The Political is Personal

Yesterday, as I was doing my best to accept the things I cannot change--one of them being an eternal Clinton candidacy, another being the eternal barroom brawl in GD: P--I thought, you know what, I'm really sick of this bullshit about who said what and what it meant and which campaign did what to whom and whether women or African-Americans deserve a president more (am I the only one who finds it bizarre that there is so little interest in how African-American women are thinking about this question?). Here's a novel idea: why don't I go look at how they actually stack up on the issues.

So, my #1 issue is the war. I really care a lot more about ending the @#$! war than I do about the identity of the president who finally pulls the @#$! plug on it. If that president successfully pulls the plug on this war while calling a reporter "sweetie" or thanking the "hard-working white voters" who made it all possible, I can forgive that president. Truly. It's been a long damn time, and I repress all of this most of the time, but when I take the time for one of those "moments of remembrance" (good thing you only asked us for a moment, George...any longer, and people might start remembering what a colossal bloodthirsty narcissistic global catastrophe YOU are) I can still feel that whole-body sickness that seized me as I watched the Shock and Aweing of Baghdad begin.

Well, bonus for me! Both candidates say they want to end the war. But of course that doesn't tell you whether a) they actually intend to do it once they're safely ensconced or b) they actually know how to go about it. So I went to the campaign websites and had a look-see.

Here's Hillary Clinton's page on Iraq. Here's Barack Obama's.

Both sites talk about withdrawing troops, preventing the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq, engineering an end to the civil war through UN intervention, firing up a major dipolmatic effort to stabilize the region, and addressing the massive humanitarian disaster we have created. Both, rather worryingly, express a determination to keep small numbers of troops either in or around Iraq for the purpose of engaging in "targeted strikes against Al Qaeda." We can hope that's "I-am-not-soft-on-terrorism" boilerplate; but regardless, both campaigns' statements include it. As far as all that goes, the differences are mainly in terms of style, though some of those differences are significant. Obama's statement, for instance, comes right out and calls the Iraq a "crisis" and an "ongoing humanitarian disaster," whereas Clinton's talks about the refugees' "extensive needs."

That difference in tone grows out of the one major difference between Obama's statement on Iraq and Clinton's: Obama's site stresses the fact that he was against the war from before it started. Clinton, of course, now has to work around the fact that she voted to authorize the invasion; so instead her site stresses the fact that she has sponsored legislation designed to revoke Congress's authorization, on the grounds that what we're fighting now is not the war that Congress authorized.

I don't mean to trivialize that difference, because I think it is a major problem for Clinton's campaign, just as Kerry's IWR vote was a major problem for his campaign. It's not just about avoiding the dreaded "flip-flopper" label; it's about the fact that having voted for the IWR, Clinton cannot with credibility make a properly categorical, unequivocal, brutal critique of the Iraq war. If she becomes too forthright in her condemnation of it she will be stuck explaining how she could have brought herself to vote for it, which can only be done either by apologizing or by entering into some sophistical explanation of how she wasn't *really* voting for *this* Iraq war--which is basically what the "de-authorization" push is about. She can say that thanks to the Bush administration's incompetence and corruption the military action she voted for has morphed into a gigantic unholy unforseen disaster--and that's certainly true. But the part of the truth that she cannot tell is that this war should never have been authorized in the first place.

Obama can say that, and he does. His page leads with a quote from a speech Obama gave in Iowa in 2007, in which he laments that "too many took the President at his word instead of reading the intelligence for themselves. Congress gave the President the authority to go to war. Our only opportunity to stop the war was lost." Who were these "too many" people? Well, here's a chunk of Clinton's floor speech from October 2002, in which she announces her rationale for authorizing the Iraq war resolution:

"President Bush's speech in Cincinnati and the changes in policy that have come forth since the Administration began broaching this issue some weeks ago have made my vote easier. Even though the resolution before the Senate is not as strong as I would like in requiring the diplomatic route first and placing highest priority on a simple, clear requirement for unlimited inspections, I will take the President at his word that he will try hard to pass a UN resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible." (emphasis mine)

