What is wrong with this picture?
First, the LA Times:
Obama is shifting toward the center
Barack Obama, as he introduces himself to the broader voting public, is emphasizing centrist — even conservative — positions on hot-button issues.
In recent weeks, he toughened his stance on Iran and backed an expansion of the government’s wiretapping powers. On Wednesday, he said states should be allowed to execute child rapists. When the Supreme Court the next day struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, he did not complain.
These views would fit many Republican candidates, but they are the recent profile adopted by a man who has been called the most liberal Democrat in the Senate.
In the primary season, candidates’ chief goal is usually to win their party’s most ideologically driven voters; afterward the candidates often adjust their policy stances. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has also changed tack on an array of issues. But Obama has drawn attention for the number of issues on which he has taken a moderate stance in recent days.
Now on some level this should seem normal. Candidates have traditionally moved toward the center after winning their primaries to attract more undecided voters. Except that that isn’t happening with John McCain, who has if anything gotten crazier in recent months. As Matt Taibi notes:
But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway. […]
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, “One of us! One of us!” all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he’s unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he’s given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said.
How does this happen? How has wingnuttery so poisoned our elections that both candidates are striving to show the rest of the country just how stupid and crazy they are? Don’t we need, to coin a phrase, a choice not an echo?
I’d like to see news coverage that referred to “former maverick John McCain.”
Now on some level this should seem normal.
Should it? I thought Obama was ushering in a “new” brand of politics.
I thought Obama was ushering in a “new” brand of politics.
You believed that horseshit?
Obama at least has to change his policies & statements to be viewed as running toward the right (er, um, excuse me, “center”); McCain is granted to be permanently Mavericking a Ben Stein Republican establishment with his awesome centrist policies, no matter what McCain is actually doing or saying, and how right wing it is.
The problem is not that the politicians think American people are stupid. The problem is that 50% plus 1 of American people are stupid.
Obama’s ability to make both wingnuts and their pencil-dicked dumbshit leftist enablers seethe with rage makes me happy.
[…] Party, Barack Obama has been moving rightward ever since he clinched the nomination. Though bloggers and mainstream media like to say he’s moving “toward the center,” that’s […]
It’s utterly inexplicable. It’s like neither candidate reads the papers.
The bush/cheney policies are universally loathed, discredited and viewed as failures by an angry electorate who overwhelmingly believes the US is going in the wrong direction.
The republicans themselves acknowledge that the “brand is trashed” and the entire electorate is looking for something different, something more honest, more transparent, more competent.
And huge majorities want to see policies that emphasize so-called “liberal” issues like heath care, investment in infrastructure, education, sustainable energy and the like.
And yet…
And yet both candidates aggressively campaign like they just read a newspaper from late 2004 and they know EXACTLY what people want them to do.
I am incapable of understanding why, in spite of all the evidence supporting a shift away from EVERYTHING represented by the last eight years, they continue to embrace it. It’s almost as if they’re both lowering expectations.
Or throwing the fight…
mikey
Obama’s kinda blowing it here. I don’t know whether or not he’s concerned about the Fourth Amendment, &c. But IMHO it is to his advantage to differentiate himself from John Sidney McCain III & tie McCain to Bush, that is, to keep up with the left-leaning rhetoric he was using before. If he flip flops, the media will call him out, while failing to highlight the flip flops of McCain. The perception will be two sorta centristy candidates in November. And one of them’s black. Who wins that race?
Perhaps I’m misunderestimating my compatriots on race, as well as factors such as the expected increase in Democratic turnout (myself included — I’ve switched from Moore to Obama). I dunno. I do know I failed to make this post coherent.
….”or throwing the fight….” Hmmm. It would seem that Obama, at least, is on track to turn off the very same supporters he will need even more now that he has decided against public financing. Does he have the same advisors who helped him run his primary? Have they decided they can kiss off his most passionate donors in favor of maybe picking up a few independents?
mikey, just to take a wild guess: Because they must first be mindful of the corporate overlords who underwrite their power trips? Yeah, there’s always that quaint notion of the will of the voters, but as we’ve seen, that’s a mere technicality.
