Enh. BOR-RING!

     

For what it is worth, which is not a great deal… Balz on the Edwards announce (which will be shown on C-Span 1 tonight at 8 ET).  What I have caught of the announce, well, it is leaden.  Very heavy, airless pastry.

Earlier this week I saw this slide by from Edwards.  Going to be a very, very long two years….

In his e-mail, Edwards said he chose to announce in New Orleans because it demonstrates the power people have to build America when they take responsibility instead of leaving it to Washington.

I don’t even know where to begin with that one.  The failure was the government’s ..willfully abandoning people, before and after Katrina and the ”topping” of the levees, to the enforced destruction of a city (and a coastal region).  THEN the neglect, both malignant and planned, to destroy any sort of decent partnership with citizens’ efforts to rebuild their city, their home.

People should NOT be left to the “mercies” of churches, corporations, criminal business practices (I defy ANYONE to make sense of what the insurance companies are doing in NO, what a fucked mess) the [Southern White Christian Government Compliant] Red Cross.  They need a responsive government, where the various vagueries of “charity” is an “also”…. and not the savior of first, second, third and last resort.

Last but scarcely least, I read recently that as of close of November, Edwards had less than 21K COH… further, his campaign still had debts from 2004 of 300K.

Oh yes, early days… I always think back to an early outing of Kerry’s in NH in the dark, cold, winter days of the early primary efforts.  He met with about 30 – 40 salt of the earth people, in the back dining room of a restaurant.  One woman asked him about NAFTA and his vote (for it!).  She also brought up the suffering in the town from lost jobs.  He barely looked at her and she sat directly in front of the small corner of the room from which he addressed the gathering.  He delivered senatese.  And he appeared bored.  I was disgusted.

I never saw that much changed from then to the conclusion on Nov 3.

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On the other hand, Glen Ford at BAR has up an overview of some of the bubbling stories, and a few predictions.  I do agree with his view of Obama and Hillary (what a pair).

[O]bama took great pains early in his term to convince senior Democrats he would be a team player. The question is, Whose team? All indications are that, politically, he’s on the Hillary/Bill Clinton Democratic Leadership Council team. Indeed, the editors of Black Agenda Report have for some time strongly suspected that Barack and Hillary are playing presidential tag-team, in order to hold down the top two funding and popularity slots in the Democratic primary race. The longer the duo can keep this up, the poorer the rest of the field’s prospects.

The Washington Post said as much, on Christmas Eve:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), trading on star power, the capacity to raise tens of millions of dollars with relative ease and an ability to dominate media attention, are rewriting the script of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, driving potential rivals to the sidelines and casting a huge shadow over all others who may run.”

It takes courage to run the two-year-long, grueling race for president. Since setting foot on Capitol Hill, Obama has shown great stamina, but nothing in the way of an inclination to challenge entrenched power – and in the Democratic Party, the Clintons ARE power. Obama’s voting record is less progressive than that of his senior senatorial colleague from Illinois, Dick Durbin. Rhetorically – and all we hear from Obama is the blandest of rhetoric – he more closely resembles…Hillary. [snip]

There is more, but that gets to the nut.  They appear apart, but may likely (or surely) end up together.  Makes as much sense as anything…

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UPDATE, 1:30 PM

On the subject of “BOR-RING!”:

Oh Honeeee!  Did not all of Kos’ frantic, reactionary diatribes (for years now) get the “You Hippie!, You!” accusers off your [collective] back?

Speaking personally as the child of two very non-radical apolitical middle class professionals (both of whom grew up in the 1960s), it’s been quite frustrating to essentially be called a dirty hippy for opposing the way that power lies and insults us.  Chris has documented the way that new progressives are called emotional children with no credibility by mainstream pundits and old leftie types alike.  This is a result of many forces, and one of them is ignorance.  They don’t know who we are and they don’t know how we can possibly differ ideologically from the 1968 convention protesters.  And while there are those among us who know and have been through those fights, until recently I wasn’t really aware of the 1960s experience except through the hollow and annoying shell of the single-issue groups and a legacy of a shattered and self-hating collection of frightened liberal politicians.  [snip]

Seems not.  Stoller has up another of his long, interminable wheezes on The Sixties, The Left, New and Otherwise. In fairness, following the first toe dip in the boiling stew of still living history, he seemed to get a thing or two from the replies, emails and reading lists.

