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Obama haters-Hillary haters: Just stop it!

By American Street


(Image by darkblack, of course!)

Both Democratic candidates have their supporters. I initially gravitated toward Edwards. After he left, I stayed ambivalent. Both candidates have positives and negatives. And either, at their worst, would be far better than St. John McSame. And recently I came to support Obama.

So I really can’t understand the hate speech directed at both by their partisans in the bloggersphere (y!pctp!). Corrente was the first high-profile blog that added me (back when it was just me) to their blogroll, and then gave me front-page posting privileges, and I have never forgotten that. I have personal relationships with several of the front-pagers, and while I hadn’t checked in there lately, I was shocked to find this:

Barring a stunning reversal of fortune, my party is heading into November with a candidate who thinks the GOP is “the party of ideas,” who badmouths socialized medicine, progressive partisans, liberals (and their Chablis-soaked limos), and who says he was “called to serve” by Christ himself.

As Obama’s former friend and mentor recently noted, “he says what he has to say as a politician.”

Sure, I understand that to overtake a more-popular and more-experienced party rival, it’s necessary and appropriate to destroy her and her husband’s reputation via completely fraudulent charges of racism. Sausage ain’t beanbag, as they say.

And this, from a different Corrente blogger:

I finally realized why I was having such a hard time saying that I’d vote for Obama if he is the nominee.

I’ve been voting straight ticket Democratic just about my entire adult life, and one of the big reaons is that I find the GOP’s use of its Southern Strategy abhorrent.

Obama’s use of race baiting in an effort to create huge margins and massive turnout in the AA community is his own “Southern Strategy.” Every time I think about what they’ve done to Bill and Hillary Clinton in the name of securing the nomination, I feel ill.

So I’m sitting November out if Obama is the nominee. I’m not going to vote for a “Democrat” who employs the tactics I find most abhorrent in Republicans.

Wow, just wow. And they’re not the only Liberal bloggers to be anti-Obama. Taylor Marsh joins in:

I will say this much. I am a fighter for Democratic and progressive causes. I will fight against John McCain’s candidacy with every fiber of my being.

Hey there. Loved the top of your site today pointing out the Republican disaster and can’t wait to have your wonderful talent focused on McCain. And you’re quite a fighter. Thanks. - Tony (reader email)

That said, since I can’t make the case for Senator Obama now, I won’t be making it later. His fans will have to do that. There is no way I can ethically or in good conscience turn 180 degrees to start touting him. But I can and will stand up for Democratic principles. So the focus will be on making sure John McCain is not elected.

As for why Obama supporters, which some of you call “trolls” will continue to be welcomed here, it’s because discourse in the Democratic party between our camps is important. If you don’t want to talk to them don’t.

I just don’t get it. At least Taylor will work against McSame. That says a lot.

But I still don’t get it. Perhaps my co-bloggers here or commenters can enlighten me.

Now for the anti-Hillary camp, here’s one blogger:

With the champion of universal health care, education reform, nuclear non-proliferation, the environment and the nation’s poor out of the running, I find myself turning towards the candidate who, I think, shares John Edwards’ hunger for change, and deep belief in the innate decency of the American people. That candidate is not Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As a woman and a feminist, l feel a profound sense of sadness that I cannot, in good conscience, support Hillary Rodham Clinton’s historic bid for the presidency. Because to me, being a feminist means not only supporting initiatives that improve women’s lives as mothers, workers, caretakers and citizens, it means being a driving force in the quest to better understand women’s roles in our homes, our nation, and in the world. Being a feminist does not mean voting for the only woman in the Presidential race - it means voting for the person who will stand up for all women, and the issues that directly affect us and our families.

And from Democratic Underground, posted by a user:

if she gets the nomination. I am an Obama supporter, but I could never help McCain win. This country would not recover. Hillary has done a lot these pass few weeks to piss me off, my respect for her has been greatly diminished. I do think she will harm the party if she stays in the race too long. That said, if by chance she gets the nomination I would not think twice to vote for her. Any Democrat that acts like a spoiled child and says they will vote for McCain if their candidate loses is just not thinking straight. Grow up people!

There are more like that in the thread following the main post, so there is I-won’t-vote-for-Hillary sentiment out there. And here is one more anti-Hillary blogger:

Today Clinton neglected to vote on the FISA bill and she lost my vote. She offers a Comprehensive Government Reform page on her web site, but won’t stand up NOW against vast, illegal spying in our out of control surveillance society. Obama, on the other hand, voted against telecom immunity. I called Clinton’s campaign office to let them know this decided it, and then donated to Obama’s campaign.

