obama > clinton

ok, so hillary clinton just beat barack obama in new hampshire, which i am not happy about at all. i was very happy when barack obama won by such a large margin in iowa. and i am glad that mitt romney was defeated by mike huckabee in iowa and defeated again by john mccain in new hampshire. i am glad that rudy giuliani has done horribly in every state so far and is pursuing an insane strategy of doing most of his campaigning in florida. giuliani has the most totalitarian views of government power over individuals and the most radically neoconservative foreign policy views and advisors. mitt romney is a complete phony who changed his positions on all the issues to advance his personal political career. i am hoping that billionaire mike bloomberg does not enter the race as an independent, since he could very well ruin everything. i am glad that john edwards is not winning the democratic race, since he is the most mean-spirited with attacks on fellow democratic candidates, providing potential ammunition for the republicans in the general election. bill clinton has been disgracing himself a lot recently with all of his nasty and nonsensical attacks against barack obama. bill clinton got elected thanks to ross perot dividing the conservative vote in 1992, went on to lose congress big time in 1994, won in 1996 with the help of back-stabbing traitorous republican strategist dick morris, was impeached in 1998 due to his scandalous behavior, and failed to get his vice president al gore elected president in 2000. bill clinton’s primary legacy was handing all 3 branches of the government over to the republicans, and leaving the democratic party in disarray, full of leaders who knew nothing about winning elections or advancing progressive/liberal priorities, who only knew how to surrender to the republicans and let the republicans make all the decisions. he ended the welfare system that helped the poor, and pushed through the nafta agreement that shipped jobs to mexico, paving the way for permanent normalized trade relations with china, and of course the world trade organization. he was no “first black president”. he had us democrats all mesmerized and by the time we woke up and realized what was going on, the republicans were in control of everything, and were eagerly dismantling our civil liberties and plotting pre-emptive wars. bill clinton denounced howard dean in the 2004 democratic presidential primaries, even as al gore was endorsing him, and bill clinton helped john kerry get the nomination that was ultimately doomed to failure because john kerry was too wishy-washy and could not make up his mind on a matter as simple as the war in iraq. john edwards, by the way, helped earn the defeat of john kerry as well, by refusing to go on the offensive as vice-presidential candidates traditionally do, and having a relentlessly positive message that made no sense for a challenger running against an incumbent administration. of course, john kerry also had a large part to play in this defeat, especially when he failed to go after the swift boat liars for bullshit. anyway, it seems hillary clinton won in new hampshire by winning most of the votes from people who are uneducated, such as high school dropouts or people with no education past high school. and barack obama won most of the people with advanced graduate degrees, who are much less numerous. that is the same way joe lieberman beat ned lamont in 2006 in connecticut: by winning the votes of all the stupid people. of course, hillary clinton is lucky to have surrogates like her husband to attack the other candidates, while she gets to play the victim, as if everyone is out to get her. but in her i see a victim mentality and a sense of entitlement, as if she thinks she is entitled to the job, regardless of what the people think. earlier in the campaign, she ran on a theme of inevitability, and for a while she had me convinced that nobody could stop her and it was hopeless to even try opposing her, given her commanding and consistent leads in the polls that never went away... it was quite depressing. and john edwards, when he is not attacking his fellow democrats (barack obama never says anything bad about the other candidates, by way of contrast), goes around railing against corporations and rich people. well you know who else does that? mike huckabee, a republican candidate proposing a system of taxation far more regressive than the current one, the so-called “fair tax”, which would greatly benefit the wealthy and hurt everyone else. john edwards is extremely wealthy, and we all know how john kerry’s wealth through his marriage to the heintz ketchup princess helped make him look bad. the same thing is happening with john edwards and the stories about his big mansion and $400 haircuts. it makes all his talk about helping the poor and railing against corporations look phony and ridiculous and insincere. even if he is really sincere about what he says, i do not think he can convince people of that. he certainly has not convinced me. so i support barack obama. we have had a bush or a clinton in the white house since january 1981, before i was even born, and if that ends a year from now, it will still be 28 years. imagine another 8 years of a clinton... we do not need another dynasty; just look at what the bush dynasty has brought us. and every republican candidate except ron paul promises nothing but more of the same bush policies, more wars, more tax cuts, more destruction of the environment and global warming, more redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle class to the super-rich, more chipping away at our civil liberties, more