“Chris Hedges is right. Stand ready to support the party and candidate who reprents your views towards public policy.
Don’t sweat the outcome.”

THE OUTCOME IS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT!

Whoa:::

me thinks your protests are telling me much…

Kucinich, only as a proponent of healthcare as a fundanmental right, not as the next POTUS.. (comment on what I wrote not what you think I wrote)

You are a bright guy, an admirable fellow,, but you have this propensity for placing words in others mouths..

December 21st, 2009 at 1:18 pm
“howls of execration”

Pablo – you are too kind. But I will do my best to live up the standard you’ve set for me. I guess I should pull my Ginsberg off the shelf to get the juices flowing.

————————

No reg, it’s Camus: “L’etranger” (The Stranger, last line) check it out… maybe at City Lights.

Pablo… I have forgotten more about Nader and Kucinich than you will ever hope to know. I have known them both for 25 plus years. I told you I was one of the few endorsers of Nader in a NYTIMES ad when it was very unpopular.

I think Nader was an OK candidate in 2000. After that, he became a terrible candidate. I also think his latest book is a lot of conservative home-spun hogwash.

Kucinich was more or less a catastrophe as mayor. He has been a terrible candidate for president. He surrounded himself with New Age (advisors) and mixed the Course of Miracles mumbo jumbo into his stump speeches.

He has NO concept in how to turn whatever support he has into any sort of real movement. When he entered the Iowa caucuses in 2008 it took him months to open a single campaign office. And when he did, he hired ONE staffer for the most important caucus of the campaign.

Now, perhaps this is all due to shortage of resources. Or neglect. Or both. Or because even Dennis didnt take his own campaign seriously. But you tell me… why should have anyone wasted their support, their vote, or their donation on a Kucinich campaign that wasnt even willing to make any real fight on the ground on Iowa? Dennis’ “campaign” was all about getting his mug on TV and not about movement bldg.

And before you cry me his financial woes and the odds stacked against an underdog, remember that Howard Dean started out in mid 2003 with 1% name recognition, no federal profile and NO money whatsoever. I seem to remember him overcoming that because, unlike Kucinich, he took his campaign seriously and the favor was returned by a whole lot of Democratic voters.

When Kucinich voted AGAINST the House bill (the good old days compared to the senate version), he earned himself a tin foil hat, of not a kick in the pants. His vote aided the enemies of reform by allowing them to say the damn thing squeaked by with only 2 votes. Thanks Dennis.

And it wasnt even an authentic vote. I would bet MY LIFE that if passage of the bill had actually depended on Kucninich’s one vote, he would have voted for it.

I asked you in the other thread and I will ask you here: PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME THE POLITICAL DYNAMIC THAT RESULTED IN KUCINICH GETTING ONLY 2% OF THE DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY VOTE (OR LESS). Why didn’t grass roots, average working class Dems vote for the sort of change you claim they have been clamoring for?

My answer to that question: Democratic VOTERS (not the elites) didn’t agree with or didnt find Kucinich to be a serious candidate and they chose someone else. Pretty damn simple.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/leadership-obama-style-an_b_398813.html

Once the snow melts and the maple syrup is harvested.

Pablo – you are too kind. But I will do my best to live up the standard you’ve set for me. I guess I should pull my Ginsberg off the shelf to get the juices flowing.

Kyle: “irritating and irritable scrags”

I think, unfortunately, that Kyle has more of a grip on the reality.

Anyhoo, thanks for the rockin’ posts. In the midst of my cynicism and pissed-off-ness regarding the recent nauseating sausage-making in congress, your posts are a shot in the arm. You’re like an atheist Santa! (thinner, and currently beardless, of course).

That would work. So would Russ Feingold.

” In other words, the one little tiny concept y’all can’t seem to get in your head is that there is NOTHING holding back the people from changing the system if enough of them wanted to. History is full of examples. ”
——————————-

When your hunble but outspoken resident village idiot suggests that the vanguard begin with an exodus of progressives from the DEMs, with their empty words and lukewarm deeds, you and the East Bay defender of the Party greet us with howls of execration.

In this fashion you two sound like the PRI: Oxymoronic. (How is it one both Institutional and Revolutionary? often asked in Mexico) So the people are free to leave the party…. up to the point where they begin to talk about it seriously… then they are, as Marc and Reg have variously said, fools and idiots.
On the other hand I have yet to observe a similar critique arising from the DEM who moves to the right and joins the party of torture. The colloquial explanation usually offered is that shit happens.

You seem to argue that that the American people are all yearning to be free but that Reg keeps tricking them back into the arms of the Democratic Party
————————–

It’s that Las Vegas thing going on in the big room behind where you are playing cards.

The rabbit, the hat, the wand… and REG bamboozling us with talk of the party.

The Democratic party has bent over backwards to follow the party of torture in their rightward drift…
You want to argue analogies about FDR and the PRI… argue the point!
The reason there is no meaningful reform of healthcare is because some DEM representatives are to the right of Atilla the Hun. Why not? Seats are safe.

(you know nothing of Atilla you BSers! In 1332 he was actually a man of the people!)

You seem to find ways to support the DEMs no matter how attenuated their populist leanings.
Think it will get better?

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

I said IF it actually did something I was for it. On the basis of your understanding that it WILL expand Medicaid and lower the threshold for the needy to step over into that group then OF COURSE it is a life raft.

Because I am self employed with a wildly vacillating income and am lucky enough to live in a state and county where services for 50′s are based on sliding scale for access to a very good county clinic for “seniors” (god help calling a baby boomer a “senior”) that is in part funded by a bequest AND depending on income I am sometimes covered by various levels of Medicaid. So I am “lucky” to have stumbled into a community I didn’t plan on living in where there are such amenities. It is an exception.

Most of my life I skipped around uninsured except when living in England.

I hope that clarifies my feelings about the bill.

And your lecture to Pablo isn’t saying anymore than what I have said forever on this blog about the American public being all the things HL Mencken said they were only triple it 80 years later and THAT is why we can barely maintain our ‘democracy’. We are a weird collection mental aberrations that the gene pool is still sorting itself out on.

And I think your failure to recognize a Kucinich or Nader as samples of good genetic material that should be engineered into the general population is just willful obtuseness. Human history has never supported the good guys, Marc and you have plenty of martyred friends to know that. So why your determination to classify a Kucinich or Nader as tin foil hat people? You should be photo shopping that gear on the heads of the masses.

It just occurred to me (as its near Christmas and all) to give you the benefit of the doubt and wonder if your refusal to even admire those that stand on principle is because your experience in South America associates doing that with a pretty good certainty for being murdered. History certainly supports that…so maybe as a survival mechanism you feel constant compromise and incremental progress the only safe way for institutions to be reshaped.

With all due respect to Kucinich, who I appreciate as a perennial gadfly, I think Dennis himself stops most Democrats from voting for him. Personally, if I were given the absolute power to put a full-blown social democrat in the Oval Office, I’d choose Bernie Sanders – who “isn’t” a Democrat. As someone who has the reputation as some sort of glad-hander for the DNC in these threads, I love seeing that “(I)” after Bernie’s name (even though he’s a de facto Democrat – and frankly one of the best spokespeople fervently progressive Dems have going for them on the issues. Of course, Senator Bernie represents a populace that’s smaller than Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district.)