Draft Anthony Zinni for U.S. Senate (Pennsylvania) 2006!
*Please note that this is a draft. The actual posting for this will end up at Young Philly Politics
Like most Democrats, I’m sick of losing. Losing, however, is a symptom of much greater problems for Democrats and Progressives. One major part of the problem is structural—we lack an effective and efficient party organization, we lack sufficient messaging capabilities—but the other problem stems from our inability to frame ourselves in a way that appeals to the people whom we claim to represent. One key to successfully reframing our party is to field candidates who embody the frames we’re trying to put forth, and the lack of strategic thinking when it comes to putting forth national candidates is one area where we desperately need to improve. So with that in mind, I am putting forth this suggestion- that in the biggest race of 2006, the race for Rick Santorum’s Senate Seat, that it is insufficient to put forth a candidate who will simply win. This is why I am advocating that we Draft Anthony Zinni for US Senate in 2006.
Here’s a short Zinni bio:
Anthony Zinni was born in 1947 to Italian immigrants in Philadelphian. Zinni’s father gained his citizenship through his enrollment as an American soldier in World War II.
Zinni joined the Marine Corps while enrolled in Villanova University in 1961, and he was made a an infantry second lieutenant when he graduated, with a BA in Economics, in ‘65.
His numerous assignments for the military brought Zinni to over 70 countries, and into contact with numerous and diverse cultures. As Frank Kaplan notes:
His final posting, before retiring in 2000, was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command (CentCom)—the command that, under his successor, Gen. Tommy Franks, ran the war in Iraq. Through his 40-year military career, Zinni was director of operations for the Somalia task force (before and after the Mogadishu disaster, but not during), head of the Marines' counterterrorism unit, commander in chief of U.S. European Command, deputy commandant of the Marine Corps, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, director of various training and doctrine commands, and a decorated Vietnam veteran. Finally, from 2002-03, Secretary of State Colin Powell named Zinni to be his special envoy to the Middle East.
The
BBC bio on Zinni notes that:
During his time (in Vietnam), he lived with Vietnamese people, learned the language and had little contact with other Americans.
"I immersed myself in that culture," he told the Washington Post in 1998. "I saw the world differently than my peers ... I viewed it through my prism."
The general says his experience taught him the importance of developing understanding of different cultures, particularly non-Western ones.
It also notes that when Zinni took over CentCom he “began learning Arabic, read a string of books on Arab culture, and spent several months traveling to meet Arab leaders.”
Zinni’s travels have helped him to keep an open mind when dealing with people with different cultures and beliefs. As
Zinni noted “I have spent my life as a U.S. military man in the Caribbean, in the Far East, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Southwest Asia, and in Central Asia, in Europe, Eastern Europe. Our biggest flaw is that we never take time to understand the culture. Some things we do that make perfect sense to us do not make perfect sense in another culture.”
This, I believe, would be the first frame that Zinni could help us to push- that
we need to be more understanding of other cultures and work with the International Community to solve our collective security problems.
It also doesn’t hurt that Zinni is very well educated. Besides
his studies at Villanova, Zinni has attended numerous military schools and courses including the Army Special Warfare School, the Marine Corps Amphibious Warfare School, the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and National War College. He holds a bachelor's degree in economics from Villanova University, a master's in international relations from Salvae Regina College, a master's in management and supervision from Central Michigan University, and honorary doctorate’s from William and Mary College and the Maine Maritime academy.
And before you ask “is Zinni even a Democrat?” The answer is “no”, unless something has drastically changed. Zinni voted for Bush the first time, and has
called himself a “Lugar-Hagel-Powell” Republican. But then again, Wes Clark voted for Reagan and Nixon, and possibly the first Bush, and he tried to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2004.
