12 reasons to Reject Obama
- Thread starter Ruanaidh
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That is one of my favourite websites
- Aug 1, 2002
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The Cockburn Brothers [who are on the money most of the time] agree with you on the NeoCon Rahm argument:
http://www.counterpunch.org/. The horror - No Shalom for us
After spending a few days with the thirty somethings in Canberra you would think I was immune from self delusion about bourgiouse "progressive" parties. Oh well maybe hope is audacious [and self deluding]
By the way Jane is the reason you love Palin so much connected with the fact she was the Kristol's personal choice. Kristol the younger is still cheerleading for Palin 2012
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12516666
For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.
...
Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble
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Andrew Sullivan interesting on Palin:
Mark Lilla has a must-read in the WSJ today. (Dislcosure: we were political theory students of Shklar and Mansfield at Harvard together years ago). It charts the collapse of the intellectual right from a pioneering attempt to re-think established nostrums about public policy to ... well the Caribbean cruise now floating around on a sea of denial and contempt:
Mark Lilla has a must-read in the WSJ today. (Dislcosure: we were political theory students of Shklar and Mansfield at Harvard together years ago). It charts the collapse of the intellectual right from a pioneering attempt to re-think established nostrums about public policy to ... well the Caribbean cruise now floating around on a sea of denial and contempt:
The Palin farce is already the stuff of legend. [but] John McCain's choice was not a fluke, or a senior moment, or an act of desperation. It was the result of a long campaign by influential conservative intellectuals to find a young, populist leader to whom they might hitch their wagons in the future. And not just any intellectuals. It was the editors of National Review and the Weekly Standard, magazines that present themselves as heirs to the sophisticated conservatism of William F. Buckley and the bookish seriousness of the New York neoconservatives. After the campaign for Sarah Palin, those intellectual traditions may now be pronounced officially dead.
Irving Kristol's bitter capitulation to populism a quarter century ago was the harbinger. It's all been downhill since:
Their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.
One reason I believe the reconstruction of conservatism will require a generation's work is that the rot has gone so deep among so many with so much patronage. If it weren't for the blogosphere allowing new thoughts and debate to bubble up from below, and outside the Kristol-Lowry-Steyn axis, I'd despair.
evo
Let's hit the f*ken road!
It's true.
The GOP need a new Barry Goldberg to expel the Kristols and various other riff raff.They've had their go now,and royally ferked it up.
The GOP need a new Barry Goldberg to expel the Kristols and various other riff raff.They've had their go now,and royally ferked it up.
The neo cons work in the Republican party is done. Now the baton has been passed to their next gen neo lib confreres in the Democratic Party. Suspect you might find even Kristol, Krauthammer et al moving to support of the Obots over time.
Unless this financial crisis gets so bad it stuffs things for the Obots (or Obama's lack of experience DOES become a negative factor) in 4 years time they will take the remaining Rebublican strongholds in the south and mid west/west and really effect a sea change in the United States - just as Tony Blair did to the Tories.
A la Tories, the Repubs will then have to recast themselves to embrace the permament middleclass-welfare-state Obama is intending to create. It'll be the Palins, Jindals of the Republican Party who will be best placed to pick up the Repub banner then, as they are popular, centrist, radical reformers in their own states.
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Even if you lose you win Jane!!
Is the reason you love Palin so much because she is the Kristol's choice. Surely you cannot believe they are good for American democracy. They make William F. Buckley seem like a great guy
They're faux fixation with Nascar Republicans reminds me of university left nerds of the seventies who loved workers but did not really know and would prefer not to associate with the lower orders
PS - Rahm's Dad seems like a colourful fellow who can give good advice to his son:
Emanuel, as Ralph Nader points out in my interview with him below, represents the worst of the Clinton years. His profile as regards Israel is explored well on this site by lawyer John Whitbeck. He’s a former Israeli citizen, who volunteered to serve in Israel in 1991 and who made brisk millions in Wall Street. He is a super-Likudnik hawk, whose father was in the fascist Irgun in the late Forties, responsible for cold-blooded massacres of Palestinians. Dad’s unreconstructed ethnic outlook has been memorably embodied in his recent remark to the Ma’ariv newspaper that "Obviously he [Rahm] will influence the president to be pro-Israel… Why wouldn't he be [influential]? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House."
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They have destroyed it!!!!
In this case, rather to my surprise, I think I have. .
If someone had asked me "Is there anything that would change your mind about Obama" ... I woulda said, "sure, someone convinces me the Obots are Blairites ".
Contra. Honestly.
I. Do. Not. Love. Sarah Palin.
But nor do I suffer from adolescent Palin Derangement Syndrome.
One look at her record as Governor and before that as the elected mayor of her home town, shows that she is a centre right (not FAR right) radical/progressive reformer who is able thereby to cut across party lines and achieve stratospheric popularity ratings. If Obama does the same while he is in office he will be matching her already demonstrated performance but on a national level, not state.
They are both representatives of generation X coming to power. They have far more similarities than differences. That's why both of them pulled the big crowds and the big ratings and why the thread on Sarah Palin here must be the longest recorded on BF.
So please spare me further lectures when you yourself admittedly still yearn for the 70s! I'm in 2008 right now and its a new century.
