Monday, March 2, 2015

Scott Walker, God's Gift to the Democratic Party

I'm not certain if this proves the existence of God, or the collapse
of Capitalism.
If Scott Walker is God's gift to the Democratic Party, it should cause
great alarm among Believers. God used to be able to part seas,
destroy entire cities, turn people into pillars of salt, and raise his
son from the tomb. And now the best He can do is to deliver Scott
Walker to the Democrats?
But setting Walker aside, a pleasant thought indeed, and looking over
the growing field of president wannabees, a more probable case can be
made for this being the warning of the collapse of Capitalism. This
once energetic, forward looking system is now wallowing in its own
poop. By boldly leading the Human Race down the broad, gold plated
road to prosperity....of a few...it is now only able to send forth
retreads to carry its banner.
But Capitalism still has the power and the wealth to dress up the
slimiest of its Lackeys and present them as forward looking Leaders.
Should Scott Walker bluff his way to the top of the pig pile, and
become the "chosen one", the Ruling Class will turn this sow's ear
into a silken purse. And people who should know better, will eat him
up. Think not? Just dredge up the offerings of the Republican Party
during last presidential election, Sure, voters did go with the
Lesser of Two evils, but remember, we did put George Bush II in
office...twice!
But lest we believe that the Democrats will rise to the opportunity
and present us with new, young, energetic blood, give it up. Dragging
her well worn old carcass to an early finish line is none other than
our first woman president, to be. Hilary Clinton, all that Capitalism
could ask for in a loyal servant.
Even as it is in its decline, Capitalism continues to ravish, plunder,
cheat and steal, as if there is no tomorrow. And if we humans don't
come to our senses very soon, there will be no tomorrow, for us.

Carl Jarvis

On 2/28/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> Taibbi writes: "Beltway Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks
> like they could have plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the
> weekend, Scott Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election,
> is suddenly leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls."
>
> Matt Taibbi appearing on Democracy Now! (photo: Democracy Now!)
>
>
> Scott Walker, God's Gift to the Democratic Party
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 28 February 15
>
> Beltway Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks like they could
> have plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the weekend, Scott
> Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election, is suddenly
> leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls.
> Walker is surging thanks to his performance at this week's Conservative
> Political Action Conference, where the union-busting governor inspired
> raucous applause with his "I was a dick in Wisconsin, and I can be one in
> Washington, too!" stump speech.
> Walker's address was a broadside against a litany of conservative bugbears,
> from Planned Parenthood to the media to tax day to the subversive act of
> voting without a photo ID, etc.
> But the money line came during a Q&A session. Asked how he would take on
> radical Islamist terrorists, Walker referred to his experience taking on
> pro-union protesters in his home state:
> If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.
> Walker's seeming comparison of peaceful union activists to head-chopping
> Islamic terrorists drew a predictable response, with progressive groups
> like
> American Bridge sending out alerts denouncing his comments, along with
> outrage from the Democratic National Committee.
> But the National Review also called it an "unforced error," with writer Jim
> Geraghty taking special offense at the fact that Walker had forced him into
> a place where he had to defend, of all people, union activists. Even Rick
> Perry, not exactly a kumbaya-chanting paragon of tolerance, chided Walker
> for crossing a line:
> These are Americans... You are talking about, in the case of ISIS, people
> who are beheading individuals and committing heinous crimes, who are the
> face of evil. To try to make the relationship between them and the unions
> is
> inappropriate.
> In response to all of this, Walker's campaign quickly backtracked from his
> statement, sort of. Campaign spokesperson Kristin Kukowski said that Walker
> was "in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS," which sounded like
> a
> retraction.
> But Walker himself denied making any offensive comparison, and blamed the
> whole thing on the media. "You all will misconstrue things as you see fit,"
> he said.
> This echoed earlier comments, made in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's "Barack
> Obama doesn't love America the way you do" flap, about "self-manufactured
> 'gotcha' moments from the media."