But, and this gets to the heart of what I’m trying to say, we need to reframe what it means to be a Republican and a Democrat. Why in the world would this incredibly intelligent and open-minded working class guy, who has selflessly given his life to his country, align himself with religious extremists (many of whom, I might add, hate Catholics), neoconservative fanatics, and the corporate-greed lobby? I don’t know for certain what the answer to this is, but my guess is that Zinni felt that the Republicans were the stronger party, and that the Democrats were just a bunch of spoiled brats who thought that everything in the world should be provided to them, and who didn’t understand the harsh realities of the world we live in. This brings me to the first image that we must reframe- the Democrats need to be seen, once again, as the party of Strength
Democrats Are The Party Of StrengthHere is the perception that Democrats must fight, from an interview with General Wes Clark, on
why he voted for Nixon, Reagan, and the first Bush:
I fought so that people could demonstrate in the streets and have the freedom to voice their disagreement with the government. But unfortunately, those disagreements often focused on not the government (policies) . . . but on the people that were carrying them out. I was just doing my duty as a soldier. I didn't make the policy in Vietnam, but I did raise my right hand and take an oath to obey the orders of the commander-in-chief.
How can any mature person blame our soldiers for our leader’s mistakes? War is hell, and you know what? Bad things happen in hell. If you don’t want those hellish things to happen don’t start wars (obviously when you have the choice), but once it starts don’t blame shit on our troops. Our troops are out there laying sacrificing for their country, and it is never their fault if they are misused or sent into action without a good strategy for winning. I have no idea how based in fact this perception of Democrats was (I assume that it was largely overblown), but the perception is there, and it is seriously damaging the image of Democrats, and thus our chances for winning back our majority status.
This quote from General Clark,
where he describes why he left the Republican Party illustrates the shift in party identification that I hope a Zinni candidate could foster.
Well, in the United States Army you never have a party, at least most of us didn't as far as I know. You just voted for people that were strong for national security. When Bill Clinton ran in '92 and I listened to him and I had of course known of his record from Arkansas, I found him extraordinarily inspirational and I voted Democratic. I later ended up working around the White House when I was at the Pentagon. I was back and forth across the Potomac for various staff meetings and so forth. And I was impressed with the people in the Clinton administration . . . . That's when I learned that the old myths were wrong. That it wasn't that the Republicans were tough and strong on defense and the Democrats were soft and blame America. I t was really that the Republican Party had become shrill and partisan and isolationist and the Democrats were working mightily to craft a new strategy to take us into a new world. And that's where I found myself.
But while I feel that Zinni could help reframe the national security image of Democrats, he could also help us to reframe many other issues as well.
Healthcare as a National Security IssueZinni can help us talk about a strong national health care system as a national security issue. Zinni is at the fore of military thought and he understands that we now face threats from a variety on non-traditional areas, the most disturbing of which is the possibility of a large scale WMD attack.
As
Zinni has noted:
We will eventually see a weapon of mass destruction used in a terrorist act. And, I would say we had better start thinking about how we're going to be prepared for the threat, because we're woefully unprepared for that event, and that's inevitable.
And as
this study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)- a semi-governmental non-partisan defense think tank- points out:
The US and its allies also need to rethink internal security planning, public health, response, and defense efforts to deal with the broad range of CBRN threats. This requires us to refocus homeland defense on attacks using each type of CBRN weapons, and covert means of delivery.
Within the United States, we need to examine the full range of options for defense and response, make hard trade offs between them, and develop an integrated mix of federal programs to deal with them. The most urgent effort, however, should be in dealing with biological attacks, simply because they combine high potential lethality with greater ease of acquisition and use. This means developing new detection, characterization, and warning systems where these can be proved to be cost-effective. It also means rethinking the national stockpile of vaccines and medical goods, and our investment in public health services and surplus medical capacity.
As Ron Brookmeyer, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, noted (sorry, the link to this is now dead):
Strengthening the public health infrastructure to improve early detection and rapid response is going to be a better use of resources to improve disease surveillance and to get drugs out to people quicker than a mass pre-attack vaccine program
Strong defense equals a strong public health system. I believe we have a lot bigger chance of getting hit with a biological agent than a nuclear one--do to the much lower restrictions on production, acquisition, transport, and delivery-- so why are we investing in
Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems that don't work instead of building up a dual-use public health system?