Obama's foreign policy will be interesting. Obviously he's committed to withdrawal, and he's gonna place more emphasis on diplomacy and soft power and less on sabre-rattling. But there's an awful lot of wiggle room, it seems to me. Despite his willingness to talk to Iran, he's kept military force on the table, and he's just as pro-Israel as anyone. I think it's pretty clear that the US deployment in Iraq will be scaled back -- but by how much? If there are residual forces (and there will be), what form will they take? Bush-era foreign policy will certainly be revised, but it may not be reversed -- at least not as much as many anticipate.
The ridicule and controversy provoked by Palin were only partly to do with where she fell on the political continuum, Jane. As the campaign rolled along, it became increasingly clear that she didn't meet even the most minimal competence, intelligence, or knowledge threshold. Not to mention the fact that she lied repeatedly and blatantly.
As for her popularity in Alaska, that's easily explained -- it's got SFA to do with some previously hidden political brilliance and everything to do with the $3000 rebate she put in Alaskans' pocket via oil revenue. Christ, that kinda windfall will buy anyone popularity -- even I would approve of her if it was my pocket the money was going into. (Well, not really. But you get my point.)
More similarities than differences? Apart from (relatively) proximate birthdays, how do you figure that? Obama is an ivy-leaguer, Obama edited the Harvard Law Review, Obama can actually speak in coherent sentences, Obama has written two bestsellers in which he explains his beliefs and ideology, Obama has been interviewed by countless better, tougher journalists than Katie Couric and not come out of any of them looking like a blithering idiot, etc.
Your Palin apologias are embarrassing dreck, Jane. Next you'll be telling us that Russell Robertson is the next Mick Jagger and Hayden Christiansen the next Al Pacino.
I don't think Emanuel's appointment as CoS is necessarily a harbinger of Obama's foreign policy. Personally, I think Emanuel's selection has more to do with organisational skills, Washington and White House knowhow, and ruthless partisanship. He's savvy and he's a headkicker. While he'll no doubt have input into a whole host of policy areas, I suspect he's viewed more as a can-do man than a repository of great foreign-policy expertise or influence.
evo
Let's hit the f*ken road!
Thats what they said about Cheney.
Neo Libs and Neo cons have stuff all in common.
Neo Libs have even less in common with the Dems plenty of whom are anti free trade and most of whom love tax and spend.
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I don't yearn for the seventies - I am just not willing to bend over and take it from clowns who are chicken hawks. You have moved way beyond accomodation particularly if you talk glowingly about the Kristols. These people are enemies of ordinary people. They send them off to wars which they are unwilling to fight themselves and they treat people like pawns. If you unable to see the last eight years of neo-con foreign policy as an unmitigated tragedy then you are more ideologically blind than the most trenchant Lennist. Everyone else is walkiing away from them accept you - seems to me that a lot of Nascar republicans have lost their lives or limbs for **** all
As far are pontification and unremitting condescension you beat me down cold and are the undisputed queen on these boards
The leafy Eastern suburbs are affecting you. You are becoming so self righteous and disappearing so far up your neo-con arse it is almost impossible to have a reasoned conversation with you . Come on give me a TINA lecture!!!!
Spot on Evo.Thats what they said about Cheney.
History will be far kinder to Bush than you are.
Iraq will end up being looked upon more like Malaya than Vietnam.
No.
It has to do with internal party power politics, backhanders and favour returning.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
No.
It has to do with internal party power politics, backhanders and favour returning.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
Of course the CoS appointment is about 'internal party power politics' -- how could it not be? And of course there's probably an element of quid pro quo in it as well. It's politics. I'm not sure who people were expecting... the Dalai Lama?
Care to throw in some Tattslotto numbers as well?
Not a neo-con that represents a lot of things that Obama was opposing throughout the lengthy campaign. That's for sure.
Emanuel is Chief of Staff, not Secretary of State or Secretary of Defence. I don't think anyone should leap to conclusions about what this would mean for foreign policy or national security. I still suspect it was Emanuel's organisational expertise that got him the job, not his positions on foreign policy. And anyway, he'll be one of a battery of advisors.
Although Obama's been outspoken about withdrawing from Iraq (whatever that means -- the devil's in the detail) and has been a sensible advocate for diplomacy, his foreign policy positions aren't exactly dove-ish. He's always been pro-Israel -- he wouldn't have been elected if they weren't. He's also said from the get-go that he'd expand the size of the US military, and has never ruled out the use of force against Iran. Now, you can say that he's just mouthing US foreign-policy pieties because that's what he has to do to get elected. But you could also say that he truly believes these things. We'll see, I guess.
But I don't see that Emanuel's appointment materially changes anything.
evo
Let's hit the f*ken road!
It doesn't materially change anything.That's the problem.
It's the same hegemonic America that it was last week.Only probably worse now. Because now when they decide to invade Pakistan or Iran, or wherever ,the Obots (to borrow from Jane) will fall over themselves to apologise for it , rather than oppose.Everyone will become Chris Hitchins.
It's like the internet filter.If that was Howard bringhing it there would calls of fascist and absolute outrage.That it is the socially liberal party *chortle* introducing it, barely raises a whimper.
