It occurs to me that it might not be a productive idea to needlessly alienate people on the far left end of the spectrum if your goal is build an effective movement for progressive change. Your mileage may vary.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Well now you sound like me.
what happened this time?
Yes, what happened? I feel like I’m posting about something I don’t understand. Some crappy thing over in Orange? I don’t go there unless forced.
kos mouthed off again.
Then I agree 100% with Kos. Nader is an idiot and a disgrace to the progressive movement. Just this year he has accused Obama of trying to “talk white” and on election day he said Obama might be an “Uncle Tom”.
Sorry, that kind of talk is straight up racist. Nader has been a delusional opponent of real progressive change for the past decade.
And yes, I know that Nader accomplished more in the 60s and 70s than most Democrats in politics today. But that was then, this is now. George Lucas used to make good Star Wars movies and Coppola made the first two Godfather movies. But people get old, they get cranky, they lose their touch. So with Nader.
Gotta say i agree with Kos too.
Here in PA, the Greens worked hand in glove with the GOP in 2006, and if Santorum had been a little less insane, I might be looking at 4 more years of Senator man-on-dog.
And it’s sad because the US really needs more than two parties.
yeah, first Chuck Schumer forced a right-of-center Democrat as the choice to run against Santorum, and then the Republicans financed a petition drive for the Greens. We could have lost against Santorum, for crying out loud, and by then, he was so despised that even Richard Mellon Scaife’s newspapers were editorializing against him.
A lot of Democrats volunteered weeks of their lives to check those petitions, which were all pay per name and signed by many more Mickey Mouses than live in Pennsylvania. Some Greens were checking petitions, too, but mostly the opposite side was represented by hired temps, most of whom were horrified to find out they were working for Santorum.
and Kinky Friedman in Texas.
Total spoiler for the Texas Governor’s race, and no one even heard of the Dem candidate, Chris Bell. Nice policy ideas, not electible.
In regards to Kos and his hardcore h8 for all things and people Nader? Seems like bad strategy. However, teh Orange Lucifer has never made any bones about his thoughts on Nader. As someone who was a one-time member and who still sympathizes with the Green Party – though I’m truly certain that Nader’s time has passed – I don’t think it’s too much of a turn off.
Principles are great to hold onto and admire, but they’re only one part of teh sausage. If the Greens want to get pissy because Kos – currently the most successful progressive netroots organizer on the planet – calls them assholes, they need to grow-the-fuck up or find another hobby. The world is full of assholes. At the very least, we should be happy some of them assholes our on side of the fight.
More and more the Greens look like the liberal version of Paultards. They want the rest of us to stop mocking them? They need to quit doing shit that may cause people to mock them. That, or counter the derision with something other than contempt.
Do you have any idea how small and uninfluential the Green Party is in this country? What’s your beef?
They didn’t let him on their ballot in 2004 or 2008. This year their candidate was Cynthia McKinney if I’m not mistaken.
Nader is a racist old ass, and it does the progressive movement no good to respect him or his braindead supporters. It’s the equivalent of Republicans saying they must respect Alan Keyes and his supporters in order to build the conservative movement. Jokers on both sides should be ignored and/or mocked depending on what idiocy they are trying to push.
Ralph Nader might be an old ass, but racist he is not. On the contrary, as an Arab-American he has been on the wrong end of racism any number of times.
As for his alleged remark about Obama being an Uncle Tom, my recollection is that he did not call Obama that, but suggested that he had a choice of being that or something else. If my recollection is correct, the charge that he called Obama an Uncle Tom is false. Either way, plenty of others, including a number of black people have suggested that Obama is an Uncle Tom. So, are all those black people racist too?
Disclaimer: I am not suggesting that he is an Uncle Tom. I see him as a human being first, an American politician second, and a black person third, at best. I don’t see Uncle Tomism as a factor at all in his candidacy for President or his incipient presidency.
It may not make the far left happy, nor certainly the far right, but it might just be a very effective way to get things done.
What is “it”?
I think just the sight of such hostility alienates evens non-far lefters.
Yes, a variety of events and circumstances led to a solid electoral victory this year. But it seems the surest way to lose the momentum we built this time around is to get complacent or, in this case, divisive.
If we lived in a parlimentary democracy, rather than this one-party, two-party state, we would tolerate each other better despite the differences. This two-party system forces one to gather strength to the n-th degree, and that’s destructive to allowing new ideas and change to emerge. There’s too much competition between the two parties that end up ruling like one party, adopting each other’s successes.
So what? Leftists in the US? Is that like .5% of the electorate or what? Why bother with us in terms of force of numbers?
I like this site, so being so crude with the “fuck this and fuck that” stuff is not my thing, but I get your drift. We have to get beyond our emotions, it’s so easy to fall into an emotional hole, and can’t see out.
Internecine fights on the left should be avoided if possible, and the current Kos pissery is certainly avoidable. Kos probably doesn’t want progressive change to go past certain limitations, which is fair enough, but there is no danger of that for the foreseeable (unless he is further right than I think), and you need a far left if you want to move the overton window. The Overton window always has space to its left and its right, and creating more space on the left gives it further to move.
It was very nice seeing Obama on 60 Minutes just now.
The only thing that bothered me is that he said we have a “free market economy”, and soon after that said that he wants to keep away from “ideology”. But saying that we have a free market economy is itself ideological: what we’ve had since the New Deal and World War II is what economists call a mixed economy, with government spending constituting a considerable portion of GDP.
Well let’s not get carried away in assuming that a Democratic blogger is necessarily all that progressive.
Engaging in the culture wars has pushed the GOP so far to the hokey religious right that some of the more educated, younger, secular members stopped feeling at home there. And some of them left the GOP – not because they were really unhappy about major policy issues, like economics or foreign affairs, but because the GOP’s obsession with culture wars left no room for e.g. gay people who have too much self-respect to become Log Cabin Republicans or atheist Republicans who think the born-agains are embarrassing nutjobs.
