I added 6-7 links from our thread the other day.
Try to guess who they are.
*** Update ***
This is good news- Greg Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch is not dead. He sort of dropped off the face of the earth for a while there.
by John Cole| 33 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
I added 6-7 links from our thread the other day.
Try to guess who they are.
*** Update ***
This is good news- Greg Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch is not dead. He sort of dropped off the face of the earth for a while there.
This post is in: Election 2008, I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign
No one can drive me to the brink of madness like the Clinton family. No one.
I just looked through all my posts from yesterday, and it really is funny. I woke up early, had my coffee (gourmet with cinnamon, because I am an elitist), got in a good work-out, read the morning papers and websites, made two posts unrelated to Clinton, and started to examine some new software I want to use, and then I made my mistake.
I turned on CNN. Within a few hours, I heard numerous Clinton surrogates babbling about who had worked harder most recently and the unfairness of not seating MI/FL, and on and on and on. I saw an interview of Geraldine Ferraro in full outrage mode because Obama appears to look at Clinton funny in a photograph and because he brushed dirt off his shoulders at a campaign event. And then we learned that Hillary plans to take this fight to the convention.
And then, once again, the only family who can do this to me, had managed to push me yet again into unholy madness. It is mind-numbing. This isn’t an election anymore. This is a secret bet between Bill and Hillary ala Trading Places in which they bet how much bullshit they can make the electorate swallow.
Then the Florida 2000 poison– another bucket.
And then the suffrage nonsense– yet another bucket.
And the co-option of the Civil Rights era after weeks of transparent appeals that whites won’t vote for the black guy which JUST SO COINCIDENTALLY took form during the Appalachian primaries (which conveniently occurred after North Carolina, the last state with a large black population)- buckets of bullshit over your head, in your face.
And then Zimbabwe remarks, a bucket of bullshit so stupid that her audience probably didn’t even understand it (I would kill to see video of the people in the audience during that).
It just never stops.
I know I am not a perfect person, but I like to think of myself as a good person. I am profane, I over-react, I say stupid things and sometimes mean things and then calm down and apologize, but I always try to be fair and try to do the right thing and try to give people the benefit of the doubt and I believe in forgiving people for their mistakes. I will always listen to people, even when I disagree with them.
But no one, and I mean no one, has the ability to drive me so completely into madness like Team Clinton the past few months. Their non-stop nonsense just drives me insane as it dumbs down the rest of the electorate. Listening to Clinton the past few months is for me what listening to right-wingers claim that Iraq was going to use remote-controlled flying vehicles to bomb us with chemical weapons and all the rest of the bullshit in the run up to the war was for the DFHer’s.
We are told we must count all the votes, over and over and over again, when it was the Clinton campaign who intended to lock this all up by February and didn’t care about the rest the states enough to organize there and whose campaign told us for months that certain states don’t count and whose ONLY path to victory is to pretend they have the popular vote by NOT counting the caucus state votes and not counting all the people who voted uncommitted in the unsanctioned Michigan election and by seating the Florida delegation that HER people at the DNC chose to sanction and on and on and on and the bullshit just keeps coming so thick and so fast and without pause that she has well and truly driven me to utter unholy madness.
The only consolation is that I am not alone. Steve Benen, the Carpetbagger, is done. Atrios is disgusted. Tbogg is states he has never seen such a level of “intellectual dishonesty, disregard for reality on the ground, and shamelessnes” and is comparing her to Lieberman. Even Hilzoy, one of the most decent people to ever pen a blog post, is in full-on ridicule mode. Most people are looking at this train wreck, and the collective response is “WTF?” The talking heads on all of the channels are now verging on open mockery.
Just make it stop, please.
I am begging you. Make it stop.
I am going to do everything in my power to ignore the Clinton campaign today, for mental health reasons. Dear God, please don’t let her compare herself to Ghandi today. I need a break.
Hillary Clinton Stole My Bike, Insulted My Mom, and Kicked My DogPost + Comments (135)
by John Cole| 28 Comments
This post is in: War on Terror aka GSAVE®
A shocking development in the Petraeus testimony:
Gen. David Petraeus said Thursday that by September he is likely to recommend whether further force reductions in Iraq are possible.
The four-star Army general, who has been leading troops in Iraq, is slated to become the head of U.S. Central Command. He told a Senate panel he now believes he can make a recommendation for possible force reductions before changing command this fall.
“My sense is that I will be able to make a recommendation at that time for some further reductions,” Petraeus said. “I don’t want to imply that that means” a particular brigade or major combat formation.
“But I do believe there will be certain assets that, as we are already looking at the picture right now, we’ll be able to recommend can be either redeployed or not deployed to the theater in the fall,” he said, while repeating his past caution that conditions on the ground could change.
Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, responded: “That’s good news to most of us.”
On a less-optimistic note, Petraeus said it is unlikely that Iraqi security forces will take the lead in all provinces this year, as was recently predicted by the Defense Department. Petraeus said events in the past month and a half — alluding to a spike in violence in Basra — have pushed that goal to 2009.
It never ends.
This post is in: I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign
Kos:
Okay, today we found out that counting the fake Florida primary is, according to Hillary Clinton, like:
Woman’s Suffrage
Civil Rights
Florida 2000
ZimbabweIt’s also like the Big Bang, Jesus, and cute kittens.
Actually, Kos, McCain is like Jesus.
What else is it like?
