Bill, in the politics forum here on the boards someone started a thread saying the democrats need to get rid of the Michael moore types in order to move forward. But many people disagreed saying they need more Michael moores. Obie, who I respect more than almost anyone else over there, said that the republicans have people like Michael Moore and were just as obnoxious as Moore and the Republicans stil win. He used that as evidence that Moore isn't hurting the party (which is odd that Moore is now considered a democrat since he blasted Al Gore while running with Nader in 2000 and his own views are far to the left of the democrats). My argument was the while some of the republican media types that act like Michael Moore never went to Europe and called American's stupid. The republican radio hosts never slandered our troops. The republican commentators never wanted radical changes to our economic system. That has been my point in several posts here and in the politics forum for the last 2 days. If the democrats want to get back in the race then they really do need to get rid of Michael Moore. Honestly I think it would have helped Kerry if he ame out and denounced F9/11. He could have said "Michael Moore makes some good points worth looking into, but I don't agree with several of his conclusions and some of them were irresponsible and harmful." That's all he would have needed to say. Even Bill Clinton said he had no comment on the movie. Same goes for MoveOn.Org that is the most ridiculous website ever and they lie more than any 'media source' on the planet. they try to tie every bad thing that happens to anyone to President Bush. If one of the writers there gets a toothache he writes an article about how Bush cut funding to the MDA and is outsourcing dental jobs to Bangladesh. If they refuse to admit that these type of people are hurting their cause then screw em, the Republicans will continue to win.
That was a great article, but don't get too cocky, guys. If the GOP serves up candidates like Dole, Michael Moore will have a cabinet job. However, I do remember Clinton giving Barbara Streisand an office in the white house in '93. I still shudder at that one. He also had Hillary going around accusing opponents of her health care plan of being deadbeats. Stuff like that probably helped greatly in Newt's takeover of the house. By the way, don't get too complimentary of obie. He can be just as dishonest as any liberal over there. Just mention illegal aliens and watch him accuse you of racism and claim that our economy will collapse if they leave.
Steyn is a genius. The left needs to stop blaming some mythical Christiam takeover and start looking in the mirror. They stand for nothing, they appeal to no one, they bounce ideas off each other and revel in their mutual approval and then get the crap kicked out of them at the voting booth and just can't figure out what's wrong.
According to the Newsweek editor on Today, Billy Boy gave Johnny Boy some advice before his surgery "let the states decide the gay marriage issue" And Johnny Boy rejected it. I dislike Clinton, but the man was smart and knew that you needed to move to the center to win elections. Johnny Boy wasn't willing to change his convictions and was lousy at pretending to. And it's one of the reasons he lost. No one ever bought his "shifts" because the could see what he truly believed in.
They know what's wrong. They just can't admit it's them. It's always the other guy that's stupid and doesn't get it. Zell Miller gets it, though. Ah hell. Here it is: MY VIEW I tried to tell you . . . Democrats repel voters, who put faith in freedom Published on: 11/04/04 America's faith in freedom has been reaffirmed. With the re-election of President Bush, America recommitted itself once again to expanding freedom and promoting liberty. Only the 1864 re-election of Abraham Lincoln, the 1944 re-election of Franklin Roosevelt and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan rival this victory as milestones in the preservation of our security by the advancement of freedom. This election validated not just freedom, but also the faith our Founding Fathers placed in average folks to navigate the course of this great nation. By weighing the greatest issues at the gravest times and choosing our path, ordinary people have again accomplished extraordinary things. With courage and caution, rather than fear and timidity, the voters chose a path to ensure others would enjoy the same freedom to set their own path. This election outcome should have been implausible, if not impossible. With a litany of complaints — bad economy, bad deficit, bad foreign war, bad gas prices — amplified by a national media that discarded any pretense of neutrality, a national opposition party should have won this election. But the Democratic Party is no longer a national party. As difficult as the challenges are — both real and fabricated — Democrats offered no solution that was either believable or acceptable to vast regions of America. Tax increases to grow the economy are not a solution that is believable or acceptable. Democratic promises of fiscal responsibility are unbelievable in the face of massive new spending promises. A foreign policy based on the strength of "allies" such as France is unacceptable. A strong national defense policy is just not believable coming from a candidate who built a career as an anti-war veteran, an anti-military candidate and an anti-action senator. Democratic Party policies haven't sold in large sections of America in decades, and the only success of Democrats in presidential elections for 40 years was when they pitched themselves as pro-growth, low-tax, strong-defense, fiscally responsible, values-oriented candidates. