“I had chicken for dinner. It was really good. I really need to catch up on some laundry tonight. I’m kind of sad that Pricilla Presley was voted off of Dancing With The Stars last night. My daughter decided on a college today. I love ice cream.
“I wonder if ABC will schedule a debate for me to discuss these things on national television.” – BarbinMD
It made me laugh, anyway. I actually fell asleep during the debate. It started to sound like the world’s most painful engagement in small talk.
Update:
Worst. Debate. Ever. – Richard Adams: The Guardian
Godawful Moderation – ABC News comments
Garbage time – TNR
and, finally:
“I thought the questions were excellent” – David Brooks.
myiq2xu
The fanboiz are butthurt because Obama got treated like a Democrat.
Non-OFB reviews say Hillary stomped the goo out of Barry.
calipygian
I didn’t watch the debate, but, I hear it was so bad that even the Doughy Pant Load said that this debate was nothing but republican-water carrying.
myiq2xu
Funny, but the OFB had no problem with the debates when they were piling on Hillary.
You know, back before SNL exposed the unfairness with “Senator Obama, would you like a pillow?”
TR
Over 10,000 comments at the ABC site, and almost all are focusing on the shitty moderators.
cleek
early voting in NC starts today. or so Robobama told me on the phone last night.
time to end this.
sweet.
jake
All the proof you need that the questions were 1,000% bullshit.
Someone throw Bromide a rope before he drifts any further from reality.
TR
Take a look at Tom Shales today.
myiq2xu
The problem with Obama isn’t that the emperor has no clothes.
The problem is that the clothes have no emperor.
TR
Did you stay up all night working on that one, MyIQis2?
I’ll make it $100 to Obama today. Thanks for helping!
myiq2xu
Barry thanks you. Michelle really likes that $99lb Iberian ham.
TR
Wow, that’s the best you’ve got?
myiq2xu
According to Walter Shapiro:
“In the end, Obama seemed to win simply by not losing.”
That’s setting the bar to G-Dub levels.
“Barry didn’t shit himself, therefore he won”
myiq2xu
If you want to waste your money so that Barry can buy $3 million a week in television ads in Pennsylvania where he’s gonna lose by 15-20 points, go ahead.
PeterJ
myiq2xu is disintegrating rapidly, I’m guessing it’s due to some sort of substance abuse. He really needs an intervention before the democratic primary is over.
MBL
So the Clinton trolls are reduced to DEFENDING the shitty, Republican-reinforcing MSM now?
Gotcha. I think I’ll vote after work today.
calipygian
Obviously you have never tried Jamon Bellota
It is what God made pigs and acorns for.
I would kill every motherfucker in the room for this ham.
(Note to trolls: just a slight exaggeration. I wouldn’t actually kill anybody for a ham, although I might sacrifice one of my own body parts for this delicious, delicious ham)
wvng
After last night’s travesty of a debate, it’s pretty clear what the general election debates in the fall will look like, whether the Dem nominee is Obama or Clinton. Question to Dem: Some people say that you should stop raping children. Would you stop raping children long enough to respond? To McCain: Everyone knows you are the bestest most heroic American ever. Why do Dems keep saying bad things about you?
TR
I can spare the money and it’s a worthy cause.
If you want a more meaningful bet, how about if we test your proposition that Clinton’s going to win Penn. by 15+? John can ban the IP address of the loser forever. How’s that sound?
jenniebee
Would it be unpatriotic to request that the debates in the general be moderated by:
* A panel made up of Glenzilla, Bob Somerby, Walter Cronkite and Jane Hamsher
* Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Jonah Goldberg (Colbert’s dumb-guy act really shines when you set it beside the real thing)
* BBC America
Also – hey, look, I’m not the only girl who’s uneasy with the Hill hate
Zifnab
Wow, myiqisprobablyaninteger has really jumped the shark tonight. Perhaps this proves that the ABC knew at least a fraction of their audience. “Hey, let’s run a bunch of meaningless right-wing attack questions on both candidates and question whether they’re intelligent or moral (but not too intelligent or moral – like an elitist) to tie their own shoes, much less be President.”
