Politics, Music, Sounds, and Sanity: Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
If ever I would leave you....
How could it be in spring-time? Knowing how in spring I'm bewitched by you so? Oh, no! not in spring-time! Summer, winter or fall! No, never could I leave you at all!
Now he’s opening the closet (closet, closet, closet)
The wonderful folks at the Courage Campaign are trying to, ahem, expose Rep. David Dreier (R-Closet) and his abject and unwavering fealty to GWBush:
And George W. Bush's rubber stamp is...
Congressman David Dreier.
Help us expose David Dreier's rubber-stamp record. Watch our "Bush Rubber Stamp" ad and contribute to get it up on the air in the 26th congressional district.
Not a lot of people know it, but Congressman David Dreier has voted with George W. Bush approximately 93.6% of the time. On the most important issues of our time, he has been a rubber stamp for the Bush Administration, voting for Dick Cheney's energy bill, Bush's war in Iraq and, inexplicably, against education benefits for the soldiers he sent to fight in it.
No matter where you live in California -- and no matter whether or not you live in his district -- you have the power to hold David Dreier accountable today. That's why we're launching a provocative new TV ad today to get the truth out to as many people as possible.
We have spent a lot of time in this Congressman's district, conducting focus groups and constituent research to understand how citizens view him. The results? Once people find out about their Congressman's consistent, deep support for President Bush, their opinion of him changes significantly.
Of course, they'd like a contribution for their TV ad campaign to help yank this guy out of the closet district he's held since 1981.
You may be surprised to know that -- according to Congressional Quarterly -- from 2001 to 2007 David Dreier voted with George W. Bush's agenda approximately 93.6% of the time. Not only is this out of step with the values of California's 26th Congressional District, but it is completely contrary to the "moderate, independent" image that Dreier has slickly crafted for the last 28 years.
For the longest time, Republicans had a winning electoral strategy: simply tell everyone that a vote for the Democrats means that the terrorists will attack America. Unfortunately that strategy doesn't seem to be working any more. Despite the Republicans' best efforts, the voting public steadfastly refused to crap their pants in 2006 and booted the GOP out of the House and Senate.
So what's next? They've got no ideas, they have a terrible record of failure, and their last best electoral strategy is a dud. Where do Republicans go from here?
Neo-con Daniel Pipes might have the answer. While discussing the possibility of an attack on Iran during an interview with National Review Online last week, he said:
What I suspect will be the case is, should the Democratic nominee win in November, President Bush will do something. And should it be Mr. McCain that wins, he'll punt, and let McCain decide what to do.
Or in other words, if you vote for Barack Obama this fall, hair-trigger George will lose his shit and start World War III.
I'm not sure if that's exactly a winning message for the McSame campaign, but it might be all they have left.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
(Video by Robert Greenwald at Brave New Films)
There are some folks we call dead-enders. They will follow The Party no matter what. If they saw GWBush, John W. McCain, Dick Cheney, and Grover Norquist gang-raping their child on TV, they would still vote for anyone with an "R" after their name, including the aforementioned McCain.
It always cracks me up when a supposed 'thoughtful' Right-wing pundit criticizes a Democratic candidate, thoughtfully, as if they would ever vote for said candidate, or even consider him anything but a traitor willing to sell us all down the river into Islamofascist slavery:
The fact that everyone knows who Bush was referring to and the fact that the substance contained in the remark reflects the widely held belief of a very large percentage of voters should have given Obama an opening to retract the remark and share his thoughts on engaging Iran, Syria, and other terrorist supporting nations in a useful dialogue.
Instead, Obama and the Democrats hit the ceiling, calling Bush every name in the book and whining about their hurt feelings. Their reaction reminded me of a line from the movie All The Presidents Men where the Washington Post has published an article accusing the White House of wrongdoing and the reaction to that article from the Nixonites. Ben Bradleee observes “They doubt our ancestry, but they don’t say the story isn’t accurate.”
Obama called Bush’s words “an appalling attack,” “dishonest,” divisive, “fear-peddling,” fear-mongering,” but for some reason, never got around to responding to the substance of Bush’s charge; that Obama and the Democrats cannot be trusted with running American foreign policy because their outlook on the world is is based on false assumptions about, our friends, our allies, our role in the world, and most of all our deadly enemies.
