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Saturday Open Thread [8.15.15]
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Jeb Bush very unwisely went after Hillary Clinton last night on the grounds that her Iraq policies gave us Daesh (ISIS, ISIL). Bush may think he is cleverly pulling a Karl Rove, attacking his opponent on her strong point (foreign policy), as Rove swiftboated John Kerry in 2004. But this isn’t 2004, and virtually no one is excited about having more Bushes in the White House (apparently a third of Republicans want Trump and like 12 percent want Bush, despite his advantage in name recognition). The fact is, every time Jeb Bush says “Iraq,” he loses more votes.
One of the arguments Mr. Bush made was that while his brother, George W. Bush, didn’t get everything right, he did have a brilliant moment with the 2007 troop escalation or “surge,” which put the world right. Then that horrible Obama crew, including Mrs. Cinton, came along and screwed things up by withdrawing from Iraq in 2011.
First of all, saying that W. didn’t get everything right in Iraq is like saying that Custer didn’t get everything right at the Little Bighorn. Bush’s Iraq misadventure was the biggest foreign policy screw-up in American history. Didn’t get everything right, indeed.
Second, Jeb Bush’s narrative about the “surge” is mythical history unconnected to reality. See my Engaging the Muslim World for the real story. In brief, here is what happened.
I tell them, Juan. It was both the Iraqi government and the Bush Administration that set the 2011 withdrawal deadline. The Iraqis wanted us gone. We had fucked up their country enough.
The Weekly Addresses
In this week’s address, the President spoke about the work the Administration is doing to enhance trust between communities and law enforcement in the year since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.
In his weekly message, Governor Markell highlights efforts across Delaware to strengthen the state’s transportation system.
Saturday Daily Delawhere [8.15.15]
The Devon on Delaware Avenue in Wilmington. Photo from markmillerinsta on Instagram.
Friday Open Thread [8.14.15]
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At Politico, Sen. Claire McCaskill explains “How I Helped Todd Akin Win — So I Could Beat Him Later.” It is an enjoyable read, including the ancedote that she shotgunned a beer after Akin won the GOP primary. I wish there was video of that. However, I have to criticize her this morning because she has recently said that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic Trump. That is not even remotely true, on every possible level, and it is an insult to Bernie Sanders.
On Bernie Sanders and being a realist Progressive
It is 2007. Our wonderful Pandora says to family and friends that the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate is a shoe-in to win the Presidency, unless of course that candidate is a black man or a woman. She of course thinks there is a lot of racism and sexism left in the world, and that would prevent either from winning a general election. And of course she was and is right. Where I disagreed with her was that the racists and sexists wouldn’t be voting for the Democrat in the general election anyway, for, after realignment over the last forty years, they were diehard Republicans.
Thus, for me, thinking that race and gender were no longer barriers to winning the Presidency, I firmly believed a Democrat, any Democrat (well except maybe John Edwards) would win the general election. So, I abandoned my traditional pragmatism when it comes to voting.
You see, I usually want to vote for the most progressive candidate that can win.
Because winning is important to me. You don’t get to enact progressive policies to affect progressive change unless you first win an election.
So in evaluating candidates, I follow my heart and mind. But in 2008, I could more follow my heart, because my mind told me any Democrat then running (save John Edwards with Gingrich-style cheating on his cancer stricken wife) could win. And so I went with Barack Obama instead of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
But now it is 2015.
Thursday Open Thread [8.13.15]
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Over the years, many black leaders have asked the populists to include specific remedies for our specific ills. We have done this politely and behind closed doors. Often we would hear that their “progressive economic policies” would disproportionately help black folks, so we should be fine with our community’s needs never being addressed by name.
It was infuriating. Sometimes, it seemed some Democratic politicians were happy to publicly name and embrace every part of the Democratic coalition — immigrants rights defenders, womens’ rights advocates, environmentalists and champions of LBGT equality. But not black people.
At least, not explicitly — and certainly not comfortably. We were just supposed to sit there and hope that race-neutral rhetoric and race-neutral proposals might somehow fix our race-specific problems. I starting calling this dubious strategy “trickle-down justice.”
Today’s young activists simply are not having any of it. In case anyone missed the memo after Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston, here it is: the Obama era of black silence on issues that matter to us is over. And the entire Democratic Party needs to sit up and take notice.
It’s the holdover of the Democratic Party’s fear of being the Democratic Party that took hold in the 70’s after southern racists, who were once Democrats, became Republicans after we passed the Civil Rights Act. We couldn’t publicly acknowledge that African Americans are a constituent of our party and their concerns are our concerns, and thus we have specific policies to address African American problems, because that might piss off Southern or Midwestern whites who once were Democrats. And then when Obama became our party leader and later President, the CW was that it would be unseemly if an African American explicitly used his power and bully pulpit to help his own people.
Demographics are such now that the Democratic Party can win national elections easily without even being on the ballot in the South now. So Fuck the South. Fuck racist whites. As for ending the Obama Era of Silence, I think that is over. In fact, I am not precisely Obama ever himself adhered to the Obama Era of Silence. Hell, remember the beer summit early in his Presidency? That was the result of Obama speaking up on racial injustice where he saw it.
Wednesday Open Thread [8.12.15]
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“When you’re dealing, and that’s what I am, I’m a dealer, you don’t go in with plans. You go in with a certain flexibility. And you sort of wheel and deal.”
— Donald Trump, quoted by the New York Times, on his presidential campaign not releasing any policy proposals.
That’s not going to fly for long among Republican base voters. Trump will have to be stridently anti-choice, anti-Obamacare, pro-war, pro-theocracy in order to win the nomination. So far, he’s got the anti-black, anti-brown people and anti-woman thing down. But that’s not enough. And I still want to know how he is going to make Mexico pay for the Huge Wall in such a way that they will enjoy it.
Tuesday Open Thread [8.11.15]
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Joan Walsh on the innate sexism of conservatives.
So many in the media are shocked at the rise of Trump and the piggishness he represents. I can’t understand why. From the dawn of the Obama administration some of us have experienced the surge of racism and misogyny personally.
Within days of Obama’s inauguration, I had former House Majority Leader Dick Armey tell me on “Hardball,” after I’d criticized Rush Limbaugh, “I’m so damn glad you can never be my wife, because I surely wouldn’t have to listen to that prattle from you every day.” A lot of folks on the left were outraged; on the right, they laughed and cheered Armey.
One of those who laughed was Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, a debate moderator along with Kelly Thursday night. On conservative Mike Gallagher’s radio show, Wallace said he found feminist anger over Armey’s insult “pretty funny.”
Walsh cites other examples, such as personally being the recipient of misogynistic swipes from GOP and conservative stalwarts such as Gordon Liddy and John Kasich. My mother was a diehard Hillary supporter in 2008, while I was a diehard Obama supporter, and she said to me that Hillary’s loss proved that sexism was more prevalent than racism in our society. I disagreed with him, at least to the point that it explained while more liberal Democratic voters chose Obama over Clinton. But we can now see that those who are racist against blacks, bigoted against gays, are also sexist against women. And most of those voters make up the GOP base.
This reality has always been true, but the media refuse to acknowledge. And now they are being forced to by Donald Trump’s unexplained resilience in the polls after his racism and sexism was exposed. Jeb Bush says that Donald Trump is a threat to the GOP Brand. That is not true. Exposing the truth about the GOP voter is a threat to the GOP Brand.
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