2004 Elections: Democratic Party Contenders

See what I mean? C'mon down hyar to Texas, drive on over to College Station, and see if you can get at the records. Gwan. Just try. Meanwhile (admitting I don't have a clue about the Dean records, one way or the other), I have family and friends in Vermont who swear by Dean. He didn't get elected by a machine, either.

All records of tenure as governor of Texas have been removed to George Bush Sr.'s library, sealed in secrecy and are un-available for public view.

All the way back to forever records have been sealed by Bush Jr., directly against law!

Just Speculating (by Calvin Trillin)

So Limbaugh has been hooked on pills,
While Bennett's hooked on slots.
Do all the right-wing morals police
Have copybooks with blots?
Does Falwell have a floozie, say,
Does Ashcroft, you suppose,
Get home from church and swiftly snort
Some white stuff up his nose?
Does Robertson crave demon rum?
Does Cheney make clerks promise
To hide the fact he's renting tapes
Last viewed by Clarence Thomas?

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031103&s=trillin

Fellow anti-Bushies -- I think we have left a job undone. We have not come up with a word or description -- a meme -- for those who have been completely fooled by Bush. The sooner we come up with a goodie, use it frequently, stick 'em with it here in A2K and beyond, the better.

"believers in the un"- nay, to the point but too awkward

According to the Dean PDF on the Judicial Watch site, "Gov. Bush's records were recently moved from his father's presidential library to the Texas State Archives for review under the State's open record law."

PDF

Something like "poopy-heads"? It worked to wonderous effect in similar playground sitiuations that I recall.

No, no, Craven. We have to be as adept as Karl (Kindergarten Kid) Rove is... at least!

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2003/10/02/dean_is_asked_to_release_gubernatorial_records/

Because of his initial actions with respect to the papers (stupid move), those who want access will always have it in the back of their minds that they're not getting full access. After everything else he's done, with his reputation for lying, would you believe GWB when it comes to "full access to gubernatorial records"?

We tried like crazy to get a good AG in and almost made it, but during the final ten days there were a series of dirty tricks on the part of the Rep. Party of Texas. So the AG is yet another dubious type and we revert to a kind of Old West routine.

BTW,

1st - hypocracy exists when a person raises a stink because one person uses the same means to prevent something from happening and didn't raise any objection when the first practice occurred.

2nd - What Bush did is against the law what Dean did isn't - a very big difference.

3rd - Dean negotiated a period of time for some of his documents, Bush unilaterally decided for all of his documents.

4th - There is no evidence that all of Bush's documents will be released. And, I seriously doubt they will.

Just in case cravens sarcasm didnt already make the point clearly enough:



That is EXACTLY the kind of childish pest that is already making many politics posts practically unreadable. "Stick 'em with it and use it frequently"? Are you bloody serious?

There's several A2Kers out there whose posts I might actually read if they stopped forever pulling such yawn-evoking kindergarten stuff. Now I just scroll ... I mean, who's interested in another oft-repeated childish rhetorical putdown mixed into an as oft-repeated three-line broad sketch of how, like, Bush is just soooo stupid, and they're all dangerous criminals, those people, and its a shame and a scandal and we should out them for being stupid and criminal in our every second post, cause thats really going to enlighten anyone, here. Yawn f***ing yawn.

"We have to be as adept as Karl (Kindergarten Kid) Rove is... at least!", grumble - no - the point is, to be the opposite. As effective as him, sure, I'll buy that - but "playing tough" (as tough as them) doesnt, 's far as I know, equate with pulling silly stupid **** on bulletin boards. Like, whatll that achieve? You'll chase some conservatives off of this board onto another one, and meanwhile annoy the heck out of those of us trying to keep an interesting conversation up here. Victory surely will be nigh.

<end of rant>

I'm not the one who turned this into a Dean/Bush war, the article was merely pointing out the extraordinary time frame so I posted it in the 2004 Dem contender thread. I just happened to read the moving of Bush records as I was reading the Dean document.

This bit struck me as unexpected, georgeob1.

Nowadays, the usually suggested defence of the 80s arms race policy seems to be that Reagan actually pushed through a brilliant strategy, one that succeeded in bringing the Soviet state to its collapse.

After all, by forcing the Soviet Union to compete in a rapid escalation of (arms) spending when it did not have the fundamental economic basis to durably succeed in that, it forced the inherent weaknesses and limitations of the Soviet system to the surface, forced the Soviet system to burst at its seams so to say. In this logic, it was Reagan's unrelenting neo-Cold War strategy that necessitated Gorbachev to face up to the facts and reform the Soviet state into the end of the Cold War and communist dictatorship.

That defence often works wonders, as long as people don't slip back into the defence used back then - the one you use again now - that the arms race was necessary because the Soviet empire was actually getting "increasingly strong", and thus posed an ever more imminent threat.

It seems like only one of the two logics can work. How do you work that out?

Nimh,

I generally agree with your assessment of the facts. However in my post I referred to the belief that prevailed then that the Soviet Union was far stronger than it actually was, not the facts that later emerged.

The feckless and merely reactive foreign & domestic policies of the Carter Administration had left the United states in a rather depressed state. Europe too. We were being pushed around by the revolutionary government in Iran, squeezed by an OPEC cartel that was then quite effective, and cowed by an arms race started interestingly by the Soviets themselves, with SS-20 mobile ballistic weapons in eastern Europe, major rapid mobilization exercises of their mechanized divisions in the GDR and Poland, very rapid deployment of large numbers of new, well armed, surface ships and submarines, and the introduction of new types of high performance combat aircraft. (Remember the FOXBAT?)

Reagan's assertions that it was "an evil empire", that would eventually collapse as a result of its internal contradictions and that the capitalist democracies, not socialism that were the progressive future of mankind, were greeted with shock and dismay in most of the West. However, history proved he was correct.