Affirmative Action and Education.Zinni was a signature of the 'friend-of-the-court brief' in defense of Affirmative Action. You can tell from this that education itself is vital, in the eyes of the military, to maintain national security.
As the brief states:
Based on decades of experience, amici have concluded that a highly qualified, racially diverse officer corps educated and trained to command our nation’s racially diverse enlisted ranks is essential to the military’s ability to fulfill its principal mission to provide national security.
...
The absence of minority officers seriously threatened the military’s ability to function effectively and fulfill its mission to defend the nation.
...
The crisis that mandated aggressive integration of the officer corps in the service academies and in ROTC programs is a microcosm of what exists in our society at large, albeit with potentially more severe consequences to our nation’s welfare. Broad access to the education that leads to leadership roles is essential to public confidence in the fairness and integrity of public institutions, and their ability to perform their vital functions and missions.
Honesty and Accountability in Government/Speaking Up in a Time of WarZinni, one of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq War, had this to say about
those who try to silence dissent in a time of war.
Look, there is one statement that bothers me more than anything else, and that's the idea that when the troops are in combat everybody has to shut up. Imagine if we put troops in combat with a faulty rifle, and that rifle was malfunctioning and troops were dying as a result. I can't think anyone would allow that to happen, that would not speak up. Well, what's the difference between a faulty plan and strategy that's getting just as many troops killed?
And this about holding our leaders accountable for their actions:
”I blame the civilian leadership of the Pentagon directly. Because if they were given the responsibility, and if this was their war, and by everything that I understand, they promoted it and pushed it - certain elements in there certainly - even to the point of creating their own intelligence to match their needs, then they should bear the responsibility,” he says.
”But regardless of whose responsibility I think it is, somebody has screwed up. And at this level and at this stage, it should be evident to everybody that they've screwed up. And whose heads are rolling on this? That's what bothers me most.”
Adds Zinni: “If you charge me with the responsibility of taking this nation to war, if you charge me with implementing that policy with creating the strategy which convinces me to go to war, and I fail you, then I ought to go.”
On
lying to the public to go to war:
I also think the case that was made to the American people for going in was exaggerated. And I think that's dangerous. We've been down that road before. If it was to take down Saddam because he is bad and evil, if it was to improve things in the region, if it was a strategic decision based on some strategic assessment, it should have run on its own merits.
Other Possible Framing Areas And Marketing Areas:1. Deficits are a national security problem.
2. Maintaining a strong manufacturing base is a national security issue.
3. Environmental Protection has a national security componant.
4. Zinni is a strong and handsome father-figure type guy, qualities that should help any candidate to win.
I'm sure that there are other framing areas that I am leaving out here, and all of this would, in my opinion, have to be tested out across the state to guage the actuall effectiveness of each area.
Oh, there’s another problem with drafting Zinni to run for office, other than the fact that he hasn’t left the party that turned its back on national security. Zinni has stated unequivocally that he would not run for public office. Here’s one episode where he was asked about the possibility:
At the end of an appearance by Zinni before the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington on Tuesday night, the event’s host, Washington power broker, Aspen Institute president, and former CNN head Walter Isaacson turned to Zinni, a registered Republican, and suggested that Kerry might call him and say, “You should run with me on a ticket of national unity.”
The audience of 200 retired State Department officials, Washington lawyers, and foreign policy think tank experts burst into applause.
Zinni replied, “I’m not interested in any political office in either party.” When Isaacson persisted, Zinni said, “Do you have trouble with the ‘N’ or the ‘O’?”
