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    Over a year and a half..., 2003-05-13 03:32:47 | Main | "Something smells funny"..., 2003-05-23 22:19:08

    Of all the "irrelevant" canidates:

    Moseley Braun seems to be irrelevant for no good reason [1]. DailyKos and Newman are both putting Kerry in the lead now. Being as this entire silly game is first and foremost a shallow popularity contest to be created by a frivolous media machine all I can say is that I hope we end up with somebody I can stomach voting for. Kucinich shares more of my politics than others on the list, but that's unacceptable, apparently. Sharpton gets the same treatment. Despite that spooky, awkward grin of his during the debate I don't mind Dean - and I don't think he's any more "electable" than Kerry, or any less. As Newman pointed out Kerry has some record of beating at the doors of the US security establishment, making a decent case for why he might make a less terrible emperor than King George. Edwards getting hot water for campaign funds. Gephardt getting hot water for being an old fart. The water is otherwise lukewarm, with the usual crap about how the encumbant is a shoe-in. If Dems can put up somebody not blatantly offensive to the Democratic "base" [2] the election will serve some purpose, either way.

    If Lieberman gets nominated I suspect I'd write-in the Chomsky/Zinn ticket, just to veil my rampant anti-semitism by voting for "self-hating Jews". I think he's a losing ticket - he's as far to the right in the DP as Kucinich and Sharpton are to the left, he shouldn't be treated seriously. His foreign policy is 'I could aggressively expand the empire better than Bush'. We'd have to already have IRV before I tossed him a sub-tier vote, after Greens, DSA, SPUSA, Labour, WFP, and Libertarians. If supra-nationalism is the way this country is really heading I don't want any part of it, and I have my doubts about the rest of these canidates already.

    Bush's claim to foreign-policy success is nothing more than defeating two of the most dilapitated military machines in the third world, and so far failing miserably at winning the peace (nevermind that over four thousand civillians were killed in the Iraq invasion). Lieberman's comments on post-war Iraq if anything refuted our responsibility for the aftermath (paraquoting from memory, his comment was basically, 'we shouldn't be concerned about Iraqi well-being when Americans are suffering at home'). Nevermind Bush's radically anti-free trade policies in raising tariffs (hurting US manufacturing) and farm subsidies (driving narcotics production and starving brown people) basically amount to Kucinich's 'anti-trade platform' with none of the benefits of alternatives for us or anybody else.

    1. I'm tempted to toss in something about liberal racism, ie. colonial paternalism, but the comments I've seen don't merit it for their more or less total lack of substance, much like everything offered thus far, outside Gephardt and Kucinich, by these canidates: "Moseley-Braun and Al Sharpton need to trade hairstyles", "Irrelevant", "Moseley Braun is just a stalking horse against Sharpton", and from Kos comments: "Eloquent and increasingly respectable. Not sure what the point of her campaign is, though." The "failed senator" line is baseless, as was the scandal she lost re-election over, so far as I remember.

    2. On CSPAN today Foley and Gingrich discussed third parties briefly, in which Gingrich said that Republicans made it an overt strategy to co-op libertarian voters in '94. That's important, when the Republicans saw a lost election because of a third party they did something about it beyond petty whining (re: jim, they took up pretty rhetoric). What was interesting was that Tom Foley didn't seem to pick up that this might be an idea worth looking into for '04, instead he threw out a vague attack at Greens. Typical establishment-liberal elitism, I guess. Really, how hard is it, instead of attacking them, to pay a little lip-service to people who don't think you care anymore? Nobody, of course, mentioned the obvious solutions to the third party "skewing" of election results that they were complaining about.


:: posted by buermann @ 2003-05-13 06:08:24 CST | link





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