The 2008 Fall Campaign

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Post by cam »

buzzflash.com says Obama will pick his VP tomorrow. My bet it will NOT be Hillary, although she has said she would be interested.
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Post by cam »

I might be late with this, but according to Matt Drudge, Obama will begin e-mailing as early as Tuesday( tomorrow) in order to sign up a VP.
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Post by Greg »

Apparently, Joe Biden is the frontrunner to be Obama's Vice Presidential pick. If Obama believes the main job of the VP candidate in the campaign is to be the attack dog, Biden is the best choice he could make.
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Post by Heksagon »

I have to admit I have lost all interest in following this election after the primaries ended. Certainly not even the Democrats can lose this one?
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Post by Greg »

Obama and McCain are to attend a debate hosted by mega-church pastor Rick Warren, who said this in an interview:

That's why whether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is beside the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage, you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.

http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archive....o_c.php

I hope at least Obama has the nerve to stand up to this tripe.
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Post by Greg »

Thanks, Tee.
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Post by Mister Tee »

Actually, I found it; in print. The url below shoudl take you there.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst....59C8B63
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Post by Mister Tee »

Greg wrote:
Mister Tee wrote:Greg, are you aware that the comment alluded to in the bolded section is referring specifcally, if anonymously, to Krugman's fellow columnist Tom Friedman?

Did Friedman actually say something to that effect in one of his clolumns?
I don't recall now whether it was in a column or on Charlie Rose (I believe in print). He specifically said he thought there was a terrorist bubble in the Middle East, and that we needed to puncture it somewhere, anywhere (the clear implication: any Arabs would do).

His most chilling TV-quote (frequently referred to by Atrios), was on Charlie Rose -- after the fact of the Iraq invasion, he opined that, by invading Iraq, we had said to terrorists "Suck. On. This". Spoken with a smug satisfaction.

The scary thing: the guy's still thought of as the ranking expert on Middle East coverage.
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Post by Greg »

Mister Tee wrote:Greg, are you aware that the comment alluded to in the bolded section is referring specifcally, if anonymously, to Krugman's fellow columnist Tom Friedman?

Did Friedman actually say something to that effect in one of his clolumns?




Edited By Greg on 1218653986
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Post by Mister Tee »

Greg, are you aware that the comment alluded to in the bolded section is referring specifcally, if anonymously, to Krugman's fellow columnist Tom Friedman?
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Post by Greg »

Apparently, John McCain is really nostalgic about the Cold War.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYm7wZbcGqY&feature=user
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Post by Greg »

Here's an editorial by Paul Krugman, with a jaw-dropping section in bold. I am quite curious as to exactly who told him that.

Know-Nothing Politics
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 7, 2008

So the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part.

And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

Now, I don’t mean that G.O.P. politicians are, on average, any dumber than their Democratic counterparts. And I certainly don’t mean to question the often frightening smarts of Republican political operatives.

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

In the case of oil, this takes the form of pretending that more drilling would produce fast relief at the gas pump. In fact, earlier this week Republicans in Congress actually claimed credit for the recent fall in oil prices: “The market is responding to the fact that we are here talking,” said Representative John Shadegg.

What about the experts at the Department of Energy who say that it would take years before offshore drilling would yield any oil at all, and that even then the effect on prices at the pump would be “insignificant”? Presumably they’re just a bunch of wimps, probably Democrats. And the Democrats, as Representative Michele Bachmann assures us, “want Americans to move to the urban core, live in tenements, take light rail to their government jobs.”

Is this political pitch too dumb to succeed? Don’t count on it.

Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.

Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

It wasn’t until Hurricane Katrina — when the heckuva job done by the man of whom Ms. Noonan said, “if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help” revealed the true costs of obliviousness — that the cult began to fade.

What’s more, the politics of stupidity didn’t just appeal to the poorly informed. Bear in mind that members of the political and media elites were more pro-war than the public at large in the fall of 2002, even though the flimsiness of the case for invading Iraq should have been even more obvious to those paying close attention to the issue than it was to the average voter.

Why were the elite so hawkish? Well, I heard a number of people express privately the argument that some influential commentators made publicly — that the war was a good idea, not because Iraq posed a real threat, but because beating up someone in the Middle East, never mind who, would show Muslims that we mean business. In other words, even alleged wise men bought into the idea of macho posturing as policy.


All this is in the past. But the state of the energy debate shows that Republicans, despite Mr. Bush’s plunge into record unpopularity and their defeat in 2006, still think that know-nothing politics works. And they may be right.

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

The headway Republicans are making on this issue won’t prevent Democrats from expanding their majority in Congress, but it might limit their gains — and could conceivably swing the presidential election, where the polls show a much closer race.

In any case, remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.



http://www.nytimes.com/2008....=slogin
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Post by Big Magilla »

Sabin wrote:I had so many friends that said they were going to vote for Bush because ultimately it didn't really matter. They're all entirely different people now.
That's pretty lame. Proof will be in the pudding as to whether they've changed when we see the results of the November election.
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Post by Sabin »

Why not, Wes? The show may have been liberal but it was overtly political in a time of relative apathy. 2000 was the Who Gives a Shit? election of our time, which proves ultimately no and forever there is no such thing as a Who Gives a Shit? election. I had so many friends that said they were going to vote for Bush because ultimately it didn't really matter. They're all entirely different people now.
"How's the despair?"
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Post by Big Magilla »

OscarGuy wrote:I haven't seen it, and I'm not questioning its poignancy...what I'm questioning is McCain's reference of the scene. It seems calculated to ensure that people know by reading the article that he's a God-loving Christian. He could have recited any similarly poignant scene in film history, but he chose one with a religious connection...
The question was in reference to Marlon Brando movies, not any film in history.

I don't think it was calculated. That is a genuinely moving scene because of the way it shows how a grown man can learn to read not because of what he was reading. If McCain wanted to inject religion into his answers he could have named a Christian singer as one of his favorite singers or a religious TV program as one of his favorite TV shows.
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