Was saving this for next week, but well, you know.
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Got a blank screen on your iGadget? Kvetch to Steve Jobs.
The Imperial City And The World
Was saving this for next week, but well, you know.
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Got a blank screen on your iGadget? Kvetch to Steve Jobs.
“He literally sat down with a yellow legal pad,” said McAuliffe, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, adding that Clinton told him: “Make sure, Terry, you get these talking points out to every candidate.”
It was then, McAuliffe said, that Clinton confided that he has been frustrated with the Democrats’ message.
“He is just baffled and bewildered about why there has not been a more coherent message talking about what the party has done, why we allowed ourselves to become human pinatas,” McAuliffe said. “I think he is agitated that Democrats haven’t put their best foot forward in explaining to the American public what they’ve actually done.”
We feel that pain, as we know you do, too, Dear Reader. It’s really as bad as we’ve feared since 2007. We get no joy in that. A Nation at risk, and 2 men and a yellow pad the real firewall.
Faltering Democratic institutions still coasting on inertia from 40 years ago? The coterie of Democratic alleged political professionals? Useless. Many still claiming it’s just the economy. Some even believe it.
Brand Obama, the Post-Partisan Boy King, transcendent, floating away from petty politics, serenely unengaged while the Movement took shape. Watching and waiting for 20 months. Doing nothing, flinching before News Corp or Lindsay Graham. Then helpless, routed as the Movement unleashed its long telegraphed firestorm.
Why gossip about just replacing Biden on the ticket? Of the two, Biden at least acquitted himself honorably and effectively. Do you want to spend the next 6 years defending people who can’t — or worse — won’t, fight?
Desperation does odd things to people. Usual Suspect blog and cable dopplegangers now clutch at new generic Gallup poll numbers with only a 3% gap between Republicans and Democrats. Just as we remember the bugged eyed, ambitious but very minor McCain bundlers feverishly asserting in mid October. Eerie.
To maintain this folie a deux that Steiner The Boy King Van Hollen will burst through and avert doom with a last minute relief offensive, Democrats must ignore inconvenient reality. You, Dear Reader, know well the difference between ‘likely’ voters and a generic choice. (No worries, we won’t foist upon the world yet another over-used ‘Downfall’ parody video. It was an amusing pop-culture riff maybe the first 5 times (especially the X-box Live cancellation) years ago. The 200th version? When old, clueless guys like Howard Fineman email their friends about ‘discovering’ a ‘new’ hilarious video, well, you know).
Wiser operational and pundit heads are focusing on banked votes in addition to ‘likely’ – i.e., some states permit early voting – anyway. Republican operatives we spoke with after 2008 saw the huge flaw in Roves’ vaunted GOTV focus on last minute surges. Too many votes and way too much intensity potentially left on the table should passions peak too soon. Their obsessive example? The practical operational implications if they could have ‘banked’ votes after Palin’s Convention speech.
As for November, the fate of this feeble crew no longer interests us. They were are useless in the majority. Irrelevant as a minority. Their irreversible decay and degeneration are so profound they mirror their Movement adversaries. Both are apart from a commitment to purposeful, pluralistic political participation. Only one of them doesn’t know it.
Still so clueless about with whom they grapple. Bleating like a beaten baby seal: ‘Where’s the rational dialogue?’ Beyond pathetic. Claire McCaskill Exhibit no. 1. Pure mewling.
We’re not going to repeat for the 10,239th time what the Movement is up to, etc., Weimar, yada, yada, yada. Go read Digby or Greenwald for the ‘shock.’ We can’t be bothered to write it anymore. If a governing majority is determined to yank defeat from the jaws of recent victory, be our guest.
Still depressing. America’s future still steered by the cynical, self-dealing, manipulative class. Their vessel? Poorly educated, white, easily scared and angered, Baby-Jesus-loving mobs with some racism sprinkled in. The same Plutocrats who prospered under the Warlord floating on a sea of venom, hatred and irrationality making steady progress for the Port of Status Quo.
