On the whole, I’ve been a defender of Majority Leader Harry Reid. I believe he is often unjustly criticized for decisions that are made not by him, but by a few centrist members of the Democratic Caucus. A Majority Leader can suggest a direction for the caucus but he can’t make senators go where they are unwilling to go. And, once it is clear that the caucus will not support something, it is up to Reid to put the best face on it to the base of the party. This often results in Harry Reid insulting our intelligence by telling us that dogshit smells and tastes just great. Consequently, Reid winds up taking a lot of heat that would be more equitably directed at unnamed senators who are the real obstacles to progressive change. I still believe this, but I can’t defend him anymore. He’s a yellow-bellied coward who I am ashamed to associate with as a co-member of the Democratic Party.
Oh, I know that this time is no different. If it weren’t for cowards within his caucus refusing to provide funding for the closing of Guantanamo Bay, Reid wouldn’t have had to give us the dogshit spiel. But he went further than usual. He didn’t just whip out his cock, piss on our legs, and tell us that it’s raining. He cut tail and ran. In the Army, they shoot people for that. It’s called fucking ‘desertion’ and it puts your comrades at needless risk.
The President ran a campaign in which he promised repeatedly to close Guantanamo Bay and to treat the people there within traditional American practices of jurisprudence. He got no argument on that score from Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, or anyone else. But now that the Republicans are trying to frighten people about our ability to keep potentially violent criminals behind bars in this country of a bazillion prisons, Harry Reid is playing a different tune. Now he’s a coward.
Let me tell you something. This country doesn’t need Harry Reid in Congress. We’ll do just fine without him. We need him to show courage and help the president do what he promised to do. If he loses his seat as a result, so fucking what? That’s what they call a Profile in Courage. There will be no new chapters dedicated to Harry Reid in the next edition of that book. He’s a complete turncoat and an absolutely gutless fool.
And let me tell you why this upsets me so much. For my entire life the Republicans have made a political living by arguing that the Democrats don’t have what it takes to protect American interests and American security. I always thought they were full of shit. But the Democrats in the Senate are proving the Republicans right, and me wrong. Any organization that is afraid to house Gitmo prisoners in super-maximum security prisons within the United States (for real or political reasons) is too yellow-bellied to protect the United States. If this is all the guts the Democrats have, they should be voted out of power and the Republicans should be re-entrusted with our national security. At least with them, you know that they will fight.
The idea that a proud and confident party would shrink from backing their own president on a matter of such profound national consequence because of the illogical and ridiculous fearmongering arguments being advanced by the Republicans is so far beneath my contempt that I cannot stomach it.
Harry Reid is dead to me.
Tell us how you really feel!!
Seriously though … I have been harder on Reid than you have .. zombie LBJ would be a more effective Majority Leader than Reid .. granted sometimes Reid can’t force members to go where they don’t want to … but would you agree .. or disagree .. that while he can’t crack the whip all the time … he ought to be able to crack it some of the time? .. like say this one? Is this an important enough issue? Did Brendan call Reid’s office and tell them we already have terrorists housed on US soil? If not .. I’ll gladly call Reid’s office tomorrow and tell them that
That is sad, Booman, but I’m afraid the “Democrats are cowards” explanation doesn’t cut it. More accurately, they are part and parcel of the national security state/global American empire. They will happily carry water for the Military industrial complex and their main purpose is to beguile well meaning progressives into thinking something is being done when in fact nothing is.
Change will not come from an election, but from mass protests and people putting their bodies on the line to demand change.
It wont be easy.
.
It just doesn’t stop ….
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I have to agree with you in the main. The Democrats are part of the exact same system as the Republicans, they just try to put a different face on it. Being a peaceful, cooperative member of the international community, not insisting upon dominating the world militarily, economically, and politically, is the key to national security, and the Democratic party is no more interested in that than the Republicans are.
Sweden and Norway are examples of very successful, prosperous countries that do not have ambitions toward world dominance. When is the last time their national security was threatened?
