I’ve had some pretty strong disagreements with Joe Klein in the past, but I am still occasionally dumbfounded by things he writes. In the midst of blasting Donald Trump, the Republican convention, and the modern Republican Party, Joe Klein explains why he began this election season thinking the country desperately needs a Republican president and conservative reform.
I’m not sure I know how to write about this election anymore without seeming imprudent. I came into this year believing that our government was desperately in need of conservative reform and restraint. I came to those views watching the corroded incompetence of the Department of Veterans Affairs and also in the belief that Democrats had been too unwilling to look at and think clearly about the failures of the welfare state. I had some problems with Hillary Clinton too–from her support for the invasion of Libya to her foolish personal behavior, accepting big-money speeches from Goldman Sachs because, she said, she “wasn’t sure” she was going to run for President. But I would never question her essential decency; indeed, she is one of the most thoughtful politicians I know. And the Democratic Party, for all its politically correct smugness and silliness, has never surrendered its soul to the extremists lurking on its left. The Republican Party, by contrast, has become a national embarrassment. Donald Trump is a national embarrassment. This election will be the greatest test, in my lifetime, of the wisdom of our people and the strength of the democratic project.
Obviously, the Washington Monthly has written extensively about the myriad ways in which the Veterans Affairs scandal was hyped and misleading. That Klein seems to have fallen for that narrative hook, line and sinker is depressingly sad.
I don’t know what Klein means when he talks about the failures of the welfare state. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t think it isn’t generous enough to deal with the appalling lack of savings people nearing retirement have accumulated, or that it insures too many people against health catastrophes. What are the conservative reforms on the table that Klein was eager to see implemented? Drug testing mothers of dependent children? More strictly curtailing what can be bought with food stamps? No more filet mignons and crab legs for the poor?
He sounds like a pre-welfare reform McGovern Baby battered spouse.
What about the Republicans’ behavior in the Obama years led Klein to weigh Goldman Sachs speeches as equally or more appalling? And I was vehemently opposed to our intervention in Libya, and I don’t recall having a vocal ally in Joe Klein.
Is he really so offended by the “politically correct smugness” of liberals that he’d prefer a rerun of the Bush presidency, or Ted Cruz, Ben Carson or Newt Gingrich be our president?
If Klein were actually a conservative, these things would be understandable. But he’s not a conservative. He just seems to have an aversion to the left, and it leads him to say the dumbest things.
This election isn’t a test of the wisdom of the American people. Not more than any other election, anyway. Actually, it’s the easiest choice we’ve had in modern history.
When someone leads with:
You know to stop reading because the “reform and restraint” won’t be defined, a case for it won’t be presented, and no Republican politician is interested improving government.
Klein, like many pundits, just likes to pretend every once in a while that he’s not a rock ribbed, status quo party guy. And does that by claiming to offer careful consideration of supporting the same version in the opposing party.
That was exactly my reaction and in fact I stopped reading as you suggested. Mr Joke Line clearly has such a cushy situation that he is completely out of touch with any of the impacts of government policies and is operating entirely academically. He actually thinks that life is too easy for poor people. What a jackass.
Exactly so. Still the story has legs. I hear about it from all my conservative friends. Government can’t do it, and that’s been proven, so it needs to be privatized. It is hard or impossible to beat back hereabouts. Why is it those who support it cannot get their side out? It is disturbing.
Because supporters get all hung up on the details and can’t distill it down to an emotionally appealing truth.
FDR/his team was uncommonly gifted at that. Or maybe it’s because Democratic pols, advisers, etc. can only look right for clues as to what sells because like all Republicans, they have a complete aversion to anything on their left.
That and the big bucks people do not pay for the truth to come out. They pay for crap like what Klein wrote here. It’s all you ever see, mostly, in any M$M outlet of whatever sort.
There’s good writers out there who can distill issues with the best of them into good sound bites that even the most distracted person can understand. Don’t ever expect that to last very long, if at all, in any of our many media outlets.
Truth? Heaven forfend!
To be fair, a rightwing message is a much easier sell than a leftwing one. Greed and fear. Low taxes will make you rich. Poor people (the other) wants to steal your justly deserved goodies. So much easier that Trump can toss out the most simplistic and untrue lines and they still sell.
