US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

Let me guess--an indefinite-detention post is close at hand.

i don't wanna mention Hindenburg v. Hitler one more time, but that's really where i stand wr2 Obama's upcoming reelection. i would vote for him only b/c there's no viable alternative, and for no other reason.

Yeah, look, the event doesn't deserve anything more than a nod -- and would have been ten times funnier had Obama never tacitly acknowledged Trump's legitimacy by releasing his birth certificate for the second time. I can't repeat this enough.

look man I'm gonna take the damn lols where I can get them. practically everything this guy does pisses me off & I have to content myself with "but imagine how much worse it could be!" so if he talks a good line & gets in some jabs at a racist troll asshole then I'm gonna say, fuckin' LOL, commander in chief man, most days you're the guy signing off the torture of people in secret prisons and not saying shit about the ongoing assault on reproductive rights but today you are the guy teeing off on a dude demonstrably & obviously WAY worse than you so get yours

like if I go see a bill and both bands on it suck but the headliner sucks less than the opener then damn right I'm clapping louder for the headliner, you know?

Sure, but today it's been like every poster I know acts like they walk out after the opening act.

which I say in total agreement with this

i don't wanna mention Hindenburg v. Hitler one more time, but that's really where i stand wr2 Obama's upcoming reelection. i would vote for him only b/c there's no viable alternative, and for no other reason.

voting for Obama is going to make me feel like a dumbshit sellout asshole like all the other dumbshit sellout assholes I hate, but what the fuck else are you supposed to do?

Not sure why you have to vote for anyone besides your local rep or senator if you don't live in a swing state/district? I didn't vote for Obama in 2008

I'm of the opinion that allowing any polling data to tell you whether your state is a swing state or not is pretty naive - assume that everybody's data has an agenda seems like the only sane strategy to me

If EVERYTHING Obama does makes you angry, you might need Paxil

I love his smile!

not to turn this into being about me, but considering that a scant 11 years ago i was pleading and screaming w/ liberal friends to NOT vote for Nader i consider this to be quite a change in my way of thinking. perhaps i was deluded then (though i will still defend my views from back then), but frankly the rot w/n the Democratic Party has become so pronounced that it cannot be ignored any longer and frankly it threatens the sort of country that we will become. john focuses on stuff like torture and reproductive rights, i focus on economics and Wall Street, but both are symptoms of a much deeper sickness for which Obama et. al. is not only not the cure but also the enabler.

like, if data suggested that Florida was WAY more in play than had been assumed, don't you figure that by the time the news reached you, it'd be getting to you with enough topspin to...fuckin'...some ping-pong metaphor, not fully up for it, feel free to fill in

and he had pretty good timing. And I loved the tie that made him look like Cliff Huxtable at that hospital fund raiser.

like, if data suggested that Florida was WAY more in play than had been assumed, don't you figure that by the time the news reached you, it'd be getting to you with enough topspin to...fuckin'...some ping-pong metaphor, not fully up for it, feel free to fill in

despite the Angry Cuban Vote, Dems won Miami-Dade County in 2008.

If EVERYTHING Obama does makes you angry, you might need Paxil

look I said practically and I gotta stay unmedicated to maintain my edge

look, the real "message" here is that I need to unsubscribe from Facebook.

Let me guess--an indefinite-detention post is close at hand.

― clemenza, Sunday, May 1, 2011 8:14 PM (15 minutes ago)

this dude constantly has the biggest chip on his shoulder when he posts. chill son

I generally like clemenza's historical posts, but I'm surprised he didn't learn that moderation and reason have so little to do with American politics going back to the 1790's; they've only existed when the opposition is in disarray.

Oh, please. Where you get chip-on-his-shoulder out of a resigned prediction of what you think is coming next, I have no idea.

Again, I like moderation in terms of someone's temperament. As for the political landscape right now--as mundane as it might sound, and as angry as it may make some of you--I continue to believe that Obama is more or less doing the best that he can in an insane situation. And I'm not oblivious to the detention, the Wall St. ties, or some of the other things. I tried to explain my interpretation of this in a long post on another thread, and didn't get any response.

nah dude i think you're a great guy i just picture you sniffling into a kleenex when reading all your posts, you seem to take everything so personally

I don't know why you'd say that. I think my posts are generally about as not-confrontational as they could be.

"Sniffling into a kleenex"? Good grief, no--I get upset on occasion, but it passes quickly.

Right, but no evidence exists that Obama "is doing the best he can," which suggests he's a passive agent. From my pov it's because he's smart that I wanted him to hire anybody but Geithner, Sumners, Emmanuel, et al. And he wasn't required to. Moderation and equanimity in the face of his capitulations are not virtues!

I'm on record here of speculating whether the FISA compromises of summer '08 meant the triumph of an amiable, moderate, intelligent chief executive accepting the Bush-era abuses as a matter of settled law -- in the same way that Eisenhower accepted the New Deal wholesale.

Nice Goldwater allusion...I think there are different theories to explain why he took on those people. But it's done. I just wish that you'd balance your perpetual outrage with some acknowlegement of the positives. When your hatred of Obama becomes such that last night's dinner becomes one more reason to jump all over him--or to jump all over the fact that he got some good press today because of it--and you're really angry that he released his long-form birth certificate (was it just to placate Trump? doesn't something like 30% of the country question his citizenship?), at that point you lose me.

you don't understand that (a) there was no reason to release his "long form" birth certificate" when (b) the percentage of the country that believed he should have released it was never going to vote for him.

I'm not Morbs -- I acknowledge some positives. Understand that my skepticism is rooted in my instant attraction. I read Dreams of My Father in 2006! But I see attraction as a roadblock.

but he's not courting you

xp

For what it's worth: I was once accused on a baseball thread of enjoying these Clemenza-vs.-the-world debates. No, I pointed out--didn't then, don't now. I would really love for someone closer to my own point of view to jump on right now and chime in.