I would say with Norway, that would 1940, only 69 years ago, when the Germans invaded and took over the country and installed Quisling as Prime Minister. A name that has become synonymous with traitor. Of course, Quisling was executed for treason in 1945, shortly after Norway was freed.
I agree with you about Harry Reed though. The only problem is he has a lot of company.
In other words, the threat to the national security of Norway, a successful, prosperous country that pretty much minds its own business, came nearly 70 years ago from a powerful country that saw itself as exceptional in the world and whose government and people had aspirations of world dominance.
hmmmmmmmm.
The above comment comes to you courtesy of the Acme Irony Company, Jejune Sarcasm Division.
Any impression that it expresses insight is purely coincidental.
OK, so what does all that obscure-sounding verbiage mean? I am a primitive, simple-minded Ayrab who only understands primitive simple language. Are you saying that a country’s minding its own business and not trying to dominate the world does NOT enhance that country’s national security? And are you saying that American exceptionalism, and attempts by the United States to dominate the world economically, politically, ideologically, socially, and as a consequence militarily DOES makes the United States more, and not less secure?
If you can find someplace in this diary or comments where anyone , other than yourself, said that Norway “saw itself as exceptional in the world and whose government and people had aspirations of world dominance”. Then I will say your comment makes sense.
I never said Norway “saw itself as exceptional in the world and whose government and people had aspirations of world dominance”. That would be the exact antithesis of my point. I said that the threat to Norway’s national security that occurred 70 years ago came from such a country – i.e. Nazi Germany.
I haven’t yet but I will.
Booman: thank you for this.
We have ’em housed right here in Colorado (Canon City and Florence area), prison capitol of the country. But our nutty born-again Congressman Lamborn thinks we’ll be in great danger if we put any more in SuperMax. No one had/has a problem with Kazinsky, McVeigh et al. being there. Or some of the Middle Eastern guys already incarcerated there. In general, the public loves the jobs those prisons provide and from what I can tell has never much pondered about who is in there or why.
But what if they use their super powers to melt the walls?
Obviously Reid has other issues that are far more important than this one. Someone has to do what he does.This is high profile crap that is being used by the GOP to tarnish the already tarnished images of Reid and Pelosi. It really doesn’t stack up like health care or the economy. I’d like to see it closed and our troops brought home from Iraq and Afghanistan but the War Boys control the money!
“If this is all the guts the Democrats have, they should be voted out of power and the Republicans should be re-entrusted with our national security. At least with them, you know that they will fight.“
HUH?! So, ummmmmmm, you are saying that the so-called “fighting” that the Republicans have been doing has, ummmmmm, made the U.S. (not to mention the rest of the world) MORE secure?
OKAAAAAAY, if you say so.
Well they did fight them over THERE so they didn’t have to fight them HERE.
I mean the terrorists. Why go to America when it’s easier to take a pot shot at someone in Iraq?
Except that they weren’t fighting “the terrorists” “over there”, they were fighting mainly people who were absolutely legitimately resisting imperialist aggression.
And how’s that been working out for the U.S. “over there”, by the way?
The United States consistently manufactures its own enemies by the way it conducts itself in the world.
that’s a pretty severe misreading of what I wrote and everything I stand for.
It certainly did seem inconsistent with what I have come to expect from you, but given Republican history over the last decade plus-or-minus, I don’t know how else to read “the Republicans should be re-entrusted with our national security. At least with them, you know that they will fight. So, can you clarify for me? What DID you mean by that statement, other than, of course, an expression of the level of your frustration, which I DO understand?
PS You have come up with some incredibly severe misreadings of things I have written and everything I stand for, so I guess communication is not always perfect.
I meant that if the Democrats are so fearful of terrorists (or if they are so fearful of asinine political attacks) that they will lie down in a supine position and be run over on this matter then they actually are too cowardly to protect our national security and should be voted out of office for that reason. You can’t have a party that doesn’t believe in combat in charge of protecting the country. I love John Lewis for his principled pacifism, but you can’t make him Secretary of Defense. Likewise, any one party that would undercut their own president on a key national security issue of this magnitude out of nothing more than craven and senseless fear does not deserve to be in power. The Republicans, remember, are only pretending to be afraid.