Reading the entirety of the speech--which I did, to my sorrow--it's really hard to know whether Clinton seriously believed that bastard was actually willing to use diplomacy. All I can say is that her speech carefully positions her vote as a middle path charted between two extremes (unilateral pre-emptive war one one side, refusal to use military force until all possible diplomatic options have been exhausted on the other) and that it also includes several allusions to her experience with international diplomacy during the Clinton presidency as well as a reference to 9/11. All of this reminds us that Clinton's presidential campaign has essentially been underway since her husband left office in 2000, and that everything either of them has done in the past 8 years has been leading up to this. So when you wonder aloud why Clinton can't understand she's done and throw in the towel, remember that if she quits now, she's basically accepting the fact that she put in 8 years of work preparing the ground for something that now is not going to happen. But absolutely the most infuriating part of that speech is this section of her closing paragraph:

"So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him - use these powers wisely and as a last resort."

Jesus H. Christ. You're handing "awesome responsibility" over to the Chimperor because you trust him to "use these powers wisely and as a last resort?" Are you living the same country I'm living in? Can you not see what that bastard IS?

So. Clinton has a pro-IWR vote and a speech to match. Obama doesn't have that baggage. Is that fair? Not entirely. Obama was, of course, not in the Senate when the IWR vote passed, and no one knows what he would have done. But this is politics; it's not about what's fair, it's about what works. And as we know, saying "I voted for it before I voted against it" is not a winning strategy.

Here's the thing, though. As significant as the differences between Obama and Clinton are when it comes to the Iraq war, they are not policy differences. Their stated policies are virtually indistinguishable and for me they raise the same questions (how exactly is Obama planning to "press Iraq's leaders to reconcile," when it appears so far that nothing on God's earth can do that? what in God's name makes Clinton think that any "regional stabilization group" she could put together would actually stabilize that region?) These differences are meaningful in terms of 'character' issues and electability only.

And that's why this has all gotten so ugly. Because, for voters such as myself, there is so little variance on the issues, we have to make our choice based on how we answer questions like: which candidate is more likely to fulfill his/her promises? Which candidate is more likely to be just saying what we want to hear until s/he gets ensconced in the White House? Which candidate is a person we might be able to trust? Which candidate is least likely to fuck up, to abandon the issues we care about, to betray our support and enthusiasm? Which candidate will be better-loved by all those other Americans who don't understand that even a Democrat you don't much care for is better than a Republican?

In other words, everything about this campaign is personal. We have to make our decisions based not on what the candidate plans to do but on what kind of person we think the candidate is. And of course we can't ever really know what kind of person the candidate is--and if we could, we'd have no way of knowing how that person would transform once s/he took office. And that's a recipe for some ugly, even before we bring race and gender into it. Because basically, everyone who picks a side is saying, "Mine is a better human being than yours is." And then of course once we all get locked into the simplistic race vs. gender paradigm the media has built for this race, it becomes "my identity position is better/more oppressed/more worthy/more representative of the average American than your identity position." Thence we drop down to "in the general election, my candidate's whiteness beats your candidate's maleness," or vice versa. So it becomes very difficult to express support for one candidate without dissing the other, implicitly or explicitly. And because people get attached, they take it personally. So no wonder it's ugly.

At the bottom of it for me, I guess, is all that buried anger and shame and madness over the Iraq war. Ending the primary, for me, is not just about picking a candidate; it's about moving on to the next stage of actually ending this @#$! war. Our failure to do that in 2004 must still be hurting all of us. It's maddening to think that we might fail *again* in 2008.

So no wonder we fight. I guess understanding it now will maybe help me accept it, and come to the conclusion that this is something that has to happen, a stage the party has to move through before coming together in the GE. At the very least, I have to accept the fact that it's now 12:15, and there's no point in keeping this going in the hope that I'll get to a more optimistic ending.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

I listened to Clinton give that speech on the floor. I heard Robert Byrd plead with the Dems, it was such a painful, heartfelt plea that brought tears to my eyes. And then one by one (not all, of course, Teddy didn't let us down) Democrat after Democrat voted yes.

Let's be clear. To read the text of those remarks given for the IWR is an exercise in torture. Those who voted for the war had already made up their minds. They felt they couldn't say no. In some ways, I understand. Bush had whipped the nation into a cowboy frenzy with a bullhorn. America wanted blood. My sister works in D.C. She is a rational person. But seeing the destruction to the Pentagon, losing friends she's known since high school in NY... that did something to her. She is a lifelong Democrat, but on the day Bush announced we invaded Iraq, she said something that horrified me: "I support the President. We're going to get them."