My guess is that he released it not to win votes, but just to shut some percentage of them up--half of 30%? a third? somewhere in there. And, yes, he also released it for political reasons. I'm not oblivious to the fact that Obama is much more of a politician than he presented himself as in 2008. Which is fine--that's politics.

even Obama had a few seconds of icy-stare pique when Myers started talking about Huckabee and Kenya (around 11:40 in the video clip above). Probably manufactured--he has to show he has feelings.

This bit is now suspiciously absent from the video on the C-SPAN site.

You haven't mentioned yet what you would consider an unacceptable compromise, clemenza.

i would've liked to have seen him send some shots @ newt, such an easy target

For as long as you're got four or five Democratic senators who are essentially Republicans, that's hard to say. But I would hope that he stands up for Medicare and Social Security as much as possible in the next big budget showdown (which, as I understand it, is bigger than the one that just took place). But I also realize that your country has a major deficit problem. So I don't have the answer there. I don't think anyone does.

At present "stands for Medicare and Social Security" means "stands for drastic reductions in Medicaid and SS at the same time that I accepted the Bush-era tax cuts as a baseline for fiscal responsibility."

I got nothin' here--I'll have to defer to you on specifics for the time being. But I will check into that.

1) The dinner is a fact of life.

What would happen if the prez just refused to play? That's the prez I want (if I thought there'd ever be another good one).

Yeah, Obama is doing "the best he can" to be Bush 3.0.

clemenza, you're Canadian.

and re that Nate Silver thing placing O on the 'liberal' scale, how did he account for a generic mainstream liberal in 1975 being a Trotskyite loon in 2011? (Answer not necessary. I rue the day Silver left Baseball Prospectus for this trivia.)

You haven't mentioned yet what you would consider an unacceptable compromise, clemenza.

Don't want to speak for clemenza but I think the way that you & I & morbz & k3v & I'm not sure who else think of this thing is from a deep-ideological place different from the way that clemenza & others do. not "better" or "worse" but different at a real fundamental place. from what I'd call just for the sake of sportsmanship "the rational stance," there's no answer to "what is an unacceptable compromise" - if a question comes to the point of "get nothing or compromise," the correct answer will always be "compromise," because small gain is better than no gain, and is perceived by this mindset to always be movement in the right direction.

to the opposing/different standpoint, which I'd call "the emotional standpoint" but ppl can say "irrational" or "childish" or whatever, there is value - symbolic at the very least, but I at any rate would argue that symbolic value has rippling actual effects in many places (vide how aggressive the right is on abortion right now; if compromises that many said weren't really important, practically, had not been made, I believe the right would be much less likely to move so boldly now) - in holding to principle even when it causes you to lose ground/political capital/votes/elections. this good can even be conceived as greater than short-term gains, even though many of these are practical & have genuine benefits for people's lives (we got health care! --except that for the many women for whom Planned Parenthood was primary care provider, they didn't "get health care" in the compromise - they lost health care) which cannot be denied and shouldn't be minimized. In a way, cleaving to principle is to always also be compromising; you are compromising the gains you're turning down.

Everybody already knows that I think this, but I think the longstanding effects of the "when it's compromise or stand your ground and get nothing, there are times when it's better in the long view to stand your ground" have been amply demonstrated over the past eleven years: they are catastrophic.

Carter didn't "play," and he was punished (deservedly). Look at Reagan: he "played" and not only got most of his legislative agenda passed -- besides winning the pundit war -- but changed forever the "conversation" from liberal to conservative.

I accept proudly membership in your/our claque, but I know a lot about presidential power and I accept -- not to mention sympathize -- how to use prez-level "charisma" and control over patronage power for acceptable levels of achievements.

sorry fucked up that last graf, which should read

Everybody already knows that I think this, but I think the longstanding effects of the "when it's compromise or stand your ground and get nothing, some compromise is always best" have been amply demonstrated over the past eleven years: they are catastrophic.

A general observation, though: in the midst of a fragile, skittish economic recovery, having the government shut down seems to me to be a dubious proposition. I know Clinton won that battle, but he did so in a very different context.

I'm Canadian, yes. So I don't directly feel the impact of whatever takes place in Washington (indirectly, yes, although Canada has maintained surprising equilibrium during the economic meltdown--usually we're much more aligned with what happens in the States). But it doesn't mean I can't take an interest or have opinions, right? I follow American politics much more closely than my own country's.

I accept your answer -- politely and amiably, I hope -- but then wonder if what you know about presidential power requires civility and moderation as virtues, which, as a result, leads you to admissions like "-'ll have to defer to you on specifics for the time being."

I agree that my fuck-the-correspondents scenario would require the American public to not be apolitical zombies, so yes again, I have given up.

aero otm, but I'd backdate it to at least '92: ever since the Dems got 'realistic' with Bubba's Third Way and marched along with BushCheney's post-9/11 security framework, the gains of the Great Society have been nearly obliterated.

Alfred, your admiration for Reagan's 'optics' (bleccchh) seems to overshadow the fact that America loved him because he told them pretty lies.

Your sentence is a tautology. Reread what I wrote.

Well, deferring to you on specifics for the time being means I'll check into it and then decide if what you say is true or not. You said something about Nixon and Monica Crowley on another thread, I disagreed, I checked into it, and concluded that my reading was closer to the truth than yours.

first let me look up tautology

xp

Reagan got what he wanted because (a) he was expert at lying to them (b) the citizenry was SO ready to be expertly deceived.

oh, yeah

there's a ballgame on, so later

lol I've even alienated Morbz.