Uncommon Sense, just see Monty Python’s Life of Brian, okay? The references will all become clearer.
Since you ask anyway, I’m a moderate, which in the US today is short for “fiscal conservative, social liberal” despite frequent obfuscation by the partisans. The Democratic Party and its candidates usually match my preferences more than anyone else’s do, mainly because they’ve targeted us moderates while the Republicans are excommunicating theirs. That’s been different in the past, and it could change again. Yes, I am in favor of all the things I listed; I could list more, but those are the ones that moderates who still adhere to the Republicans seem primarily interested in, and that’s who I aimed it at.
The point of that post was to get any reader with a serious dissatisfaction with their party to consider which party best reflects their own views of what the government should do. That suggestion is independent of time or place, too.
I see no one, including you, has taken issue with the observation that the hard-core right is not about to “give back” the GOP to the moderates who used to run it. If the moderates don’t want to generate the militancy required to take it back, then they need to make a decision of a different sort - and yes, that can be deciding to just keep on whining ineffectively but voting for 'em anyway.
I’m assuming you’re talking about Howard Dean here; if not, disregard the following. Dean was well within the Democratic mainstream, politically. He “took on the established power bloc” mostly by not being afraid to take on the Republicans, head-on, instead of going along with most of what they wanted, and trying for a concession here and there.
McCain in 2000 is a better model for what you’d like to see happen - and despite winning some big primaries, McCain was a long way from being able to win the 2000 nomination. If he’d run as an independent/third party candidate this year, he might’ve rearranged the political scene considerably.
The Clintons are hardly an omnipotent force in Dem politics. It’s not the sort of party where anybody can be one, really. And as I understand it, Wes Clark was the Clinton-backed candidate, and he got into the campaign awfully late in the game.
The problem for you is, the Christian right isn’t going to go away. They’re also on the Internet, and still have the best grassroots in the game from pre-Internet days.
I doubt the tax-cut obsessionists are going to go away either, until there is no tax on capital gains or dividends, and the top income tax rate is 25% or less.
According to the news accounts I’ve read, it was pretty much nationwide before the DNC convention, though why it didn’t get any news coverage then, I’ve no idea. One would think that Michael Moore would have loved to have been screaming about this when it was going on. (Not that he’d have been wrong in his anger, IMHO. I cannot, for the life of me fathom why anyone would think that this is a good idea.)
And frankly, I’m almost to the point where I don’t give a damn who wins the fucking election, I just want the winner to be selected by an overwhelming majority, so there’s none of the bullshit of, “You stole the election!” “Did not!” “Did too!” that we’ve had to put up with for the past four years. It’d be nice if we could spend our time discussing the actions of whatever shithead happens to be in the White House, without it getting hijacked (or non-political threads suddenly getting hijacked) with debates about how the election was decided or if that land deal ten years ago was legal, or if the President did or did not get a blow job, or if the VPs really running the show, or if the President has any balls, or if he can walk without tripping over his own two feet, or if he knows what the hell he’s doing in Vietnam, or if he’s screwing around on his wife, or if all he does is play golf while the Soviets are running amok in Europe…
Because there was no conspiracy. The election was so incredibly close and divisive that people scrutinized everything they could looking for a reason “why”.
For example, you probably consider yourself an honest person, yet I have no doubt that if a person trailed you for a week, recorded and researched everything you said and then selectively only reported that, you (or any of us) could be made to look like a horribly dishonest person.
They found discrepancies because:
The election was so close so as to make what would normally have been unnoticed and standard snafus an important factor.
I’m sure you also believed the story that the White House had been left in disarray by the Clinton team so that the Bush team would have to undo damage before they could begin their campaign of tyranny.
Oh, sure. And I’m supposed to believe the Republican interns who were flown down to Florida to stage a riot and shut down the recall just happened to take a group vacation by coincidence, right?
If all it took was a few interns from a different state to shut down a recall then the recall effort going on had to be pretty loosely knit, wouldn’t you say?
Thank you for missing my point completely, and thereby providing a partial example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.
Whether or not there was a conspiracy is startlingly irrelevant. Focusing on claims of a conspiricy at the expense of actually dealing with the frickin’ problem is. Yammering on about how there is no conspiricy and that the mean ol’ Democrats are just setting up grounds for contesting the election if Bush wins does nothing but shift the blame away from the people who are actually responsible, in any sane universe, for dealing with this mess.
Again: there were serious problems with the 2000 election was conducted in the state of Florida. You seem to consider those problems “standard snafus” that “would normally have been unnoticed”. I, however, and quite a few other people, consider voters being disenfranchised by erroneous lists of felons and the military ballots being accepted after the deadline (to name two such problems) to be pretty fucking serious whether or not they’re noticed. In fact, the fact that they were noticed is one of the only mitigating factors here. And the possibility that these are “standard snafus” just makes this even more fucked up.
I for one hope that people continue to pay incredibly close attention to the 2004 election in Florida. I think the United States voting populace deserves every possible assurance that the results will be completely legitimate and above-board. And a giant spotlight of public attention is a much better way to accomplish that than the alternative, which seems to be whining that it would be so much fairer to the Republicans if everyone would stick their fingers in their ears and assume that everything’s going to be just fine.
No doubt. But my weekly routine doesn’t affect the course of superpower nation of two hundred and fifty million people.
My week: little geopolitical impact. Need for accountability to the world at large: small.
The 2004 U.S. Presidential election: huge geopolitical impact. Need for accountability to the world at large, and to U.S. citizens in particular: pretty damned clear.
Wasn’t there supposed to be a ‘hundred’ in between ‘a few’ and ‘interns’? Because that’s how many paid protesters Time Magazine said were there. And not outside the building, either, but inside, on the nineteenth floor, pounding on the doors and windows of the counting room.
You know, the counters just might have felt a bit physically intimidated. That wasn’t what they’d prepped for, when they came to the office that morning.
So why doesn’t Jeb and his buddies make absolutely sure the mean ole Demmies have nothing to complain about this time. Instead we get them trying to pull the felon scam again, his insistence that a paper trail is not necessary, and the new and cute trick of “investigating” Democratic voters.
Yelling up front about how anyone objecting to you taking all the pots is a sore loser does not excuse you when aces are found up your sleeves. Ask yourself why Republicans in Florida are so afraid of a fair election. Republicans in California don’t seem to be.
I left the Republican party this spring for these reasons and more. The current rulers of the party are not satisfied with winning fairly, but they also had to use underhanded methods in the primaries 4 years ago. The create an environment in which torture happens, then get upset about it being exposed. They are more interested in winning than in fairness. There are many tactics that work, like the big lie, but moral people and parties refrain from using them. Morally I could no longer stay in the Republican party.
The only way things are going to change is if the reactionaries get beaten so badly that the party has no hope of rejoining the mainstream until a change is made. The best thing that could happen to the Republican party in the long run is Bush losing by a landslide.
