Letters to the Editor
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Salon is usually more thorough
I mean, how can I evaluate these people fairly when I have no idea what Vilsack, Bayh and Richardson were wearing? It must be important, since the author felt it necessary to tell us that "Though she [Clinton] looked tired, she was chic in slimming black with a choker around her neck, and her bright white smile lopped two decades off her 58 years." How unlike Salon to avoid giving all the facts...
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Nobody Really Likes Hillary
The bottom line is that nobody really likes Hillary. I'm a lifelong Dem and I cringe at the idea that she's the best Candidate we can come up with in 2008. The woman is just not very likable. I'm afraid that the Rethugs will find another smooth talking good old boy that the Bubbas will feel comfortable having a beer with and that will be the end of Hillary, and quite possibly the DNC. Strong, yes. Smart, check. Principled... I think so. But likable? Hell no. Electable as President? Probably not.
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Pocket Democrats
The thing that frightens me is the Clintons and Lieberman's strategy as pocket Democrats; they are to me like pocket Battleships, all gun and no platform. They have failed to call Bush on his appeasement of our real foreign policy threats. Fortunately the Heritage Foundation documents our progress in military readiness, which seems to suggest losing in Iraq will be the warm-up for even greater defeats in the years to come. The situation suggests at least from a political standpoint the Democrats could have had it both ways on Iraq, and chose to have none of it.
It makes one question their political skills, or worse, their motives, were they just along for the ride, and was betraying the Democratic party, by moving to the middle and making George Bush virtually indistinguishable from his opponent, the price we have to pay? Maybe these Democrats are guilty of moral relativism. The rest of us are not.
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GOP Secret Weapon
I totally agree with Ebonius, Anderson, et al: if the Dems nominate Hillary Clinton, it will insure at least another 4 years of Republican rule in the White House.
She'll galvanize the legions of conservative voters who despise her while boring center Dems and alienating the left.
Personally, I don't think I can vote for her despite my fear and loathing of Republicans. Her support for the Iraq war and now the Israeli invasion of Lebanon show her to be utterly without moral principle, motivated only by political ambition and a lust for power. That she can take such pro-war stands in face of the truly horrific death tolls at the hands of American arms and allies sickens me.
The fact that Bill Clinton is now campaigning for Lieberman in CT (against Lamont) only rubs salt in anti-war Democrats' wounds. The corrupt Democratic Party leadership has taken us for granted, no, they've deliberately spit in progressives' faces by such acts--and others, too, such as Dean's slamming gay marriage on the 700 Club. Yet they expect us to turn out loyally on election day.
I, for one, am so fed up that given a choice between Hillary and...anyone the Greens nominate, I may well vote Green.
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Teaching young raptors to ATTACK
I think that we all know the ragged, stale dishrag known at the Democratic Party is going to lose in 2008. It's a virtual certainty.
I wonder how raptors train their young to ATTACK a target..? Most of it must be genetics, but what about the last 5%..? Territorial imperative (am I old or what?)..?
What the Democratic Party must do is to ATTACK AND DESTROY Karl Rove before he can reach into his fucking bag of dirty tricks. Go for the throat. By that I mean the jugular vein. Pull the rug out from under the Republicans.
I most definitely do not mean "debate" or "engage" -- I mean ATTACK AND DESTROY. If you're upset by the sight of blood, leave the room at once. This is going to be messy.
Question their patriotism -- the Nazis were patriotic, weren't they? You bet! Using a very, very sharp razor, we need to slice precisely between the US flag and the mountains of shit who have wrapped themselves in the US flag to achieve their ends.
Now. How do we train a stale dishrag to attack?
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Three short points:
Use of the word "center": The DLC, which supports corporate welfare and war in Iraq (neither of which poll well among any set of voters), is described as the "center." Meanwhile, those to the left are "liberal." Maybe the center is somewhere other than corporate funded abstractions like the DLC. I expect more out of Salon.
"Voted to give Bush authority to war" v. voted for the war: By 2003 it was clear to any responsible senator that Bush was a lying, amoral sack, who could not be trusted. Anyone voting to give him the power to declare war knew what they were doing and any claim that they trusted him to use that power wisely is not honest.
DLC opponents are Nader voters: First, you are wrong. Many Democratic voters angry at Clinton and the DLC are actually Gore and Kerry voters. But I'll let that one slide. Even if they weren't, blaming Nader is wimpy.
Bush won in 2000 because the Supreme Court stopped a recount of Florida votes (and Katherine Harris purged many more voters than the margin of victory in one way or another). To blame American voters who picked the candidate that best represented their interests rather than the televised theft of democracy is one of the biggest chicken-shits out there. Don't you have the balls to fight the real enemy?
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Not so Boggling
"Jim" argues that Democrats that voted for the war resolution were not voting for the war or authorizing the war but rather giving Bush a "bargaining tool with the understanding that he would use it judiciously."
Technically, Jim you are correct. But non-technically, in the real world of things the argument just doesn't stand up. I was there, and I assume so were you. I'm afraid anyone who paying the slightest attention at the time fully understood that Bush wanted to go to war. He had been building up to it for months. Years, if you want to include the pre-9-11 Iraq trial balloons. When, for no reason sparked by outside events he and his posse so whole-heartedly turned their attention to Iraq when Afghanistan was still quite unresolved - demonizing Saddam, belittling the UN arms inspectors, and the UN in general, floating this argument and that - it was obvious to anyone watching the news at leas once a week, that Bush was going to war with Iraq and that the resolution was to give him desired congressional cover.
Sure the resolution itself included all kinds of nice contingency language and such, but any Dem that hides behind it is not to be trusted, because it was obvious at the time that only wording that mattered was that which gave Bush permission to engage in armed conflict against Iraq. I knew it, the press knew it, I suspect you knew it, and you can be darn sure that every single Democrat that voted for it knew it.
I won't remove all their cover. They can make some credible claims about misleading intel and such. But that's about as far as it goes. In the real world, a vote for that resolution was a vote to go to war; clear and simple. I'm sorry that so many Dems that we would all like to think better of, voted for it, but there is no doubt as to what they were doing when they did.