> Meanwhile, the polls spoke for themselves. Politicians who make major
> accidental gaffes usually don't see a bounce in the numbers, but what
> little
> data there is suggests Walker surged on the strength of this past week's
> performance. The Quinnipiac poll, admittedly a small sample size and one
> taken extremely early in the game, shows him at 25 percent and lapping
> presumptive favorite Jeb Bush, who's now limping along at 10 percent.
> This came on the heels of another interesting poll. Remember how much abuse
> Rudy Giuliani took (even I got into the act) for accusing Barack Obama of
> not loving America?
> Well, the Huffington Post took a poll asking America what it thought, and
> it
> turns out that while 47 percent think Obama does love America, the rest
> think he doesn't, or they're not sure. This remarkable poll also showed
> that
> only 11 percent of Republicans believe the President of the United States
> loves his country.
> All of this data speaks to Walker's remark being a smart short-term move,
> not a dumb gaffe.
> Conventional Wisdom would hold that no candidate who's on record comparing
> hardworking, law-abiding Americans to mass torture-killers would stand a
> chance in a general election. But in so holding, Conventional Wisdom would
> be missing the current point of the exercise from Walker's perspective,
> which is to win the nomination.
> And the sad fact is, you can probably win the Republican Party nomination
> doing things like comparing unionized state workers to ISIS, or hinting
> that
> the president hates America.
> The entire narrative of modern conservative politics casts the United
> States
> as a fast-disappearing Eden of freedom and democracy that's under siege
> both
> here and abroad, surrounded by a constellation of enemies united (for some
> never-fully-explained reason) in their passionate hatred for the simple,
> God-fearing, freedom-loving American.
> It's not just terrorists who hate us for our freedom, but lefty college
> professors, dilettante Hollywood actors, undocumented immigrants sucking up
> tax dollars in the form of entitlements, Al Sharpton, Jonathan Gruber,
> feminists, environmentalists who want to forcibly abort babies to keep more
> room free for trees, scientists who think global warming is real, the
> Manchurian President Barack Hussein Obama, etc.
> The blurring of lines distinguishing these domestic political irritants and
> armed foreign murder cults is rhetorically popular and has been for a
> while.
> You can hear this pretty much every time you turn on afternoon talk radio.
> Here's Rush Limbaugh's answer, when asked which is the greater threat, the
> liberal or the terrorist:
> Both of them - both liberals and terrorists - have a lot in common. The one
> thing that they hate the most is freedom. A leftist and a terrorist - a
> leftist and a totalitarian - are one and the same.
> Fox's Eric Bolling not long ago blasted campus activists for tweeting "Je
> Suis Charlie" when (according to him) many of those same people were
> anti-speech zealots who had disinvited speakers to their schools. "The same
> people want to wear these pins and tweet 'Je suis Charlie,' I am Charlie,"
> he said. "No you're not! You're more Al-Qaeda than you are Charlie!"
> And then of course there's Ann Coulter, who famously said this in a tirade
> against college activists: "Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate
> America like liberals do."
> None of this is saying anything new - people who aren't Fox fans long ago
> grew used to being called traitors, America-haters, sympathizers with Osama
> bin Laden and so on.
> The problem is that no candidate carrying this narrative around past the
> convention can win a general election. Even Mitt Romney, a politician so
> sunny and loquacious that he can make it sound like he's selling you a
> vacuum cleaner when he's actually calling black voters freeloaders, ended
> up
> capsizing his campaign on rhetoric like this.
> The announcement that he never intended to "worry" about the 47 percent of
> Americans he believed incapable of taking personal responsibility exposed
> Romney as a politician who had no vision for the whole country.
> Even if you're lying about it, you have to at least pretend to have a
> vision
> for everyone. Yet the Republican Party's own rhetoric sells half the
> country
> as a kind of domestic enemy. It's a nearly impossible balancing act for a
> general-election candidate.
> Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't
> have
> George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom
> magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the
> one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy
> of
> the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly
> seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the
> beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern
> Democratic
> Party is set up to beat.