Now, in a two party system, where do you go when there is no longer room for you in the GOP, except to the Democrats? So the GOP’s obsession with God, guns and gays has meant an influx of people into the Democratic party who aren’t necessarily progressive – who are in fact horrified by anything that smacks of leftism, and who in many ways sound like paleo-conservative Republicans (or perhaps conservative libertarians) but simply have no place anymore in the GOP.
Some of these former Republicans who are now Democrats have become very prominent bloggers, and have been very effective in helping Democrats get elected. But sometimes, outside of the specific red meat issues that pushed them out of the GOP in the first place, their politics sound very like the party they left – like on say, womens’ issues, foreign policy, American exceptionalism, Islamophobia. This can make some of their pronouncements sound rather odd to people who mistakenly assume Democratic = Progressive. In some cases, Democratic simply means “no longer Republican”.
I’m not going to cause trouble by naming names here, though coincidentally I find that I am reading DKos and Americablog much less these days.
Both DailyKos and Americablog are very progressive on women’s issues and foreign policy. What are you talking about?
If you can name a right wing streak in John Aravosis or Markos Moulitsas I’d love to hear it. Kos has some libertarian sentiments but is leftist on just about every issue discussed. Aravosis was pushing the Sarah Palin rape kit story pretty hard, and pressing for the women’s advocacy groups to go after her on it.
I don’t think kos is too fond of the “Sanctimonious Women’s Studies Set” as he put it (then later slightly apologized)…
Well for example, Americablog is downright racist when the subject is to do with Arabs. They are ingrates who should be thankful for all the money we spent on them in invading and occupying Iraq; they owe us cheap oil and are portrayed as stereotypical moneygrubbing oil sheikhs should they force us to pay market value for it; Rashid Khalidi was shamefully and repeatedly portrayed as “Jew-hating terrorist”; and John’s stance on the Arab-Israeli conflict is and always has been pure Likud, literally.
foreign policy stances have you seen frontpaged on dKos?
Shergald and others here are, at least, unable to get a word in on dKos as to the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hate to change the subject but all of you need to read the following article by
Nouriel Roubini
The Worst Is Not Behind Us
Beware of those who say we’ve hit the bottom.
here…
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21228.htm
I believe this man and only wish that Obama and others would listen to him and ppl like Mike Whitney instead of so many so called experts that seem to have center stage in making us believe that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
We are on the precipice of a financial black hole which will open wider after the retailers report the dismal holidays sales starting with the day after Thanksgiving and once your sucked into a black hole no one knows where or when you will come out.
Hold on for the ride of your lives ppl save your cash liquidate all your investments into cash and as the old saying goes get all you can can all you get and bury the can in the back yard.
.
I agree with a lot of what Nader stands for. I like the idea of the Greens and I wish that California had a voting system like in New York State where a far left party can have the same candidate on its ticket as the Demos. (I’m incapable of explaining the system right now, but essentially Obama could be on, say, the Demo ticket and the, I’m inventing this, California Far Left Party ticket, and all the votes for Obama get added up, but if you’re farther to the left your vote gets counted to the Far Left Party; it gives smaller parties more representation).
I also like the voting setup in San Francisco and other places where you vote first and second choices, so that you can vote for a minor candidate and as long as no one gets fifty percent of the votes as first choice, your vote can go to, say, the moderate Dem in the second round. That’s something that the Green Party has pushed through around the country.
And a lot of those wacky Green Party ideas are being adopted by the Dems now. Energy policy, environmental issues.
No point in getting pissy about the Greens. I’m a registered Dem and generally vote for Dems, but that doesn’t mean Greens should be marginalized. That’s stupid. They want what we want.
Boo, a link in your post might have cut down on the confusion.
Nader/Gonzales ran with different parties in different states. Peace & Freedom in CA, Ecology in FL, Peace party in OR, the Independent party in NM. Cynthia McKinney was the Green Party candidate.
You can agree with many of Nader’s ideas but still loathe him as a washed-up, race-baiting has been who cares only about himself. He hasn’t been there on any of the major fights of the last decade. He only shows up when there is a presidential election to influence on behalf of Republicans.
In 2004 and 2008 he willingly took money and support from Republicans to help himself get on the ballot. We all know what happened in 2000. On election day just two weeks ago he called Barack Obama a possible “Uncle Tom”. The guy deserves scorn and then some.
do you have any links to stories on how the Greens, particularly, influenced San Francisco to go with first & second choice voting?
Is that different from, or merely another name for instant runoff?
It seems to me that if the Democrats believed Nader voters were responsible for their 2000 election loss, they would have taken steps to convince Nader voters to vote Democratic. But just the opposite has occurred. The infamous lack of spine (or another anatomical metaphor) of the Democrats made it seem like they were actually trying to prove Nader correct.
I voted for Nader this year (though not in prior elections) and I’m not apologetic about it. The Democrats failed the nation over the last eight years by not being an opposition party. Bush got what he wanted time and time again (social security privatization being, thankfully, a prominent exception). I didn’t want to reward any Democrats (at least in Congress) with my vote.
If the strategy of the Democrats was to give the GOP enough rope to hang themselves, the strategy worked, but at horrific cost to the country. Obama’s election does not erase the last 8 years. The damage done to the Constitution, the economy, the global environment, and America’s reputation in the world cannot be easily repaired.
On the day after Election Day in 2000, I cursed Ralph Nader. I don’t feel that way anymore. It was like when I curse the bus for getting me late to work on a morning when I hit the snooze button 5 times before getting up. Gore should have won the election and didn’t. His campaign was to blame, not Nader.