alternative hippopotamus

As a post script to the Great Blog War of 2008, this from two Clinton-supporting blogs. One of which has laid down their weapons, the other of which seems to be decamping to the hills and marshes, preparing themselves for the next skirmish. I’ll let you be the judge which one is which.

Big Trunk Democrat @ TalkLeft:

So let me get this straight — the first act of the self declared Democratic nominee Barack Obama will be to state that Michigan and Florida will not count? This is insane. Two key states in November will be dissed in the first act of the newly crowned Democratic nominee. At the least, Obama should wait until he has 2209 delegates counting the existing Florida and Michigan delegations.

Shystee @ CorrenteWire:

D. Aristophanes, in an extremely classy gesture, apologizes and asks:

…what do Obama and his supporters need to do today to get you into this car?

One answer is pretty simple: don’t be jerks about it. That and more progressive policy positions.

The worst possible downside to the thousands of hours we have all spent paying attention to this campaign is that democratic voters who supported the losing nominee will be so pissed off that they won’t show up to vote in November.

All it takes is a few percentage points in a few battleground states to lose this thing. Half of Americans don’t vote and a lot of them just because they’re too pissed off about something or other.

BTD is a tough cat to read. Is he blogging about this because he’s concerned about Florida and Michigan? Or does he just like the attention? The good news is that if BTD really feels disenfranchised, he can campaign for voting rights for our nation’s capital. It’s easy to forget after a bruising primary like this, but those of us that live in Our Fair City, DC, don’t get a vote in congress. That’s not just during the Democratic Party primary. That’s all the time.

Btw, where was BTD in 2004 when DC moved up it’s primary to vote for Howard Dean, and got the same treatment that Michigan and Florida did in this election? (Okay, the punishment was to make the vote “non-binding,” but if the issue is making every vote count, it’s hard to see how that differs from MI and FL in any practical way.) You can read about it here.

I had not planned to take time off from blogging. But, life has a funny way of intervening some times.

I have been engaged in non-internet-based activities involving other people. Upwards of 90% of which have been very positive and/or fantastic.

That said, the stupid bullshit has to stop. I really wish I had been the first to say that.

My take in a nutshell on the Democratic process is this: Hillary Clinton looked for a while like the inevitable candidate. Now, it looks like it isn’t going to happen. How her supporters deal with this is the next chapter in the saga. A suggestion if I may: patience is said to be a divine virtue. It’s not said to be a divine virtue because it comes easily to us. It’s a divine virtue because it takes some cojones. Or, if you prefer, some huevos. If you will, some huevos rancheros. Sorry, all this talk of feeding oneself on $30 ramen noodles has me pining for some solid food.

I suspect that this isn’t the first time that civilization has experienced this set of events. For the moment I’m lost on what the right historical parallel might be. I do hope it isn’t Les Miserables.

In comments below eRobin points me to a list put together by eriposte at the Left Coaster with the objective of showing that, like the Clinton campaign, the Obama campaign has gone negative. This is apparently in response to a post by Kos, referred to by the post author as “the crown prince of CDS.” For the uninitiated, CDS is Clinton Derangement Syndrome, a variant of the malady known as Bush Derangement Syndrome, or BDS. BDS was first proposed by (former psychiatrist) Charles Krauthammer, a defender of the Bush administration, who believed that dislike of the 43rd president could be best explained as a psychological disorder. By extension, Clinton Derangement Syndrome has been used to explain criticism in the left blososphere towards Senator Clinton.

Eriposte links to a post at CorrenteWire under the title: “Why won’t that stupid bitch quit?” watch. Lambert quotes Kos here:

Clinton’s license to do harm
by kos
Thu Apr 17, 2008 at 07:21:00 AM PDT

In one of the threads last night, commenter theran made a good observation:

At some point the concept of “Republicans will do X” has turned into a license for Hillary to do all the same things. It’s bizarre, but I don’t really consider her a Dem any more.

Yup.

