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Ferpetessakes, will the real Democratic party please grow up??

Well, that didn’t take long. According to the New York Times, Hillary is supposed to come to the rescue of the Democratic party going into 2016:

In the coming weeks, Hillary Rodham Clinton will stop delivering paid speeches. She will embark on an unofficial listening tour to gather ideas from the business community, union leaders and others. And she will seek advice from such far-flung advisers as an ad man in Austin, Tex., behind the iconic “Don’t Mess With Texas” campaign and a leading strategist at a Boston-based public affairs consulting firm with ties to the Kennedys.

The Democratic debacle in Tuesday’s midterm elections has put new urgency on Mrs. Clinton’s efforts to create a blueprint for a 2016 presidential candidacy, including exploring White Plains as a possible national headquarters and digesting exit polls to determine what the midterm results could mean for the presidential electoral map

A number of advisers saw only upside for Mrs. Clinton in the party’s midterm defeats. Before then, opinions had been mixed about when she should form an exploratory committee, the first step toward declaring a presidential candidacy, with some urging her to delay it until late spring.

No pressure or anything.

I will acknowledge that there are many people in the country who have been waiting six long years for her to jump back into politics.  But the Democrats are the most messed up party I have ever seen.  They have the strategic thinking of two year olds who insist on doing things themselves but want a parent around to save them after they find they’ve messed up and are throwing a fit about it.

And there will be some Democrats who will never accept her even while they grudgingly admit there is no one else who has her cachet.  They’re still convinced that she’s a corporatist and a neoliberal.

Can I just say right here that I will be very disappointed if bloggers and their audiences continue to use these words?  If given a choice, I would much prefer to work in a corporate lab. That’s because I wouldn’t have to negotiate for services with every other part of my project team. I could just walk down the hall and ask the guy in analytical or medicinal chemistry or whatever if I could join their queue. Some industries work better in corporate environments. They get more stuff done. Does that make me a corporatist? That being said, the MBAs who run some of these corporations should be in jail. But the Democrats screaming “Corporatists!” aren’t differentiating. I find it disturbing. It’s the same with the word “neoliberal”. What exactly does that mean or is it a catch all for anything you don’t like? In other words, stop using these labels and think through your issues with any candidate, not just Hillary.

As I was looking up stuff on narcissism and how the narcissist operates, I came across the term “triangulation”. This is not the same triangulation that Dick Morris advised Bill Clinton to do after his party lost midterm elections. No, this refers to the practice of narcissists to keep otherwise allies from speaking to one another. For example, if there is a narcissist in your family, you will find him/her by looking at the number of people who are not speaking to one another. Narcissists hoard secrets and other valuable pieces of information.  In order to control relationships between people, the narcissist acts as an intermediary and uses these secrets to influence the perceptions of people in the relationship. Before long, no one is speaking to anyone. Everyone is either hurling accusations or becoming defensive. There are a lot of hurt feelings. The family becomes dysfunctional and the narcissist has achieved her goal. No one communicates except through her.

The solution to this is pretty straightforward: cut out the narcissist. But for some peculiar reason, that’s very hard to do. They tend to be the people who *seem* so credible.

We are being manipulated by some of the most selfish people on the planet. They bought the party back in 2008, installed their enabler, got him to go easy on them, and they continue to stir up trouble between the various parts of the Democratic party.  We can not talk to one another about Hillary without accusations flying and defenders becoming angry and bitter.

Look, I don’t care if you personally like Hillary Clinton. All I’m interested in is if you can judge fairly. Right now, I can’t see how that is going to happen. Is she corrupt? If not, will she make a good president? Those are the only two questions I am asking right now.

I’m not expecting her to save the party’s bacon. It seems to me that the Obama administration and it’s supporters have asked the Clintons to do this one too many times over the past six years and then they turn around and continue to beat the s^&* out of both of them in the comments section of every blog continuing to divide us up into two camps. This is exactly what I would love to see if I were a selfish, narcissistic power addict. No one is getting along. The scapegoat always tries to do the right thing for the party and then gets trashed.

Note that I didn’t say the scapegoat is perfect. One thing we should all be on our guard against is the way bad people manipulate good people by sowing mistrust. There’s nothing that works so well as the need for perfection. We Democrats are a bunch of sanctimonious Angel Clare’s in this respect, turning up our delicate noses at the merest hint of political acumen or ability to raise money. But political acumen is how politicians get things done and they all take money because to do otherwise means they can’t run. The questions that should be asked are who is giving the money, how much are they giving with respect to each candidate and what are they getting in return?