Obama was not on his ‘A’ game for most of the night and I was genuinely disappointed in how he fielded a number of his questions – namely the “lapel pin” and “Wright” line of attack. But at least this is warming him up for whatever October Surprise the GOP thinks they’ve got.
Clinton was a flat-out embarrassment. I’ve never not wanted to vote for her so much in my entire life. Truly rock bottom performance. Her response to Tulza was about as laughably pathetic as you could ask for – I think Mark Foley gave a better press conference over his Pedo-Gate scandal. And she had this ridiculous grin on her face, like she was actually enjoying being a part of the worst debate of 2008. Where was the policy wonk of New Hampshire? Where was the sophisticated businesswoman of the Senate? You’re not running for school newspaper editor, Hillary, you’re running for POTUS for christ’s sake.
I only caught 30 minutes of that train wreck and it was all I needed. My god that was terrible.
kate r
my favorite comment from the abc board:
Svensker
MyIQ — I’m assuming that your fixation on the Obamas’ ham bill has something to do with their being elitist. Apparently, even tho Bill and Hill had an income of over $10 million a year in the last decade, they nevertheless have eschewed the Iberian ham for pork rinds and Velveeta Cheese Grits cuz they are real ‘murikans, not elitist fops like Michelle and Barry Osa…Obama.
Was that your point?
4tehlulz
Wow. I almost miss Tim Russert.
4tehlulz
>>I’m assuming that your fixation on the Obamas’ ham bill has something to do with their being Muslim.
Wingnuttified.
myiq2xu
You assumed wrong, and went downhill from there.
And it’s “Obama” not the terrorist guy.
Barack Dukakis Obama
some overpaid journalist
You go to these debates and and those people have been watching and waiting for I don’t know twenty or thirty years and they’ve been told that things will have substance sometime but whether it’s Cronkite or Rather or Lehrer, it always comes down to other things.
Things like hypothetical wifekilling, how free Eastern Europe is, tie selection, broccoli harvests, and Wendy’s commercials. So the people reach for and grasp onto their pitchforks and say “Oh my fucking God!” as they watch. But if they’re bitter, I’m sure it’s Obama’s fault and I’ll run a twelve-part series to explore just how much this is true.
4tehlulz
Barack Dukakis Obama > Hillary Rodham Feith
El Cid
Clearly ABC did their viewers a disservice by only posing Sean Hannity’s questions indirectly via George Stephanopolous.
A truly respectful, meaningful Democratic debate would have had a panel consisting of Hannity, Limbaugh, and Neal Boortz, and maybe Colmes to introduce the video footage of Democrats’ training with the terrorists.
4tehlulz
>>Hannity, Limbaugh, and Neal Boortz
That actually would be better; at least the stench of conflict of interest (yes, George, that means you) wouldn’t be there.
El Cid
I also like the expensive Jamon Iberico from Spain. You can get it from
http://www.latienda.com
But then I make less than $40K / yr so I must be some super ultra wealthy elitist because no ordinary people ever buy anything extravagant, we just all shop for cheap Chinese products at Wal-Mart and eat generic store brand mac & cheese and we save up all our money for flag pins and for blast shelters to protect us from Bill Ayers.
4tehlulz
>>eat generic store brand mac & cheese
Fuck you man that shit is good.
jake
Yes. SA2SQ.
I’ll save MyIQBites2 the trouble of responding to this one:
“No, because last time I tried to place a bet here all the FanBoiz dodged and then someone ruined it and [mumble] and anyway I can’t because [eats handful of corn chips] mmph – Obama’s going down hard and there’s no point letting you take such a sucker bet.”
p.lukasiak
more MUPpet projecting.
I didn’t see anyone defending the performance of Gibson and Stepanopolous here.
What I see is someone telling you that this is what Obama was subjected to is a taste of what Clinton has put up with for years. And that Obama can’t handle it.
The mods performance was despicable — not just because it focussed on “gossip”, and not just because it was biased against Obama, but because nobody in Pennsylvania cares abou the capital gains tax, and when issues were discussed, the questions had nothing to do with the way voters think about issues.
But as horrible as the moderators were, unlike the badgering that Clinton is constantly exposed to, the badgering of Obama served a useful purpose, because the Obots can complain all they want to, but the media isn’t going to change between now and November.