It’s money. We the people don’t have any money; at any rate, we don’t have enough money to buy the presidency. The corporations have the money. If the corporate powers that be decide Obama won’t play ball with them, they will swing into action in a way that will make the swiftboating of John Kerry look like a good natured joshing. The Allied Insurances and the Wells Fargos and the Citigroups have to feel secure that nothing of real substance will interfere with the ongoing slurping up of the swill at the public trough. It they believe that Obama will not interfere too much with the status quo and only make cosmetic changes – sops to the Democratic base – they may not interfere too much with his election. I don’t think they really trust McCain that much either. It may be that the non-military corporate folks are afraid that McCain’s aggressive military stance just might be bad for business.
MCCAIN ’08
Because thousands more American men deserve to die in Iraq because I caught someone looking at my butt in the elevator today.
MzNicky beat me to it, and was more succinct.
That’s right! I’m the only candidate who isn’t under corporate control!
(yay! McCain’s touching my pee-pee again! Yummy!)
MMcZu: Wow. Way to conflate various reasons why the Dems are eating their own.
(yay! McCain’s touching my pee-pee again! Yummy!)
Yeah, thanks for nothing there, Ralph.
OBAMA 2008
Because dammit, I can touch my own pee pee…
mikey
Remember how one big reason to consider a different candidate than Hillary was to curtail the triangulating tendencies of Teh Klintinz and their DLC cabal?
I’m voting for the first candidate to promise a unicorn in every garage and a passenger pigeon in every pot.
Many western democracies seem to be plagued with rightie syndrome and the names of parties are becoming meaningless. Conservative parties have been overtaken by fundamentalist libertarian nutjobs. Liberal/labour and social democratic parties are now conservative.
mikey,
Throwing the fight? You suspect that Election Eve, Sen. Obama will be watching the returns and Tom Daschle’s gonna tell him, “Kid, this just ain’t your night?”
Aren’t most people’s views to the left of what currently is considered “center”? I mean, regular people, not politicians. Don’t most people, say, want certain programs left alone (Social Security), want some sort of universal health care, want the US to get the hell out of Iraq (& meanwhile not start another Operation Blood for Oil in Iran)? In today’s political climate, those things are considered the views of radical leftists. There is a pronounced dis-connect here: the population is left of “center” (I put the word in quotation marks because .. well, let’s just say that Nixon would, if he were alive today with his platform from the early 70s, be considered left of center); politicians are right of “center” and straying ever further toward the grazing grounds of authoritarians & other lunatics.
The end result is that regular people — & most of us regular folks are hurting rather a lot after all this compassionate conservatism — have no representation.
I need that on a bumper sticker immediately, mikey.
TaiBBi
Lesley asserts that there’s a broad movement toward more conservative policies in many western Democracies, implying that what is happening in the US is not abnormal. I disagree. First, a counterexample: the Social Dems in the German state of Hessen, teaming up with the Greens and the Leftists, just made higher education in the state free again. A couple of years ago the Christian Dems instituted a symbolic Euro 1000/year tuition fee. The drift in the US into wingnut politics is a consequence of laws that regulate and also influence voter registration and the lack thereof. Turnouts have been in the 50 to 60’s for several decades producing a feeding frenzy for special interest groups. Abortion, Isreal gun laws, immigration, Cuba, the 10 Commandments, evolution. I mean who really gives a shit? Small numbers of well-organized wingnuts who can swing elections because turnouts are so low. Laws have to be established to up the turnout. Start by consolidating all services points between the state and its citizens into one office, introducing picture ID, and harmonizing balloting across the 50 states. With turnout in the high 70s the presidential candidates will be less neurotic about the wingnuts.
Is this really that surprising, in light of the fact Obama’s whole strategy is about “national reconciliation?” The whole strength of Obama is that he’s the first candidate that was born after the 1960s, and had no role to play in the traditional grudges of that era.