> This was supposed to be the election cycle that featured an inclusive new
> conservative vision, one that reflected the country's changing demographics
> and would make the Democrats work harder for everyone's vote. Instead,
> they're churning out the same old us-against-everybody narrative, filled
> with the same insulting bromides about how they have a monopoly on
> patriotism and are apparently the only people in America paying taxes.
> If that's where this is going - if the Republican Party runs with someone
> like Walker instead of having the courage to tell their voters to stop
> calling the rest of us terrorists and traitors - then they deserve to lose
> again and lose badly. Forget about how offensive it is, that schtick
> doesn't
> work anymore, not even for them.
> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
> valid.
>
> Matt Taibbi appearing on Democracy Now! (photo: Democracy Now!)
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/scott-walker-gods-gift-to-the-demo
> cratic-party-20150227 -
> ixzz3T0PR2AOrhttp://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/scott-walker-gods-gif
> t-to-the-democratic-party-20150227 - ixzz3T0PR2AOr
> Scott Walker, God's Gift to the Democratic Party
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 28 February 15
> eltway Democrats may not deserve good luck, but it looks like they could
> have plenty in the next presidential race. Heading into the weekend, Scott
> Walker, a man born to be slaughtered in a general election, is suddenly
> leading the Republican pack in the Iowa polls.
> Walker is surging thanks to his performance at this week's Conservative
> Political Action Conference, where the union-busting governor inspired
> raucous applause with his "I was a dick in Wisconsin, and I can be one in
> Washington, too!" stump speech.
> Walker's address was a broadside against a litany of conservative bugbears,
> from Planned Parenthood to the media to tax day to the subversive act of
> voting without a photo ID, etc.
> But the money line came during a Q&A session. Asked how he would take on
> radical Islamist terrorists, Walker referred to his experience taking on
> pro-union protesters in his home state:
> If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world.
> Walker's seeming comparison of peaceful union activists to head-chopping
> Islamic terrorists drew a predictable response, with progressive groups
> like
> American Bridge sending out alerts denouncing his comments, along with
> outrage from the Democratic National Committee.
> But the National Review also called it an "unforced error," with writer Jim
> Geraghty taking special offense at the fact that Walker had forced him into
> a place where he had to defend, of all people, union activists. Even Rick
> Perry, not exactly a kumbaya-chanting paragon of tolerance, chided Walker
> for crossing a line:
> These are Americans... You are talking about, in the case of ISIS, people
> who are beheading individuals and committing heinous crimes, who are the
> face of evil. To try to make the relationship between them and the unions
> is
> inappropriate.
> In response to all of this, Walker's campaign quickly backtracked from his
> statement, sort of. Campaign spokesperson Kristin Kukowski said that Walker
> was "in no way comparing any American citizen to ISIS," which sounded like
> a
> retraction.
> But Walker himself denied making any offensive comparison, and blamed the
> whole thing on the media. "You all will misconstrue things as you see fit,"
> he said.
> This echoed earlier comments, made in the wake of Rudy Giuliani's "Barack
> Obama doesn't love America the way you do" flap, about "self-manufactured
> 'gotcha' moments from the media."
> Meanwhile, the polls spoke for themselves. Politicians who make major
> accidental gaffes usually don't see a bounce in the numbers, but what
> little
> data there is suggests Walker surged on the strength of this past week's
> performance. The Quinnipiac poll, admittedly a small sample size and one
> taken extremely early in the game, shows him at 25 percent and lapping
> presumptive favorite Jeb Bush, who's now limping along at 10 percent.
> This came on the heels of another interesting poll. Remember how much abuse
> Rudy Giuliani took (even I got into the act) for accusing Barack Obama of
> not loving America?
> Well, the Huffington Post took a poll asking America what it thought, and
> it
> turns out that while 47 percent think Obama does love America, the rest
> think he doesn't, or they're not sure. This remarkable poll also showed
> that
> only 11 percent of Republicans believe the President of the United States
> loves his country.
> All of this data speaks to Walker's remark being a smart short-term move,
> not a dumb gaffe.