We’ve spent too many hours with people who helped set up ‘Fox Nation’ and communicate with Ailes, Norquist, Newt et al. Their utter disdain for any moral consequences of their political activity is bottomless: especially when overlooking Right Wing moral hypocrisy. Expediency doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. But they know what all the Democrats (netroots aside) don’t — you only need to pretend to believe in democracy to *gain* power. An energized minority can overawe the sheople. Be the wedge for the Dictatorship Of The Entitled to govern. Nazis. Guns. Lynching. ‘Deal With It!’ as the angry internal Fox memos say.
All these Neo-Upper-West-Siders (in spirit if not fact) Starbuckians now on MSNBC crying foul. They wimper and plead for calm discourse over another frappuccino, preferably in NPR tones. They gasp and careen into run on sentences blurting the discovery that lobbying groups are involved! Yeah, for real. Get out !
Democratic consultants tut tut about how these ‘crazy’ tactics ignore pluralism and politics of the middle. What’s the point of supporting the willfully dim? Recall – it took the greatest economic collapse since the Depression to seal the deal last November even with Katrina, Iraq, etc., etc. We’ll know it’s over when Shrum comes out. His declaration on Gregory that it’s all to the Democrats’ advantage is the final act in the farce.
The very estimable Frank Rich wonders if we’re getting ‘punk’d’. DOH. See the spectral-looking founder of Politico, Jim VanderHei, equivocate, lamenting that all the town hall shouting and violence makes it hard to see definitively how much *might* be coordinated or a real grass roots phenomenon. He’s worse than a battered spouse – he seemingly yearns for the Warlord’s boot of fear and punitive control. Laurence O’Donnell then ponders the percentage of ‘astro turfing’ or ‘a genuine uprising’ (think about the flinch in those words). But then O’Donnell thinks everything is a sham unless it occurs in the Senate Finance Committee. Did you know by any chance he once ran Committee staff?
Well, we did get Obama out 12 days into August. Should we do cartwheels because Obama had one town hall today? With a gun toting wing nut carrying a sign calling for bloodshed in the audience?
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Changing gears, isn’t it curious to watch Tweety’s back and forth over HRC? The other day we got a Nutrasweet imitation of admiration. Then today his gloating over her curt response to a misinterpreted question. Given how many times Tweety has gone berserk on air — including with Olbermann — isn’t it beyond (what’s the Catholic word for it?) chutzpah ? Although it does beg the question when the State Department will ever get competent translators. The Kennedy worship services with Tweety, the busted fabricater Barnicle and the plagarist Doris Kearns Goodman are also getting old.
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Note to Dems, before you get stomped on (again) like hapless chinchillas, go rent ‘Terminator’:
Kyle Reese: Listen, and understand. That
terminatorRing Wing Movement is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Tattoo *THAT* on your foreheads you idiots.
“C‘est le hystérie qui fait l’homme.” Perhaps.
All the swooning over the Crown Prince reveals to us a subliminal (and certainly not self aware) Dada-ism in the smug clique over at Huffington Post, etc. The words typed there and elsewhere made into analysis simply by assertion. It’s commentary and analysis because we say so. Such fevered adoration certainly demostrates embrace of irrationality. Moreover, finding suitability for global leadership in a laundry list of state bills can not be anything but diving for obscure meaning. Do we not have Dada in its most contemporary possibility?
Not to put to fine a point on it, but parallels between then and now are significant. if Dada could said to have its origins after the disaster of WWI, then our current political zeitgeist is mostly a rejection of the disasters of 2001-07. Leaders today are not artists and they do not completely embrace the provocative zany behavior of Dada. But why should they? It already is produced by our surrounding Kultur. They just need to flash a Jay Z. And even then like now, they are all actually closet aesthetes.
Back then, Dada stood for freedom: from war, from a lying press and government, etc. Today is simply one word, change.
Yes, we can. Indeed.