Just got back from Senator Clinton’s event at the State Room, which, we were told, raised over $1.4 million. Lots of familiar faces throughout the crowd, including Mayor Tom Menino and his predecessor, Ray Flynn, Council President Maureen Feeney and Sheriff Andrea Cabral. The state and region were also well represented with Senators Marc Pacheco and Harriet Chandler, a few reps, former Treasurer Shannon O’Brien, Providence Mayor David Cicilline and former DNC Chair Steve Grossman. Lots of grassroots people there too from Kate Donaghue to the DSC’s Martina Jackson to Anita Cecchin-Gonzalez and Jess Taubner of JP. National GBLT Coordinator Mark Walsh of the South End got a big ovation when introduced.
Many more there, of course (Barbara Lee had two tables) including a number of Massachusetts political operatives and advance men and women from Bill Clinton’s campaigns.
Big applause lines — “I intend to be the first woman elected President of the United States”. “If George Bush doesn’t get us out of Iraq by the election, I will” and “We need universal health care in the United States”. Lots of commitment to a real energy policy. Would have liked to have heard a bit more on job creation and youth opportunity, but maybe another day …
Matt Yglesias and John Judis point out that Hillary Clinton’s plan calls for keeping 75,000 troops in Iraq in permanent bases.
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I’ve got some doubts about her commitment there.
How mant troops are there now?
which is an improvement.
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But what I’m getting at is when she says, “End the war in Iraq,” does she mean what voters want her to mean?
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And most voters want us out of there. Not halfway out.
Thanks for posting this. Good to know, though I usually make my choices primarily on domestic issues, Iraq can’t be ignored.
Like Willy Sutton, she knows where the money is.
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It would have been better if the bitch* had just stayed away. Of course she wouldn’t. And, just let me know, how much did her entourage disrupt traffic in the Boston/Cambridge area?
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*Lest anyone accuse me of being sexist, I refer to Billary as a bastard. Not a legal one. But a moral one.
It just shows what’s happened to this very well intended web page. You try to give a narrative that would be of interest to Democrats, and I hope that Obama, Edwards, Richardson, et al will do likewise in the best spirit of BMG.
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I just hope both of the “people” who used the word above get some help and leave the good people of this blog to converse in peace.
But if they themselves want to blog, go ahead! đŸ™‚
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We still need an edit function for ourselves here …
the hatred that the Left has of Hillary? For heaven’s sake, it resemble the Right more than anything. Dick Morris could have written this post.
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So she feels entitled to be president. As if Gore or Kerry didn’t? What is Kucinich’s campaign other than a vain exercise in entitlement?
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So her main qualification is being Bill Clinton’s wife. Edwards’s main qualification was being Kerry’s running mate, Obama’s main qualification a speech he gave in Boston 5 years ago that was well received.
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Richardson (as people have pointed out) fails many litmus tests on equality amongst orientations, just as Biden does. These are all flawed people, because we still ask human beings to do the thankless task of running for president.
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Hillary is welcome in my state, as is every Democrat running for president. Doesn’t mean I” give ’em money, agree with em or even like em, but I’m not gonna start slinging misogynistic language because they ruffle my feathers.
Can someone explain the hatred that the Left has of Hillary?
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Are you unable to distinguish between hatred and contempt? Are you really? If you are unable to distinguish between the two, the Amerikanishe Sprache–the American language–has gone to the wrack and ruin that I believe it has gone to.
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Listen up, and listen well. sHillary, by way of her comments, has made it perfectly clear that she is nothing more than a snake-oil sales person. As did her husband. I recognized that immediately in her husband. The fact is that she doesn’t carry it off as well as Billary did. That’s the long and the short of it.
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And, of course, snake oil sales persons sold more than a bit of snake oil.
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BTW, if you want to ask about hatred of the Left of sHillary, you’ll have to ask of someone on the Left. That does not include me.
Quite a bit, much more than most of us on the blog put together… just saying. If more people listened to Bill when he was actually being honest (anytime he was talking about policy), our country would be in a better place and there’d be peace in the middle east.
…Her and her husband have fought the good fight
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I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. If you want to understand what I mean by that, get a copy of Andrew Sullivan’s article from one of the Oct. 1998 issues of the Advocate. It was entitled Sex, Lies and Us and it was a scathing indictment of the Clinton’s duplicity in regards gay people. I didn’t agree with everything that was written in the article, but most of it was entirely correct.
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sHillary squandered whatever political capital she might have had with me, after her duplicitous crap regarding healthcare financing reform. It was handled so stupidly that even a knave could see through it.
