Letters to the Editor
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Read The Damn Column!
Gwool:
So, if Bush is appealing to only his core, then what does that say about the congressional core of 28%.
That says the middle, the 40% or so in the center, are disgusted with BOTH parties.
As Glenn points out:
Compare that with the approval ratings from Democrats with regard to the Democratic Congress, from the same poll:
Do you approve or disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job?
DEMOCRATS:
Approve - 37%
Disapprove - 49%
Unsure - 14%
Plainly, the reason the approval ratings for the Democratic Congress are so low is because the rank-and-file of their own party disapproves of the job they are doing, by an unusually wide margin. It is Democratic discontent, grounded in perceptions of excessive passivity, which is responsible for the low esteem in which the Congress is held.
Got it? Dems are upset with their own leadership for not standing up to Bush.
Gwool:
The biggest thing that this moderate republican happens to be disgusted with, frankly, is the strident, nasty rhetoric being slung by both parties at one another. I am sick to death of it.
Seeing your level of reading comprehension, it's hardly a surprise that you think Democrats are as strident as your own beloved leadership.
It is why, I think, a character like Obama can burst onto the scene and strike a chord. One of his famous tag lines happens to be that the baby boomer generation has been fighting amongst itself on the national stage now for 40 years and the rest of the country is tired of it.
Obama is historically ignorant. Or, rather, he's depending on the general historical ignorance of the American people. Americans have been complaining about partisan fighting since the parties first formed in the 1790s. The boomers didn't invent it any more than they invented sex.
We don't want another 8 years of Clinton Era nastiness. The left can argue it was the vast right wing conspiracy that drove it all, but it sure as hell was not the vast right wing conspiracy that had the Hillary camp go off on David Geffen for saying the Clintons had turned lying into an art form during a fundraiser for Obama.
Yeah, it all started when he hit me back. Tell me about it.
That kind of quick, nasty, attack mode has run its course for a while, it appears.
Ahem. Would you like to buy a bridge?
So yes. The country sits to the left of the current Bush agenda that, in addition to Iraq, seems dominated by extreme life positions as evidenced by jumping the shark on Terry Schiavo and the extreme position on stem cell research.
But, no, the country is not to the left of the democrat leadership at the moment.
Again, with the reading comprehension thing. It's in the damn column! The country wants out of Iraq. The Dem leadership is unwilling to force what the country wants. They are to the right of the country.
And, as I note in my own comment, there is nothing new or unique about this situation.
The country is right in the middle being shouted over by two foam-at-the-mouth extremes representing 30% each.
You make the all-too-common narcissistic mistake of thinking you are the country. Sorry, dude. You're just a sorry dude.
You believe self-comforting narratives that soothe your ego, and can't handle looking at simple polls numbers. You could be on TV!
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And furthermore
That says the middle, the 40% or so in the center, are disgusted with BOTH parties.
There is no center. Vanished.
http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/05/16/welcome-tom-schaller/
A Big Old Geek,
It's important to stress we had no business invading Iraq. It was the greatest strategic blunder in history. While we have been breaking laws, treaties conventions all over the world and violating our own constitution at home, the people who attacked us on 9/11 are back stronger than ever.
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8QAL5N80&show_article=1
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About time
The phenomenon you so eloquently describe, Mr. Greenwald, is one that really began to bother me during the Clinton impeachment. 76% of the country wanted the impeachment nonsense to stop, but all the media moguls spoke as though the people were outraged at Clinton and demanding his head. It was the first time I realized what a bizarre disconnect the media was presenting us, and you're the first writer I've seen explain it in detail. Thanks.
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Fair enough, then
At 8:30, Anonymous wrote:
I read part of the article in question. It's of a type not usually of interest to me, I'm way past that. But it appears to be questioning these ridiculously outmoded and anachronistic patriarchally enforced gender roles, not re-inforcing them.
I'm assuming this is you, Glenn.
I read it completely differently... or at least got a completely different vibe off of it. To my ears, it totally bought into the "Republicans are though, manly-men and Democrats are wimps and sissys (except for the women who are castrating ballbusters)" meme of the last decade or so.
But disagreement is ok, keep up the good work.
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What I would be curious to see...
is a breakdown of that 25-30% that clings to Bush and his incompetent policies...
Presumably, some percentage of that minority would be those who have benefited most from his tax breaks. But even some of those who have so benefited have made it clear (think Clintons, Hollywood, Kennedys, Warren Buffett, Gates,Sr., etc) that they do not support his policies, especially the tax cuts. So that percentage really can't be very large.
So who are the rest of them?
Allowing my personal biases to show...
I'm guessing they may be some "natural" RWAs, some Neocons, and fundamentalist religious types, but also some blue collar and less-sophisticated voters, who paradoxically like Bush's anti-intellectualism, even though voting for his policies most often means voting against their own interests, and who also still think they'd rather have a beer with him than any other candidate, despite his alcohol & substance abuse history.
It seems very likely that Bush's base is made up of some very strange bedfellows. In fact, I'll be that some of them are hardly acquainted with the others, and would just as soon keep it that way. What if they were introduced to one another? Would that center-- small as it is-- still hold, if the latent disdain that is the subtext for Bush's base were revealed? I don't think so.
I'd love to see Glenn or anyone else dig a bit deeper into the numbers that make up Bush's base, and reveal how many (or few?) of them are indeed the Have-mores and how many (more of them?) are the Have-littles.