What if, and I realize it is a big if, Obama’s health insurance reforms work. What if we all do measurably better under a cooperative approach legislated by the Democrats. Would conservatives be OK with it?

I deplore double-standards and I ask myself — what if we could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that tax cuts for the rich, for example, was the best approach to raise the median standard of living. What if conservatives were right and tax rates are north of the sweet spot for the best return into the US Treasury. I would be DELIGHTED. What if the Bush approach to Iraq had succeeded in 6 months, like they hoped. DELIGHTED. My goal is not that the Left “wins”. My goal is that we get better at government so that we get the most bang for the buck on our shared interests such as national security, the economy, health care and education.

I’ve said this before, but some people think: the Left was mean to Bush so we can be as mean as we want to Obama. You have to remember that we were all hopeful for Bush in the early days. He ran on the compassionate conservative thing and I honestly hoped he’d be successful. He was immediately deeply partisan in every single thing he did. Many of us were shocked. Bush earned our hatred. He really did. He earned it day after day for 8 years.

It is completely possible that Obama justly earns people’s hatred. If he is highly unsuccessful in measurable ways like Bush was, he’ll have earned our disapproval. If he is highly political, highly partisan, shady, obtuse and, accordingly to some, criminal like Bush was, he’ll have earned our hate. But he hasn’t been any of these things. The jury is still out on most of his policies, but he has not been a bait and switch like Bush and he has been an honest broken on the issues. I realize that Left and Right disagree on the prescriptions but even fuckwits like Glen Beck should be able to see that Obama is a straight shooter.

The hysteria on the Right is manufactured and they’ve done so because “it worked” that we all hated Bush. Even the Right hated Bush by the end. But the ideologues are jumping the gun on Obama and they are losing their credibility as a result, except to the extent that they preach to their own little retarded choir.

But frankly, if Obama can’t do this job well, I am seriously worried for us. He is as smart and as well-informed as individual we have seen in that office. He is no raging liberal. I think the vitriol we are seeing 9 months into his term is unfounded.

As to foreign policy, I really think if you are focused on bows and smiles you are dangerously distracted. Those things don’t matter one bit. Obama is setting a new tone. That is the strategy. Smiles and bows are, at most, tactics in that strategy and are more probably just one man’s natural reactions. I agree with a strategy of friendlessness and fairness. I think we should and I expect we will negotiate strenuously for our own best interest. But acting nice is totally allowed.

My peeve, as mentioned in a couple previous posts, is this: Bush was in office 32 times longer than Obama has been. If Obama continues a Bush philosophy, like the bail-out or the budget, the Republicans complain. I’m sorry guys, you lost your right to complain about the bail-out and the budget when your party did the same thing. When Obama changes a Bush policy, such as torture, the Right is quick to call it catastrophe. Listen to Cheney try to tell us that torture is necessary.

The Right is gleeful that they can be the opposition party now. That’s fair. But they are such ‘tards about it. Their QB lost 32 quarters of football. Obama has won 1 quarter of football, IMHO, but even if you think he lost, it’s the 1st quarter. Are you really going to start the drama about America dying inside already?

I hope Obama is successful at getting the economy going. That’s not one man’s job but I think he is a great person to have in the chair right now. I hope Obama is successful at making the world a safer and more peaceful place. I hope his plans for energy independence are actualized and effective. And, if so, I expect the Right Wing to cry that the sky is falling the whole goddamn time.

Such is life. We have a better man at the helm now.

Obama is obviously going for a “speak softly and carry a big stick” philosophy. He is not going to budge on the issues that are important to the American people. But he can do that more effectively if he is thought a kind and fair man by the people he is negotiating with.

Do I even have to explain this to you?

Yes, apparently I do:

You tell ‘em, Hillary.

It is fucking ridiculous that the goddamn Right Wing thinks we are going to forget the last 8 fucking years. If you disagree with the approach Obama is taking — GOOD! That means we might be on the right track. Your credibility has been obliterated by your steadfast support of the most ineffective retard ever to hold the office of the President. So how about you shut the fuck up for at least a year or two and see what happens when honest, educated, intelligent , well-informed and yes, imperfect people run things for a while.

And, by the way, the fact that 70% of the US and 100% of the world thought Bush was a complete failure does not mean that you get to be just as mean to Obama as we were to Bush. We were mean for a reason. The molehills that the Right is trying to turn into mountains right now don’t count.