As much as respect and admire Bernie, he falls short on crafting the language required to defeat the 2016 neoliberalcons. And don’t appreciate his “at all costs we must defeat Trump” because that merely reinforces US fear based politics. What’s wrong with “If no experience, no skill, and no knowledge doesn’t defeat Trump then this country is in bigger trouble than we dare admit. The world knows what happens when a buffoon is put into power and it’s not pretty.”
“Low taxes is the road to serfdom. Always been true.”
“High income/wealth inequality makes individuals and a society unhealthy. Sick. Early deaths. Unhappy. The wealthy can build their moats and hire their guards to protect themselves from those they’ve impoverished, but their luxury prisons are still prisons.”
Remember, it took a few hundred years for Christianity to begin selling. And that was after they junked and/or minimized all what the Christ preached and stood for.
. . . are still prisons.”
I’ve recommended Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael trilogy and acknowledged its large influence on my thinking and worldview (including my notion of the nature of the revolution that would be necessary to save us from ourselves). Similarly for Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society (which I first became aware of via a reference to it in one of the Ishmael books).
In one of those books (My Ishmael, I think), Quinn/Ishmael uses the analogy of prison administration/guards which nominally run the prison, prison gangs which actually run it, and the general prison population to describe our now totally dominant (“Taker”) culture, with varying degrees of privilege, but all stuck inside the prison.
I think that’s right.
Government does Social Security and Medicare just fine. Try those for starters. If you get an ideologue who complains about those programs, ask the idealogue if they want to have the programs taken away from them. When they say “no,” maybe that will open up space for them to consider the possibility that other programs might be imperfect but worthwhile.
It’s the easiest choice we’ve had in modern history.”
Word.
Contrarian clickbait? It has almost come to that, I think.
Might be. What Klein says makes no sense, frankly, especially from someone who I thought knew a tiny bit more than the average brain dead heavily propagandized citizen out there. Guess I was wrong about Klein, and he gets to join the ranks of the know-nothings out there. Sure doesn’t make me feel like reading what he’s writing if he’s that clueless or deliberately misleading.
Not new for him. These guys are so far into the belly of the Beltway that changing the color of pennants they wave from blue to red (or vice versa) is their notion of being edgy and relevant.
“And the Democratic Party, for all its politically correct smugness and silliness, has never surrendered its soul to the extremists lurking on its left.”
Klein is officially dead to me.
Here’s my political correctness to Joe Klein: pfffft!
“… in the belief that Democrats had been too unwilling to look at and think clearly about the failures of the welfare state.”
Again with the sweeping broad brush statement. Totally lazy and essentially meaningless, but boyohboy Klein’s really really good at this particular conservative dog whistle.
I see Klein conveniently neglects to provide an inkling of what “failures” he sees with the welfare state. Sure we could all list plenty, but most of what’s failing is due to conservative policies. And hey: note to Klein: since you really ignored what truly happened with Veteran Affairs, I guess you also ignored the fact that Congress totally obstructed just about everything this Admin has tried to do.
I say this as someone who doesn’t even like Obama all that much, but let’s get real about who’s really responsible for failures of the welfare state. I think the Ds are total wusses, but the Rs despise any form of welfare and have tried their damndest to get rid of every single program out there. Conservative “reform” of welfare = getting rid of all of it.
Klein = worthless. No wonder I don’t read him anymore. Thanks for saving my time.
Well, weren’t expecting him to trash Clinton’s “ending welfare as we know it” that led to increased poverty rates or the public policies of both Democrats and Republicans since the early 1990s that directly contributed to increasing income and wealth inequality were you?
Like all selfish “I got mine” folks, he smugly trashes the have nots without even a nod to the public policies that made “getting his” possible.
One clarification: republicans generally despise any welfare that goes to individuals that need a helping hand, but they are quite enthusiastic about welfare for corporations.
Well yes indeed. Welfare to poor people is simply awful. Corporate welfare in all its many guises is simply the best… more of that please! Along with more tax cuts for the super wealthy!!
Actually, Republicans are perfectly fine with welfare when it goes to the people who are truly deserving of it – themselves and their fellow tribe members.
Everyone else should die in a gutter.
“corporations”? Presumably, some farm operations are incorporated.
And some are not.
But virtually all get extensive “welfare” in the form of various subsidies.
None of these “count” either as welfare though, of course. Analogously to why terrorism by non-Muslims doesn’t count as “terrorism!”.
So does Booman.
Like this:
The failure of the welfare state is quite plain to see in every ungentrified ghetto of the U.S., Booman. Its “failure” is that it still exists, really. And it is growing.
