The current conservative (see: sewer trash) talking point is that Bush’s torture was effective because some hapless random idiot six years ago blurted the nickname of the person that the CIA was following in the last two years, which eventually resulted in the location of the ObL garbage.
No mention that Bush actively stopped the CIA team that was looking for ObL, that he publicly commented that ObL was not a target or an interest, and that Obama re-focused the US Intelligence into trying to find that piece of excrement and use all kinds of available intelligence to locate him. And that was successful.
There’s no low point the Repubs will not dive in a sewer for.
I don’t think this is an isolated sentiment among lefties. I personally think the attitude is insane - if the GOP were to win the White House next year, they’d surely win the Senate too, and yes they are fucking willing and would then be able as well to tear down every last bit of the New Deal and Great Society they can get their hands on, public opinion be damned - but it’s hardly down in the white noise, and given the historic effects of primary challenges on incumbents’ re-election chances, it worries me far more than the crop of potential GOP challengers.
It’s not but now there’s a new media term for them: left “independents”.
Obama is a centrist and has made too many concessions to the conservative (see: sewage) demands and expectations.
It is a pattern: Democratic Reps, Senators, and Presidents, seem so willing to buck to the vicious pressure from conservatives that if they don’t kill and destruct, they will not be deemed as deserving Americans by the voting public (see: idiots).
Preliminary personal opinion polls are 85% favorite right now, but the sewage of conservatism will throw all kinds of insane blocks on his path, and he may be unreasonably accommodating to them by next voting day.
If another Dem gets the nomination in 2012, there’ll be a good chance of President Trump. I’m mostly okay with Obama, but if I weren’t I’d still rather he served out his two terms and looked instead for suitable candidates in 2016.
Well it would be insanely dangerous to run a strong progressive candidate against the Repubs in 2012, but I didn’t say I wanted that. I said I wanted a strong progressive CHALLENGE to Obama in the PRIMARIES. I want the Democratic power structure, such as it is, to be SCARED SHITLESS of the Dem progressives, so that they will pay SOME attention to progressive demands, instead of happily ignoring us. Because they clearly will not reward us for simply voting Democratic. I want the Dem power structure to be as frightened of the progressive wing as the Repub power structure is of the Tea Party.
As it is now, we’re being pushed rightward, and not slowly either. I remember once when it seemed rational to think seriously about things like a serious prison reform program aimed at getting criminals actually reformed and back in society as contributing member. I remember when decriminalizing pot seemed a sane topic to debate. I remember when we were BUILDING a strong social safety net. Now we’re tearing down our social safety nets! Now we are locking prisoners up, three strikes and you’re out, in prisons so overcrowded that judges rule them in violation of the rule against cruel and unusual punishment. Hell, now we’re embracing fucking goddamn Nazi TORTURE as an acceptable way to treat some prisoners! While we let rich bankers who commit FRAUD and thereby ruin the economy, get away with it!
I can envision a not-too-distant future where we’re saying, “It’s not right to let poor people and their children STARVE just because they can’t find work” … and then … “You can’t ENSLAVE people, it’s morally wrong” … and then … “first of all, witches don’t even exist, second, you can’t go around burning people alive because your milk is sour!”
America is being turned into just another Third World shithole by the right. Progressives have got their work cut out for them. It’s time they started taking names and kicking ass. You probably think my scenario is farfetched. I ask you … Fifteen years ago, did you think we would be engaging in long tendentious arguments with conservatives over whether or not TORTURE is a good thing?
We gotta remember Obama is going to run against the pubs. Rememberthis?
Let’s see. He said he’d reform health care, and (pretty much) did. He said he’d support green energy- it doesn’t get much press but he does. He said he’d kill Bin Laden- check!
Meanwhile the pubs, to me anyway, come across as decievers one and all. Look at Walker- he bullshitted his way into office to promote an agenda nobody wanted.
Obama is for real, the GOP are chumps and liars. I don’t see how they can compete by 2012 without some tremendous fuck-up by the Dems.
The Republicans are not so much deceivers as fuckups. And they’re fuckups because their political philosophy is based on stupid and childish ideas. They don’t like big government, or governing really, which is where you get all that “starve the beast” thing. They like to keep expenses low but their idea of foreign policy is to invade random Third World countries, and of course, the money spent on these enormously expensive invasions is NOT considered part of the budget. Nor is the enormous military complex part of big government, nossirree bob. They revere America and think Americans are great but they’re OK with poor people going homeless and old people doing without medical care. They are chumps, that’s for sure. But I’m not sure that all of them are liars … though some certainly are.
I thought it was the Democrats who are the fuckups. The Republicans strike me as more like a well=organized criminal gang. Or they have until getting some kind of brain cancer in the past couple years.
Only their election machinery and especially their propaganda machine are well organized. They fall apart when they govern because they don’t like government and have childish memes about government that prevent them from doing it well. They’re just as smart after they are elected as they were before, and perhaps as well organized, but their basic ideas about governing and the world in general are so fucked up that when they try to implement them, they fuck up … basically, they are succeeding at implementing fucked up ideas. Republicans believe big government is fucked up, and when they are in power, it is.