And if Obama is the nominee, he’s going to have to compete in the media environment we have, not the media environment we wish we had.
Right now, Obama is in big trouble — if you look at the early debates, you saw pretty much the same Obama you saw tonight….someone that really wasn’t prepared to talk discuss anything that wasn’t “pre-framed” in the way he liked to talk about them. When Obama gives a speech, he gets to create the context in which issues are raised — but when forced to deal with issues that are presented outside his context, he couldn’t do it.
Now, Obama was able to survive those early debates because he wasn’t horrible, and the media loved him, so he was graded on a curve. And although it took him about a year to finally get his power-point responses for a Democratic audience to issue questions down, he did it.
But the questions, and the audience is changing. Obama had about a dozen Democratic debates to polish his act before anyone really started paying attention — and no one really cared when he did poorly because he was just one of the slew of “not Hillarys” on the stage during those debates.
Obama was just a cats paw the media decided to throw at Hillary, so it didn’t matter how well he did, all that mattered was how Hillary handled him.
But now, Obama’s debate performance does matter — and Obama doesn’t have the luxury of honing his responses to stupid moderator questions in little watched debates anymore. There is no more “on the job training”, he’s gotta know how to do the job, and get the job done.
And this ties into something I’ve been saying all along — that Clinton has been running for President, and Obama has been running for the Democratic nomination. What he learned to do in the last year is how to respond to question in a way that appealed to Democratic primary voters — and those learned behaviors and responses aren’t going to work when it comes to the general electorate.
And that’s what you saw last night — a candidate who is completely unprepared to deal with a different context. Winning in Idaho and Utah in the spring doesn’t mean shit if you’re not ready to win in Ohio and Pennsylvania by the time summer comes around. By then, its already too late if you’re the nominee, because the moment you become the nominee, everything is focussed on you, and you’ve only got one chance to make a good first impression on all those voters who don’t give a shit about the primaries.
Obama isn’t ready. The moderation sucked, but it always sucks, and candidates who haven’t figured that out, and don’t know how to deal with a media that sucks are going to lose.
Ed in NJ
The comments on this and other boards post-debate are hilarious. To hear Hillbots talk, John McCain is such a strong, compelling candidate that Obama has no chance against him.
The reality is that Hillary is Obama’s best opponent, and once he dispatches her, John McCain will be easy to take down.
It’s very sad that these Hillary supporters don’t understand that Hillary is done. She has zero chance to win this nomination on its merits, and to win by superdelegate coup would hand McCain the election. And an electoral defeat this year by Obama would be blamed on Hillary, effectively ending her national aspirations.
Jen
Why on earth would a Hillbot like this debate? I would’ve thought it was at least common ground that the flag, bitter, Tuzla, Rev. Wright and the Weather Underground for what, seventy minutes, is asinine beyond belief. For balance, they probably should’ve asked about Travelgate and whether or not the Clintons stole the White House silver, sure, so I can see how the sheer idiocy was a little more favorable to Hillary, but I’m just not sure it was enough to explain it.
Are you saying has mastered the art of massaging the MSM’s prostrate, ’cause I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there, Bob.
Jen
Why on earth would a Hillbot like this debate? I would’ve thought it was at least common ground that the flag, bitter, Tuzla, Rev. Wright and the Weather Underground for what, seventy minutes, is asinine beyond belief. For balance, they probably should’ve asked about Travelgate and whether or not the Clintons stole the White House silver, sure, so I can see how the sheer idiocy was a little more favorable to Hillary, but I’m just not sure it was enough to explain it.
Are you saying has mastered the art of massaging the MSM’s prostrate, ’cause I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there, Bob.
*Hillary* has mastered, is what I’m trying to say here.
Jake
Right now, Obama is in big trouble—if you look at the early debates, you saw pretty much the same Obama you saw tonight….someone that really wasn’t prepared to talk discuss anything that wasn’t “pre-framed” in the way he liked to talk about them.-puke.siak
Please. You’re such a fucking joke. Obama has held his own at earlier debates. He easily won the last one.
The guy had an off night. He’s human. I would like a POTUS who is one, instead of some plastic impersonation (HRC).
