I hadn’t planned on doing open threads for the RNC like we did for the DNC, but with the Bush/Thompson/Lieberman tri-feckless tonight and the introduction of the Wasilla PTA’s National Security Czar tomorrow, loading up some open threads as a guffaw catchers is probably a good idea.
About this one issue, anyway. Jenkins and the other Fox propagandists will no doubt find more cooperative interviewees in the alley behind the bail bonds joint.
Slapped in the face! Repeatedly! This appears to be the metaphor du jour at the virtual Hillary Wailing Walls as news of Biden’s selection as VP candidate sinks in:
Even if the rank-and-file clowns of this year’s election sideshow, the PUMAs, can’t perceive it, their leaders surely know the circus will soon fold its big tent. When your entire act consists of jumping through flaming hoops of gender, age and race-based resentment, lurid personal psychodrama and self-destructive vitriol centered around one year’s election results, well, it’s not a show with a long shelf life. No matter who wins in November, it won’t be spring time for the PUMAs in their present incarnation, even if they succeed in helping elect McBush.
Enter PUMA redux: The New Agenda. Oh, they call themselves a “nonpartisan group.” And why shouldn’t we believe them? After all, it says so right in their press release, as featured prominently on self-described conservative and PUMA blogs. No partisanship there.
Tommy Christopher of AOL’s Political Machine made an admirable attempt to give The New Agenda a fair shake here and here. He says there’s nothing to indicate the group is a PUMA offshoot. I respectfully disagree: It’s the usual PUMA suspects, and the proof is right in the aforementioned first press release:
Many of the women who attended The New Agenda’s first meeting got to know each other as a result working with pro-Hillary groups. Attendees included founding members of such groups as Together4US, Party Unity My Ass (PUMA), IOwnMyVote, Just Say No Deal and Vote Democracy ’08.
“This group is comprised of women who are “gravely concerned about the mistreatment of Hillary Clinton during the primary season, and the passion and emotion that resulted from Hillary’s mistreatment brought us together.,” says Siskind. [yes, that one—Ed.]
“There was enough brain power in that room to do just about anything. [ROFL!—Ed.] We are looking to help the women of our country, who often have no voice. We are hoping to make life better for women in all walks of life.”
The New Agenda has already contacted representatives of the McCain and Obama campaigns to press its concerns.
“While we have had a much better dialogue with the McCain campaign, I believe both sides increasingly understand that the votes of women over the age of 40 will determine this race,” says Siskind.
The New Agenda you say? Same old PUMA crap, I say—the kitty can’t change its spots this easily. And as a woman, can I just say I wish these people would stop trying to help us sisters out so much? They personify every negative stereotype of women ever propagated, giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the sexist tropes trotted out by their patriarchal, knuckle-dragging new BFFs in the conservative press.
Wow. I’m just dazed ... no doubt will have PTSD. I wandered into the PUMA you-tube debate, took on a PUMA and had my ass handed to me. Where can I get first aid?
elculver2424
dumb video. I’m a PUMA so if you got somethin’ to say, then come on.
elculver2424
Just because a republican might win, and McCain is the same party as Bush, it doesn’t mean anything. McCain can be like Bush in very little ways, but Obama is exactly like Bush in different ways. For the sake of our country, we can not vote Obama.
poputonian
OK Einstein, precisely how will Barack Obama hurt America? Be very specific.
elculver2424
I am not going to say anything. I can sit here all day and tell you bad things about him and what will happen if he gets in the White House. Everybody should know better by now…....
poputonian
Just as I thought ... you got nothing.
elculver2424
You really are no good. I told you I could go on for hours, and you probably think the people that say that don’t have anything. And I can understand that, but you are wrong this time. I truley could go on all day, so I’d rather not say anything to someone who won’t listen anyway….....
poputonian
Well, don’t go on all day ... just give me very specifically the single most catastrophic way he will hurt the country.
crickets
chirp chirp
silence
silence
chirp
I wonder if it’s waiting for a PUMA leader to provide it a hint ...
Tommy Christopher at AOL’s Political Machine has an interesting post up on the PUMAssholes. Like any piece that attempts to shed light on the byzantine machinations of the “movement,” Mr. Christopher’s post has provoked the wrath of legions of flying PUMonkeys in the comments section.
The post touches on the unsettling opening sequence of the bizarre PUMA “documentary” the PUMA PAC made, which is coming soon to a theater near you. (If the theater near you focuses exclusively on weird, cult-like offshoots of losing political campaigns or conducts penetrating sociological analyses of the GOP dirty-trick technique known as “ratfucking,” that is. Otherwise, you’ll have to see it on YouTube, along with stuff like this, and this and this.)
