THE CANCER KILLING PDCOM - Blow-by-Blow Coverage of Democratic Primary Race

[Suu]

Let me tell you this...

With the Kennedys endorsing Obama...he just won MA and RI outright. We don't even need to have primaries now.

[AFK]

Hillary is definitely out of the "inevitable winner" slot, and until Feb. 5 nobody can be sure what will happen. It's boding well for Obama that voter turnout, especially among younger voters, has broken records in almost every state so far. If that patter can be maintained through next Tuesday he might yet win.

Although, Hillary seemed pretty convinced she wasn't going to win South Carolina, and spent her time in Feb 5th states while Bill crashed and burned for her in SC.  But yes, I can see it coming down to whose bloc of core voters is bigger, which is worrying.

Do you think the Kennedy endorsement for Obama counts for much?

I think so, because in a certain sense it's the old-guard, or at least part of the old-guard of the Democratic party saying they want to move on from the Clintons.  Whether or not this actually translates into a majority of Democratic voters going along with it, it remains to be seen.  Like Suu said, the biggest impact will be in New England, probably less of an impact in the South. 

[hunter s.durden]

I think so, because in a certain sense it's the old-guard 

Nailed it.

The numerous comparisons to JFK definatly had to touch a few people.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I think so, because in a certain sense it's the old-guard 

Nailed it.

The numerous comparisons to JFK definatly had to touch a few people.

I never understood what the big JFK comparison was all about anyway... I mean he did good on the Cuban crisis and certianly pushed for some liberal ideas... but mostly he just kinda died before a real legacy of actual stuff could be established, didn't he?

Let's see, stuff that happened on JFK's watch:

Bay of Pigs (real winner there)
Cuban Missile Crisis (Good job on this actually)
Using Specter of Communism to engage in questionable foreign policy stuff (like backing a bloody Baathist revolution in Iraq to out the Communists)
The Peace Corps was a good idea, the Space Race was fun...

But what actually did the guy accomplish? Am I missing something huge, or is JFK just a meme at this point?

[hunter s.durden]

I was saying that the comparison was valuable, not that JFK had merit.

JFK is an American God.

[AFK]

Ask yourself this,

Do you think there would be the outpouring of National grief if W got plugged?  Do you think there would be as much of the "Where were you when W got shot?" as there was for JFK?  If the answer is no, then you have your answer to your previous question. 

[Cain]

He did some good stuff in standing up to the CIA/Pentagon's resident crypto-fascists and on the civil rights front.

But again, he did some very bad stuff, like emboiling the USA in Vietnam, treating the CIA like a personal assassination service and pointlessly provoking the Soviet Union (thankfully, Khrushchev was smart enough not to call the bluff of a drugged out crazy).

Really,I think its because he got to bang Marilyn Monroe, was drugged up to the eyeballs 90% of the time, and died young.  I mean, shit, rock and roll President or what?

[Cain]

Ask yourself this,

Do you think there would be the outpouring of National grief if W got plugged?  Do you think there would be as much of the "Where were you when W got shot?" as there was for JFK?  If the answer is no, then you have your answer to your previous question. 

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7498&IBLOCK_ID=35

A PATRIOT FALLS

MAUMEE, OHIO -- America is in shock and mourning following the surprise assassination of President George W. Bush during a campaign rally yesterday in Maumee, Ohio.

The suspect, a white American male, was quickly subdued and transported to an undisclosed location. So far no group has claimed responsibility, and it is believed the gunman acted alone.

Bush received at least nine bullet wounds while delivering a stump speech to a friendly crowd of unemployed factory workers, many of whom identified with Bush's strong values and congenial personality.

"It was just like in a movie," said Randy Walker, a recently-laid-off 46-year-old auto parts assembler from Maumee. "I heard what sounded like firecrackers and the President slumped into the podium, gurgling. I figured he was just illustrating a point about tax and spend liberals because he just kept right on at Kerry, even after he shorted the mike out with his blood."