The irony in all of this is that Obama is likely to be the most vetted candidate anyone can ever remember. And yet, if he’s elected POTUS, the right will be quick to call him the first Affirmative-Action President. You can count on it.
4tehlulz
>>the first Affirmative-Action President
whose been graded on a curve…
Conservatively Liberal
Glad to see p.luk and noiq shitting all over the place first thing in the morning! Nothing screams “I HAVE NO LIFE!” like the posts of those two mental midgets.
Hillary gave it her last big shot last night, and I think everyone got a dose of her that they will not soon forget. When the only acclaim is from Hillary nuts and right wingers, you know it had to have been pure crap.
Hillary is not commander in chief material, let alone Girl Scout Leader material. She clearly admitted that she LIED about Bosnia last night, and that was about the best she could do. I loved the ‘massive retaliation’ she is offering if anyone attacks anyone she decides to defend in the ME. That ought to warm the hearts of the chickenhawks.
Keep shilling for Shrillary McLieberman though! Like her, her supporters do not know when to stop flogging the poor dead horse. Obama is now ahead in pledged delegates, super delegates and the popular vote.
Yup, Hillary is winning!
BarbinMD has a post at Kos contrasting statements by McCain, Hannity and Hillary, all about Obama. He asks you to see if you can tell who said what.
You can’t. Hillary is a Republican, through and through. The Goldwater Girl to the end.
slippy hussein toad
I swear you ran outta here several weeks back, tears streaming down your face, telling us not to look for you.
As a result, I will be completely ignoring your comments. Much like I will ignore the mainstream media.
zzyzx
Clinton is doing so well that Obama has only received 5 Superdelegate endorsements in the last 30 hours! Rumor has it that some Clinton SDs are about to flip today too, but Clinton is definitely selling to them.
Conservatively Liberal
Where there was potential in the two posters, NoIQ and p.luk now come in here only to verbally masturbate. Nothing they post is worth even glancing at, let alone wasting the time to try and seriously comment on. They know they will not change minds with their blather, and all they seek to do now is be an irritant to Obama supporters.
They know Hillary is pretty much DOA now, and they feel the need to get their last shots in before receding into history. I would have to say that of the two, p.luk is the one who really comes off looking like an idiot. NoIQ is an idiot, so nothing lost there.
Soylent Green
A majority of Americans do not like or trust Hillary Clinton. Never have and never will.
She should have waltzed to the nomination but a more likable and trustworthy opponent, with a much better managed campaign, gave Democrats a choice.
In the general, Clinton will almost surely lose to a guy who people generally like and trust. So might Obama, but his chances of winning are better, because more people like and respect him, including many Republicans.
We can decry how issue-free the debate was, but issues matter little to people who after all this time are still undecided. Many if not most don’t tune in until the conventions or debates. Then they go with their gut — who do they like and trust more?
Thus is guy-you-can-drink-a-beer-with (not policy wonk egghead or windsurfing bore) our current president.
I give you John Cole’s assessment of George W. Bush, October 2004 (sorry, John):
I think he is honest, decent, fair-minded and the right man at the right time.
Right or horrendously wrong, that’s the kind of perception that calls the shots in November.
So the ABC News moderators knew exactly what they was doing, their mistake being doing it in the primary when only informed (and misinformed) voters are paying attention. That issue-free shit will be just what the uninformed, who-do-they-like voters want when they finally check in.
Zifnab
I would have gone with Hillary Mondale Clinton, but to each his own.
4tehlulz
>>I would have gone with Hillary Mondale Clinton
Mondale was not a fan of MASSIVE RETALIATION FUR ATTACKS ON TEH ISREAL the last time I checked.
Could be wrong though…
cleek
Hillary Walker Clinton
Soylent Green
P.luk–
That was a pretty good assessment, your post at 8:01. Except for this:
Au contraire. Here you are projecting. By treating the primary like the general, and running against her Democratic opponent as though she were the Republican, Hillary has been running only for the primary. To appear presidential, she should have been running instead against the presumptive GOP nominee, as Obama has. She should have been running on her positives and McCain’s negatives rather than slinging mud at a fellow Democrat, which has achieved nothing except to pull both Democrats down.
It’s too late now, and it’s her loss. And because of her tactics, maybe the party’s as well.