Anyway, as reported here last week, the “documentary” trailer opens with PUMA Poobah Darragh Murphy recounting a call she received from a nutjob offering to join forces with PUMA to kill Obama. Kind of a weird way to open a documentary about how your anti-Obama group is being bullied and persecuted by Obots who are intent on destroying democracy, huh?
Mr. Christopher expounds on the “WTF is up with that?” question – not only as it relates to the “documentary” but its implications for the “movement” as a whole – and asks what will happen to the PUMAs who are now convinced Obama is the Anti-Christ, a fascist, a Manchurian Muslim fanatic, etc., if he wins. It’s a good question.
My theory: I think they’ll all gain 60 pounds and form a militant offshoot of Jenny Craig. The Craig Cougar Crew or Crew Crux Craig or something. But that’s pure speculation.
One of the many things that piss me off about the Bush administration on a personal level is this: it has forced me to join the tinfoil hat set—a club I never wanted to join. But this latest twist in the anthrax case has me wondering anew about government and media machinations in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Glenn Greenwald has a comprehensive overview of the implications of the latest twist in the anthrax case here. It’s long but well worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a brief summary:
The anthrax attacks, which began a week after 9/11 and were designed to appear as if they were launched by Islamic terrorists, were instrumental in convincing the American public that the 9/11 attacks were part of a larger, ongoing effort to destroy the US.
Government officials – including McCain, Bush and Cheney – falsely linked the anthrax used in the attacks to Iraq. That link appeared to rest on a bogus claim that the anthrax contained a chemical called bentonite, which was used in Iraqi bio weapons programs but not by US labs.
Prominent WaPo columnist Richard Cohen claims that a “high government official” advised him to start taking the anthrax antidote Cipro before the anthrax attacks. And ABC News claimed shortly after the anthrax attacks that 3 to 4 separate “well-placed sources” told them the anthrax used in the attacks contained bentonite, which helped bolster the Iraq link and in turn gave rise to feverish speculation about Iraqi bio and nuclear weapons programs.
The government now says the anthrax attacks were the work of a crazed government scientist using anthrax from the US bio weapons research lab. That scientist committed suicide this week. And we now know the anthrax contained no bentonite. There was no false positive test that gave rise to that rumor, either – it appears to be a wholesale fabrication.
So if the attack was the work of a homegrown nutjob, who was the official who tipped off the WaPo’s Cohen prior to the attack? Who were ABC News’ three or four “well-placed, separate sources” who spread the lie about the bentonite?
Just when I was starting to feel a grudging admiration for Taylor Marsh for defying the anti-Obama torch and pitchfork mob she helped create and giving a forum to anti-PUMAs like Christina, she goes and highlights this dishonest screed by Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin at the top of her site:
Women voters aren’t warming to ‘cool’ Obama
The Obama campaign has a woman problem. How big? How small? It’s not clear, but in a close election, small can be big.
[snip]
…[T]he women Obama needs right now are the ones who do not dine downtown. They’re the ones who can’t afford organic anything, forced to choose between a gallon of gas and a gallon of milk because they can’t buy both on the same day.
Women like Sarah.
A few hours after leaving the “Women for Obama” luncheon, I ran into Sarah, not her real name. I’ve known her for a few years. A single mom, she free-lances, working as many jobs as she can to support two growing boys. She dreams of a permanent gig with benefits, but it’s still just a dream.
A 37-year-old Democrat, she is also a college grad and a news junkie who has watched this campaign like a hawk. She surprised me with her anger Tuesday, saying she’s voting for McCain.
[snip]
It seems pretty clear that if Obama is not going to pick Clinton as his running mate, he’d better not pick a woman at all. That, Sarah made clear in our conversation Tuesday, would be unfair.
Sweet, weeping Jesus in a coral pantsuit with cream-colored piping, where to begin? First of all, the whole “gender gap” is a load of steaming horseshit. As Booman pointed out:
The July 15 Quinnipiac University poll shows women overall backed Obama over McCain 55 percent to 36 percent. Then again, the margin was far smaller among independent women, who preferred Obama by just three points, 45 percent to 42 percent. And finally, there’s that Clinton problem. The Associated Press/Yahoo News “found that just 12 percent of former Clinton supporters say they are excited about Obama.”
According to the 2004 Edison-Mitofsky Exit Polls, Mr. John Kerry rolled up a whopping 51-48 edge with voters of the female persuasion. And those white women that make up the heart of Clinton’s base? They voted for Bush by a 55-44 margin. So…Kerry…3-point gender gap. Obama…19-point gender gap with 9% undecided.
