sm77 at PUMA blog the Confluence sums up their irrelevance in a goodbye post (emphasis mine):
To think we waited 8 years PRAYING for a Democratic President. Well now we have one and I still feel the same. But as a true, firebrand, loud and hellacious liberal who endured the Dubya years, my job is to dislike the president and critique anything and everything the president does. So it’s not like things have changed much. Instead of a “W” now we have an “O.” Instead of obsessively myopic Evangelicals, we have obsessively myopic Obamacrats. Meet the new boss, same as the old.
PUMA power couldn’t resist going out with one last bang of ironic detachment from reality. McCain, affectionally dubbed McSame, was cast out in enthusiastic favor of Obama. The sense I got, reflecting on the vitriol sent our way by McCain/Palin supporters with those who supported Obama, Edwards, and Clinton during the primary season, was that we all had won. The 18 million strong turned out to be a couple hundred vocal pundits and bloggers after all.
Meanwhile the candidates who stood for the same principals and policies as Hillary Clinton carried the day, defeating the heir to Bush’s self styled throne and the Cheney loving anti-feminist he picked as a “fuck you nod” to disaffected Clinton supporters.
Now is the time to recognize what Obama stands for, and to take up the banner he shares with Clinton and help bring progress to this great nation of ours. Now is the time to leave PUMA behind, and follow Hillary Clinton’s lead and support our new President.
How desperate do you have to be when you edit your user’s comments to fraudulently make it appear they support your position? Riverdaughter has sunk to a depressing low.
(Edited for the amusement of the Site Administrator)
My original comment asked how she could support writing Hillary Clinton in, when the NY Senator is not running, and in fact endorsed Barack Obama to continue fighting for their shared political positions. I asked how PUMA could support John McCain, when he is pro-war, anti-choice, and stands against expanding health care (once Hillary Clinton’s signature issue).
The little disclaimer slipped in there leaves much to the imagination. Is this Dan (Fitness) guy a Hillary supporter? Did he leave spam or abusive comments? No. I just left a comment that ripped apart the flimsy rationale behind PUMA’s existence, and she couldn’t take the criticism.
There will be no love train. I’m not onboard. I will never be onboard.
You didn’t listen to us during the primaries.
You didn’t listen to us during the convention.
You are going to hear from us in November.
Barack Obama will NEVER get my vote. I don’t owe the party anything.
And if you want to find someone to blame, look no further than the superdelegates.
Backlash is comin’. We will make the powers that be the powers that were.
Let the DNC and your State Attorney General know how you feel about having your vote stolen by faithless delegates and a party who asks for your taxdollars to run a primary and then does what the hell it wants.
No riverdaughter, you don’t owe the party anything. You owe it to yourself to vote for the candidate who stands for what Hillary Clinton still stands for. You are using Hillary Clinton’s name, yes, but you are going against her own wishes, her own politics, and everything she fought so hard for. You are screaming about the glass ceiling while standing with John McCain as he tries vainly to keep Barack Obama from breaking through.
I won’t let another Republican get into the oval office and damage this country like Bush has. PUMA can add “my ass” every time I say party unity, but as November gets closer, the call for unity will drown their snide and selfish whine out with the roar of progress.
I’ve supported the Democrats for 40 years because the Dem party was also the democratic party. This year, those two things have diverged.
No, they haven’t. One candidate won the primary with the most votes and the most delegates. PUMA is standing against democracy in democracy’s name. Why should the majority of voters be disenfranchised so your candidate (who now supports Obama) can be installed?
I hope I’ll be able to support the Dem party in the future but with different leadership that respects our commitment to democracy. Leftists have taken control of the party, casting our liberal ideals aside, and they need to go.
We aren’t going anywhere. It is the centrists, the spineless cowards who caved to Bush on every affront to life, liberty and justice, who need to go. The word leftist should never be a dirty one to a Democrat.
The only way we can get our party back is to make sure they lose in November.
Right, because that worked so well in 2000. That’s the same reasoning that led people to choose Nader over Gore in states that mattered. (For the record, that election was lost in the courts, and not by the slim margin of votes that went to Nader). The point is that viewing defeat as anything is unrealistic. If the Democrats lose to McCain, it will be a loss, and we will feel it: in the courts and in our foreign and domestic policy.
