Well yeah it's bad if the other guy does it.
Barack Obama was the first president elected on a platform of withdrawing American troops from an ongoing war. Now, though political pundits and the reporters rarely mention it, Obama’s re-election depends on winning back the peace vote in November.
"Peace vote" They don't care in the slightest nobody even acknowledges that kids are dying daily, the only people that know are those directly involved, that's right those with family or friends putting their lives on the line' Oh I didn't mean to mention those being bombarded with drone droppings, sorry.
Let's move on..
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While the election will turn on economic conditions, those have been defined through too narrow a lens. It is dishonest to compartmentalize the economy without totaling the trillions in unfunded war spending that has ballooned the deficit.
Oh another problem, damn maybe we should just provide war funding without question
Sensing they have no voice, many peace voters are fed up with Obama, the Democratic party and politics in general. They do not volunteer, are not energized and may not even vote. These voters tend to be white and isolated from the currents of loyalty to Obama that run deep in the African-American community. As detached independents, they lack the material interest in electoral outcomes that draws groups like organized labor into electoral battles. These voters—potentially non-voters—go so far as to complain that Obama and Romney are essentially identical, that Democrats and Republicans are Tweedledee and Tweedledum, even that Obama has been worse than George Bush. They dismiss as an illusion any overarching economic debate between Obama and Romney over corporate power and Wall Street. They implicitly believe that Democratic voters (seniors, blacks, Latinos, women, labor, environmentalists, LGBT activists, etc.) are mistaken in perceiving that the Obama-Romney difference matters.
Yeah read the rest it makes me sad.
It's where we are, two sides of the same coin.
Comments
Actually
Hayden tries to bring it back around but reading the critique meh is where I end up.
So
You're disconnected from dem politics if your identity is white and not in a union? Maybe they need more checkboxes on the form. I'm sure they could come up with some. Evicted illegally by a bank? Lost your job? No, that wouldn't include any white non union voters, best to stick with the traditional identities that have nothing to do with the class war. Why bring people together when we can separate them and keep them from talking to each other?
Not too long ago....
... I considered "The Nation" just about the best magazine around, right up there with "Mother Jones". Now?.... ummm it's VERY hit-and-miss. And Hayden?... sad to think how some of the guys involved in Chicago 8 have fallen. I guess I should just be glad Abbie isn't still here to see it.
Oh, and one more thing
Am I the only one sick of hearing how Blacks are supposed to have some kind of "loyalty" toward Obama? I think that's insulting (to Blacks) in the extreme. I don't know how well this will go over, but I'm gonna say it anyway: IMO, anyone (whether you're black or white or hispanic or whatever) who votes for a politician mainly because that politician is Black (or any other race), is nearly as racist as someone who votes AGAINST a politician because of his/her race.
I don't think its "loyalty."
This is a really interesting scene from Alexandra Pelosi's documentary about the right wing during the 2008 election where a McCain volunteer is talking to a group of black men. One of them point blank tells her, "I ain't voting for no Republican." That is a sentiment that I can relate to, as a gay man. I suspect that the reason why many racial/ethnic and sexual minority groups vote for Democrats is the hostility we feel from Republicans. Same with union voters. We may get a lot of lip service from Democrats, but Republicans use antipathy toward us to get votes.
The GOP scares me. It frightens me what they can do with power. That's why I vote for Democrats. The brain-dead media might call it loyalty, but I really don't think it is. It's fear.
this sentence is pure conjecture
These voters tend to be white and isolated from the currents of loyalty to Obama that run deep in the African-American community.
so, non white voters are not interested in peace? really? really?? and that hypothesis is supported by which studies???????? massive failure and terrible writing.
hard to say without it sounding elitist
It's difficult to say without it sounding like an elitist putdown but most independent voters are not really independent as much as they are simply ignorant. I mean ignorant in the classical definition of being uninformed, not ignorant as in stupid. Independent voters in 2012 have none of my sympathy and little of my attention. Really? You're 'independent'? So, Mr. and Mrs. Independent American you would give the Republican party another chance at power since they performed so well since, oh, say 2000. You're not independent. You just do not pay attention and you don't know what is happening in the world around you.
it's not elitist at all to say that...
we are an incredibly dumbed down low info public, and generally "independent" does not mean what it used to mean.
and i just love the meme (not) that says independent voters are centrist. what bullocks that is... pffft...
