Is this ... "the real platform the Democrats are running on this November"

[Emit]

THE LOW POST: Hill on Fire
Hillary Clinton copulates with the ghost of Richard Nixon
Matt Taibbi

Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she's deserved all of it.

~snip~

We live in a two-party system where both parties are pro-war; when the wars go badly, the system scrambles to find a way to prevent antiwar sentiment from taking the drastic step of mounting a meaningful opposition.

Therefore from time to time we have to suffer through the spectacle of some status quo dingbat letting his hair down and performing a tortured impersonation of a peace activist during an election season. He bounds to the podium all hot and bothered and indignant-looking, and he sounds like he's against the war. Only once you've listened to the tape five or six times do you realize that he's saying that he's actually in favor of the war, he just thinks it should have been prosecuted more effectively.

This was the basic message of Richard Nixon in 1968, and exactly the same message now belongs to Hillary Clinton, who unveiled her new pseudo-anti-war pose during an absurd clash of war collaborators with Donald Rumsfeld on the Senate floor last week.

~snip~

Beltway pros like Hillary have long understood that in tough times, the vast majority of disgruntled Americans would rather find a way to convince themselves that their party agrees with them than face the fact that they never had any choice at all on a wide range of crucial issues. They're willing to be swayed by a carefully scripted display of canned anger like Hillary's outburst in the Senate because the alternatives -- third-party politics, grass-roots activism, dropping out of society altogether -- are too exhausting and radical to even imagine. Because getting to the root causes of things is so hard and scary, they'll settle for punishing an unpopular politician, even if it means electing his accomplice.

So they'll vote, even for a factory-produced fraud like Hillary Clinton, because voting is easy. Much easier than doing something. That's the real platform the Democrats are running on this November.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11111467/the_low_post_hillary_clinton_and_the_ghost_of_richard_nixon/1

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Yeah, well, you notice that the MSM has shut up about HRC being the

"front runner", haven't they?

We have a choice. We always have a choice. The important thing to remember is that we DO have a say, as long as we don't allow them to convince us we don't.

Lamont's victory is one shining example.

[msongs]

2. nice piece of slime from rolling stone - dehumanize your opponent

"Hillary Clinton has taken an enormous amount of abuse over the years from some very bad people, but her basic problem is that she's deserved all of it."

sure hope the author of this crap is not associated with any democrats or the democratic party in any way.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[bling bling]

3. He's ripped on Kerry and Clark too. Maybe other Dems as well.

But I think he considers himself a Dem. Or at least doesn't consider himself Republican. I think. Not 100% sure.

Seems like the kind of guy who's trying to just call it as he sees it, keep it honest and all. I guess that's why he called Kerry a doofus and made Clark sound like a nutcase. I think his schtick is unnecessarily calling out the people who are supposedly on his side for no apparent helpful reason.

Whatever. Everybody's got an angle. He's just trying to express an opinion and make a buck like everybody else while arming the Democrats with even more reasons to hate our own party. As though we need more anti-Dem crap around this place.

[msongs]

4. criticize behavior and politics all he wants but leave the slime

and personalization out of it.

I seriously doubt Hillary has deserved everything bad that has happened to her. sounds like something cut and pasted from the RNC website.

Just like all this stuff with Lieberman. Its not personal...at least to me.

Msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[Emit]

5. He certainly has a unique writing style

and opinion of politics.


Here is a critique of his own book, "Spanking the Donkey."

Most of "Spanking the Donkey" is a collection of vicious tirades directed at various politicians and journalists during the last campaign season. It would therefore be the most egregious cop-out if I were to spare myself that same treatment.

So here it is -- my review of "Spanking the Donkey", list price a ridiculous $24.95, publisher the aforementioned New Press. Release date: May, 2005.

Let's talk for a moment about what this book was supposed to be, and then let's talk about what it is. This is probably the best way to get at the failure of "Spanking the Donkey."

