Jim DeMint is My Hero

Who said I was an ideologue? Let them fall silent, for today, unlike those 13 namby-pamby Dimmycrats who wouldn't publicize their votes against Lieberman, Senator Jim DeMint of the Palmetto State put his name to a resolution to expel Ted Stevens from the Senate, thereby earning praise from these quarters. Not only that, while Mitch McConnell was speaking, DeMint said he had the ten-and-a-half:

"After talking with many of my colleagues, it's clear there are sufficient votes to pass the resolution regarding Senator Stevens."

Making DeMint's assault on Stevens even more brazen, the whole process of retribution may be moot, because Begich is up by some thousand of votes.

Clearly, this is a choice based on principle, not expediency. A reformed conservative movement will stand on principle, and that means kicking the bums out. Even when the voters have already done so. Nothing better than a surreptitious kick to the balls...

As for the Democrats' vote on Lieberman, IHT offers some tidbits:

Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Pat Leahy, D-Vt., spoke against allowing Lieberman keep the Homeland Security and Government Affairs post. Reid, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Kerry, D-Mass., were among those speaking in his favor, according to a Democratic aide, who spoke anonymously to discuss a private meeting.

Some, like Iowan Tom Harkin, still harbor hard feelings for statements Lieberman made during the campaign. Harkin took particular offense when Lieberman said a vote against funding the war in Iraq without a deadline for a troop withdrawal meant Obama had voted to cut off funding for troops in harm's way.

As near as I can tell, from hints in this one and the articles above, those agin' Leebs: Sanders, Leahy, Harkin?, Casey? More speculatively: Byrd?, Webb?, Feingold?, Feinstein?, Kennedy?

For Leebs: Reid, Durbin, Kerry, Salazar, Dodd, Klobuchar, Nelson (NE), Nelson (FL), Carper (DE), Cardin, Landrieu.
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Jou wanna leef like da'? Like some kinda cheep...Baa Baa

In the aftermath of the rapidly floundering attempt to link BHO to the Weathermen, re which I can't wait to watch Walnuts get all fusty and unhinged tonight as he promised to once more try the Obama-is-a-terrorist waters, there emerges a late entry in the right-wing-counter-terror-as-career-strategy-meme: it turns out that McCain and Lieberman are quislings for Cuban radicals! While campaigning for McCain, he promised to pursue a presidential pardon for Eduardo Arocena:

Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983. Arocena was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In 1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign government property within the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana. His targets included:

Madison Square Garden (he blew up an adjacent store);

JFK airport (Arocena's group planted a suitcase bomb intended for a TWA flight to Los Angeles—in protest of the airline's flights to Cuba. The plane would have exploded if not for the fact that the bomb went off on the tarmac prior to being loaded);

Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (causing damage to three levels of the theater and halting the performance of a music group from Cuba);

the ticket office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot;

and a church.

He also attempted to assassinate the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.

So while McCain is busily denouncing Barry's domestic leftism, Lieberman is getting it on with "freedom fighters," like Furs jou get de money, den jou get the power, den jou get dee weemen...Ileana Ros-Lehtinen beware!
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Obama to Lieberman: Get your ugly fucking goldbricking ass out of my beachfront community...

BHO can put the LBJ on Poor Joe Lieberman because Leebs doesn't have any friends in the Senate. And he doesn't have any friends in the Senate because everyone realizes that by January 2009, Virginia is going to have two Democratic Senators for the first time since the era of Harry Byrd. That's a clear majority, my friends, even if all six of the seats in play go red. I drink your milkshake.

Viz., Joe on a McCain conference call:

"If Israel is in danger today, it’s not because of American foreign policy which has been strongly supportive of Israel in every way, it is not because what we have done in Iraq, it is because Iran is a fanatical terrorist, expansionist state and has a leader and a leadership that constantly threatens to extinguish the state of Israel." (emphasis mine)

See how energetic he gets by the end? Weird, right? Nervous about something...

Assuming he's off the squad, how will Republicans swallow his pro-labor, pro-choice, pro-amnesty platform? What will it be like to be the most junior Republican Senator?

What's it going to be like for Joe to sit between Jim Bunning and Tom Coburn? Won't Jim De Mint kick his ass every day for his lunch money?

Joe is wrong about The Consequences of Leaving Iraq, The Persian Menace, and The Rise of Islamofascism; won't the Republican Party be seeking people who can read the international tea-leaves a trifle better? Don't they need fewer, rather than more such braying jackasses? Lieberman has virtually the same foreign policy weltanschaaung as Rick Santorum, who now writes unfunny op-eds in the vein of his wrestling commercial...

I'm saying Lieberman's future is bleak.

So what was in that conversation on the Senate floor?

