August 28, 2008
Hillary Clinton gave an eloquent speech calling for Democratic Party unity, but some of her supporters are making clear that they so hate Barack Obama that they would prefer that John McCain extend neoconservative rule in the United States rather than let Obama into the White House.
Some of these die-hard Clinton backers claim they have suffered various slights, such as receiving inferior hotel rooms in Denver or finding the Obama campaign insufficient in its ardor courting their support. Others blame Obama for examples of sexism and unfairness that arose in the long primary campaign.
12 comments:
This is one of the most idiotic expressions of political will I have ever seen. On one level, knowing how much BS has been launched from right wingers to fuel the infighting one would think Hillary supporters smart enough to sort that out. Though since they authored some of that crap I guess it just goes to show... everyone is more concerned about their pathetic little ego's than perpetuating the most disastrous presidency in history.
You selfish, sad, immoral hypocrites. I wish you some comfort when you realize what you've done. What a bunch of tools.
Mr. Parry, most people are unaware of the tasteless cartoon you mention, but you (and others) continue to call attention to these ridiculous sideshows in your ongoing attempts to paint the Clintons in the worst light possible, so YOU are part of the problem, too.
You cannot understand why Barack Obama's support is stagnant, and by some accounts, even waning. But, the reality is he has been unable to close the deal because many Americans just aren't convinced he has what it takes to lead the country.
David Axelrod was successful in reeling new people into the electoral process, but he has not been as successful at convincing enough people that Obama is the kind of standard-bearer who reflects the values of the traditional Democratic Party voter, because the candidate's record is paper-thin. There is no there, there. Promises of change, based on hope and fancy rhetoric obviously is not a closer. Obama has not sold his POLICIES to the American electorate, therefore, he may not win in November.
Some Democrats have huge misgivings about Obama's moral authority (his lies on FISA are a perfect example); they have misgivings about his commitment to economic security issues (they don't trust Goolsbee or Furman), and while it's important to address our adversaries, Obama doesn't seem to get how to do that. Some of them honestly believe that Obama does not have the right stuff to sufficiently handle national security issues. When the Russia-Georgia think erupted, he was off the reservation before his handlers got to him in Hawaii and told him what he thought!
Obama is praised by his swooning masses for having both the promise and the understanding to repair the stunning damage done to our country during the Cheney/Bush years -- but, if you ask them for specifics, they can't give you an answer other than "he's what we need right now."
Accuse the PUMAs and anyone else you want of hijacking Obama's chances for the Oval Office, but at the end of the day, it's Obama's job to prove he deserves to win the presidency. If he loses, it'll be nobody's fault but his own and his wife's.
Normally I have the greatest respect for Mr.Parry, and have read his views for a couple of years now. However, I must take issue with this whole meme about Hillary's angry supporters...not only espoused by him, but encouraged in the mainstream media. I've followed the convention closely on C-span, kept up with live bloggers on Kos and FireDogLake, and read several daily newspaper accounts. I simply don't see the evidence for this notion. It appears that the particular is being touted as the general. I've seen videos of and read the views of a few distraught and illogical women, however, I have yet to see anything like a whole movement of betrayed and injured Hillary supporters. Rather, my observation of the convention has been that the speeches have been remarkable, the tone has been civil, and the delegates appear unified. I suspect that many bloggers and MSM journalists are seeing less than meets the eye. I can't imagine why they might want to perceive rancor where not much exists, except that it feeds a story-line championing the same crappy divisive discourse we're accustomed to think of as "normal". I am sorry to see Mr. Parry join the ranks of those who encourage shouting matches and bad news.
I don't believe this tired old script for one minute. I think these so-called Hillary supporters, who supposedly are so angry that they are going to vote for McCain, are really Republican operatives pretending. It's all part of the ruse for stealing yet another election. Do you really think McCain won the primaries fair and square? Really? McCain? And how will it be explained that McCain won over Obama? Angry Hillary supporters will be part of the alibi, no doubt. WAKE UP and smell the criminals who cancelled the news and stole the US government and are poised to do it again with hackable computerized voting machines owned by friends of the GOP.
Enough is enough. Who is going to stop these CRIMINALS?
I don't believe this tired old script for one minute. I think these so-called Hillary supporters, who supposedly are so angry that they are going to vote for McCain, are really Republican operatives pretending. It's all part of the ruse for stealing yet another election. Do you really think McCain won the primaries fair and square? Really? McCain? And how will it be explained that McCain won over Obama? Angry Hillary supporters will be part of the alibi, no doubt. WAKE UP and smell the criminals who cancelled the news and stole the US government and are poised to do it again with hackable computerized voting machines owned by friends of the GOP.
Enough is enough. Who is going to stop these CRIMINALS?
