’08/12 Election

Why I’m Not Blogging The Democratic Primaries

'08/12 Election, Blogs, Meta, US politics
Published on

For a start, there’s plenty going on the rest of the world. It’s not all about you, you know.

But my other main reason for my having barely blogged about the Democratic primaries is nicely encapsulated in this post, which comes from eRiposte via Lambert at Correntewire:

[…]

To me, the 2008 Democratic primary campaign is a watershed event in the history of the progressive blogosphere. It has revealed that some of the alleged “progressive” bloggers are fundamentally no different than the media and the deranged right-wing bloggers they have long claimed to detest. The Trina Bechtel incident is the “crowning” event on a sickening trend in this election campaign – where Gore was replaced by Clinton and the “media” was supplemented by an influential portion of the allegedly “progressive” blogosphere. I can easily see an entire book being written on the work of these jokers who have turned the credibility of the blogosphere to dust because of their Clinton-hatred. There used to be a time when bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and Atrios used to write again and again about how the right-wing blogosphere was almost always wrong, especially in their attacks on Democrats. Today, it is clear that such blog posts could equally well be written about a prominent section of the formerly “progressive” blogosphere.

More…

I don’t even have a vote. There’s no way I’m dipping a toe into that pool of acid.

Accusation, counteraccusation, venom, and bile is the current flavour of much of the formerly diversely opinioned (but mostly united in wingnut-hatred) US progressive blogosphere; but it’s not not aimed at the opposition but turned almost entirely inwards, against each other. .

So many chances lately to really nail those evil fuckwit Republicans but they’ve fluffed them; meanwhile the Bush administration’s slowly unraveling by the day. The inner circle is reduced to Petraeus and Bush. Soon it’ll be just the Chimperor and his dog. Nemesis is on the way for the Republicans and they know it – most are engaged in frantic shredding and last-minute nest feathering and othewise couldn’t give a shit what happens next, just as long as it’s someone else’s problem.

They’re so sure the game is up that they’ve nominated John McCain, an unbalanced, nasty old man, as president – a man that even they loathe. So toxic is he, notwithstanding his warhero status that many republicans will vote for Clinton instead, should she win the nomination. But even wit an easy target like McCain all the blogospheric Obama and Clinton partisans can do is snipe at each other. The rest of the world can go hang, unless they’re photogenic Tibetans.

Of course it’s crucially important which candidate is chosen – but by the time they finally do choose (or have the choice made for them – so much for democracy) they may well have torn themselves apart or have handed the election to this man:

That would be a disaster for the whole bloody world, not just US Democrats.

….Speechless….

'08/12 Election, Funny, US politics, Video
Published on

Either the worst, most inept campaign video ever, or a sophisticated false flag operation, you decide. Not suited for people who suffer physically from out of tune singing. If there is a hell, this will be played on a 24 hour loop in some of the more severe circles.

Comment of The Day

'08/12 Election, Comment of the Day
Published on 2 Comments on Comment of The Day

At Sadly No, commenting on the observation that many formerly sane lefty blogs have turned rabidly partisan:

atheist said,

March 13, 2008 at 20:07

Here’s how I look at it:

Obama = Dirt
Clinton = Shit
McCain = Toxic Waste

I’d prefer to eat dirt rather than eat shit, but I want to avoid eating toxic waste if I possibly can. I don’t want to eat shit, or dirt really, but toxic waste could hurt or possibly kill me. So, if necessary, I’ll eat shit.

So what are Ralph Nader and Ron Paul, then?

Will She or Won’t She? Gitmo And Hillary

'08/12 Election, War on Terror
Published on

Still the injustice of Gitmo goes on, while the media obsess over the primaries and a candidate’s eyebrow raised here or a tone of voice lowered there. But the media rarely ask the candidates about what they plan to do about routine kidnap, detention and torture.

Mother Jones:

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees often argue that their clients are being held based on thin intelligence, but Kurnaz’s case is the first where the record clearly shows that evidence of innocence was ignored to justify his continued detention. His story, pieced together from intelligence reports, newly declassified Pentagon documents, and secret testimony before the German Parliament—much of it never before reported in the United States—offers a rare window into the workings of the secretive system used to hold and try terrorism suspects.

It seems there are more rare windows into those workings, in the shape of fifty videotapes of CIA interrogations that Busco inadvertently failed to get wiped, (with their usual combination of evil and incompetence). There’s ten months to go of this. How much more?

Lawyers for Gitmo detainees endorse Obama as the best choice to reverse Bushco War on Terror detention policies to “restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.”

Hillary Clinton has yet to give a definitive answer on what she’ll do about Gitmo – and more importantly what she’ll do about an intelligence and security apparatus that knows no restraint under Bushco.

Hillary boasts of her wealth of foreign policy experience, gained on the right-hand (so to speak) of the president. That would include experience of enabling Gitmo and the kidnap and detention of inocent men like Murat Kurmar, then?

It was the Clinton administration that established the precedent for Camp X-ray when it jailed Haitians for having AIDS, says Pauline Park at Visible Vote ’08:

In the wake of the September 1991 military coup that ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, the U.S. Coast Guard interdicted thousands of Haitian refugees who’d fled their country by boat and brought them to Guantánamo Bay. In 1992, the last year of his first and only term, George H.W. Bush ordered 300 of these Haitian refugees who had tested positive for HIV detained indefinitely without access to lawyers and held in leaky barracks behind razor wire. When Bill Clinton came into office, he continued the detention of these Haitian refugees.

Bill Clinton had won election in November 1992 as The Man from Hope, but to the Haitians in the AIDS death camp at Guantánamo, the situation looked hopeless until Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale University law professor, began working on their case with a group of his students. Brandt Goldstein documents the extraordinary story in his book, Storming the Court: How a Band of Yale Law Students Sued the President — and Won (Scribner 2005). In partnership with New York lawyer Michael Ratner, Koh and his students filed suit on behalf of the Haitian refugees. The Clinton Justice Department responded by moving to get the case dismissed and to have Yale and Koh punished with financial sanctions.

“Plaintiffs have been trying to use the courts to decide matters of national security, in place of the Defense Department, the Department of State, and the president himself,” Justice Department attorney Scott Dunn declared in arguing for the Clinton administration in federal court. “The courts have already decided that’s improper,” Dunn asserted, anticipating arguments that the Bush administration has made in defending the indefinite detention regime at Guantánamo since 2001.

Don’t look to another President Clinton to close Gitmo or stop rendition.