BartBlog

BartCop.com Volume 2003 – The wild gift.

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Right attacks ‘Sicko’
	W learns from Students
	Bush’s legal noose
	Can Gore save Edwards?
	Who’s the Phoney?
	Global distrust of Bush
	W to Congress: F.O and Die
	Agave commodity
	Kristen Bell in big danger

BartCop.com Volume 2002 – De-fund his ass.

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Iraq Cover-up Continues
	Cheney: “Stand down”
	Rahm plays poker
	Harry the Mouse Reid
	Rudy slams Big Dog
	Cheney: OK, so I lied…
	McCain & Swift-boaters
	Leahy subpoenas all
	Catherine Bell – Army Wives

BartCop.com Volume 2001 – Fully Lobo.

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Cheney not Executive?
	Why Hillary Scares Me
	If Reid were Rove
	The Hatred of Women
	Beating Victim Upset
	Denied Equal Pay
	Lugar: Iraqi no workie
	Bush: Above the law?
	Hillary Duff’s Shape

BartCop.com Volume 2000 – Corn 2007 is online at BartCop.com.

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Levin’s False History
	White House: Trust us
	Why I hate Hillary
	Preacher in blackface
	Chemical Ali 2 B beheaded
	Marijuana & Violence?
	Coburn helps killers?
	Bartcopwatch drops
	Bionic Michelle Ryan

Once there was a restaurant – a very popular one. It was called The Donkey Diner. The owners and managers created a menu that catered to a wide variety of people. You couldn’t find everything on the menu you liked and no one was completely happy with it, but there was enough selection to keep you coming back and that is what made it a success. And the prices weren’t that bad, either. Not surprisingly, the eatery attracted people from varying walks of life, ethnic backgrounds, and economic classes.

At some point, a few of the patrons felt the menu lacked a sufficient amount of items they liked and some of the dishes weren’t prepared they way they thought they should be, so they began complaining to the management. The management said, “hey, look, we’re trying to make everyone happy. But naturally, if a type of menu item is popular, we feature more of it. If a dish just isn’t selling well, we’re not going to push it.”

(more…)

So, my piece from yesterday on Sen. Barack Obama has made it’s rounds on the internet. Someone posted it over at DemocraticUnderground, Blogger News Network picked it up, Total Drivel linked to it, and Bartcop quoted it on his page after it appeared on his blog.  The comments it has gotten from some leftwing Obama supporters have been a riot, though none have ventured a denial of the post’s content.

“Umm, the DLC has endorsed Clinton’s candidacy so this post is pretty much irrelevant”  writes one person.  Actually, no, the DLC  has not endorsed Clinton.  But even if they had, why would that make Obama’s embrace of DLC third-way philosophy irrelevant?

Ben weighs in with this:  “I think you overstate the case about progressives disliking the DLC… (Barack) has gone really far towards avoiding ties with corporatism. He flies commericial.”  Hey Ben, what Bizzaro world do YOU live on?  Have you missed the almost daily attacks on the DLC by the “progressive” left?  Did KOS’s call to make them “radioactive” get by you somehow?

Now, I won’t deny I’m enjoying making a few folks in the netroots squirm over this.  The spin cycle over at Democratic Underground is working overtime.  But it just goes to show how little about Obama many of his supporters know.  Take a blogger over at DailyKos, for example.  “Snout” is a “strong supporter” of Obama and feels he’s an “asset to our party.”  However, on the subject of Bill Clinton, Snout is a bit more negative.

“Clinton turned the clock backwards on the poor via welfare reform…He was a decent Republican president.  I’m looking to vote for a Democrat this time.”

Hmmm… Snout, this strong Obama supporter, believes Clinton is a Republican for enacting welfare reform.  So how do you think Snout reconciles this quote from Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope?

“conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old A.F.D.C. program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect.”

The answer?  Snout has probably never read that quote.  In fact, I’d wager this strong Obama supporter has never read his book.  Should it not be someone’s business to educate themselves about a candidate before they profess adoration of him or her?

I like Barrack Obama and wouldn’t have a problem voting for him in the general election if he won the Democratic nomination. But after spending a great deal of time on various “progressive” blogs and websites where his support runs deep, it has become obvious Obama is not the man the left believes him to be.

Cavorting With The Enemy

If one entity has been the adversary of the modern “progressive” movement, it’s the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, the think tank that got Bill Clinton elected. This may surprise many people who might think the Republican party is the left’s enemy, but consider this: “Progressives” view the DLC as a barrier to them taking power. In their minds, if the DLC disappeared there would be nothing hindering a glorious leftwing revolution in the United States. Given a choice between themselves and the Republicans, they believe, Americans would pick “progressives” over conservatives every time. They just have to eliminate that pesky centrist think tank!