This, eriposte explains, is what motivated a post detailing “The Hypocrisy of Hope, Change and Unity.” In his/her words: (my emphasis)

Now, Sen. Clinton is no fairy and I do agree that she has perpetuated some Republican style talking points against Sen. Obama - something that I disagree with. However, if that is now the key criterion for inclusion in the Democratic party (according to the Crown Prince of CDS), let’s just say that Sen. Obama would have had to be expelled from the party quite a while ago. (To be clear, I believe Sen. Obama is a Democrat who requires no expulsion of any kind, but I’m pointing out what would have had to happen if we followed the illogic of the Crown Prince of CDS). All I can say is, if the Crown Prince of CDS and his like-thinking friends keep this up, Sen. Obama’s already tenuous support amongst a significant chunk of Sen. Clinton’s base (which is roughly half of the Democratic party) will start depleting even further and become problematic if Sen. Obama becomes the nominee. Their behavior is certainly not the kind that fosters any kind of hope, change or unity and it is sad that fact-free, irrational, hate-filled, blog posts - something that used to be the domain of Little Green Fascists and other lower life forms on the Right - have become part of the mainstream of Sen. Obama’s blogger base on the internets (also see Turkana’s post on this).

The tenor of this spat is a bit over-wrought. It’s difficult for me to look at this as a prelude and take this list that eriposte has put together seriously.

Now, I did look his/her list, and thought it was thin gruel. For example, what was supposed to show Obama going negative on Bill Clinton’s sex life was this letter to the editor in the Denver Post by an Obama superdelegate:

The Democratic Party chairman in Wyoming is predicting that Democratic candidates throughout the Rocky Mountain region will be damaged if his party selects Hillary Clinton for president.

“Every Democratic candidate in Wyoming will be painted with that same liberal, big-government brush. We will also be the target of the locker room jokes that rightfully belong to Bill Clinton,” John Millin wrote in a letter to The Denver Post.

“While I don’t agree with this view of Mrs. Clinton, I have to accept that this is the truth. It has become the dirty little secret in the Democratic Party,” he wrote. “Westerners have an independent, libertarian spirit and Democrats can make Republicans pay a heavy price for years of pandering to the social conservatives. None of this will happen if Hillary wins the nomination.”

This statement is well within the cultural norms of Wyoming. And not from the Obama campaign, but from somebody who plans to vote for him. So, I don’t think it’s fair to say that this is the equivalent of Hillary Clinton linking Obama to the Weather Underground during a televised debate.

Just for a second, I’d like to pick on Turkana at The Left Coaster (apologies in advance. It’s not personal, just business.). There’s two representative misconceptions in this post, which I’d like to address.

• Delegates vs. Popular Vote.

  While Obama supporters continue to tout The Math, they continue to ignore the fact that Obama cannot win the nomination on pledged delegates. Once again, repeat after me: the superdelegates will decide the nomination.

  The primary system, like any contest, is a mechanism designed to measure the will of the people. The rules of the contest, some of which are contrived, must be agreed on in advance for the contest to be fair. The expected results, or The Math, as Turkana puts it (referring to a Karl Rove subterfuge when the House was hopelessly lost by the Republicans), shows that at the end of the primary process Obama will have the plurality of votes. How then, do we decide the contest if the plurality is less than a majority? Turkana argues that the popular vote should be the deciding factor:

  The pledged delegate metric is only one, and because Clinton cannot catch Obama in that metric, her entire argument rests on the possibility of her ending up with the most popular votes. That’s a reasonable argument, and one that the uncommitted superdelegates are clearly willing to listen to.

  But there was no method agreed on in advance to count popular votes. How do caucus results count? How do states count where no contest was held? How should the delegate count be weighed against any method used to estimate the popular vote?

  Let’s say for a second that there was a clear way to obtain the popular vote. Would the Clinton campaign say “Well, you’ve got us there. We really have lost this one.” Or, would they move on to some other criteria?

• Clinton’s Dirty Laundry vs. Obama’s.

  The good news for Obama, in the long campaign, is that all the bad news has now been aired. As Joan Walsh and others have pointed out, better now than in October. Rezko’s at trial, we’ve seen the Wright videos, we’ve heard the name Ayers, we’ve looked aghast at Obama’s flagless lapel.

