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Originally Posted by reconmike
Why just federal office Host? When state and local corruption affects me and most people more. You see I live in Jersey the most corrupt democratic state in the union, I can cut and paste 5 pages of the shit that they pull in Jersey.
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Let's see it, reconmike.....walk us through it, for comparison's sake.....
As far as the federal parties comparison, I'm going to start with the Cunningham corruption "linkage", and the mostly unrelated corruption of Rep. Doolittle and his wife, after I comment about Alcee Hastings. I am going to make my arguments about impact and co-ordination....the web of corruption and it's consequences and potential consequences, because I think that those are the two things, besides the sheer numbers of corrupt republicans, that set the examples in each party, apart......
RE: New Jersey, New Sopranos episode is on HBO, now. I'll be back just after 10:00 pm EDT.....
My goal is to separate substance from feelings......I can't say it enough.....
....and willravel, I cannot agree with you about the democrats being "broken".
To be sure, there are "money party" democrats....the Clintons....and now, probably....Obama, as well. But there are democrats who have almost no peers in the republican ranks....men like Russ Feingold, Dennis Kucinich, and even Howard Dean....politicians who have not "sold out".....remember the "Fancy Ford" website designed to attack Harold Ford's masculinity and to set him apart from voters, because of his race...(ethnicity)?
I posted about the "Fancy Ford" attack in March, 2006....
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=102077
Seven months later, a new thread dealt with it as if it was comical:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthread.php?t=109936
That is what republican strategists are good at...they certainly can't run on their record:
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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/...y-digby-i.html
Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah
by digby
I think that one of the reasons the conservatives are mostly hanging tough with Coulter is at least partially due to what she specifically said. She used the word "faggot" to describe a Democrat. This is the premise that forms the entire basis of the Republican claim to leadership and lies at the bottom of the media's continuing ridiculous assumption that the Republicans are more natural leaders than Democrats. For forty years the Republicans have been winning elections by calling liberals "faggots" (and "dykes") in one way or another. It's what they do. To look too closely at what she said is to allow light on their very successful reliance on gender stereotypes to get elected......
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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/...-there-is.html
Man Up
by digby
I see that there is a little argument going on in the comments of this post over at Election Central as to whether John Edwards was asking for the Republicans and the Queenbee to go after him when he spent $400 on a haircut. Some people believe that he is a hypocrite because his campaign is based on the "two Americas" theme and his spending so much money makes him look bad.
I don't know if that's the case, but I do know that's not what the Republicans and the Queen Bee are getting at. It's not about how much the haircut cost --- it's about the fact that he gets his hair cut by a fancy "hairdresser" instead of a butch barber like a real man would. They are basically calling him a "faggot" just like Coulter just as Coulter did.
They are feminizing him, the same way they feminized Gore with his earth tones and Kerry with his "flip-flopping" you-know-what.They tried to do it with Clinton but couldn't really get at him very well because he was a womanizer --- so they said his wife was a dyke instead.
The Republicans start these memes and pass them around to their little insider pals because they know it amuses the sophomoric punditocrisy during homeroom. But it is also a way for them to get the media to subtly identify with the manly virtues they covet or admire, thus furthering the GOP goal of alienating the legions of insecure white males (and the women who love them) in this country from the Democratic party. They've been doing it for years, ever since the 60's when Ronnie was talking about how you couldn't tell the girls from the boys anymore.
Don't confuse this with money. These people are all millionaires. This is about social hierarchy and high school archetypes being used to sell Republicans --- and the dupes or agents in the press who help them. If they haven't signed on to GOP politics directly, the Queen and all her followers in the media at least signed on to the idea that if they treat the Dems like a bunch of feminized losers, tripping them in the halls, knocking over their lunch trays and putting "kick me" signs on their backs, the awesome BMOC's will finally invite them to the party. Why do you think they kissed that macho jerk Don Imus's butt all those years?
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and....the "freepers" loved the "the Queenbee's" "hit piece"......
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http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1821156/posts
Running With Scissors (Dowd Takes Down Edwards)
New York Times ^ | 21 April 2007 | Maureen Dowd
Posted on 04/21/2007 5:23:01 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...Americans have revered such homely leaders as Abe Lincoln. They seem open to balding pates like Rudy’s and flattops like Jon Tester’s. They don’t want self-confidence to look like self-love.[If this is original with Dowd, it is a very good summary of human nature]...
...Someone who aspires to talk credibly about the two Americas can’t lavish on his locks what working families may spend on electricity in a year. You can’t sell earnestness while indulging in decadence......
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http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...42&postcount=2
Impossible, Ridiculous, Repugnant
October 6, 2005, Thursday
By BOB HERBERT (NYT); Editorial Desk
......Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P.'s biggest hero, opposed both the Civil Rights Act
and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960's. And he began his general
election campaign in 1980 with a powerfully symbolic appearance in
Philadelphia, Miss., where three young civil rights workers were murdered
in the summer of 1964. He drove the crowd wild when he declared: "I believe
in states' rights.".........
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater
.......Atwater on the Southern Strategy
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to historian Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N-word, N-word, N-word.' By 1968 you can't say 'N-word' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.....
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I cannot believe that people here who I respect for other reasons, can post an opinion that the two parties are ALL the same. The democrats are flawed, to be sure....but they are not, in the majority, completely sold out to narrow interests, and they are not, as of this writing, appearing as an organization that is indistinguishable from an organized crime operation.....