I would argue it is like the Grinch that Stole Christmas. And the War of the Roses. And the Reichstag Fire.
Have fun, and consider this an open thread.
This post is in: I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign
More relevant than ever:
I will say this one more time. All the times over the past few years when the Republicans would repeat their mantra that the “Democrats are worse,” they were not talking about the Democrats, they were talking about the Clinton family.
And they were probably right.
Consider this an open thread.
*** Update ***
Now that I have calmed down, that probably was a little over the top.
*** Update #2 ***
Crazy person. Point and laugh:
Desperate to get attention for her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”
“We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe,” Clinton explained. “Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people,” Clinton told the crowd of senior citizens at a retirement community in south Florida.
I think it is time to stop taking her seriously. Let’s run a contest to see who can come up with the stupidest comment from any member of a Clinton campaign between now and June 3rd. Winner gets a 25 dollar gift certificate to Amazon or a $25 donation to their charity of choice.
And no, you can not use crazy statements from Hill-bloggers.
This post is in: Election 2008, I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign, Assholes
No graceful exit in sight For Our Lady of Inevitability:
Hillary Rodham Clinton says she is willing to take her fight to seat Florida and Michigan delegates to the convention if the two states want to go that far. In an interview with The Associated Press, Clinton was asked whether she would support the states if they continue the fight.
The presidential candidate said Wednesday, “Yes I will. I will, because I feel very strongly about this.”
Clinton is calling for delegates from both states to be seated at the convention based on the primaries. Both states were stripped of their delegates because they voted early, violating national party rules. Clinton won both states; Barack Obama’s name wasn’t on the Michigan ballot.
Translation: “If this party doesn’t give me the nomination, I am gonna blow shit up.”
Once again, the hostage crisis metaphor is appropriate. A roll down memory lane, when Hillary discussed the Michigan election last October:
What a contemptible wretch Sen. Clinton has turned out to be, and I find it stunning that many Democratic blogs who routinely bitch about the various and numerous violations of rules, law, and international agreements by the Bush administration sit by and swallow this nonsense from the Senator Clinton.
*** Update ***
After courting the white vote for months in Appalachia, Mrs. Nixon informs us that seating Florida and Michigan are akin to the Civil Rights Movement. No. Seriously:
“This work to extend the franchise to all of our citizens is a core mission of the modern Democratic party,” she said. “From signing the Voting Rights Act and fighting racial discrimination at the ballot box to lowering the voting age so those old enough to fight and die in war would have the right to choose their commander in chief, to fighting for multi-lingual ballots so you can make your voice heard no matter what language you speak.”
What an asshole.
*** Update ***
Chait nails it:
This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It’s obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don’t want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton’s character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton’s gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.
If she’s consciously lying, it’s a shockingly cynical move. I don’t think she’s lying. I think she’s so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It’s not just that she’s convinced herself it’s okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency.
Misogynist!
by John Cole| 54 Comments
This post is in: Election 2008
TPM links to the Oregon exit polls:
The Oregon exit polls lend a bit more weight to the theory that Barack Obama’s real problem is more with Appalachia than it is with working class whites in general, as the Hillary campaign has repeatedly suggested.
In Kentucky yesterday, Hillary slaughtered Obama among these voters. But the Oregon exits show a different story.
Obama beat Hillary by sizable margins among all ages of white voters except those 60 and older. And he beat Hillary among voters with no college degree, too — and since the state is overwhelmingly white, these voters are the ones he’s supposed to have trouble with.
Late Update: The exits also show that Obama also beat Hillary by seven points among voters making less than $50,000 (though she won among voters making between $15,000 and $30,000).
What’s more, Obama also won among voters from a household with a union member. I’ve edited the above to make that point.
One point that is often not made enough is that many Democrats in WV and Kentucky and elsewhere are often times people are Democrats simply because it is the only game in town. One of the things that kept me reflexively a Republican is that in WV, pretty much the entire state was run by Democrats at every level.
Until recently, in WV, if you wanted to vote in a primary that mattered, you had to be a Democrat. My mother, who has voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election in my lifetime, at least as far back as to Ford in 76 (I am not sure about Nixon, but I do not see her as McGovern voter), is a registered Democrat and has been all her life (she grew up in Maryland, moved to WV in the late 60’s with my dad, who was from Ohio). As a registered Republican in WV until very, very recently, quite often there simply was NO CANDIDATE to vote for- if you win the Democratic primary, you have won the race. The only credible challenger to Alan Mollohan for years was a libertarian named Richard Kerr, a local Doctor.
This is something else to keep in mind when you hear all these exit polls in Appalachia in which Democrats state they will not vote for Obama or Hillary in the fall- it isn’t because they necessarily hate Hillary or Barack, it is because for all intents and purposes they are Republicans. Ticket-splitting is alive and well here in rural states.
*** Update ***
For example, McDowell County here in WV:
The Democrats are expected to rule Tuesday in McDowell County.
There are no Republican candidates competing in Tuesday’s primary contest, according to County Clerk Don Hicks. However, several Democrats are competing against Democrats for their party’s nomination. Without Republican opposition, the winners in Tuesday’s primary will most likely be unopposed during the general election in November.
“Whenever you have just Democrats running with no Republican opposition, normally in the primary that is pretty much it,” Hicks said. “Unless there is a write-in candidate.”
It went to Hillary 72-22.
And Another Thing About Democrats In AppalachiaPost + Comments (54)