Over at DKos, Kos himself has written up a little attack on every DLC’ers favorite whipping boy, Ralph Nader. He recently mocked Nader and his supporters and in response, received several emails and now was mocking the emailers as well.
Anyone who sails with the Nader crowd deserves nothing more than ridicule.
Fuck Ralph Nader, and fuck his supporters. If the past eight years hasn’t smacked any sense into their addled brains, then nothing will. This site caters to the reality-based community. No one else need apply.
Well, I’m no Naderite, but I think Kos could use a huge dose of reality right about now.
Kos takes issue with Nader saying that there is only one party:
Saint Ralph
Said that there was no difference between the democratic and republican presidential candidates in 1980, with President Carter versus Ronald Reagan. Nader repeated this nonsense in 2000 with Gore versus Bush and handed the damn election to Bush.
Both Carter and Gore went on to win the friggin’ Nobel Peace Prize. Reagan went on to murder 250,000 people in his insane wars in Central America, and the Dubya has terminated between 600,000 and 1.2 million people from his war in Iraq.
There are buckets of blood worth of differences between those candidates. And yes, Nader and his lunatic supporters need to be held accountable for these actions.
What Nader actually did was point out that the current system is fixed. You get two choices: A corporatist shill or a lunatic corporatist shill, ie, a boogeyman candidate to scare you into voting for the corporatist shill. The only logical choice for any sane person is to vote for neither. This, of course, leads to the lunatic being elected. Which is what happened.
However, let’s get back to Kos assertion that DKos is a “reality based” commmunity. This is the reality about Barack Obama:
Can We Talk About The Real Obama Now? by Sam Smith
Obama supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts. David Sirota in the Nation wrote, “Opposed by most major civil rights and consumer watchdog groups, this big business-backed legislation was sold to the public as a way to stop ‘frivolous’ lawsuits. But everyone in Washington knew the bill’s real objective was to protect corporate abusers.”
He voted for a business-friendly “tort reform” bill
He voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards
He had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries
He was even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain
He was most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists
In 2003, rightwing Democratic Leadership Council named Obama as one of its “100 to Watch.” After he was criticized in the black media, Obama disassociated himself with the DLC. But his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is also chief economist of the conservative organization. Writes Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, “Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures.”
Added Henwood, “Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, ‘The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,’ one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they’re socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he’s the man to do their work. They’re also confident he wouldn’t undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth.”
Civil liberties
He supports the war on drugs
He supports the crack-cocaine sentence disparity
He supports Real ID
He supports the PATRIOT Act
He supports the death penalty
He opposes lowering the drinking age to 18
He supported amnesty for telecoms engaged in illegal spying on Americans
Conservatives
He went to Connecticut to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against Ned Lamont
Wrote Paul Street in Z Magazine, “Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neo-liberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having “a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.”
Writes the London Times, “Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee. Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defense secretary.
Richard Lugar was rated 0% by SANE. . . rated 0% by AFL-CIO. . . rated 0% BY NARAL. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 27% by the National Education Association. . . rated 5% by League of Conservation Voters. . . He voted no on implementing the 9/11 Commission report. . . Vote against providing habeas corpus for Gitmo prisoners. . .voted no on comprehensive test ban treaty. . .voted against same sex marriage. . . strongly anti-abortion. . . opposed to more federal funding for healthcare. . .voted for unconstitutional wiretapping. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations
Chuck Hagel was rated 0% by NARAL. . . rated 11% by NAACP. . . rated 0% by Human Rights Coalition. . . rated 100% by Christian Coalition. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 22% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 36% by the National Education Association. . . rated 0% by League of Conservation Voters. . . rated 8% by AFL-CIO. . . He is strongly anti-abortion. . .voted for anti-flag desecration amendment. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations. . . favors privatizing Social Security
Ecology
Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.
He supports federally funded ethanol and is unusually close to the ethanol industry.
He led his party’s reversal of a 25-year ban on off-shore oil drilling
Education
Obama has promised to double funding for private charter schools, part of a national effort undermining public education.
He supports the No Child Left Behind Act albeit expressing reservations about its emphasis on testing. Writes Cory Mattson, “Despite NCLB”s loss of credibility among educators and the deadlock surrounding its attempted reauthorization in 2007, Barack Obama still offers his support. Even the two unions representing teachers, both which for years supported reform of the policy to avoid embarrassing their Democratic Party ‘friends,’ declared in 2008 that the policy is too fundamentally flawed to be reformed and should be eliminated.”
Fiscal policy
Obama rejected moratoriums on foreclosures and a freeze on rates, measures supported by his primary opponents John Edwards and Hillary Clinton
He was a strong supporter of the $700 billion cash-for-trash banker bailout plan.