Schlagle
Shorter David Brooks:
“It’s the journalists’ job to try and make the candidates look foolish. Some times they succeed, but it’s the candidates’ fault.”
Jen
Next time, just throw some local yahoo up there to moderate, they at least know what the hell people who are not named Sean Hannity care about.
Evinfuilt
My faith has been restored in Humanity. Not because of the debates. But because so many people here appreciate good Spanish Hams.
I doubt there’s any American who will every try one and not fall in love with their salty, fatty goodness.
John S.
And the transformation is complete.
Hillary, her campaign and her supporters have all turned into Republicans. Congratulations myiq and p.luk, you guys sound like TallDave and Darrell in the early years of Bush’s
train wreckpresidency.You must be very proud of yourselves.
Davis X. Machina
Considering that ‘salty, fatty goodness’ is the ‘liberté, fraternité, égalité’ of American cuisine to begin with, I’m guessing the answer is no.
MBL
Seriously, p.luk, you dumbfuck, if Obama’s so bad at this then how come he’s winning? And how come his numbers have been going UP while he’s been so busy falling apart over the last couple of weeks?
He’s BEATING A FUCKING CLINTON. Something the Republicans have NEVER managed to do. He’s run a better campaign than her by every imaginable metric. And you think McCain is going to be a problem?
Crawl back in your hole, you silly twit.
jake
Unfortunately, it was only a temporary bout of hyllsteria.
Scrutinizer
What debate, ph.uk? Last night certainly wasn’t a debate. By and large the previous 20 weren’t debates either. What you’re saying is we should base our choice for president not on issues, but on how well candidates respond to bullshit Republican talking points which have nothing to do with the challenges this country face.
Rehashing Wright, flag pins and bitterness is just as stupid as if Hillary had been asked to rehash the Rose billing records, Vince Foster, rumors of Hillary being a lesbian, and the state of the Clinton marriage all over again. That would have been equally wrong last night, and would have been as roundly decried. When you limit the candidates ability to “get the job done” in terms of responding to questions like that, you are doing a disservice to all of us. The only effective response to those questions is to ignore them and talk about what issues are important, but unfortunately I’ve never see any candidate have the balls to do that consistently.
Others have already said this, but Hillary has less chance of getting past all this kind of shit in the general, because she has so much more of it, going back more than a decade, especially with the media-love for that straight-talker McCain. Hillary has survived VRWC attacks, but she has not come out of them stronger. Survival is not the same thing as victory. Her unfavorables are at their highest in years, and she is not, and never has been, ahead in her own party’s nomination process. When Hillary jumps on the same Republican talking points to cut down Obama, and by extension the party, I really can’t see much difference between voting for Clinton or voting for McCain in the fall. After all, if Hillary is going to take political opportunism as far as she’s taking it in this primary, all I would expect to see if she won the general is more triangulation and more Third Way.
Fuck that, we’ve done it all before, and it didn’t work out all that well the first time. Your failure to condemn the current process and instead cast it terms of the job a candidate is expected to do is damaging to reforming our current political process, and leads down the same road to Bush that we’ve walked before.
El Cruzado
Three weeks from now I’ll be going back to Spain to check out the family after 3 years out, and I’ll be gorging myself with Serrano ham until I can’t take it anymore (if such a thing is possible).
And fuck anyone who doesn’t think it won’t be worth every penny.
Jamey
Liu-Kang WINS! Flawless Victory!!
p.lukasiak
Welcome to the world of real politics.
Obama supporters can’t explain why his position on health care is better than hers — because, of course, his position isn’t better than hers. Just ask Elizabeth Edwards — she’s not exactly a fan of Hillary Clinton, but she isn’t going to let that stop her from telling the truth.
Obama supporters can’t explain why Obama’s position on Iraq is better than Clinton’s. All they can do is repeat “AUMF”, “AUMF” as a mantra.
When was the last time John Cole did a post examining the relative merits of Clinton and Obama’s respective position on an issue?
How many times has John Cole done a post ranting about what a horrible person Hillary Clinton is?
The political landscape that Obama supporters found so delightful has turned into a toxic wasteland for them. But the landscape hasn’t changed at all, the weather has — the clouds full of acid rain that they’ve been seeding which have been pouring down on Hillary have shifted, and the acid rain is now landing on Obama.