Yep, Obama’s in trouble with us wymyns, alright. McSame is gonna ride into the White House on the padded shoulders of disgruntled Clinton supporters – women so committed to the feminist cause that they want to bar any woman other than Clinton from office. Well, fuck you, “Sarah,” if you exist. Which I doubt.
But rather than pointing out the blatant dishonesty of the column’s premise, Marsh riffs on the mythical “Sarah’s” plaint in another post:
The economy is issue number one for Americans. So who in the general election will speak to it for Democrats? Barack Obama can speak about the policy side of things, but who will reach the people?
[snip]
Obama can speak in long sentences that rap around dreams, visions and enough rhetorical cotton candy to make his primary season word fogs look coherent. But the man cannot connect.
“The man cannot connect”? Hell, Obama can lure 200K people – sans free beer and brats! – to hear him give a speech in a foreign language! He came out of nowhere and connected on such a level that he beat the best-known, best-funded, establishment candidate in what will go down as one of the most stunning upsets in primary history. Can’t connect my ass. Marsh continues:
What is he going to do for my neighbor who has been laid off? Or the other neighbor who is about to lose his house and his life savings?
Hillary would have an answer. She would reach inside these voters and talk to their deepest despair and desperation, telling them that she can’t work miracles, but she can offer solutions that provide a road map to find the way out.
Yeah, like suspending the gas tax. That’s a sure-fire “roadmap to find the way out.” Marsh goes on:
For the first time in decades a Democratic candidate reached down into voters’ anxieties and talked to the issues most on their minds. No Democrat has done it in recent election cycles. That is, make lunch bucket, Reagan Democrats believe that a Democratic candidate not only knows their plight and their challenges, but also gets them and has a solution and a road map to lead them out. That person was not Barack Obama.
When thinking of the team that can lead Democrats to victory in November only one stands out. It isn’t matching Obama with Evan Bayh, and it sure as hell isn’t serving up Tim Kaine.
We all know who can make this trek to the White House not only easier, but a road of mission and purpose on which every American would be proud to walk, because their best interests would be served. But the truth is that the people involved don’t seem willing to call it up.
So much hope wasted on the alter [sic] of ego. Our best chance of winning spurned in the balance. Because contrary to popular belief, we haven’t won this thing yet.
Not to be an elitist English major, but I really wish someone would set Marsh straight on the “alter” vs. “altar” thing. She does that all the fucking time.
As for the rest of it, Marsh yammers on about “lunch bucket, Reagan Democrats,” a voting bloc most of us in 2008 refer to as “Republicans.” Or “people—many now dead since we’re talking about the 1980 election, which was 28 fucking years ago – who were dupes of the GOP Southern strategy, much to our national disgrace.”
But as usual, Marsh filters it through the prism of her own narcissism. Having owned up to once being a “Reagan Democrat” herself, she continues to believe it the most important voting bloc evah, despite copious evidence to the contrary. This “Reagan Democrats” thing is just an extension of her ceaseless auto-pimpitude, like her reference to herself (who else?) in this post [emphasis mine]:
However, if the Obama team has been leading on Clinton and her supporters, of which I am a vocal and significant member, as this report hints, while simultaneously the Obama team, including Obama himself, has been giving complimentary talking points to the media when they know she’s out, they’re going to stir up fury barely buried, not to mention more bad blood, neither of which Democrats can afford if we’re to win in November.
Well, she’s half right – she’s vocal. And pretty damn cheeky to accuse anyone else of a surfeit of ego. Damn, I miss John Brown.
I’m attacking her for being a piece of shit who is so stupid that she thinks being swarmed by flies is the same thing as being popular. That’s all. Thanks for the email. Murphy.
What is it about Obama-led change that scares Boston’s Darragh Murphy so much?
Is Boston—America’s third-whitest major metropolitan area—as racist as it once was? Is this city of neighborhoods in fact a city of segregated ethnic enclaves?
Boston is becoming a city of minorities, said Orfield, quoting statistics from several CRP studies. In the 1990s, he said, the white population of metro Boston fell by 1 percent while minority populations rose: blacks by 30 percent, Latinos by 47 percent, and Asians by 88 percent.
Looking to the future, he said, “we’re not going to have the same Boston, metrowide, that we’ve had.”
Could it be that Darragh Murphy can’t make any sense of this change and consequently, on a visceral level, sees her whole world slipping away?
