2008 Primaries Thread 3: The Rejecting and Denouncening

which i guess is 'beltway scandal', if that's how you want to judge it. daily howler is more media criticism innit?

xps

colin are you for real? pls outline a scenario where she gets the nom.

yah tracer tpms reporting is mostly scandal based - which i love - theyve had major impact on a number of big stories - particularly the us attorneys firing scandal (which was the final nail in alberto gonzales) and all that shit w/ted stevens up in alaska

easily one of my fav sites

(that yellow cake related story was a total dud tho)

I'm suddenly curious to know what exactly you had to put up with during Clinton's presidency

oh let's see DOMA/stab in the back with a serrated knife, crypto-racist campaign leading to welfare takedown, the use of bombs as convenient distraction, a decade's worth of pointless sanctions for the sake of sating the right how are we doing so far

or are we disqualifying outrageous policy out of hand

Sssh! Bill and Hils are two different people, donchasee?

don't forget Telecommunications Act of 1995.

http://media.gallup.com/poll/graphs/20080326democrats1.gif

dang.

http://www.breitbart.tv/html/68124.html

^^ hillary's pilot into bosnia denies evasive maneuvers during landing

i don't think those numbers will stay like that into the fall, but that is a bad bad sign

xp

28%??? thats insane, id expect the number to be maybe a quarter of that at most by nov xp

you gotta think those #s will come waaaaay down once emotions subside in the wake of the battle.

still kinda disturbing tho.

which is why i think the dem leadership is gonna have to handle closing the door on hillary v skillfully. it has to be obv that obama won fair not by some shady backroom shit.

even if i didn't have a bad taste in my mouth from '92-'00, the clintons' "campaigning" this go-around would send me pretty quickly over to obama's side.

yeah things are obviously going to be at their worst right now with all the back and forth but... nearly 30% is o_O

I didn't notice his coverage of the attorney firings, but I don't read him any more. He's essentially a hardworking hack, which is fine -- he covers scandal, backdoor favors, etc. This is the very stuff of tabloids. (The attorney firings are right in that groove.) He's the sheriff, and he's gonna find those people who broke the law -- if it don't involve law-breakin, he's not interested. But he writes about it with this high-minded, cud-chewing tone that drives me up the wall. As if his ambulance-chasing is God's work. Whereas Somerby's subject is much more complicated: he's trying to investigate how our understanding of our political reality is constructed. But he does it in the most outrageous, entertaining, tabloidy way he can.

don't forget Telecommunications Act of 1995.

^^^^this was major. majorly wrong.

elmo, where does Mom put McCain on Angry Scale? (maybe 7 more months of him will provide sufficient eruptions)

I'm curious how those figures reversed themselves. It used to be that more Hillary voters were OK with Obama than vice versa, which made a certain amount of sense in that Obama was attracting voters from outside the party's base, people who were already turned off by the Clintons.

It seems like one of the things that Clinton voters don't like about Obama is that he seems unelectable, but they're the ones that will make him so if they abandon him in November.

other Clinton fuckups: relaxing restrictions on pharmaceutical industry, Hillarycare, bombing Sudan, mishandling Bosnia/Serbia/Kosovo, Defense of Marriage act, NAFTA, etc etc

pretty long list.

x-post

Dudes I wasn't saying Clinton was so great, I was just interested in Alfred, Lord Sotsyn's reasons. It seems weird to me to be hatin on the Clinton years after eight years of the Worst President Ever.

well also the rising calls for clinton to get out of the race / she can't win at this point stuff might lead to more umbrage at the moment as they feel the nomination slipping away.

xpost to jaymc.

yeah my nonscientific sampling of clinton people is in this weird fantasy world where the nom is in a dead heat and all the calls for her to get out are just sexist

dear primaries thread,

bill clinton is not running for president. just so you know.

best,

william safire

Not that I don't agree with the criticisms of the Clinton presidency, but it sometimes seems a little disingenuous coming out of the mouths of liberals who eight years ago were wishing the 22nd Amendment had never been passed. Not saying you were doing this, Shakey or HOOS, I just hear this sort of thing a little too often, which is why I'm more in omar little's corner on this one.