This is hooked into the failure of the educational system to have provided even an adequate education for ghetto children, and that failure is further hooked into the massive spending on military affairs…money and manpower that could have been used on education and needed maintenance of the whole U.S. infrastructure. But it wasn’t used for those things. Instead, the multinational corporations have pursued their agenda of militarily enforced economic imperialism in every part of the world that is weak enough to be conquered or at least destabilized, and the always growing wealth of the .01% speaks to the truth of that statement, as does the also always growing list of enemies that the U.S. has created and continues to create.
Now we have war at home. Homegrown “terrorists” by the handful, and…bet on it…more on the way.
The failure of the neocon/neoliberal shell game over the past 25 years to achieve anything other than lining the pockets of the .01% and maintaining a fragile peace in the streets of the U.S. by the application of essentially militaristic terror is now coming home to roost in the ongoing…and rapidly accelerating…success of (the so far only near-fascist) Donald Trump.
How many cops have gotten away scot free w/unjustified shootings…let alone killings… in the past 25 years? Hundreds? Thousands? That is a warning to any and all who might consider resistance of any kind to police state actions. Try it yourself next time a cop tells you to do something that is not really backed up by any “law.” You probably won’t get shot…after all, you’re white and identifiably middle class…but if you persist in resistance…even passive resistance…you will most certainly be arrested.You’ll be convicted too, unless you cop a plea. Bet on that as well. A slap on he wrist he first time, more later if you continue to be troublesome.
When and if Trump wins, it will be all of our loss. And that loss will be directly attributable to the policies of the Clinton/Bush II/Obama years. And if HRC wins? We will just go deeper into the can and an even more vicious candidate (Or coup…we’re just a big Third World country now, really.) will eventually rear its ugly head.
The policies that you support and espouse today…unlike the origin of this blog, the logo of which showed a hog-tied Bush/Cheney/ war criminal surrogate apparently headed for the gallows that he so certainly deserves…are identical to the policies of the Bush II administration. The only things that have changed are the party affiliation and some tactical adjustments.
But here you are, rah-rahing for the bad guys.
You might as well be working for Trump.
Every word of approval for what the Dems have done over the past 8 years creates a new Trump voter.
Nice work, Booman.
Nice work.
AG
Poverty rates in the United States have been substantially reduced by the Great Society programs, filling as they did holes in the New Deal safety net; poverty has never returned to its pre-1965 levels. It argues against history to claim welfare programs have failed.
The claim that “poverty exists, therefore welfare has failed” is a right-wing argument. It has become unsurprising that Arthur would execute this argument, given that his posts here are consistently in service to the Trump campaign, and it is quite apparent the Trump campaign excites him.
It is you: that “excites” me, centerfield. You and the scores of fools who believe the bullshit that is broadcast from Centrist Central. You are the real enemy.
Go “vote your conscience,” just as Cruz suggests.
There is no conscience without consciousness. You cower behind the centrist walls set up in your mind by the media without ever venturing into the real world. Go work in Newark, NJ. Go eat in Camden NJ outside of the capitol buildings. Go walk down the desolate streets of the people who have been gentrified out of Harlem into a truly nasty ghetto in Newburgh, NY. Go at night, unarmed. I dare you. Go check out the south side of Chicago, the bad streets or Murderdelphia, PA. Put on some black makeup and a ghetto hoodie and hang out in the worst neighborhoods of Oakland at 3AM on a hot summer’s night. I fucking dare you, punk. Walk home from your parked car at 3AM in the Bronx carrying a valuable musical instrument and hope to hell that it’s not finally your turn in the mugging barrel. And then tell me about the “successes” of the welfare state. Go work in the grammar schools of the South Bronx like my own significant other who comes home in tears way too often.
You are a coward sniper, only you use words. A coward, hiding in the bushes of white middle class complacency.
But you have lousy aim.
Thank God.
You have no conscience, because you have no real consciousness. All you have is the bullshit you read and watch in the media. You don’t even exist, really. You’re just a cog in the Big Fix. You and your fellow centrists. Self-righteous sons of bitches, each and every one of you. And as “used” by the controllers as are the people of color. You are the overseer class.
Nice work if you can get it.
Nice work if you can stand it, actually.
You disgust me, sir.
Go vote your “conscience.”