"He fought real hard, like a true hero," agreed Lance Tiggs, a 32-year-old Army mechanic who lost both of his legs in Iraq and has since stumped for Bush.

The President, who had lost all vital life signs within minutes, was quickly airlifted to an emergency care facility in Cleveland, where he warned his surgeon and nurses that John Kerry would have big government telling them how to run their lives.

"It was heartbreaking," said Dr. Morris Feingold, Bush's surgeon. "He just didn't understand how grave his situation was."

At 2:54 p.m., as he was praising the Iraqi people for taking more responsibility for their lives, the President was pronounced dead. In a hasty ceremony reminiscent of Lyndon B. Johnson's assumption of power in 1963, Vice President Dick Cheney immediately took the oath of office, which he consummated by sucking from Bush's head wound and eating his heart. "It's an old Indian thing," he explained.

Across the country, Americans set aside their differences and bonded together as a nation. In Boston, after the World Series was canceled with the Red Sox up 10-0 in the sixth inning of Game 4, Democratic party activists held a somber "American Unity" prayer ceremony headed by George Steinbrenner and Senator Zell Miller. Farther south, in Tampa, blacks agreed to refrain from voting in order to give local white poll monitors time to grieve.

However, unrest broke out in several parts of the country. In one of the worst incidents, Bush supporters in La Jolla, California rampaged in their golf carts through South San Diego's Latino neighborhoods, setting fire to trees and forcing thousands to flee their homes.

The National Guard was called up in twenty-nine states in order to maintain order. Due to the Iraq war, the severely-depleted Guard was forced to supplement its numbers with private militias and paintball teams. Unconfirmed reports say that Canadian Mounties are massing at the U.S. border and are prepared to intervene "if asked."

The eXile's Special Assassination Supplement was conceived, composed and performed by Jeff Koyen, editor-in-chief of the New York Press, along with eXile editors Jake Rudnitsky and Mark Ames, and eXile designer-babe Dasha Mol'.

[hunter s.durden]

Ask yourself this,

Do you think there would be the outpouring of National grief if W got plugged?  Do you think there would be as much of the "Where were you when W got shot?" as there was for JFK?  If the answer is no, then you have your answer to your previous question. 

Pretty good point, but W is just so... Gawd.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Ask yourself this,

Do you think there would be the outpouring of National grief if W got plugged?  Do you think there would be as much of the "Where were you when W got shot?" as there was for JFK?  If the answer is no, then you have your answer to your previous question. 

So then, JFK is remembered because he was a Hot, Young and Charismatic President, not for any actual merit on its own? Or is it because it was the destruction of innocence? I mean, what real value is there to "He's like JFK" if it only means he's young good looking and may be shagging some famous Marilyn?

Oh wait... that means...

[Cain]

Oh, there was the whole "Camelot" mystique, I suppose, but that was marketing, not policy.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Oh, there was the whole "Camelot" mystique, I suppose, but that was marketing, not policy.

Maybe Mr. Manson can be Lancelot?

[AFK]

What I'm getting at is that JFK seemed to have the ability to move people, in a positive way.  It was good looks, certainly, and charisma and conviction.  When he said he wanted to go to the moon he had the country hanging on his every words.  Maybe you don't remember but it was just a couple of years ago W was talking about going back to the Moon and then on to Mars.  Do you remember that?  Probably not.  It didn't make the big headlines like JFK's space initiatives did. 

So, I think some people in the DNC are seeing the potential of Obama having some of these qualities.  I don't buy it myself.  I think he is a good speaker, I think he has some charisma, but he doesn't have that same self-assured swagger that JFK seemed to have.  I don't think he can captivate the America of the 2000's like JFK captivated the America of the 60s. 

