Diogenes the Dog
Narcissistic Jerks And The Parties That Love Them
So Joe Lieberman gets to keep his gavel. Can someone tell me why Harry Reid still has a job? Lieberman will keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee and Armed Services Subcommittee. But in a stirring show of wussitude, they stripped him from the Environment and Public Works Committee. Ouch. I bet that very nearly stung a little.
I can’t understand why the Democrats chose to do this. The obvious answer is they have no spine. But honestly, I still think they don’t need this guy. God knows Connecticut thinks it can do without him. A new pole shows 61% of voters disapprove of his performance and 48% saying they’d definitely vote for someone else, with another 18% saying they’d consider someone else.
This is the guy who, when asked if Obama was a Marxist said, that’s a good question. He spoke at the RNC saying that Obama voted against funding for troops in the field. He pushed the Bill Ayres connection, said Obama was not ready to lead, that he put party ahead of country, and that Obama was the candidate of Hammas.
In one move, the Democrats have lost the ability to crack the whip on its own membership the way the Republicans have done so well over the past eight years. By forgiving Joe Lieberman for what was a very public betrayal of the party that brought him to Washington in the first place, they have eliminated the chance that there will be any repercussions for party members who deviate in the future. And this is not Lieberman’s first betrayal. Two years ago he got all the heavy hitters, including Barack Obama, to come to Connecticut to campaign for him. In exchange, he agreed to honor the primary results. When he lost, he went back on his word and ran as an independent. It has often been said that in the Senate you are only as good as your word. This puts Joe Lieberman’s value right around that of a festering bucket of afterbirth.
Which puts Lieberman about $0.23 shy of Harry Reid, whose only response to opposition, despite being in the majority, is to shrug and say, well, I tried.
Except you didn’t did you Senator? I mean, my god. Someone threatens to filibuster and you say, ok, you win. How about making them actually filibuster? No one does that anymore, the whole Mr. Smith collapsing at the podium thing. Someone says that if legislation goes forward they will filibuster, and Harry Reid, having all the moral fiber and strength of character as a piece of damp cardboard, he just shrugs and gives up instead of making them actually filibuster. I’ve had infections with greater tenacity than you!
It’s like the DNC has Battered Wife Syndrome. They’ve been kicked around so much the only response they can muster is to curl up in a ball and weep, completely incapable of extricating themselves from the hellish downward spiral in which they live. When that sort of thing happens to a single person, it is tragic. When it happens to an entire party, it is pathetic.
Senator Reid: I call upon you to either grow a pair, or resign so that you might be replaced with something more useful, such as one of the pieces of furniture in your office.
Ok. Now that I’ve gotten that out, yes, I admit that it’s a lot harder for the Senate to bust Lieberman’s balls when Barack Obama has publicly forgiven him and asked that everyone move on. Then again, after running a campaign that promised an end to work together in the best interests of the country, he didn’t have much of a choice.
And one can argue that as long as Lieberman has his chairmanship, the Democrats still have something to hold over his head to keep him in line. The thing is, I don’t think they’ll ever pull the trigger on that one. This Congress hasn’t exactly been all that big on accountability, so the odds that they’ll actually hold his proverbial feet to the metaphorical fire are virtually nil.
Beyond Prop 8
Most of the results were in. With all but a few House and Senate seats nailed down, my attention turned to collecting the scattered results of all the ballot measures I was following this year. By and large, it’s your standard culture war stuff: abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage.
Julia Child was a freakin’ spy!
There are important things happening all over the place right now. The conflict between Russia and Georgia, the Olympics, and who Barak Obama will name as the new apostle Peter-erg, uh-Vice President.
So it’s naturally some stories get overlooked…such as the fact that Julia Child was a spy fighting the Nazis! The kindly old lady I used to watch on PBS? The one who taught me how to cook a turnip and engaged in incomprehensible banter with Jacques Pepin? She was a spy. Next thing you know I’m going to find out Yan Can Cook is a contract killer and Bob Ross was the original American Ninja.
Julia Child was a freakin’ spy!