And let me also add that I am not giving Obama a free pass. He will succeed or fail and I’ll call ‘em like I see ‘em. But right now he is just starting to get his agenda going and it is intellectually dishonest as well as stupid to claim the goddamn sky is falling when we are still in the first 100 days.

Good on ya!

With that said, I predict that we will not see a flawless Obama presidency. There will be a multitude of Right Wing attack dogs trying to undermine him. He is not perfect and he will make the wrong call on some things. (He is to the right of me on many issues.) He is also inheriting 2 wars, a failed economy and an international reputation which has been tarnished. This is not going to be easy.

I also want to make a very specific point to our Republican friends: twice you elected George W. Bush to office and, especially in the early years, you were enthusiastic about his politics and policies. Almost all of you have since distanced yourself from Bush. So let’s be clear: you had your chance, your guy had the seat, you even had the Congress for a portion of that time. Your politics were a total and complete failure. So it would be wise, IMHO, to cut Obama some slack and see what the other team can do out on the field. Your high horse has been carted off to the glue factory so give it a rest.

And, while I believe that Bush and Cheney should be tried for their crimes, I don’t expect it to happen under Obama. They will now fade off, Bush to Alzheimer’s and Cheney to heart disease. Good riddance, you fucks. You have deeply harmed America and you deserve far worse than your remaining years will deliver.

And with that last bit of venom out of my system, President Obama, do your duty. We are behind you.

The United States of America did the right thing. We made history tonight but more importantly, we chose an excellent man for the job.

God Bless America.

I’m a capitalist. I’m not suggesting we tax at 50% or create a welfare society. Neither is Obama. The biggest untapped potential in our economy is realized when people transition from low-income to middle-income or from middle-income to high-income. When we move the whole bell curve, the whole bell curve moves! Amazing! So you rich folks get richer, too, when poor people get richer.

Morally, it’s always funny to me how, as individuals, we are offended if people call us selfish or greedy. Those are not qualities we want in the people around us, either. Almost all of us are gracious, giving and caring people. Yet somehow the Right can spit out “share the wealth” as if it was the most vile concept to ever cross their lips. How dare he suggest that we should be gracious, giving and caring people! Why, that’s un-American! Right Michele?

WRONG. It is possible to be a capitalist and a small-d democrat and still rise up to our shared responsibility to make possible a decent standard of living for our citizens. Those of us who do find ourselves making more than we need should feel lucky and grateful and willing to help others achieve it.

QED

On Palin:

I don’t believe she’s ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president

On the rat-bastard Republicans:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said: such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is he is not a Muslim; he’s a Christian, has always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, “What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?” The answer’s “No, that’s not America.” Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion he’s Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists. This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

On the economic crisis:

I have especially watched, over the last six or seven weeks, as both of them have really taken a final exam with respect to this economic crisis that we are in, and coming out of the conventions.

And I must say that I’ve gotten a good measure of both. In the case of Mr. McCain, I found that he was a little unsure as to how to deal with the economic problems that we’re having, and almost every day there was a different approach to the problem. And that concerned me. I got the sense that he didn’t have a complete grasp of the economic problems that we had.

On McCain’s campaign:

I’ve also been disappointed, frankly, by some of the approaches that Senator McCain has taken recently — or his campaign ads — on issues that are not really central to the problems that the American people are worried about.

This Bill Ayers situation that’s been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign, but Mr. McCain says that he’s a washed-out terrorist. Then why do we keep talking about him? And why do we have these robo-calls going on around the country, trying to suggest that because of this very, very limited relationship that Senator Obama has had with Mr. Ayers, somehow Mr. Obama is tainted? What they’re trying to connect him to is some kind of terrorist feelings. And I think that’s inappropriate.

I agree with Powell on this one.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

He also slams John McCain:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

So the Right is pissed off and Buckley offers, and the National Review accepts, his resignation.

One would be tempted to say the obvious except we don’t have to, Buckley does it for us:

I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

Mr. Buckley is not alone among conservatives. Oddly enough, the conservative vote this year is for Obama.

McCain thinks he can scumbag his way into office. Norm Coleman apparently thinks the same thing. When will they learn? Those scary ads about how scary the other guy is with wolves howling and facts set aside for sensationalistic lies DO NOT WORK.

There is exactly one thing McCain can do to stay in this race: stop talking about Obama and start talking about himself.

I seriously think McCain is losing it. He sounded like Palin last night in the debate, trying to get every issue into every answer. Obama was pretty so-so as well, it seems both those guys are tired.

