US POLITICS: AMERICANS, PLEASE WELCOME YOUR NEW PRESIDENT... SCOTT BROWN!

lol "useful" prob wasn't the word i was going for

I found this fascinating yesterday. Reagan the leftist?

This one is almost as good. The best recent book on how Reagan handled Gorby and Soviet diplomacy generally is James Mann's Reagan's Rebellion.

The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, sorry.

depressing

What's depressing isn't even that I agree with Reagan, it's that there's an intellectual underpinning, a coherent argument behind it. With the present bunch it's all mindless CYA for Cheney and everyone's embarrassing flip-out after 9-11.

yep its very much CYA in action - Dubya/Cheney fucked things up so bad bringing so many random people into detention and then torturing them, its like there's no legally and politically viable way forward

And the partisan rump of remaining Republicans will find and use ANY way to justify anything to their (perceived) advantage.

Actually, Cheney has theories, which he's postulated since the Ford years.

Cheney was not so batshit, as I recall, as Sec of Def under Bush, Sr.

I just do not get, at a profound level, how over-reacting and changing our policies and 'going to the dark side' w/terrorists isn't giving them exactly what they want - a terrorized response. It's feckless AND craven.

yeah i dont think anyone here disagrees w/ that, unless i missed something. idk about "giving them what they want" tho - maybe just stop being terrorists and the terrorists will stop too

this is going to be awesome:

Taking cues from the “Contract with America” that led to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, a group known as Tea Party Patriots used a website to gather ideas for what they're calling the Contract from America.

Among the thousands of ideas submitted by more than 100,000 people so far are “Drill Here, Drill Now,” “Abolish the Department of Education,” and “Congress shall not exempt themselves.” The group will ask Americans this month to start winnowing 20 ideas down to a 10- or 12-point platform. The contract will be unveiled on Tax Day, April 15.

http://www.contractfromamerica.com

i smelllll a pollllllll

Under the U.S. Constitution, the Federal government has NO legitimate role to play in education. Unconstitutionally ignoring that fact has encouraged power-lusters to inculcate a spirit of serfdom in school children.

o rly

Nice.

Islamic terrorists have no more chance of "bringing America down" than the Weathermen did in the early '70s. They are the Republicans' greatest blessing. (I will spare you the D Perrin post on this.)

tea party makes me hate the internet tbh, it used to be these people just thumbed through a loompanics catalog & hung around at the greyhound station

Don't think anyone here will disagree with you on that, Morbs, Perrin link or no.

ya rly, although honest and heartfelt thanks for witholding the Perrin link

i'd be very very interested to know just how much and in what ways this mob is being prodded and paid by organized established political players

the answer may be less than we think, but it may be more

"if you control the mob, you control the country"

It's prodded, yes, and organized slightly, but these deep pockets of rage have always existed.

Last week's New Yorker boasts a profile of the Tea Party and that delightful charmer, Dick Armey.

sure, but it's all about mobilizing that rage. the usual ingredients, at least since the 1953 iranian coup, are:

- cash
- a few well-placed semi-undercover operatives
- a whole bunch of people who feel tired and powerless and disgusted

and no i don't mark all this down to some conspiracy, but i suspect there is leadership and coordination here that comes from well outside the grassroots (maybe this is mentioned in the newyorker article)

I think part of the dynamic we're seeing - and it's one of the reasons I support the President's incremental approach - is one where the right-wing populists, people who generally are puerile, incurious, emotional and self-entitled, are feeling frustrated that they've been basically proven wrong and are having difficulty swollowing that and moving on. They repudiated Bush and Cheney in 2008/2009 but now that the Republicans haven't really changed, just shifted personnel, the Teabaggers et al are trying to find reasons why they were more right to be 'conservative' than to admit that the libruls were generally right. They're going to lose generationally on gay rights. They're economically retarded wrt health care insurance reform. They're painting themselves into a sclerotically ideological corner and at some point, hopefully in 2012, a majority of the independants will prefer the sane, if ponderous approach of Obama to the loony, out-of-touch, obscurantists yipping and whining on the right. Regardless, I will either feel immense pity or downright contempt for whomever gets the Republican nomination in 2012; s/he will either be a partisan Kool-Aid drinking fool or a deeply compromised person of out-sized ambition. Just look what the combination of party lunacy and ambition has done to McCain.

McCain's facing the first real primary fight of his life. Did you see the twaddle he said at the DADT hearings yesterday?

Via Sullivan, this is McCain in 2006:

"The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to."

The guy is nothing but ego, now, if ever he was anything else.

What really worries me is that occasionally I have had vague sympathy with old school liberal Republicans and without a credible, viable opposition the Dems are going to get more bloated, more corrupt and more vain. When the major opposition party is nothing but fire-breathing flat-earthers, the Republic is in serious jeopardy.

The guy is nothing but ego, now, if ever he was anything else.

in fairness there is no politician of whom this statement is not true

any liberal Republicans left? Are Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits, and Charles Percy dead?

rip fiorello laguardia

in fairness there is no politician of whom this statement is not true

Point taken, however facile that is - the devil's in the details.

a deeply compromised person of out-sized ambition

M White, in fairness there is no presidential candidate in memory of whom this statement is not true.