Bush actually did Obama a favor. He gave him a golden opportunity to lay out his “realistic” ideas on American foreign policy so that it would get the widest possible hearing. The problem, as Obama and the Democrats well know, is one of perception – a perception they try their best to finesse rather than tackling head on. It’s not about talking tough and making threats. It is about calling our enemies, well, enemies . They could try that for starters.
Right. Problem is, any idea Obama lays out as realistic will be ridiculed by this guy and his crowd. Yet he seems so reasonable. But often so do most sycophants and supporters of totalitarian regimes.
What could possibly be wrong with 75,000 people attending a political rally?
Admittedly, not much on the surface. And perhaps if the times weren’t so perilous and the candidate who was the beneficiary of that huge crowd wasn’t so problematic, we could really celebrate such an outpouring of support, free from the nagging doubts that plague many of us about Barack Obama and his past associations and present ideological beliefs.
Except my republican soul (note the small “r”) is a little frightened at this mob scene. Politicians should be plebeian in their appeal – being one of us and not standing above us, Caesar-like in their beguilement of the masses. Truman and Eisenhower were plebes; modest in their habits and with no illusions regarding their own failings. There is something to be said for such solid republican values in a presidential candidate and when someone such as a Kennedy or Obama rises above the masses, presenting themselves as perhaps something more than a servant of the people, we are bound to look in askance at such a phenomenon.
The anti-populist elitism, the sniff of "dirty masses" from an ivory tower conservative psuedo-intellectual is almost enough to make the spirit of Bill Buckley smile up from Hell. The fear of the people revolting, trying to further their own best interests, has been a touchstone in conservative politics since long before the Cold War.
And in case he forgot, there's never been a more anti-plebian President than GWBush, with the possible exception of Poppy Bush, who really took his elitism as a life style, and didn't try to hid it with a phony rancho in Texas.
Moran finishes his anti-Obama whine thusly:
But dangerous he is – for his beliefs, not for his personality or the character of this mass movement he has inspired. So when I see 75,000 people screaming his name with the kind of abandon reserved for rock stars or religious figures, I worry more that the candidate won’t be able to live up to the lofty expectations he has engendered in his legions than he would use such a movement for nefarious purposes.
And given his incredible lack of experience and zero track record in getting anything done, I would guess that if he is elected he would generate more disappointment among his followers than any other president in memory.
Dude, that's rich in unintended irony. He worries, poor concern troll he is, that Obama won't live up to the Left's expectations, that he has an "incredible lack of experience and zero track record in getting anything done", and will "generate more disappointment" blah blah blah.
Like, you know, George W. "28%" Bush has done.
The real reason for all this pearl-clutching and hand-wringing is in the video at the top, and rests on the heads of the Republican collective, the "dirty unwashed masses" who voted for McCain, once a pariah in Republican top circles, now their candidate. Weak as Wally Cox with the flu, ethically challenged as Ferdinand Marcos, anti-intellectual as GWBush, and flip-flopping more than a trout in the bottom of a boat, McCain's star is the one they have hitched their wagons to. So Moran instead carps and whines about Obama's mis-perceived problems, and pronounces him a bad candidate.
Let me get this straight: uncontrolled anger is a virtue, and McCain intends to campaign on it, mocking his questioners who have a legitimate problem with an historically angry man with his finger on the metaphorical nuclear button? How desperate must the GOP be, to run such a man for president? And yet, with the effectiveness of the GOP election theft apparatus, and the media's preoccupation with the angry man, he may well take the office.
Like threatening fellow Congressional members, or cursing at your wife in public or bombing Iran, or returning to finish off what was left undone in Vietnam....
Really nice of you to mock our concerns, McCain. But we've learned not to think it's a laugh to have an uncorked personality in the Oval Office. And if it's you who get to be in the White House, we have to trust your judgment and cool deliberate reasoning.
So making jokes about your temper might be clever and mavericky, but we will no longer be grinning and saying how cute.
"F--- you," he shouted at Texas Sen. John Cornyn last year.
"Only an a------ would put together a budget like this," he told the former Budget Committee chairman, Sen. Pete Domenici, in 1999.
"I'm calling you a f------ jerk!" he once retorted to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
With Cornyn, he smoothed things over quickly. The two argued during a meeting on immigration legislation; Cornyn complained that McCain seemed to parachute in during the final stages of negotiations. "F--- you. I know more about this than anyone else in the room," McCain reportedly shouted.
