PUMAs on the Loose: Open thread

Holy Hemiola! We got some serious attention today, didn’t we? First, Salon’s tagged teamed Rebecca Traister and Walter Shapiro against us. Shapiro was especially offensive with his bad boyfriend, “Where else are you going to go?” Downright creepy. Then HuffingtonPost got into the act with Will Bower (By the way, Will, our PUMA posts are time stamped. Just sayin’) Even Big Tent Democrat got into the act. But what was amazing was the sheer number of people who were fed up with the way this primary season has been going and thought it was time to take action against the DNC. If the comments I read today were any indication, the PUMA message of “It’s my vote, you’ve got to earn it” has a lot of followers.

So, keep spreading the word. A lot could happen in 2 months.

Like, Obama could drop his “Eagle-as-target-practice” pretentious, presumptuous presidential seal.

This is an open thread.

Person Walter Shapiro

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The Book Confluence

A meeting of great books and good friends

As we drift into summer and an uninspiring election season of two sub-par presidential candidates, we Conflucians will no doubt desire new topics of conversation.  We’ll need something to break up the monotony of the continual back and forth between Candidate A and Candidate B over who is more beholden to lobbyists, whose wife has the better cookie recipe, who better represents the Hillary voters, whose VP is more conservative, who appeals more to Evangelicals, who is the greater monger(war or hope), who has the biggest…well, you get the point.  Face it, after one of the most exciting primary seasons of most of our lifetimes, where a gifted, inspirational leader emerged and grew stronger with each passing contest, we’re left with two guys who  “straight talk” but can’t shoot straight.  No better time for a little summer reading.

Monday: Hits and Misses

There are a couple of posts around the web that got my attention last night. You might have already seen some of them. We have a few hits and a few misses. One is tempted to say, “I told you so” to the middle one but it probably wouldn’t do any good. {{sigh}}

• Rebecca Traister kind of misses in her Salon piece Why Clinton Voters Say They Won’t Support Obama. The biggest miss is that she assumes that Hillary lost. We don’t believe there was any reason for Hillary to lose. The problem is that the process was flawed, the game was rigged and the superdelegate system failed to give us the stronger candidate. The superdelegates could still give the nomination to Clinton. If FL and MI are counted in full, the delegate count narrows to less than 100 and is statistically insignificant. For whatever reason, supers are not inclined to do this but there is still time for them to change their minds. What we need is a fair and transparent convention. With the DNC unable to pay its convention bills, we can hope they will come around in time to realizing that behaving badly will not open the money spigots. But she’s also totally clueless about whether we’ll come around in November. She thinks we’ll come crawling back because we have no where else to go. It’s all about reproductive freedom. Ok, we went over this last week in The Roe Ruse. The SCOTUS already has enough justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and this will not change unless one of the conservative justices quit, which will be like… never. Anyway, the real issues revolve around business, commerce and civil liberties and we have already seen what Obama feels about privacy in his FISA position. So, please, trust us Rebecca, we’re not coming back. Really.
• Regarding Obama and FISA, Big Tent Democrat tries to make sense of it John Cole’s mysterious poker metaphor in On FISA, The Media and Poker while Hunter at the Big Orange Cheeto finally has a “Soylent Green is People!” epiphany in Even Barack Obama Thinks You’re Stupid. (Sorry, no link, we’re honoring the strike) Yes, Hunter finally wakes up and smells the coffee. Except, in Hunter’s case, I don’t believe he ever bought the Unity Pony shtick in the first place. He went along to get along. It wasn’t that he loved Obama so much as he absolutely couldn’t stand Hillary for reasons that are probably still a mystery, even to himself. But I suspect it goes something like this: the Kossack buzz words were carefully played, first by Joe Trippi and then by David Axelrod. Oh, yeah, she was an establishment corporate toadying, lobbyist money sucking harlot of the first degree. And she liiiiiiiiiies. But the final straw was that damn Kyl-Lieberman amendment thingy that was a symbolic, no-committment vote that whipped Kossacks into a shrieking, hysterical frenzy and one she no doubt probably felt she had to vote for in order to establish her national security creds. (Do we have a vote for that for Obama? No, we do not. How conveeeenient.) And now, Obama goes out of his way to vote for FISA for I suspect the same reasons that Clinton chose to vote for Kyl-Lieberman: he needs national security creds. So what if it’s your civil liberties in jeopardy? Isn’t winning important to Kossacks? This is apparently where Hunter draws the line, like all the other $&*( Obama campaign pulled during the primary season wasn’t enough. As if using the term ‘racism’ as a weapon against half of the Democratic base wasn’t sufficient reason to be completely disgusted with the arrogant lightweight. I’d say it was better late than never but frankly, as much as Hunter loathes him now, he’s probably going to still vote for him because I’m betting he still thinks Hillary would have been worse. No need to ask for proof of this. Psychological conditioning is complete.
• Finally, Anglachel gathers up some of Bob Somerby’s recent posts on the death and glorification of Tim Russert, aka Pumpkinhead, in The Heart of Their Culture. I have to admit that I only recently started to notice the Irish Catholic Parochial School Graduate phenomenon at MSNBC. It was pretty clear with Maureen Dowd though. It’s not so much the prudery or the prosecutorial manner in which the MICs do their jobs at MSNBC as much as the obedience and devotion to it. Somerby touches on the intersection of Jack Welch and the MICs only tangentially but they are actually quite harmonious. The rank and yank system that Welch created a way to promote the aggressive employees who excel from the losers who need to be cut free depends on pleasing the person who will ultimately rank you. It encourages slavish devotion and obedience and there’s no better training for that than with the Sisters who subscribe to group punishment and zero tolerance. It makes perfect sense. (And lay off the pearl clutching over the MIC label. My Dad was from a MIC family and they never shied away from the label. Anyways, they always told me that there was a gun in the basement of Saint Joe’s church with my name on it and any time I was ready to join the IRA, I was welcome to it. I’m kidding!, Kidding)

From a Broad to a Dame

There’s a point when a broad becomes a dame—and Hillary Clinton has just earned her shoulder pads.

She’d been anointed a broad some time ago by circumstances. She was fighting with the boys on their turf—the Presidency. She dug in her pumps and rolled up her sleeves to expose a designer watch and a diamond ring. Just like the men, she could wear her fortune like a uniform. She wasn’t afraid of money; she knew the good it could do. She said, “Yeah, I’ve got it, and now I wanna give some to you.”

She didn’t say this to the boys, mind you. She said it to the spectators, to the hoi polloi sitting in the nose bleed seats on high, or the ones with their noses pressed to the canvas, they were squeezed in around the ring so close. She wasn’t making her case to the referees, she was making it to the hard-working masses who came to the match every four years to watch. She was a petite broad in a suit, and she looked so out of place—but the words, the words were right.