THE GREAT PUNDIT CABLE REPUBLICAN PUMA FRAUD: http://pundits.thehill.com/2008/08/27/the-great-pundit-cable-republican-puma-fraud/
Brent Budowsky
@ 5:16 pm
Yes, indeed, one of the pundits with the latest "Hillary supporters will vote Republican" words admitted she was repeating the GOP talking points, which indeed she was, along with the jib-jab of the cable talkies and the flim-flam of the so-called experts who treat smears as truth and talking points as news.
The "Hillary supporters will vote Republican" myth is a fraud, a figment of the imagination of Fox News, a fantasy of the Hillary-obsessed pundit class, and a mirage that will be shattered when the PUMA Republicans are revealed for the fraud they are and more than 90 percent of the Hillary supporters will vote against more war, against overturning Roe v. Wade and against the economic royalism of the oil company party led by John McCain, who opposes equal pay for women while he would privatize Social Security for the elderly.
The pundits chortled when a Gallup poll showed McCain pulling ahead, but they are silent when the next Gallup poll showed Barack back on top.
Here's the catch. When CNN dredged up that African-American Hillary delegate saying she would give Barack Obama two months to prove his worth to her, that woman will end up voting for Obama and is counted in the bogus math of the alleged "Hillary supporters will vote for McCain.” In fact, the polls that show Obama slightly ahead count NONE of those alleged "Hillary voters" as Obama voters when in truth MOST of them will be.
In short, they are already being counted AGAINST Barack, yet when there is movement in their numbers, it will be TO Barack.
Let’s be clear. This convention has not dealt with economic or energy issues, as it should have. Democrats are in the fight of their lives. Make no mistake about that.
But make no mistake about this, either. No matter how many times the pundits repeat the Republican talking points, no matter how much the cable talkies are obsessed with Hillary, no matter how much propaganda is spread by the Republicans and repeated on the cables as news or by the pundits as wisdom, the truth is this …
The PUMAs are nothing but a fraud who speak for no one except a handful of people and Republicans who support them, promote them, and try to sell them to the press as they once sold Mr. Chalabi as the future of Iraqi democracy and once sold Jack Abramoff as the go-to power guy in Washington.
It is fraud, it is a sham, it is a myth — and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Thanks for the mention, Bob, you've helped raise my stats immensely.
What got me involved in politics for the first time in my life, in 2000, was the theft of an election. The theft of this primary is no different to me. It has shown me that the Democratic Party is just as corrupt as the Republican Party.
Many of us who have supported Hillary Clinton have tried our best to make sure you Kool-Aid drinkers understood the magnitude of what you were doing. But you wouldn't listen. So let's sit back and watch the results.
Obama is about to be hit with the most vicious campaign ever waged. If you thought what was done to Gore and Kerry was bad, just wait. The Republicans have a 1,000-page dossier on Obama, and they will be relentless. After all, Rove and Bush have to make sure to keep their butts out of prison. That's an incredible incentive to make sure McCain is elected. Hillary had a better chance of stopping it, Obama has no chance at all.
The Party thought it could nominate a ham sandwich, someone they could control, in this year that should be a shoo-in year for Democrats.
Your hatred for Hillary and that of your friend Brent Budowsky helped make this happen. It is YOU who have helped elect John McCain.
Congratulations.
Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com
I thought Hillary and Bill did a fine, though belated job at the Dem convention patching up the old primary campaign wounds. I also agree that the disgruntled PUMA faction is largely an overblown phenomenon, eagerly seized upon by the GOP for obvious reasons, and by the mainstream media talking heads so that they can continue to focus upon superficial personality politics trivia while Rome burns.
The real problem looming for Barack Obama is not angry Clinton supporters. It is the choice of Joe Biden as veep, to supposedly add foreign policy smarts and experience to the ticket. That is the disaster waiting to happen.
Joe Biden stood maybe two baby steps to the left of Joe Lieberman during the entire Iraq invasion run up propaganda campaign. Granted, Senator Biden didn't show up in the Rose Garden, but he did everything within his power on the Foreign Relations Committee to marginalize and ridicule antiwar voices who sensed the whole WMD scam was based on lies and cooked intelligence. Biden opposed the Levin amendment. From the Senate floor before voting for the Iraq war 2002 AUMF, he declared that America's ground troop committment into Iraq should last a long, long time. Even today, Joe Biden remains an unrepentant hawk on keeping a big US military presence in the Middle East (despite his otherwise excellent domestic credentials). He is a major proponent for the trendy neo-liberal scheme to "balkanize" Iraq into Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shiastan, as though that were somehow Uncle Sam's call to make.
There is a good reason that the last five minutes of Joe Biden's acceptance speech last night at the convention fell flat. It's the same reason why, as a candidate in the early Democratic primaries, he could never edge above 5%, much less break into double digits.
Joe Biden was the most outspoken, overtly militarist Democrat in the wannabe presidential field - a far bigger enabler and cheer leader for George Bush's Iraq war and the occupation fiasco than Hillary Clinton ever was.
