I CAN'T STAND THE FACT THAT OUR PRESIDENT IS DEPLORABLY INARTICULATE

Well, I did say that his inability to string a coherent sentence together was just the tip of the iceberg. The man's giving a speech in Hershey, PA right n ow (broadcast on CNN and MSNBC), and it's truly flabbergasting how poorly spoken he is. FOR PETE'S SAKE, HE'S THE SINGLE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE FREE WORLD - HE SHOULD BE A GREAT COMMUNICATOR!!!!!

alex, why do you keep having rogue letters appear, at the ends of your posts?

I don't know, but it only happens here on my office computer.....and it's really pissing me off.
p

xpost Huck

1. You are unbelievably stupid.
2. See #1.

The level to which I despise this man frightens me.

Haha..good point. I didn't mean to allude to "great communicator" as the title ol' Ron was often tagged with, but rather in a literal sense.

Another thing that bugs the bej esus out of me is Bush's habit of smiling at wildly inappropriate times while trying to make a point. It's just such a shallow ploy to drive home his agenda, and it makes my skin crawl.
v

xpost

This does not mean I find him in any sense an acceptable president.

I'm equally fine with GW emulating any dead president, really.

(Add that one to your file, Secret Service.)

(whhoooaaaaaa x-post)

Are you serious? It should be MANDATORY! How else are you going to effectively convey ideas? How are you going to convince the rest of the world of the actions of your military are sound and just (beyond merely pigeon-holing your enemies as "cold blooded killers who hate freedom!"m

Huckelbrace OTM - That drives me crazy.

xpost

and?

I said it was irrational but since many of his mannerisms are obviously (whether contrived or not) southern-style the jabs at them seem to be thinly veiled classist insults to me.

Jesus Alex those extra letters at the end of your posts are cracking me up. Sorry guy.

Even the most extreme right-wingers would concede that Clinton was intelligent.,o

and a guy born in Connecticut, who went to Andover and Yale, is not a Southerner. Just because someone might've lived somewhere doesn't make them from there. Living in New York doesn't make me a New Yorker or a Northerner or a Brooklynite, even if I wanted to be one.

I don't think so. Biographies and other histories of various geniuses suggest it isn't, depending on how broadly you want to define "others." Other professionals working with the same set of data? Maybe, but even then there's a spectrum which doesn't seem to map to the quality of the understanding. The public at large -- in other words, an ability to explain an idea to people who encounter it at a disadvantage compared to the manner in which you encounter it? No, not at all. That's a whole separate skill-set. It's a very good skill-set to have, but it's separate from the understanding.

"Bush is not an imbecile. He's not a puppet. I think that Bush is a sociopathic personality. I think he's incapable of empathy. He
has an inordinate sense of his own entitlement, and he's a very skilled manipulator. And in all the snickering about his alleged
idiocy, this is what a lot of people miss."

Emphasis Mine.

stence OTM too, I hate that he's so constantly considered a Southerner when the majority of his raising & education occured in New England

Not all of them are - but John seems to have put some thought into who he supports rather than voting for anything in the right party.
John has offered no more evidence of this than I have (and I wasn't really saying John doesn't put thought into his choice, I have no idea, but if someone who always votes Dem is unthinking, the same goes for someone who alwayas votes third party).

But I haven't seen a Nader supporter flatly deny anything like gabbneb flat out denied aspects of Clinton's Presidency up there.
Greens have been pretty keen on flatly denying Nader's stock holdings (which don't really matter, but Nader pretty fiercely attacked Gore for similar holdings) and most importantly, Nader has never held public office, Clinton was President of the United States, it's not like Nader has proven himself AT ALL or had deal with anything close to the pressures Clinton faced as President of the United States. I wouldn't go as far as gabbnebb necessarily, I disagree with a lot of what Clinton did, but he was still a good President.

Why is it that Bush managed to push through so much of his ideological agenda without the mandate (of actually being elected) that Clinton had either term? It's not just 9/11. Under Clinton, as I said, we saw real wages decline, the wage gap increase, rollbacks to the social safety net, military spending stayed the same, "don't ask don't tell," etc..

What have Democrats gotten by co-opting the GOP-lite pro-business agenda? Nothing. It hasn't even won them elections.

John has offered no more evidence of this than I have (and I wasn't really saying John doesn't put thought into his choice, I have no idea, but if someone who always votes Dem is unthinking, the same goes for someone who alwayas votes third party).
But I never said anything about your voting patterns or habits. You haven't indicated, at all, the level of blind support for anyone with a 'D' that gabbneb has.

Greens have been pretty keen on flatly denying Nader's stock holdings (which don't really matter, but Nader pretty fiercely attacked Gore for similar holdings) and most importantly, Nader has never held public office, Clinton was President of the United States, it's not like Nader has proven himself AT ALL or had deal with anything close to the pressures Clinton faced as President of the United States. I wouldn't go as far as gabbnebb necessarily, I disagree with a lot of what Clinton did, but he was still a good President.
No, Nader hasn't held office, but that's irrelevant. I've never seen the levels of blind support, the cult of personality around him that would deny any wrongdoing on his part. And, it has to be said, no one who voted for Nader really thought he'd be President.

