The Democrats Gloat Thread

Not a gamer myself but yeah, Tico, those spending their days here repeating ever the same opinions are obviously much superior to gamers, huh? Or no, wait...

OK, so there's good news and bad news. The good news is: Bush remains as unpopular as he ever was:

No Recovery for Bush Approval in U.S.

39% approve; 58% disapprove. 28% think the US are heading in the right direction (down another 4%); 66% say the US are on the wrong track. If they act on that realisation in next year's elections, that's good news for America.

The bad news is that, if as it appears now Hillary will indeed be the Democratic presidential candidate in '08, she doesn't seem to stand much of a chance against McCain or Giuliani. Only against Condoleezza Rice would she have a shot:

McCain, Giuliani Could Win 2008 U.S. Election

Clinton is polled as losing against McCain 38% to 49% and against Giuliani 39% to 50%. Against Rice she'd win, 46% to 43%.

This is why my money is on the Wes Clark nomination.

The worse the Iraq war gets, the worse that Dems who support the Iraq war are going to get. Look for a big push for a non-Hillary nominee by the Net; we all hate her, really.

Cycloptichorn

Did I denigrate him? Well, perhaps a bit ... but if I did it was not because he played a game online. It was because he felt the need to share that the prediction he was boasting about was made to the guildmates of his multiplayer online role playing game. I find that amusing ... you obviously don't.

Aren't we all?




I suppose that quoting a passage we might have written in a role playing game is somewhat different than one we might have written in a Letter To The Editor of the local newspaper.

It is not so unusual, however, to quote fictional characters in a novel, play, etc, in order to support a point. I would think a passage in a role playing game would be in the same department, if well composed.

No different than talking around the poker table, or water cooler, or with members of one's baseball team.

I don't look down on people who play video games, which I consider to be a perfectly legitimate passtime for an adult. As more and more people who grew up with video games age, the rate of adults who play on a regular basis is going to skyrocket.

I do realize that this is difficult for those who are older to understand...

Cycloptichorn

Yes,that is one of the problems with Hillary. Can she come back from the pounding the Right has been doing to her for a dozen years?

On the other hand, can the Democrats win if they spend their time wondering what the conservatives are going to do?

Hillary did well in usually conservative upstate New York, to the surprise of many.

I haven't made up my mind for Hillary yet,by the way. I just don't think she should be ruled out, at this stage.

"More mature" is the word phrase you were looking for, grasshopper.

How Different Groups Feel About Bush
How Different Groups Feel About Bush
By The Associated Press
October 8, 2005, 7:33 PM EDT

Some demographics and details from the AP-Ipsos poll on President Bush's job performance. The results are taken from a poll of 1,000 adults conducted Oct. 3-5 by Ipsos, an international polling firm. The survey has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, larger for subgroups.

Percentage of people who strongly approve of President Bush's job performance -- in January 2005 and October 2005.

OVERALL

January 2005: 27 percent

October 2005: 21 percent

INDEPENDENTS

January 2005: 23 percent

October 2005: 11 percent

WHITE EVANGELICALS

January 2005: 49 percent

October 2005: 33 percent

REPUBLICAN MEN

January 2005: 57 percent

October 2005: 42 percent

PROTESTANTS

January 2005: 36 percent

October 2005: 25 percent

SOUTHERNERS

January 2005: 32 percent

October 2005: 22 percent

RURAL

January 2005: 35 percent

October 2005: 26 percent

Heh, Tico, out of many words to best describe you, "mature" is not immediately the first to come to mind... ;-)

Hey, thanks, nimh.

Nope. Cheerful, optimistic and funny, with mature coming in fourth

<Sure beats depressed, whiney, and paranoid>

Okay, that was good.

Foxfyer
Has your husband recovered from his medical problems? Haven't heard anything re him for a while.

BBB

If that was addressed to me, yes he is doing well. Apparently the surgery was 100% successful, no follow up treatment is necessary, and he's back to work and running two states on his churchly duties again. Life is good.

Great! Glad to hear it, Foxfyre. And, you have recovered as well, I take it? (I know how hard it is on the spouse!)

Fox, Good news! Glad everything is working out okay. c.i.

Thanks to all. And even Democrats should keep those check ups up to date yanno.

A diagnosis of cancer hits you like a kick in the stomach whether it is yours or a loved ones, but almost all cancer detected early enough is curable now.

Along with Fox's advise about early detection of cancer, those over 50 should get an annual checkup for prostate. Women have more breast cancer and heart attacks, so learn the symptoms.

I consider people who gloat to be only slightly more agreeable than those who dismember small forest creatures for fun.

The present administration, and the coalition behind it, is now falling apart. How pervasive and long-lasting the resulting damage to the Republican Party and the new conservative movement might be remains to be seen but the next month or two will tell us a fair bit.

Still, the present situation, both as regards Iraq and as regards the domestic picture, looks to me so unusually volatile that one ventures a hell of a risk of looking very silly indeed casting ahead merely a single year to the next elections. Three years?! Even conservative theologians agree that provides easily room enough for the End Times to come and then, rudely, pack up and leave again.

How pleased am I to see this whole contraption breaking apart in slo-mo, careening wide-eyed down Washington Boulevard while taking out some garbage cans and unlucky black people who just happened to be on the wrong curbside? I'm not pleased. I'm seriously depressed that things got this ugly, this criminal, this deceitful, this subservient, this selfish, this cruel, this totalitarian.

