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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
L.W.M.
Published Letters: 6225 Editor's Choice: 5
I left the Democratic Party in the mid-1990s. The straw that broke the camel's back was welfare "reform," but a lot of other things led up to it. (FWIW, I consider myself a Green, but since I can't register Green in my state, I'm formally an Independent.)
At least you have your head screwed on straight. Many of us, (about a third of Glenn's readers are way to the right of you), are not happy with the centrist DLC and the insistence on triangulating away from the very large base of the real DNC wing of the party that Hillary does to get centrist indies and moderate Republican swing voters. That is all changing. Green party candidates are often funded by the right and the RNC, you know? The idea is to move the Democratic party back to the left. The center has vanished.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bal-op.schaller02may02,0,7506945.column
If Shooter is doing good, the economy is doing good.
Shooter, you ain't in the top 1 or 2%. You ain't even in the top 5 or 10%. When the crunch comes, you will feel the pinch like everyone else not in the top 5%.
"Ok so you win"
You can stop right there. You've said all that needs to be said. And you can't carry a tune anyway.
There's certainly as much, if not more, groupthink on the right of the blogosphere as on the left. But I believe that the left of the blogosphere is more institutionally tied to the Democratic Party than the right of the blogosphere is to the GOP.
Most of us have grasped the pointlessness of third parties. It's not bias, it's social and political science. See Duverger's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_Law
It's a law. Many of us would welcome the institutional changes necessary for third, or fourth, parties to become viable. The more the merrier, I say.
I say this in part on the basis of a 2005 study done for the New Politics Institute by two prominent progressive bloggers, Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers. Entitled "The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere: A New Force in American Politics," the study concluded that one of the differences between the right and the left of the blogosphere was that the left was more partisan. Stoller and Bowers saw this as an advantage:
Progressive blogs are far more likely to identify with the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers are to identify with the Republican Party. This leads to greater contact between progressive bloggers and the Democratic Party than conservative bloggers have with the Republican Party. It also means more influence.
As I've already indicated, while agreeing about the importance of the ties between prominent left bloggers and the Democratic Party, I don't think this ultimately is an advantage for the left of the blogosphere.
("The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere" can be downloaded here: http://www.newpolitics.net/files/The-Emergence-of-the-Progressive-Blogosphere.pdf )
I'll cut you the slack that you are just misguided and don't understand, but you sound like the Versailles media or Jonathan Chait at TNR.
Read this:
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/04/chait-on-the-netroots/
...As other bloggers point out, this purported equivalence doesn’t pass the giggle test.
As for the claim that netroots bloggers’ attacks on “fairness,” “moderation” etc are motivated by their fundamental distaste for compromise and honest intellectual debate – it’s nonsense. Again, netroots’ criticisms of ‘moderation,’ ‘bipartisanship’ and so on are historically limited. I had one discussion with a prominent netroots blogger about bipartisanship which is worth quoting.
Bipartisanship isn’t necessarily bad. Bipartisanship in the current political atmosphere, where only one side is being bipartisan, is bad. In the six years that Bush has been in power, when has he compromised? … There is nothing inherently bad in bipartisanship. There is something inherently bad in bipartisanship with this crowd.
This isn’t a statement that compromise and moderation are evil in any absolute sense. It’s a specific argument that in our current circumstances (or more particularly, the circumstances before the mid-terms, when I had this discussion) compromise is a bad idea. It’s furthermore an argument based on a real and substantial analysis, which I think is mostly right, and which for me is the single most valuable thing that the netroots have come up with. The short version of the netroots argument, as I understand it, is this. The ground rules of American political debate have been set in ways that disadvantage those on the left side of the spectrum. Prominent pundits repeatedly call for “moderation” and for “bipartisan solutions” which tend to favour both Republican interests and the interests of those on the right of the Democratic party at the expense of left and center Democrats, because the supposed center of American political debate has been shifted considerably to the right by a concerted effort on the part of conservative opinion makers. Even more to the point – this shifting of the center allows ‘moderate’ Democrats to score political brownie points at the expense of their party by repeatedly seeking to distance themselves from it, undermining in the process any possibility that the Democrats could bring through real political change...
Dem partisanship is the only thing that kills the GOP beast. Green party only lets it live longer.
I make it a habit now to look at a new commenter's *cough*(Ironclad)*cough* other letters. It saves time in crafting your response, or even bothering with one.
I am an economic lefty and a little to the right of the Green party, on defense. I like the Green party. I think Clinton was the best "Reuplican" president since Eisenhower. If the Democratic party was back to Ike on national security and Henry Wallace on domestic policy, I'd be happy. It would be close to the major planks of the Green party.
If I were president, I'd suspend habeas too, if warranted, in the case of armed insurrection or threat of invasion. Those cases don't exist today.
That is correct. You should quit while ahead.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
Salon headlines in your mailbox
