Shell of a party, shells and shills… (Updates)

Well. I am shocked … ;).. to agree with Ezra over at TAPPED… but I do.

TALKING ABOUT TALKING ABOUT. I’m basically agnostic on whether Democrats should welcome a national security debate this fall. If the Democrats weren’t such a bunch of fools and knaves, a rollicking, high-intensity discussion over George W. Bush‘s failing war, bin Laden‘s surprisingly successful game of hide-and-seek, and the unpreparedness for disaster that Katrina exposed would be a welcome additive to the GOP’s anxieties. But the Democrats often are a bunch of fools and knaves, so who knows how it’ll wash out. [snip]

And having caught the Democratic leadership <paroxysm of coughing> and their noon presser on C-Span… let me say it was a pathetic endeavor.

Reid, Nancy, Steny, Durbin, Carper, Gen Clark… and The Third Way. They all prominently mentioned The Third Way and brandished, like a shield, the report they are touting. It was tired… the line that resonated came from the report’s author… that we can ”turn the numbers around in Iraq”.

God, help your lost children. Or take them away.

If the party cannot speak about Iraq, and over and over they prove they cannot and will not (Murtha came forward almost 11 months ago)… not a lot more to say.

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From Garance at TAPPED [thanks JJB]:

[I] know for a fact that several active commenters on Daily Kos are either Capitol Hill press secretaries, who post comments defending their members, or campaign workers. That makes them sock puppets for their causes, even if they win praise, in some quarters, for defending their bosses. [snip]

Ah yes… the old ”pack the hall with shills”. A well known technique... and certainly Kos is loaded with that sort… Loaded to the ragged gills.

And: Yes I agree with a couple posters to the TAPPED thread: Name the names.

more to come… 😉

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UPDATE, 10:30 pm

Well between computer collapse, or AOL collapse and what ever else (I still say Pluto is fighting back!) I did see this from Jane Mayer at The New Yorker… and wanted to pop it up… in among the shells.. 😉

This snip, from the vagaries of dealing with an al Qaeda informant, gave me a laugh:

[F]adl’s older children spoke only Arabic, and they were provided with tutors for their schooling. Soon they were playing American sports and begging for trips to McDonald’s and water parks. But the process of assimilation was bumpy. At one point, when a supermarket-checkout person stared suspiciously at the agents and the Fadl family, the agents explained that they were “missionaries” and that the Fadls were converts. Cloonan recalled that the checkout person was overcome with admiration, offering to do anything she could to help the family.[snip]

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UPDATE, 9:00 am Wednesday….

Going to plug along in this post for a bit, while i have a shakey computer connection…

Blogometer has a few things of interest today... Stoller, whose site assiduously kept away from the Cegelis Duckworth primary in Illinois 6… Bowers (think it was Bowers, “boyz” congeal) wrote a pretty silly “so shocked” at how close the race turned out to be. MY own take had been that the boyz dropped Cegelis – whom Kos had early on been sweet on – at a cue from DC. Bowers even admitted DC had assured them, Duckworth had it in the bag, possibly by 10 pts.

I smell Rahm.

But now Stoller has a post up on Duckworth’s mailer on amnesty in the immigration issues. Girl is running on hard core, some might say war porn hard core, anti amnesty. And let me add, Duckworth is another one with a spotty record of voting as a private person. They neatly said it was an issue of being in the military. Illinois Reserves. Whatever.

Hoist that helicopter…

IL 06: Maybe Pols Should Just Stay Out of Uniforms

Matt Stoller at MyDD has photos of Iraq war veteran Tammy Duckworth‘s (D) latest mail piece which he describes as “xenophobic and unpersuasive” and asks his readers: “Didn’t we learn in 2002 and 2004 that uniforms don’t convince people that Democrats make good Republicans?” Stoller takes some heat in the comment section for his attack on the piece, but argues in response that there are better ways for Dems to talk about immigration than the way Duckworth did in her mailing:

And a snip from the Stoller epistle on this… Hey boys, don’t cry now. You could have supported Cegelis. Or Winograd against Jane Harmon. We all have choices.