Two of his top advisors are former Goldman Sachs chair Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Noted Glen Ford of black Agenda Report, “In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, ‘The Committee to Save the World.’ Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard derivatives, the exotic ‘ticking time bomb’ financial instruments, from federal regulation.”
Robert Scheer notes that “Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale.”
Obama’s fund-raising machine has been headed by Penny Prtizker former chair of the Superior Bank, one of the first to get into subprime mortgages. While she resigned as chair of the family business in 1994, as late as 2001 she was still on the board and wrote a letter saying that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledging to “once again restore Superior’s leadership position in subprime lending.” The bank shut down two months later and the Pritzker family would pay $460 million in a settlement with the government.
Foreign policy
Obama endorsed US involvement in the failed drug war in Colombia: “When I am president, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program.”
He has expressed a willingness to bomb Iran and won’t rule out a first strike nuclear attack.
He has endorsed bombing or invading Pakistan to go after Al Qaeda in violation of international law. He has called Pakistan “the right battlefield … in the war on terrorism.”
He supports Israeli aggression and apartheid. Obama has deserted previous support for two-state solution to Mid East situation and refuses to negotiate with Hamas.
He has supported Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, saying “it must remain undivided.”
He favors expanding the war in Afghanistan.
Although he claims to want to get out of Iraq, his top Iraq advisor wrote that America should keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq. Obama, in his appearances, blurred the difference between combat soldiers and other troops.
He indicated to Amy Goodman that he would leave 140,000 private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq because “we don’t have the troops to replace them.”
He has called Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez an enemy of the United States and urged sanctions against him.
He claimed “one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn’t get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That’s all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people.”
He has hawkish foreign policy advisors who have been involved in past US misdeeds and failures. These include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, General Merrill McPeak, and Dennis Ross.
It has been reported that he might well retain as secretary of defense Robert Gates who supports actions in violation of international law against countries merely suspected of being unwilling or unable to halt threats by militant groups.
Gays
Obama opposes gay marriage. He wouldn’t have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage
Health
Obama opposes single payer healthcare or Medicare for all.
Military
Obama would expand the size of the military.
National Service
Obama favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and with a bill requiring such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.
He announced in Colorado Springs last July, “We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
On another occasion he said, “It’s also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it’s important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.” Some have seen this as a call for reviving the draft.
He has attacked the exclusion of ROTC on some college campuses
Presidential crimes
Obama aggressively opposed impeachment actions against Bush. One of his key advisors, Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said prosecuting government officials risks a “cycle” of criminalizing public service.
Progressives
Unlike his deferential treatment of right wing conservatives, Obama’s treatment of the left has been dismissive to insulting. He dissed Nader for daring to run for president again. And he called the late Paul Wellstone “something of a gadfly”
Public Campaign Financing
Obama’s retreat from public campaign financing has endangered the whole concept.
Social welfare
Obama wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare,
Social Security
Early in the campaign, Obama said, “everything is on the table” with Social Security.
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As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist right. We have moved from the prospect of disasters to the relative comfort of mere crises.
Using the word ‘extreme’ alongside the term ‘center’ is no exaggeration. Nearly all major damage to the United States in recent years – a rare exception being 9/11 – has been the result of decisions made not by right or left but by the post partisan middle: Vietnam, Iraq, the assault on constitutional liberties, the huge damage to the environment, and the collapse of the economy – to name a few. Go back further in history and you’ll find, for example, the KKK riddled with members of the establishment including – in Colorado – a future governor, senator and mayor after whom Denver’s airport is named. The center, to which Obama pays such homage, has always been where most of the trouble lies.
The only thing that will make Obama the president pictured in the campaign fantasy is unapologetic, unswerving and unendingly pressure on him in a progressive and moral direction, for he will not go there on his own. But what, say, gave the New Deal its progressive nature was pressure from the left of a sort that simply doesn’t exist today.
Above are listed nearly three dozen things that Obama supports or opposes with which no good liberal or progressive would agree. Unfortunately, what’s out there now, however, looks more like a rock concert crowd or evangelical tent meeting than a determined and directed political constituency. Which isn’t so surprising given how successful our system have been at getting people to accept sights, sounds, symbols and semiotics as substitutes for reality. Once again, it looks like we’ll have to learn the hard way.
Sorry Kos, but it looks like it’s NADER who’s part of the reality-based community, not you.
But then, with the revelations coming from every direction that this presidency is not going to be what we all had hoped it would, I suppose Kos is feeling a little defensive about his role in helping the Democrats to elect another Wall Street sellout by making DKos a “Democratic Party” website and progressives be damned.
