One of Sullivan’s readers sums it up:
The Clintons are like the arsonist firefighter in the movie Backdraft — using their political skills to create divisive and destructive fires in an attempt to dominate their opposition, and then immediately promoting themselves as the only firefighters that will put them out. They did it in the White House by making Bill’s indiscretions a partisan issue, and now they’re doing it with the gender and race issue. And it baffles me how willing Hillary supporters are to continue to participate in this cynical and destructive mechanism.
I’m a very politically interested Dem in a large family of moderate to conservative Republicans and Independants. I can, and have, made a good case with them for Obama, but there’s no way I can justify a Hillary nomination to myself, much less to them. If the Dems are short-sighted and suicidal enough to give a Hillary the nomination instead of seizing the opportunity with Obama to create a once-in-a-lifetime historical political realignment in this country, they can count me, my family, and many of my Dem friends out this Nov.
– Eric Miller, millerec@etown.edu
Filed under: Obama
This link was posted by a reader last week, but I didn’t get around to reading it until today. Everyone should.
– Eric Miller, millerec@etown.edu
Filed under: Polarize
One of the key reasons – perhaps the reason – why Obama needs to be our next president (and this is and will continue to be a recurring theme) is so we can start to get past our absurd national polarization. None of the Republicans can do it, and Hillary certainly can’t either. If it happens, maybe we can get past the era of ridiculous discourse – ridiscourse? – that we’ve wallowed in for the past decade, most recently championed by Jonah Goldberg. We’ll look back and giggle, like it was snap bracelets or pump-up sneakers.
This guy is in the New Era like 27 times a week…
Here’s a piece linked to on the DFA site, by Jim Wallis. His point is a valid one – democratic voters weren’t asked about their ties to the evangelical community, republicans were, and the implication is that democrats are never evangelicals, so why bother to ask. It’s an incorrect assumption. Pollsters, pundits, and network news are not strong on “nuance.”
There are tons of democratic evangelicals in Lancaster County, and all of them know a thing or two about being marginalized.
Filed under: Election
Just spent the afternoon with the DSC at the Lancaster Host, and I can say, with all the confidence of a professional pundit – I surveyed the parking lot bumper stickers – that the PA Dems will go strong for Barack Obama…
Filed under: Christianity
Lately I’ve been going back to a couple of old books that help me make sense of election years. And by “old” I mean old relative to the political climate. The first is Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas (2004), which is as clear and biting an analysis of the Rove-approach as anyone has ever written. The second is Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul (2006), which offers an interesting conservative critique of the Bush years. A couple points that I think will remain relevant:
1. Frank’s main concern is that – particularly in 2000, but also, we saw, in 2004 – Republicans were able to sneak their economic policies in the backdoor while winning voters with social issues. Or, rather, harnassing “cultural anger.” This harnassing process, I think, is actually the generator of such anger. The irony, Frank says, is that Republican campaigners were able to drive “values voters” out by the millions, only so they could promptly vote against their best interests, doing so happily (or, actually, angrily), opposing imaginary “elites” by voting for the real ones. It’s a revolution: working class Joes rising up in anger to fight… themselves? From Frank:
This situation may be paradoxical, but it is also universal. For decades Americans have experienced a populist uprising that only benefits the people it is supposed to be targeting. In Kansas we only see an extreme version of this mysterious situation. The angry workers, mighty in their numbers, are marching irresistably against the arrogant. They are shaking their fists at the sons of privilege. They are laughing at the dainty affectations of the Leawood toffs. They are massing at the gates of Mission Hills, hoisting the black flag, and while the millionaires tremble in their mansions, they are bellowing out their terrifying demands. “We are here,” they scream, “to cut your taxes.”
The result of this phenomenon, inevitably, is that Christian voters send people to Washington, only to find that those people are more interested in cutting their own taxes than making good on their promises – just ask David Kuo. And the inevitable consequence of this is an eventual break between mainstream Republicanism and Christianity (particularly on the fundamentalist end). We’re seeing this already with the popularity of Mike Huckabee. It’s an important moment, and here’s why…
2. Sullivan’s book basically argues that true conservatism – which hasn’t existed in the White House since… Bill Clinton? – must exist apart from religious influence. This is a common sense argument, and it is shocking. Sullivan at one point refers to fundamentalist influence as a “tendancy” within modern conservatism, which grew and florished in the nineties/early 00s. I think this is an understatement. The union – or supposed union – between Republican politics and Christian fundamentalism was specifically engineered by politicians who saw a large voting bloc ready to be spoken to. They got some good mileage out of that group, but the partnership is on the wane.