The reason the left despises the “Bill Clinton wing” of the Democratic party is because of their embrace of free market capitalism, competition, and entrepreneurship. The DLC is shunned because they believe many New Deal and Great Society social programs no longer work as they were designed to and should be reworked or shelved completely. The DLC is labeled “Republican lite” by the left because they take corporate and lobbyist money to compete with Republicans, and they believe in a strong military.

But what really gets the left’s goat in regards to the DLC is their willingness to work across the aisle, to compromise with the opposition party, in the spirit of progress. After all, that is the true definition of politics. And the left hates it! So who does the left turn to to lead their charge? Barack Obama.

Not Who You Think He Is

Obama is the left’s “great white hope,” except he’s black. He’s the “progressive” being tapped to be the Hillary slayer of 2008. But there are problems buried deep in the pages of his book “Audacity of Hope,” a secret that threatens to rip away the image the left blogosphere has given him: He’s the enemy.

Starting on page 10 of Audacity of Hope, Obama proudly proclaims he believes “in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised….”

Just like the DLC!

He states, “I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military.”

Just like the DLC.

Several pages later, Obama laments the polarization of our political system, calling it the “smallness of our politics.” He states, in an obvious slam to the very faction of the Democratic party who supports him, “In distilled form, though, the explanations of both the right and the left have become mirror images of each other. They are stories of conspiracy, of America being hijacked by an evil cabal…. A government that truly represents these Americans (those “who are going about their business every day”)—that truly serves these Americans—will require a different kind of politics.”

Say it with me… just like the DLC!

Obama also criticizes the Democratic party for being weak on moral values, he speaks of the naivety of the 60s “progressive” movement, he endorses the death penalty, and, what may be the most lethal stab to the heart of his netroots base, declares “a lot of liberal rhetoric… value(s) rights and entitlements over duties and responsibilities…. Reagan offered Americans a sense of common purpose that liberals seemed no longer able to muster.”

Ouch! While the DLC certainly is on board with those concepts, they wouldn’t go so far as to pile adoration onto Ronald Reagan!

If you think you’re seeing some very definitive third-way thinking with Obama, you are correct. But it doesn’t end with the utterances in his book. During first quarter fundraising, Obama declared he’d take no lobbyist or corporate money. It was later revealed he had. Finally, during the first Democratic debate in South Carolina this year, Obama gave an answer on the topic of abortion straight out of the DLC’s “safe, rare, and legal” playbook.

Does all this mean Obama is bad candidate? Absolutely not. Most of this would make me more likely to vote for him. What it reveals, though, is a certain hypocrisy on the left. The candidate they’ve latched onto, who is taking policy advice from Colin Powell as a matter of fact, is the mirror image of what they claim to despise.

DonkeyDigest 

If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you know how I feel about Matt Taibbi, a revolutionary wannabe known for casting aside all common sense in his quest to radicalize the Democratic party. So it might surprise you to learn he’s written a piece I mostly agree with. Not completely, but mostly. Perhaps he wasn’t high on the day he wrote it.

Titled “The American Left’s Silly Victim Complex,” Taibbi says pretty much everything I’ve been saying about the “progressive” movement for years. Here’s a taste:

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class… the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

Taibbi, a long time basher of the DLC, doesn’t miss the opportunity to dig at them again in this piece but finally realizes the DLC’s purpose was to hold back the swelling tide of conservativism brought on by presidential candidates who were liberal champions while pandering to every single issue advocacy group. People like McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis.

The writer provides a great quote from Sen. Bernie Sanders: “A lot of these folks really don’t have a lot of contact with working-class people. They’re not comfortable with working-class people. They’re more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it’s their issues that matter to them.”

Here’s more:

This is another dirty little secret of the left – the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being “elitists” are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.

there’s probably no political movement in history that’s been sillier than the modern American left.

What makes the American left silly? Things that in a vacuum should be logical impossibilities are frighteningly common in lefty political scenes. The word “oppression” escaping, for any reason, the mouths of kids whose parents are paying 20 grand for them to go to private colleges. Academics in Priuses using the word “Amerika.” Ebonics, Fanetiks, and other such insane institutional manifestations of white guilt. Combat berets. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees. Combat berets in conjunction with designer coffees consumed at leisure in between conversational comparisons of America to Nazi Germany.

We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

The only real downer in an otherwise brilliant piece is Taibbi attempts to distance himself from that which he has described by saying he is a “progressive” and not a “liberal.” Anyone who has followed his career knows what a silly proposition that is. Or maybe he’s seen the light?

DonkeyDigest 

Someone told me yesterday he’d seen more Barack Obama bumper stickers than ones for any other Democrat. He’s probably correct. I’ve seen a few of them, too, around the Atlanta area. But come to think of it, the only bumper stickers I saw in 2004 were for Howard Dean. So if bumperstickers are any indication of a candidate’s chances, I’m sure Hillary Clinton would gladly concede the bumper sticker primary to Obama.

But she will concede little else.

