I was going to post a diary today on the ruling establishment and their agenda but I got busy and couldn't finish it.
So I figured I'd share a little trick with you all I've been doing lately, especially since the campaign flood.
The Rec'd diary list only has eight slots - which is not enough imo. This ensures that diaries with a significant number of recommends, which are a good indicator of quality or point of interest, will not make the list.
So I have a little workaround the gives me a cool list of diaries based on how many rec's they have.
The crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration are simply too many to mention here. And as the last week has shown, we haven't even scratched the surface yet. There are so many, in fact, that we've become almost desensitized to them. The accumulative effect is that our country, a nation of laws, has been defined down.
Even the most egregious have lost their bite when we speak of them. "Bush lied to take us to war" has become a hollow cry - I have to rephrase it just to restore its impact: Bush actually manufactured false evidence to trick the American people into supporting his illegal invasion of Iraq. That kind of works.
Bush violated the Fourth Amendment of the constitution and lied to the American people while he was doing it. Oh well, that's George.
One of my favorites that has largely gone unnoticed: The Bush administration manufactured terrorist threats to scare the public for political objectives. Keith Olbermann is the only journalist I know of who has remotely addressed this one. All in a days work, right Dick?
Currently, on the recommended list, there is a diary where the argument is made that we should be focusing more on McCain because, and this is a quote, Hillary's "already lost".
Now, I fully agree with many of the sentiments made in that diary, and those of Rachel Maddow who I admire greatly. Especially the one about winning gracefully. I believe wholly that the venomousness of some of the attacks on Clinton are actually hurting Obama and don't accurately represent the kind of campaign he's trying to run. And more than anything, we're going to need these people in the general election. So I'm all for winning gracefully, and trying to be like Barack and heal this party.
But the part about Hillary having already lost is both incorrect and dangerous at this time in the campaign.
You know, I'm just asking. Because the look on that little boy's face is really important to me. There was a time, I have to believe, when it was important to you. Are you really so determined to win that you would try to destroy that? Really?
Of course, Hillary will never read this, so this is really going out to the Hillary supporters who, if Gallup is to be believed, claim they would rather vote for John McCain.
Do you really want to be associated with a campaign to destroy what's depicted in that picture?
Am I the only one who noticed that, during the debates, almost every time John Edwards began to speak about one of his central campaign themes, corporate power and corruption in Washington, Wolf Blitzer would begin to interrupt him? Brain Williams at NBC did it too. Edwards could ramble on all day long, but as soon as he mentioned corruption, he was suddenly out of time.
Then, after Edwards dropped out, the eulogies for his campaign, at least in the corporate media, reduced his message to fighting poverty. How quaint. No message of corporate power or corruption in Washington. Suddenly Edwards's whole campaign was about poverty. You would think he had been running for president of the Salvation Army.
We're seeing the same thing with the Obama speech. In today's New York Times, plastered all over the front page of their 'Week in Review', are African American lips. Seriously, you really have to see it. African American lips. Suddenly, with all that's at stake, from war to the economy to global warming, and yes, corporate power, this election is all about race. Of course, the Times is not alone. While Obama himself has never made race a campaign issue, the corporate media has done it for him.
I don't watch a lot of television. So I missed until the last two days the full extent of what's been going on. And what is going on is another full scale assault by the media (mostly television) on one of our Democratic candidates.
It's really simple. The media needed some way to take down Barack Obama, and since they didn't have anything on him (by all accounts he appears to have conducted his life with honor and integrity - something that makes him dangerous in Washington), they went after his preacher. And so we find ourselves in a situation where a presidential candidate is being attacked not for what he did, but for what someone else did.
If I had been watching television, something I occasionally do just to see what shit they're peddling, I would have written this a week ago - I'm sorry this is somewhat late to the game. And it appears the netroots have lost focus of what is really going on here. It is simply unacceptable to hold a candidate responsible for the actions of someone else who is not under their employ. I can't believe people are falling for it.
It's amusing. A relative handful of Hillary supporters have launched a "strike" on Daily Kos and now such luminaries as Matt Drudge have picked up the story and others are citing it as representative as a great divide among the blogosphere between the two camps.
There is no great divide. Hillary supporters constitute somewhere around a whopping 10% at Daily Kos. Is that division? No. That means that Daily Kos users are 90% united in their support of Barack Obama.
But it's not just Daily Kos. I read many progressive blogs. And while the numbers don't appear to be quite as severe as Daily Kos, they do trend similarly in their support of Obama and, most importantly, their opposition to the negative campaign tactics of the Clinton camp.
Get out the popcorn and watch John Pilger's excellent documentary on the real American agenda in the Third World. Spreading democracy? Hardly. Try propping up murderers, dictators and rightwing terrorists so we can loot the resources of poor countries.
I've heard twice now Obama say that we can't build a moat around America. He says we should "embrace globalization" and that our workers "can compete".
So it looks like the change that Obama is advocating doesn't much include trade policy. This is to be expected. I still want him to win.
But I would like to point out that if there is one country in the world that could build a protectionist moat around its borders, the US is it. And this is important because it goes to the lie that has been propagated for decades.
We hear it all the time: the US economy cannot survive protectionist trade policies. You hear it from politicians, leaders of trade groups, of course, and you hear it obedient economists - the stupidest single group of individuals on Earth.