(fox...a tip of the hat to your husband)

From the NYT:

October 14, 2005
Jitters at the White House Over the Leak Inquiry
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 - Karl Rove nosed his Jaguar out of the garage at his home in Northwest Washington in the predawn gloom, starting another day in which he would be dealing with a troubled Supreme Court nomination, posthurricane reconstruction and all the other issues that come across the desk of President Bush's most influential aide.

But Mr. Rove's first challenge on Wednesday morning came before he cleared his driveway: how to get past the five television crews and the three photographers waiting for him. He flashed his blinding high beams into the camera lenses and sped by.

That is the way things are for the Bush White House these days. The routines are the same. But everything, in the glare of the final stages of a criminal investigation that has reached to the highest levels of power in Washington, is different.

Mr. Rove is scheduled to testify before a federal grand jury on Friday, the fourth time he will have done so in the case, which centers on the disclosure of an undercover C.I.A. officer's identity.

Mr. Rove, deputy White House chief of staff for policy and senior adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, are the most prominent administration officials to find themselves squirming under the attention of the hard-nosed special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, and the attendant news media scrutiny.

But the inquiry has swept up a dozen or more other officials who have been questioned by investigators or have testified before the grand jury, and, should it lead to the indictment of anyone at a senior level, it has the potential to upend the professional lives of everyone at the White House for the remainder of Mr. Bush's second term.

The result, say administration officials and friends and allies on the outside who speak regularly with them, is a mood of intense uncertainty in the White House that veers in some cases into fear of the personal and political consequences and anger at having been caught in the snare of a special prosecutor. And given how badly things have been going for Mr. Bush and his team on other fronts - a poll released Thursday by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center put his approval rating at 38 percent, a new low - they hardly have deep reserves of internal enthusiasm or external good will to draw on.

"Everyone is going about the work at hand while bracing for the worst case," said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to get around the official White House position that it will not comment on the investigation.

Most administrations come to a point like this, at risk of being paralyzed internally and frozen externally in the klieg lights of scandal. To those who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, it was almost a way of life and such a searing experience that many former Clinton officials have more than a dollop of sympathy for what their successors in power are going through.

"In this presumption of guilt culture, which is what has come about in Washington in the last 10 or 15 years, there must be a sense of anger there and an inability to manage the facts," said Lanny J. Davis, a lawyer in Washington who was brought into the Clinton White House to help deal with the multiple investigations of that administration. "It's hard to imagine how bad it is. You sit at your desk and you know what the facts are, but you can't get them out to the public because the lawyers tell you you can't - or if you can, the noise from the presumption of guilt culture overwhelms the facts."

Mr. Bush joked late last year with Matthew Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine, about why Mr. Cooper was not yet in jail for fighting a subpoena demanding that he testify about a conversation with a source who later turned out to be Mr. Rove. These days, though, the leak investigation is almost never spoken of openly within the West Wing, and certainly not made light of, administration officials say.

Lawyers for most of the officials who have testified before the grand jury have by and large chosen not to share information with one another, leaving colleagues largely in the dark about what others are telling Mr. Fitzgerald.

There is a presumption inside the White House that anyone who was indicted would resign or go on leave to fight the charges, though it is unclear what planning has taken place for that possibility.

The prospect of a White House without Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush's longtime strategist, has some allies of the president in a near panic, fearful that without him the administration would lose the one person capable of enforcing discipline across a party that has become increasingly fractious and that is almost at war with itself over the president's nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court.

With the White House stumbling and preoccupied, some allies of the president already see a policy void that is being filled by other prominent Republicans, like Senator John McCain of Arizona, who recently outmaneuvered the administration to win passage of an amendment that would set new standards to guard against the use of torture in the interrogation of detainees in the fight against terrorism.

Asked about the case in his daily on-camera news briefing on Thursday, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, portrayed Mr. Bush as eagerly awaiting the results of the investigation. The case centers on whether administration officials illegally disclosed the identity of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Wilson, as part of an effort to distance the White House from criticism by her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV. In mid-2003, Mr. Wilson, a former diplomat, became an outspoken critic of how the administration had used prewar intelligence about Iraq's weapons programs to justify the invasion.

The investigation led to the imprisonment of a reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, for 85 days for refusing to testify before the grand jury about a conversation with a confidential source, later identified as Mr. Libby.

"The president has said that no one wants to get to the bottom of it more than he does," said Mr. McClellan, whose own credibility has taken a pounding because of statements he made two years ago that Mr. Rove had no involvement in leaking the C.I.A. officer's identity. "I want to get to the bottom of it. We don't know all the facts."

Despite the fear inspired by Mr. Fitzgerald, the White House has treated the special prosecutor extremely gingerly, making no public criticism and pledging at every turn to be completely cooperative. When Mr. Bush was asked about the investigation during an appearance on the NBC News "Today" program on Tuesday, he said Mr. Fitzgerald had conducted the case in "a very dignified way," a statement that could make it difficult for Republicans to attack the prosecutor if he should bring charges against administration officials.

If the Bush White House is marked by anything, it is relentlessness and resilience. While the West Wing seems more on edge than usual - Mr. McClellan got into an uncharacteristically heated exchange with reporters on Thursday about the Miers nomination - the official line is business as usual, and the principals appear to be trying hard to play their roles.

Mr. Libby still arises in the wee hours each morning and puts in 14- to 16-hour days in Mr. Cheney's office. Mr. Rove, who left his house at 5:50 on Wednesday morning, has kept up his usual duties, Mr. McClellan said. After appearing before the grand jury on Friday, Mr. Rove will get right back into political mode. He is scheduled to appear at a fund-raiser over the weekend for Jerry Kilgore, the Republican candidate for governor of Virginia.

Doug Mills contributed reporting for this article.