Loyal Democrats like us who don’t support Obama have been told by Donna Brazile to shut up and stay home on election day. No, we won’t. She also said that the “new” party doesn’t need us, it’s long loyal base. If the “new” Democrats succeed under these circumstances, we won’t even have a party to go to in the future. We’ve been put out and have no place to go right now except to McCain.
I don’t want you to stay home on election day. I want you to vote. But keep clearly in mind that if you actually vote for McCain, there is no way in hell you are a loyal Democrat. Not because you are voting against the party’s candidate in the race. Because by supporting John McCain you’d be supporting the disaterous foreign and domestic policy of George W. Bush, and joining in an assault on everything Hillary Clinton stood for.
You say you are a loyal Democrat. Do you support freedom of choice? An end to discrimination based on sexual orientation? Peace in the Middle East? Universal Healthcare? Economic policy informed by economists, not lobbyists? Preserving the environment? Stopping torture and domestic spying by our own government? Freedom of speech? Separation of Church and State? The Rule of Law? Tackling excessive lobbyist influence and political corruption?
If you actually support John McCain over Barack Obama, recognize you’ll be taking a big step back on all of these issues. In some cases, even further back than George W. Bush himself has dragged us.
Barack Obama is not the best candidate in the world, but he is a solid candidate. And he will move us forward on each and every one of the issues above.
As the convention approaches, PUMA‘s distance from Hillary Clinton will become even sharper. That will leave the PUMA crowd with a choice between a candidate with experience fighting everything Hillary Clinton stood for, or a candidate with less experience (but hardly none) fighting for the same ideals, positions, and people Hillary Clinton represented. Who will they choose?
Bruce pointed me to this in the comments, and hot damn is this awful. Essentially, PUMA (via the Confluence) setup what was supposed to be a giant conference of 250 people. They got 60. As Bruce acidly and accurately observes:
The conference was a furtive mess than culminated in a fresh bout of lies to feed to the press. Which seems to be nothing new for a group that considers Hillary Clinton the rebel to Barack Obama’s establishment.
I think the best observation about PUMA supports comes from brian in the comments(emphasis mine):
hillary supporters are funny, especially if they like hillary enough to vote for mccain over obama. You still gotta live here after mccain wins, you fools.
I hope the 60 2.5 million PUMA supporters take that to heart. What kind of country are they working for?
According to riverdaughter, the effort to override the voters (Obama won both delegates and the popular vote) and install Hillary Clinton as Presidential candidate is now a movement (emphasis mine):
There are MILLIONS of us. This is no exaggeration.
The first day that Darragh Murphy opened her doors on PUMAPac, she got 35,000 hits. That’s ONLINE hits. There are many, many more people who aren’t internet addicts who we are contacting every day. This movement was sparked by the RBC meeting and took off like wildfire. It was always our intention to use the internet and the media to get our word out.
You just can’t pack more humor into your unintentional statements folks. PUMAPac is getting ONLINE hits. In the thousands! Entitlement Action Clinton fans can rejoice, she now is seeing a wave of online popularity that vaguely approaches Ron Paul before the word got out. She’s practically the next big thing.
There will be a roll call vote (great, now Hillary will get to see who her percieved enemies are) at the convention. Hillary Clinton is not going to win, despite her efforts. If she unseated the elected nominee, there would be enough chaos to give someone as utterly unqualified as possible to become President the boost he needs. No, what will happen is a close vote in which Obama is declared the nominee. Meanwhile Hillary’s crass effort to count votes in states where her opponents didn’t campaign or weren’t on the ballot and PUMA’s complaints about the losing the Democratic process will fall flat. The only thing they will garner is plenty of “serious, hard hitting” articles examining whether or not the Democratic party is falling apart.
It isn’t. There is simply a tug of war still going on between the two establishment candidates, the one who won, and the one who lost. And in the fall Obama will win on a hard-won landslide procurred by supporters desperate to avoid the further suffering, violence, and economic downturn that would intensify under a McCain Presidency.