I don’t think they fall apart when they govern. I think they deliberately destroy the mechanisms of government because to them, government is an obstacle and a problem.
Except of course, when they want to stop gay sex, unmarried sex, abortions, birth control, etc.
The case is simple. Obama ratings went up over 10 points. His administration did what the Shrubs could not, he got Bin Laden. He showed guts and took a chance that could have failed. If they missed or OBL was gone,they would have looked like fools.
For most Americans Obama got a huge shot in the arm .It will definitely help his chances to get reelected. That is why the Repubs are bumping into each other trying to find a way to diminish an accomplishment, they they were all behind enthusiastically. They look stupid when they try.
But not at the cost of putting a Republican in the White House a couple of Januaries from now.
It’s really simple: a primary challenge to an incumbent President that genuinely scared his party’s establishment would also seriously reduce his odds of getting re-elected.
I want the Democratic party to not take people like us for granted, too. But not at the cost of kissing the New Deal goodbye. I’m in this because I give a good goddamn what happens to actual human beings living in this country. My pride is secondary here. I can see how bad things would be for my in-laws without Social Security and Medicare, and I know there are a lot more people like them out there.
There are lots of ways for progressives to organize and start changing the game. But the key word is ‘organize.’ We need the sort of sustained effort to primary the most in-name-only Democrats in Congress that the Club for Growth has been doing for years on the other side, and to recruit progressive candidates for Congress in GOP or open districts that we feel progressives stand a reasonable shot of winning. We need a progressive organization that will do this.
But primarying Obama would be a huge mistake. Like it or not, there’s a strong connection between a significant challenge to a President in the primaries, and his likelihood for success in the general election. Lefties overlook this at not so much their peril, but rather other people’s peril.
Don’t challenge Obama, challenge the* menshevik*, Blue Dead Dog, Clintonista “centrist” Congresscritters who have a “D” attached to their names for no good reason. The first and foremost challenge is getting people to the polls. The Pubbies did that rather deftly when they put gay marriage on all the state ballots they could manage, thus ensuring a major turnout amongst the anti-gay crowd. And, of course, as long as they were there taking care of their number one concern, they might as well vote Republican.
If we challenge a Blue Dog, and he wins the primary, but gets the fear of Og put into him, good. If he loses the primary to a more lefty candidate, also good, even better, so long as the candidate is not so radical lefty as to lose in a mixed district. Because if I can’t have a “real” lefty, I still want one with a “D” after his name, seeing as how no “R” candidate is likely to be any more acceptable. Tres duh, mais non?.
We don’t need so much to fire up the base as we need to fire up the people, all of them, get out the vote, and let the chips fall wheresoever.
Then maybe my spellcheck will stop asking me if I want to ignore Obama.
But let me add that the key thing is the reliability of a primary challenge if your voting record sucks badly enough from a progressive perspective.
For the next 3-4 cycles minimum, the 10 nominally Dem Congresscritters with the worst voting records relative to their districts should be able to count on a primary challenge. We can’t do this business on a scattershot basis the way we have so far, where I can only think of 3 Dem Senators (Lieberman, Specter, Lincoln) and 2 House members (Wynn, Lipinski) in the past 3 cycles who’ve been primaried from the left.
Nobody’s afraid that they’ll be next, and unless you’re worried that you’ll be next, you’re not going to change your voting record to avoid being primaried in the next election cycle.
There really are Americans on the left who are angry about the fact that Obama got Osama. Whatever their public reasoning is the fact is that they dislike the United States. Fortunately, this kind of nonsense has not been fashionable since the end of the War in Vietnam.
Hogwash. I am a flag-waving, red-blooded, all-American radical lefty, I have been hearing such flaccid sneering on my patriotism all my adult life, and they are the utterest crap. Your choice of the word “fashionable” speaks volumes about the shallowness of your slur.
These “lefties” of which you speak, name them, point them out for me, so that I can read what they have to say. Hell, take a couple minutes, name them all. Because frankly, pardner, I think you’re bluffing.
I certainly haven’t seen any open hostility from lefties in response to OBL’s demise. Looking at the old facebook, I do however see consistent reactions to the event from friends at both ends of the political spectrum:
Far right: quick to point out this was entirely Bush’s doing… :dubious:
Far left: quick to show their disgust with people celebrating a man’s death, and frequently incorporating into their ‘status update’ a quote wrongly attributed to MLK :smack:
I don’t think it hurts him but it will not help him that much - after all, the overriding issue against him is the economy and not foreign policy. How exactly will his campaign position the killing of Osama bin Laden during the next elections? It’s hard to see how they could make a strong selling point out of it, not to mention the strong likelihood that this selling point will be strongly rebutted. It all turns on how well the economy would be 18 months from now. Osama’s death is a pleasing sideshow but it’s just that - a sideshow.