And as
this piece notes:
Zinni vows that he has learned a lesson. Reminded that he endorsed Bush in 2000, he says, "I'm not going to do anything political again -- ever. I made that mistake one time.Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I have faith that if we drafted Zinni to run that he would actually consider it. I mean nobody has been more outspoken about the internal threat faced by the Neo-Cons. Nobody has had a better seat to watch as the Bush Administration guts the military, state, and intelligence agencies. And I believe that Zinni understands the unique threat we face from this revolutionary administration, so why wouldn’t he, in the face of a great threat to our nation, heed the call to once again protect and serve the United States of America?
Draft Anthony Zinni for US Senate in 2006!
Countdown To The Draft: 5 Units of Military Reserve Miss Recruiting Goals
The New York Times today reports that 5 Units of Military Reserve may miss their recruiting goals. I wonder why that could be? Could it have anything to do with the extended duty the reserve is seeing? Could it be that there just aren't enough Americans willing to die for Bush's fucked up crusades?
WASHINGTON, Feb. 16 - In a sign of continued stress on the armed forces from operations in Iraq, five of the six military reserve components have failed to meet their recruiting goals for the first four months of the current fiscal year, the military's top officer said on Wednesday.
The officer, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee that only the Marine Corps Reserve had achieved its recruiting quota through January.
General Myers said the Army Reserve and the National Guard had been particularly hard hit because the Army was retaining more soldiers on active duty instead of letting them retire and join the reserve.
A spokesman for the Army's Recruiting Command, S. Douglas Smith, said the Army Reserve was increasing the number of recruiters to 1,524 by April, from 981 in January. He also said the Reserve was offering new bonuses of $15,000 for recruits with military experience and $10,000 for those without.
Hmmm. How much are my legs worth? How about my life?
It's not that I don't commend those men and women who choose to defend their country no matter what, but I just couldn't see myself going to fight a war started on a lie, and heading to hell in a handbasket faster than you can say Ayatollah Assahola three times.
Now Hiring- Souless Hack Who Will Say Anything For A Buck
This is really a heart wrenching story.
Armstrong Williams, the asshole hack who was paid $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act for the Department of Education last year is having a hard time finding people who are willing to pay him to spout propaganda for the Bush Administration.
In apologizing for blurring the lines between journalism and government work, Mr. Williams says he was not lured into promoting President Bush's policies by either the administration or Ketchum Public Relations, the firm that arranged for him to produce and broadcast advertisements on his syndicated television show. Instead, he says, it was his own idea to seek a contract with the administration.
In an interview after the forum, Mr. Williams said he submitted proposals early in the administration to both the Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services offering to play a role promoting programs aimed at African-Americans. "Can you imagine being embroiled in a controversy for a program educating children?" he said in the interview.
Mr. Williams said he had been inspired by Tom Joyner, the nationally syndicated radio host who volunteered his broadcast platform to help health officials promote "Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day" (though Mr. Joyner worked free). He said he had viewed the advertising on his own program as both a public service and good business, never imagining it would someday erupt in an episode that has made his name a metaphor for government efforts to pay off journalists.
"I'm no longer Armstrong Williams," he said. "I've become a noun. And in some cases, I've become a commodity."
Here's the dictionary entry:
Armstrong Williams- (N)- A shameless political hack who gets paid to secretly spout partisan propaganda. A souless asshole.
Oh, and here's the latest definition- Someone who blames racism when they are caught clearly breaking ethical standards and possibly laws:
Mr. Williams repeated his apology for his work for the Education Department but expressed bitterness over the criticism he has received since news of it broke. He said he had revised two chapters of his book "The New Racism," to reflect his belief that "the liberal elite despise black conservatives," a factor that he thinks helped fuel the controversy.
"I am a conservative who does not know his place," he said. "If I were white, they wouldn't care."
And here's the really heartbreaking part. Williams is having trouble finding TV stations that will pay him to come on their shows and spout Bush Administration propaganda:
"I'm just trying to keep my business together," Mr. Williams said. "It's been a rough month. It's been a hard price to pay."
And just think- if he ends up really poor he may have to send his kids to head start. Oh, how wonderfully ironic that would be.
