Obama is Bush Redux

Written by Bud White (Retired from the L.A.P.D. and now working full-time for No Quarter). A line from his role in L.A. Confidential: “It’ll look like justice. That’s what the man got. Justice.”
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Kristen Breitweiser was married to Ronald Breitweiser, an executive at Fiduciary Trust International. They lived a charmed upper-middle class life in Middletown Township, N.J. They had one daughter and a dog named Sam. They were Republicans.

On September 11, 2001, Ronald was killed at 2 World Trade Center. His wedding ring was found in October at ground zero and Kristen wore it on her right hand.

Kristen Breitweiser strongly disagreed with the Bush Administration’s foreign policy after 9/11, particularly in regards to the invasion of Iraq. She campaigned hard for John Kerry and now writes for the Huffington Post. Ann Coulter attacked her and the other Jersey Widows in a particularly ugly manner. She has earned her bone fides as a critic of the current administration.

The Obama supporters’ biggest insult, in these pages and others, is that Hillary supporters are Republicans, as if recoiling from disenfranchisement, racial politics, and blatant sexism makes one a Republican. We believe, in fact, that it is the Obama supporters who most closely resemble the far Right in their viciousness towards Hillary, and their use of race, sexist stereotypes, and disenfranchisement as electoral tools.

I take the bait: perhaps we should be listening to former Republicans, people like Breitweiser. We should do this for no other reason than to understand the thinking of independent voters and fellow Americans.

Obama supporters are delusional if they think that their race-baiting, misogyny, and jerryrigging the nomination will go unnoticed or unpunished. Kristen Breitweiser writes:

Those who are responsible for putting Democrats in the broken place we are in right now with regard to Barack Obama had better own it to the end. Leave those bumper stickers on and wear those campaign pins until the bitter end folks because YOU OWN IT. And people are going to want to know who is to blame.

And as for the superdelegates, just an FYI, we have the list with your names, you will be held accountable on Election Day and beyond, too. This time around, everybody’s going to be looking for accountability.

On her conference on Friday, Hillary specifically apologized to her on-line supporters for the nastiness coming from Obama supporters. I was reminded of the strike staged by Alegre and other DailyKos diarists, and I went back and read Alegre’s post and a few of the comments. This one comment struck me because of the author’s ahistorical understanding of the 1990s and misplaced hatred:

Hillary Clinton…typifies a wing of the Democratic party that is anathema, a wing that is responsible for the party’s downfall, and complicit with the rise of radical conservatism. The wing that sells out its principles, moves ever towards the middle, which is itself ever moving right, the wing that allowed “liberal” to become a bad word…She scoffs at party-building, and disagrees with the 50-state strategy.

The suggestion that Hillary is responsible for the rise of the Right typifies Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS). Anglachel, who has been exploring the Left’s CDS for months, writes:

The Republicans have good reason to hate both the Clintons – Hillary and Bill beat them. Repeatedly. The Democrats have no good reason to hate the Clintons – they beat Republicans repeatedly.

What the hell is up with my party? Disenfranchising voters to throw an election? Declaring vast swaths of party loyalists to be racists? Deriding party stalwarts as “Republican-lite”? Dismissing the economic successes of a previous Democratic administration? Just why are the self-described progressives so frantic to remove Bill Clinton from the company of Democratic presidents?

In addition to Obama’s lack of experience, race-baiting, and unsavory associates, many of us are turned off by him exactly and ironically because his own supporters’ belligerence towards Hillary, as shown above. Kristen Breitweiser succinctly describes the backlash against Obama:

[M]any Clinton supporters are reluctant to vote for Obama if he becomes the nominee. It’s not because they are bitter. It is because they chose Hillary over Obama for two real reasons: experience and definition.

Supporting Breitweiser’s assertions regarding Obama’s many weaknesses, Alegre writes that Hillary is the stronger candidate because of her electoral strength:

At this point, neither Obama nor Hillary can win sufficient pledged delegates to secure the nomination. This means the superdelegates have the power and obligation to decide who will be the best, most electable candidate for our party. Obama and his supporters must recognize that he did not win the major (swing) states and that his victory in states that are highly unlikely to vote Democratic in the fall make Hillary the stronger and therefore our strongest candidate in the general election.

In addition to her electoral strength, Hillary now leads in popular votes.

Obama partisans should listen closely. There are rumblings of mass defections by women, working-class whites, and independent voters. The neo-liberals can call us names, but they must understand that for many of us an Obama nomination would be as illegitimate as Bush “winning” Florida in 2000, and we will not condone the smearing of perhaps the most racially progressive couple our party has produced by voting for a candidate whose tactics go against everything we believe in.

