Here’s Charlie Cook, writing a column about the woes of the Republican Party.
Driving over to the Gaylord’s National Harbor Hotel and Convention Center to meet with a campaign manager Saturday afternoon, I passed a group on a street corner advocating the impeachment of President Obama. It was a useful reminder of just how far out the extremes—on the right in the GOP and on the left in the Democratic Party—really are.
Now, I occasionally see Tea Party folks standing on suburban corners with stupid placards, although not so much since the last election. I see anti-choice folks protesting here and there. Every day I read about a couple of dozen outrageous and frankly ridiculous things that some Republican has done or said.
But I don’t see much of this on the left. There were some rather extreme views expressed at the Occupy protests, but I don’t think telling the bankers to jump out of the window of their office buildings was really an irrational sentiment. More to the point, I don’t see elected officials on the left making insane and delusional statements on a daily basis. I just don’t. Maybe Charlie Cook can point me in the right direction. Maybe he can find me the Democrat in Congress who is the equivalent of Louis Gohmert or Steve King or Michele Bachmann or Paul Broun. Find me the candidate who is the equivalent of Todd Akin or Christine O’Donnell or Ken Buck or Richard Murdoch. I’m sure he can find me some state senator who’s mentally ill. I think we have one of those out in Nevada at the moment. But, really, I just cannot see that the left in this country is extreme at all.
If Charlie Cook can show you a Democrat in Congress who thinks that the deficit isn’t our most pressing problem, that we should lower the age at which we’re eligible for Social Security as opposed to raising it, that we should close Gitmo and try suspected terrorists in the US proper, that single-payer healthcare is a worthy goal, and that we should bring all our troops home from everywhere and slash the Pentagon budget in half, then he’ll think he’s shown you someone as extreme as Gohmert, King, Bachmann, and Broun combined.
I would describe myself not so much as a far-left Democrat extremist, as a far-out Democrat extremist. My most deeply held conviction is that Zombies rule Belgium.
I am wondering when President Obama will wake up to this obvious fact.
For more of my view of the world today, see:
http://www.zippythepinhead.com/pages/aaconfidential.html
I don’t recall any Occupy views that were extremist. Do elucidate.
Cook obviously buys into the coward’s creed: When your pay or your sources or your cocktail invites are at risk, just make up another false equivalency. There are enough Americans who consider this a hallmark of good journalism to let you squeak by.
If there’s a real problem with the Dems, it’s that most of them are dozing in the middle of the right lane. The Dem “extremists” would presumably include Sanders, Warren, Schakowsky, maybe Markey. Only the truly dishonorable or insane could find anything they’ve championed “extreme”. Unfortunately.
WTF happened to Cook, who didn’t used to be a complete fool. Or did he?
I normally find Cook’s analysis to be pretty decent, although he sometimes falls prey to MSM crap like this. His colleague at National Journal, Ron Brownstein, doesn’t usually. I find Brownstein to be excellent most of the time. Their boss, Ron Fournier, is terrible though.
I remember reading some Occupy stuff that essentially urged a return to Marxism/Communism, which I thought was dumb. But nothing too terrible and that sort of thing wasn’t the focus of the movement as far as I could tell.
I can’t think of any other developed country where Marxism would be considered extremist or where elected officials would need to hide their Marxist leanings. So I guess if you’re sticking to American bumpkin standards, you may be right. If we go by global standards, not so much.
In fact ol’ Karl is looking like a pretty good prognosticator these days.
Beltway CW holds that Paul Krugman is a leftie economist (and not the somewhat conservative Keynesian) and therefore is best to ignore. The only economist that makes sense these days is the Marxist Richard Wolff.
Or Doug Henwood. His FB feed and his new blog(!) are well-worth following.
Henwood is an excellent leftie business reporter that highlights the work of economists such as Wolff and Yanis Varoufakis.
IMO Cook is a senior version of Chuck Todd. They both should just stick to crunching numbers because they both seem hampered by an inability to think outside the Beltway CW box.
As an example, I remember a smug Cook and a less smug Todd being the very last prominent pundits insisting that the Democrats could not take the Senate in 2006. Again, YMMV but – when they’re not talking numbers – they are both just too comfortable hiding behind the Beltway’s false equivalencies to insure that their TV-talk is balanced, no matter how far they have to stretch credibility to do it.
That is true – Cook consistently underrates Democrats’ chances in elections.
They’re not even leftists! They’re center-left, at best. Shit, once again, if we were in Canada, Bernie Sanders isn’t even “left” enough for the NDP. At best, Bernie Sanders and Warren would be on the right-most spectrum of the NDP, and roughly in the middle/center-left of the Liberal Party. And fucking Markey voted for the Iraq War. Why progressives coalesced around him from the get-go is a mystery to me; now that the contenders are set it makes sense, but not early-on.
We have no socialists in elected office. Our best chance was probably Matt Gonzalez in 2003 rather than Newsom.
I don’t think telling the bankers to jump out of the window of their office buildings was really an irrational sentiment.
Insofar as there were Occupy protesters who really believed that, how many do you think were Democrats?
They all must have been Dems. If they were Reps the bankers would have pushed an office boy/girl out the window to keep them happy.
Silly person. If someone’s not a Republican, then obviously he’s a Democrat. Have you learned nothing from Beltway CW?
But, but …. New Black Panthers!!!!!!
The idiocy of the both sides argument:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGArqoF0TpQ
I have seen no advocacy on the left for the impeachment of Obama. All of that is on the right.
Charlie Cook is a liar. And Republican shill.
Why would anyone on the left call for Obama’s impeachment? Everyone on the left is a Democrat, and all Democrats fall in obediently behind their Leader. Where do you get these ideas, TD? 🙂
I’ve seen it from the part of the left that likes to call Obama a war criminal. Dennis Kucinich called air strikes in Libya an impeachable offense.
The Beltway media misses Kucinich, because he was a cartoonish figure that could always be cited for the necessary false equivalency. There were several key differences, though, most notably that Kucinich was a pariah among his party’s leadership, not a star, and that Kucinich, for all his flaws, was almost always factually correct. He didn’t make shit up.
That’s one of the stupidest and laziest instances of “both sides do it” that I’ve seen. You could write a computer program to do this for you. You feed in something like:
And you get back:
Sure it doesn’t make sense, but the computer doesn’t know that.
Yeah, it’s astonishing how thoroughly Cook mails in that “both sides do it” aside. He leaves it unsupported by the rest of his writing here. It’s farcical.
Then there’s this:
“But this is the first time either party has confronted and analyzed in a systematic and public way what went wrong, why, and what’s to be done about it.”
I thought Cook is a veteran. Here he is, getting spun by a pure PR document. The only policy precription in this GOP “autopsy” is something in direct and total opposition to the curent Party platform, and this recommendation carries no enforcement mechanism. It’s as if Charlie likes being punked.
Yeah, well, lefty protesters carry signs with stuff like
“BIGFOOT ISREAL”
and that proves Cook’s point. At least all his rightwing friends say so.
You know, it’s the crazy Dems advocating for gun control, access to healthcare and addressing climate change. Yep, those extremists.
.
Senate Democrats to drop assault weapon ban from gun bill
The ugly gun ban was the least useful part of the gun control bill. If dropping that can get it passed, that’s the easiest decision in the world.
agreed. Much more important to get a ban on large ammo clips than on ugly guns.
Yes, and background checks.
Hmmm– actually can’t tell from the NYT article if the large ammo clips ban is still in the bill…
looks like that might be offered as an amendment?
The large ammo clips ban was part of Feinstein’s Assault Weapons Ban of 2013.