  There is a misconception that Clinton is doing us all a service by smearing Obama. The reasoning goes that this gets it out of the way now, so that the Republicans can’t use it in the general. Clinton, on the other hand, has already been smeared by the Right for years, so there isn’t any public good served by bringing up unsavory points in her past. There isn’t even a negative context that hasn’t been explored, so the argument goes.

  Unfortunately Clinton’s supporters underestimate the degree which the right despises both her and her husband. Republicans I’ve known over the years would rather eat glass than see her elected to the presidency. As an example of relatively unexplored topics consider this from an article in The Nation by Tom Hayden:

  Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”. Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. (All these citations can be found in Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic 2007 Clinton biography, A Woman in Charge.)

  All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom Hillary attacks today, represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

  You don’t think the regular suspects on the Right will read Bernstein’s book looking for dirt? The reason that these kind of smears haven’t been used by the Obama campaign is that this is precisely the kind of behavior that has turned off so many of us to politics. The Right-Wing Freak Show? Not so much.

Of last night’s debate, that is.

Last night was pretty much a perfect event in so far as one needed to both observe and then discuss the Kafka-esque nature of our political discourse. Actually, it would be more fair to say that our media lies somewhere between Kafka and a John Waters movie. That scene with Tab Hunter and Divine comes to mind almost unbidden.

I knew I was going to hate myself in the morning. After all, I hate myself anyway. But the nausea I wasn’t expecting.

As Glenn Greenwald mentioned during the discussion after the debate last night John McCain polls as well, or even better, as either Obama or Clinton on the economy. McCain himself wouldn’t say he could handle the economy as well as either Clinton or Obama. How did we get so petty? How did the question about the flag pin count more than a single question about the substantial issues of our time: how do we get out of this war, how do we re-enter the world community, how do we pay for healthcare, how do we recover from the lending crisis?

Bowers:

The situation residents of Philadelphia now face is akin to Charles Gibson flushing your head in a toilet until you promise to drop everything else and debate flag pins. You might be worried about Iraq, or the housing crisis, or global warming, or even the upcoming Sixers game, but Maureen Dowd and George Stephanopolous are going to handcuff you to a metal chair in a dark room and make you watch Reverend Wright YouTube clips while listening to Beethoven’s 9th for the rest of the day.

*Left the Building Watch (TiNAD**)
** Tuesday is New Acronym Day

CorrenteWire, like Elvis, has left the building:

According to Lind, Obama and his supporters are “Greater New England” types. But he thinks this is not a good thing:

“The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).

Indeed, the Greater New England moralist culture has been rejected by practically every other substantial subculture in the United States: Irish-Americans in Northeastern cities, Appalachian white Baptists and now, evidently, Mexican-Americans. And this has always been the case.”

What Lind is describing is what we have seen in electoral politics for generations. When the Democratic party nominates a GNE liberal, we lose. We lose because they fail to connect to blue-collar, rural and small town voters. They fail to connect because they just don’t get it.

When I see idiotic statements like this, I like to learn something about the author: “Michael Lind (born in 1962) is an American journalist and historian, currently the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Ideologically, he has gone from liberal (in his college years) to neoconservative (in graduate school and directly afterward) to radical centrist (through the early 2000s), and back to a liberal (present).”

That’s a quite a set of ideologies! At least he doesn’t have to worry about a fixed set of values weighing him down. I realize what a hobgoblin foolish consistency can be, it’s just that foolish inconsistency isn’t any better.

Here, Lind just makes up a demographic, Greater New England, demonizes it, and state that this proves that despite his lead in the popular vote and delegates, Harvard Class of ‘91 is too elitist to get elected. Meanwhile, Yale class of ‘73 is salt-of-the-earth, and that saltiness makes the working class wanna go drinking with her, except for blacks, who in Lind’s analysis don’t really count.

The only thing worse than being Michael Lind is quoting from him approvingly.

I was at the DC for Democracy meeting where it was decided who to support in the Dem primary. In that group of mixed gender, race, and state of origin, economically middle class, Obama was a clear favorite. IIRC, Edwards was the second place favorite. If you had accused the folks at that meeting of being GNE moralist elitists (I hate to dignify fictional demographics, but for the purpose of conversation and ridicule) they’d kick your ass. Or laugh you out of the room.