From the get-go, Obama lamented in his book that Senators from both parties no longer go out together for lunch the way they did in the fifties and sixties. Maybe this is the Nixon era’s legacy of nasty politics, but who started it is beside the point.
Even in the Obama race speech that Conservatives love to get all pants-pissed scared about, Obama more or less said to (of all the knuckledragging troglodytes in history) racists, “hey, I guess I kind of see where you’re coming from.” This, to RACISTS.
Laws have to be established to up the turnout.
Perhaps we could use recent events in Zimbabwe to promote this idea.
A parody of the popular social networking site Facebook has spawned an evil twin — http://hatebook.org/
Hatebook.org is the creation of German market researcher Nils Andres — or Dr. Evil, as he likes to be called online. It’s a Facebook spoof that pitches itself as the “anti-social utility that disconnects you from the things you hate.”
But not everyone sees the site as a forum for silly rants. The odd user manages to register bona fide hate, usually sexist or racist, before it’s taken down.
Andres says those users are few and far between, because the community as a whole understands that discrimination isn’t the point of Hatebook. He maintains that in creating the site, he just wanted to see what would happen if he turned Facebook on his head.
Wow. Now the referrer spam is harvesting referrer spam.
Oscrod, In Britain, Canada and the US, mainstream parties have all swung to the right. This is directly tied to globalization and corporate interests. The trend of privatizing health and welfare services – particularly health care – is occurring globally. This is no coincidence.
These articles are somewhat dated but still relevant.
Europe ‘Is Rubbing Its Eyes’ at the Ascent of the Right
Interpreting election results in western democracies
The swing to the centre right (in the Netherlands)
McMaverick is on the teevee chatting up Billy Graham. Now last I knew, this is the same guy on tape talking to Nixon about how Jews have a stranglehold on this country. Why does Billy Graham get away with stuff that would make anyone else more radioactive than Farrakhan? Because he’s old?
Cause he’s WHITE.
Catching up on old (young) George Carlin like this and this – the Mike Douglas show co-hosted by John Lennon and Yoko Ono – and this, and 70s era Saturday Night Live and can only marvel at how far we’ve declined.
Found this little gem, Richard Lewis is angry.
Bronstein is correct. Wingnut bigotry is assumed, and hence uncontroversial.
Brad, an excellent point.
Well, because he’s white, yes, but Billy Graham has also been internalized.
Once a public figure has been accepted as a symbol, it no longer matters what that figure says or does.
This is why the spate of “Bad Santa” pictures were supposed to be so shocking. Santa no longer can be mentally manipulated; he’s good, period.
For instance, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, as well as being dead, has been internalized as a saint-like figure, and everyone conveniently forgets that he was, at the time, considered dangerously radical, and his sermons towards the end were very similar to the “shocking” ones of Rev. Wright.
We see this working for McCain, whose “maverick” image will be very hard for a lot of not-paying-attention voters to shake. It doesn’t matter how many pictures of him suckling at Bush’s teat they see.
Because they must first be mindful of the corporate overlords who underwrite their power trips? Yeah, there’s always that quaint notion of the will of the voters, but as we’ve seen, that’s a mere technicality.
—
Let me get this straight. Whenever anyone disagrees with MzNicky on anything, it is because of the inexorable pull of their omnipotent corporate overlords.
Only MzNicky has the power of independent, non-slave consciousness.
Well of course not. Clearly you’re disagreeing with her, and the reason is because you’re a stupid ass.
It’s a little bit complicated because the question started with “how does” and “how has” instead of “why do they” or “why don’t they”. But the general rule of thumb about questions like that has a darned good track record.
If the question starts out with “why do they” or “why don’t they” – the answer is money.
Shoot. They angry cop above was me.
Clearly you’re disagreeing with her, and the reason is because you’re a stupid ass.
The predicate, of course, is the only possible reason someone could reach a diffrint conclusion than MzNicky.