There are important things happening all over the place right now. The conflict between Russia and Georgia, the Olympics, and who Barak Obama will name as the new apostle Peter-erg, uh-Vice President.
So it’s naturally some stories get overlooked…such as the fact that Julia Child was a spy fighting the Nazis! The kindly old lady I used to watch on PBS? The one who taught me how to cook a turnip and engaged in incomprehensible banter with Jacques Pepin? She was a spy. Next thing you know I’m going to find out Yan Can Cook is a contract killer and Bob Ross was the original American Ninja.
Julia Child was a freakin’ spy!
There are important things happening all over the place right now. The conflict between Russia and Georgia, the Olympics, and who Barak Obama will name as the new apostle Peter-erg, uh-Vice President.
So it’s naturally some stories get overlooked…such as the fact that Julia Child was a spy fighting the Nazis! The kindly old lady I used to watch on PBS? The one who taught me how to cook a turnip and engaged in incomprehensible banter with Jacques Pepin? She was a spy. Next thing you know I’m going to find out Yan Can Cook is a contract killer and Bob Ross was the original American Ninja.
Laugh or You’ll Go Mad
Lear goes for a walk in the rain and loses his mind. If his fool had been funnier he might have held it together. In the wake of the disastrous and unnecessary FISA mess that got signed into law this week, I’ve been feeling pretty down. So, I offer this bit of news for those who, like myself, need something to keep them from a short sharp descent into madness.
Remember conservative Tory MP David Davis? He resigned last month in protest of the Labour government’s extension of the period during which a subject can be held without charges to forty-two days. Yep. Everything’s backwards in England. They drive on the left, they have a queen, and in England, the conservatives are the ones standing up for civil liberties against the oppressive liberal government.
Neither the Liberal Democratic party nor the Labour party put forward a candidate to run against Davis, who ran to reclaim his seat against twenty-five fringe candidates, resulting in a record longest ballot ever seen in a by-election. Some of his opponents included Miss Great Britain of the Miss Great Britain Party, Mad Cow Girl representing the Moster Raving Loony Party, conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has claimed that he is the son of the true Godhead and that many world leaders are in fact reptiles or at the very least reptile sympathizers, and Buss Pass Elvis from the Church of the Militant Elvis Party. At one point, there was even a war of words between the pseudo-King, and Miss GB in which Elvis accused her of bribing the electorate.
For anyone interested in the results, a short list follows:
Davis – 17,113
Icke – 110
Mad Cow Girl – 412
Miss GB – 521
Bus Pass Elvis – 44
Sometimes, it is not so good to be The King.
Laugh or You’ll Go Mad
Lear goes for a walk in the rain and loses his mind. If his fool had been funnier he might have held it together. In the wake of the disastrous and unnecessary FISA mess that got signed into law this week, I’ve been feeling pretty down. So, I offer this bit of news for those who, like myself, need something to keep them from a short sharp descent into madness.
Remember conservative Tory MP David Davis? He resigned last month in protest of the Labour government’s extension of the period during which a subject can be held without charges to forty-two days. Yep. Everything’s backwards in England. They drive on the left, they have a queen, and in England, the conservatives are the ones standing up for civil liberties against the oppressive liberal government.
Neither the Liberal Democratic party nor the Labour party put forward a candidate to run against Davis, who ran to reclaim his seat against twenty-five fringe candidates, resulting in a record longest ballot ever seen in a by-election. Some of his opponents included Miss Great Britain of the Miss Great Britain Party, Mad Cow Girl representing the Moster Raving Loony Party, conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has claimed that he is the son of the true Godhead and that many world leaders are in fact reptiles or at the very least reptile sympathizers, and Buss Pass Elvis from the Church of the Militant Elvis Party. At one point, there was even a war of words between the pseudo-King, and Miss GB in which Elvis accused her of bribing the electorate.
For anyone interested in the results, a short list follows:
Davis – 17,113
Icke – 110
Mad Cow Girl – 412
Miss GB – 521
Bus Pass Elvis – 44
Sometimes, it is not so good to be The King.