If you want a good cult following to match up, I'd point to Noam Chomsky's followers. Some of those people are just as scary in their worship as gabbneb (or Stuart).

This is why I am afraid of Dems - Clinton bombed, invaded & fucked with countries in a way that would give Dems conniptions if Bush were doin' it/when Bush is doin' it, but they still get misty about the guy who brought us such revolutionary acts of egalitarianism as "don't ask/don't tell." Please God spare me gutless center-leftists like President Clinton.

Perhaps the third party revolution or whatever really has to come up through the state level to have any chance of success. "voting your conscience" these days seems to be the same as "throwing away your vote on someone who can't even get 5%". I like to think that as (if) the states get more progressive, the national gov will inevitably follow suit (to justify to myself a vote for lousy Kerry).

I think all *three* of us would agree that people can be terrible disappointments, that political parties and especially American ones at this point in time can be and are walking and talking contradictions and potential examples of hypocrisy, and that regardless of what happened in the past there is definite folly in the White House at present, yes?

(xpost Ned, there's nothing particularly special about the flaws of American political parties unless you are also implying that Americans are by default worse human beings than everyone else on the Earth.)

No, I meant that given America's particular role and place in the world their flaws are more magnified and also more understandably worthy of scrutiny than the flaws of political parties in Kiribati or Martinque, say.

And I thought I was bad when it came to reductum ad absurdum arguments!

While that's certainly part of the story, but Clinton and Les Aspin failed to adequately armor the troops he reinstated after he pulled out and violence flared again. Still, there's a clear difference between (even major) mishandling of an extremely complicated situation the minute one starts a term (Clinton never had the grace period given to almost every other President) and Bush's premeditated Iraq attack.

But you just said yourself that that kind of compromise is inherent in the Presidency? Nader or any other Third Party candidate might not have to make any of the campaign compromises the Dems and Repubs have to, but those same checks and balances would still the minute they entered office.

There's a name I haven't thought of in a long time...

(C0l1n: point taken, but I really didn't want to write an entire essay to highlight the basic point, namely the situation in Somalia was not the same thing as the situation in Iraq and equating them solely so that you can ride your hobby horse against someone who is actually more sympathetic towards you than 80% of the people on the thread is FUCKING STUPID.)

I think he died a few years after he resigned.

Reading JD's comments again - at no point does he equate Somalia and Iraq. He cites Somalia as an example of a place where Clinton fucked up, and where he was given a pass by Dems, and stating that if it had been Bush II in the exact same situation the Dems would be livid.

Dammit Ned I came back to this thread to rant, not to hear reaonsable people mending bridges and whatnot

Yes Ned, we can agree that Bush sux, etc. I am even, as I have said before when foolishly choosing to enter discussions like this one, going to bite the fucking bullet and vote for the wealthy white plutocrat that the primary voters ran like sheep to nominate after he'd won one primary and the news weeklies had announced that he was the guy with momentum. OK? You guys win, I'll vote for a guy from the party that had to be dragged kicking & screaming into the age of civil rights, conspired with their "opposites" to squash the Equal Rights Amendment, hasn't got the fucking balls to say out loud "of course gay people have the right to marry, what are you people, insane?", etc. etc. etc. I'll vote for the guy who is by no means worth my vote, or yours. It just infuriates me, to the point of spitting frothing rage, that I'm supposed to not only vote for this privileged fuck, I'm supposed to get all happy about it and pretend like Kerry is some vast improvement over the asshole presently in office. He isn't. He won't appoint quite so many born-agains to his cabinet, so there's that. But he voted to bomb Iraq when my gut said, and the guts of so many on the left (and in the center! and on the right! worldwide!), that it was premature at best and deeply fishy at worst. "If I'd known then what I know now" is a disingenous line of argument: it's not like he couldn't have cocked an ear toward the very demographic he'd be courting a year later. He smelled which way the wind was blowing and voted to doom thousands upon thousands to a death they didn't deserve. He'll do more shit like this in office, and when people on the far left complain about it, we'll have to hear how he's better than Bush, or how Roe v. Wade isn't in as much immediate peril (though the Democratic party has done so much backpedaling over the right to choose in the years since Reagan that to imagine Roe v. Wade is "safe" under a Dem president seems wildly optimistic to me), or how he's working real hard to stop drilling in Alaska, but it's going to be a slow process and not to expect any miracles overnight, and so forth.

But yes. You guys win, and you'd won already because you kind of do have a point: the guy who'll only kill three of my sisters is marginally better than the guy who'll kill all five. I'll vote for the lowest common denominator in November, and I'll vote to re-elect him in four years, and so on. But please. Don't ask me or others to pretend that the Democratic party likes the left except when it finds the rhetoric convenient every four years, 'cause it doesen't.