I forgot that with some of the subject matter at Sadly, No! the answer is sometimes “poor reading comprehension” or “addiction to bad faith arguments”. What did MzNicky say?
Emphasis mine.
How did you interpret it?
Attacking regulars is pretty good troll technique, but UR DOIN’ IT WRONG.
Seemed pretty straightforward to me, too, chuk.
Seemed like she was merely introducing the possibility that politicians respond to the needs, wants and desires of their contributors.
Nothing really controversial there, to me.
My answer would have looked more like “yeah, but if Obama’s getting his campaign funding from almost two million individuals that OUGHT to change that dynamic. It remains to be seen to what extent ought becomes IS…
mikey
Not nearly as surprising (or upsetting) as Harold and Kumar Shift Toward the Center.
“yeah, but if Obama’s getting his campaign funding from almost two million individuals that OUGHT to change that dynamic. It remains to be seen to what extent ought becomes IS…
Thanks Mikey, what you say is what I was thinking. Obama is not getting his funding from corporate mega-donors. His funding is small-donor based. So his recent seeming movements toward the “center” (which I abhor) cannot be rationally ascribed to bowing in obeisance to his ‘corporate overlords’ …
unless the conspiracy goes even deeper than we were first led to believe.
o’scrod: you’ve brought up some good points but there are much more systemic problems with our elections that you’re ignoring.
In America, we only get one choice for President. How many people are there who would agree with any invective you could hurl at Obama but are still going to vote for the guy because he’s better then McCain? How many Republicans loathe McCain but are still going to vote for him because he’s better then Obama?
Our “democracy” is a fucking sham. And not because it was hijacked by special interests; it is a sham and a failure on the most basic level.
People say Nader cost Gore the presidency. What has to be true for that to be the case?
Well, it has to be that, had those Naderites voted for Gore, Gore would’ve had so many votes he would’ve won without any problems. Furthermore, it must be that Gore was enough like Nader that the Naderites would’ve found him to be a more tolerable president then George W. Bush.
In other words, Nader can spoil the election for Gore if and only if the majority of voters want a liberal President. The same is true in reverse; Perot can only spoil the election of Bush if the majority of voters want a conservative president.
The only conclusion I can come to is this: a third party candidate can screw over an ideological compatriot if and only if our electoral system is built so as to deliver results that have nothing to do with what the voters want, and to do so in a predictable, systematic fashion.
We know when the system will fail; it will fail when a person whose ideas are popular runs for President without first receiving the permission of the ruling parties. Democrats seem to think the solution is for nobody to run for President without party permission, but this is no solution at all; telling Nader not to run is as fundamentally undemocratic as what happens when he does run.
Our presidential election system is an utter failure on a very basic level that has nothing to do with fraud or poll taxes.
As for that bastard Obama, first of all, he thinks he can rely on our fear of McCain to bring us to the polls, which means he only has to be a little bit less nutty then McCain to win. Why the fuck would he care that lefties don’t like this shit? We’re gonna vote for him anyway.
Second, all these things are aimed at bringing more power to the government that he’s about to run. His slide to the “right” doesn’t seem to include, eg, huge tax cuts.
The guy’s not a wingnut, he just wants an oppressively powerful government, just like everybody else.
Seemed pretty straightforward to me, too, chuk.
Then again, perhaps this is all part of the great corporate kabuki organized by the huge multi-nationals and only MzNicky and Douglas Watts are real people and not monkeys in robot-human suits. It’s all part of a bizarre scheme to secure oil drilling right in ANWR, because that’s where Cthulu sleeps, and when our corporate ovelords pierce that icy prison, the End Times will truly have come.
Apropos of nothing, but FETUS starts shooting this month.
The plot actually sounds pretty compelling.
A little offtopic, but can someone explain to me what is going on with the woman in this Day by Day comic?
Is that the largest testicle I’ve ever seen between her legs? Is she pregnant, but with a severely prolapsed uterus? Or is her far leg simply filled with fluid because of elephantiasis?
