In case you missed the news:
Representative Anthony D. Weiner, an influential Democrat who had been considered a leading candidate to be the next mayor of New York City, said Thursday that he was resigning from Congress following revelations of lewd online exchanges with several women. “I’m here to apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment that I have caused,” Mr. Weiner said, adding that he had hoped to be able to continue serving his constituents. “Unfortunately,” he said, “the distraction I created has made that impossible.”
Not a great couple of days for Democrats who have solid policy positions but whose behavior is sorely lacking in other respects. And before everybody jumps down my throat about “equating” Weiner (who is a fool but not a criminal, as far as we know) and Sal DiMasi (who is both), settle down: I’m not equating them. But I am saying that in both cases, people who could have done a lot of good for the causes they believe in instead squandered their once-promising political careers, thereby depriving the public of an effective advocate on important issues. And also, perhaps, harming the causes themselves by changing the subject and, in DiMasi’s case, by encouraging people to seriously argue that if we’d only elect more Republicans, maybe this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.
It was time to go. I can’t recall Obama interjecting his opinion into something like this before.
He should probably do it more often. He could start with Vitter.
Or censured, maybe? Maybe patronizing prostitutes is legal in Louisiana.
To me it looks, once again, like the Democrats are just a bunch of suckers. Do they think people will start to look at them as the morally upright party because Weiner left and Vitter stayed? Fat chance of that.
we play in circular firing squads.
they always seem to get their way. Whether they’re the majority or the minority, the GOP controls the debate.
People tend to do what other people say they should do, and political people think of “other people” as the other party. So Republicans do what Democrats say people should do (get busy and do what they feel like), and Democrats do what Republicans say they should do (get all judgmental and vindictive).
http://riolimbaugh.blogspot.com/2011/06/dr-cuteless-goes-social-scientistic.html
Happy days.
The question to be asked, however, is how much does real, true and honest-to-goodness legislating resemble a ‘circular firing squad’? How different from a ‘circular firing squad’ is a pure democracy, with a vastly intertwined set of competing interests, compelling needs and contrasting outlooks? Or, in it’s simplest form, isn’t any debate between more than two people a form of ‘circular firing squad’?
Or, put another way, is it only in contrast with the lockstep, robo-disciplined and militaristic holy warriors on the Right that the messy, disorganized, fractious and hard slog of real democracy takes on a sheen of self-destructive ‘firing squad’? Perhaps, at one time, the Republicans had their own ‘circular firing squad’? Perhaps the aforementioned interests, needs and outlooks, at one time, were the energy focusing the legislature? Sure, from a distance it looked like a ‘circular firing squad’ but in reality it was a circle of checks and balances squad… ?
What if the Democrats don’t play games? What if Democrats legislate and the purpose of their legislation is to raise the economy for all concerned, even Republicans?
You may be right when you allude to the ‘win at all cost’ motto of the Right. But what if the motto of the Democrats is both more complicate and more righteous: ‘Legislating is for everyone; legislating is hard; legislation should be undertaken with a bloodless sobriety and seriousness of purpose for the greatest good’. Doesn’t really fit on a bumper sticker, but then… why would you want to be ruled by anything that would fit on a bumper sticker…?
Having two parties that ‘play to win’ would be the end of the Republic. Somebody has to be an adult here.
Why?
because Republicans have not, can not, and will not win. They may get their policies enacted, but they will suffer from them as will we. And if they don’t get their policies enacted they’re altogether willing to scorch the earth in some sort of childish tantrum. Lose lose, for us and for them. They can ‘play to win’ all they want, but they never will win…
However, if the Democrats seek to turn the legislature into a vehicle for punishing Republicans for their scorched earth tactics, if they respond from a knee-jerk, and even more childish, emotionalism, then all is lost in a ruthless lose-lose race to the vicious bottom.
and, sure, when we lose, we can be satisfied in the fact that we were polite and fought fair…. but we still lost. If we were playing football or going bowling, I’d absolutely agree that’s how we should play. But we’re determining whether or not poor, senior citizens on a fixed income will get some help with their heating oil to stay warm in the winter, or whether or not we want a public infrastructure that’s good enough so that everyone who can’t afford to have their own private helicopter can get to work on time.
It may displease some people to hear this, but as Sean Connery’s character said in one of the better movies to come out of the 80s, never bring a knife to a gunfight. We have to be willing to win at all costs, too, because while the other side is far from perfect and certainly has their fill of incompetence, what they are willing to do is stick together and do what’s necessary to win. And if having that sort of attitude in our own party is what it takes to make sure that the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes, that health care is both universal and affordable for everyone and that people aren’t told they should be afraid to go to the police if they were raped because they could be deported, so be it.