Gary Chapell Hill over at pro-Hillary-at-any-cost blog The Confluence has an important piece up on free speech zones at the Unity event in NH:
As soon as we got there they informed us that we would have to move to “free speech zones”. I will let the video speak for itself, but first I would like to post some commentary from the “progressive blogosphere” regarding these zones. I will assume that they are just a bunch of hypocrites until they speak out against the suppression of free speech by the Obama campaign.
We should absolutely speak out strongly against this tactic. And its not the first time the Obama campaign has resorted to it. Although I find it darkly humorous (if predictable) that Hillary’s supporters have cast a blind eye to their failed candidate’s own use of free speech zones during this election. In fact, the Democratic Party as a whole seems to have embraced the practice back in 2004! Nice.
The Republican Party is a more natural fit, and they do not dissapoint.
Free Speech Zones have become a part and parcel of campaigns exerting nervous control over the percpetion of their events. Obama supporters don’t want a handful of Hillary-or-bust nuts conveying a mainstream glow onto a fringe movement.
The thing is aside from being completely against the vest principles America has to offer, it is a poor strategy. The media will break its back searching for anti-candidate protesters when it fits the sellable narrative. Censorship accomplishes two things. It ensures photos of the crowd lack bitter pro-Hillary slogans, and it allows anti-Obama protesters the chance to pose as free speech matyrs.
Its a stupid practice and it should stop. The Obama campaign and we his supporters should take notice, even when its pointed out by utter hypocrites.
Something is wrong. These are our allies, and the level of mistrust and hatred is palpable. But so is the level of denial (The Confluence):
Doesn’t look too good for him though. I love the stories from fellow conflucians about how they are responding to requests for donations from the DNC. I think Paul’s (plukasiak) was my favorite:
off topic, but…
Just got mail from the Obama campaign. So I wrote a check for $100, tore it in half, and am sending it along with this message…
Dear Senator Obama
On behalf of my friends in Florida, please find half a check for $100. Since your campaign saiid their votes should only count as half votes, I figure you’ll know what to do with half a check.
But, in case you need a hint – the RBC corruptly ensured your nomination while violating the DNC charter “sunshine” povisiions for meetings. In that spirit, you can take my half-check, and put it ‘where the sun don’t shine’.
Hillary Clinton ran in Florida against zero opponents. If the Florida vote were to be in any way representative, it would have had to be a revote. But at the same time, it is important Obama supporters recognize why the Florida situation is bullshit. Its bullshit because the primary system we have let’s some states have an inordinate say in the process. Florida tried to skip ahead in line, and got stuck arguing about whether or not it was caught doing anything wrong with the DNC. Instead of acting like a sneaky kid in class, Floridians ought to join the rest of the country and demand that we do away with delegates, single-state primaries and conventions. How about one national primary, popular vote only? Hell, why not have that for the general?
This is the kind of thing we need to talk about, that we need to focus on. Otherwise we can turn this quarrel about Florida into a debate over what caused us to lose to McCain.
Dear Clinton Supporters Who Oppose the Party Nominee,
The primary was bitterly fought. But the candidates, policy wise, are vastly more similar than Clinton is to say, John McCain. And experience, the trumpet call of the Clintonistas, isn’t quite the issue its being made out to be (XX-Factor, emphasis mine):
I answered her that the experience issue doesn’t resonate with me, especially as Cheney and Rummy had been around since the last ice age, and where did that get us? Hillary has been in the Senate only four years longer than Obama: big whoop. If you count his time in the Illinois Senate, he’s actually had more experience as an elected official. (And while of course her experience as first lady counts for something, would we give Laura Bush full credit for those years—even though, as she belatedly tells us, she, too, had a big policy role all along?) The whole experience question just feels like a stand-in for race, or maybe something else I’m missing. Because when someone says they would slit their wrist before voting for Obama, that is NOT about Clinton having been in the Senate longer.
PUMA stands for Party Unity My Ass. Its quite catchy, and the logo works well. Its just that the sentiment underneath it all is rotten, and the effect it will have will go directly against the people holding up the banner. Letting McCain win this election is a mistake that comes with a dreadful cost. Another term of NeoConservative Power in our highest office puts our courts, our rights, our economy and our security at risk.