[Cain]

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-kennedys-are-endorsing-obama.html

Senator Edward Kennedy has decided to endorse Barack Obama for President, saying he wants a President who "can make us believe again." Over the weekend John F. Kennedy's daughter, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, announced her support for Obama, saying he reminded her of her father. Kennedy's speech writer Ted Sorenson asked what he could do for Obama last year, hoping no doubt that after the election Obama will ask what he can do for Sorenson. Like Kennedy, Obama is young, handsome and inspiring and he represents the passing of the torch to a new generation. But it is not just that Obama reminds them of Kennedy, it is also that the Clintons remind them of Lyndon Johnson. And if there is anything that the Kennedys don't like, it's a bunch of hillbillies in the White House, which is being kept in trust until a competent Kennedy can be groomed to take it back for its rightful owners. Until that time Obama will do.

Like Johnson, the Clintons play politics like it was mud wrestling or the roller derby, while the Kennedys have always believed that politics should be like a friendly game of touch football or beanbag. They never had to get down in the dirt with their opponents. Their father and his friends always took care of that for them.

When Hillary Clinton pointed out that it took Lyndon Johnson to get the Civil Rights bill passed, she was not only insulting Martin Luther King but also JFK, who did all the hard work of asking southern Democrats very politely to please vote for the Civil Rights bill, which they might have done some time in future as soon as they looked into their consciences and realized it was the right thing to do. Then Kennedy died and Johnson stepped in, rudely cajoling people and threatening to show them his scar unless they voted for it. Is that the kind of politics we want in America? Of course, if Kennedy had lived he also would have awakened one day and realized, unlike Johnson, that all of his advisers were not the best and the brightest but were really a bunch of dopes and he would have stood up to them and got us out of Vietnam.

In 1968 Robert Kennedy tried to take the White House back from the dumb hick who had taken it over by a fluke of history, but he was killed, too, before he got the chance. Ted Kennedy tried to save the country from another country bumpkin who got the keys to their house in 1980, but he lost to Jimmy Carter in the primaries. At first the Kennedys let Bill Clinton burnish their image by showing the photo of how he was somehow able to sneak his way into the White House to shake President Kennedy's hand when he was a young man. Now the Kennedys are saying enough is enough.

No one loved the Kennedys and hated Johnson more than liberals and the liberal media and they feel the same way about the Clintons. "Is the right right on the Clintons?" liberal pundit Jonathan Chait asks in an article in the Los Angeles Times. For years conservatives have been saying that the Clintons give politics a bad name. We look back with nostalgia to a time when gentlemanly Democrats like Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey lost elections with grace and dignity. They didn't go around smearing their opponents and cynically triangulating the way the Clintons do. Now many liberals and members of the liberal media are coming around to thinking we've been right all along.

Although Republicans do not love the Kennedys the way liberals do, we hate Johnson and the Clintons more. Like many northeastern liberals we hate the way Johnson and the Clintons seem to believe unfairly that Americans are a bunch of racists. Unlike Johnson and the Clintons, Republicans are completely colorblind and never think of race at all. After the Civil Rights bill passed many southern Democrats were so tired of the way Johnson crudely and repeatedly flashed the Race Card that they became Republicans. President Nixon never mentioned race at all in his battles against busing and crime. President Reagan, who paid silent tribute to three Civil Rights workers who were killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when he launched his campaign there, never used the Race Card either when he fought against Welfare Queens and quotas. The first President Bush loved black people except when they were criminals like Willie Horton and his son appointed black people like Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice to his cabinet and felt really bad about all the black people who died in New Orleans.