… That we can cleanly separate our acts from our motives: somebody who is
willing to “win at all cost” will eventually throw the seniors under the bus in order to gain some tactical advantage. “Winning at all costs” is a corruption and you make a grave error if you presume your present motivations somehow make you immune.
In the end the deceiver deceives only himself
Means embracing minorities, seniors, youth, the environment, etc. That’s our calculus to win.
The Republican calculus to win is to get a vocal minority to be angry enough and amped up enough to vote at a high-enough percentage so as to make up a majority of the electoral votes, once methods of decreasing democratic turnout has been used (by attacking our strongest candidates, by getting us to turn on each other, and by playing different sides of our “tent” against each other — and by attacking our ability to organize or our credentials to go out there and vote, like is being done across the country, sometimes with nary a peep from Democrats *cough*acorn*cough*).
Playing to win means calling them out on their BS, and it means engaging in some pretty strong tactics to show the American people what the GOP is all about. To be frank, I don’t think winning at all costs for our party necessarily means sacrificing our soul — thanks to the wide and growing segment of the population we have to work with. It just means getting our sleeves dirty and being willing to play in the mud, including supporting people who may have sent a few embarrassing pictures to the wrong people.
“At all costs” means just that. If you advocate for an “at all costs” approach, you cannot later quibble and say…’well, I didn’t mean that cost’, when you later make a mistake or watch some ally incur a cost you later find distasteful.
I think episodes of scandal, pseudo-scandal and simple opportunities for mockery ought to be judged on their own merits (sic) and not in some uber-context of machiavellian score keeping or some childish tallying of cancelling wrongs. We stand or fall as Democrats. We are not anti-Republicans. No amount of mud, blood or fear slinging will serve to advance our agenda nor will such retard theirs.
If you want to fight for seniors social heating oil then fight for that. Don’t contort yourself into some gruesome caricature of your opponent because you think that’s effective. It isn’t. It can’t be. If you want to fight for infrastructure, then fight for infrastructure. If you want to fight for social security, fight for social security. You have history, current law and the majority of the population behind you in those fights.
Being morally righteous is the harder path, always has been, always will be. Crap flinging and fear mongering is the far far easier path. But adopting the flinging and the meanness and the low tactics is just an admission that you either don’t want to, or don’t feel capable of, the hard work of moral righteousness. Our job is harder. Our job always will be harder. Our job also comes with bittersweet rewards: if we win, then the Republicans win too… It won’t be a win in any way they define winning, but they’ll also get to live in an America better for having our moral righteousness succeed: Bob Dole is collecting Social Security right now. Amen.
But otherwise, well said.
A very nice speech, petr- you sound a bit like Obama ’08. The question remains, though: what happens when the good guys lose? Shall we look for justice in the afterlife?
We remember what MLK Jr said: “the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”
We got social security, medicare and a solid infrastructure once. We may lose these things in the short term. But once people start dying and the misery becomes, again, widespread and inescapable then people will remember and the pendulum will swing back. The inevitable come-uppance for the depraved mercilessness of the Right is going to hurt most, if not all, of us. The only real way to lose is to act as depraved and merciless as they.
We are obligated to fight against it and to save what lives we can. We are not, however, obligated, or entitled, to say that all is loss and despair if and when they (momentarily) gain the upper hand. It is only momentary: If it wasn’t, we’d never have moved past tribalism and warfare with sticks.
It sounded absolutely wonderful, and would have been a fantastic point had it not taken everything I said in terms of what I meant and thrown it out of the window, substituting your definition of what you think I said should have meant. In other words, a straw man.
All I’m trying to say is we have to be willing to fight. I don’t think the tools of our fight are going to be things like lies, cheating, breaking laws, ethical abuses or other things of that nature. In the end, they won’t help us win.
What will help us win is not being afraid to call a spade a spade, not being afraid to engage in language that brings the public to the logical conclusion of Republican proposals, that this isn’t just a battle of ideas, but a battle of survival for the American middle and working class in the 21st Century.
Doing that will seem rather impolite to a lot of people in our camp. We’re not used to fiery rhetoric, or going after Republicans. There’s always double standards when it happens, of the IOKIYAR variety, but we have to be willing to confront those double standards and stand up for what we believe in, not back down. We try to create an affordable, universal health care system in America — and get called death panelists — meanwhile, the logical conclusion to what the Republicans were doing in that fight was 1) more people dying because they didn’t have insurance, and 2) more people going bankrupt because they couldn’t afford that insurance, particularly if they got sick. Perhaps, instead of doing everything we could to appease and console Republicans for the months and months of that drama, we could have called them out on it: called a spade a spade. Instead, the few Democrats who had the gumption to make that point were called out and widely ridiculed by our party leadership, and low and behold we allowed the Republicans to get away with what they did and lost the House because of it.