Um, not to point out the obvious, but even if Obama isn’t relying on the corporate overlords for funding, the corporate overlords might awaken from their dead but dreaming state to devour him if they get the idea that he’s going to rock their boat. Through massive negative campaigning against him they can just as surely determine the outcome as they can if they are directly funding him. I have no problem with him throwing them verbal scraps to placate them until the election has passed, so long as he doesn’t really mean it. And we’re not going to know for sure if he’s playing them or playing up to them until after he is elected.
Is that the largest testicle I’ve ever seen between her legs? Is she pregnant, but with a severely prolapsed uterus? Or is her far leg simply filled with fluid because of elephantiasis?
Neither. She’s either a scaleless mermaid or has a parasitic twin growing out of her nether regions, and you’re seeing its back.
The reason the American political system’s fucked is pretty simple from a historical perspective.
The right-wing authoritarians and center-right moderates worked together through most the 20th century to make sure any left-wing political group got fucked over or accused of un-Americanism and stripped of any potential growth for decades upon decades.
The end result of this was that while Europe has a strong left-wing because they couldn’t keep socialists or communists down, the U.S. has been leaning right for nearly 100 years and is tipping over as we speak to a 90-degree angle.
And well, leftism is a beast prone to schism, so even if we got everyone who is honestly left-wing in this country to abandon the center-right representative Democrats, we’d all kill each other trying to decide on what left-wing philosophy we should organize ourselves into.
Ahem. Please skip this post if you don’t want to read my brief rant about the evils of the passive voice.
This is one example of why I occasionally fantasize about plunging journalists into flaming vats of shit. The natural question: Who has called Obama the most liberal Democrat in the Senate? goes unanswered and without an answer, the writer starts to look like the asshats who spread rumors about Obama’s Muslimitude.
Now maybe Ms. Hook (who has been called the woman most likely to lie down before a beast) was just lazy. Maybe she was on deadline. But when they only people who’ve made that claim are Republicans and the bobbleheads who make their living by repeating GOP talking points on TV, I sort of kinda start to wonder if Ms. Hook is in fact another hack.
Thanks, I’m done.
Look, I’m the first to admit I’m not familiar with all the conventions, but hey, wouldn’t there be some serious righteous upsides to laying down before beasts?
I mean, it sounds like something worth doing, at least a couple times, right?
mikey
Leftism is a beast prone to schism, so even if we got everyone who is honestly left-wing in this country to abandon the center-right representative Democrats, we’d all kill each other trying to decide on what left-wing philosophy we should organize ourselves into.
Well, that’s a self-fulfilling prophesy. But I agree with its sense. For example, William O. Douglas and Earl Warren and Hugo Black and Bill Brennan are now seen as the solid liberal rocks of the U.S. Supreme Court, but they fought like cats and dogs on the details. But they suppressed themselves enough to get important work done. Lefties have to do the same or they bankrupt and destroy their own self-avowed goals.
It doesn’t matter how many pictures of him (McCain) suckling at Bush’s teat they see.
Ooooooo, you’ve got pictures?!?
Just because it worked so well:
Sunday night dinner….
Garlic Herb roasted yukon gold potatoes.
Boneless Ribeye, medium rare w/crispy edges, seasoned real simply, topped with sauteed mushrooms with bell peppers, onions, garlic and asparagus tips.
Simple romaine, tomato, and feta salad with a tangy raspberry vinaigrette…
Fucking YUM!
I’m pretty much done with sunday…
mikey
I occasionally fantasize about plunging journalists into flaming vats of shit.
I know the shit won’t actually burn, but the journalists might.
No no no – everyone knows Cthulhu is enjoying his naptime in Antarctica, that is, FOR NOW … if Mt. Erebus suddenly starts erupting, we’ll know that he just woke up with a righteous bitch of a 220 million year hangover.