I’ve thought this campaign has sucked since September, when everyone decided to go negative on Clinton. It had been about issues up until then, and Barack and the rest turned it into a campaign about bullshit.
So lets not pretend that you gave a flying fuck about “issues” when the “bullshit” was about Hillary. Because you didn’t.
p.lukasiak
he’s not “winning”, he’s losing. He’s just losing slightly less than Clinton. Obama isn’t getting 2025 pledged delegates either.
As to why Clinton is “losing slightly worse”, its because she’s running for President. Obama is running for the Democratic Nomination. And while running for President may not be the smartest thing strategy-wise when it comes to winning the nomination, its a lot smarter than what Obama has been doing, which is acting like he’s still on the south side of Chicago, and all he has to do is pull an underhanded stunt and challenge (without warning) the nominating petitions of the competition, and “earn” the State Senate seat by default.
Now sure, getting rid of the opposition with a tactic right out of Karl Rove’s playback is effective, but the White House isn’t a safe Democratic seat in the Illinois State Senate.
And Obama seems to think it is.
Soylent Green
Not really. When Hill stops sucking all the air out of the room, outlooks will improve greatly.
For no good reason, in your fevered imagination.
Pot, meet kettle.
Soylent Green
Damn blockquotes.
Conservatively Liberal
Just for the fuck of it, not that I expect this asshole to actually listen to a word I say:
He is not MANDATING coverage. Hillary is. Mandates feed the insurance industry. I remember when we were told that when everyone had car insurance, rates would drop for everyone else. It never happened. The same will happen with mandated coverage. Bet on it. This is one one point of many in his favor, I will not bore you with the rest since this response is essentially a waste of my time.
He has consistently spoken out against the war, yet he is responsible enough to know that when we leave that we need to listen to the generals who are in the thick of it. And none of your ‘He voted to pay for the war’ crap either, please. That is about as disingenuous as it gets. Hillary said last night that the troops would come home when she says, no matter what the generals say. I would say that this statement shows that she makes decisions based on what she can get out of it. Obama had a much more responsible answer than she did.
John? ;)
How many time has she provoked people into responses like that by her Republican tactics? There is your answer. He is sick of Republicans, and here is one that he said that he would vote for if she won the primary. That has to make anyone sick, especially a former republican. He left that party to come to this mess of Hillary’s making?!
Since the rest of your post is nothing more than more verbal masturbation on your part, I will leave the derision of it (and you) to everyone else. As it is, answering this much was a waste of time that I will not repeat any time soon.
Now go back to sucking on shit pie.
Soylent Green
Coming from a loser, that makes sense.
Conservatively Liberal
p.luk knows Hillary cannot catch up with Obama. Obama holds the lead in super delegates, pledged delegates, popular vote and states won. He has won by every possible metric there can be without going into contortions and excluding some states or voters for others as the Clintonistas love to do.
So what p.luk is saying, loud and clear, is that the super delegates have to give this to Hillary. She deserves the win because p.luk says that she is commander in chief material, and dammit! Don’t you know that p.luk is an expert in knowing what Americans need? That we should all bow and humble ourselves before his all-knowing political mind? Well, the super delegates better give it to Hillary because people like p.luk says so.
The super delegates can give the win to her over Obama (the leader), but I dare them to. I dare them to usurp the will of the voters so Hillary can have her coronation. I dare them to spit in the faces of Obama’s supporters, people who have worked hard and honestly for the win. People who gave it their all, only to have the party elites take it away from them.
I dare them to do it.
Scrutinizer
No. It’s time to stop this silly TMZ crap and start treating politics like the serious thing it is. I don’t have problems with hardball politics, but this is just “Britney is so lame!” writ on a larger scale. You, pluck, you enable Britney politics by giving it legitimacy, and wind up sounding like the more-macho-than-macho 101st Keyboarders.
Clinton and Obama could savage each other all day over policy issues, and by doing so could help us make sense of the marginal differences between their positions. There are differences, and those might be important to the people who have to live with the fallout: ie, us. But when you call the process that we’ve got now “real politics”, you enable the corporate media who have turned this into a game of gotcha. It’s not “real politics”, it’s a fucking sham, and you buy into it.
