Hillary Clinton Supporters at Daily Kos Go On Strike!

Many Republicans have despaired about whether there is any chance of electing a Republican as President in November (if you count John McCain as a Republican). But increasingly many Republicans are saying, "Yes we can!"

The bitter rift in the Democrat party between supporters of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seems to be getting worse and worse and just split wide open on the Daily Kos. Alegre a diarist at the Daily Kos, is fed up with the nasty personal attacks against Clinton supporters on the site and made a stunning announcement: that supporters of Hillary Clinton were going on "strike," that is they would no longer post diaries there. "I've decided to go on 'strike' and will refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution," she wrote.

Daily Kos founder and President for Life Markos Moulitsas responded with characteristic sensitivity to her concerns. "First, these people should read up on the definition of 'strike.' What they're doing is a 'boycott.'" He said. What Markos was saying, I think, is that not only are supporters of Clinton traitors to the liberal cause, they are incredibly stupid as well. They have been posting on his site for free for all of this time while Markos has been raking in money and not sharing one cent of it with them, which certainly cannot be characterized as an employer-employee relationship as anyone who has taken an Economics 101 class and is not a dunderheaded Clinton supporter would know. Although Markos suggested that the word "boycott" would be more appropriate than "strike," I think the word he was looking for was "slave revolt," since "slave" is a much more appropriate term for someone who works for no pay while the plantation owner enriches himself. The word "slave," however, has certain unfortunate racial connotations that he probably felt it would be best not to raise, so he went with the word "boycott" instead.

But of course this battle is about more than just semantics. What has especially irked Clinton supporters about Obama supporters at the Daily Kos is that Kossacks for Obama have learned what politics is really about. Politics is not about getting someone elected or changing the world, which anyone who has taken a look at the ability of the Daily Kos to actually get people elected should know. Politics is about feeling good about yourself. Who cares if Obama gets beaten in the general election; he will make everyone who voted for him feel really good inside. That's how Ralph Nader made people who voted for him feel in 2000. It didn't matter whether he had a chance to win or not, it only mattered that his supporters didn't feel icky by voting for Al Gore or George Bush.

For many Democrats, voting for Hillary Clinton would make them feel icky. Even if she somehow gets the nomination, many of them will probably stay home, or vote for Ralph Nader, who is running again so that he can feel good about himself by making people feel good about themselves. Then their souls will remain pure and not be sullied by voting for someone who gets elected and does something they don't like. That's much more important than who becomes president. I don't know what the average age of Kossacks is but judging by the level of their writing, it appears that most of them weren't even born when Bill Clinton was President. But they have studied enough history in school to know how terrible those years of peace and prosperity were since they directly led to the war and economic downturn we are experiencing now and understandably they don't want to go back to that.

Obama supporters also understand that voting should never be about picking the lesser of two evils or about making a strategic choice. If you don't agree with everything your candidate says, believe he or she can do no wrong and think that the other candidate is evil and that everyone who supports him or her is a traitor, then you really have no business voting at all. That's what those of us who supported George Bush believed and look how great that has been for the country.

I have not endorsed any candidate because so far all of the candidates would make me feel icky. I was hoping that Alan Keyes would do better because I agree with him on almost every issue and I believed that voting for him would help heal the racial divide in this country and would prove that I am not a racist. Unfortunately, he seems to have dropped out of the race (though he hasn't made a formal announcement as far as I know), but I am hoping he will run as a third party candidate so that I can vote for him even if he has no chance of winning. I may just write him in as a candidate so that the next time someone accuses me of being a racist, I can tell them that I voted for Alan Keyes, so there.

No conservative can support John McCain in good conscience since he has betrayed us on so many issues from torture to immigration to campaign finance reform to judicial appointments to gay marriage. And many are worried that he is a Manchurian Candidate who was brainwashed in Vietnam. But if he spends the rest of the campaign repudiating all of his principles and turning his back on everything he believes, many of us might change our minds. So far he has made a very good start.

Many conservatives were hoping that Obama would get the Democrat nomination because we are so tired of the dirty politics of the Clintons and we wanted to have a real debate about the issues, such as whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing to elect a Muslim who hates America and is probably a Communist as President. We wanted to have a civil discussion about whether we should surrender in Iraq, raise everyone's taxes and use it to give free health care to freeloaders and destroy the moral foundations of our society by permitting gay marriage, which would lead to people marrying their livestock or their grandparents. Conservatives believe that this kind of debate would be good for the country.