Here's a case of the "will of the people" gone awry. Over 70% of Americans supported this war in the beginning. Dems were afraid - no question about it. That is still no excuse for the way they voted, but I understand why they did. Those floor speeches were just an attempt to politically justify the decision they had already made based on American sentiment at the time. Clinton and others may have had Bush the First in mind and his Desert Storm Operation. I don't think anyone imagined how HUGE of a fuck-up Dubya's administration would make.

Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

-- Interview with Gilbert in Göring's jail cell during the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (18 April 1946)

Hermann Göring was, in the last weeks of his life, more honest with us than Cheney/Bush in the last eight years.

All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

My own Senator, Dick Durbin, was mercilessly attacked in the media for expressing similar sentiments and cautioning us not to rush into something that we could be paying for in decades to come.

It amazes me that people still fall for this. My own, very intelligent, sister did. Of course, she now admits her mistake.

The little bulldog, as I call him. He got it right, and they did attack him. In fact they attacked anyone who didn't grab a flag and go goosestepping behind the hawks.:mad:

Wonderful quote and thank you.

:hi:

up, instead of standing down.... this war was a mistake from the beginning, we took our eyes off what was really important and this is where we find ourselves.... it's an extraordinarily sad state of affairs.


We need, for the love of our country to come together to STOP THIS, just STOP IT.... this country can take no more, it can pay no more, it can provide no more. We cannot continue to rely on the bank of China and all the other countries we owe, we CAN NOT DO IT....

We need our troops home, and I don't think 2 years is pulling out too quickly, if anything we should have pulled out long ago....

End of my rant.

And he spoke out against it also. He and Obama were both mentored by our late great Senator Paul Simon and I believe that Obama would have, like Senator Durbin, voted against the resolution if he had been in the Senate. I love having the Senators that I have and I am proud to support the one who is running for the presidency. I trust Obama to do everything he can to get this country back on more solid ground if elected, and to get our troops home as quickly as he can.

As for, nobody imaging how huge a fuck-up bush's administration would be. I did. I am no genuis and I have no political power, but shortly after 9/11 I knew instinctly what his war plans were, I knew he would fail, and I knew this country would end up damaged and would never be the same. It is a shame that only some of us saw it, and no one listened to us.

I recall that I felt it in my bones, the significance of these events. I was horrified to my bones. And I recall that billions of others were horrified to their bones, too. And I will not permit people who try to rewrite what I know to be history, history that I experienced so recently, to influence me. I declare that such people are liars.

'nuff said.

Well, I'll first offer the waggish response: "Hell, I've ALWAYS been interested!" :silly:

Now I'll offer the counterpoint: "How about white males?" (Yeah. I know.) :eyes:

I find it more than remarkable and less than relevant how much "identity politics" (the politics of ad hominism) has polluted the discourse. It was about a year ago when I posted the prediction that this primary election may devolve into charges and counter-charges of racism and sexism. What I didn't foresee was how DU (of all places) would become host to the claims that race would be an (alleged) advantage (for the black man) and gender would be an advantage (for the white woman). Even MORE remarkable is the fact that the former reached the mainstream and also prevails in the stated opinions of those bold enough to say it (and not introspective enough to clean up their act).

I've already posted regarding my attitude regarding ALL forms of human objectification. Here it is http://journals.democraticunderground.com/TahitiNut/521



Now, about the war and the IWR. I'm not comfortable with either candidate's "plan" for withdrawal. I favor the Kucinich plan, which was vey close to the plan offered by Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives. That said, I'll grant Obama more slack than Clinton if only because he's not tangled in his own errors in that regard.

I will offer one more observation regarding Clinton's vote, from the perspective of a former Corporate Internal Management Auditor and Operational Analyst.

I (we) had a "rule of thumb" regarding approval signatures on any paperwork: anything more than three signatures was a guarantee that nobody actually personally evaluated what they were approving. Sad to say, this was more often true than not and processes addicted to "approval" in lieu of actual review and evaluation were far more error-prone than those with abbreviated (sstreamlined) review and approval processes. People ASSUME "the other guy" looked at it and cut corners to save themselves the time and effort. For a lawyer, it's called "due diligence" ... but we know that those duties are also casualties to self-serving motives, too.