I defended Hillary against bullshit up until the day she endorsed McCain over Obama. At that point, she ceased being a Democrat and showed that she, like Bill, was more interested in triangulating herself into a position of power she felt she was entitled to. Since that time, she has shown herself to be an incompetent executive, has egregiously lied to promote herself, and has shown that she is willing to sup from the same cup with the same VRWC that she so decried during the Lewinsky scandal. If you lie down with dogs, the saying goes, you get up with fleas. At this point, Clinton is fairly infested with the little buggers.
p.lukasiak
not at all. Personally, I’d be happy if the SDs said “a pox on both your houses. We’re nominating Gore”.
I am saying that the SDs can’t give it to Obama, and expect to take the White House.
The SDs have a tough decision to make — give in to the whiny ass titty babies who are Obama’s most vocal and vociferous supporters, or go with their political instincts, and nominate someone who can win in November. Hillary is one option for that…but she’s not the only one.
I don’t care who wins the nomination, as long as its someone I know can win. While I’ve expressed doubts about Obama’s electability in the past, last night removed all my doubts. Obama won’t win if he is the nominee. I’ll vote for him. I’ll bitch and moan about how the media is covering bullshit like “Wright”, and not focussing on the issues.
But for the last couple of months, I’ve been bitching about how the media has treated Clinton, focussed on bullshit, and ignored the issues.
And that hasn’t changed the media one iota.
Sometimes, you have to face a harsh reality. That reality is that Obama will lose if he is the nominee.
Rick Taylor
I originally supported Hillary because I liked her slightly better on the issues, particularly on health care. I suppose I still favor Hillary overall slightly on domestic issues, and Obama on foreign issues. His opposition to the Iraq war before it was fashionable means something to me, even if he did have the advantage of not having to vote and take a stand in the U.S. senate. More importantly, I like the fact that the advisors he’s been choosing on foreign affairs also include more people who opposed the Iraq war before it began.
But Hillary and Obama are very close on the issues and they’re both very smart. So that’s why the issue of how they run their campaign can make a strong difference for me. I only started leaning back towards Obama over the remarks she made over the commander in chief threshold, and her attempts to seat the delegates in Michigan and Florida and her most recent campaigning have been enough to seal the deal for me. It might be different if I thought her policy positions were far better than his, but they’re very close, especially when contrasted with the Republican nominee. And I’d prefer a campaign that stuck to the issues, but with Hillary attacking Obama on being an elitist and picking up even things like Ayers, well, one can’t just let that lie.
And just to say pre-emptively, yes I know Obama is a politician, and no angel. I was disgusted by the Thelma and Louise style adds he ran early on, for example, but for me at least, Hillary’s tactics have swamped those concerns.
p.lukasiak
then who are you supporting now? Because I know that you can’t support Obama, after he praised Reagan and trashed Bill Clinton.
calipygian
el cruzado – when I was stationed in Spain as recently as 2001, 100g of ham (a tapa size, if you will) was about a buck and a quarter. I think the expense of Serrano ham here in the states is due to import duties and licenses.
Either that or the motherfuckers at the Virginia Ham Council need a kneecapping.
p.lukasiak
opposition to the war was quite fashionable in his state senate district when he made the speech while running for re-election.
And the minute Obama entered an environment with a different fashion perspective, he made sure he was seen to be fashionable there too.
If you want to see the record of someone who has consistently opposed this war, look at Dennis Kucinich’s record. Or Ron Paul’s.
They didn’t compromise their positions in the name of political expedience. They didn’t mute their criticism in order to give a keynote address at a party convention. They didn’t vote to fund the war, using the lame excuse that they were “supporting the troops”.
That was Barack Obama. He’s always been fashionable — the problem is, he has no sense of style, he just knows how to spot trends.
p.lukasiak
but the Rovian swift-boating of Clinton on the race-baiting issue in South Carolina didn’t swamp your concerns?
You’re concerns have a very convenient way of finding high ground when hey don’t want to get swamped.
Blue Raven
Fascinating. You use that phrase, and you’re the one throwing the tantrums. Have you thought about doing something about this obsessive type-A personality thing you keep displaying? Talking to a therapist? Switching to marijuana from alcohol? Stepping away from the keyboard?