I note that both you and J0hn are apparently uninterested in the nuance of the degree of self-regard and shamelessness exhibited by candidates. I, however, do. In fact, and yes, I basically agree with you, I find that is one of the most interesting things about politicians and people in power - what will they not stoop to do?

"The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, senator, we ought to change the policy, then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it because those leaders in the military are the ones we give the responsibility to."

The guy is nothing but ego, now, if ever he was anything else.

― Mit der Kattzheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens (Michael White), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 10:44 AM (46 minutes ago)

he's not quite as lax on torture though, hm

I note that both you and J0hn are apparently uninterested in the nuance of the degree of self-regard and shamelessness exhibited by candidates.

yeah for me this is almost an aesthetic exercise - the degree exhibited is more a question of self-control, isn't it? i.e., if one politician (the guy I vote for) manages to persuade me that he's actually less power-mad than the other guy, that says less about him than about 1) his powers of persuasion and 2) my need for a kind of political narrative

however facile that is

feel free to quit bein a dick to me whenever, dunno if this is news to you but people can disagree abt shit w/o being assholes

(k3vin I think from a sort of Greek tragedy standpoint McCain's position on torture is also essentially ego-originating - because it impacts him so personally, he cares. we're all like that to greater & lesser extents, but the selling point for a politician is that he's above just thinking about how he feels, above caring about stuff in which he has or has had a personal stake)

but let's not forget: McCain caved on torture.

the selling point for a politician is that he's above just thinking about how he feels

surely not though? There's at least as much political hay to be made from being the opposite type of politician.

Warner/McCain/Graham/Powell to Bush: "Drop dead." (aka, the US, torture and the Geneva Convention, fall 2006)

feel free to quit bein a dick to me whenever, dunno if this is news to you but people can disagree abt shit w/o being assholes

Sorry, J0hn, that was not only uncalled for but really directed at someone else here at work who's been exasperating me all morning.

It's not that I'm uninterested in evaluating who's Less Awful, just bored with it.

What seems facile is saying it can't be different (always a matter of degree, yeah; degrees that matter).

I have never said it can't be different, and I try never to be too self-assured about anything under the sun, but I have been studying politics and history since I was a child and not just those of the US, and it has left me with a somewhat jaundiced though not hopeless view of human behavior and politics. The stories of the weaknesses, temptations and pratfalls of the powerful are nothing new in any culture.

Evil is interesting, guys.

Sorry, J0hn, that was not only uncalled for but really directed at someone else here at work who's been exasperating me all morning.

no sweat Michel it's not like I don't snap at ppl too! xxoo jd

does anyone post on these boards who's actually studied political science? cos i've been knocking around this theory for a while, and i have no idea if this is old ground or what. anyway here goes:

politicians in an electoral system, if they're successful, have to have (what boils down to) two qualities, that i've shorthanded in my head as "juice" and "weight".

"weight" is all the off-camera governance stuff: administrative skill, experience, negotiating power, ability to command others, dispute settling, time in the trenches of one org or another, policy chops, broader theoretical education, etc. but also even less quantifiable personal attributes like drive, emotional stability, "cool under fire," commitment to principles. this is what people like to think they're getting when they pick a candidate to support -- and coming up with ways of indicating these qualities is most important in a primary situation, when the candidates are most ideologically similar

but there's the pop element. "juice" is basically anything about that politician that is unique to him or her that gets and holds attention/affection/admiration in a mass sense. physicality, the celebrity element, the voice, personal history, all that. this is where "identity" resides, and it doesn't have to be fair. hillary is a woman. that's important. obama, you may have heard, is black. you'd get these weird arguments during the election that obama's blackness was an unfair advantage because it made attacking him a little trickier for a bunch of old white conservatives, and because he had a ready and willing base of support in black america (after dicking around with bill clinton's temper for a while).

anyway, where am i going with this? john mccain's primary made me think of all this again, cos it seems to me that the thumbnail sketch of mccain that everybody knows -- "honorable maverick who was tortured as a POW" -- is not weight, it was juice. the feckless national media always considered it very "weighty" but it wasn't, it's a hook. being black in america is no picnic, historically, and neither is doing time in the hanoi hilton, but, lo and behold, in 2008 these ARE "positives" ie, political advantages, of a kind. mccain has always been weight-less, he has always been all-story, all-character. conservatives hated him cos he was "moderate," but that's not even accurate; i don't think it's even accurate to say he was incoherent. he ran on personality, kept winning on personality, and that's how he legislated. i don't think his selection of palin -- the most all-juice, zero-weight figure imaginable -- is or was a headscratcher at all.

so basically i can't stand the guy, he's a clueless fraud and i'll be happy to see him fight and lose, or maybe win, even tho the other guy is a huge nutbar. and i doubt a democrat can win that race in AZ, and if one does it'll be another ben nelson. but whatever, fuck you, john mccain.

it occurs to me i can't even remember if i've hashed out this theory on these threads before, lol

"Alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art," - Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), on what he claims will follow in the wake of repealing DADT.

The book I'm reading now shows the disjunction between serving as the visible face of a movement and the numerous chits this avatar has to collect if he wants to keep being the face.

there's no way that's a real quote

"Alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art," - Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), on what he claims will follow in the wake of repealing DADT.

massive lol