That's what happens in Congress when the legislator has a weak sense of personal duty. It's easy to pick which crowd to go along with ... or even which President. It's EASY to assume that the blame can be shifted to the originator. CYA time. But it's a FAILURE of character. It's dishonest and self-serving. Serving one's self instead of one's duty to one's constituents. And it's sadly not uncommon.

So, that doesn't mean Obama is certain to have not fallen into that trap. It just means there's a little bit better chance. At least in my opinion. I'm not a fan.

You just nailed it right there. Contrast that with someone like Russ Feingold who was the only U.S. Senator to vote against the Patriot Act. I try to imagine what that must have felt like; to be the lone person voting against something that 98 of one's colleagues are for.

That's a strong sense of personal duty right there. And moral courage.

...is how misogyny is killing Clinton in the primary, but somehow in the general election it will not be a problem.

No...no, that's not my favorite thing. My favorite thing is how Clinton was always a shoo-in and that all she had to do to get elected was not morph into a ravening tentacle-headed snorfmonster and eat puppies for breakfast, and yet somehow she managed to do that. Yes, because her being a woman was never an obstacle.

No...wait...oh, never mind.

I'm sure you're right about diffusion of responsibility. The sad thing about Clinton's vote is that you have to pick one of three interpretations: 1) she was really stupid enough to trust George @#$! Bush. 2) she was not stupid enough to trust George @#$! Bush, but she really wanted the war anyway for reasons of her own. 3) she was not stupid enough to trust George @#$! Bush, and she did not want the war, but she figured this was what she had to do to keep her seat, so she made up a bullshit rationale for it. And as someone said further up the thread, I think #3 is the winner.

Anyway. I have often thought to myself that if you are a feminist, looking for the _feminist_ presidential candidate, rather than the female one, your best bet is really Kucinich. But of course he's gone. America may or may not be ready for a woman president or an African-American president, but one thing we know is America's not ready for a radical president.

Ah well,

The Plaid Adder

Ms. Nut,
I think I misjudged what must have been a joke you made on another thread once. I've been skipping your posts and that means I've been missing out. If I misjudged you, I offer apolgy. You are on top of things!
The internet lacks context and is like reading and writing in a void. It is easy to miss a point that is made with nuance.
You are really pretty great. If I said otherwise at any point, I was far from correct.

Thanks for a very well thought out opinion.

Obama was, of course, not in the Senate when the IWR vote passed, and no one knows what he would have done.

he said it in 2002.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x121691

In October, 2002, Obama spoke at a similar rally in Chicago. It was NOT a mystery to many of us. We KNEW Cheney/Bush were lying their asses off even then.

No mystery as to what he would have done......cause it's like, what we who were marching would have done; said Hell NO! You've got that right.

Fifteen years in the Bay Area - living in Cupertino then Los Gatos - and that was a glorius day spent with 49,999 soul-mates ... including some wonderful DUers: Tinoire, noiretblu, proud patriot, Jaysunb, and others.

We. Knew.

Hell, I marched against Bush in San Francisco before 9/11. That's how much I couldn't bear him as President. There were only about 300 of us then. :)

We don't know how he would have voted had he actually been in the Senate. It's two different things.

I'm not saying I don't appreciate him coming out against it in 2002, but the fact is that he was campaigning against Alan "Selfish Hedonist" Keyes, who I think wound up garnering 20% of the popular vote in that election. So he was not taking as much of a risk in doing that as some of the Congressional Democrats would ahve been if they'd voted against the IWR.

It's perfectly possible Obama would have lived up to his words and voted against the IWR if he had actually been in the Senate at the time; it's maybe even likely; but we don't *know.*

The Plaid Adder

You can find "against the war" speeches and comments by most of the Dem Senators who voted for the IWR. They were aware of risks, but something or someone persuaded them to vote for a resolution that lacked prudent restraints on actions by Bush. I have concluded that something so spooked them that they voted for this obviously flawed legislation. What could it have been?