But it faded fast:

[N]ow, there certainly are latent movements that exist in parallel, such as the immigrant rights movement, but there’s very little direct interaction between the immigrant rights community and us.  I expect this to change as the forces that have created us are quite massive and are empowering reformers in other communities – it’s only a matter of time before we form alliances.  But race came first in the 1960s, then came the stupid war.  The opposite is true for us.  […]

There’s a lot more, obviously, and I still don’t have a totally clear organizational framework.  [don’t fret, no one does!  -Mcat]  

I will say that the most obvious and probably most important difference is that the 1960s white left was a political and cultural reaction to top-down liberalism, whereas we are most directly a reaction to right-wing extremism.[snip snappy!]

Which makes y’all what you are:  Male White Centrists!  One commenter suggests he read Noam Chomsky… but I wonder if he will.

The sad thing is how much the commenters buy into the notion that the online elections apparatchiks are a “movement”…

Oh sure, I am laughing. What else is new?

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Ooops!  Almost forgot this rather troubling comment.  The poster should chill with the yearning and worry, she/he WANTS what amounts to corporate leadership for the nation. 

 I’d like to see older and newer generation liberals give up on the yearning for the charismatic leader. He will not appear. He is JFK, MLK, and RFK, and he is not coming back. We are the leaders we yearn for because we are democracy. Don’t yearn for the other, the savior, the adored one. Just. don’t. do. it.  It’s very very bad for us and prevents us from forming a more perfect union and hiring a competant, experienced, intelligent, skilled CEO of our country’s government, our president.

The corporate model is well in place.  Strange that s/he thinks it is any saner [how could it be?] than the fixers on view…

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UPDATE, 5:20 pm

hmmm.  Listening to Edwards speak from NO this am… the part he is on now is that ”America must be the stablising force in the world”.

Nellie bar the door!  Lordy…

But! Madman passed me these from HuffPo…

Shearer:

[N]o, the clue from Edwards’ morning appearances comes from what he says about Iraq. “First,” he told his many questioners this a.m., “tell the truth about how we got here.” Senator Edwards, until you tell the truth about what happened to New Orleans–the truth clearly eluciated by three separate forensic engineering teams and then, belatedly, reluctantly confirmed by the Corps itself in June of this year, the truth that New Orleans was leveled not by a natural disaster but by arguably criminal negligence–your use of the city as a backdrop reminds me not of any of your political heroes. It reminds me of Anderson Cooper.

By the way, who’s he keeping honest these days?

UPDATE: I’ve now seen Edwards’ official announcement speech on C-SPAN. His failure to tell the truth about New Orleans just becomes more glaring: most of the good things that have happened there, he says, have been because of the volunteers who’ve come to town. What’s unsaid: that the volunteers can’t speed up the government and contractors who fail to execute their basic obligations. Most of the good things in New Orleans are, in fact, being done by individuals and community groups precisely because of the abject lack of “good things” being done by responsible agencies. If Edwards doesn’t believe government should work, he should say so. [snip]

… from Michelle Pilecki:

[F]or example, there’s the New York Times blithely captioning the locale as “the backyard of a victim of Hurricane Katrina.” Nary a single reference to the levee failures, which, the NYT reported in May, “were caused by flaws in design, construction and maintenance.”

“People didn’t die because the storm was bigger than the system could handle, and people didn’t die because the levees were overtopped,” said Raymond B. Seed, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chief author of the report, [told the NYT].

“People died because mistakes were made,” he said, “and because safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced cost.”

That message was pretty much lost on most media outlets covering Edwards’ announcement, from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times. Not that Mr. Edwards himself seems to be deviating from the “meme”: I could find no reference to the defective levees at his website’s blog, just another repetition of the photo-op site as a “home was hit by Katrina.” Hmmm, before he turned to politics, didn’t Mr. Edwards take a great deal of professional interest in defective products and the havoc they wreak on ordinary people? But he takes no interest in the alleged culpability of the US Army Corps of Engineers?  [snip]

Welll I just heard the whole of it from Edwards.  It was glib and empty.