( Cthulhu is a subsidiary of Viacom – Copyright 1984)
The trend to the right is indeed international – but it’s not universal. Take a look at what’s been happening in a region long assumed to be eternally safe for the ultra-right – South America … which is now having a serious economic renaissance while the Western economies threaten to hemhorrage. If America’s huddled masses of regular folks would just get a bit less provincial in their POV & see this, they’d lose the romance for the right real fast, & start demanding what they need – with the proverbial olive-branch in one hand & a gun in the other.
I fear that Obama is now afraid of losing his substantial advantage in the polls, & thus has begun shifting to a defensive/reactive stance toward the GOP – & just look how splendidly letting the enemy dictate the game has worked for the Dems, resulting in victories for great Presidents like Dukakis & Kerry.
mikey, I could hunt up the story I saw linked here a few months ago, but … no.
Let’s just say it involved a man, a horse and eventually, a hearse.
You didn’t go back far enough.
1848 is where everything fucking changed. The time was right in Europe. In the U.S.? Sadly, No. We were too busy dealing with the twin historical forces of mass western migration AND the slavery question, making our situation completely different from the Old Countries. Marxism would have fell on deaf ears…we were too busy gobbling up land or killing our neighbor or what have you.
Whatever happened in the 20th century can’t stand on its own.
Additionally, I’m thinking about filing a complaint with the dean over at UT law for the Ole Perfessor’s increasingly inappropriate, peeping tom-esque photos displayed at InstaDoofus. Anyone else in?
cock-sucking presidential aspirant
He says that like its a bad thing. I don’t want “cock-sucker” being used as an insult for neocons and media hacks. The one thing I’m really good at . . .
Assuming you don’t want to punish the suckees when you’re finished, and then you don’t feel the need to invade or bomb sovereign nations when you’re not indulging your expertise, I think perhaps in your case, Signor Monkay, it’s NOT and insult.
That’s my pos, anyway…
mikey
Probably more like years, not months… Enumclaw says, “Just say neigh.”
Good lord! His drawing of women is getting worse day by day (pun intended). It won’t be long until they’re just large blobs.
The cartoonist Muir (if, by cartoonist, we mean somebody who picked up some pens and paper at the local Wal-Mart) is depicting the lady lying on her side, sort of.
Well, her hips are lying that way, but her torso is supine.
Her left leg is on top, flexed at the knee and hip. That big bump is her upper thigh, left butt cheek, and hip.
He’s had her traipsing around in her panties/thong these past few days.
How do I know this? I’m a little ashamed to say.
Luckily, it’s tomorrow already, and Muir is back to his usual shtick of a white guy pretending to be a black guy chewing out black guys for not being more like white guys.
Looking at the other cartoon, it appears the elephant man is going down on the female character.
Chris Muir has given me a reason to join http://hatebook.org/
Worst palindrome ever.
The right wing swing in Europe is not universal, but is notable in some respects, but most of the right wing parties in Europe (with the exception of the Mussolini wannabe in Italy) would be accused of been leftist loons in the US. However, the labour party in the UK has traveled so far to the right, that the old Tory party is probably more left wing. Its a sad thing, but they have doomed themselves, people are naturally left wing in my opinion.
Let’s just say it involved a man, a horse and eventually, a hearse.
Riddle of the Sphinx, beta version.
[gets up, pours coffee, turns on computer, checks out S,N!, sees name strewn throughout a thread]
Uh…wha..?
I think Mr. Douglas Watts is still upset because I made a non-condemnatory remark about Ralph Nader on a different thread a few days ago.
I’m thinking about filing a complaint with the dean over at UT law for the Ole Perfessor’s increasingly inappropriate, peeping tom-esque photos displayed at InstaDoofus.
D.N. Nation: I might be of service in that regard. Contact Gavin for details, if interested.
I know the shit won’t actually burn, but the journalists might.