I’m generally not a fan of dancing on newly dug graves, but I’ll make an exception for Jesse Helms. It seems fitting since his former allies aren’t content with uttering a bromide or two over his carcass but are instead building a myth:
GEORGE W. BUSH: “Throughout his long public career, Sen. Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty.
“Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember—in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.”
What a pack of offensive, bald-faced lies. Helms was no “unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty”—he was an avid bigot who sought to oppress minorities and gay people at every turn. He didn’t advocate freedom—he funded death squads and helped prop up fascist regimes.
ELIZABETH DOLE: “In succeeding Jesse to represent North Carolina in the United States Senate, I knew I could never replace him, but I continue to strive each day to provide the dedicated constituent service he provided the people of our state for 30 years. As my father would say, Jesse was indeed a watchdog — for North Carolina and for the nation.”
A mangy, rabid pit bull is more like it. That Dole could utter such falsehoods about a racist, homophobic creep like Helms with a straight face is all the more reason to hope she gets kicked out on her ass in the next election (and all the more reason to throw some bucks to the campaign of Dole’s Dem opponent, Kay Hagan).
BILLY GRAHAM: “In the tradition of Presidents Jefferson, Adams and Monroe — who also passed on July Fourth — it is fitting that such a patriot who fought for free markets and free people would die on Independence Day. As we celebrate the birth of our nation, I thank God for the blessings we enjoy, which Senator Helms worked so hard to preserve.”
Christ on a Triscuit. That anti-Semitic old fraud is another dinosaur lumbering toward the pit, but he’ll leave a whelp behind to carry on God’s work, so we can look forward to more stupefying nonsense from the Graham clan well into the future.
The truth is Helms was a vicious racist, homophobe, despot-enabler and tool of the tobacco companies. I’m sure his death is a sad event for his family, but its sole meaning for US politics should be as an occasion to mark how far we’ve come since he was a leading figure in it. The collective mewling over Helms’ carcass from people like Bush, Dole and Graham shows that they don’t get that and never will.
The most fitting way I can think of to mark the occasion is for Barack Obama to carry Helms’ home state of North Carolina in the upcoming general election. That the race is even close in that state is a welcome signal that the Helms era is over.
The Bush advance team must be losing its edge. They used to be pretty good at vetting crowds. The occasional protester might sneak in; however, thanks to Bush’s crack team of screeners, most are corralled in Orwellian “free speech zones” far away from the event. But yesterday at Monticello, Bush was interrupted by several individuals who called for his impeachment, accused him of war crimes and observed that he has brought fascism to our shores. As security dragged one of them away, Bush remarked—apparently without irony—that we believe in free speech here in America.
Underscoring his complete lack of self-awareness, Bush used the setting to pimp his own supposed contributions to the spread of democracy:
“We honor Jefferson’s legacy by aiding the rise of liberty in lands that do not know the blessings of freedom.”
The opposite is true, of course. Bush defiled the legacy of the man who built Monticello and drafted the Declaration of Independence. He lied us into a pointless war. He used the cudgel of terrorism to squash dissent and undermine the very foundations of freedom Jefferson laid. Bush sullied the nation’s prestige and depleted its moral authority, convincing the rest of the world that the US is as arrogant, incompetent and feckless as he himself is.
January 20, 2009 should be a day of worldwide rejoicing, with the biggest party taking place right here in the US. But even if Bush’s exit from the world stage were celebrated on a global scale, would he feel the smallest pang of shame? I honestly don’t think so. He appears to lack the necessary self-awareness. He’ll go back to Crawford—and eventually to his grave—without the smallest chink in the armor of his self-righteousness. But at least he’ll go. And that’s worth celebrating.
I have my own peculiar Pat Buchanan story. I was at the Republican Convention in ‘04. The floor was getting wildly crowded for Schwarzenegger’s speech and, feeling a bit agoraphobic, I slipped out to view it on one of the many monitors available in the corridors. While watching the speech, I sensed someone standing behind me. I turned around. It was Pat, staring at me with something between contempt and hatred. Where did that come from? I had never met the man. Was it his disdain for Arnold or for who I was?
The implication being that Buchanan gave Roger the stink eye because he’s Jewish. Buchanan is renowned for being anti-semitic, but it’s quite a stretch to imagine that he makes a practice of scowling at random Jews, even ones who look like this. The most likely scenario? Buchanan had just rented Scenes from a Mall and someone had told him Roger was the screenwriter. In that case, Rog got off easy. He’s lucky Buchanan didn’t grab the back of his head and start bashing it into the nearest wall while yelling, “A surfing Woody Allen with a fucking ponytail!?! Are you fucking kidding me!?!”
