I’ve decided to not vote for Obama in the fall

Yeah, it just occured to me that as a well-educated, professional woman who works in a creative field, I don’t really need him anyway. I mean, one of the prime reasons to vote for a Democrat come the fall would be to prevent any more Samuel Alito appointments to the Supreme Court. But abortion rights aren’t really a problem for me anyway. If I need one, I can just hop a jet to somewhere where I won’t be treated like a criminal whore. And I can do the same for my two daughters. I’ve got the money. It’s no big deal. And all of the Obama girls out there can probably do the same. And even if they can’t, it’s not really my problem. I’ve paid my dues, I’ve worked my way up to a comfortable niche in the employment spectra. Why should I care what happens to some young twenty something? Overcoming obstacles builds character!

Same with contraception. I’m assuming that Hillary’s universal healthcare plan would have covered them. But I can afford to buy them even if my employer’s insurance plan doesn’t cover them. No biggy. Oh, I’m sure that the cost will be a bit burdensome to the firm and nubile but they’ll just give up food to buy them I’m sure. Anorexia and contraceptives: perfect together! Just what every Obama man wants.

Oh, sure, if Obama is the nominee and he loses to McCain, the war will go on indefinitely. But people, you worry too much. Surely we will elect enough senators this fall to overcome a filibuster. Surely! But so what if we don’t? It’s not like *I’m* ever going to have to go to war. No, that’s strictly for the young to worry about.

No, I think I’ll just take the fall off, kick back and watch the leaves turn colors, decorate for Halloween and not worry at all about the future. Who needs change? I don’t.

come Saturday morning….

• Mr. Obama, I saw this video of your most recent remarks and there are a couple of things we need to review. But first, let’s go to the videotape:

Ok, that was ugly and probably David Axelrod, your ratfaced campaign person, put you up to it. But this demonstrates to me how naive and unprepared you are to be president. Because, it’s one thing to get all of the guys together and make fun of your female opponent and guilt some women into joining you because they want to feel cool and stuff. But it’s another thing altogether to bring up that whole menstruation and “women are slaves to their raging hormones” myth. Let’s unpack what you’re really saying here:

1. You are implying that Hillary Clinton is prone to periodic attacks on you when she is feeling emotional and down on herself. Sort of like PMS. Except that Hillary Clinton is 60 years old and is most likely free of any of that pain-in-the-ass periodicity or PMS, if she ever suffered from it at all. And you know this and I know this. Everyone and their brother Joe knows this. So, are you referring to the raging hormones that no longer apply to her or are you signaling by contrast that Hillary is past her prime in a biological sense? That her waist to hip ratio is no longer optimal, her skin no longer elastic, her eyes no longer clear. Are you signalling to the male gender of the species that she is no longer attractive and can therefore be safely dismissed like so many middle aged women are? She is invisible, powerless and all because some of you guys out there don’t want to fuck her. Excuse me for being blunt but I’m just channeling my inner frat boy to figure out what might be going on in your primeval brain stem.
2. You may not be aware of this but there are drugs on the market that make it so that women never have to have a period again. Yep, it’s giving the tampon makers fits but there it is. Biology is not destiny anymore. Moving on…
3. The other message you seem to be telegraphing is that Hillary Clinton is being emotional and that her feelings of frustration and lack of her own self worth are driving her “attacks” on you. Just about every woman I know will identify this as the “soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend you’re only angry because you’re emotional there is no other legitimate reason” maneuver. Guys can’t possibly know why we are mad but you guarantee that it’s nothing to do with YOU; it’s all in our heads. I refer to the “soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend” because relationships do not last long after men pull this crap. It shows contempt for the legitimate anger of the female partner and when contempt enters a relationship, the end draws swiftly nigh.
4. Female Obamaphiles: Is *this* the kind of Change!™ you had in mind? Because it sounds suspiciously like the same old stereotypical @#$% we’ve always put up with. Maybe you want to sit down and think this thing through again. Your male counterparts are probably going to do fantastically well in the Obama era; you?, ehhhhhhh, not so much.
5. Prediction: Expect Michelle to be trotted out to give a spirited defense while she also makes some remark about Hillary’s “tone” or something.  Wait for it.  You know it’s going to happen.

Mr. Obama, you have successfully captured 15% of the population that calls itself African-American. They could have been Hillary’s constituency as well because the Clintons have a history of working to overcome the racial divide in America. But whatever, you played the race card, headed for the fainting couch, twisted words, milked the media tea and sympathy for all it was worth and campaigned like a maniac in all of the urban areas of the states where you thought you had a shot of winning African-Americans over. It worked like a dream in some places and not at all in others (like in NJ where I understand you dumped a load of cash with no payoff- at all. You were beaten handily by 10 points.)

But if you think for one minute that you are going to sail to the nomination by dogwhistling to men at the expense of the biggest bloc of voting Democrats, you are very much mistaken. Personally, I hope you don’t apologize or that your attempts at an apology come off like your fumbling and incoherent responses to debate questions. We poor, high school dropout, prematurely aged and invisible females will make our irrational, emotional anger known in the privacy of a primary state voting booth (as I already have). Enjoy your brief frontrunner status while it lasts. Boneheads who make these kinds of statements are not suitable presidential nominees.