Fledermaus
Well, if I have this right, the theory goes that people have been accusing HRC of awful things for over a decade. And a lot of people have come to believe some of those things. Look she’s so tough she alienated half of her own party and 54% of likely voters don’t think she is trustworthy.
How can you not see what a stong canidate she would be in the general?
Scrutinizer
And now you’re being disingenuous again. Obama didn’t endorse Reagan’s policies as President, he said that Reagan was able to take Democrats who were disaffected with the party and get them to vote, and in many cases become, Republicans. I can’t argue with that—we’re still living with the result. Bill Clinton’s triangulation policies, on the other hand, pulled him farther to the right of the Democratic Party, and essentially threw the party under the bus. NAFTA, DOMA, welfare reform—all on Bill’s watch, all endorsed by Bill. From the standpoint of a Democrat, Bill Clinton was very much a mixed blessing. Certainly he didn’t transform politics—unless you consider the idea of targeting swing voters and to hell with everyone else transformative. I don’t.
tBone
It’s the reason p.luk and myiq do their best to fill these threads with chaff, to distract from the fact that they can’t answer one fundamental question:
If battle-hardened, Ready on Day One Hillary can’t beat a junior senator with a crazy ex-pastor and a fondness for arugula in a primary process that she should be intimately familiar with, how in the hell could she ever hope to compete with McCain in the fall?
Obama has out-organized, out-fundraised and generally outcompeted the establishment candidate across the nation. He’s weathered two potentially candidacy-ending controversies in a month, while his opponent has flailed around desperately, trying to get something, anything to stick to him.
Who’s not ready again?
I won’t hold my breath waiting for an (honest) answer to that question.
Soylent Green
Obama is not a peacenik and has never represented himself as such. I think he would not hesitate to use our forces to achieve objectives that were not ideological fantasies, that we were adequately equipped to achieve, and that would not be undertaken without contingency planning and an exit strategies. I believe he would be the first sensible CinC we have seen in a long time, whose decisions will be informed by all the facts that can be mustered. He has been forthright about the need to deal with the situations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which have both been swept under the rug, and he intends to use every tool at his disposal, but to do so without recklessness and without ignoring the objections of his defense and state department advisors.
Once we were mired in Iraq, he voted with the majority to maintain its funding. Cutting it off might have made the peaceniks happy but would not have been sound in operational terms. You can argue that the Dems have enabled the administration for far too long, but what was the alternative without the power to change policies? This is a very sticky wicket.
Obama’s recent questions to Gen. Petraeus showed me a desire to gather pertinent information as to how quickly and how safely we can exit Iraq without the place blowing up around us, or even if that’s inevitable. I think he intends to keep a fair number of troops in country, removed from policing sectarian conflict, for some time to come so that we can respond to events. He has been very clear in stating that he will proceed in Iraq on the basis of intelligence he will have access to once in office rather than making politically expedient promises now.
This is my 10th presidential election. I have never seen a candidate who seems to me more rational, thoughtful, calm, and level-headed and less likely to put our people in harm’s way to please the arms merchants or oil companies or think tanks or Israel or the House of Saud or anyone else with an axe to grind or profits to make.
I’m pretty sure that all the nations in the world that used to be our stalwart allies but now think we have our heads up our asses would like to see Obama become our next president. They don’t want the U.S. to carry on like a drunken bull in a china shop and then collapse like the Roman Empire, they want us to rejoin them on the world stage as a trustworthy partner with a stake in our collective futures.
Our feckless media always turns these elections into Britney vs. Christina popularity contests. But the outcome has a hell of a lot to with the future of the world.
Ever since Dubya came in, we have been living in Opposite World, where truthiness® is peddled as the truth, and what people believe carries a lot more weight than reality. Like Republicans, you Clinton dead-enders seem determined to project onto Obama everything that is actually true about Hillary. It’s like we’re living in the house of mirrors at the amusement park.
ImJohnGalt
I eagerly await the day in November when I can pull the lever for either Reagan or Bill Clinton. Because that is what would have to happen for your argument to make one iota of sense.
Or perhaps I just haven’t passed the retarded threshold yet. Keep trying.