Laugh or You’ll Go Mad
Lear goes for a walk in the rain and loses his mind. If his fool had been funnier he might have held it together. In the wake of the disastrous and unnecessary FISA mess that got signed into law this week, I’ve been feeling pretty down. So, I offer this bit of news for those who, like myself, need something to keep them from a short sharp descent into madness.
Remember conservative Tory MP David Davis? He resigned last month in protest of the Labour government’s extension of the period during which a subject can be held without charges to forty-two days. Yep. Everything’s backwards in England. They drive on the left, they have a queen, and in England, the conservatives are the ones standing up for civil liberties against the oppressive liberal government.
Neither the Liberal Democratic party nor the Labour party put forward a candidate to run against Davis, who ran to reclaim his seat against twenty-five fringe candidates, resulting in a record longest ballot ever seen in a by-election. Some of his opponents included Miss Great Britain of the Miss Great Britain Party, Mad Cow Girl representing the Moster Raving Loony Party, conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has claimed that he is the son of the true Godhead and that many world leaders are in fact reptiles or at the very least reptile sympathizers, and Buss Pass Elvis from the Church of the Militant Elvis Party. At one point, there was even a war of words between the pseudo-King, and Miss GB in which Elvis accused her of bribing the electorate.
For anyone interested in the results, a short list follows:
Davis – 17,113
Icke – 110
Mad Cow Girl – 412
Miss GB – 521
Bus Pass Elvis – 44
Sometimes, it is not so good to be The King.
2,118
That’s the new number required for either Clinton or Obama to take the nomination. The Rules and Bylaws Committee has decided to seat half of the delegates from Michigan and Florida. Conventional wisdom says Obama will have this wrapped up come Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, but Clinton adviser Harold Ickes has stated that the senator has asked that he reserve her right to take this fight to the Credentials Committee…in Denver. I can only assume that she’s holding off her decision until she knows whether or not she absolutely has to have all the delegates from Michigan and Florida to keep this going.
So, everyone is saying it’s over, except for Clinton who, instead of Rocky, is taking a line from Rambo this time, saying, “Nothing is over! Nothing! You just don’t turn it off! It wasn’t my war! You asked me, I didn’t ask you! And I did what I had to do to win! But somebody wouldn’t let us win! And I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting. Calling me baby killer and all kinds of vile crap! Who are they to protest me? Who are they? Unless they’ve been me and been there and know what the hell they’re yelling about!”
Ok, maybe I went a little overboard on that one, but you get the idea. This puts Obama short of the nomination by about 66 delegates, depending on whose count you use.
The vote went down 19-8 to split the delegates from Florida based on the primary results (Clinton-105, Obama-67) and Michigan, a trickier matter as Obama was not on the ballot, split between the two candidates (Clinton-69, Obama-59). Each delegate will have half a vote at the convention. According to some news reports, the Obama camp had enough votes on the committee to split the votes 50-50. However, the candidate instructed his supporters to vote for a solution more favorable to Senator Clinton, an attempt to heal wounds in the party. Except that doesn’t seem to have worked.
According to multiple reports, the crowd at the meeting was raucous and combative, shouting back and forth at one another and heckling the speakers on both sides of the debate.
The longer this fight goes on, the harder it will be to bring the party together and with both sides acting like whiny children, my hopes are not high. So, to both sides I have the following advice: grow the fuck up!
Clintonites: Florida and Michigan broke the rules. If the party does not punish them in some way it will have no power over the primaries. States could hold their primaries at any time, and, of course, they all want to be first which means it will be chaos as each of the states makes their primary earlier and earlier. Sooner or later, the party needs to step in and impose some order and if they let Florida and Michigan skate, their threats will have no power behind them. Please remember here that the primaries are how the party chooses a candidate. And the parties are private organizations. If you don’t like how they do things you can start your own or go be a Republican. But since you chose to vote in the Democratic primary, you agreed to play by the party’s rules.