Is this what I want? No. I want them to get a backbone and stop humiliating themselves.
Thanks for the clarification.
For sure the Democrats are afraid of asinine political attacks to the point of self-paralysis at times. I doubt very much that they are much more fearful of terrorists than the Republicans are, except, of course, to the extent that terrorist matters could lead to asinine political attacks.
Unfortunately, I have not noticed the Democrats are any more reluctant than Republicans to kill and destroy to achieve their military and political aims, however. I cannot overlook the fact that one of Obama’s first acts as President was to sign off on bombings of Pakistan that have resulted in huge harm to civilians, including the deaths and maimings of tens of Pakistani women and children, and have done nothing to stabilize the situation there.
I am not a pacifist, but violence is almost never the correct course.
Clarification: Violence is almost never the correct course except in the face of imminent or ongoing violence against oneself. In that case it is often necessary for self-preservation.
you think I am criticizing the Democrats for insufficient use of violence?
I am saying that they are afraid of combat. Those are two totally different things.
Geez! No, that is not what I think.
Let me tell you something. This country doesn’t need Harry Reid in Congress. We’ll do just fine without him. We need him to show courage and help the president do what he promised to do. If he loses his seat as a result, so fucking what? That’s what they call a Profile in Courage. There will be no new chapters dedicated to Harry Reid in the next edition of that book. He’s a complete turncoat and an absolutely gutless fool.
I’ve thought that for a while now. I was not fond of Tom Daschle, but Reid makes me long for him. Reid is no leader.
TOOK YA LONG ENOUGH.
AG
At least he got there. 🙂
How are you, AG?
Jes’ fine, CG.
Jes’ fine. (“Jess Fine” was my name when I made my last attempt to make some sense over at DestructoKos.)
Busy trying to overcome society’s overall adverse reaction to great music, as ever.
And you?
AG
I’m hanging in there. 🙂 We live in interesting times…
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AG’s So…get used to Dirty Harry and the Gang of 100/Dirty Nancy and the Gang of 435
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Ayup. This pretty much sealed the “is he in a bad situation, incompetent, or stupid” question for me. In every possible way this was a stupid, cowardly act by Reid.
Is anyone going to primary against him in the Democratic primary in 2010? I’d like to donate some money to anyone who might be thinking of a run at the seat. I won’t donate to a Republican, but I’d donate to a Dem challenger even if it meant losing the seat to a Republican. Reid is worse than useless – he’s actively making things worse as Majority Leader. If the Dem caucus won’t get rid of him, the voters should.
We should work on getting rid of all the DINOs.
The problem with this is, once you start purging, when do you stop?
Change D in DINO to C for Conservative. What you have then is Rush Limbaugh’s plan for the Republicans: “We should work on getting rid of all the Conservatives In Name Only.” Hence, a party that’s shrinking to the barest minimum base.
Like it or not, Progressives are a minority in the electorate.
Why was LBJ a success at driving a Progressive agenda? Internal political clout. Too much of Congress owed him too much to cross him (and he also knew where all the bodies were buried). Obama’s single biggest deficiency is having been in the Senate for too short a time, so he has no bag of favors owed to him.
So, I’d suggest, purging the party isn’t the answer. Just replacing Reid would be a big, big step.
I agree – this whole “DINO” thing is stupid given that the Democrats are not and really have never been an ideological party. They’re a governing coalition party, and that means the wiggle room on ideology is much greater than anything you see on the Republican side of the aisle, much less in a country with a multi-party system like much of Europe has.