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BTW, just to make the obvious obvious, I am not going to temper the language my comments to suit the sensibilities of some people here. If you don’t want to read my comments, I have a suggestion: don’t. But don’t complain about the language I use. The English language is probably the richest language in the world–for a reason. And I intend to make use of its richness.
Clinton didn’t help gays enough? That’s the whole deal? Written by a guy who was rooting for republican takeover?
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Clinton did ‘dont ask dont tell’ and then lost the 94 elections, never had a democratic congress again – he did all he could for gays, which was next to nothing. But he was on your side.
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What with the ‘sHillary’ schtick and your habit for Repeating Crap Republicans Said About Democrats, I’ll take your advice and quit reading.
I have an idea.
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You’re a verbal polluter. Sometimes interesting ideas, sometimes zany ideas, both of which most readers welcome, but you cross the admittedly gray “decency” line so often….
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Let’s create a “what most people would consider really foul language” offset program modeled on the carbon offset program. “Bitch” counts even when you * it. The Tony Snow comment counts.
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Let’s say we all get 2 per year. You can have 1 of mine — that gives you 3 verbal pollution offsets for the next 8 months. We’ll start today.
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What do you say?
Excesses of the 90’s left not withstanding, while it may be distasteful and non-harmonious to be sexist, homophobic, harmful to small animals and the environment, we do not live in a world in which these evils go away after banning certain Anglo-Saxon words used in common discourse.
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I defend Raj. Though I do not personally consider Hillary a flaming Bitch, I recognize how many Bitch-spotters may find their mark in Hillary. We should not bitch if the word is loosely applied, bitchiness after all is in the eye of the beholder.
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A world in which the word Bitch is forbidden in any sense of the word is a world in which first-class, grade A, top-of-the-line Bitches will never be recognized for what they are. I would challenge any nouveau-Victorian sensibility that precludes Ann Coulter being recognized as a bitch for labeling Edwards a faggot (In that case I must admit I preferred a certain c word that seems to have a more immediate inflammatory effect.)
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By the way, if you want to identify the real assholes, ask any freeper to identify who PIAPS is.
More than anything else, it’s sad that for some folks “bitch” is the harshest insult they can come up with. That’s kiddie playground stuff. If you’re going to come out against someone do it in style…
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“Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable,
mangled up in tangled up knots.”
I was concerned more about the external language police, not those suffering from a trite inner voice with an enfeebled capacity for rage đŸ™‚
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Anything that breeds imagination, even contempt, is respectable. Grinches unite!
It might do well in a multi-page sentence in the German language–which sentences are not unheard of–but, not here. Parsing the sentences would take too long. Even for Germans.
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BTW, it would be “dung heap” instead of “dump heap.”
when you get Hillary you also get Bill. Now Bill actually signed NAFTA, a concept which I have asked Satan himself to repeatedly stab Bill in the face with an icepick for all eternity in the afterlife.
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Plus just this week I saw on the mind-numbingly retarded MSM TV an infomercial featuring Bill and Bush 41 jointly touting http://www.ready.gov, in an attempt to promote disaster awareness. What, the disasters they have created?
I do realize that I have a worldview highly unlike that of the majority of Americans but I also have been removed from
American society and American MSM in an expat assignement. During that time my perceptions of world affairs became shall we say peaked.
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A search for the very first website which gave me a proverb in German which was the very first German proverb I fully understood “das gibt doch nichts” has become defunct.
In it was a quote in German from Abraham Lincoln.
“You can fool some of the people all of the time…….
But then again in these time I happen to like Martin Neimoller.
That is really what is going on here with you and Raj. Youth both sound like a couple of five year olds.
The ‘threatened-by-strong-women’ trope is both predictable and shallow, but thanks, I won’t bitch further about you infantilizing people who happen to have a different opinion about this word (‘open society’ indeed).
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Why would anyone feel threatened by the word bitch? Camille Paglia and I both want to know.
Didn’t Flynn endorse Bush last time around in 2004? Also Hillary will NOT end the war, but just as importantly could never win the White House either.
Ray went to 20 states to campaign for Bill Clinton, did some campaigning with Hillary in “Reagan Democrat” areas as Pat Halley’s book well documented, New Orleans and Scranton in particular.
…another comment thread started by me taken off by a bunch of children who, together, determined that they didn’t want to look at it.
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I’m sorry, but if this place is nothing more than an “I don’t want to see what I don’t want to see” place, it is next to worthless.