We will all pay for your willful ignorance. Black and white alike. No matter who wins.
AG
Arthur, making the case against voting for Hillary, in his apocalyptic style. As he has frequently.
But no, he’s not writing in effective support for the Trump campaign, not at all.
Perhaps AG wishes we wouldn’t draw any conclusions about him from the combination of his support for voter ID laws and his simultaneous opposition to Clinton in an election which has Trump on the ballot. I have decided to draw conclusions which are easily supported by Arthur’s own statements.
In the case of the vast majority of Frog Ponders, even those who I frequently disagree with, I’m interested in continuing community dialogue with them in the hope they will be part of the coalition which helps elect Clinton and figure out ways to effectively push her and her Congress to the left after taking office.
In the case of Arthur, I’m pleased with the prospect that he would not be part of our coalition. His policy preferences, and his offensive rhetoric, make him an unwelcome coalition partner. AG simply doesn’t want the same things the rest of this community wants, and he seems eternally determined to insult people with whom he disagrees.
He is likely to continue to come here and attempt to rhetorically bully us into becoming Ron Paul supporters, but his pursuits will remain futile.
If and when HRC loses, Ron Paul and Libertarianism in general will start to look much better to many people who are now staunch HRC-bots. I am voting Libertarian this time around. I do “vote my conscience.”
Why? How?
Because I have one, and some degree of consciousness as well.
You?
Prove it.
Pull that lever, centerfield. If HRC wins, about two years from now if someone asks what position you play you will be forced to answer “Left Out.”
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. As far as “apocalyptic” style…what better way to address a coming apocalypse?
Like this one:
OY!!!
Watch.
How is he winning?
Like this.
He’s crazy like a fox….it’s the greatest dumb act that I have ever seen.
Watch.
i tried to warn y’all over 12 moinths ago. You went right ahead with your weak leftiness shit. “Oh, he’s just some clown. Some media sideshow. We’ll laugh him of the national stage by July.” Only your “right aheads” went up your asses. Now you think that HRC will somehow reason him out of contention?
Get real, Bubba.
I TOL’ ya!!!
I tried, anyway.
I do keep trying…
You?
In beating the drum for Ron Paul and the Libertarian Party, I believe Arthur is wildly optimistic about the appetite liberals hold for a Federal balanced budget amendment and absolutist gun rights, or for the repeals of the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Housing Rights Acts, all positions long held by Paul and his movement.
Trump’s not winning. Unlike the GOP primary campaign, when Trump was in the lead from beginning to end, the cumulative polling has consistently shown Clinton in the lead in the general election. To create an expectation of a Trump landslide in the face of this appears to be an exercise in wishful thinking by Arthur.
There is this very amusing claim, frequently repeated, that the liberal/progressive movement will be done in by its complacent belief that the electorate will never give the Presidency to Trump. To which I respond by observing that there is no complacency being displayed by the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign, and organizations in the progressive/liberal coalition responsible for voter turnout. No complacency whatsoever.
I don’t generally hold much hope for polls. You do, apparently.
Here are a couple in which you…might…be interested. If of course your head isn’t so far up your ass that there isn’t enough light to read.
The jury is still out and the great game is still afoot, centerfield.
We’ll know more in several weeks.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch…
Heh heh heh.
AG
Further…just to give something to gnaw on other imagining that I am some sort of Trump supporter or apologist::
Heh heh heh.
AG
A summary of reports from the 2008 Presidential primary:
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2008/01/clearing-view-of-ron-paul.html
Excerpt:
“As voters in Michigan go to the polls to vote in today’s primary, volunteer coordinators for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are working hard across the state. One of these is Randy Gray, a 29-year-old resident of Midland, Michigan whom the Ron Paul 2008 Michigan Campaign Web site lists as the Midland County coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign. Gray’s campaign profile page, a cached version of which can be seen here, doesn’t go into much detail; there’s a picture of Gray with the candidate, along with Gray’s statement that “I support Ron Paul because he is in the fight for freedom.” The page contains no mention of one of Gray’s other roles: organizer with the Knight’s Party faction of the Ku Klux Klan.”
Gray at a rally in 2007, mere months before he had a lead role in campaigning for Ron Paul’s Presidential campaign:
That sounds and looks very much like important portions of Trump’s nomination acceptance speech.
Do you really imagine that a candidate for national office has complete knowledge of and control over who is working for him or her?
Please!!!
