Bruce Moomaw
- : Cameron Park, CA
- : 54
- : liberal
- : Democratic
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Nice philosophy, Boyd. Pity it didn't work for John Kerry.
Any candidate has to respond to ANY false accusation, and fast, because -- let's face it -- all voters in every human polity, although not stupid, are ignorant as hell where politics is concerned, and if some candidate throws out an accusation and the other doesn't answer it they naturally tend to assume that it's because he doesn't HAVE a reply to it. Fortunately, Obama usually seems clearly aware of this unfortunate fact.
(By the way, back in the 1980 election, we had a spectacular example of this in Sacramento, near where I live. Respected state senator Albert Rodda figured he didn't need to run any campaign ads to swat down an obnoxious, smarmily fundamentalist ultraright challenger named John Doolittle -- after all, he'd been representing the voters for years, and surely they knew him. Doolittle won in a narrow upset because (as the polls later showed) most of the voters had gotten Rodda mixed up with a Southern California Democratic state senator named Alan Robbins who was currently involved in a child molestation scandal. Yes, that's the same Doolittle most of you know about -- after he got thrown out of that district in the next election, he moved to my own district.)
Posted at July 27, 2008 10:04 PM in response to Chicken Little Is Dead: The Genius Of Obama's Strategy
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Yep. He's almost as inspirational as Thomas Jefferson's denunciations of slavery...
Posted at June 9, 2007 1:03 AM in response to Addendum to Bill Gates' Commencement Address
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"Iran has a pefect right to develop its own nukes"? What you're really saying is that the current dictatorship running Iran has a right to develop its own nukes. Is it really necessary to point out to an adult that nukes are a hell of a lot more dangerous in the hands of a dictatorship -- any dictatorship -- than they are in the hands of any stable democracy? The multiple reasons are really not that hard to figure out; they'll be left as an exercise for the readers.
Posted at May 7, 2007 4:16 PM in response to THE DEMOCRATS' ROAD TO WAR
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Just make sure your "grand strategy" doesn't forget Florida, Missouri, Iowa and Arkansas. (The rest of the South -- including West Virginia -- can go fly a kite. That's even if Edwards gets nominated -- he could make a token effort in North Carolina for pure appearance's sake, but he has no hope of carrying it and he doesn't need it.)
Posted at January 13, 2007 12:34 PM in response to The Mile High Convention
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I don't believe we've heard one word from McCain yet on just where he's going to GET this swarm of additional troops he swears we need in Iraq. The draft? Not a peep yet from Mr. Straight Talk on that one. I myself am convinced we WILL need a draft for the overall global War Against Megaterrorism -- particularly the nuclear variety -- but if we take that step, we will have much more important things to use that draft for than pouring the draftees down the rathole of Iraq.
McCain and Giuliani are both extremely vulnerable on this point, and I think that either Edwards or Obama (though not Hillary, who remains utterly incoherent in her Iraq policy) could flay them alive on it. (Of course, if we're completely out of Iraq anyway by the time the 2008 campaign cranks up, it will be a different matter.)
Posted at November 26, 2006 2:30 PM in response to Straight Talk about "Straight Talk"
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Doolittle, I'm happy to say, DOES have a strong GOP primary opponent this time -- in fact he had him before the scandal broke: Mike Holmes, the Mayor of Auburn:
http://www.auburnjournal.com/articles/2006/01/29/news/top_stories/03doolittle.txt
I don't know who's financing Holmes, but he is very well financed indeed -- my family (we are, alas, represented by Doolittle) has already received three computerized anti-Doolittle push-poll phone calls. Not that I'm complaining: we've been waiting 22 years for Rep. Uriah Heep to get his -- especially since his political career would have been ended back in 1984 if he hadn't pulled a last-day electoral dirty trick so blatant that it got him fined several thousand dollars.
Posted at February 9, 2006 12:24 PM in response to The Daily Muck
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Regardless of the fact that the GOP Right hates Giuliani and McCain, they'e going to have much, much more trouble stopping one of them from getting the nomination than they had stopping McCain in 2000. Bush was, after all, Bush -- one of the best-known brand names in US politics -- and he was always both the overwhelming favorite of party officials, and had a landslide lead over McCain and everyone else for the 2000 nod among national GOP voters, even after McCain had won New Hampshire.
But the GOP Right has no one Mr. Big to unite behind at all this time -- let alone one as well recognized and popular (because the public thought he'd have the same policies as his father) as Bush, or with support remotely as strong among party officials, many of whom after all WOULD like to win and recognize that Rudy or John would be a vastly stronger nominee in 2008. How many Americans right now have even heard of George Allen?
He or some other comparably obscure rightist may still get the nod, if the GOP Right throws a big enough tantrum over Rudy and John. But it would only be after a spectacularly divisive and bitter fight in the GOP, which is fine with me. The only people with enough clout to genuinely steamroller Rudy and John would be Cheney or Condoleeza, neither of whom seems interested in running.
Posted at January 27, 2006 10:44 PM in response to George Allen
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One delicious footnote to the Doolittle statement: After weeks of refusing to talk to reporters at all on the subject, he finally agreed to make the above statement on the talk show of conservative Tom Sullivan -- but only on condition that, if he "didn't like the way the interview was going", he would be allowed to completely block it from broadcast. Well, he made that statement, allowed it to be broadcast, and Sullivan jumped him afterwards anyway. It was all over the local TV news yesterday. (Doolittle, I grieve to say, is not only my Congressman but a fellow alumnus. I've been waiting for that smarmy little Uriah Heep to get his for a quarter-century now -- and, judging from the man-on-the-street reactions plus the fact that he already had a well-financed GOP primary challenger, maybe it will finally happen.)
Posted at January 24, 2006 2:54 PM in response to The Daily Muck
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Footnote: even the latest issue of the Reader's Digest is forcefully pointing out the fact that Bush seems uninterested in preventing nuclear terrorism, and that the Iraq War has been a distraction from this. So why the hell can't the Democrats do so?
Posted at January 14, 2006 1:32 PM in response to Iran Links
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One would think that, if preventing Iran (or any other dictatorships or shaky states) from getting the Bomb is extremely urgent -- which it is -- then we damn well ought to prepare to move our troops from Iraq to Iran immediately. Particularly since preventing Saddam from getting the Bomb was by far the strongest argument for the Iraq War (and was in fact why many of us supported it initially, before we found that the Administration was lying through its teeth about the nuclear evidence because it had lied to itself about the ease of Iraqi reconstruction).
Note that Stanley Kurtz, like Hanson, is cranking up, so help me God, to try to blame the fiasco on the opponents of our continued entanglement in Iraq ( http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=5802 ). It doesn't seen to occur to these cretins that, if our invasion of Iraq really HAD been necessary to stop a dangerously imminent development of the Bomb by Saddam, virtually nobody -- liberal or otherwise -- would have opposed the invasion even if we did bungle the occupation afterwards.
Or maybe it does occur to them... Certainly the Dems did leave themselves somewhat open to such idiotic accusations by their own reluctance (particularly on the part of Kerry) to talk about the Iraq War as a disastrous impediment to the absolutely crucial prevention of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.
Posted at January 14, 2006 1:30 PM in response to Iran Links