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Use your scrool bars, dears. That’s what they’re there for.
Raj,
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It is troubling that messages get deleted by groupthink here. While you and I don’t agree on a lot of things, I think we both agree on that.
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That is why over at RMG, Patrick has decided to disable that feature. People need to own what they say, not have others remove it.
It’s a beautiful thing when the folks who make the most noise about freedom of speech are the first to violate it!
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Hillary Clinton is unelectable for many reasons. Barack is unelectable, resume is less than paper thin. Edwards:same drill. Richardson may have a shot if you’re just looking at credentials. He puts me to sleep listening to him, but he has done more in his time on earth thatn all of the other candidates combimed.
But I argue that there is no logical connection between the politics of the left as a whole and the action of over-emotional ‘liberals’ bent on ‘community standards’ (a nice Orwellian term for enforcing group-think, which they justify as a response from using identity-derogatory language like ‘bitch’)
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To insist there is a connection is just another form of ad-hominem logical fallacy.
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But there is something to be said about identity politics, and I’d like to take your comment as a hypothetical.
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As a Republican and a male, you may feel and express that Hillary Clinton is unelectable because she is a bitch. As a Democrat and a female, someone else may feel and express that Hillary Clinton is unelectable because she is a bitch. (Anyone who believes that females do NOT consider or express other females to be’a bitch’ is deceiving themself).
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If the response to these comments is different because of identity, the double standard is worth noting. Besides this
, the word bitch is interesting because it is a slur, but also implies an attitude or action. It’s similar to the words ‘gay’ and ‘queer’ (as opposed to say, ‘faggot’). A better response to the usage is counter the perception and to bring up the obvious challenges to assumption; ie. aren’t female politicians allowed to be assertive, is Hillary more self-serving than Obama, etc, etc. The ‘blind left’ will not counter the perception that Hillary is self-serving, etc, but attack and police the usage of the word itself. The blind left is doing as much harm as any anti-feminist right, because it allows facile ad-hominem rhetoric as a response.
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Some on the left has become so enamored with identity politics in general that they have put aside their real goals: we should be working to put more women in office, not for a world in which the word ‘bitch’ is verboten.
Margaret Thatcher then you would have more women in office.
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I am of the opinion that most people can see through the Clinton facade and do not like what they see. Ms. Clinton brings pandering to new heights. She is one of the people who will do and say anything, which I find very troubling.
Most men and women that I’ve know in politics, no matter how contenptable, drew a line that they would not cross. I’m afraid Ms. Clinton has not found that line to date.
…I’ve been banned from right-wing sites such as FreeRepublic.com, including right-wing gay sites such as indegayforum.org, by the management for refusing to toe the corporate line. Now, my opinions here on a lefty site are being banned because I refused to toe the lefty groupthink line.
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Whatever. The internet has pretty much lost its value as a discussion forum. The righty sites want to kowtow to their corporate sponsors, and the lefty sites want to give in to the groupthink of the children who lack the eye-hand ability to use the scroll bar that has expressly been given them to navigate past material that they don’t want to read.
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The internet has become pretty much worthless, in regards sites like this.
Wikipedia has features that allows editorial decisions to be made transparent, and debate can move to this when needed.
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Blogging software used on political sites need a similar feature.
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I’ve disagreed with you on a number of things (ie the ultimate intentions of so-called ‘process liberals’) but your use of the word ‘bitch’ was NOT gratuituous (though I do not share your view of Clinton) and really shouldn’t have been cause for deletion.
Being a tad less flammable may help. I think many people don’t quite grasp your nuanced writing style.
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The difference between you and I is that some folks may dislike you a good measure more than I because you are able to prosecute your arguement with more passion and erudition that others may find threatening. I’m just an old hay seed that people can laugh at and move on.
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Whatever the issue, there are many folks who have convinced themselves that their belief system is inviolate, and if you disturb it or god forbid, render inoperatibe a tenet of that belief system, then you cannot be tolerated and you gotta go, for the benefit of all like minded people.
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The 1st amendment is only tolerated when it benefits certain people, everything else is hate speech or some “ism”.
… In other words, I’m not going to change my writing style for the children. They have to learn to avoid it.
She’s probably my choice so far, though it is early.
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That might just be residual longing for Bill, whom I wish could run again. And again. And again. Heck, the best thing about HRC is that the Big Guy may wind up back in action again. I could live with that. In addition, the “ambassador to the world” thing may be a very good thing for undoing the vast damage inflicted upon our foreign policy by the buffoons presently occupying the White House.