Currently http://www.electoral-vote.com/ forecasts Obama getting more than twice the electoral votes as McCain.

If you want the next four years looking just like the last eight, then I am not your candidate. But if you want real change – if you want an economy that rewards work, and that works for Main Street and Wall Street; if you want tax relief for the middle class and millions of new jobs; if you want health care you can afford and education that helps your kids compete; then I ask you to knock on some doors, make some calls, talk to your neighbors, and give me your vote on November 4th.

I DON’T want the next 4 years to look like the last 8. Obama represents a much, much better shot at that than John McCain. If people weren’t single issue voters or rabid ideologues, Obama would crush McCain. As it is we have to convince people that the party in charge of the last 8 years should not be in charge of the next 8. That should just be obvious.

A friend sent me this. We’ve all seen that Palin clip by now. I think it is maybe the first time that SNL was able to use a quote word for word and have it be absolutely hilarious. Jack is mad and he should be.

I would forgive Palin for having one bad moment. We all say stupid things. Lord knows micadelic is going to paste some Obama clip to insure proper balance. But with Palin they are ALL bad moments. I haven’t heard her say an intelligent thing yet, outside of her speech at the convention. She’s not quick on her feet, she’s not well-informed, she’s not highly educated and she’s not articulate. She would be a horrible candidate for President. With McCain being 72 years old, she is running for President. And thus the MaCain-Palin ticket is excluded from being a serious choice for your vote.

I know, I’m some big elitist because I want our highest leaders to be highly intelligent.

WTF.

Palin is doing the one thing that a VP candidate should never do — weakening the ticket. The Republican ticket consists of an old man who can’t seem to control his campaign and a woman who clearly doesn’t have a clue. The financial crisis on Wall St. is damning as hell to the incumbent party and I think we are at the beginning of a McCain tailspin to defeat.

It’s clearly not over yet, but the Palin love affair, with the exception of the most brain-washed pro-lifers, is completely over.

Here’s a quote from the above link:

If you spend 3 years as a brilliant community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

Obama’s resume is fantastic. He is the most qualified candidate since Clinton, in terms of his intelligence, education and firm grasp of the issues. He has good judgment, good insights, he’s candid, articulate and personable. He’d be a great President.

1. 9/11
2. Katrina
3. The credit crisis
4. The closely related housing crisis
5. Iraq
6 Afghanistan
7. $4 gas

Now the government just nationalized Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac — another example of deregulation at work.

While the Democrats are deeply flawed in many ways, the Republicans are just completely incompetent. They are unfit to lead this country. They want their cake and eat it too and the math does not work out.

Recall the Republicans held the Congress for 6 of the last 8 years and the Presidency for 20 of the last 28 years.

This has been 8 years of a financially irresponsible administration, a foreign policy based on expensive national building, an economic policy of caving to the rich and sticking it to the middle class and a deregulation policy that has led to Yet Another Expensive Government Bailout.

It makes no sense whatsoever to believe that the Republicans are the answer to the problems that the Republicans created.

We need a president like Clinton again — a really smart moderate with liberal tendencies. We don’t need another President like Bush.

Obama could be a very Clinton-like President. McCain would be another Bush-like President.

At the biggest moment of his political career, he delivered a flat, stupefyingly boring address that drained away all the excitement generated by Sarah Palin’s pit-bull-with-lipstick performance the night before. His central message – that it’s time to clean up Washington – was incoherent. Yes, McCain has some legitimate reformist credentials. But he’s also a 25-year Washington insider who marches in lockstep with George Bush on such issues as the war in Iraq and tax cuts for the wealthy.

“It really is an audacious ploy, to tell people that the country’s got to correct the mistakes made by a political party when that’s the very party you represent,” writes Tom Shales in today’s Washington Post. “It’s like staging a revolution against yourself – saying that the Republicans have got to go so the Republicans can move in and clean up the mess.”

The facts are in: McCain supports 90% of the Bush agenda. You call that change? Palin is worse than McCain, favoring teaching creationism in school, being irrationally anti-choice and begging oil companies to come in and defile the last great wilderness in America.

Obama/Biden is the ticket that represents real change. The Republicans have been in power for 20 of the last 28 years. They had their chance.

(That is an embed from CNN, we’ll see if it works.)

It’s funny (but painful) to see CNN actually ask and demand answers to hard questions. The McCain campaign has no answer as to why they have a different standard for Sarah Palin than they do for Barak Obama when it comes to the necessary foreign policy experience to be President.