Didn't mean to call you a zombie Dan, but you did say I had a defective mind. I mean sure I didn't go to HARVARD or nothin' but

kidding, kidding

No, what I said was that the current two party system breeds compromise. Which is why, unless things change drastically, I've been voting for third party candidates since 1990.

The two major parties are not the same at all, but the reality is that they tend to act similarly once in power. It's what you have to do to retain that power.

(from one of my posts further above:)

And I thought I was bad when it came to reductum ad absurdum arguments!

And I thought I was bad when it came to reductum ad absurdum arguments!

and I...a..t..e...re...ctum

Or even:

and I...a..t..e........c.um

x-post Ned u r $$$

sorry that my language was imprecise - i was amused by my assignment of an implication to your language (that some on this thread who claim to be of the left may in fact be of the right) that you likely did not imply. i was not amused in any way at your expense.

The Democrats of yore were hardly heroes, but they managed to actually have a few principles outside of "cash check, get elected." That was the wonderful thing about Dean (and to a lesser extent "honest, I'm pro-choice!" Kucinich) - even if his principles weren't to my liking (or to the liking of someone who supported him), he actually had them.

Ah, advertising. The wonderful thing about Dean is that he managed to bring back to the fold those who pay more attention to rhetoric than action.

...and Milo's right to be suspicious: the "you must vote" lecture is almost always followed by an explanation of how third parties are good in principle, but "now isn't the time," because "this election is too important," because "there's too much at stake," etc.

No, I think third party presidential candidates are always bad in principle as long as our government maintains the current constitutional order, if for no other reason than because they threaten to disenfranchise a plurality if not a majority. But I do think that "there's too much at stake" this year, because BUSH IS THE THIRD PARTY. I am indebted to Andrew for being a nonpartisan who can articulate this point rather than one who is tinged with the scarlet D.

As for the great horrors of Clinton's tenure in office, I am of course aware of the evidence presented on the thread (and of course don't agree with certain of his decisions, though I do agree or at least am agnostic on others) but I stand by my statement. I'll substantiate it some day when I don't have to work all night, and if I feel like it.

and fyi, milo, I have in fact voted for third party candidates to the left of the Democrat before. not in national elections though.

No, I think third party presidential candidates are always bad in principle as long as our government maintains the current constitutional order, if for no other reason than because they threaten to disenfranchise a plurality if not a majority.
Voting for a third-party candidate causes disenfranchisement? How does that work? I took away someone's vote by casting a ballot for Nader?

and fyi, milo, I have in fact voted for third party candidates to the left of the Democrat before. not in national elections though.
"My third-party friend..."

I wasn't necessarily talking about you.

Voting for a third-party candidate causes disenfranchisement? How does that work? I took away someone's vote by casting a ballot for Nader?

you're aware of the desire of many in the third party community for instant runoff voting? work backwards.

"My third-party friend..."

yeah, well I guess I don't have your "blind allegiance"

you're aware of the desire of many in the third party community for instant runoff voting? work backwards.
The desire for IRV is irrelevant. What you said was, "they threaten to disenfranchise a plurality if not a majority." How does voting for a third party disenfranchise anyone?

you think I was saying that you're the only person who supported Dean?

Or does that depend solely on whether or not you think can come up with a response?

but conscience doesn't necessarily translate into "i will vote for the candidate whose stated views approximate my own, or if there is no such candidate, i will not vote"--it can just as easily translate to "my conscience compels me to make the vote that i feel will translate most effectively into ensuring the survival or augmentation of certain policies and programs that i feel are just, or the ending of other policies which i feel are unjust"

dan writes: "There's absolutely nothing wrong with supporting a third party if neither of the major parties appeal to you. My issue is the characterization that neither party appeals to you, ergo they are the same. IT'S NOT TRUE. It's akin to saying "People from New York City are exactly like people from Chicago.""

this is my feeling entirely. vote for nader if you prefer, but saying that the democrats and republicans are ideologically close as parties are not say, here in france (though this is arguable), is not the same as saying they are identical. and i truly believe that in their distinctions, however small they may be from a certain perspective, are the fates of a lot of americans' lives.

I was quite clearly talking to you (but not only you), and never said I wasn't (note the word "about" upthread). Yes, your post suggested to me that you had "support[ed]" him at least in the sense that you wanted him to win the nomination (I obviously have no way of knowing if you would have voted for him in the general, and would be skeptical about the likelihood of your doing so), though this wasn't necessarily clear. But I wasn't basing my point on the imagined possibility of your support alone - did you think that I was saying that the great thing about Dean is that he got one extra vote? Whether you "support[ed]" him isn't relevant to my point, which was that to me your characterization of him accurately described why he received extraordinary support from many young people who aren't you. Is there really a need for this kind of exegesis?