TPM: "Full Firing or Just Gelded? Is Penn Really Out? Completely, Positively Out?"

[mod mom]

04.06.08 -- 11:00PM // link | recommend (17)

FULL FIRING? OR JUST GELDED?
Is Penn really out? Completely, positively out?

Here's the statement ...

Statement from Maggie Williams
After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as Chief Strategist of the Clinton Campaign; Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign.

Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson will coordinate the campaign's strategic message team going forward.


The campaign statement says Geoff Garin and Howard Wolfson are taking over strategy and message. But Garin's a pollster. So the logic of the situation says he's taking over the polling. But it doesn't actually say that. Meanwhile the statement does conspicuously go out of its way to say that Penn and his firm will not only keep doing polling but also keep advising the campaign.

I'm going to have to wait to hear from some of my DC Dem consultant/polling community friends to get more of a feel for what happened here. Because if he was really sacked, the sacking announcement sort of reads like he helped draft it.

-snip

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/187620.php



MY COMMENT: NPR stated this morning that Penn will remain with the campaign to do polling and ADVISING. WAS THIS JUST A PLOY TO HELP HER NUMBERS IN PENNSYLVANIA? Did they not want the direct link with a UNION BUSTER and with someone advocating for free trade? WHY NOT A COMPLETE BREAK AND DENOUNCEMENT?

[C_U_L8R]

1. It's a title change

a skunk by any other name is just as stinky

[mod mom]

3. UNFAIR!

a skunk is actually a cute furry mammal-Penn is a despicable reptilian CLINTON ADVISOR/POLLSTER. ;)

[C_U_L8R]

6. Indeed. My apologies to skunks everywhere.

And reptiles as well.

[Zueda]

4. I'd say this makes him even more stinky.

This whole Penn got fired/demoted thing is just weird.

[mod mom]

2. oops wrong location

[0007]

5. Maggie Williams in action.......

NOT!! What is stinky is that Mark is dating Linda Tripp!

[JayFredMuggs]

7. With a press release like this...

It's like the wounded Hillary Clinton can keep bleeding votes and delegates for another two weeks until the PA primary.

Obama folks will be like a shark in the water over this.... either Mark Penn is gone, or he's going to continue to haunt her campaign.

This Mark Penn fiasco is disastrous for the Clinton campaign, and she ought to realize it, and kill this now, if she thinks she's still going to stand a chance of gaining the nomination.

Hillary supporters, wake up and smell the coffee, your candidate is drowning in her own duplicity.

[Peace Patriot]

8. The issue is the hiring, not the firing ('demoting'). She hired a paid agent of Colombia

--a government with one of the worst human rights records in the world--and if she only had a curious mind, and had sought out independent sources of information, she would have known that he was a paid agent of the Bush Junta in Venezuela, in 2004, and created a false poll saying that Hugo Chavez had not won the '04 recall election (--a rightwing recall election effort, supported by our tax dollars, from the USAID-NED budgets). The poll was to be used to foment rightwing "riots" and another rightwing coup attempt. In fact, Chavez had won it with 60% of the vote, in an election system that puts our own to shame for its transparency. Penn's foul, dishonest, Rovian behavior in Venezuela was not a secret. It is something that anyone in politics could and should know. But instead of vetting her chief campaign strategist, she apparently consulted him and took the Bushite line that Chavez is "a dictator"--a disinformation lie as bad as the one about WMDs in Iraq.

She can take Penn's title away; she can try to pretend that this Rovian shit is not advising her any more; or she can outright dump him. The question remains: Why did she hire him in the first place, when he was the paid agent of a foreign government whose close ties to paramilitary death squads--the murderers of thousands of union leaders and other innocent people--she supposedly descries? Or, if Penn's paid service as a foreign agent for fascist pigs occurred after she hired him, why didn't she fire him immediately upon learning of it? And if she didn't know about it, how does she explain the utter incompetence of that ignorance?

This is a "lose-lose" for Hillary. Maybe that's why she's waffling. She has all along relied on one of the most corrupt political consultants and pollsters in the country (not to mention the world). And, given his behavior in Venezuela--and his association with Colombia--one can only shudder at how he may have intended to create a Clinton win. I'm afraid that Hillary has made a fatal mistake in presuming that, to beat the Bushites, you have to be as underhanded, as unscrupulous, as ruthless and as lawless as they are. She didn't count on the honest Democrats in Congress who have resisted the Colombian "free deal"deal (free fire zone against union leaders); she didn't count on the truth about Colombia becoming known (and the truth about Mark Penn); she didn't count on people wanting the truth, and on being so sick of the lies that they will not tolerate them any more; she didn't count on the American people demanding something better in our political life; she didn't count on the grass roots, demoralized by the 2004 election theft HERE (--it didn't happen in Venezuela, cuz they count all their votes), rising up again and demanding something better, and working hard to get it. She has been playing Bushite games, and that appears to be why she is losing the nomination.

We still have the remaining--and very grave question--of whether or not the PA and other primaries, and the general election, will be honestly counted. A VERY non-transparent vote counting system is in place (in primary and general election voting--not in the caucuses), that puts the results in the hands of rightwing Bushite corporations, with virtually no audit/recount controls. And God and the fascists only know what this means. Are they favoring Obama because they think they can successfully steal it from him, without causing American Revolution II? Do they fear Hillary because she is so Bush-like? Or do they intend to give it to Hillary, in the end, and put her in the White House, so as to blame the post-Bush economic meltdown--and other meltdowns (Iraq?)--on the Democrats? (Or, do they intend to do that to Obama?) And what say, if any, do the American people get to have on all of this? Is all of this just shadow-play for Bushite Stolen Election III?

Stay tuned.