Sadly, no! Many years ago, I dated a bloke whose father was a fireman. His favourite work anecdote involved a large fire at the local sewerage treatment plant: picture the poor fireys trying to wade through burning ‘slurry’ without it pouring into their boots, and you’ll have some idea. Some of the guys couldn’t deal with it, even with the masks and breathers (and throw up in one of those and you’ll know about it). There’s something about aged and mixed effluent, at least when it burns, that really turns the stomach, apparently.
Well, her hips are lying that way, but her torso is supine.
I think we already covered the total awesome-ness that is Chris Muir’s idea of how spines can move. I’m trying to figure out how she’s almost completely visible behind the other guy. They’re supposedly asleep, so either her right side is bizarrely distended or whatever it is they’re lying on is pitched torwards the viewer somehow. Also, he sleeps with his glasses on and a TV remote glued to his hip.
This strip is actually funnier if you read it backwards. The redhead first realizes the extent to which Chris Muir has been whoring her out, she then smashes herself in the head as hard as possible, killing herself by snapping her own neck like a twig and leaving her head hanging in a grotesquely unnatural position. All while he remains obliviously asleep.
Yeah, I heard about the Tories being more liberal than the Tories on a few positions than and was really shocked.
I know the Spaniards went further left since
Al Quedasome small Moroccan terrorist group blew up those trains. Australia has also gone left because the people were sick of John Howard and his party (which like UK’s Labour has drifted far right of its original intention. And yeah, I know Australia is not in Europe, but I decided to throw it out there).Ummm… when has he ever drawn her with more than panties/thong?
Barry is useless. He threw the best foreign policy attack dog he has under the bus.
“Get disappointed by someone new”
The Tories are currently without positions. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t on the right, as they will demonstrate when they lie their way into power. It just means they are not letting on just how far to the right they actually are. Because the British are sick of Labour, they are willing to project whatever they want onto the blank canvas of Cameron.
It’s funny that you mention the UK, actually. To me, Obama seems very much like Blair: basically a centre-rightist at best, who pretended to represent the kind of change people were desperate for, and once empowered, continued to shove the country to the right.
People are not generally leftwing, sadly. They tend to be rather conservative. People want change in the number of dollars that flow into their pockets much more than they want change in others’ lives.
To me, Obama seems very much like Blair: basically a centre-rightist at best, who pretended to represent the kind of change people were desperate for, and once empowered, continued to shove the country to the right.
I thought Tony Blair was a version of Bill Clinton. That would make Obama a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Like a Monkees tribute band.
Christopher thanks for your response. I agree, voter choice is comparatively limited in presidential elections in the US. The solution is to explicitly establish parties in the Constitution by amending the document with a mechanism that assigns seats in the House to parties according to their performace in Congressional elections, as measured by the percentage of the total vote won. In other words, a shift away from the current direct election of one candidate to a combined direct election of one candidate plus party preference vote. This would produce a winner with a face, the successful direct candidate, plus a winning party, the one preferred by most voters. It would when supplemented by voter registration improvements have a good chance of producing genuine democracy in the US.
Now here is some serious prime-time crazy (from Taibibi’s article):
A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. “He exaggerates too much,” Ron says. “He’s not honest.”
“OK,” I say. “What does he exaggerate about?”
“Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother,” he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
“Well, he was saying . . .” he begins. “As if that qualifies him to . . .”
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
“Look, you either are or you aren’t,” she says.
“And he aren’t,” Ron says, nodding with relief.
[…]First, in all three conflicts, Democrats postponed the initiation of direct combat as long as possible. In only one, World War I, did Wilson decide to join the war without prior direct attack. Roosevelt maneuvered near war but did not enter the war until after Pearl Harbor. Truman also maneuvered near war but did not get into direct combat until after the North Korean invasion of South Korea. Indeed, even Wilson chose to go to war to protect free passage on the Atlantic. More important, he sought to prevent Germany from defeating the Russians and the Anglo-French alliance and to stop the subsequent German domination of Europe, which appeared possible. In other words, the Democratic approach to war was reactive. All three presidents reacted to events on the surface, while trying to shape them underneath the surface.[…]