If Democrats had been more critical in their thinking in the spring of 2008, the party might have been more robust right now. But in any case, Hillary is human. She’s not the party’s mother. It is time for the party to grow up, figure out who its real friends are and stop listening to every Ivy league male grad student activist who was in elementary school when Bill Clinton supposedly sold out poor people and single handedly revoked Glass-Steagall while causing global warming. Likewise, if Hillary doesn’t make it all better instantly after the party insisted on doing it all itself for six years, that’s just too damn bad. There are people, like myself, who have taken huge economic hits because the person in charge after the financial collapse was a politically inept neophyte and we’re disgusted with the way the so-called “creative class’s” messiah has performed.

We don’t have time for that kind of immaturity anymore.

34 Responses

  1. Democrat leadership don’t listen…Pelosi is running again for minority leader because she ‘KNOWS RICH PEOPLE’ ala she knows where the money is. I am not rich and I think Titanic Pelosi needs to step aside and let some knew (new leadership) ideas gain speed and hopefully the new leadership won’t claim being RICH as their main qualification.

    As for Pelosi claiming voter suppression, I cough as she suppressed the votes in the 2008 Primary. Contradictions all around and the game plan is the same one, Titanic Pelosi.

  2. She’s not the party’s mother. It is time for the party to grow up, figure out who its real friends are and stop listening to every Ivy league male grad student activist who was in elementary school when Bill Clinton supposedly sold out poor people and single handedly revoked Glass-Steagall while causing global warming
    Great essay.
    Saw some host on MSNBC last night; he and his two guests all insisting that they don’t want Hillary Clinton. They want (you guessed it) Elizabeth Warren.
    They called Hillary all those bad names; oh, but she’d better not distance herself from Obama!!!

    • Elizabeth Warren is Obama 2.0. I like her but she has the same exact problems Obama does. No executive experience, no foreign policy, no nothing except the world of academia.

      • And that’s what makes her so perfect for Obama’s fanbase.

      • Well . . . she did oversee, create, and engineer the Consumer Protection Bureau into functional being. And that is a particular display of successful executive functionality in a particular instance.

        Let her fight her way through the primaries along with all the other willing candidates.

        • Obama stuck the shiv in her too regarding the Consumer Protection Agency. I wonder how all that would play with his fan base?

          • His fan base would do whatever they felt he really truly wanted them to do. If he said “support Warren” and really meant it, they would do it.

            But the thing is . . . he won’t say “support Warren”. The same High Finance players who hired him to grant them immunity and impunity are the same High Finance players who did not want Warren on that bureau. They will also not want her to be DemPrez nominee. They will quietly let Obama know that his out-of-office payday and revenue streams are in jeopardy if he doesn’t prevent her from being nominated. ” See to it, boy!
            Chop Chop!”

  3. Going into this election, I have one question for any candidate… “And I (or my friends) get?”

    Supplemented by the 12 point platform, at each point, I want to know “What’s in it for me (and my friends)”

    However, I suspect we’ll all be asked for more sacrifice — OMG, what’s left to take?

    I’ve read all the gloom and doom about Hillary’s plans. But, I’ll wait to see how she (and whoever else) answers those questions before I start freaking out.

  4. Gee, “SUPPOSEDLY” sold out the middle class? I seem to remember that Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA rather hard. His WTO and gifting China with most favored nation status enabled Pfizer to pack up its US labs and rebuild them in China. Which is where the jobs of Riverdaughter’s fellow scientists went.

    And while Bill Clinton wasn’t solely responsible for financial deregulation, he certainly was part of it. Reappointing Greenspan to the Fed, which is supposed to supervise big banks, put the fox in charge of the henhouse, and helped set the stage for the Bush’s financial meltdown. So did appointing Bob Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. After leaving office Rubin became vice chairman of Citigroup — and the repeal of Glass-Steagall was designed to allow Citigroup to come into being through the previously illegal merger of Citibank and Travelers Insurance. Rubin earned $100 million at Citi; nice payoff if you can get it. Moreover, when Commotiy Futures Trading Commission Chair Brooksely Born wanted to regulate financial derivatives, Greenspan and Rubin stomped all over her. The prelude to the 2000 passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which made it illegal for any regulator to even THINK about regulating credit default swaps, ever.

    And as for distancing herself from Obama. Hillary was his Secretary of State for four years.The new trade agreements, TPP and TATIP, will be on her if they pass. So will continued involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Not to mention bombing a few other countries like Syria, Yemen, and Libya. Oh for the days when committing even one act of war against one country was treated as the extremely serious business that it is. If we don’t tie Hillary to Obama, the Republicans will. Which is one reason she is far less “electable” than many believe.

    • So, which horse are you backing, centaur?