I’m on Sarah Palin’s side on this one. If she is smart, educated and well-informed I believe she can be the President of the United States. Now I’d like John McCain and all you Republicans to say the same of Barak Obama. Then we can set aside this experience argument once and for all.

When I think about what the most important criteria is, for me, when it comes to choosing a presidential candidate, it’s intelligence and honesty. I want to know the person is really smart and has really good judgement and will be honest with the American people. I will forgive almost any failure if I think this is true. It’s why I think Jimmy Carter was a great president, for example. I will accept failure if it is honest failure. I think Clinton was a great president for the same reasons: he as really smart and he wasn’t afraid to be honest with us. I still recall a debate where he answered a question by a doctor and he said “I’m gonna raise your taxes.” He did not try to hide that and his honesty was refreshing. (As an aside, Slick Willy was not necessarily honest in all regards and I do not give him a free pass for that, per se.) I even liked John McCain in those times that he was boldly honest. I’m seeing less and less of that McCain.

So Obama, to me, has the two most important qualities. He’s really smart and he’s not just blowing smoke up our asses. We’ll have a good-faith problem solver at the helm. That alone is a major, huge, gigantic, colossal, phenomenally large difference compared to Bush. In the intelligence/honesty department I think McCain is also an improvement over Bush. He is nowhere near as smart as Obama, though, plus he’s old, which slows down the processor a bit. He’s also been caught famously lying, like in regards to the rebel flag issue. He came clean, which I respected, but he lied about it in the first place.

Biden is really a great man. He is a liability politically because of his long voting record and the fact that he is an East Coast Liberal. We’ll be hearing all sorts of horror stories about what Biden has voted for (and against). But he is a solid guy with a solid reputation in the Senate and I love that he is boldly outspoken.

So Obama is better than McCain and way, way better than Bush and Biden is way, way better than Cheney. We have a chance to significantly upgrade our executive branch. President 2.0. Let’s do it!

What’s funny, though, is that Bush sent the bull in the China shop and now people are hard as hell on Obama, as if he should alone have all the answers and make all the right predictions about Iraq. It’s obvious to everyone, McCain included, I think, that it is time to get out of Iraq. Obama has suggested a policy of a reasoned withdrawal. This is a view that many, many people share. I believe the Iraqis themselves are suggesting it. Said the Obama camp:

“It is hard to understand how Sen. McCain can at once proclaim his support for the sovereign government of Iraq, and then stubbornly defy their expressed support for a timeline to remove our combat brigades from their country,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

If Obama is elected President he will be inheriting Bush’s mess and it may not go 100% smoothly. Given how unsmoothly it has gone so far, and how tolerant the Right has been with it, I’m sure they will be very supportive and tolerant of Obama’s efforts.

Yeah right.

“What Senator McCain neglected to mention was that during those thirty years, he was in Washington for twenty-six of them. And in all that time, he did little to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said. “So when Senator McCain talks about the failure of politicians in Washington to do anything about our energy crisis, it’s important to remember that he’s been a part of that failure.”

Lest anyone think I am blind to Obama’s failings, I think it is lame that he softening on the strategic oil reserve and off-shore drilling. Neither of those are solutions to our problems.

1. In retrospect, was it a good idea to invade Iraq?
2. Given that we are in Iraq, what is the best course of action?

My answers: 1) Of course not. It represents a complete failure of foreign policy. This is universally agreed upon with the exception of the ultra-wacko-wing of the Right wing. 2) We should transition to an international non-US-led peace-keeping and reconstruction effort and we should completely withdraw troops from Iraq except to the extent that we participate in that effort.

What would McCain say? What would Obama say? What do you say?

‘Cause the thing is — the answers to these questions basically tell you the foreign policy philosophy of the respondent. If you don’t question our actions in Iraq given what we know today, you are a hardcore imperialist hawk. Given what we know today it did not warrant unilateral US military action in Iraq, no question about it. We could have kept playing the diplomacy game just like we do with North Korea and Iran. Only people who want to control the Middle East for strategic control of the oil think Iraq was a good idea.

For #2, given #1, can we admit a mistake? Can America be humble? Can we do the right thing after a mistake?

As for the war on terror, it is separate from the war in Iraq. The sects in Iraq will have to come to some equilibrium. Everyone wants to start putting things back together. The terrorists, to the extent they are there at all, will be demotivated by peace and prosperity. The US military is impeding, not aiding, the transition to self rule. That “the surge is working”, if it is, is proof of this. Peace is proportional to the number of troops on the ground in that way of thinking. It’s untenable. Peace has to be proportional to less troops on the ground if we are to be successful.