Maybe I’m missing the point, but the anti-Hillary posts seem a little calmer, more rational, more issue-based. The anti-Obama posts seem, well, I don’t actually know. Surely they’re based on issues, but that seems to get lost in the interpretation.

Thankfully, we have some willing to talk sense:

Finally: I’d like to state once and for all that I do not give a shit who wins this godforsaken primary. Yes, I voted for Obama because I thought he was marginally better on foreign policy, despite his weaknesses on domestic policy. Neither candidate is perfect, both are vastly better than McCain. Too many Obama and Clinton supporters need to step back, take a deep breath and realize that this election is far more important than their individual candidates. I’ve seen entirely too much stupid bullshit over the past few months, such as Kos summarily excommunicating Hillary from the Democratic Party or this nonsense about how opposing Hillary’s gas tax plan means that you “don’t acknowledge that there are poor people in America.” Stop the stupid bullshit, people. It’s not doing any of us any good, because we all have far more in common than Hillary and Obama have differences. People shouldn’t be kicked out of the damn Democratic Party because they didn’t vote for your damn candidate.

That’s from the folks at Sadly No!, who have been debating Lambert et al at Corrente. And finally we have this:

Whichever Democrat you prefer, just cut the shit.

This is one place where I don’t mind saying “a pox on both your houses.”

Adherents of both remaining Democratic candidates are playing this card, and however wounded you feel by what the other campaign is doing (or is perceived as doing), there is a lot more than a dime’s worth of difference between our Democratic options and John “Bush’s Third Term” McCain.

Make the case for your candidate and/or against the one you like less. But if you want the next four-to-eight years to be even a little better than what we’ve just had, stop all this “I’m too good to vote for the second-best Democratic option.”

Pretty please, with “for fuck’s sake” on top.

That’s actually from VastLeft, at CorrenteWire. Calmer heads prevail, thankfully.

SteveAudio.blogspot.com

"Pop" - The Bursting of Yet Another Leftist Myth

The following is from a response I posted on March 16, 2008 to counter Rachel Maddow's and Thom Hartmann's dishonest and deliberately misleading blatherings about Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Last week, Rachel Maddow and the surrogate for Thom Hartman, who was in Darfur, loudly announced on their radio shows that after reviewing 600,000 captured Iraqi documents, the Pentagon found no "direct operational link" between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. After doing so, said pundits smugly stated how such findings proved yet another of Bush's reasons for invading Iraq - an Iraqi/Al Qaeda nexus - to be a lie.

Not a bad story were it not for the fact that the claim, itself, is another leftist lie and one about which Maddow and her ilk were so excited to broadcast they probably almost urinated on themselves to do so. Excerpts from an article summarizing the Pentagon study prove what I mean.

Saddam's Dangerous Friends

What a Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents tells us.

For example, this is what Maddow and the rest of the leftist media reported:

On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service first reported that the new Pentagon study was coming. "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network." McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves many of America's largest cities. The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence.

Strobel quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the report" who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a "direct operational link" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration's prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism.

Now, here's what the report truly said:

This ought to be big news. Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

...

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime."
Among the study's other notable findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.
For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."
In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

There is much, much more. Documents reveal that the regime stockpiled bombmaking materials in Iraqi embassies around the world and targeted Western journalists for assassination. In July 2001, an Iraqi Intelligence agent described an al Qaeda affiliate in Bahrain, the Army of Muhammad, as "under the wings of bin Laden." Although the organization "is an offshoot of bin Laden," the fact that it has a different name "can be a way of camouflaging the organization." The agent is told to deal with the al Qaeda group according to "priorities previously established."

In describing the relations between the Army of Muhammad and the Iraqi regime, the authors of the Pentagon study come to this conclusion: "Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda--as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."

Conclusion: Knowing how an honest reporting of this study would undermine its propaganda about the lack of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda link, the left (1) (like the McClatchy News Service, Rachel Maddow, and Thom Hartman's stand-in stooge) did the only thing it knows how to do: It lied, claiming there was no link, when, in fact, there was one.

So yet again, the lies of the dishonest left proves how it could really care less about this country, its citizens, and freedoms. Instead what it proves is how the left will lie, mischaracterize, spin, use half-truths, and do whatever else is necessary to support its ethically absent, morally bankrupt, backward, dishonest, and regressive ideology, even if it means spreading the terrorist's propaganda for them, and, in effect, becoming their allies for doing so.

One last excerpt from the article sums it up best:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

Indeed, the phrase "no amount of evidence to the contrary..." also describes the left as it desperately seeks to keep its lies about the war in Iraq alive, despite overwhelming evidence exposing the left's statements for the lies that they are.

By SheddMay 9, 2008 - 1:55am