When progressives are damned, this whole planet is damned. So on behalf of the Naderites that I don’t even belong to:
Fuck you Moulitas. And fuck your DLC supporters too.
Cross-posted at Pen’s Pages
So who cannot praise Nader for his honesty about where the left has been driven during these past thirty years, largely on Clinton’s notion that the country has moved right. Who today would dare propose a “war on poverty?” Terms like “the poor” and even the “working poor” are anathema to our new Democrats, Obama included.
So what does Kos really have to say about Democrats except that he made a lot of money living off of them.
Honesty? Nader has been the Republican’s trojan horse for years. Why do you think they pay for his campaigns? Where do you think his money comes from? Nader has no integrity, he is a professional diversion.
On the other hand, as Somerby keeps trying to point out, the reason Gore was unable to take office in 2000 was the press’ war on Gore. Nader was just a bit player in all that.
This has nothing to do with what one thinks of Kos
didn’t have a damn thing to do with Ralph Nader.
If the Al Gore of today had been running in 2000 GWB wouldn’t have had a prayer. Gore lost because he was being somebody else. Nader has never tried to be anyone but himself.
As to integrity, Nader has more by himself than the whole Democratic Party put together.
Nader may have once had integrity, and the ability to lead but he doesn’t have either anymore.
He is,now, as many have said, just a useful idiot used by the Republicans to pull people away from the Democratic Party.
Were there a viable 3rd Party candidate who didn’t support amnesty for corporate lawbreakers, etc – I would support that person.
As it is, we the people picked the best of the choices offered & it remains to be seen what that person does in office.
He better do right if he wants a 2nd term.
“He better do right if he wants a 2nd term.”
Or else what? You’ll vote Republican? You see the problem here, I hope.
There is just a lot of ambivalence about Nader among Democrats and the main problem is that the Democratic party moved right, and that is evident in Obama’s positions as it was in Clinton’s 16 years ago.
We Democrats argue among ourselves about Nader and issues pertaining to left and center, but we are all still Democrats, not Republicans, or right of center.
It’d have to be a pretty good Republican to get me to for him (we assume that a ‘her’ is pretty much out of the question in that party).
But poor performance creates apathy – Obama’s FISA vote took a LOT of wind out of my sails. I took my contribution check out of the envelope & tore it up when THAT move went down.
It was apathy, over the 1001 shitty deals the Dems were doing, as well as a concerted push by the Right, that got this mess started.
We can easily head back that way if good people become convinced that their choices are ‘bad’ & ‘worse’.
Obama seems to be off to a good start – let’s see how it goes.
Alice, I love you, so I am repeating this comment for you. I am certain that the Republicans saw a chance to use Nader to draw down the Democratic vote, if that actually happened. But here it is,
“There is just a lot of ambivalence about Nader among Democrats and the main problem is that the Democratic party moved right, and that is evident in Obama’s positions as it was in Clinton’s 16 years ago.
We Democrats argue among ourselves about Nader and issues pertaining to left and center, but we are all still Democrats, not Republicans, or right of center.”
Quite a litany! Hard to decipher if the rant is against Kos or Obama.
In all kindness, be careful of the sources on which you rely and especially taking sound bites out of context.
I expect you’ve joined the movement to impeach President-elect Obama before he takes the oath of office on January 20, 2009 because he was not born in Hawai’i….all evidence to the contrary that he was.
Given the views you’ve expressed I need to ask when will some Americans grow up? Is it possible to hold different views on differing subjects? Pure laine does not exist, even in Japan.
Not grown up? Can you give a few examples of Pen’s exhibiting a lack of maturity in his diary?
For example, do you think this is incorrect and demonstrates not being grown up:
Now that the election is over, an appropriate slogan for bloggers like Kos would be “Daddy knows best.”
Alexander, did you notice — I asked when will some Americans grow up? Did I write Pen? No.
Listen up, every person on this planet thinks they own Obama. During the primaries and the campaign Obama was not swayed by netroots or progressives or any particular groupies. I’ve written within this space before, Obama will disappoint the left and far left. If you’ve been following his thoughts very closely, his philosophy and if he fits any category (hard to do) Obama is a moderate small c conservative..his Kansas Hawai’i upbringing is his grounding. SOme Americans do need to grow up. Taking one side of an issue and digging heels in resolve nothing.
fixing the economy and reversing eight years of Bush’s damage will take a lifetime. The earth ain’t square.
Sorry if I misinterpreted you, idredit, but you addressed Pen as “you” in the same sentence in which you wrote that “some Americans” are not “grown up”, so that it was not unreasonable for me to suppose that you think that Pen falls under “some Americans”.