My friend Tom Watson recently wrote a piece about an endangered species in the liberal blogosphere: the Clinton blogger. In his piece he cited this modest blogger as "the rare righty who doesn't hate Hillary." Of course, I don't hate anyone, so that is technically accurate. And although I have said in the past that electing Hillary Clinton President would destroy Western civilization as we know it, I also believe that sometimes it takes destroying a village in order to save it. Some conservatives have said that the best way to make this country realize what a terrible mistake it has made by turning its back on conservatism would be to elect Clinton President, which would soon have the American people begging us to come back. I do have some sympathy for these conservatives who are considering becoming "suicide voters" in the fall and voting for Clinton if she gets the nomination.

But the more I see these idealistic Obama voters who are so committed to their candidate and personally attack anyone who opposes them as traitors and idiots, the more I recall those idealistic days when I unquestioningly supported President Bush and believed anyone who opposed him was a terrorist sympathizer. If you close your eyes and read what Andrew Sullivan says about Obama (I know you can't read if you close your eyes, but with Sullivan you don't actually have to read his blog to know what he is saying), you can't help but recall his onetime fanatical support of President Bush and the War in Iraq and the scorched Earth tactics he used to attack those who opposed him. It might be worth seeing Obama get elected just to see how long it would take Sullivan to realize that Obama is the worst President ever and for him to excoriate him and back one of his opponents with the same romantic fervor.

When I think of the devotion and starry-eyed idealism of Obama supporters I wonder if I could really pull the lever for Hillary Clinton, even if I do believe that it would be best thing for the country to destroy it. I wonder if I could look at myself in the mirror and still love myself. Because, after all, feeling good about myself is what elections should be about. In the end it all comes down to me.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Daily Kos, 2008 Election, Republicans, Democrats, John McCain, Politics

Why the Kennedys Are Endorsing Obama

Senator Edward Kennedy has decided to endorse Barack Obama for President, saying he wants a President who "can make us believe again." Over the weekend John F. Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, announced her support for Obama, saying he reminded her of her father. Kennedy's speech writer Ted Sorenson asked what he could do for Obama last year, hoping no doubt that after the election Obama will ask what he can do for Sorenson. Like Kennedy, Obama is young, handsome and inspiring and he represents the passing of the torch to a new generation. But it is not just that Obama reminds them of Kennedy, it is also that the Clintons remind them of Lyndon Johnson. And if there is anything that the Kennedys don't like, it's a bunch of hillbillies in the White House, which is being kept in trust until a competent Kennedy can be groomed to take it back for its rightful owners. Until that time Obama will do.

Like Johnson, the Clintons play politics like it was mud wrestling or the roller derby, while the Kennedys have always believed that politics should be like a friendly game of touch football or beanbag. They never had to get down in the dirt with their opponents. Their father and his friends always took care of that for them.

When Hillary Clinton pointed out that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights bill passed, she was not only insulting Martin Luther King but also JFK, who did all the hard work of asking southern Democrats very politely to please vote for the Civil Rights bill, which they might have done some time in future as soon as they looked into their consciences and realized it was the right thing to do. Then Kennedy died and Johnson stepped in, rudely cajoling people and threatening to show them his scar unless they voted for it. Is that the kind of politics we want in America? Of course, if Kennedy had lived he also would have awakened one day and realized, unlike Johnson, that all of his advisers were not the best and the brightest but were really a bunch of dopes and he would have stood up to them and got us out of Vietnam.

In 1968 Robert Kennedy tried to take the White House back from the dumb hick who had taken it over by a fluke of history, but he was killed, too, before he got the chance. Ted Kennedy tried to save the country from another country bumpkin who got the keys to their house in 1980, but he lost to Jimmy Carter in the primaries. At first the Kennedys let Bill Clinton burnish their image by showing the photo of how he was somehow able to sneak his way into the White House to shake President Kennedy's hand when he was a young man. Now the Kennedys are saying enough is enough.

No one loved the Kennedys and hated Johnson more than liberals and the liberal media and they feel the same way about the Clintons. "Is the right right on the Clintons?" liberal pundit Jonathan Chait asks in an article in the Los Angeles Times. For years conservatives have been saying that the Clintons give politics a bad name. We look back with nostalgia to a time when gentlemanly Democrats like Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey lost elections with grace and dignity. They didn't go around smearing their opponents and cynically triangulating the way the Clintons do. Now many liberals and members of the liberal media are coming around to thinking we've been right all along.

Although Republicans do not love the Kennedys the way liberals do, we hate Johnson and the Clintons more. Like many northeastern liberals we hate the way Johnson and the Clintons seem to believe unfairly that Americans are a bunch of racists. Unlike Johnson and the Clintons, Republicans are completely colorblind and never think of race at all. After the Civil Rights bill passed many southern Democrats were so tired of the way Johnson crudely and repeatedly flashed the Race Card that they became Republicans. President Nixon never mentioned race at all in his battles against busing and crime. President Reagan, who paid silent tribute to three Civil Rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when he launched his campaign there, never used the Race Card either when he fought against Welfare Queens and quotas. The first President Bush loved black people except when they were criminals like Willie Horton and his son appointed black people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to his cabinet and felt really bad about all the black people who died in New Orleans.