> Conventional Wisdom would hold that no candidate who's on record comparing
> hardworking, law-abiding Americans to mass torture-killers would stand a
> chance in a general election. But in so holding, Conventional Wisdom would
> be missing the current point of the exercise from Walker's perspective,
> which is to win the nomination.
> And the sad fact is, you can probably win the Republican Party nomination
> doing things like comparing unionized state workers to ISIS, or hinting
> that
> the president hates America.
> The entire narrative of modern conservative politics casts the United
> States
> as a fast-disappearing Eden of freedom and democracy that's under siege
> both
> here and abroad, surrounded by a constellation of enemies united (for some
> never-fully-explained reason) in their passionate hatred for the simple,
> God-fearing, freedom-loving American.
> It's not just terrorists who hate us for our freedom, but lefty college
> professors, dilettante Hollywood actors, undocumented immigrants sucking up
> tax dollars in the form of entitlements, Al Sharpton, Jonathan Gruber,
> feminists, environmentalists who want to forcibly abort babies to keep more
> room free for trees, scientists who think global warming is real, the
> Manchurian President Barack Hussein Obama, etc.
> The blurring of lines distinguishing these domestic political irritants and
> armed foreign murder cults is rhetorically popular and has been for a
> while.
> You can hear this pretty much every time you turn on afternoon talk radio.
> Here's Rush Limbaugh's answer, when asked which is the greater threat, the
> liberal or the terrorist:
> Both of them - both liberals and terrorists - have a lot in common. The one
> thing that they hate the most is freedom. A leftist and a terrorist - a
> leftist and a totalitarian - are one and the same.
> Fox's Eric Bolling not long ago blasted campus activists for tweeting "Je
> Suis Charlie" when (according to him) many of those same people were
> anti-speech zealots who had disinvited speakers to their schools. "The same
> people want to wear these pins and tweet 'Je suis Charlie,' I am Charlie,"
> he said. "No you're not! You're more Al-Qaeda than you are Charlie!"
> And then of course there's Ann Coulter, who famously said this in a tirade
> against college activists: "Even fanatical Muslim terrorists don't hate
> America like liberals do."
> None of this is saying anything new - people who aren't Fox fans long ago
> grew used to being called traitors, America-haters, sympathizers with Osama
> bin Laden and so on.
> The problem is that no candidate carrying this narrative around past the
> convention can win a general election. Even Mitt Romney, a politician so
> sunny and loquacious that he can make it sound like he's selling you a
> vacuum cleaner when he's actually calling black voters freeloaders, ended
> up
> capsizing his campaign on rhetoric like this.
> The announcement that he never intended to "worry" about the 47 percent of
> Americans he believed incapable of taking personal responsibility exposed
> Romney as a politician who had no vision for the whole country.
> Even if you're lying about it, you have to at least pretend to have a
> vision
> for everyone. Yet the Republican Party's own rhetoric sells half the
> country
> as a kind of domestic enemy. It's a nearly impossible balancing act for a
> general-election candidate.
> Scott Walker as a political performer is pretty uninspiring. He doesn't
> have
> George Bush's pretzel-mouthed Texas charm or Sarah Palin's hockey Mom
> magnetism. He can't fall back on an ethnic American dream parable like the
> one Marco Rubio can run on. He's just a doughy, finger-pointing white guy
> of
> the type the Republican Party has been churning out to fill state assembly
> seats or run in back-bench congressional districts seemingly since the
> beginning of time. He's exactly the kind of politician the modern
> Democratic
> Party is set up to beat.
> This was supposed to be the election cycle that featured an inclusive new
> conservative vision, one that reflected the country's changing demographics
> and would make the Democrats work harder for everyone's vote. Instead,
> they're churning out the same old us-against-everybody narrative, filled
> with the same insulting bromides about how they have a monopoly on
> patriotism and are apparently the only people in America paying taxes.
> If that's where this is going - if the Republican Party runs with someone
> like Walker instead of having the courage to tell their voters to stop
> calling the rest of us terrorists and traitors - then they deserve to lose
> again and lose badly. Forget about how offensive it is, that schtick
> doesn't
> work anymore, not even for them.
>
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> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>

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