theocracy/plutocracy/kleptocracy, and filling our supreme court with more right-wing radicals like antonin scalia, clarence thomas, john roberts, and samuel alito. any republican other than ron paul, if elected, would be so much like george w. bush, it would be just like re-electing dubya a second time, for a third 4-year term. and that is why it is so important that the democrats find the right candidate who can actually win this thing. barack obama has a uniting rhetoric, not a divisive rhetoric. people are drawn to him, rather than turned off by him. independents and even republicans are drawn to him, including conservative commentators like andrew sullivan and david brooks. but he is not really a centrist, if you really look at his record, back to when he was a state senator, and a community organizer. barack obama is just as firmly committed to a liberal/progressive agenda as hillary clinton or john edwards (neither of which can remotely compare to dennis kucinich, by the way), but he is smart enough to avoid talking about issues that divide us and talk instead about things that unite us. just as ronald reagan used optimism and a positive message to win and then pushed through a staunchly right-wing agenda that brought conservatism back from the dead, and then was re-elected by an overwhelming margin, barack obama can also use this technique to win overwhelming public support and then push through a left-wing agenda. and hopefully not like bill clinton, who used optimism and a positive message and his charisma to push through an agenda of centrism and triangulation and victory for himself but defeat for the rest of his party. now recently ralph nader endorsed john edwards and wrote an article making fun of barack obama, but remember ralph nader is the genius who said there is no difference between george w. bush and al gore. i think that anyone who has observed and followed what george w. bush and al gore have both done in the last 7 years would have to conclude that they are both completely different in every possible way. ralph nader took votes away from al gore and helped george w. bush get elected, but has never had any guilt or regrets about this, and he tried to do the same thing again in 2004, but his own green party was so disgusted with him, they nominated somebody else instead and didn’t even consider him for nomination. he does not seem to understand that we have winner-take-all elections, and how a third party can never be anything except a spoiler, except under rare circumstances where more than 1/3 of voters are completely disgusted with both major parties and willing to take a chance by voting for a third-party candidate. he should have run in a presidential primary in one of the 2 main parties instead, which, it seems, he has now realized is the best way to win, since he is endorsing john edwards. but john edwards’s rhetoric railing against rich people and corporations is dangerous, because it means that rich people and corporations will be much less inclined to finance his campaign, and you need their money to win an election. someone like barack obama, on the other hand, could have them all fooled with his inclusive, positive rhetoric that brings people together, and they might not realize what they are in for until it is too late, like how a frog in water on the stove will jump out if the water gets hot too fast, and live, but if the water is heated very slowly, the frog will just sit there and have no idea what is going on, until the water is boiling and it is dead. a similar technique will be necessary in order to get rich people to pay their fair share in taxes, and to get them to allow other essential reforms like fighting global warming and saving the environment and having universal health care. if they catch on too early to what is going on, they will use their money to finance whoever is not proposing things they oppose, and finance groups like the swift-boaters to swift-boat anyone they don’t like. now it is clear that hillary clinton promises the same kind of presidency as bill clinton, except without sex scandals, and with a woman in charge, but also without any charisma. but it would be the same people working for her, just like dubya brought back all the same people who worked for his dad and reagan and even all the way back to gerald ford. i think we ought to bring in new people who haven’t had the chance to screw this country up already, because everyone we gave that opportunity to already has succeeded amazingly well at screwing things up. and in all honesty, i do not think anyone who thought invading iraq was a good idea is qualified to be president, so only candidates who were opposed to the war before it even began are ones i am willing to consider, at least in the primaries. so, of course, this means that only one republican is qualified, namely ron paul, and all the others would be spectacular failures as president just like dubya. and among the democrats, just barack obama, dennis kucinich, and i would also add bill richardson, since although i think he originally was supportive of the war, he changed his mind pretty quickly once he saw how badly things were going, and has opposed it strongly ever since then. hillary clinton and john edwards both have much more mixed records on the war, and although they talk like they oppose the war in iraq nowadays, they voted for it and keep sending mixed messages about it, and might keep troops there another 5 years. barack obama is also supposedly one of the ones who might keep troops there another 5 years, but given the fact that he opposed this war right from the start, i would have to say that the antiwar message sounds a lot more