If the goal of this mail piece is to turn off Republican voters who are worried about Duckworth’s moderate stance on immigration, the right message is to attack Roskam and the Republican Party’s credibility on the issue. The conservative base is quite upset that the GOP hasn’t been able to get anything done on immigration, and if you are able to convince them that both parties are the same, you can drive down GOP turnout. Which is a more persuasive argument to a right-winger? Bush and the Republicans aren’t conservative enough and can’t get anything done, or Tammy Duckworth is a hardliner on immigration even though she backs McCain-Kennedy and will vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker.

Yes that vote for either Nancy or Reid (or if one believes the slop being pushed, Hillary) is what so many have hung themselves on.

Fine with me… 😉 We will look at the numbers in November.

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In other news at Blogometer, Hamsher of FDL has hired a publicist who pushed Ykos to push her “stable”.

Natural Born Killers producer and progressive activist Jane Hamsher at firedoglake announced 9/2 that FDL hired Christina Siun O’Connell as Team FDL’s new press sec. Hamsher writes: “Many will know her as a valued member of the FDL community and also for her work handling press for Yearly Kos. She’s also a good friend and I’m really looking forward to having her on board.”

Gotta laugh. Might as well. It was my take, last winter, there were great plans at FDL to push a movie on PLame. My little beady eyes spied fluffers in threads to push that very thing…

America, the land of enterprise. Or a dollar.

I really regret these joints are called Liberal. Or left. Frankly by now they can have “progressive”… or as SMBIVA puts it: pwogwessives.

And Blogometer is entirely too facile… I am being kind… in how they characterise some early bloggers:

The Blogometer is much less distressed by this development. In fact, our feelings are quite the opposite. Looking at the top 10 most trafficked blogs, only DailyKos, Crooks and Liars, Michelle Malkin, and Instapundit started out as lone blogger-hobbyists. [what!! Mcat dropped her coffee mug]

The other 6 (including The Huffington Post, The Corner, and Think Progress) are either planned business enterprises, outgrowths of existing MSM pubs, or online presences of otherwise established orgs.

puhleeeze.

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UPDATE: 10:45 am Wednesday…

Waiting for Lord Bush to read us the daily instructions… but wanted to mention that I caught Charilie Rose last night with David Sanger from the NYT.. and he spun hard for Iran war. Made it seem easy as pie. Apple pie. We could do it… we could even invade – said the pale and bland Mr Sanger… he admitted it would be a tad tough after initial invastion. And he was utterly blithe about taking out the hardened underground installations. It could be done.

People refuse, absolutely refuse to see how far gone we are – or they gratuitously point to online apparatchik businesses as “movement politics” – that will Save America.

What the NY Times misses is that it is the progressive blogosphere that has consistently insisted that there is still hope for America and has insisted on fighting back. The press sees this as nasty, as strident, as radical, and yet you can see in psifighter’s latest call to arms the best of the blogosphere.

(Send that boy back to the baby bottle, a soupy commercial product in the bottle.)

It is not enough to point fingers at a FP reporter (not just Sanger, many) for the NYT. Just the newest Judy Miller – a stay at home sort of Judy Miller. And Pinch is still Pinch. Son of Punch… More articulate than Bush… no cow boy boots that are easy to point fingers at and make fun of… but hardly different. A very embarrassing Legacy Boychick.

… everyone knows what I think of the Big Box Blahgs… and their tied-in Box Car Sites. BlahgSnots…BlahgKnots.

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UPDATE, 11:10 am

– Israel –

Happened to see this at Electronic Intifada. An interesting look inside the workings of what the author calls “Post Zionist Israel”…

The closing grafs:

If there’s a single ray of light from this war, it is that it has sharpened the alternatives before which Israel stands. Unilateral solutions, based on military superiority, are no longer viable. In the end, the country will have to decide on a direction. A peace treaty with Syria and Lebanon will not solve the conflict at its root. The question of questions, on which Israel has stumbled time and again, remains that of the Palestinians. Nor is this just a matter of occupied territory. It is a matter of long-term economic occupation and the effects thereof. The per capita GDP in Israel today is $24,600. In the West Bank it is $1000, in Gaza $600.

In Egypt it is $3900, in Jordan $4700. These countries are nominally at peace with Israel, but their populations have become increasingly hostile to it and the West. A lasting solution can hardly be expected from within the Middle East, which swings between corrupt dictators and religious fundamentalism.

As long as the gaps remain so large, no peace can hold. A solution depends on the demise of the global system that maintains these gaps and its replacement by a system that can vanquish them.