I don’t really understand what CorrenteWire is trying to accomplish these days. If the idea is to create a club where Hillary can be praised, and Obama (and his supporters) can have mud slung at them, I guess there’s no law against that. The idea as I understand it, however, is that democratic debate is struggle without destruction. It supposes that each participant in the process will respect the views held by the others. That’s why the Democratic Party, despite their manifold flaws are still the good guys. That’s why the Republican Party is not.

And now for the punishment: 5 shots of Crown Royal with a guy named “Dad.”

Sometimes I get busy and don’t get the chance to write things in as timely a manner as I’d like. The only advantage to this is that I get to let certain ideas simmer on the back burner of my cerebral cortex. Eventually you have to take the slightly charred cortex and put it into the refrigerator for a while. Then you have to take it out and reheat it in the microwave. If you’ve ever had cerebral leftovers you know what I’m talking about.

So a few of us were standing around in yard of the Mott House next to the Supreme Court. The occasion was a fundraiser for Netroots Nation, also known as the Kos Kids Kegger. By the way, from the Mott House you could see that the activity in the Supreme Court clerk’s offices was in full swing. I’m not sure if that’s a good sign. The Scalias, Roberts, Alitos and Thomases of the world, as well as their consorts, should not be up late without adult supervision.

At this point I brought up the Great Blog War of 2008 between Clinton and Obama supporters. I had relayed a brief conversation I had with Eric Boehlert at Take Back America on what had happened to the Reality-Based Community over the feud. He chose his words carefully- I was sporting a red-flag Media badge at the time, but he used an expression along the lines of “out the window” to describe where the reality had gone to.

So us bloggers at the Mott House talked about this. If there was a consensus to the discussion it was that things would get better after the nominee was 100% clear. Whether Clinton would continue to campaign (as the SNL sketch had suggested) well after the 2009 inauguration was unknown.

What is less clear to me is whether some of the blogs that have gone off the reservation would be able to return to the fold. Indeed, the very nature of the fold was being critiqued with Obama supporters being labelled as “the boiz.”

I want to take a moment to explain what I mean by going off the reservation. The nature of the progressive blogosphere has always been to argue, often passionately, over the nature of life and politics in our fair society. Yet, there has always been an unwritten rule that the argument needs to stay within certain bounds. It is not okay to take things completely out of context, use straw-men constructions, quote selectively, or to play any of the other tricks described in the rules of fallacious rhetoric. It is always been a source of pride that the right-wing freak show uses those tactics, while the left doesn’t.

Now, let me pick on Talk Left which, like Elvis, appears to have left the building. Today I noticed this post:

Where’s Obama on Israel and the Palestinians? On both sides.

Since running for President, he’s become an outspoken supporter of Israel. While in the Illinois legislature, he was a friend, supporter and beneficiary of Palestinians whose organizations trashed Israel.

Likewise, I’ve been wondering whether Obama prefers hot dogs on one hand, or beer on the other. He obviously can’t have it both ways on the hot dog/beer debate. By the way, any commenter who asks whether I mean Kosher dogs or Ball Park Franks is reading too much into the analogy.

What’s encouraging in this case is that the comment section picked up on this as well:

Wow (none / 0) (#3)
by silly on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 01:23:05 AM EST
Wow, this post scares the crap out of me.

With regard to TL and Jeralyn.

Are you really saying that someone who has an ounce of sympathy and understanding of the Palestinian situation is somehow not fit to be president?

As Matt Yglesias often points out, the spectrum of views about Israel is far more dynamic, open, and honest among Israeli Jews than it is amongst American politicians.

This post, and your initial comment, are really saddening.

Absolutely not (5.00 / 2) (#6)
by Jeralyn on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 01:26:18 AM EST
I said nothing of the kind. Nor did I express my own views of Israel and Palestine. I am writing about news reports showing his inconsistency and questioning whether his current support for Israel is a product of his run for President or are his true beliefs.