Obamaniacs: There is such thing as being a sore winner. So you don’t like the way Clinton has run her campaign. Well, I can’t say I disagree. That said, she would make a much better president than John McCain (McCain people, feel free to object in the most absurd terms below). Her positions on the issues, along with her voting record, are not all that different from Obama’s. So while she’s taken some bad advice from some very foolish people, and run with it like a Weight Watcher’s meeting after the Good Humor truck, she’s not that far off from your candidate. So stop acting like she’s the devil. While I think she’s lost her bearings almost as badly as Senator More Wars, Bomb Iran, Hundred Years of Iraq, Lobbyists Are Wrong Except When They Run My Campaign, Don’t Know Much About the Economy McCain, she would make a decent president. So when 23% of you say you would rather vote for McCain than Clinton, it only exposes your own ignorance. Try at least to act like you’re old enough to vote.
The best solution at this point is probably to lock both sets of fanatics in a room and refuse to let them out until one side is dead or, in the chaos of raging hormones and heightened emotions, they all start doing it. Wither way, wire the room for video and it will make for some interesting YouTube footage. So go on! Carpe Inimicus!
Windmills? What Windmills?
Ever see an action movie where the hero and some bad guy are both in a car, involved in some kind of high speed game of chicken? The hero can stop it, but he refuses to do it until the bad guy gives him what he wants. Invariably, the bad guy says something to the extent of, “You’re crazy!” and the hero says something like, “Yeah…just crazy enough.” Well, that’s the best metaphor I can come up with to describe how Hillary Clinton is handling the democratic primary. It comes off with a very, “If I go down I’m taking you with me,” mentality. However, I think there’s more to it than that. I think she honestly believes that Obama cannot win a general election. So what looks to all the world like some kind of ego-driven quixotic bid to win at any cost, it is in fact and ego-driven bid to save the party from perceived total disaster, even if that disaster exists only in her head.
In order to make the case that Senator Clinton should stay in the race, the Clinton campaign has reinvented the rules, the justifications, and the laws of mathematics. They have argued that Obama did not win the states that democrats have to win in the general, like California. The logic here is that if Obama can’t beat Clinton, he can’t beat McCain. Personally, if I were running against McCain I wouldn’t have gone ahead and drawn that parallel, but then that’s me. This is, of course, complete and utter shit. If the Clinton camp thinks that California will really go for McCain over Obama then they are dumber than Mark Penn after he’s gotten the savage beating with a 2×4 that, in a perfectly just world, he would have gotten ten times over by now. Burston-Marsteller: Advocating for complete bastards since 1953.
Then there was the contention that Obama couldn’t win over white working class voters as Clinton has consistently beat him in that category. Once again, that assumes that those who voted for Clinton would never vote for Obama, an assumption with no basis whatsoever in reality. But when has reality ever stopped Team Clinton? In addition, no democratic candidate for president has won a majority of white working class voters in roughly sixty years. Finally, Obama has consistently improved his numbers with white working class voters. So much for that premise.
The argument that the Clinton camp has stuck to longest is that they are winning the popular vote. The way they go about calculating that has changed with shifting election results, but nevertheless, the Clinton camp insists they are winning the popular vote. This requires several assumptions.
First, one has to count Florida and Michigan, which Clinton agreed not to do right up until the point that she realized she needed them. Next, one needs to ignore the fact that caucuses have drastically smaller voter turnout numbers than primaries, thus minimizing the damage done to Clinton’s standing by Obama’s incredible performance in most of the caucus states and subsequently marginalizing the voters in those states. Finally, one needs to forget that the rules, set by the party and agreed to by the candidates, determine the nominee on the basis of the delegate count, not on the popular vote.
So the question remains. Why is Hillary Clinton still running? Short of Barack Obama being photographed eating babies or being assassinated, and we would never wish for that, would we Liz Trotta, she has no hope of securing the nomination. Right now, her goal seems to be to force a convention fight wherein she can make the case that Obama cannot win the general election. However, this course of action would push the selection of a Democratic candidate into August, leaving two months for the general election and ensuring that whoever got the nomination would almost certainly be crushed by McCain, who would have had a free ride through the summer. The result would be that any party members at the convention would be so pissed off at Clinton for dragging out the fight that she would be even harder pressed to persuade the superdelegates to side with her.