And you don't see divisive racial battles in the Republican primary. None of the candidates has even mentioned the fact that Alan Keyes is black. When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York he lowered crime, which disproportionately affects black people, by giving more power to the police and ended all the racial divisiveness that erupted during the previous black mayor's term. Mitt Romney feels really comfortable around black people probably because his father marched with Martin Luther King, which affected his son so much that he imagined he was there, and how he did cry tears of joy when the Mormon Church announced that black people were no longer considered evil and his maid wouldn't have to go to hell after all. Governor Mike Huckabee stood up for the rights of all the people of South Carolina, black, white, brown, yellow and green, not to be told by white northern elites that they can't have the Confederate flag flying on their state buildings, which is a historical symbol of their unique culture going all the way back to 1962. And all the Republican candidates have fought very hard for the rights of African-Americans not to have their low-paying jobs taken away by illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are really appalled at the way the Clintons are injecting race into this campaign. In a piece in Red State called "Democrats: The Party of the Klan?" Eric Erickson writes, "They are always claiming that Republicans are racist, but it is looking more and more like the Democratic Party, to its core foundation, is racist." In South Carolina the Clintons threw everything at Obama they could think of except pointing out that he fathered a black child. Republicans are offended by such down-and-dirty politics, which reminds them of the time they had to employ Lee Atwater to counter all the dirt the Democrats were putting out, which even Atwater himself regretted as soon as he was dying. His protégée Karl Rove no doubt was also troubled by all the dirty politics that erupted in campaigns he was involved with, which could never be traced back to him since he had nothing to do with it at all.

Many conservatives are saying nice things about Barack Obama, even though he is liberal and black, which they probably don't even realize, because they long for the days before the Clintons ruined politics. "I tell you, he almost had me tonight until he talked about the war that shouldn't have been authorized and reminded me there are real policy issues at stake in this election!" gushed Kathryn Jean Lopez in The Corner. "But listening to his inspirational, rallying speech tonight it's clear and obvious that if he's the nominee, he will be tough to beat." Andrew Sullivan, who makes no secret of his hatred for the Clintons, has endorsed Obama. Unlike the Clintons and many white Democrats, they don't see him as the black candidate. Almost 25% of white voters voted for Obama in the South Carolina primary and if he is nominated he may even get a few white votes in the general election, though probably not enough to win. That's because race is no longer an issue for voters in the South and it really is rude of the Clintons to subtly imply that it is, if that's what they were doing and we know it was because the media has constantly pointed it out.

I think everyone is tired of the kind of politics the Clintons represent, which sees voters as easily manipulated racist dupes and does not appeal to the better angels of their nature the way Barack Obama does. Conservatives are really hoping that the Democrats nominate Obama because he gives us a chance to heal the wounds that the mean-spirited Clintons have inflicted on the body politic. Conservatives would relish the chance to debate about ideas again. I can assure you that I and my fellow conservative bloggers and pundits will not go digging around for mud to throw at him. We won't spread rumors that he's a Muslim or bring up past drug use or go looking through his books Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope for contradictions we can exploit.

That was the old kind of politics, which is entirely the fault of the Clintons. We want to transcend that. I agree with Bob Kerrey that it is great that Obama went to a madrassa and I think Hussein is a very nice middle name. I think it's about time we had a President who admits to using cocaine in the past so that he can tell our youth from experience how bad it is. Conservatives can all get behind a man who talks so movingly about faith even if his church does have some wacky ideas about white people being devils and it once honored Louis Farrakhan. And I think we'll all forget that he is black and best buddies with Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. If the Democrats nominate Obama conservatives will relish the chance to talk about issues and make the election as he says not "about black and white but about the past and future." Who couldn't be stirred by that kind of rhetoric?

Of course, we won't vote for Obama in the general election but that will only be because he is a tax-and-spend liberal who wants to surrender in Iraq, is against executing murderers and wants to impose gay marriage on everyone. In other words, we will just point out that we have a few policy differences with him. We relish the chance to debate the nuances of Obama's policy proposals and we'll be relieved not to have to drill into the heads of voters simplistic demeaning labels the way we had to do when we constantly referred to John Kerry as a flip-flopper and Al Gore as a phony. And the media will be happy not to have to repeat these charges in every story they write, which must have gotten kind of boring for them. Instead, they will be able to write the kinds of long thought pieces about issues that matter to people, which is what journalists really want to do. Conservatives will be so grateful to actually be able to finally debate the issues in a civil manner that we won't even mention all the other troubling stuff about Obama. You can trust us.

[Cain]

McCain and Hillary wins, but Hillary is pwned because she gets no delegates.