Alright. I haven't written one attack diary on Hillary Clinton or her campaign in this entire primary season despite my strong opposition to her candidacy. Not that I couldn't have. There's a lot of dirt under the Clinton's fingernails as they've clawed their way to power. I just haven't seen the value in going negative. I wrote a diary last week suggesting Hillary should pull out before she goes negative. But I kept it nice.
But now... really, I am almost speechless. If the last week wasn't enough to disgust even the most neutral of observers, as the Clinton camp dived further into the slime, this should:
"So many women around Texas and America are saying, `Wish Ann was here, for us and for Hillary,'" a female voiceover says on the video.
"Today Ann would be asking all of us to make a statement. She would be traveling to every small town and big city in Texas, urging us all to take a stand, be counted, to make a difference, to make history," it says while a picture of Richards and Clinton appears on the screen. "This one's for Texas. This one's for our country. This one's for Ann."
I just got off the phone with a friend. He's the kind of guy who enjoys running database queries on voter data. I called him before I wrote this to see if he could help me find a reason for Hillary to stay in this race. He couldn't.
It is a mathematical certainty that Hillary Clinton has lost this race. And there is simply no scenario where she can claim the nomination without doing severe harm to the Democratic party.
To understand this you have to understand the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters. There hasn't been anything like it in generations. I asked my wife, who works with African American kids to help them get into college, what her students were thinking about this race.
Imagine the scenario where the first African American in history to actually have a better than average chance of winning the presidency, wins both the popular vote and the majority of pledged delegates in the primary election, only to have it stripped away by the leaders of the Democratic party.
I've often imagined what it would be like if there wasn't a Democratic party. But only in the context of how long it would take for the Republicans to destroy themselves if allowed to fully realize their vision for America unfettered from the Democrats. It's a fun thought experiment. And I give it about 10 years before the backlash from right wing rule created an American equivalent to Evo Morales.
But today I am thinking of a Democratic-party-free world for an entirely different reason. I'm thinking about how the scenario mentioned above would actually play out. And it's looking like I may get to see my thought experiment in the real world.
I've tried to get into this race. I really have. I should be excited about the first female and first African American presidential candidates who actually have a chance to win. It is historical. But unfortunately my enthusiasm for the great achievement this race represents in overcoming long standing prejudices and unequal opportunities, especially for African Americans, is tempered by my disfavor of being manipulated.
Many won't like to believe this, but Barack and Hillary were chosen long before today. Before even the 2006 midterms. Here was the plan: The Clintons return to the White House with Obama as running mate. Then, hopefully, the groundswell of dangerously populist sentiments rising among the utterly disgusted electorate will be drowned out by the historical reemergence of racial and gender politics.
Then, according to the plan, the 2008 presidential race, and by proxy the congressional races as well, will not be about corporate power, the corruption of our government, the real causes for the destruction of the working class, the real causes for the Iraq war, the real crimes of George Bush and company, or anything else that threatens the establishment power structure in the US. If all goes accordingly, we'll be so caught up in the Big Firsts that we'll put those concerns aside.
The following is an (relatively small) excerpt from Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone article, How Trivial Can the Media Make the Presidential Race?. I strongly recommend it. I didn't blockquote it because it's all him after this. Me, I'm speechless.
"Some people think you get change by demanding it," says the former first lady. "Some people think you get change by hoping for it. I think you get change by working hard for it every single day."
I see reporters frantically writing in their notebooks and laptops. The line was the money shot of this whole presentation, tomorrow's headline.
In a vacuum, of course, this is the most meaningless kind of computer-generated horseshit, the type of thing you would expect to hear coming out of the mouth of a $200-an-hour inspirational speaker at a suburban sales conference. But in this tightest of presidential races, Hillary attacking "hope" amounts to a major rhetorical offensive. "Hope," after all, is Barack Obama's own personal spoonful of oatmeal, and by disparaging it, Hillary has given this gym full of political hacks tomorrow's sports headline.
I know. It's not over till it's over and all that. But it's time to make a choice: Is the increasingly slim chance for an Edwards victory worth giving this thing to Hillary?
I have all the concerns about Obama that so many have stated here. I honestly, to this day, don't know what change Obama is specifically talking about. That scares me. I believe that in a democracy such as ours, in this modern age, you have to lay out what you really want to do, fights and all, and let the voters choose. Only then will we have the mandate for change.
But while I don't know exactly what an Obama presidency will bring, I have a damn good idea what Hillary's will. And it will be bad for the country, bad for the progressive cause, and bad for the party.
There are two kinds of people in this world - those who believe in people, and those who believe in ideas.
Those who believe in ideas understand that people are imperfect, sometimes betray, often disappoint. They understand that people come and go, while ideas live forever. Here's an example of some people who believed in ideas.
Many supporters of Barack Obama believe that he will usher in a new era of change. They believe that he can unite the country, pull in independents and moderate Republicans, and "take this country forward." Lately, Obama's been ramping up his anti-"special interests" rhetoric, and they believe that too. But I think any serious, objective Democrat needs to ask a couple of hard questions.
If Obama really is this candidate of change, why doesn't he scare the hell out of the entrenched interests who benefit so much from the status quo?
And why the hell are they supporting his campaign? That's right. Supporting his campaign.