It is a given that many of the people who are working for Hillary Clinton are representing billion-dollar lobbyist groups…as is the candidate herself.
Given the choice of an occasional horse’s ass insinuating himself into a campaign that is ideologically quite interesting in terms of how it looks at the problems of Big Corp-owned America or a campaign that represents Big Corp-owned America, my own choice is clear.
Ron Paul has been painted with that racist brush again and again by corporate centrist hustlers and well-meaning stooges like you. Below is his statement on “race.” You do not hear this sort of stuff from racists, centerfield. Not even those who are trying to dogwhistle racism in an attempt to split the difference in terms of votes. He is an ideologue, not a racist. His ideas make more and more sense as the neoliberal system goes further and further off of the tracks.
Repeated accusations of racism were…and remain…just another tactic by corporate-owned media to non-person those who think that Big Corp has gotten way, way too big. Big Corp will not let go of a cent of its its obscene profits without being forced to do so. So far, they have been quite successful in their campaign to turn us all into serfs on their property, serfs who work for them at the lowest possible wages and in the highest possible debt. Ron Paul is at the front of a wave that will one day trim their sails. or at least that is my fervent hope. The successes of the Sanders and Trump campaigns…no matter what you may think of the candidates and their real intents, at least the so-called “message” of those campaigns was anti-Big Corp…their successes speak to the growth of an anti-Big Corp, anti-(Big Corp owned) Big Government movement.
Long may it wave.
Looking forward to 2020, I remain an insurrectionist.
AG
Ron Paul had already made the statement you quote here many months before Grey and other white supremacists gravitated to Paul’s 2008 POTUS campaign. If they knew Paul was of stalwart morality on this issue, why did the Stormfront crowd find his campaign and his worldview so appealing? It’s because his statement was paired with an active desire to deny non-whites protections from racism.
Paul speaks of liberty in this quote, yet his desire to strip racial minorities of equal access to the vote and to public and private accommodations, desires protected and enforced by the anti-Jim Crow laws of the 60’s, would strip non-whites of their liberties.
The many Voter ID laws passed in the wake of the evisceration of the VRA’s Section 5 have the effect of disproportionately stripping citizens with low incomes of the right to vote. We’ve heard from a number of Legislators and staffers in various States who have let leak that their voter ID laws were intended to deny the vote to citizens with low incomes, with foreknowledge that this would most frequently deny the vote to non-whites and women.
And allowing businesses to deny services to Americans based purely on their skin color, sexual orientation or other fixed personal characteristic is a repudiation of liberty, not a defense of it.
So you say.
I say otherwise.
So does Ron Paul.
Where does he say anything whatsoever about his “… desire to strip racial minorities of equal access to the vote and to public and private accommodations, desires protected and enforced by the anti-Jim Crow laws of the 60’s…”
Show me.
Also…
“…allowing businesses to deny services to Americans based purely on their skin color, sexual orientation or other fixed personal characteristic is a repudiation of liberty, not a defense of it.”
I don’t like mob guys. I know them well, too. Gang bangers also. They are not allowed into “my place of business.” Mob guys are a “fixed personal characteristic.” Bet on it. If you think that they are not then you have no personal experience with them. I also don’t much like KKK folk or raving Christian fundamentalists. Three card monte sharks as well. They all are not welcome in my place of business either.
Where does the legitimate right to choose end and “prejudice” begin? A hard question, best settled in the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, fuck with me in my place of business and I will…to the best of my ability and with no regard whatsoever to race or religious affiliation (if it is not too loud)…kick you out. At the point of a gun if necessary.
Tough questions.
So it goes.
No easy answers.
AG
No, in a decent society it’s an easy answer.
Well, here, I’ll ask you: should the jazz clubs you play be legally allowed to deny service to non-whites? To women? To LGBTQ people? Should the clubs you play be legally allowed to deny service to white men? Not for an anti-social behavior, but simply for their corporeal being.
It’s an easy answer.
Repealing the CRA and VRA would result in some denial of public and private accommodations to Americans, not for their behavior but for the color of their skin and for their sexual orientation. Ron Paul might not run a business which chooses to deny services to someone based on race or sexual orientation, but if he led a successful effort to make it lawful to do so, he would have participated in causing those customers to lose liberties they were given by these Laws.
Oh my God, I just realized: Arthur, you’re supportive of North Carolina’s bathroom law and other recent laws of its type, aren’t you?