• Damn, everybody thinks they can do snark these days. Ok, so Dahlia Lithwick can do it well enough to get paid for it. So?? (frickin’ showoff). *sigh* Here’s her latest: It’s Not You, It’s Me- Letter from a Young, Hip, Cynical Former Obamamaniac.

I come not to bury DailyKos, but to praise it…

Kinda not what you expected, eh?

Here’s the thing: I LOVE DailyKos, or what it used to be anyway. I totally believe in the whole concept of “Crashing the Gate”. The site was a godsend to many of us leading up to and after the 2004 election. That’s where we found each other and promised to watch each other’s backs. We commiserated. We schemed. We wrote brilliant commentary. Some of Hunter’s old posts are the most breathtaking pieces of cantankerous, pithy snark I’ve ever read. Georgia10 was just a baby studying for her bar exam when she came up with Fitzmas and the hillariously funny Fitzmas carols that followed. And there was Markos, cheering us on, telling us to ignore what the media threw at us because we were challenging them to become better journalists. We challenged the narratives they constructed against our candidates. We made David Brooks snipe at us in frustration. We gave readers options.

And DailyKos gave hundreds of thousands of us a voice.

Therefore, the powers that be determined, DailyKos must go.

It struck me sometime in 2006 that the media and the Republican Wurlitzer operatives were going to have to take DailyKos down and other nascent blogs out if there was any hope of controlling the narrative in 2008. There was too much “Netroots Nation”, hanging together instead of hanging separately, too much of the “alternative version of the story” about DailyKos. But how to do it without being obvious? Well, attacking the strength has worked so well before so go after it’s cherished independent voices. Make it more homgenous in the hopes of driving a wedge through the heart of it. And it’s like one big focus group. Find out what motivates its most passionate voices and bait them. Ahhh, and they claim to not be single issue voters but they sure don’t like anything to do with the war (well, who does?), so couple a new war resolution with that Benedict Arnold of the Democratic party, Joe Lieberman, and watch them flay themselves and the strongest candidate they have running in the fall election.

Finally, don’t forget group dynamics. The thing that drove everyone to DailyKos in the first place was the relief at finding a tribe to belong to. So, destroy tribal loyalty. Turn the tribe on itself with trollstorms and divisive rhetoric. Exile the most committed to the group in favor of those most committed to a personality. Humiliate and shun the people calling for reconciliation and who still have the nerve to support the a candidate not sanctioned by the tribe. Make it uncool. Make them “not one of us”.

It worked brilliantly. The perception managers took themselves out to dinner recently to celebrate the demise of DailyKos.

Friends, Democrats, Kossacks, they did this not because DailyKos was a failed experiment or a refuge of fanatics. No, they did this because DailyKos was a phenomenal success. Now, everyone has a blog and takes comments and invites contributors and the voices in the public forum have multiplied many, many fold because DailyKos showed us how it is done. Newpapers and cable TV and radio are struggling to find their audience while their audience, sensing something worng with the presentation of “facts” have sought the truth online, with first person accounts and international sources and a new generation of blog based pundits who reinterpret what’s really going on.

And we owe much of that to Markos and the thousands of dedicated online activists who got off their asses in 2006 to put more Democrats in office. We may not have gotten Bush/Cheney impeached, but it is no exaggeration to say that we saved the Republic. (And BTW, Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake deserves the credit for seeing the Achilles heel that was Joe Lieberman in the CT senate race.  When history is written, let the laurels go to Jane for almost single handedly changing the Iraq War narrative that swung the 2006 elections.)  We saved it from even greater excesses of the Bushies. We saved it from even more Constitutional violations. We alerted people to what was really going on by turning over voter after voter who were tuned into the actual zeitgeist. One persuaded voter and many persuadable friends, person by person, American to American who spoke loudly and clearly in November 2006 and said “Enough! I want my country back” Friends, that is powerful. That is awesome.

Yes, some of us lament that it wasn’t enough and nothing has been done and Congress has capitulated one too many times and all we have is a stalemate. Friends, if all we have is a stalemate, that is a victory. We have stopped the Bushies from doing their worst. We’ve prevented the Senate from going Nuclear. We’ve kept another Sam Alito off the Supreme Court. Does anyone think in their wildest dreams that if another Supreme Court justice retired right now that Bush would be able to appoint anyone before the November election? Nah gah happen. I dare him to try.

So, while it pains me to see DailyKos ripped apart by so-called friends internally, I am ever hopeful that Markos and the other brilliant frontpagers (except for KagroX) will rally and overcome their psychogenic fugue soon. They need to get a grip and examine the internal forces that are ripping DKos to shreds. They need to examine their consciences and discover where their animus towards one candidate is coming from. Really figure it out. They need to do it soon because time is running out and the division that began at DailyKos months ago is now spreading throughout the Democratic elecorate as the forces that seek to undermine us stir up old prejudices and only one candidate benefits from them, leaving millions and millions of women exiled from their own tribe. If that candidate is going to win, let him do so on the strength of who he is, not at the expense of what he is not.

Get it together, Kos. Don’t let the Villagers demoralize you. Go back to the beginning and bring us together again. Don’t make me write another one of these damn posts. Good luck.