Why did Barack Obama pick Biden?
Up until last night's acceptance speech, I thought perhaps the VP nominee might be there to deliver the theme that Barack was right, and that I (like millions of other well meaning, supposedly more astute Americans) were wrong. Opps! The spin was spun out otherwise: Bush and McCain were wrong leading the nation into Iraq, and Barack Obama was right - we should send three brigades more over into the Pakistan border area quagmire instead.
This threatens to be a repeat of the same self-defeating, stupid, triangulate-to-the-center strategy that doomed the 2004 John Kerry campaign. Karl Rove's operatives must be overjoyed to the point of delerium this morning.
Unless Barack Obama can somehow quickly correct course in his Mile High stadium acceptance speech tonight and in the antiwar themes developed in the next few weeks, the Democrats will be lucky if the Biden choice and going wobbly on ending the occupation of Iraq proves to be only a net wash - one potential voter lost from Obama's grassroots anti-Bush base, in exchange for every potential voter the Democratic ticket might pick up by choosing to pander to the blue dogs, the undecideds, and the Council on Foreign Relations DC beltway poobahs.
If the dynamics of the Denver convention unfold in this ominous fashion, once again the presidential race will become close enough for the GOP to steal. And that tragic result will really have nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, nor anything to do with Hillary Clinton's angry supporters.
It's the war - and the warfare economy - stupid.
Bill from Saginaw
I have been watching a number of PUMA websites for several months. Reading the comments there, I find it hard to believe that these people are really Democrats. Compare the way they express themselves to callers on right wing talk radio, or people who post on sites like Little Green Footballs or Free Republic, and I am convinced that you will agree that the tone and mode of expression are nearly identical.
I hardly ever hear talk like that on, say, Eschaton or Daily Kos.
This has led me to the conclusion that these people are nothing but right wing trolls. Want to check for yourself? A site I found called Rumproast has a nice list of PUMA blogs. Spend a few minutes examining them, and I am sure you will be convinced that very few PUMAs (if any) are real Democrats.
Bill from Saginaw makes a valid point.
Many of Obama's early, excited, emotional supporters think he is an anti-war candidate. What foolishness! Obama claimed to be against the Iraq War of Choice, but he's very hawkish about other military adventures -- including more troops in Afghanistan as soon as he takes the oath of office (if he does), and he has no qualms about attacking Pakistan based on "actionable intelligence" (we know how they can cook the books on that!), and who knows where else.
Obama has a tough row to hoe if Biden's vociferous early support of the Iraq War becames a "talking point" because he will not be able to explain to his adoring acolytes why he "changed" his mind and invited an Iraqi War supporter to be his ticket mate. That's not the change we can believe in!
Hillary's imaginary -- or at least greatly exaggerated -- angry supporters cannot steal the election from Obama. If he loses in November, he must look at the man in the mirror.
It's up to Obama. The buck stops at him!
Stop looking for excuses for the guy -- sheesh! Have a little confidence!
Those who say that they supported Hillary but will now vote for McCain remind me of former Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk.
After having a testicle removed due to cancer, he showed up at spring training the next season with a t-shirt that read "If You Don't Let Me Play, I'll Take My Ball And Go Home."
While his shirt was in jest, it is no laughing matter to hand John McCain the presidency. They need to get over it. Hillary and Bill did.
The travesty of Election 2008 is too many White folks just can't seem to get over the Racist Hump on the Back of America!
They so want to believe RACE is the issue when in fact it is WEALTH - THE ILL-GOTTEN GAIN OF WEALTHY WHITEBOY 1%-ERS. Obama IS NOT THE REASON the Shia & Sunni KILLED OVER 10,000 U.S. SOLDIERS TRYING TO TAKE IRAQ'S OIL & GAS FOR THEIR WEALTHY WHITEBOY MASTERS!It's not OBAMA'S FAULT 1/6 OF AMERICANS ARE WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE, OR THAT MEXICANS ARE POORING ACROSS THE BORDER OR THAT MUSLIMS ARE BEING TORTURED EVERY- DAY JUST FOR BEING MUSLIM.
Now, Obama may not be Hillary but neither is McCain, a dull-minded pasty-faced 72yr. old white man with little Intellect and even LESS Memory! America's had enough of BUSH and certainly don't need an ALZHEIMIC CLONE to take over the Whitehouse and lose the keys to it the first night!
American White Women who supported Obama but won't vote for Obama can look forward to NEVER SEEING THEIR SOLDIER CHILDREN ALIVE EVER AGAIN
IF MCCAIN HAS HIS WAY! To WEALTHY
WHITEBOY 1%-ERS, THE CHILDREN OF HILLARY'S WHITE WOMEN ARE JUST FODDER AND NOTHING MORE!
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