Bringing Our Online Communities Offline.
Zephyr Teachout, the former internet Director for Howard Dean's Presidential campaign, wrote a very timely piece this week about bringing our online communities offline, a topic which I'm sure a lot of us have been thinking about.
She notes that while the internet is surely disrupting the status quo of how politics is waged, most of the energy right now is going into "fundraising, list-building, and ... online community building". But what Zephyr hopes to see come from these new internet tools is "offline communities based on online connections but rooted in public places."
As someone who has become part of an offline political community through the internet, or more specifically through Music for America, I find this to be a highly germane topic for discussion. I was attracted to Music for America in part because it showed the promise of being able to bridge culture and politics and I saw first hand how much easier it was to persuade people to vote, and vote progressive, when you talked to them, face to face, in cultural spaces that they felt comfortable in. But I also recognized the limits of what MfA was doing- I mean how much time can you really expect to spend at concerts? And how much of a real community can be formed in places where the costs of entry are as hi gh as a music venue? MfA had a brilliant way to get through to people and tweak their interests in combining culture and politics, but there was little fostering of offline communities, outside of volunteering for concerts, to plug kids into.
Why is it important to focus on these cultural spaces? As Zephyr notes:
Local involvement in community organizations – be they explicitly political or not – correlates with much greater sense of power over political life. Sidney Verba and Gary Almond have shown, in a multi-decade, five-country study that participation – even passive participation – in local voluntary organizations appears to directly lead to greater satisfaction with government.
In addition I'd like to point to one of the central philosophies behind what MfA did in the last election- the single best way to get someone to vote is to have a friend, or at least someone they can identify with, ask them too. It has been shown that a young person is
between 8-12% more likely to vote if another young person asks them to, so just imagine the potential increase if it wasn't just their friends and random peers who asked them to vote but rather if they and their friends all belonged to some sort of offline community where each person encouraged the others in the group to participate in politics.
But the fact remains that the civic groups that once formed the bedrock of the Democratic Party have largely disappeared, for a variety of reasons. However, Zephyr seems to think, and I agree, that the internet can help to remedy this situation.
Among one of its most unsung charms, the internet lowers the barrier to finding places to host public events, and telling people about them. If political and media (though that's another essay) organizations with incentive and opportunity exploit this lowered barrier, the Internet could power a resurgence of a new version of the great American voluntary association.
How could the internet be used to fuel this resurgence? Zephyr seems to think that the DNC could be the central avenue of advancement for a resurgence of voluntary associations and if it turned itself into more of a "service organization" and if it utilized
Meetup more effectively. She also spends considerable time discussing how a group like the ACLU could facilitate these local groups, which I won't summarize here.
Anyway- as I noted above, I believ that this is one of the more vital conversations for progressives who are interested in fundamental political change in this country to have, and I'm glad that Zephyr and other bloggers are thinking about it.
So let me pose a question- what do you think that we need to do to really start to build local voluntary organizations? What do you think that the role of national organizations, like the DNC, the ACLU, and America Comes Together, could/should be in helping to foster these groups? What is a reasonable timetable for getting these types of groups off the ground, and what sort of investment do you think they will take?
Am I having Deja-Vu? Good Morning Iran!
From the Washington Post- In Europe, Rice Issues Warning to Iran
Here we go again. How long do you think we are from major military operations when the secretary of state says this:
"'I believe that everyone is telling the Iranians that they're going to have to live up to their international obligations, or next steps are in the offing,'"
Hmm. I wonder what those next steps could be?
And I think everyone understands what next steps mean." She added that under International Atomic Energy Agency statutes, Iran "has to be referred to the U.N. Security Council" if it does not meet its obligations.
"The Iranians should take the opportunity that the Europeans are giving them," Rice said. "I think the message is there. The Iranians need to get that message. And we can certainly always remind them that there are other steps that the international community has at its disposal should they not be prepared to live up to these obligations."