"Joe. Come here. Let me explain something to you. Personally, I don't give a shit if you work for the old man. Your conscience is free. Kill babies, run over old ladies in the Piggly Wiggly. Whatever. My position is this. If you persist in sniping at me from my side of the aisle, you will live out the rest of your term in agonizing fucking pain."

"B-but --"

"Agonizing pain. No reason why you should rank. No reason why you should have a nice office, or your own sub-committees --"

"B-but, Rules --"

"Rules? Fuck Rules. This is what I'm saying to you. You go make peace with those Ku Klux across the aisle. Because you know what? Fuck your seniority. Lyndon Johnson said fuck your seniority --"

"But I'm the decider --"

"You're not deciding shit Lieberman. You haven't been all Congress. I don't like your jerkoff name; I don't like your jerkoff face; and I don't like you, jerkoff."

Exeunt
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If I had some nuts on a wall, would those be...

Agreed. The prospect of this John McCain winning the presidency is laughable. The one who tours a Baghdad market, proclaims it safe, whereupon it is swiftly carbombed; the McCain who can't tell the difference between the Sunni Islamic State of Iraq and the Shiite Mehdi Army; the McCain whose strictly pro-business position on immigration will doom his party, this McCain will lose.

But I can't help but think that only people who pay too much attention to the game see this kind of thing happening. I find it far more likely that most voters -- call them what you will, the people who purportedly cling to Guns and Religion: "downscale whites," the Axl Roses -- haven't tuned in yet. They woke up when the nightly news claimed they were being dissed by some Ivy-league half-foreigner candidate at a gay-folks kaffeeklatsch. But they've been asleep since.

(I'd like to think that's why HRC has a double-digit lead in West Virginia: folks paid attention to the Ohio primary and haven't had a reason to follow anything since. Are the stories of Hillary's imminent demise actually not on the air in the Wild, Wonderful? Why was Monday the second total time BHO has visited the state? This makes me crazy. West Virginia is Indiana on stilts. Use the template of small-format speeches and massive student turnout at the state universities. If Barry contested even Morgantown, he'd pull within six, right?)

So McCain's chances depend on which McCain shows up in the media at the last possible instant. Joe Lieberman's 1988 Senate run offers some relevant instruction. Joe ran as a Reagan Democrat against the liberal Republican Lowell P. Weicker; he wasted Weicker for not supporting Reagan's invasion of Grenada and bombing of Libya; he picked up support from William F. Buckley; he dissed LPW for missing votes, ran goofy cartoon attack ads of Lowell as a sleeping bear. A screwy confusing campaign. But the fundamental point was this: Lieberman said Weicker was not a maverick, but a misfit. In effect, the Democrat did ideological housecleaning for his opponents. No Republican in 1988 wanted to seat on their side of the aisle the only GOP Senator to call for a boycott of the South African Apartheid regime. The net effect was that the Connecticut GOP (like everywhere else) swung to the right, and the Democrats only gained seats by seating conservatives.

Which McCain shows up in the media? Maverick or Misfit? More importantly for our futures bidness, which would be the preferred outcome for Obama Democrats? (Let's ignore the fact that no one knows what an Obama Democrat is. I think we ODs are post-grad educated Northeasterners-Rustbelters who are willing to "diss partisan politics to get a gig," thanks Martin Sheen. But discuss amongst yourselves.) After McGovern purged the party (part by accident; he sure didn't intend to lose urban whites in the Northeast), McGovernism became the default Democratic position for a generation: mercy for the underclass, negotiate for peace. McCain's ability to draw support from the moderates of 2006 is a boon to the ODs.

Check it: the Democrats elected to the House in 2006 got in because two camps of opinion about the Iraq War shook hands: "I don't think we should be there," and "I think we should win." As an OD, I want the "I think we should win," camp to bolt, because their ideology is transparently bogus. They do not belong in my tent. Frank Rizzo and Dick Daley can come back into my tent, so long as they denounce the Iraq War, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, "coercive interrogation" and warrantless eavesdropping. Five points of light. My tent might be 20 percent of the electorate, but at least I know who's in it. The numbers come later. The whole point is to align party and ideology in your own camp, and disorient party and ideology in the opposition.

And Walnuts makes that real easy: right now he's got free-traders and protectionists, comprehenisvists and Minutemen, dudes hung out to dry on the end of the "surge" and dudes who want war with Iran yesterday, fiscal conservatives who hate giving atropine to the economy over and over again and reps whose constituents are losing their homes. It's not a Big Tent. It's a total clusterfuck.

