Ship's Ahoy
Far- fetched, I know, but I would love it if Dean, Hilary, and Barack bin Obama defected to the Greens. How I yearn for a real deal third party. . . .
Viability? Here’s the reality. Dean is a bit like Santa Claus to me. Sometimes I believe in him, and other times I want to. When he first entered the national political scene, I was very excited. I got fired up! Then, just before “they” decided to take him down, I got fed up with him and jumped ship. You can call me a waffler, though it’s not true. However, when all was said and done, I wished that the Dems had put him in the ring with the ‘Shrub. Even if we’d lost, we’d have lost good, by running a real candidate, by which I mean someone cut and dry different from the status quo. I could have been proud of that kind of a loss.
In a couple days, Dean will probably be voted the head of the Democratic National Committee, spinning the party's wheel. Dean is an admirable fellow to stay loyal to the crew that mutinied on him. Yet I feel as if he’s falling into a trap. As admiral, he’ll be shuffling lots of paper, wheelin’ and dealin’ for money (which he’s damn good at) and basically handling a plethora of administrative tasks. Affecting policy? Fuhget about it. Won’t be no time between all that money and donors, donors and money, merry-go-round.
Dean should be a rat like me, and dive off a party boat that's got the turning radius of the Titanic. Let it sink to its watery grave.
Viability? Here’s the reality. Dean is a bit like Santa Claus to me. Sometimes I believe in him, and other times I want to. When he first entered the national political scene, I was very excited. I got fired up! Then, just before “they” decided to take him down, I got fed up with him and jumped ship. You can call me a waffler, though it’s not true. However, when all was said and done, I wished that the Dems had put him in the ring with the ‘Shrub. Even if we’d lost, we’d have lost good, by running a real candidate, by which I mean someone cut and dry different from the status quo. I could have been proud of that kind of a loss.
In a couple days, Dean will probably be voted the head of the Democratic National Committee, spinning the party's wheel. Dean is an admirable fellow to stay loyal to the crew that mutinied on him. Yet I feel as if he’s falling into a trap. As admiral, he’ll be shuffling lots of paper, wheelin’ and dealin’ for money (which he’s damn good at) and basically handling a plethora of administrative tasks. Affecting policy? Fuhget about it. Won’t be no time between all that money and donors, donors and money, merry-go-round.
Dean should be a rat like me, and dive off a party boat that's got the turning radius of the Titanic. Let it sink to its watery grave.
posted by mpho3 at 7:20 PM
2 Comments:
At one point I thought that it would be better to have someone kind of boring like Kerry to go up against Bush, seeing as Bush seemed so reckless. But somehow he ended up making himself seem like the safe option. I'm not sure how he accomplished that -- maybe God is on his side after all.
God, ha ha. Actually, I meant to say that Dean is like Clinton specifically because sometimes I believe in him and other times I want to, but I thought a Dean-Clinton analogy would be confusing. For the record I've always hated Santa, that good for nothing. But the Dems are supposed to hail Clinton the way the GOP hails Reagan. I have to say that there was a time that I loved that pasty-lookin,' sax playing opportunist from Arkansas. I didn't care about Monica Lewinsky or the Starr Report or any of that other geegaw. But history has a way of ruining those who would be heros or heroines. Lincoln didn't care about the slaves, Jefferson slept with his, hell even Mother Theresa has been maligned (see http://www.edwardtbabinski.us/feedback/more_teresa.html for an entertaining debate). Then there's ol' Clinty. I've always forgiven him everything until finally I found the thing for which I just can't: Rwanda. I knew that his administration was guilty of denying the term "genocide," but I really wan't aware of how deep our lack of involvement was until I read former NYT correspondent Howard French's book, A Continent for the Taking. He notes that "On her first stop, in Ethiopia, Albright made a go at apologizing for the Clinton administration’s failure to halt the 1994 Rwandan genocide. 'Let me begin that process here today by acknowledging that we—the international community—should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 and called them what they were: genocide,' she told the Organization of African Unity, whose headquarters is in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Bill Clinton used much the same tepid language in the apology he delivered in person in Rwanda in March 1998. But what, I wondered, is the worth of an appeal for forgiveness that avoids acknowledgement of the original transgression? 'In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda,' said a minutely researched critique of the Clinton administration’s behavior during the Rwandan genocide that appeared in The Atlantic magazine. 'It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term ‘genocide,’ for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing ‘to try to limit what occurred.’ Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.” (p. 241) I don't know why I have found that so much more chilling than anything I've read about our government's handling of that situation. Which has nothing to do with Dean, I know. Like I said, it was a bad analogy from the get go. Incidently, the Atlantic piece from which he quotes is by Samantha Power, entitled "Bystanders to the Genocide: Why the United States Let the Rwandan Tragedy Happen," dated September 2001.
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