I agree that Obama is a moderate conservative, and apparently so does Pen. What that means is that the progressive blogosphere should not stop pushing for progressive policies and viewpoints now that we have a Democratic president elect. Pen’s diary is an example of that kind of activity, so I don’t understand why your response to it was so hostile.
Fixing the economy after the Great Depression did not take a lifetime. If it takes a lifetime now, that would be because the left is less focused and cohesive now than it was then.
The point is that progressives need to keep on making demands on a Democratic president the way regressives do with a Republican president.
You seem to be saying: we shouldn’t demand that Obama implement progressive policies because Obama is not a progressive. That sounds exactly like the pre-emptive surrender that our last Democratic Congress perfected.
No, you DID call me immature. So be man enough to admit it.
I certainly don’t think I own Obama. I DO, however, have the right to point out who he REALLY is, not who everyone wanted him to be when they glommed onto him during the election.
He is a corporatist. Americans overwhelmingly elected him on the hope that he wouldn’t be a corporatist.
He ran on CHANGE. Being a corporatist, he doesn’t offer ANY change.
How is it that America was fooled into nominating a corporatist when it’s the last thing Americans want or need? People like Markos who squash reality when it’s inconvenient to their personal agenda to get Democrats elected before progressives.
It’s about priorities people. The world is not Democrat vs Republican. The world is about a small cadre of very rich people, the corporatists, vs the rest of the human race.
Until THAT is how we view all political discourse, we cannot claim to be a “reality based community”.
And neither can Kos.
Way back when, I was a D.Kos regular. The Pie Wars and their aftermath finished me off. I can still log in. Once in a blue moon I do.
So it is pure fun and amusement to hear what nonsense Markos is up to. That he is still obsessing about Nader is certainly worth a chuckle.
Nader is not wrong, but in a practical sense he is getting nowhere with his approach. Well, who IS getting somewhere, really?–it’s a little hard to say, so I can’t find it in me to criticize him much. But I don’t concern myself with him, either: His time has passed.
Which just makes Markos funnier.
Reality-based indeed!
(A dangerous slogan: If you don’t pay it respect, it comes back to bite!)
And fuck his supporters.
.
use arguments instead. I got booted from his site eons ago. I’m enjoying blog life here in the pond.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
what’s necessary.
I’m of the mind that it was a shitty front-page post loaded with careless invectives. In the same breath (text) Markos has managed to alienate some lefter-leaning folk.
In the end, it’s his site, but I sure as shit don’t read dKos for his platitudes because he lost me about 4 years ago. Thank goodness for a lot of the other diarists.
I don’t know which bores me more, DKos or Nader.
about Nader?
Is it his desire for George Bush to stand in a glass booth and answer for his crimes? Or is it his many years of advocating the extirpation of corporate welfare?
riddle me this: aside from his quadrennial run for president, where does nadir go?
for a man who purports to be a reformer and agent of change, he’s surprisingly quiet in the interium. he doesn’t walk the talk, imo.
that’s what bores me with him…l have a great deal more respect for dennis kucinich, who at least makes the effort even in the face of much derision.
nadir’s a narcissist of the highest order, and has only one agenda…his personal aggrandizement.
he’s done nothing but sully what’s left his reputation and legacy the past decade. l, for one, will be happy to see him fade away into obscurity…a trivia question for the future.
my 2¢ ymmv
How does your CV compare to Nader’s?
Or, for that matter, how does Obama’s compare?
ralph nader is no friend of the Democratic Party. Ralph is only concerned about the size of his own ego, than reality of his comments and choices.
“ralph nader is no friend of the Democratic Party.”
Well, that settles it then – he’s clearly evil personified.
Pretty silly statement. Nader is as much a friend to the Dem Party as to the R’s. In other words, he’s a “friend” to neither, nor does he pretend to be. He’s for small “d” democracy, and an end to the two-party lock on this country. Does he have a chance to get elected? No, but he has a right to run — more of a right than he’s given in most states — and on most every issue for the last 50 years, he has been and is right.
I’m registered Dem, voted for Obama, but I have no illusions about what he is willing to or can do, with the realities of DC culture. I also have no illusions about the Democratic Party in general, which only looks good compared to the alternative. That’s why having only two alternatives sucks and should be condemned at every opportunity by anyone calling themselves progressive.
Nowithstanding Nader’s manipulation of data for his career-making Unsafe At Any Speed. It seems that his obsessive quest to destroy GM has finally come to pass without benefit of Nader’s shoddy work.
Wow guys, just got back home today and hadn’t had a chance to check out this diary since I posted it. I didn’t expect to get recced. Thanks.
Kos is Kos and it’s a pointless waste of time to rail about it. I use the site for what it’s good for. It’s just a tool for whatever your own mission may be, don’t take it personal.