That is the outcome of "McCain is a Maverick." But his biggest problem this week is convincing people that Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman heard him wrong, he definitely voted for the guy who gave him le shaft royale in SC. Problems occur for McCain when "McCain is a Misfit." On the reel f'reel. If McCain doesn't belong in his own party, how can he be trusted? If the Misfit is the standard-bearer, well, what does the party believe? If it's just an aggregate of fractious interests, what did the McCain Democrats sign up for?
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Bush league

K:

Barry may indeed weather whatever storms emerge. It seems clear that Gibson and Stephanopoulos are getting the worst of the debate coverage, for instance. John Dickerson says Obama was doomed to look petulant; and I think the stick-to-your-guns strategy is what doomed him. Because we've seen it before.

It's Bush 101 : Double Down. It may or may not enable the campaign freedom of maneuver. I tend to think not, based on Barry's flaccid attempts to thread the needle on Rev. Wright in the debate, but prove me wrong. (He was pushy and above-the-fray while delivering byzantine rationalizations of his relationship with Wright. It was cringe-inducing. There are so many ways to deal with the Rev., and he has to pick the morally upstanding one? Barry can't say, "Look, I was living in Chicago's South Side. I need this man and every other vintage militant every day of the week, because I'm from Kansas."? He can't plead expediency? Ahh, because that would be the old politics rearing its ugly head...)

There is maneuverability on the Bitter score, so fine, maybe the tactic works. Elevate. Got it. But it's a shit way to make policy. Elevation is fine for discourse; but in policy, it's called escalation. It's a perpetual raising of the stakes.

To take your abortion prediction, what does an elevation speech sound like?

***
Leebs will speak at convention if McCain can't find his keys.
Related! McCain anger okay! Not pissed enough to "blur his judgment," says Leebs!

Also, not senile enough to fumble the nuclear football! Not drunk enough to confuse Sunnis with Shiites! Still funny! Don't you quit on me...

Also related! One-third of Iraq veterans have post-traumatic stress disorder or a major brain injury. That's 19 percent with depression, 19 percent with probable brain damage, minus 7 percent with both. What's the record for Vietnam POWs?

And, forty years after: the sacrifice-shall-not-be-in-vain meme is back to shame us all...Will President McCain blockade Vietnam until the return of all captive US servicemen is accomplished? I'm for it! US out of Vietnam!

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"I consider this case closed."

K:

Meant to get at you about Liebs: clearly an object of scorn round here. I was giggling bout this the other day. Turns out Ned Lamont was not responsible for Joe's website crashing back in the summer of '06. Investigators determined Joe was. "I consider this case closed," says the Senator, and well, he knows better than anyone that there's nothing there to discover! And dismissing the federal investigation as "old news"! A classic!

Suppose we should believe him about future attacks, weapons in the sand, cybercriminals and islamofascists then.

Pictures later.

Aye, I saw the McCain tax-relief bit in the paper. I figured he was just making nice with his right flank. "See, I get it. Any problem, no matter how nutcrushingly vast, can be solved with a tax cut. Right fellas? Fellas?" Ergo all problems will be solved when we have no taxes.

Okay but for real, could he extend the tax holiday to state gas taxes? Because that, smoking and gambling are the only sources of revenue left for PA to plunder. Man, and let's not even talk about how the 400-year-old system of townships up here leads to giant property tax bills, de facto segregation, shit schools and permanent provincialism. Or how about the Philadelphia city income tax. That's right fukkas, the city takes 7 percent of my pay, and feeds it to black mafia. Let's not talk about Imam Shamsud-din Ali, a.k.a. Clarence Fowler either. Or Kenny Gamble. One day.

Nevertheless, my first response was to come up with a tax that solves problems, Northern liberal that I be, and I got one.

Pass a windfall oil tax and prorate it to our commitment in Iraq. 2% cut of industry revenue -- not profit -- for every 140,000 soldiers serving. When we drop to 70,000 troops, the tax drops to 1% of revenue.

Here's the neat part. An escalator built-in to the tax for our continued presence, viz.: one-half percent for every six months. So the tax can't be whittled down to a manageable burden; it sticks around until we're done. And it gradually de-escalates as we pay down the cost of the war.

Charts 'n' graphs: Table 1: Gradual de-escalation, 2008-2013.

Basically, everyone who says that a windfall oil tax can't pay for anything is part right. Taxing profit won't pay for shit; thass feeding off the ass-end. And who wants to do that? Take the food from out they mouths, on the other hand, and you can do things. You can't pay for universal health care. But you can cut into the deficits we've been running. By 2013, the Dark Steer Windfall Tax will be chugging along at 5% of industry revenue, estimated at 2 trillion dollars. So 100 billion. Not a lot, but a start.

I strongly dislike this campaign; I think if Obama runs to his right he's going to look phony. This is the lesson of the "bitterness." And he's doomed to run to his right. I grow weary of crystalballin'.

So, a message to the candidiates: my endorsement is up for grabs, in case any one of you has a brazole big enough to implement the Dark Steer Windfall Tax...

C'mon...who's got the ten-and-a-half?

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