The Repubs could block passage of similar bills that added restrictions on Bush's actions, so the alternative was vote for this IWR or not pass anything at all. At the time, many of us expected and feared that Bush would invade Iraq in Feb without any authority except his own as the glorious CinC. Did the Senators somehow have information that Saddam would let in the inspectors and thus defuse the situation? Or were they afraid that Bush would attack not just Iraq, but also Syria or Iran, maybe with Israel participating? How would Russia and others respond in those cases?

I don't know what it was, but I am nearly certain there was some calculus beyond the 2004 election strategy. While most people suspected that Saddam still had some chem/biological weapons, few who looked closely at that problem could see much of a threat to the US or even to Israel.

When I look at who voted for the IWR, I do not see a particularly gullible group likely to trust Bush. Don't want to hijack this great discussion. Thanks PA. BTW my journal has some discussions from last fall during the early debates nailing Clinton and Obama for trying to gloss over their actual positions on Iraq and the games they played with language -- for example does Obama exclude anti-terrorism and special forces from "combat troops"?



BTW something I didn't notice until this spring: I can find no independent verification that Obama actually gave that particular speech on Oct 2, 2002. He did speak briefly, but the only coverage was his own press release weeks later. He and his campaign recreated the speech in early 2007, crowd noises and all.

He did that in 2004, and yes he won easily. His win came so easily because he was so popular with the people, even some of us in Southern Illinois. They could not get anyone else to run against him, because everyone knew they could win against him. They imported Keyes from another state in the hopes that another Black man might be able to split the votes. What Keyes got was the "red neck" vote from some counties down here in SI. The same counties that went for Hillary in 2008, and she won them by a smaller margin than Keyes did and Keyes was somewhat of a joke as a candidate. JMHO

"As a candidate for the United States Senate in 2002...," they presumably mean that he was running in a primary or something? Cause that was what threw me off.

That was what threw me off. I do remember the Obama/Keyes race. The media coverage of it was HI. LARIOUS. My favorite comment was from a Republican bigwig who, when asked to comment on some recent piece of Keynesian idiocy, replied, "I think it's clear that we lose Illinois."

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

:eyes: because I didn't hear of him until 2004. Anyway, Keyes did not come to the state until 2004 and left the same year.:applause:

I remember seeing a yard sign with Barack's name on it, and I about wrecked my car because I misread it. (you get the picture) Then I began to wonder who this was and when I began to read about him, I got excited for the first time in a long time. I had lost all hope for this country, but with him I learned to believe that we could make a difference if we worked hard enough. I still believe we can, if others in our own party will let us. and I want to see him elected once again.

edited to add content.

This is just another example of Obama being flexible with timelines and other pesky things. I think he was unopposed for re-election in 2002 but I had trouble verifying that quickly. In 2002 he was starting to talk to his backers about possibly running for the Senate in 2004; in reality, he was "running" for federal office before he was even in the IL state senate. I have an article that discusses his early ambition from one of the Chicago papers, I think from 2004.

I really fear that Obama will blow up in our faces before November and then lose to McCain. Obama's compelling life story is too often a misleading work of fiction. I started noticing the many problems when I tried to reconcile the versions he presents in his books and elsewhere with the versions reported elsewhere. While many candidates attempt some version of the "log cabin to the white house" narrative for their life, an epic struggle of how through their hard work, family sacrifice, and the grace of God, they were able to overcome enormous obstacles and prove the doubters wrong.

Over the last 5-6 months there have been a number of MSM articles interviewing his and his parents other relatives, classmates, business associates, etc. from around the world. With these articles as starting points, I tried to independently verify points that seemed to conflict with other versions. I now have a timeline that seems relatively consistent with regard to the different versions, with the discrepancies mostly limited to the versions from Obama. I am working on a journal article documenting all this as starting point in sorting all this out.

Almost every article I read contradicts some key item in the generally-accepted life story. For example, his mother has morphed from "a white woman who grew up in Kansas and left there to attend college in Hawaii where she met and married Obama's father" into "a self-proclaimed marxist and atheist who grew up near Seattle and, after high school, moved with her parents to Hawaii and attended college there, meeting and becoming pregnant by Barack Sr. while she was still 17".