And you don't see divisive racial battles in the Republican primary. None of the candidates has even mentioned the fact that Alan Keyes is black. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York he lowered crime, which disproportionately affects black people, by giving more power to the police and ended all the racial divisiveness that erupted during the previous black mayor's term. Mitt Romney feels really comfortable around black people probably because his father marched with Martin Luther King, which affected his son so much that he imagined he was there, and how he did cry tears of joy when the Mormon Church announced that black people were no longer considered evil and his maid wouldn't have to go to hell after all. Governor Mike Huckabee stood up for the rights of all the people of South Carolina, black, white, brown, yellow and green, not to be told by white northern elites that they can't have the Confederate flag flying on their state buildings, which is a historical symbol of their unique culture going all the way back to 1962. And all the Republican candidates have fought very hard for the rights of African-Americans not to have their low-paying jobs taken away by illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are really appalled at the way the Clintons are injecting race into this campaign. In a piece in Red State called "Democrats: The Party of the Klan?" Eric Erickson writes, "They are always claiming that Republicans are racist, but it is looking more and more like the Democratic Party, to its core foundation, is racist." In South Carolina the Clintons threw everything at Obama they could think of except pointing out that he fathered a black child. Republicans are offended by such down-and-dirty politics, which reminds them of the time they had to employ Lee Atwater to counter all the dirt the Democrats were putting out, which even Atwater himself regretted as soon as he was dying. His protégée Karl Rove no doubt was also troubled by all the dirty politics that erupted in campaigns he was involved with, which could never be traced back to him since he had nothing to do with it at all.

Many conservatives are saying nice things about Barack Obama, even though he is liberal and black, which they probably don't even realize, because they long for the days before the Clintons ruined politics. "I tell you, he almost had me tonight until he talked about the war that shouldn't have been authorized and reminded me there are real policy issues at stake in this election!" gushed Kathryn Jean Lopez in The Corner. "But listening to his inspirational, rallying speech tonight it's clear and obvious that if he's the nominee, he will be tough to beat." Andrew Sullivan, who makes no secret of his hatred for the Clintons, has endorsed Obama. Unlike the Clintons and many white Democrats, they don't see him as the black candidate. Almost 25% of white voters voted for Obama in the South Carolina primary and if he is nominated he may even get a few white votes in the general election, though probably not enough to win. That's because race is no longer an issue for voters in the South and it really is rude of the Clintons to subtly imply that it is, if that's what they were doing and we know it was because the media has constantly pointed it out.

I think everyone is tired of the kind of politics the Clintons represent, which sees voters as easily manipulated racist dupes and does not appeal to the better angels of their nature the way Barack Obama does. Conservatives are really hoping that the Democrats nominate Obama because he gives us a chance to heal the wounds that the mean-spirited Clintons have inflicted on the body politic. Conservatives would relish the chance to debate about ideas again. I can assure you that I and my fellow conservative bloggers and pundits will not go digging around for mud to throw at him. We won't spread rumors that he's a Muslim or bring up past drug use or go looking through his books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope for contradictions we can exploit.

That was the old kind of politics, which is entirely the fault of the Clintons. We want to transcend that. I agree with Bob Kerrey that it is great that Obama went to a madrassa and I think Hussein is a very nice middle name. I think it's about time we had a President who admits to using cocaine in the past so that he can tell our youth from experience how bad it is. Conservatives can all get behind a man who talks so movingly about faith even if his church does have some wacky ideas about white people being devils and it once honored Louis Farrakhan. And I think we'll all forget that he is black and best buddies with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If the Democrats nominate Obama conservatives will relish the chance to talk about issues and make the election as he says not "about black and white but about the past and future." Who couldn't be stirred by that kind of rhetoric?

Of course, we won't vote for Obama in the general election but that will only be because he is a tax-and-spend liberal who wants to surrender in Iraq, is against executing murderers and wants to impose gay marriage on everyone. In other words, we will just point out that we have a few policy differences with him. We relish the chance to debate the nuances of Obama's policy proposals and we'll be relieved not to have to drill into the heads of voters simplistic demeaning labels the way we had to do when we constantly referred to John Kerry as a flip-flopper and Al Gore as a phony. And the media will be happy not to have to repeat these charges in every story they write, which must have gotten kind of boring for them. Instead, they will be able to write the kinds of long thought pieces about issues that matter to people, which is what journalists really want to do. Conservatives will be so grateful to actually be able to finally debate the issues in a civil manner that we won't even mention all the other troubling stuff about Obama. You can trust us.