Sad more than anything else…

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UPDATE, 10:15 pm

hmmm Not so bor-ring:   Further revelations from Woodward, for the FP of the Wapo tomorrow…

[T]his and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. Until now, the relationship between the two presidents has been portrayed largely as a matter of political necessity, with Nixon tapping Ford for the vice presidency in late 1973 because he was a confirmable choice on Capitol Hill.

But the tapes, documents and two lengthy recent interviews with Ford before his death this week, conducted for a future book and embargoed until after his death, show that the close political alliance between the two men seriously influenced Ford’s eventual decision to pardon Nixon, the most momentous decision of his short presidency and almost certainly the one that cost him any chance of winning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974; he pardoned Nixon just a month later. “I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill,” Ford said during the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

“I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford said in the interview. [snip]

Might as well laugh…couple of gang members, scratching each other’s backs.  Close friends from the 40s. 

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oh and what is this with headlines that Ford opposed the war?  Or thought it not justified?  Tut, tut.  How many mouths do pols have? The answer, as many as they need…

NY Daily News:

[F]ord was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He’d been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him,” he observed, “but we shouldn’t have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?” [snip]

Maybe soon ol’ Ger will stop talking.

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UPDATE, 12:15 am Friday

It is unanimous, but DO YOU THINK THE DEMOCRATS CAN FUCKING HEAR ????

Six Nations Want All Troops Out of Iraq

December 28, 2006

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) – A majority of adults in five European countries and the United States believe the coalition effort should come to an end, according to a poll by Harris Interactive for France 24 and Le Monde. 90 per cent of respondents in France and 84 per cent of respondents in Spain support the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq.

Britain is next on the list with 83 per cent, followed by Germany with 82 per cent, Italy with 77 per cent, and the U.S. with 66 per cent.  [snip]

You notice they are all measurably smarter than we are… and it only took us FIVE FUCKING YEARS.  As Afghanistan is poised to fall… Next.

Of course, Gerald Ford had to die first, before he, thru Woodward, “got it” (if he ever did…).

What a country.  What is left to say?

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UPDATE, 4:55 am…

Norman Finkelstein on Jimmy’s book:

[I]f it’s “foolish and unfair,” “irresponsibly provocative” and “dangerous and anti-Semitic” to make the apartheid comparison, then the roster of commentators who have gone awry is rather puzzling. For example, a major 2002 study of Israeli settlement practices by the respected Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem concluded: “Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality. This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.” A more recent B’Tselem publication on the road system Israel has established in the West Bank again concluded that it “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime,” and even “entails a greater degree of arbitrariness than was the case with the regime that existed in South Africa.” (7)  [snip]

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UPDATE, 10:54 am Friday…

This bit of grand and accurate metaphor grace a Miss Devore…

[T]he “Little Sister in the Frat House” image has come to me often while reading DKos.  Since last year, when I suggested women’s issues to Gina as a topic for Yearly Kos and heard vague and conflicting responses from her – and then, after YKos, when there was a panel of some sort about feminism, but it hardly rated a mention afterwards, and none at all from the Front Pagers – I’ve been worried that feminists here are backing off and allowing their concerns to be subsumed into the “Bigger Picture”.  I’m worried that feminists are yet again – as many of them were in the ’60s – allowing themselves to be the watercarriers, the coffee-makers, the toilet-scrubbers, the “support staff”, the cheerleaders, the strippers and sex toys to the Big Boys who are really the movers and shakers and the ones getting their ideas across.  

Time and again I hear responses to the effect of:

 “Yes, yes, we’re going to pay attention to your ideas and your issues when we get in power, but right now we have to focus on getting our people elected.”  Can you get me another coffee, and by the way – nice tits! [snip]

Well, yes.  There is a reason some of us are gone.  I was there for political discussion.  Had I wished, aspired to be a chew toy of sorts, well…  LOL, as it happens, I did not.  Others did.

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