That’s the kind of “do anything necessary” I mean. Do anything necessary doesn’t mean do anything, it means you do what works. What works for us is when we define Republicans just for what they are, at the very same time we define ourselves as the capable and empathetic alternative. That’s what I’m talking about. Period.
Perhaps you should work more diligently on saying exactly what you mean, rather than rely upon a squishy understanding of the declarative form. Until you do so, it’ll continue to appear as though you want something both ways: the momentum and imperative of a cut-n-dried slogan somehow supported by, or somehow in service to, an unrestrained entitlement.
But you did say “At all costs.” You may not have meant it. But you said it. That’s not just sloppy, but an invitation to a putative ally who might have less scruples than you.
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But you haven’t articulated much beyond “gee those repubs are despicable but effective.” Perhaps true, but so what? Where are we to go when your very next thought… “all we ever get to do is a circular firing squad“… denigrates our only real option? As I was at pains to point out, that very thing, a circular firing squad, is exactly how the process is supposed to work.
That’s what the framers built: one giant circular firing squad; the legislative branch is aimed at the courts and the executive, and the others are aimed back. Our constitution is an instruction manual for a circular firing squad. You have, in effect, raised the GOP above the process and then bashed the process for not being as effective as the GOP. What then, is one to think about your dialogues??
So say what you mean. Do just spit out something and then later have to walk it back. Say what you mean. It would also help if you thought it through first, before meaning it and certainly before saying it.
And doesn’t deserve to be called “morally righteous.”
I think Vitter should have resigned as well, but so what? Are you really arguing that we should support bad behavior because the other team seems to tolerate it? Sorry, I am simply not going to moderate my tolerance for this kind of crap based on the political party of the offender.
By and large, I agree: Wiener ought not to get a pass simply because Vitter got a pass.
However, I think it entirely reasonable to point out that Wiener didn’t get a pass and therefore why is Vitter getting a pass? Yes, we know why but it still might benefit from being said…
about financial corruption, and DiMasi-style shenanigans. But it bothers me that there was no Breitbart hunting down a guy like Schwarzenegger. He governed for two terms or whatever and left when he was good and ready. Given the current climate, every Democrat with an unattractive personal vice or sketchy sexual morals will be subject to exposure and removal, while maybe 1/3 of Republicans with similar issues (even to the point of criminal conduct) will suffer the same fate. So if you care about who actually ends up running the country, you should care about people like Vitter, and you should be worried about a double standard. To me it’s like trying to compete in a sporting event with biased referees.
Weiner, like Vitter, almost certainly would have been reelected. No one cares about Vitter, it doesn’t hurt the GOP that he’s still there. It wouldn’t have hurt Democrats if Weiner was still there, either. In fact, we only served to continue the story by dragging it out through leadership.
1. Weiner lied for a week.
2. Weiner’s seat is not in play.
3. Weiner was seen as a showhorse, not a workhorse.
The first matters for optics. When you lie and keep it in the news, it stays in the news. That’s no good for the party. The second is why Vitter got support… the LA seat was at least somewhat in play. The third matters in terms of others going to the mat for you.
It’s only a D+5 district. Democratic, but not that Democratic. A strong Republican could win.
3. Is where you have a point. Weiner was seen as a showhorse and he just didn’t get along with too many people in leadership.
This was about them sticking it to him over their personal grievances, not about the best interests of the party or the country. Weiner didn’t do anything that affected his ability to govern. Sending lewd pictures isn’t like taking bribes. It’s an entirely personal scandal that doesn’t affect the public, and is no one’s business but those involved. He had every right to lie about it.
When the networks muted Pelosi for talking about Medicare and jobs, they completed their descent to irrelevance. Even Fareed Zakaria has sunk. He invited Ann Coulter on GPS to disrupt the discourse. If Democrats don’t call out this foolishness, we are going to have impossible odds of helping most Americans make progress.
So many do it. While blood still seeps into the sands of the Middle East, the world’s finances collapse, human rights are spat upon, poisons flow into our oceans, we need watch the monkeys in the monkey house doing monkey things. The modern circus.
No doubt this good congressman will land on his feet with a government job or media opportunity.
I still wax nostalgic to think of the Old Howard and Wilbur Mills up on the stage with stripper Fanne Foxe as in a scene for the Blue Angel.
“The objection of the scandalmonger is not that she tells of racy doings, but that she pretends to be indignant about them.” –H. L. Mencken