    • Everybody is going to be tied to Obama. It’s just a fact of life. There’s no getting around it however the GOP has spent the last two elections talking about how Hillary fought Obama and even showed her criticizing him during the primaries. I hate to tell you but in the age of ISIL no peace candidate is going to get elected. People will pick strong and wrong over weak and right every day of the week.

    • Gee, NAFTA was pretty much a done deal when Clinton took office. Go look it up.
      Not only that but most people I know aren’t losing their jobs to some Mexican in Gualdajara. They’re losing them to someone in China or India. As far as I know, Clinton had nothing to do with that.
      I’m not going to stick up for his financial team but I will say that 1993 was quite a different time than 2008. You can try to trace all of the problems back to Clinton who was in favor of some financial experimentation and was potentially overruled by a very pro finance Congress with regards to other policy (Remember Gramm-Rudman? Probably you didn’t). That’s when the apparatus was set up and the reactants mixed. However, when the experiment started to go out of control and needed a responsible party to step in an cool things down or stop it all together, the Bushies were in charge.
      The fact that Brooksley Born was ignored, yeah, I think Clinton could have been responsible for that. But, if you were alive back then, you might remember that he was being investigated by a zillion Congressional committees and special prosecutors, the intent of which was to prevent him from giving his full attention to what was going on in the executive branch and his own plans. That 8 year distraction was very effective. Imagine Obama having to give depositions and cough up a fortune on lawyers for eight straight years. He would have lost it by now.
      Anyway, you’ve been hanging with the wrong crowd. We’ve heard all your arguments before. There’s something about people like you that really chafe at having a woman like Hillary in charge. I’m not sure what that problem is but I suggest you sit down and think about it for awhile. Because the great unwashed masses out there might prefer Hillary in overwhelming numbers this time and you need to reconcile yourself to this fact and get out of the way. THEY have a right to their opinions and votes too even if it differs with yours.
      Get over yourself. You’re just another citizen, not some enlightened individual who is going to change everyone else’s mind. Your vote is not more important than the person you think is a fucking moron yahoo who doesn’t know what you know about the Clintons. It was people like you who gave us Obama. So, you know, sit down and shut up this time around.

      • Do we know Centaur has any problem with women as such? If yes, how?

        Didn’t the Oborg screech that anyone who held reservations about Mr. Wonderful had a problem with dark-skinned people as such?

      • Clinton worked mightily and well to secure the Trade Treason Agreement known as Most Favored Nation status for China. So Clinton had a great deal to do with the people you know who are losing their jobs to China.

  5. Is centaur a troll?

    • If centaur is a troll, then so am I, because I share centaur’s analysis.
      It should not be necessary to make excuses for President Clinton’s aggressive pursuit of TTAs ( Trade Treason Agreements) among other things in order to keep a sympathetically open mind about Senator/SecState Clinton.

      • On closer reading with more time on a long break, I walk back my agreement about the SecState Clinton part of it. at least ;in major part.
        Certainly the TTAs (Trade Treason Agreements) are all Obama, and not SecState Clinton. They would be on him and his New Senate Majority of Republicans and Catfood Democrats.
        And candidate Clinton did point out that there never was a crisis in Social Security . . . kind of undermining Obama’s claims of a Catfood Crisis which must be Catfood Solved.

        But about President Clinton? No disagreement from me. People might ask themselves why Clinton has been paid so much after leaving office, and by whom, and in reward for what.

  6. No horse actually. I really, truly wish I knew.

    There’s two things I won’t do. One, I won’t fool myself about any of the candidates. That includes Elizabeth Warren. Love her pretty words about the banks but they aren’t enough for me either, and I totally get why some people compare her to Obama 08.

    Two,I won’t vote Republican. So permit me if you would to turn this around, Sweet Sue. Of course Hillary is competent and smart and will not act like the usual Republican racist/ sexist buffoon. But why do you expect her to do better than a Republican on national security, the environment, civil liberties, or economics? Is not-a-clown really enough for you?

    • You didn’t ask me, but . . . not-a-clown might be good enough for me. It could be the best we can hope for.

      If I had known “then” what I know “now”, I would much have preferred Clinton to Obama during the primary time. (I preferred Kucinich most of all, and that’s how I voted in the Michigan Primary).
      And why didn’t I know it “then”? Because DemBot bloggers like Digby
      carefully maintained a Wall Of Silence against Riverdaughter and other
      ObamaSceptical bloggers. If I had been exposed to The Confluence in relevant realtime, I might have known more and better.
      Also, if certain Clinton supporters and surrogates had not run the Nixon/Agnew style campaign against Obama that I heard them running, I might not have had the brainstem-distaste I acquired for Clinton based on pro-Clinton bloggers like Larry Johnson at No Quarter being the first to introduce Birtherism to my little corner of blogistan. As well as Nixonoid smear-by-association tactics typified by
      linking Obama to Ayers in order to call Obama an unrepentant SDS-Terrorist sympathiser. Think about how that particular smear-by-association prevented analysis of Obama’s neoliberal Free Trade Treason Global Plantationist agenda. Would you expect NeoLiberal Corporatist Free Trade Treason from a leftist SDS admirer who “pals around with terrorists” like Ayers? Would you? You would? Really?
      Well . . . I wouldn’t. And I didn’t.