You write:
The lockstep libertarian answer would be “Yes. They would go broke playing that game and thus fail.” I am not sure how that would work, but it would be worth finding out over a period of years.
You also write:
A social experiment, the outcome of which…as in all true experiments…is not not known. But…without that experiment, we also do not know how things would work out. What we do know is that the current system is simply not working.
And:
I am of several minds about those developments. As far as I personally am concerned I don’t give a good goddamn who pisses in the same room with me. I learned that the hard way in Japan over 40 years ago, sharing toilets in yakuza bars with females. It was an initial shock for a 20 year-old American male, but…when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. The shock effect devolves rapidly with the need to piss after several beers.
People with young children? I understand their concern. Basically, if you do not make overt sexual approaches to unwilling strangers of any age in bathrooms, I don’t care what sexual apparatus fate has imposed on you. If you do? Repeatedly? You ought to have it either hacked off or otherwise made nonfunctional.
You?
AG
Regarding the North Carolina law, given that no transsexual has committed a sexual assault on anyone in the United States, adult or child, and given that sexual assault was a punishable crime in each and every State well before this and other similar laws, it’s evident to me that these laws are not meant to address threats to public safety, but instead are meant to create division, fear and hatred in the general public for an emerging minority. Division, fear and hatred, for political benefit, all pursued by one political Party, the same Party and the same political movement which has been fucking in recent years with Americans’ right to vote.
As to the rest of your stuff here, it resides in the familiar wispy, theoretical, emotionally and socially detached world of the libertarian defending his views.
You concern yourself about whether a discriminating business would survive. Obtusely, you attempt to make us forget what things were like in many areas of the United States before the CRA. Discriminating businesses in many area of the nation were the most popular and powerful businesses, and businesses which attempted to start anti-discrimination policies were often socially coerced into returning to segregated services, and if highly intimidating social coercion didn’t do the trick, then the offending proprietor might have a rock thrown through windows of their houses or businesses, or might find a few goons confronting their bodies with baseball bats.
Anyone who thinks coercive practices and limited segregation of public and private accommodations would not return quickly in some areas of the nation in the wake of a CRA repeal is as credulous as Chief Justice Roberts was in his majority opinion in his case for the Shelby County majority decision, which rendered inoperable Section 5 of the VRA.
All that said, I find your concern about the viability of discriminating businesses to be an expression of badly misplaced priorities. My concern about official re-segregation of private and public accommodations centers on the very first customer deprived of their liberties by discriminating institutions and businesses, and the next, and the next. Their difficulties hold my attentions. The difficulties experienced by business owners who are forced against their wills to accept the business of a racial or sexual minority are highly trivial in comparison.
We have many social demands placed on us by laws which defend common decency and a civilized society. Angry men are prevented by law from punching people. If you chose to extend your liberty argument, you could lay claim that these laws strip a man of his liberty to behave as he likes. As brutal as this example is, your unfortunate defenses of the brutality of Jim Crow laws and practices live in the same appalling moral universe.
“Official re-segregation?” like…laws passed in some states enforcing segregation?
Oh.
That simply isn’t going to happen. Too many brownish people in positions of prominence and power in even the most redneck-populated states now. Them days are gone forever.
Further…I am sick of being societally “enforced,” myself. I do not want to be “enforced” to serve or not serve anybody for any goddamned reason, especially from a totally corrupt DC entity. I no longer trust this government on any level whatsoever. I have been of that mind since just after the JFK assassination, and for a long while I was in a very small minority. The majority swallowed the rampant, media-dispersed lies of the Deep State for a long while, but now I am not so alone. In fact, I may belong to a numerical majority. We shall see.
You?
Even after Obama literally laughed in your face as he pursued the same strategic goals as did the Clinton I and Bush II regimes…different tactics, same goals…you are right in line for a continuation of the same line through Clinton II.
So it goes.
If this line continues another 4 or 8 years, so be it. The longer it goes on, the more people are going to have the scales drop from their eyes. Barring some sort of WMD catastrophe or a total collapse of the economy, Clinton II…if she wins…will be the last of the neoliberal/neocon line.
Go do your best, centerfield. The best sometimes produces the worst.
AG
That quoted paragraph is some of the most weirdly self-refuting writing I’ve ever seen.
Jonah Goldberg is offering up political commentary on NPR. There is no more punditocracy. The end is near.
phuck Joe Klein