Amen to that…

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UPDATE, 12:30 pm…

– The Hemispheric Left –

I heard Lehrer, The News Hour yesterday… covering the aftermath, analysis of the declaring Calderon President-elect.

Very interesting, very cool to the touch analysis – and certain comments resonate for the Left in the USA!! USA!! The sports stadium, political rallying, war mongering nation that is enveloping us…

Some snips from the conversation between Suarez, Dresser and Starr:

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Pamela Starr, contest in what way? There’s that 30 percent the professor mentions, but what channels do they have to — to make their unhappiness known?

PAMELA STARR, Eurasia Group: Well, their — their contestment now is not focused on the election outcome, per se. Their concern now is to try to change the political system in Mexico, so that it will allow for an election of the left.

The left in Mexico is convinced that the political system in Mexico will never allow them to win the presidency.

So, what they want to do is see a radical reform of that political order. They’re going to use their power, both in the legislature and on the streets, to try to force the government to make those dramatic changes.

… from Dresser:

DENISE DRESSER: Absolutely. And the tribunal reprimanded President Fox for intervening in the election and stretching the limits of the law, pushing those limits.

And that gave Lopez Obrador leeway to declare that the level — the playing field had not been level for him. And, therefore, whatever he is doing is justified, in so far as Vicente Fox did not behave as he should have.

And, unfortunately, that has fed into the perceptions of many Mexicans that the system is always corrupt, always unfair, and that the only way to deal with this new injustice is to topple the whole building down, and as Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday gave a fiery speech, in which he said, to hell with the institutions.

So, he is positioning himself as an anti-institutional player, who no longer wants to play within the rules of the game, but actually change them in a way that will benefit his political movement in the future. But that won’t be a — a movement that seeks power through elections or through the legal — the legal path that Mexico has used in the past to evolve.

It will be a very confrontational, very divisive, very polarizing approach to political change in Mexico in the future.

Either people are let in to share in power, or they seize power. One way or the other…

PAMELA STARR: I think, in some ways, he has been his own enemy, when we talk about that moderate left that Denise was referring to.

But I think he has also been a very clever strategist, when we talk about how he goes about positioning himself for what he sees as the best shot for reaching the presidency in the longer term. What he’s trying to do, above all else, is to hold his political alliance together.

And that alliance is based on politicians who felt that the election was stolen from them in 1988. That’s when Cuauhtemoc Cardenas lost the election to Carlos Salinas. But the difference is, at that time, Cardenas chose not to threaten political stability in Mexico by challenging the outcome of the election.

That has left a scar in the Mexican left. Lopez Obrador is very cleverly playing to that sensibility in the left to try to strengthen his position as the leader of the left, saying: I am the individual who will challenge this outcome, and thereby make it possible for the — the left to come to power at some point in the future.

And, up until now, it has worked beautifully for him. It’s difficult to find a left-leaning politician in Mexico who will openly oppose Lopez Obrador at this point.

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UPDATE, 2:30 pm

– La Di Da –

Too too, too too funny. What preceeds the game of selling it to the movies??, optioning a … BOOK. [thanks Nanette]

Years ago, I was all for pushing on the outing of Valerie Plame. And I hung in quite a while with it. His perfect right to do so, but when Wilson, who iirc voted for Bush 1 (at the moment I just cannot recall his 2000 vote) campaigned for, appeared on TV quite a few times… in a mix of Kerry and Plame issues, I was stepping off the bus. OTB.
And when the Merry Band of Plamologists all conferred and all agreed (incestuous amplification) that “Condi had flipped on Bush”… oh do GMAFB. No she did not … she went in and cooperated with Fitzpatrick. End. No flip.

I decided then this was hyperbole beyond hyperbole… and this was a poor place for the party to think it could get traction. Or anything else.

And the “revelation” from Corn is sad. Just sad. Recall that Fitz did not find reason to charge under the issue of the outing of a NOC. But FDL has the spin-a-roo on that. Remember, a book and a movie to sell, sell, sell, sell. Many links in the piece… all the Box Car Sites are joining in, to recycle the cycles. As in, the administration ramped up to the war. Quel News.
Talk about wash rinse repeat. Ditto.

Amazing how the party, with so many chances to stand up, just gets WEAKER.