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton hummed the tune but never really sang the song, and that's why Democrat prospects have gone south in the South. In 1980, the South had 20 Democrats and just six Republicans in the Senate. As recently as 1994, the Senate had 17 Democrats and nine Republicans from the South. A decade later, the number had reversed to 17 Republicans and nine Democrats. With this election, it is 22 Republicans and just four Democrats from the South. When will national Democrats sober up and admit that that dog won't hunt? Secular socialism, heavy taxes, big spending, weak defense, limitless lawsuits and heavy regulation — that pack of beagles hasn't caught a rabbit in the South or Midwest in years. The most recent failed nominee for president stands as proof that the national Democratic Party will continue to dwindle. The South has gone from just one-fourth of the Electoral College in 1960 to almost a third today. To put this in perspective, that gain is equal to all the electoral votes in Ohio. Yet there was not a single Southern state where John Kerry had any real chance. Would anyone like to place bets on the electoral strength of the South by 2012? Maybe they should tax stupidity. When you write off centrist and conservative policies that reflect the will of people in the South and Midwest, you write off the South and Midwest. Democrats have never learned from the second or third or fifth kick of a mule. They continue to change only the makeup on, rather than makeup of, the Democrat Party. And so we have a realignment election. For the first time, in an "us vs. them" election and in the toughest of situations, Republicans have been re-elected to the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. Confronting an opposition that can win a divided electorate in the worst of times and that has a growing electoral base, the national Democratic Party has a choice: continue down this path toward irrelevance or reverse course. As the last Truman Democrat, I hope my party makes the right choice but know I will not be allowed to be part of it. Such is the price you pay when you love your nation more than your party. And so while I retire with little hope for the near-term viability of the party I've spent my life building, I retire with a quiet satisfaction that after witnessing the struggle of democracy over communism and fascism, the fear I once held that America might not rise to meet this new challenge of terrorism has vanished like a fog under the radiance of a new dawn. While the threat is still real, the shadow looming across a promising future is gone. And the credit for that goes to one man. Like the last lion of England, Winston Churchill, George W. Bush has stood alone and risked all to give the world a new, clearer path to the advancement of freedom. Abraham Lincoln, in his second annual message to Congress, stated: "In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom for the free — honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last, best hope of earth." George Bush has injected into a region of enslavement an incurable dose of freedom, and thus nobly saved that "last, best hope of earth" — free men. — Zell Miller is Georgia's Democratic U.S. senator. One of the many snippets of 'worthless' facts I came across reading through all this was reaffirmed in the essay. The union manufacturing jobs 'lost' in MI and OH are not all going overseas. They're going to the non-union south. If this trend continues and the Dems don't adjust, they will be toast for a good long while.
As Steyn points out, Michael Moore was given a seat next to Jimmy Carter at the Democratic convention. That is a very high honor, as Carter is a Nobel laureate and now is seen as the party’s conscience. But their blessing of Moore goes well beyond seating assignments. The three groups at the core of the party have embraced him. He enjoys the enthusiastic approval of Hollywood, the most prominent Democrat constituency (expect F911 to receive a best picture nomination). Some educators (so-called) who are surely Democrats have used the film as a “teaching tool.” And the mainstream media always have a (wide) seat available for him from which he can mouth his anti-Republican (and anti-republican) venom. In unguarded moments some leading Democrats sound even more like Moore than Moore. For example, Joe Lockhart has dismissed the new president of Iraq as “an American puppet” and Bob Graham has published conspiracy theories that are at least as delusional as Moore’s. There are two Michael Moores. The more public poses as something of a good-hearted prankster. Some of the newspaper ads for F911 showed only his smiling eyes, not conveying a hint as to what the film was really about. This Moore casts himself as a Joe Sixpack type, complete with gut and baseball cap. He’s just a regular guy, the kind you see every day waiting in ine at McDonald’s. The other, less public Michael Moore is a Marxist ideologue, eager to destroy America and everything it stands for. This is the virulent hater who moaned after 9/11 that the terrorists should have attacked places that had voted for Bush (he removed that quote from his website a few days later but surely hasn’t changed his feelings). This is the Michael Moore who has called the murderous Iraqi insurgents patriots and shouted that they will win. The Democratic party embraces both Michael Moores. The first, openly and enthusiastically; the second, covertly and quietly. Until they let go of both of them, they’ll go down with them.
I caught Pat Caddell on Linda Vester today, and what a revelation. For those who don't know, Caddell was Carter's chief political guru and the man who defined modern political polling. It was largely Caddell who rolled over Jerry Ford with modern techniques which he invented. He knew what the public was thinking before anybody else. And Cadell was furious today. He was going so fast, ticking off point after point, that Vester interrupted at one point and said "Gosh, you're really on a roll here" and Cadell replied "I've had to keep my mouth shut all year, but I don't have to anymore" He called Terry McAuliffe "nothing but a bagman". Vester almost dropped her mike "WHAT?" "He's a bagman" Cadell said again "for the big lobbyists and for Wall Street and for the Lawyers who run the Party" He said that the Democrats, while posing as the voice of evryman, got the vast majority of the money from lobbyists and from Wall Street. The party, he says, consists of a ridulously large number of "political operatives" who feed off of all this money, and McAuliffe is the King of the Heap. All they do is lose and lose and lose, and they go back and suck down more money and do it again, and even today, after having their brains beat out three straight times, there's absolutely no thought of changing anything. Unbelieveable. He was haywire. And he'd better hire a food taster.
Sweet map. Definitely a good find. I followed the link and looked at their map from 2000 compared with 2004. It still cracks me up that Clark county switched from Blue to Red after the Brits tried to effect change.
The unteachable ignorance of the red states. "I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million—my relatives are not ignorant, they are just greedy and full of classic Republican feelings of superiority.) Ignorance and bloodlust have a long tradition in the United States, especially in the red states."
I read some of the Slate pieces. Hilarious. This guy has some more analysis. I don't agree with his forged memo theory. I think that anything said by the White House would have been viewed as just more 'spin' and the story would have had more legs than it deserved.