trustworthy from him than from clinton or edwards. now nobody can compare to dennis kucinich in terms of being a liberal/progressive or being antiwar, but also, nobody can compare to him in terms of getting very low numbers in the polls and having no chance to win presidential primaries, let alone general elections. i would have to say the only issue dennis kucinich and i have any significant disagreement is on no child left behind, which he and most other democratic candidates want to keep, and only bill richardson has the correct position that we should get rid of that orwellian doublespeak unfunded mandate which has imposed undue financial burdens on our schools while failing to improve our academics, by limiting education to teaching things that are on standardized tests, and nothing more. but bill richardson is going to drop out of the race tomorrow, according to the news. and dennis kucinich has a message that the wealthy elites find much scarier than the message from john edwards, since kucinich would put the entire health insurance industry out of business, and put in place a single-payer government-run system. john edwards might use them as a rhetorical punching bag, but there is little evidence edwards is actually serious about taking them on, since he is very wealthy himself, and his voting record when he was in the senate was not exactly the most left-wing. barack obama is the only leading candidate i actually have any trust in, and that is on either side. he seems so authentic, perhaps because he writes his own speeches instead of having other people write his lines for him. ralph nader ran against the kerry-edwards ticket in 2004 when bush was running for re-election, so why does he support edwards now? it seems a bit inconsistent. now what is most interesting is how even the republicans are all talking about the need for change, and the word change that everyone keeps repeating is one they all copied from barack obama, showing how he is the best at crafting a winning message. but it also shows that republicans are dissatisfied with the way things are in the country right now, and think there are a lot of problems the next president will be faced with, which is funny, because who created those problems or made them all much worse? the answer is unavoidable: george w. bush. but to a republican, that answer is unthinkable, since they put him in office twice, and they supported him through thick and thin, and never really questioned anything he said, just putting their complete trust in him without thinking. although it is obvious that george w. bush is responsible for our gigantic national debt and for making people all over the rest of the world hate us and failing to catch osama bin laden and fighting a botched war in iraq that was a mistake all along, republicans find this unthinkable and would rather blame somebody else for everything their president did wrong. and now they want to elect another president who will continue all of bush’s failed policies that have ruined this country, and have our country continue digging its own grave. do we really want a democratic candidate who is too divisive and polarizing and turns people off? that is exactly what mike bloomberg wants! and then he will run as an independent, and some liberals will be dumb enough to vote for him instead of the democrat, especially since, as a billionaire, he can easily afford to blanket us with his propaganda until it works on us and use the big-brother technique of “microtargeting” that his mayoral campaign pioneered in 2001. and this will hand the election to the republicans, who will continue bush’s policies for another 4 or even 8 years, destroying what is left of this country. this is very serious business here, and we have to have a candidate who can win, not someone like hillary clinton who is hated not only by republicans but also by people all across the political spectrum, even including many on the left who have pledged they would never vote for her. and john edwards has done nothing but campaign since he lost in 2004, and is still not doing that well in the polls, after all that time and effort, and his message is quite divisive and will energize those on the other side and help them turn out their vote if he is the nominee. we need someone who can trick rich people into giving them money, and then turn around and not do what the rich people want. bill clinton actually did do what the rich people wanted, by the way, which is why the stock market did so well and why rich people made so much money under his presidency, and the growth in the income gap continued under dubya, although it has been going on for many, many years. but a persuasive speaker like barack obama could get the rich people to “pull the wool over your own eyes”, as they say. i have noticed that while feminism has become quite unpopular, and political correctness towards women is a lot less prevalent nowadays, there is still a great deal of political correctness towards african-americans, and this could help barack obama win. people seem afraid to criticize him for fear of being labeled racist, and if that works in the general election, he could easily win. i mean, for crying out loud, even republicans claim to oppose racism, at least publicly. that is despite the fact that they continue to rely on symbols like the confederate flag or campaign at schools like bob jones university that banned interracial dating or say that things would have been much better if the openly racist strom thurmond of 1948 had won that election. they have to use those techniques to win the votes of all the racists in the south who used to be democrats decades ago, but got