Anyway, Condi must have forgotten that the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is a voluntary treaty, because Iran could just pull out if the US really pushed Iran to the Security Council. And why should anyone in the world believe that the US would act in good faith in going to the UN? I mean how many more power-point and 3d Modeling presentations are our technically advanced "intelligence" community capable of (I mean the assholes who feed Bush their BS, not those members who are actually doing their jobs. But, since the purge is on at the CIA I have my doubts about how many of the later are even left). Besides that, the Bush Administration knows full well that France, Russia, and possibly China would veto any measure which could be interpreted as giving the US the blessing of international law that the US attempted to railroad through the Security Council.
The countdown has begun, and that means it's time to start taking bets. I'll take late September as the time the first American bombs will fall on Iranian targets. Anyone wanna bet?
Social Security Talking Points
There is no crisis has some very easy to follow and increadibly useful talking points on the Social Security Debate.
Also, I highly recommend checking their latest news if you want to stay on top of the debate that is going to do to the Republicans whay Universal Healthcare did to the Democrats.
Bush Is Making Me Sick
When Bush decided to scare the U.S. into a war with Iraq he used the threat of a U.S. city getting hit by a Weapon of Mass Destruction as his "rational". When Bush argued that he'd make America more secure than Kerry, he again used the "rational" of preventing a WMD attack. So it should come as no surprise that this serial lying son-of-a-bitch (sorry to the bitch- I didn't mean to insult you) has proposed cutting funding to our bioterrorism readiness programs.
From the New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - President Bush's budget for 2006 cuts spending for a wide range of public health programs, including several to protect the nation against bioterrorist attacks and to respond to medical emergencies, budget documents show. Faced with constraints on spending caused by record budget deficits and the demands of the war in Iraq, administration officials said on Friday that they had increased the budget for some health programs but cut many others, including some that address urgent health care needs.
The documents show, for example, that Mr. Bush would cut spending for several programs that deal with epidemics, chronic diseases and obesity. His plan would also cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 9 percent, to $6.9 billion, the documents show.
The cuts are part of an attempt to control the federal deficit, while increasing spending on certain priority programs. Administration officials have said that in the budget, to be unveiled on Monday, Mr. Bush will propose that overall domestic spending, aside from entitlements, grows less than the rate of inflation next year.
But the administration is proposing to increase the Pentagon budget by 4.8 percent, to $419.3 billion in the 2006 fiscal year, according to Defense Department budget documents obtained by The New York Times. That sum does not include the costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, now running about $5 billion a month. Within a few weeks, the administration is expected to request about $80 billion to cover those costs.
The president's approach to domestic programs is illustrated in the way he balances competing claims at the Centers for Disease Control.
Mr. Bush requests money to expand a national stockpile of vaccines and antibiotics. But the public health emergency fund of the centers, which helps state and local agencies prepare for bioterror attacks, would be cut 12.6 percent, to $1 billion.
In the event of an attack, states could use that money to distribute drugs and vaccines from the stockpile - for example, by conducting a mass immunization campaign against smallpox, anthrax or other infectious agents.
Kim A. Elliott, deputy director of the Trust for America's Health, a nonprofit advocacy group, said, "It's robbing Peter to pay Paul when you build up the national stockpile at the expense of bioterrorism preparedness activities at the state and local level."
Administration officials acknowledged that some of the proposed cuts would affect high-priority programs. But they said that the budget this year was exceptionally tight and that, in some cases, several programs served the same basic purpose.
Over all, the president's budget would reduce the Department of Health and Human Services' discretionary spending - the amounts subject to annual appropriations - by 2.4 percent, to $68 billion. According to documents, obtained from budget analysts who opposed the cuts, those figures do not include Medicare costs, which will increase sharply with the addition of a prescription drug benefit in 2006.
And people wonder why the left hates this scumbag so much- this is just one more example where Bush is putting us all in grave danger. The hate that I feel is really my defenses telling me that this maniac is driving all of us over a cliff and into a horrible abyss. Ah well, see you at the bottom...
