would involve "way more **** hitting a way bigger fan than would be possible with any other candidate." That really so? Obama and Edwards have been banking on an assumed anti-Hillary or Hillary-sceptic strand even within the Democratic party or at least Democratic-leaning independents, and they have singularly failed to win any traction with that line. There just doesnt seem to be half as much reserve about the Clinton era as I would have expected, or as I personally feel, among either group.

And in the end those are the groups that count - because the idea that any Democratic candidate will win over a significant share of Republican votes is pie in the sky. Definitely not any of the current Democratic front-runners. Not a union-touting populist, not a black liberal, not an Hispanic panderer.

Personally, I am as wary of Obama's and Edwards' weaknesses as Hillary's, when it comes to the expected Republican **** flinging. I know it's been some time since we first discussed these issues on the Obama thread, but just like Hillary's glaring enough weaknesses havent really been tested yet, there has also really been no test yet of whether the US is ready for a black US candidate, and how much of a dog whistle campaign could be expected from the right on the race note if Obama were to actually become a probably nominee.

I mean, for example, how many voters at large know of his past self-confessed coke use? 1% or 2%? I dont think it should be relevant, but the day that the conservative PR machine doesnt go out as viciously against the past hard drug use of a liberal black Democratic nominee as against anything they can put up on Hillary, is the day my whole perspective on America will change.

You know that it's because of this that, out of a kind of cultural pessimism really, I see Edwards as the most 'electable' candidate - white, Southern, modest upbringing, populist, all that. Well -- it's also simply what the match-up polls bear out. But "the haircut," not to mention Coulter's "f*ggot" thing, already showed that Edwards would be hit with any visceral **** the conservatives could fling at any fan as well, no matter how far-fetched - and Edwards' personality does offer some pickings of its own too. They would try to Kerry/Dukakis him just as much.

Reason I prefer both Obama and Edwards over Hillary is because they are more progressive, more principled, and have more clearly broken with the Iraq-era "liberal interventionism" of yore. The reason I then prefer Edwards over Obama is because his program is more progressive and ambitious again, and he is more combative, less sidesteppy, and because I think he is more electable. But the argument that somehow, either of them being the nominee would involve less **** hitting the fan than a Hillary nomination, I dunno.

For sure, to some degree conservative voters, like the currently disillusioned Christian fundies, would mobilise more quickly against Hillary. But the campaign itself won't be any more filthy than it would also be against Obama or Edwards. In fact, at least Hillary seems more properly prepared for the coming onslaught. In comparison, the bridge-building assumptions behind the Obama campaign just seem dangerously naive at this particular point in history.

Ack, long..

I still think there would be more against Hillary, while all three have their weaknesses. I don't know, though. Most of what I'd say in support of that position I've already said. Anyway, what I stated above is not that I think that scenario WILL play out, but that I'm worried that it will. It's of course fruitless to worry, as there is no way to measure one against the other. (If Hillary gets the nomination, and all hell breaks loose, there will be no way of knowing how bad the hell would have been if Edwards or Obama had gotten the nomination.)