Readers of my blog (and their are dozens of you now!) know that I came this close to endorsing New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson a few months back. Quite frankly, though, he has failed to impress in the two Democratic debates so far. But I have been in awe of Hillary Clinton. Her command of issues and policy have surpassed that of John Edwards. Her charisma and oratory finesse have surpassed that of Barrack Obama. And I’m not alone in thinking that because post debate poll after post debate poll indicate the same thing: Clinton takes control of the debates and never backs down.

But while her debate performances appear to have kept her well ahead of the pack, it is her campaign strategy that has separated the (wo)men from the boys. Consider what Newsweek Magazine called her “California Strategy.” Knowing that she isn’t polling well in Iowa, a state that usually votes for the more liberal element in the party and creates momentum for the rest of the primaries, Team Clinton set a chain of events in motion in California to shift the momentum to her coming into Iowa.

First, they began organizing in California early and now have a comfortable lead in state polls. Next, they convinced state authorities there to move up their presidential primary to Feb. 5. And finally, as Newsweek stated, state law will require that absentee ballots be sent to voters by January 8, 2008. Within four days of that, by Jan. 12, tracking polls (by the Clinton campaign and, the campaign hopes, by independent news organizations) will yield the first evidence of who is winning the first actual votes in the ’08 race.

And those results will be available BEFORE Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina hold their pivotal primaries and caucuses.

Are your eyes glazing over yet? Snap out if it. There’s more.

You might recall various critiques of Clinton’s debate performance in New Hampshire in which pundits described Clinton as the “uniter” on stage. She pointed out that differences among the Democratic candidates are minor but differences between them and Republicans are major. She never attacked her opponents but stood quietly between Edwards and Obama as they bickered with each other.

Was that planned? You might think so. After pundits generally agreed Clinton won that debate, and post debate polls showed her numbers increasing over Obama and Edward’s numbers dropping even lower in New Hampshire, a spokesperson for USAElectionPolls stated, “Primary voters are very tentative to vote for the candidate that they see as playing politics within the party. They want a unified party. John Edwards should know that from his second place finish in Iowa in 2004 after voters rejected Howard Dean and Dick Gephardt for attacking each other.”

The weakness for Hillary, it seemed until this morning, was her poor polling numbers in general election match ups with Republican opponents. Now, even that appears to be shifting her way. In this morning’s new Quinnipiac poll, she bests the top three GOPers.

As they say, though, there’s still a long way to go. But with the money rolling in, poll numbers rising, major endorsements daily, a top notch political operation, and two trashy smear job books tanking sales wise, there doesn’t appear to be many obstacles on Clinton’s path to the White House.

(For centrist Democratic news and opinion, visit DonkeyDigest.  Read by thousands hundreds dozens my wife daily!)

BartCop.com Volume 1953 – Weeping blood

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

• Selected Outrage
• Stengelgate
• Sum of Our Fears
• Bartcop Travel Agency
• Can Hillary win?
• Hillary fundraising
• What about Iran
• Trouble for Rudy
• She’s hot – Alina Vacariu

BartCop.com Volume 1950 – Mount Panco

In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
	Gonzo & Young Boys
	Bush to Attack Iran April 6
	Tony Snow’s cancer
	Poodle Rattles Saber
	Antiwar Tide on The Rise
	Firings a 2008 Ploy?
	Jaclyn Smith’s TV show

BartCop.com Volume 1946 – Bufferville

• Iraq & Bush’s Failures
• Praise, then Fired
• Ethics of Whoredom
• Death of a Marine
• Scandal Defenses
• Marihuana Top Ten
• Follow-Us-Home Myth
• Jessica Alba marriages

BartCop.com Volume 1937 – Murder is fun

In today’s Tequila Treehouse…

	Prosecutor Games
	Domenici tampers
	Dems rock Selma
	Happypants & Brigham
	GOP heroes short supply
	Why I Hate Her
	Kim Butters Bush
	Jennifer Love Hewitt

BartCop.com Volume 1936 – Rough sects

	Cheney Validates al-Qaeda?
	Kucinich for President
	W: Al Qaeda’s banker
	Yes to health care
	Giuliani’s Ghosts
	Mystery of ‘Iraq-gate’
	Sticks and Stones
	Angelina Jolie again

BartCop.com Volume 1934 – Bagism, Shagism

• In Today’s Tequila Treehouse…
  

  	Cheney survives blast
  	WaHoPo  right-wing
  	Kentucky Closet Case
  	Proof she can’t win
  	Let’s save our planet
  	Bush to Paraquay
  	Romney’s BS bio
  	Vic Beckham TV

BartCop.com Volume 1933 – Chucklenuts

• Gore’s Iraq Warning
• ‘Terrorist’ GOP donor
• Sharpton / Thurmond 
• Why I Hate Her
  
• US generals ‘will quit’
  
• Thank You, Al Gore 
• Arianna on Gore
• Wonder Woman