In all this mess are several things that look substantial and could be at least as damaging as Rev. Wright. While nearly everyone seems caught up in gotchas, insults, and believing the worst RW attacks on fellow Dems, we are not focusing on really learning about Obama and where his problems might be while we still have time. Sept or Oct is too late. Do your own homework and see if you can disprove the growing list of RW allegations. Visit a few of the sites rabidly RW to learn what they are using in their attacks. Do not get too smug and dismissive of their points; there might just enough to backup their allegations and to keep the attacks alive.


For a little fun, I have thought of doing "How well do you know your Obama" test. Some things are just trivia, other more important. An example of trivia in the category "Where's Obama?" and with the date February 1962. PM if you think you can document this.

Very nice find, FrenchieCat.

So PA is correct, we'll never really know for sure.

However, if you look at their foreign policy teams, Obama's advisors were mainly against the war and Clinton's advisors mainly for it. Smarter imperialism at least gets fewer people killed.

My way out of the personality thing is to look at their respective competence in organizing a campaign. Being a heavily involved local party organizer, I decided to back Obama on that basis. He respects the ongoing work that we are doing, and Clinton has nothing but contempt for it. Obama's Washington State campaign used the DNC voter database and put data back into it for the future use of local candidates; Clinton had a separate database and refused to share her data. Obama's state organizers had a decent respect for the ongoing work we have been doing; Clinton sent her state coordinator around to bully and threaten county and LD chairs with possible consequences of not getting behind the "inevitable' candidate.

In positioning herself as a "fighter" on par with McCain, she has signalled to me her inability to "lose." I think that easily translates into canting right and falling prey to the meme of withdrawal equals surrender.

Became the Democratic office. We became the place for all the local and national candidates here also. Kerry never appeared (no one comes down here to campaign) but Max Cleland came with Obama to campaign for him. It was my first time taking part in a political process, and I wish I was able to do it again this year. Dang all this health problems that keep me home.

We are down in the southern part of the state as you well know. I am a little east of Carbondale now, but still go there for shopping, hospital, part of my doctors and etc.

Or has that all gotten outsourced and homogenized now?

I'm glad that the state party is now looking at 35 or however many county strategy now. That bodes very well for the continued growth of local party organizations if we can get Obama elected.

but there is no Bunny Bread in Carbondale as far as I know. I only know of the Prairie Farms Dairy products there. I believe Bunny Bread companies in Illinois are in Herrin and Harrisburg. Don't know for sure though.

As far as the state party is concerned, I am really out of it. I volunteered in 2004, but then my health deteriated even more and I have been too busy trying to stay alive and keeping my stress to a minimum to think much about politics or anything else. I have family that works in government positions, and if I was closer to them I might know more, but.......I only began thinking about these things again when Obama got into the race for president. I just wish I could feel better about the way things are going, but I worry about November. I am wishing my life away because I just wish it was over with. :tinfoilhat: or :scared: or :shrug:

It's the time between now and August that's gonna be mighty hard on the nerves.

Seriously, when you need a pick me up, watch or listen to John McCain. He has less charisma than Bob Dole and he appears to be constructing his positions as he goes along, mostly based on what his focus-group reading handlers are telling him. Everyone in GD: P may have good time to piss away sniping at each other (alas, look at me posting here after I swore I would quit) but I don't think Obama's camp is wasting theirs on it; they're working on taking him down, and I trust them to do it. We will lose most of the bigot-American community, but I have come to the conclusion that no Democratic presidential candidate really gets much support from them anyway.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

But I worry about getting there and how much damage will be done before we get there. I just don't have much patience with what is going on right now. I use to work with children with behavior problems and now I feel like someone should be using those techniques on some of the people in the other camp. Some good counseling might help, anyway it wouldn't hurt. :shrug:

I agree about the bigot-American community. They usually go republican in the GE. and I could care less about them, I prefer to be separate from them anyway. I had a professor tell me one time that my biggest prejudice was against bigots. I had to agree.

I trust Barack and his camp to take care of things, but that makes me nervous also. It is like when you watch a ball game and your team loses, and you have this feeling that they lost because you were on their side. That somehow your bad luck rubbed off on them. ;) Paranoia much, I know. Making myself all too important.