No, the Republican Party doesn't deserve....
... another chance. But you know what? Neither does the Democratic Party, at least not under its current "leader"ship.
Ugh.
The money we spend on killing and dying is depressing.
Which is why voting for Obama is....
.... so much better than voting for Romney. At least we know Obama isn't into wars and killing and all that other cool stuff. Yaybama!
That's me
I wouldn't vote for a Republican if the vote came with a $100 bill attached to it. There is nothing in the radical, extremist, anti woman/gay/ etc. agenda that a tax cut will offset.
I'm not Andrew Sullivan who thought George Bush was hunky dory until the lightening bolt hit him and he realized "golly gee, the GOP is anti-gay".
This has to be one of the biggest POS I have read at the Nation
Not all antiwar voters are white. Some of the AA loyalty issues Glen Ford has touched upon and it is a challenge as far as many in the AA community being loyal to a president that doesn't represent them and tells them to stop whining and to stop complaining about his neoliberalism, but they are just as capable of nuance as anyone else and it is insulting to say otherwise.
It's also insulting to deny or completely ignore facts as this article does in that Obama's deference to Wall ST buying Schneiderman off in that sham of a foreclosure fraud settlement hurts the AA and Latino communities the most as they are suffering the most from the subprime mortgage crisis.That's one issue I point out at other blogs and it's never been rebutted. Obama also hires for profit prison advocates in his DOJ singing off on what Holder does and that especially hurts the AA community who suffer from our injustice system.
These are all inconvenient facts partisan outlets like the Nation who send me DCCC and DSCC fundraising emails ignore. It's pathetic. I like some writers there still, but this shit is sad and delusional.
Obama is a war candidate. The Afghanistan conflict is not going to end anytime in the next decade. He's not going to end Bush's war on terror which will be expensive forever. People willing to just vote for him don't care anymore either. the sad truth is that besides a handful, there never was a peace vote in these modern third way Democratic times. It was an act to be part of a club.
The war in Libya is what killed the Nation.
I saw it happen. Before the war, the Nation was still giving Obama some shit, but after Libya started they got suckerpunched by humanitarian intervention.
Ahh, that's a shame
The war in Libya was a direct violation of the War Powers Act and it's now blowing up in our faces as we were lied to about everything regarding that.
Remember, from 2002, that being a peace voter ...
... is one alternative, being a patriotic voter another:
What a slick candidate he was
Just to take the Civil War, the reality is far more sloppy and disturbing than his clear-cut description of an ideological war to end slavery. It may be true enough that Grant's armies freed the slaves, but it is also true that Lincoln included emancipation late in the cause because he needed to energize flagging support. Notice that the date of the Emancipation Proclamation is 1863, not 1861. The Civil War, like almost all wars, was fought over contested control of territory (the rapidly expanding country) and economic competition and, like almost all wars, the reason was given as a high-minded ideological cause. The more pure intentions of the minority of people who were motivated by a revulsion of slavery were skillfully manipulated to bring their support to the cause, just as we saw liberals convinced that dropping bombs on Libyans was somehow a humanitarian effort. This is not to say that the Civil War did not create some good, but it would be more accurately viewed as collateral benefit rather than as the burning motivation for the fight. All wars are sloppy and unpredictable and are almost always motivated by base motives of acquisition and power. The clean view of a war as a tidy enterprise which accomplished high-minded goals only emerges after the fact and is defined by the victors. As A.J. Muste said
That final quote ...
... places a spotlight on the core flaw of US foreign policy after WWII.