kicked out of the party and replaced with people who supported the civil rights movement. a certain percentage of the electorate is still racist and they are crucial to winning elections for republicans in the south. now barack obama probably has no chance in those states, because of all the racism there, but that will probably help him in the rest of the country, you know, the part that did not practice slavery, did not fight for the confederacy in the civil war, and did not have segregation. of course, hillary clinton could easily win the general election, if women were actually loyal to their own gender. as a white man, i have no need to be loyal to my gender or my race, since white men are probably still going to control most things no matter what i do, and do the other white men really need my help? certainly not. even if they did need my help, i would not care. i do not believe in petty tribalism, in being loyal to some group just because you happen to be one of them. being disloyal to your group can actually benefit you as an individual. just look at ann coulter and how she is disloyal to women, or look at clarence thomas and how he is disloyal to black people. in both their cases, it really paid off. although conservatives advocate getting rid of affirmative action and having men in charge in marriage and doing other things that would benefit white men, i do not really need their help. in fact, i am actually a member of a minority group that people hate, namely atheists, and since conservatives have declared all-out-war against atheists, i am already one of their enemies despite the fact that i am a white man, so it would not make sense to support republicans, since this would help them oppress people of reason by making religion mandatory. prayer in public schools, monuments to the ten commandments in all the government buildings, that would just be the beginning. although they are playing nice with the jews, christian fundamentalists are denouncing both islam and atheism, and would probably eventually go after jews and even their fellow christians if they had the chance, since they want to eliminate all points of view except for their own. i have listened to christian radio stations and these people really scare me with their radical totalitarian agenda. they are like the islamic fundamentalists except they have not turned violent... not yet. but the vast majority of criminals in jail are people of faith, and atheists are almost completely unknown in our prisons. so... maybe these christian fundamentalists are not as nonviolent as they might seem. i have read articles about how the united states military is being taken over by christian fundamentalists under this administration, and how the megachurches have adopted a militaristic agenda. who knows what horrors lurk in store for us if we have another republican president? will the war on terror escalate into an all-out religious crusade of christians against muslims? if that happens, i wonder what will happen to the muslims in our own country? will they be sent to concentration camps? will they be provoked into fighting guerrilla warfare against the rest of the country and carrying out terrorist attacks all over our country? how can we keep our country from escalating to that kind of insanity? i think it starts with getting out of iraq, and not invading any more of their countries. now republicans keep accusing barack obama of being a muslim, which shows how much they hate muslims, and how little regard they have for the truth, since it has been proven time and time again that barack obama is a christian, part of the united church of christ, and was never a muslim in his life. there is a chain email they are sending around, and rush limbaugh keeps saying barack obama is a muslim, thinking that if he keeps repeating the same lie over and over, people will believe it... but that is too charitable towards rush limbaugh. he actually believes the lies he repeats over and over, and he has had a long pattern of repeating all sorts of lies over and over, for many years. if you try to correct him, he will just argue with you and say he is right and you are wrong, and then insult you. and a whole lot of other republican pundits have patterned themselves after rush limbaugh, like bill o’reilly and sean hannity on faux news. i think we would be much better off without the faux news channel, but that is another story... that channel, with its bullshit and blatant propaganda, has influence on other media outlets, and now we are even seeing things like william kristol being hired by the new york times, after spending years as the editor of the weekly standard, the neoconservative propaganda journal published by rupert murdoch, who also owns faux news. and of course he is still editor of the weekly standard, and he gets to be on tv all the time because of faux news. he is the least qualified pundit in the entire world, and doesn’t even deserve a job as dogcatcher... i bet the local dogcatcher would write better new york times columns than him. when someone has not just failed a little bit at their job, but failed catastrophically, and managed to do it time and time again, it is time to find a new line of work. unfortunately, faux news has helped promote a media culture that promotes people like william kristol instead of putting them out on the street. they promote incompetence, just like the bush administration, and brownie heckuvajob who did such a good job dealing with hurricane katrina. if we have another republican president, we should expect more brownie heckuvajobs in the government trying to prove that government is incompetent with their own incompetence.