Up until a few weeks ago I would have told you she was doing this because she wanted time to raise enough money to cover her campaign debt, last reported at $21 million. But then $11 million she owes herself and about another $10 million is owed to Mark Penn who I believe to be the biggest political hack since Paul Weyrich. And now Bill Clinton is raising the specter of some dark cabal, a deep, dark Washington conspiracy that doesn’t want Hillary to get the nomination. In his most recent speeches, Bill Clinton consistently refers to the fact that they don’t want her to get the nomination because they know she could win in the general. The only people this they could be referring to, as far as I can tell, is the Republican party. But would Republicans really hate to run against Hillary Clinton so badly? From what I can tell they would love nothing more than to against Hillary Clinton. So why is she still in it? The only answer I can come up with is that she truly believes, with religious fervor and against all reason, that only she can save the party from defeat.
So how does this play out from here? Hillary wins Puerto Rico and makes some poorly advised statement about how the people who think she should drop out are like Nazis or that refusing to count Michigan and Florida in full is like denying women and minorities the right to vote. Obama will likely take South Dakota and Montana the following week. Clinton will argue that it doesn’t matter unless you count Michigan and Florida in which case Obama does not have enough delegates. Amid this sturm and drang, the Rules and Bylaws Committee for the Democratic Naitonal Party will meet and decide the fate of Michigan and Florida. If they decide against Clinton, and they’ll have no choice (more later), she will appeal the decision to the Credentials Committee which will meet at the convention in Denver. The Credentials Committee will send it to the floor for a vote where Obama will have the majority and Hillary Clinton’s hopes will go down in flames along with any hope for the Democratic party securing the White House.
Clinton had previously said that seating half the delegates from Michigan and Florida was acceptable, something to which the Obama campaign agreed. Then Clinton’s group worked out that they would need all the delegates from those states and began demanding just that. Unfortunately no one can give them that for a long time, if at all.
As I stated earlier, the Rules and Bylaws Committee is in no position to give Hillary Clinton what she wants. Recently, lawyers for the DNC sent a memo to the committee stating that they cannot admit more than half of the delegates from Michigan and Florida, which means Clinton will not get what she wants. The only entity that can do that for her is the Credentials Committee, which, as I said, does not meet until the first day of the convention in Denver. Clinton campaign senior advisor Harold Ickes refused to rule out the possibility of a legal challenge should the committee rule against Clinton and the candidate’s own rhetoric makes it sound like she has no plans of quitting any time soon. So, unless the Clinton campaign suffers from a temporary bout of sanity, we can look forward to three more months of this malarkey.
Note to Clintonites: There is nothing sexist about questioning Clinton’s strategy, nor is there anything sexist about suggesting that she is not playing with a full deck. If I were to suggest that these are in some way inherent qualities in women or that her situation was in some way related to her being a woman, or in any way referenced the fact that she is a woman in my criticism beyond the use of the female pronoun, that would be sexist. The above is merely my honest questioning of the strategy and motives of a candidate who I actually quite liked until about a year ago when she apparently got hit on the head and woke up only to find that she was unharmed save for a penchant for talking like a Republican.
There is, of course, one way out of this mess for the Democratic party. The superdelegates. A while back I wrote an article (elsewhere) detailing the arguments for and against superdelegates and expressing my own ambivalence on the subject. In the pro column was a situation just like this one. You have a tight race. One candidate has a clear lead but no substantial margin. Enter the superdelegates with their 20% share of the vote. Suddenly, that 1% or 2% lead is a 22% lead. The candidate has the clear support of the party, the balloons drop, and the party marches proudly into the general election to the tune of the chosen candidate’s campaign theme song. (Side note: It is for this reason that the Kerry ‘04 campaign has ruined Springsteen’s No Surrender for me) Sadly, the superdelegates have proven as spineless as a collective of garden slugs, and they have steadfastly refused to take either side in this race until very late in the campaign for fear of backing the wrong candidate. As such, they have shown themselves to be completely useless. In short, if you think these people might suddenly grow a conscience and ride to their party’s rescue as though they were, I don’t know, party leaders or something, don’t hold your breath.
For the rest of us, we can look forward to a spirited general election, Obama Vs. McCain…all two months of it.
I really want to be wrong about all this.