As someone who has followed Matt Taibbi's work for a number of years, there are a few things I can say about this writer. The first, and perhaps most important, is that he is not a deep thinker. He knows almost nothing about politics or anything else, and this is borne out in his reading habits; he consumes about five hours of sportswriting a day, stopping only when he is forced to go to work.

He remains employed as a journalist only due to a genetic accident. Some writers bring a variety of skills to the table when they work: a broad knowledge base, a burning inner idealism, a joyous gift for language, a keen sense of audience. Taibbi, on the other hand, possesses exactly one trick, which he uses over and over again to collect paychecks in between Patriots games. Thrust into any situation, he describes in morbid detail the most negative aspects of every thing, act and person he encounters.

Occasionally, this is amusing. This also occasionally makes his work read like principled iconoclasm, although the true motivation is probably closer to simple laziness and a kind of cowardly, masturbatory psychosis. Because he does not like to work very hard, Taibbi just blasts everything he sees as quickly as he can, and then retreats back immediately into the empty hole of his barren personal life. But this is irrelevant; the point is that the marriage of this particular writer to the subject of the American presidential election should have made for very interesting reading.

The American presidential election, after all, is a disgusting, shameful spectacle that just begs for the kind of fevered, blind shit-pounding that is this writer's ostensible expertise...

http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/21762/

[mark414]

6. matt taibbi is a great writer...

he had a great piece on iraq in the last rolling stone...i agree with him on this too - there is no way i would ever vote for hillary clinton. taibbi is no conservative but he's right about the democratic establishment for the most part...

[Emit]

7. I'm not familiar with him.

I think it best not to get all hung up on the "slime" but look toward the deeper message he's sending. It's an important message -- or perhaps I'm just getting much too cynical the more I delve into politics.

I just read this by him, too. Oh, man, he nails some things here...

David Brooks and the DLC: Best Friends Forever?

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted August 3, 2006.

The Democrats must shed their corporate spokesmen and yuppie paranoia if they are ever going to win.

There are many people out there who are baffled by the career of David Brooks, but I am not one of them...

Brooks is the perfect priest of American conservatism, and by conservatism I don't mean the bloodthirsty, gun-toting, go-back-to-Africa, welfare-bashing right-winger conservatism of the NRA and Sean Hannity and the Bible Belt. I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren't dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.

That's why the marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons.

~snip~

Brooks's column of a few weeks ago on the subject of Lieberman/Lamont, titled "The Liberal Inquisition," was a masterpiece of yuppie paranoia...

But the most objectionable thing about the Brooks column was its crude parroting of a suspiciously similar DLC editorial published about a month before (See Road Rage, from the August 10th, 2006, issue of Rolling Stone) entitled "The Return of Liberal Fundamentalism." Both columns described Lamont's Internet supporters as "fundamentalist" liberals bent on a "purge" of poor nice old Joe Lieberman, who represents heterodoxy, centrism and bipartisanship. Brooks used the word "purge" twice; the author of the DLC column, Ed Kilgore, used it eight times.

Let's be clear about what we're dealing with here. These people are professional communicators. They don't repeatedly use words like "purge" and "fundamentalist" -- terms obviously associated with communism and Islamic terrorism -- by accident. They know exactly what they're doing. It's an authoritarian tactic and it should piss you off. It pissed me off. When I called the DLC about the editorial, Kilgore was not available, but they put Will Marshall on the line.

Cont'd: http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/39862/

[johnnydrama]

8. I don't really agree.

Much to the dismay of a lot of people here, HRC hasn't come out for a timetable to leave Iraq, or said her original
vote was wrong.

That would make the article correct.

What she has done is truthfully criticized Donald Rumsfeld and the running of the war.

[Emit]

9. The jury is still out for me...

It's probably just my own cynicism about the Bush, Clinton, Clinton, Bush, Bush...Clinton? thing.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

10. "factory-produced fraud like Hillary" - the "factory" is the DLC.

The "realists" who brought us the "not as bad" party.