[ Parent ]

it’s not inconsistency. (none / 0) (#63)
by selise on Fri Apr 11, 2008 at 07:42:12 AM EST

The way I see it: It’s true that Obama has been a supporter of Israel since becoming Senator and especially since running for President. But, as a state legislator in Illinois, he more often expressed his support for Palestinian rights and opposition to Israel’s militarism.

jeralyn - imo, this is the problem. you are equating support for palestinian rights and opposition to israeli militarism as the opposite of support for israel.

nothing could be further from the truth.

and even worse - this is the kind of false choice the right in the usa makes: that support for iraqi rights and opposition to american militarism is anti-americanism.

i hope you will reconsider your amplification of right wing frames.

This is exactly right. Talk Left was using right-wing frames (not to mention fallacious logic) to argue against Obama. That her commenters called her on this is both a good indication of the kind of blog she runs, as well as the potential the reality-based community has to repair the hole in our starboard bow and get this ship back on coarse. (Update: interesting that I said “coarse” and not “course.” Subconsciously, I may have meant something by that. Better not change it. )

It relates to something that Senator Feingold said at the Netroots Nation benefit. I don’t have the exact quote in front of me, but it’s to the effect that whoever takes office in January 2009- and I strongly suspect that it will be a Democrat- we have to hold their feet to the fire. Our elected officials are accountable to us. They have forgotten this, and need to be reminded that any power they have is a result of the consent of the governed. In the same way that Jeralyn’s commenters called BS, it’s our responsibility to call BS. Not, as the NROs, Powerlines, and Captain Eds of the world do- to excuse bad conduct when it’s done on behalf of someone in the same party.

Update: Thomas Nephew has a nice rundown of the Netroots Nation benefit, and of our conversation.

Or: “Everything I Needed to Know About Political Speech Came From Watching the Sopranos.”

Shakesville writes regarding the TPM headline Full Firing? Or Just Gelded?:

I find it difficult to believe that a man of your intelligence doesn’t know that “to geld” means to castrate, and I find it similarly difficult to believe that a man of your experience doesn’t know that powerful women are routinely cast as castrating bitches, and I further yet find it difficult to believe, in light of your constant reminders that you’ve spent a good part of your adult life defending the Clintons, that you are totally unaware of the existence of “hilarious” novelty items like the Hillary Clinton nutcracker. So where exactly is the disconnect, Josh, that allows you to use such disgusting language in reference to a sitting senator and presidential candidate? Or any woman, for that matter.

As a regular reader of TPM I also saw the headline, but saw it as more the kind of talk that I often heard among competitive types in business. I’m pretty sure that its origin is as a polite version of language you’d see in a Hollywood mob movie. It’s use in the vernacular would go something like this:

A: I hear Joe’s making a play for the Friedman account.
B: He tries to go around me, I’ll personally rip his dick off and stuff it down his throat.

There’s a lot of variations on this theme, but you get the idea. I’m certainly not going to argue that this is a nice thing to say. I heard things along these lines mostly in the Northeast Corridor, and, I do think it’s likely the language of mob movies used in highly charged areas of business.

I wouldn’t say that there’s an implication that the character in the dialog above is castrating. It’s more the law of the jungle in the place of business that’s at issue.

I’ll add that I don’t hear expressions like that outside of NYC, New Jersey and Boston.

Wired:

Since the start of the Iraq war, there’s been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs — and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops’ time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. William Caldwell) considers blogs to be a valuable source of information, and a way for ordinary troops to shape opinions, both at home and abroad.

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, “Blogs and Military Information Strategy,” offers a third approach — co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. “Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering,” write the report’s co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

I’ve suggested to folks in our fair city that the Bushies have constructed a message machine that includes communication and cooperation between, say, the White House, Fox News, Limbaugh, and the rest of the right-wing freak show (Drudge Report, NRO, Powerline, etc.) I’ve pointed to David Brock’s Republican Noise Machine and Robert Greenwald’s Out-Foxed as substantiating that view, but still, my colleagues in the VLWC insist that such coordination is just a paranoid fantasy on my part.

Of course the Bushies use the blogs. It’s one of the most common-sensical things that they do. What other influences exist in popular culture to get your message out? Country-western music?