Sullivan makes frequent reference to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as one of his favorite conservative texts. This interests me especially, because I would make similar reference to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. When they were written, these two books were in direct conflict. A Burkean conservative and a Painite liberal could never have been on the same side of an issue. But the issues have changed so much, that I read Sullivan’s blog with some regularity, and agree with him much of the time. At this point, we are both backing the same candidate: Barak Obama.
The point that Sullivan makes, and that Frank would agree with, and that I think is essential, is that our national leadership needs to distance itself from religious politics. Though conservatives and progressives will continue to differ on many issues, let’s at least come together to remind ourselves that the United States, as stated in the first amendment and the texts of just about every important founding father, is a secular state, granting impartial freedom to people of all religious leanings.
Secular does not mean anti-religious, as folks like James Dobson and Pat Robertson will invariably claim. It means freedom to be religious anyway you choose, without governmental endrosement or denunciation. That’s something both right and left can support, and it’s a good place to start.
Filed under: Obama
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that one of the guys who propogates these lies was an interviewee on Hannity and Colmes. I pause, wait for the shock, and yet it does not come…
Filed under: Hillary
The Blogosphere, or at least the part of it I like – the progosphere? – has been ablaze with Hillary talk these past two days, hitting largely on two themes:
1. Glenn Greenwald- in particular – has been on the warpath for weeks, attacking Hillary’s press coverage, and with good reason. Much of it has been juvenile, the rest has been flat out wrong. And since it is so clear that many of these individuals do not like her – and many of the snippets suggest that they think with a communal brain – their reporting tries to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In New Hampshire, for instance, Obama was reported to have a dominating lead all day Tuesday and even for days in advance. The coverage was just wrong. It’s not even a debatable point – they all said very similar things, and they were just about all wrong. Keep in mind, they get paid for this. If the pundits were anywhere close to correct, Hillary would be back in New York today eating a gallon of ice cream and watching Sixteen Candles. Instead, her campaign is totally re-energized.
2. The second point, one that I felt in the pit of my stomach the second I saw the results, is that the re-energization of the Hillary campaign is a bad thing. Gil Smart sums it up pretty succinctly in his recent headline, “The Polarization Express.” The political climate in the United States has been polarized for the past seven, maybe eleven years, and most of us are tired of it. We’d like to see the semi-hereditary presidency go to someone other than a Bush or Clinton. We’d also like to see a figure who will act as a unifying force, who will dismantle the incredibly counterproducive American political discourse enough to actually fix some of these glaring problems that have come to the foreground in the past seven years – the Iraq war, our environmental crises, our healthcare crises, and our ballooning deficit. The next president will have his/her hands full of inherited problems – we the people don’t need the firestorm of idiotic “discourse” that will greet/infest the next Clinton administration.
Here’s a bit of (un)common sense to characterize the type of discourse I’m talking about - in the late nineties, our country went crazy because the president fooled around with an intern – there was an impeachment, remember? Things are a bit worse today. The Onion has a phrase for that.
But reflect: American Idol premieres again on Tuesday. Somehow we’ve managed to keep caring all along! That’s called resiliency!
Filed under: Iraq
A new study came out today that puts the Iraqi death toll around 151,000, and it should be noted that this is one of the more conservative estimates to come out in recent years – certainly moreso than the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimate, which put the figure at about 650,000.
The numbers and methodologies get complex, but the point we should take from this is that a lot of people have died. This war is not just something we watch on tv.
Here’s a recommendation for ”No End in Sight,” the Charles Ferguson documentary about how the Iraq situation played out before and after the initial invasion and occupation. It is both specific in its timeline and scathing in its criticism. Bush doesn’t fair well, or Cheney, or Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and a few other bigwigs, but most of the ire falls upon Paul Bremer (and back on Bush by proxy).
One of the most interesting and telling facts cited in the film – and there are many – is that OHRA (the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance) initially compiled a list of twenty important Iraqi cultural sites that needed to be protected post-invasion. These included the national library and museums, among others. Of these twenty important Iraqi cultural sites, U.S. military personal were deployed to guard only one – the Oil Ministry. Of the remaining nineteen, sixteen were looted and burned. This does not support our leadership’s claim to be interested in “Iraqi Freedom.”
There’s more – much more – but it’s tiresome to talk about. I think we have reached the point where everyone understands what this is about, we just need clarification on the details. See the movie.
Filed under: Bush/Cheney
Sensible points from a sensible man, but not revolutionary, because he is saying things that everyone already knows. The only puzzling thing is that not everyone has drawn such a logical conclusion.