The Bunny Bread jingle was all over every single radio staion on the dial. I guess it isn't any big surprise that local quirks are being eliminated in this era of globalization.

Sorry about your health--you need to take care of yourself first. Hang in there.

I would have graduated high school in 63. I grew up in Southern Illinois and I remember when the Bunny Bread song was everywhere, it was our theme song back then. :D

SIU is what keeps us liberal down here. The professors of SIU at least do. Some of the Frat boys are pure raving republican, but the most of the liberal arts kids are cool. I hate to be dense, but what is or was a NSF program?

My health is an up and down propisition. I was doing fairly well on my heart and other meds for the last year, then found I had the big C. I had the operations and got it all cut out, but have decided to only take the minimum of treatments for it because everything else would worsen my other ailments. It is a juggling game, and I can only hope that I have made the right decisions. My oncologists, both of them, seem okay with these decisions so maybe I am right. I haven't told my GP yet. :P

"The personal is political, and the political is personal."

That is a central tenet of feminist theory!

she will never apologize to the soldiers,their families,the iraqi people,and the american people.


as always your insights are spot on

Well said, Plaid Adder!

Thank you for being a rational voice.

Nominated.

Glad I'm tracking your journal, Plain Adder.

I suspect though, that there is another side to this coin. You wrote:

"I don't mean to trivialize that difference, because I think it is a major problem for Clinton's campaign, just as Kerry's IWR vote was a major problem for his campaign. It's not just about avoiding the dreaded "flip-flopper" label; it's about the fact that having voted for the IWR, Clinton cannot with credibility make a properly categorical, unequivocal, brutal critique of the Iraq war. If she becomes too forthright in her condemnation of it she will be stuck explaining how she could have brought herself to vote for it, which can only be done either by apologizing or by entering into some sophistical explanation of how she wasn't *really* voting for *this* Iraq war--which is basically what the "de-authorization" push is about. She can say that thanks to the Bush administration's incompetence and corruption the military action she voted for has morphed into a gigantic unholy unforseen disaster--and that's certainly true. But the part of the truth that she cannot tell is that this war should never have been authorized in the first place."

Which makes a great deal of sense. However, I also think that Clinton will be much more likely to, as President, end the war as quickly as possible. It is, as you point out, an albatross for her, and she is likely to want to prove to the "anti-war majority" that she had ended this conflict. She, like all first term Presidents, will want a second term. She has already proven herself to the "hard-liners" by her initial vote FOR the Iraq authorization, so as President she will not need to prove as much to these folks as Obama may feel the need to. It is all simply leverage.

I think that in the end, we can motivate either candidate to end this war. However, the approach will have to be vastly different.

In the end, I believe Obama already had this sewn up, and he will be a Great President with the full backing of a Democratic Congress. However, if not, and Clinton is in there, I still believe we can accomplish some great things through her and a Democratic Congress.

And equally well expressed. Thank you.

This is where it all started for me with hilary clinton..her vote on the IWR without even reading the 90 page NIE report and her ensuing support of bush policies when he was popular.

Great points.

The hope is that once the dust is settled we will realize that we've pretty much been on the same page all along, despite the personality clashes.

And in this case, DEFINITELY worth a recommendation.

Thanks, Plaidder! A very well-thought-out, well-supported exposition.

appreciatively,
Bright

I'm past the point of who voted for it because frankly, the Cheney Administration would have started the damn thing anyway.

I am only interested in who will stop it. If Obama is the president-elect he better damn well live up to his promises or I will be royally pissed off.

idea of the Obama Presidency is found in his campaign. Mobilize people to get them involved, so that 'they' can have some say in the policies that shape our society. Nothing will change if people do not insist on it. I can't see how Obama is going to exert any kind of pressure to initiate change all by his lonesome. Maybe it is 'we' who damn well better live up to our promises.

For this reason, even though I'm a hard-core Hillarite, I will vote for Obama if he gets the nomination, and I realize it's ridiculous for Hillarites to threaten to sit out this election (or even vote for McCain.)

But their policy similarity is also one of the prime reasons I get so sick of the Obamatronic theory their their guy will bring us a new kingdom on earth, paradigm-shifting Change, fix this nation and the world, etc. etc. He has no plan to immanentize the eschaton. I don't see why people assume he will do so.