Tart,

Epithets directed at Republicans (or anyone else) do not constitute persuasive arguments for other political views, nor do they add to the quality of the discourse on threads such as this. At best they are mere bombast: at worst the hallmark of those who have little of merit to say.

You accuse Republicans of being victims of an unsupported mythology. However your peremptory judgements, generally unsupported accusations, and the lack of any reasoned argument in your posts, strongly suggest that you, not they, are the principal victim of this phenomenon.

I was (predictably) going to contradict you on that one for a minute, there ...

but then I remembered that I recently looked up the figures on it for some other A2K thread. And the basic numbers I came up with back then easily prove you right (see second graph here).

Still (but thats waaaay off-topic) - call me ignorant (and I'm not much of an expert on military matters) - but even now I am as unable as I was back then to see the logic of the spending race, when it came to the development of ever more and better rockets etc.

The Star Wars program, however ill-conceived, at least had the logic of an inversed paradigm going for it - once both of you can easily destroy the world several times over, it becomes time to look at smarter defence systems, rather than keep on escalating the prowess of your offensive weapons. But what was the deal with the latter?

To put it as simply as possible: once you have the weapons to (theoretically) destroy the other's entire country with, what added benefit in developing yet more sophisticated varieties of the same? Is the other really less likely to start a war because you're now able to destroy the other's country twice over, or more systematically, or quicker?

The only argument I can see myself buying is, indeed, that it was (at least partly) a strategic ploy, focused on weakening the other's socio-economic system rather than achieving any specific military goal. But that notion - of it all being a strategic ploy - presupposes that Reagan c.s. did indeed not themselves believe in the arms race for its own sake, or in the Soviets' imminent military threat to the West's security - and I did not have that impression.

There's even a parallel to Iraq here, it seems ...

Should the Iraq war / occupation end up turning the country into a free, prosperous and allied place after all, one can defend the war retroactively with the long-term strategic end it served. But:

a) if it wasnt a ploy at the time, and Rumsfeld c.s. really believed there was an imminent threat of Saddam's Iraq to America's security, the retroactive rehabilitation will not apply to their judgements at the time. Whereas,

b) if it was, and the 'imminent threat' argument was merely an excuse to sell us the necessary means to achieve the strategic end of a free and allied Iraq with, the retroactive rehabilitation wouldn't change the implication that they lied to us, when they sent our soldiers into war (I can say "us", nowadays, cause there's Dutchmen there too, now .

Same with Reagan's arms race, I think - if I'm not just rambling here: either the Reaganists really believed in the imminent Soviet threat, in which case the end of the story, however happy, actually sheds an unflattering light on their judgement; or they didnt, and intended the arms race as a means to get the Soviets to their knees with in the first place. But in the latter case the very real, penetrating fear of nuclear doomsday that I remember from the 80s would trace back to their lies.

Of course, it might just be black-and-white thinking that's victimising me here :wink:

I speak in defence of tartarin's post here.

First of all, I do consider that it's entirely possible that the US is on the cusp of becoming something rather ugly, both internally and externally. Later this evening, if I have time, I'll begin a thread on exactly that point, with reference to three essays, each by distinguished writers/scholars, which likely won't get read by many who'll pipe in anyway, but those writers don't bring good news. I think Tartarin is absolutely right to be yelling.

Second, though I was once convinced that reason, careful discourse and organization were the only proper tools of political action, I'm no longer certain that is enough, given what we face.

For some here, even suggesting there might be something we 'face' will be interpreted as extremism, or conspiracy paranoia - for how could the US, in its perfection (or say, in it's stumbling good-heartedness and under the care of its protective constitution), even possibly be guilty of anything terribly worrisome?

Above, george takes Tartarin to task, yet on another thread yesterday, he did precisely what he indicts as a matter of rhetorial course, by referring to the dem candidates as 'dwarves'. That sort of language trick is ubiquitous from the public voices on the right - name any one...Bennett, Coulter, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Krauthammer, Sullivan, and on and on.

What they do is unseemly, and I detest it. But it has been depressingly effective, as evidenced by the number of folks who we have seen arrive here or on abuzz or in letters to editors who parrot the notions and the language of these voices.

It is no longer clear to me that Queensbury rules are in effect, nor that sticking to them even while one is being kicked in the nuts is a sane course of action.

Apart from the moral argument against collapsing into Coulterist cheapshots and childish Limbaughist putdowns ourselves, there's a rational argument on effectiveness.

What exactly do you think you are going to achieve, politically, by infesting a board like this one (with, how many active political posters exactly? Of whom how many already know pretty much exactly what they believe in - enough to resist cheap shots, anyway?) with belittling nicknames and the like? What would be the point?

I refer you to the paraphrasing, below, of the last part of my "rant":

... We need to be as effective as Rove, sure, I'll buy that - but "playing tough" in the political arena - as tough as them - doesn't, as far as I can conjure up, equate in any way with pulling stupid **** on obscure bulletin boards [sorry, Craven ;-)].

What could Tartarin's suggested A2K epithet strategy - "Stick 'em with it and use it frequently" - possibly achieve? You'll chase some conservatives off of this board onto another one, and meanwhile annoy the heck out of those of us who are trying to keep an interesting conversation up here. Victory surely will be nigh <rolls eyes> ...

You wanna play tough politics, I encourage you - no-one's suggesting the Dems should play innocent virgin when the record-funded Bush campaign is going to tear into them. But what has that got to do with infesting political discussions on A2K with childish putdowns of conservative posters? Did Italgato, for example, really achieve any good for conservative politics here? I don't see any connection between means and end, whatsoever, except perhaps an inverse one - considering you'd be chasing sympathisers like me far away.