      • The whole Ayers thing should have been a clue as to how clueless Obama is about everything not that he’s far left. Who on earth does something that stupid if they’re thinking about running for President?

        • Obama may well have been doing some “reverse psychology” there . . . letting the Ayers thing hang out in open view so that someone would pounce on it in a most AgNixonoid way . . . to generate sympathy for Obama. As I mentioned, I found Larry Johnson’s selling of the birther meme to be repellent in the extreme. It helped put me off my Clinton right there.

          And maybe he knew whose curling stone he was, and who would be sweeping the ice ahead of him to make very sure he reached the goal. In which case he knew he could be as clueless as he pleased about things like Ayers.

    • “That includes Elizabeth Warren. Love her pretty words about the banks but they aren’t enough for me either, and I totally get why some people compare her to Obama 08.”

      It’s more than pretty words. She’s a true believer. Read her book The Two-Income Trap. There’s even an anecdote about Hillary Clinton in there.

      She and Obama may have inexperience in common, but that’s about it. If you look into their activities before they were on a national stage, it’s very clear what each is interested in achieving.

      • I’ts more than just inexperience. It’s also she comes from the world of academia and presidents that come from that world tend to be lackluster when in office. Woodrow Wilson is another example of that. I’m not sure she’d be able to get anything done should she become president. I think she would be better strictly driving policy from the senate.

  7. It’s not just the Dem party that is broken down…the entire system is a shambles… and not just the political system either, but most social institutions as well.

    What ever we do in our many wars zones is eventually slated for here. That means purposefully stoked social chaos …which is ever more evident

    If Hill runs , it’s gonna be Hill and Jeb…2016

    given that choice, I’d pick Hillary

    However the powers that be will give it to Jeb…

    Bill defeated Bush One 25 years ago and denied Poppy his 2nd ,
    or should I say fourth, term.

    It’s payback time

    Regardless, who is installed, the ever expanding wars and social slashing will continue unchecked. No one is stopping that . The powers that be defeated Hillary in 2008…they would eat the Sanders and Warrens for breakfast.

    • No, that was the reason that George W. Bush ran was for revenge against Clinton. The GOP base hates Jeb Bush. So I seriously doubt he’s going to be the nominee.

      • Like the GOP base will be asked…we are in a post voter age . I don’t think they liked McCain much ,nor were they big Romney fans either.

        I

        • Well, that’s exactly why they won’t stand for Jeb. They got McCain and Romney shoved down their throats and they aren’t going to go down that road again.

  8. Here’s another question…. Will the Democrats conduct an honest primary in 2016?

  9. I don’t know if you chose that image of Hillary for ant particular reason but this is what went through my mind:

  10. Bill Curry at Salon:

    “…Democrats must now navigate the stages of grief, a tough task for a party so prone to denial. On MSNBC, Chris Hayes argued that Democratic candidates erred in running away from Obama. So did an indignant Al Sharpton and even Republican Joe Scarborough. Many liberal pundits had urged Democrats to stand by their man. Paul Krugman recently called Obama “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.”

    I think they’re all wrong. Obama left the Democrats in Congress long before they left him. They know their districts and states better than any pundits do and only bailed on Obama when voters started bailing on them, by which time it was too late. Their real mistake was failing to speak up years ago when Obama abandoned many of their party’s principles, or even to realize he’d done it.

    The MSNBC analysis is part of a larger fallacy; that the problem is merely tactical; a matter of message, not policy. The worst thing about the theory is how it disrespects voters; if only we had better slogans, they’d appreciate all we’ve done for them. The condescension alone is enough to blow an election.

    Americans can feel the vital organs of their democracy shutting down. They see the stock market surge and their prospects dim. They look out on the world and are justly frightened. They ask who will clean up politics, shore up the middle class and make them safe. They want answers. If Democrats had some, they’d have won. The election has many lessons for them but until they pierce their denial they can’t absorb them…”

    • The Democrats need a Pot Party to try and take it over the way the Tea Party tries to take over the Republicans and use them for its own purposes. The Tea Party helps make sure the Rs stand for something real . . . . good, bad or ugly. A Pot Party could do the same for the Democrats. But it would have to be just as mean and ruthless for Pot as the Tea Party is mean and ruthless for Tea.

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