McCain is Bush on Iraq. I know he would try his best to solve it his way. We would all hope that President McCain would be a greater leader and inspire greater leadership from his cabinet. But his policy is still basically the same as Bush’s. How can anyone be convinced that the Bush doctrine in Iraq is credible!

No matter how much you disagree with my answers, Bush’s answers are the problem and McCain basically agrees with Bush on Iraq. QED, McCain cannot be trusted with the presidency.

Now it’s inevitable that the extremists in either party will sling mud and pull all sorts of dirty tricks. All they need to do is hide behind empty shell companies and buy advertising. Given the current laws we have, we can’t stop these assholes from playing dirty. Thus we must do our best to ignore it. The candidates on both sides should denounce it emphatically and ask people who are supporting them to not do it.

The fair game, in my opinion, is 2 issues:

1. What qualities does the candidate have as a person and a leader.
2. What are his positions on the issues.

Those are the only two valid discussions we should have.

Now to the issue of guilt by association — it’s a gray one, in a sense, because whom you choose to associate with does lend insight into #1 above. On the other hand, we should never take some other person’s views as a proxy for the candidate’s views. The candidates can speak for themselves! So if some advisor to Obama is a racist, for example, we cannot infer something about Obama’s views from this. If McCain has a supporter who is an ardent theocrat, we can’t assume that McCain shares that view.

If McCain, though, goes to Bob Jones University (or Obama goes to, say, The Sierra Club) and proclaims what a great institution it is, then he is inviting assumptions.

Above all I’m praying to God (and that from an atheist) that the candidates themselves take the moral high ground. Both campaigns will be looking for every advantage, but being above the pissing match should be an advantage. Let’s pick the candidate who stays on the issues, has intelligent views on the issues and who avoids the slash and burn bullshit of “Swift Boat” politics.

No, of course not. Obama has a law degree from Harvard and he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was professor and a lawyer before serving in both the state senate and the US Senate. He has more government experience that probably 99.99% of the people in the country.

By contrast, Ronald Reagan was the governor of California for 2 terms. That is the sum total of his political experience. Note that this includes no foreign policy experience. Oh I guess I should mention he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Obama is more experienced and more educated than Reagan was and much better prepared to be President.

Obama is not perfect. I disagree with some of his positions. But STFU with this bullshit that he is incapable of doing the job. He is completely capable and he represents a welcome change from the 8 years of incompetence we just endured.

I have a challenge for conservatives and middle of the road Republicans — give Obama a chance. Just give the man a chance. John “Bush 3.0″ McCain represents nothing more than a minor tweaking to Bush’s policies on Iraq and the economy. When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. I know the far right could never vote for Obama but many of you that voted for Bush and were disappointed owe it to yourselves to listen to Obama and give him a chance to earn your support. I don’t agree with Obama on every issue. It’s not required that you agree with a candidate on every issue. Separate the person from the political party and give each candidate a fair shot at your support.

I respect John McCain. I really hope he doesn’t give me reason to withdraw that respect during this campaign. I agree with McCain to some extent on several issues, I respectfully disagree on some issues and I think he is dead wrong on some issues. I will listen to him during this campaign and I hope he surprises me. The Dept. of Opinion Manipulation in the Republican party is going to try to make him say all sorts of stuff*. I hope he doesn’t say it.

* I was dismayed that McCain went to the NRA with same old tired and incorrect bullshit about how Democrats want to take your guns away. I think Obama should go talk to the NRA and say “how long are you gonna let Republicans buy your vote by uttering the one sentence they know you want them to say? It’s fucking naive to think that any single issue is more important than the management of the United States of America as a whole. Your interests are much broader and more vital than the single issue of gun legislation. No one is trying to take away the guns of law-abiding citizens. Relax and let’s move on to the important stuff.”

And Dear Bill Clinton, I know you owe your wife big time for the muck you dragged her through, but we all know you would be on Obama’s side if your wife was not in the race so do you think you could ease up on the destructive rhetoric a bit? Obama is really no less experienced than Hillary and his energy, his vision and his honesty are things we desperately need in the White House.

We need a woman President and Hillary is far from the worse choice we have in the race. But there has rarely been a figure as polarizing as Hillary and that will lose the race for us in 2008.

I’m sorry, Hillary

Don’t be irrate

Obama in two-thousand-eight