Written by Bud White (Retired from the L.A.P.D. and now working full-time for No Quarter): It’ll look like justice. That’s what the man got. Justice. – L.A. Confidential
____________________________

Kristen Breitweiser was married to Ronald Breitweiser, an executive at Fiduciary Trust International. They lived a charmed upper-middle class life in Middletown Township, N.J. They had one daughter and a dog named Sam. They were Republicans.

On September 11, 2001, Ronald was killed at 2 World Trade Center. His wedding ring was found in October at ground zero and Kristen wore it on her right hand.

Kristen Breitweiser strongly disagreed with the Bush Administration’s foreign policy after 9/11, particularly in regards to the invasion of Iraq. She campaigned hard for John Kerry and now writes for the Huffington Post. Ann Coulter attacked her and the other Jersey Widows in a particularly ugly manner. She has earned her bone fides as a critic of the current administration.

The Obama supporters’ biggest insult, in these pages and others, is that Hillary supporters are Republicans, as if recoiling from disenfranchisement, racial politics, and blatant sexism makes one a Republican. We believe, in fact, that it is the Obama supporters who most closely resemble the far Right in their viciousness towards Hillary, and their use of race, sexist stereotypes, and disenfranchisement as electoral tools.

I take the bait: perhaps we should be listening to former Republicans, people like Breitweiser. We should do this for no other reason than to understand the thinking of independent voters and fellow Americans.

Obama supporters are delusional if they think that their race-baiting, misogyny, and jerryrigging the nomination will go unnoticed or unpunished. Kristen Breitweiser writes:

Those who are responsible for putting Democrats in the broken place we are in right now with regard to Barack Obama had better own it to the end. Leave those bumper stickers on and wear those campaign pins until the bitter end folks because YOU OWN IT. And people are going to want to know who is to blame.

And as for the superdelegates, just an FYI, we have the list with your names, you will be held accountable on Election Day and beyond, too. This time around, everybody’s going to be looking for accountability.

On her conference on Friday, Hillary specifically apologized to her on-line supporters for the nastiness coming from Obama supporters. I was reminded of the strike staged by Alegre and other DailyKos diarists, and I went back and read Alegre’s post and a few of the comments. This one comment struck me because of the author’s ahistorical understanding of the 1990s and misplaced hatred:

Hillary Clinton…typifies a wing of the Democratic party that is anathema, a wing that is responsible for the party’s downfall, and complicit with the rise of radical conservatism. The wing that sells out its principles, moves ever towards the middle, which is itself ever moving right, the wing that allowed “liberal” to become a bad word…She scoffs at party-building, and disagrees with the 50-state strategy.

The suggestion that Hillary is responsible for the rise of the Right typifies Clinton Derangement Syndrome (CDS). Anglachel, who has been exploring the Left’s CDS for months, writes:

The Republicans have good reason to hate both the Clintons – Hillary and Bill beat them. Repeatedly. The Democrats have no good reason to hate the Clintons – they beat Republicans repeatedly.

What the hell is up with my party? Disenfranchising voters to throw an election? Declaring vast swaths of party loyalists to be racists? Deriding party stalwarts as “Republican-lite”? Dismissing the economic successes of a previous Democratic administration? Just why are the self-described progressives so frantic to remove Bill Clinton from the company of Democratic presidents?

In addition to Obama’s lack of experience, race-baiting, and unsavory associates, many of us are turned off by him exactly and ironically because his own supporters’ belligerence towards Hillary, as shown above. Kristen Breitweiser succinctly describes the backlash against Obama:

[M]any Clinton supporters are reluctant to vote for Obama if he becomes the nominee. It’s not because they are bitter. It is because they chose Hillary over Obama for two real reasons: experience and definition.

Supporting Breitweiser’s assertions regarding Obama’s many weaknesses, Alegre writes that Hillary is the stronger candidate because of her electoral strength:

At this point, neither Obama nor Hillary can win sufficient pledged delegates to secure the nomination. This means the superdelegates have the power and obligation to decide who will be the best, most electable candidate for our party. Obama and his supporters must recognize that he did not win the major (swing) states and that his victory in states that are highly unlikely to vote Democratic in the fall make Hillary the stronger and therefore our strongest candidate in the general election.

In addition to her electoral strength, Hillary now leads in popular votes.

Obama partisans should listen closely. There are rumblings of mass defections by women, working-class whites, and independent voters. The neo-liberals can call us names, but they must understand that for many of us an Obama nomination would be as illegitimate as Bush “winning” Florida in 2000, and we will not condone the smearing of perhaps the most racially progressive couple our party has produced by voting for a candidate whose tactics go against everything we believe in.