Tracer, please explain why politicians breaking the law does not warrant news coverage.

yeah my nonscientific sampling of clinton people is in this weird fantasy world where the nom is in a dead heat and all the calls for her to get out are just sexist

to be clear, I'd prefer to cast my vote in November for HRC, but I think she's toast and I'll be just as happy to vote Obama instead

guys the real news is that mike gravel quit the democratic party and joined the libertarians today.

though he's at least continuing his candidacy.

Bernstein on Hillary's truth allergy. It'll be refreshing when the msm can alternate between trashing Obama and McCain, but in the interim we have HilLIARy. and lol at the first comment.

At the same time, in reference to Mr. Que's post, I do think that Bill Clinton's presidency is relevant to discussion when Hillary considers her years as First Lady as part of her many years of foreign-policy experience.

who? xxp

re: marshall: well i think his ambulance chasing IS god's work.

he's got a whole crew of people working for him now, most of the scandal stuff is now on the 'muckraker' sub-site. their shtick seems to be: don't let anything go by, ever. i mean every day there's a rundown of whatever gruesome stuff came out of dana perino's mouth. it is fatiguing but they're going for total reliability, i think.

xps i thought gravel did that and joined the greens like two weeks ago

well the level of minutia contained in tpms scandal reporting is unequaled anywhere - its a unique product doing important work that actually has an impact outside of the blogosphere

i would vote for HRC if she got the nom, i guess, though i'd feel like it was just contributing to the continued flatlining so maybe i'd just write in barack.

http://barelybad.com/images/quayle.gif

Despite all of the other things I disagree with, a huge accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was to change the perception that Democrats can't handle the economy. Which has knock-on effects years and decades later for the entire party.

Gavin, why would I explain that? It's a bizarre premise. But forgive me if I'm uninterested in what some Connecticut congressperson spent at a hotel bar.

My mom (who hates HRC) started out LOVING Michelle Obama, then she got spun by 'proud of America' comments being inappropriate for someone who had a free ride at an Ivy League school and therefore has no right to ever get angry at or disappointed in this notional "America". This pisses me off because my opinion is virtually identical to MO's in this respect and I don't cop this shit off Mom for it. Of course to my mom MO is also 'angry' and shouldn't be taking her girls to that scary church, so it just gets better...

I do try to reframe it for her. Like MO, I got a free ride to a very good school after getting the best of my town's public schools. When I arrived I found a wide social gulf between people who'd grown up in academic/wealthy families and therefore knew how to operate in a campus setting, as opposed to the public school students who didn't know the form for seminars/lectures/tutorials and found it hard to fit in or slighted for not knowing about things like brie. I explained this to my mom and she said "but that's social, not racial," as I banged my head against wall 4000 miles away.

telecom deregulations and Hilarycare aside, i think it's all relative--i don't see how you could possibly think Clinton was an awful President considering who is in office at the moment. Clinton may have done some dumb and harmful things but Bush has been far far worse, and McCain would be more of the same.

is anyone actually disputing that point

Alfred and Shakey Mo seem to think Clinton was the devil

But no one seems to think Bush/McCain is better. I honestly don't mean to do the internet-condescension thing here, but we can take issue with the actions of a so-called "liberal" without necessarily embracing their conservative opponents. No cognitive dissonance necessary.

Many here seem to be imagining that it's possible for the occupant of the most powerful office on earth to not make painful compromises and enact some questionable policies. And if that (completely illusory) possibility recedes they'll hand that office to John "Fucking" McCain.

not saying that Hoos--just saying, all things considered Clinton was not that bad

Tracer you're making me feel like Morbs here.

a huge accomplishment of Bill Clinton's presidency was to change the perception that Democrats can't handle the economy

But what good is this if they did it by selling out to neoliberal orthodoxy that's destroying the working and middle classes? They just tow the rightwing line on the economy, with maybe fewer tax cuts for the rich. This is like saying Hillary voting for the war changes the perception that Dems can't be strong on defense.

And now for a little light relief.

Twisted Sister want Barack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgkrX-NSt6Q

It's easy to be above it all, HOOS.

Gavin dude do you really want to get into this?

I don't know, is that a threat?

Tracer I am certainly not imagining that a President makes NO COMPROMISES or he is EVIL FOR ALL TIME, but I am suggesting that some of Clinton's compromises were morally specious and harmful to certain segments of our society. I'd like to think that someone who came from a position slightly more to the left would stand a bit firmer on the issues I pointed out, and that an O win would have some positive coattail effects that would make compromises to the right less necessary.

i'd like to continue this but i'm out for a bit