Update: It appears I have scooped the mainstream media if The Washington Post's Mary Ann Akers is correct about the reason Kennedy endorsed Obama.

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Barack Obama, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, 2008 Election, Republicans, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Lee Atwater, Bush, Nixon, Alan Keyes, Politics

The Torture Race

The New York Times story on classified Justice Department memos authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques in alleged violation of American laws against torture has some people in a dither. Andrew Sullivan has called the President a war criminal. Sen. Arlen Specter called the memos "shocking." Congress is demanding to see the secret memos, while the Bush Administrations maintains, in the words of press secretary Dana Perino, "It is a policy of the United States that we do not torture, and we do not." But although it may seem like the memos permit torture in defiance of the Geneva Conventions and the law that Congress had just passed banning the use "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" that is not actually the case. In fact, Sullivan and Specter are relying on outmoded definitions of torture that just don't apply to the 21st century War on Terror.

Sullivan has pointed out that many of the enhanced interrogation techniques approved by the CIA appear to be similar to interrogation techniques used by the Nazis. In fact, the Nazis even used the phrase "verschärfte Vernehmung" to describe these techniques, which roughly translates to mean "enhanced interrogation."

Now that sounds pretty bad, seeing how the Nazis were supposed to be so evil, until you look at what those techniques were. They included repeated beatings, long forced-standing, stress positions, withholding of food and medical care, sleep deprivation and other procedures to loosen up prisoners, which really doesn't sound so terrible. When I was a kid I got spanked, was forced to stand in a corner and went to bed without supper and I survived. Little did I know my parents were acting like Nazis! In fact, the Nazis initially banned the use of hypothermia and waterboarding as just too harsh for their delicate sensibilities, though they later discovered, as the CIA apparently did, that these kinds of limits really make life difficult for an interrogator.

Even though the Nazis were supposed to be really evil back in their day, their methods seem almost quaint by today's standards when compared with some of the stuff modern terrorists do. To even call some of these things torture is an insult to torture, according to The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb. "The Times indicts the Bush administration for exposing terrorists captured abroad to 'head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.' Boo hoo," he writes in a piece called "Trivializing Torture."

As Jules Crittenden points out, "Article neglects to mention we are fighting an enemy that considers powerdrills into kneecaps and videotaped beheading of captives business as usual. That in fact, we have yet to face an enemy in the modern era that observes anything approaching the standards we do." The Times, he says, would have us fight the War on Terror with "one hand tied behind back." (Apparently, a malfunction in Mr. Crittenden's word processor rendered him incapable of typing definite articles on the day he wrote this post.)

Mr. Crittenden makes an important point. As long as we can say the terrorists are worse than we are, we have the moral high ground. But we cannot let them get too much worse than us or there will be a morality gap that could be as devastating as the missile gap potentially was during the Cold War. So we need to stay just one small step behind the enemy in the torture race. If they ratchet up their interrogation techniques, we need to ratchet up ours, making sure that they always stay just a little bit more evil than us so that we can retain our moral superiority. If we had remained only not quite as bad as the Nazis, we would have fallen too far behind the terrorists. As the terrorists leave the Nazis in the dust, so must we if we have any hope of defeating them.

Unfortunately, the strict standards of the Geneva Conventions and American laws that incorporate them don't allow for the fact that the definition of torture is a fluid one. These rules seem to be based on an inflexible Platonic ideal of torture. But times change. What seemed like torture back during World War II is like a walk in the park today. The CIA and our armed forces need the flexibility to continually redefine torture and enhance our interrogation techniques as the enemy continually enhances its interrogation techniques. Only by frequently defining torture up -- but not too far up because we never want to be as bad as they are -- can we hope to stay on an almost even playing field with the enemy. As long as there are a few new atrocities that the enemy commits that we can point to as worse than things we do, then we know we are winning the moral battle and we still have a chance to win the military one. The CIA has a tough enough job making sure that their torture is worse than our torture (which can't even really be called torture anymore) but not so much worse that they pull too far ahead of us. They don't need to have their job made even more difficult by meddling politicians whose outdated conceptions of torture and rigid moral standards only strait-jacket our troops.

If we do win this war and Western Civilization survives, no doubt future generations will look back on this debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. "That's not so bad at all," they'll say, "compared with what we do today."

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Technorati Tags: Jon Swift, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Torture, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Goldfarb, Nazis, Foreign Policy, Politics
Carnivals: This Is Not My Country, Carnival of Principled Government