My beef with Reid isn’t that he’s a “DINO” or that he has an ideology that I think isn’t sufficiently liberal. My beef with Reid is that he undermines the effectiveness of his own party with his antics. If he were a normal Democrat it would be tolerable but he’s the Senate Majority Leader and when he undermines the party he does massive amounts of damage. In that respect he’s worse than Joe Lieberman – even though Lieberman’s antics were far more numerous and much more egregious than Reid’s have been, Reid ends up being worse than Lieberman because he’s one of the party’s leaders. He’s lousy, and he really needs to go one way or the other.
Coalition party–true enough, but some of those alliances have been unholy, if I might use the word. With segregationists, for example.
“Obama’s single biggest deficiency is having been in the Senate for too short a time, so he has no bag of favors owed to him.”
This raises a very interesting line of discussion. Regarding Reid, I think even more to the point is the fact that Reid was already entrenched as Senate Democratic Leader long before anybody even heard of Obama. Reid is a holdover from the “W” era. And so are the senators who, as Booman suggests, pull his strings. It is more a question of these guys than of Obama.
I think there’s more involved here than Obama’s alleged lack of political capital and pull. That would have been an accurate reading, I think, of a president like Carter, in a very different situation. With Obama, I think it’s different. We’re talking about a guy who pretty much wrested the leadership of the Democratic Party away from the DLC. But nobody, not even Obama with all his capabilities, could have done that alone. Many senior party members flocked to his side because they correctly recognized that he was the future of the party and of the nation. And these folks did have pull.
The only trouble is, there weren’t enough of them. There were enough to get him elected and enough to bring control of Congress back to the Democrats — and these are tremendous achievements. But there remains a faction of Democrats whose careers were built on kissing the butt of the GOP, and now that the actucal GOP has been reduced to a walking corpse, these rearguard DINOs are the the effective “axis of evil” in Congress. The best we can hope for is that in the present political climate, which is not going away soon, they can be picked off in primaries. In other words, when Obama won control of the Democratic Party by winning the nomination, that was only round one. Between the years 2004 and 2008 the Democratic party figured out that there was no future in trying to win elections by pretending to be Republicans. But there are still too many Democrats in the Senate who have NOT figured out yet. The question is, how do their constituents feel about this, and will the party back candidates who oppose them?
I don’t know enogh about the present internal power relations of Democrats in the Senate to speculate whether it would be possible to wrest the position of majority leader from Reid if he does win reelection. He was not even a good minority leader under the Republicans, but under Obama he is a complete anachronism, not to mention an embarrassment and a liability.
My understanding of elected officials is basically this. The default explanation for their behavior is a kind of slow-rolling opportunism.
We can’t expect to see anything like reliable and predictable support for Obama’s programs until there are clear signs he’ll have a second term. Until then, most of what we’ll see is hedging against a Republican resurgence in 2012. And even then it won’t be a sure thing, unless there’s strong sentiment that Obama’s successor will be a more powerful candidate than Gore was after Clinton. (No opinion offered on what this has to do with the realities of changing party ID among voters, if anything. Perception is all.)
So in the short term what’s needed is the development of an arena where Obama is in control of the risk and reward allocation. In my mind, that comes down to playing hardball with stimulus allocation. Same old same old.
AmI,
I replied to your interesting comment, but I guess I didn’t press the right button, so you will find it further down the thread.
The only way to get rid of Reid through a Democratic primary is for a Lamont type .. but even then I am not so sure .. since Reid owns the Nevada Democratic party … figuratively mind you
reids’ popularity in nevada isn’t all that good according to a recent mason-dixon poll:
the problem is, who’s going to run against him, especially on the D side? he’s firmly entrenched, and no challenger is going to get any financial support from any major democratic funding sources…dlc, etc…so deep pockets and a strong grassroots effort would absolutely be required. l find it inconcievable that obama will not support him in his re-election…ala the position he’s taken vis-a-vis the specter spectacle.
to my knowledge, there are no serious ratpublican challengers on the horizon, although some of the regular posters who live there may be better able to address that, as well as any potential D challenge.
at minimum, imo, he needs to go as majority leader, where he has, for the most part, been a dismal failure. l’m not sure that’s possible from outside the gates, so to speak, but would certainly entertain any suggestions as to how it might be accomplished.
“Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.” Benjamin Franklin
it took you a while!
However- his performance yesterday might just be what the true supporters of the president need. A sharp slap in the face. A wake up slap. More than eight years of insanity and who knows how many dead and yet this country continues to attempt to justify its criminal behavior.
How about a pledge that not one single cent be given to any dem if they choose to support the continuing dismantling of the constitution!!!!!
Guantanamo; FISA; Warrantless wiretapping; torture;
cramdown;– and all the other horrors that refect the current horrors!
NOT ONE RED CENT!
That is already my strategy, and my bank balance is the better for it.
I don’t get your last paragraph. Backing their own president? How has Obama spent much political capital to get Guantanamo Bay’s prison closed?
are you serious?
Everyone who caved in to the gibbering ninnies is a coward. Reid is just their front man and they picked him to be “leader” for that reason. Who would have thought a Dem majority could be jerked around by such stupidity? It’s very disappointing, to say the least.
Glad you finally see the light. And yes, it’s a train coming at us.
Why was he in such a panic (or some kind of state) that this got blurted out? It’s not like we don’t move prisoners around all the time.
Could it be that we treat Muslims differently than everyone else?
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Sen. Reid botches 3 subjects at news conference
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Looks like something’s got ahold of him. I’ve never been a fan of Reid, but even so, the idea that he’s vulnerable enough to lose grip of facts (or even admit that he doesn’t know, but will find out and get back to whomever) is a little unsettling.
Okay, just the hell of it, how about figuring out EXACTLY why Reid is doing this. That will be the first step in preventing these PsOS from being elected.
Fist in air on this.
Thank you, Booman
Of course much of this gets laid at Obama’s feet. Yes, Reid is a coward. But he would be afraid of Obama if Obama would do something to scare him.
Obama does not fight for anything as near as I can tell. He just suggests.
Just imagine what a Lyndon Johnson would have done to Reid.
Follow the problems we face to the top.
nalbar
Obama has cast his bet on overcoming congressional clout with popular support. Reid has become the case that tests the strategic viability of that commitment. Harry Reid has thrown down the gauntlet by taking up the legacy of Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman.
For those who want Obama to do what he wants to do, this becomes the must-win fight of this presidency. We must either get Reid dumped from his leadership post now, and if the quaint Senate rules make that impossible, back a primary challenge destructive enough to assure he loses in either the primary or the general.
We decry his cowardice, but it’s time for us to get over our own chronic fear that any challenge to a traitor with a D after his name will endanger a D seat in Congress. We’ve been scattering our shots at the DINOs to no effect. Finally Reid has given us a target we can focus on like a laser.
Well, a certain kind of elected official anyway. The ones who wished he’d never been elected in the first place. But isn’t it just a rationalization? Isn’t the truth more simple? They don’t want to get with the program. They like the lobbyists better. If Obama’s great popularity and the dismal state of the GOP are not clear enough by now, then these guys won’t see “clear signs” of a second term until near the end of the first term, or maybe even towards the end of the campaign. Maybe it’ll be a horse race, as the press inevitably finds such things to be. So you spend the entire first term waiting until you know if there’s going to be a second term? But then, what is so special about a second term? The last part of it will be “lame duck” time anyway, and then you’ll be wondering why you have to cooperate if maybe the next president isn’t a Democrat? I sincerely hope many of these guys will lose their seats before they get to find out. Rahm Emanuel is supposed to be good at stuff like this.
OK, yes — but I think what you’re saying is, there’s only one measure of accomplishment, namely, getting re-elected. Nothing else even shows up on the meter. That hooks directly to campaign contributions.
How to fix? I’d say public campaign financing (and exclusively public financing) is a good first approximation. Get the lobbyists out of the picture.
Why won’t that happen? Because the reward for all those re-elections is, precisely, getting to eat at the same trough. What you’re really aiming at is becoming a lobbyist yourself, once you’ve left office. You’re not going to vote for the elimination of your supreme career ambition.