"Cosby in 2008?" Framing Our Candidates
The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting editorial this month titled "Cosby in 2008?", which provides a list of possible candidates with "star-power" (and I would add "framing-power") who the Dems could run for office in 2008. Their list includes Tom Brokaw, Lance Armstrong, the New School's Bob Kerry and Tom Hanks amongst others.
Some of them may have a real chance of winning the nomination, while others are longshots who nonetheless represent the type of candidate who might make a run for the White House. Some are larger-than-life personalities; some have been wildly successful in business; some are already household names; and some are all of the above. Most importantlywith apologies to the governor of Iowa each can make a more exciting candidate than Tom Vilsack.
At the bottom of the list is my favorite- Anthony Zinni. But while I would love to see him run for President in 08, wouldn't it make more sense to run
Zinni for Senate in PA in 06?
Other potential candidates left off the list, whom I would also love to run, or who are already running, for Senate or Governor positions in 06, and whom I would consider "framing candidates" include
Elliot Spitzer,
Wes Clark,
Paul Newman (who has been mentioned as a
Joe-mentum alternative), and Utah resident
Robert Redford (how about a run for Utah's senate seat, which Orin Hatch may vacate?).
But regardless of who the Dems choose to run, I see this as a great move in the right direction for the way we think about who will represent our causes on the national stage. It's not enough for us to field candidates who are simply "good on the issues". We absolutely must begin to field candidates who embody our values, who show our strengths, and who have star power or sex appeal. If we're truly going to catch up to the Repugnants we have to learn the lessons that they did about national marketing of their political candidates and their party. We need to better market our messages, and to do this we need to ensure that we have candidates in the spotlight who can deliver those messages, with their words, their faces, and their lives. People vote, for better or (usually) worse, for candidates they identify with, so it's time for the Dems to get with the program and push forward liberal candidates with sex/star appeal.
Old News But Still Interesting: 7 Retired US Generals And Admirals Speak On Iraq
I've been getting in a few arguments over at MfA about just how many Generals were against the Iraq War. I found this nice little recap today from ParaPundit:
7 Retired US Generals And Admirals Speak On Iraq
Starve the Beast, Fuck the Poor
Bush Officials Spell Out Cuts in Money for Housing
So we have money to start wars of choice against nations that have not attacked us and give large tax cuts to the very wealthy, but we don't have the money to help our own working poor keep a roof over their heads? Even Scrooge would blush...
The KGB Strikes Again
Carbon Monoxide From Heater Kills Georgia Premier.
Well, at leat he didn't get green acne.
Prelude to a Civil War
One question that I always asked my hawkish friends during the buildup to war was this: Would the war be worth it if we ended up creating another Iran-like theocracy? The answer was always "the Iraqis will never choose to be ruled by an Ayatollah."
Well, guess what, the theocrats won big in this weeks Iraqi elections, while the more secular Sunnis chose to to sit it out
The New York Times > First Iraqi Election Returns Show Commanding Lead for Shiites
Now that the shia majority has the legitimacy of a constitution and election behind it, how long will it be before an all-out civil war? I'd bet that we can avoid civil war in Iraq, the extent that it isn't already experiencing one, only so long as America keeps a strong military presence in the country.
We're going to be in Iraq for a long, long time...
Pandagon: The Conservative Message To Black Americans
Jesse at Pandagon, lists the right wings messages to African-Americans
Which include, amongst other jewels:
1.) You will die early. Rather than do anything about it, let's end a program tremendously helpful to you in general (partially because we also don't care about higher poverty rates, higher infant mortality rates, or higher concentrations of minority in high-risk jobs and high-crime areas) so that you don't have to suffer the indignity of not getting as much Social Security as healthier, richer white people.
2.) You are slaves on a liberal plantation. The entire body of civil rights laws in America was improperly enacted and is an affront to "states' rights". Vote Republican!