But I wanted to speak especially to riverdaughter, about her post. I like your blog, I identify with your politics. But rather than pulling together to fight a man who stands against everything you stand for, you’ve engaged in the politics of personal destruction, and aimed your rhetorical heat ray at Obama supporters:
I’d like to refer you to one of Anglachel’s latest posts, The Idea of Obama. I think that what Anglachel is describing is a kind of “puppy love” or an infatuation. The situation we have here is precisely the reason why superdelegates were created in the first place. There is a unacknowledged immaturity about the Obama faction that many parents among us will recognize.
…
Like adolescents, they insist on making their own decisions and yet expect us to get them out of a jam later. They hate us because of who we are and yet they need us in order for them to get what they want. And the superdelegates are the too permissive parents who are giving in to them because they can’t handle the screaming and guilt trips that will follow if they don’t.
There is nothing adolescent about my decision to support Barack Obama for President. It is not an emotional whine by an infatuated child. It is a reasoned choice based on my assessment of the candidate’s positions, electability, skill, character, and strength. And I am not alone in that:
It is an insulting tact to take.
The fact is Obama won the most delegates. That counting Michigan and Florida never should have been contentious. Obama didn’t campaign there, so the only option would have either been a new primary or no dice, not some compromise allowing a false election to go forward and benefit the only candidate who didn’t play ball. Hillary Clinton lost. But her policies don’t have to.
Obama is not a perfect candidate, but he is a strong candidate. I like him because his policies are largely within the range of what I support, because he has the good sense to surround himself with smart people and listen to them. This is most evident when you look his support among (and reliance on) economists. This is why the whole “We’ve had an inexperienced politician before” argument, a clear reference to Bush, always fell utterly flat. Obama isn’t going to get into office and force his authoritarian politics onto this country. He’s going to do his best to open it up and encourage people to step up and take advantage of it. I can easily stand behind a guy who represents a movement towards democracy, not a cowardly retreat towards the status quo.
And please don’t mistake that for idealism. It is a somewhat cranky pragmatism born of experience. The status quo right now is all about various elites working in a non transparent environment, and we only get to consume the product. Thats not government, that’s business.
For a government to truly be by the people, we need more transparency, more reform, and more efforts to build up and organize people. And on every single issue stemming from this, Obama is on the right side of the debate with McCain in direct opposition.
The media is building a false narrative that Hillary Clinton helped begin (Telegraph):
But to most Americans – the ones who are less beguiled by rhetoric and more concerned with financial survival, and those who need practical reassurance more than inspiration – this election will be about proven character and tested judgment.
John McCain is a terrible choice, and infinitely inferior to Obama when it comes to the economy. As for proven character and tested judgement, we need look no further (but we can and should) than issues like the war, civil rights, or separation of church and state. On every one of these issues McCain has given up principle in favor of appeal to the most twisted branch of the Republican party. On everyone of these issues Barack Obama has stood firmly and proudly.
I began this election cycle supporting John Edwards. Right now I am supporting a man who I believe can and should win, against a man who should never see elected office again. This is a fight whose consequences will be felt. I invite you warmly to join in. Help us avoid another four years of Bush, and help us find eight years of competence, compassion and wisdom.
Even if this is just a baby step forward, we’ll need every muscle in the Democratic body to avoid being forced to take a giant step backwards.
Newsweek’s Howard Fineman just said on MSNBC at 8:35pm Eastern that the Clinton campaign is demanding that Hillary be offered the VP position, which she will then decline, and then Fineman quotes the Clinton campaign as saying “don’t you dare offer it to another woman.” Isn’t that special. Apparently, Hillary was only planning on breaking her own personal glass ceiling. For the rest of you, you can break you own.
I hope the above is not true. Selfishness that goes that far is a serious character flaw.
Hillary Clinton’s assassination quote is far more problematic than I originally thought.
Frankly I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in the light of what I felt where more serious offenses, but I think I was wrong to do so. Kevin noticed some interesting trends in terms of how people responded to her quote:
At the primarily white blogs, there is much debate over whether or not what she has said is offensive (I won’t bother repeating it here since it’s been posted everywhere) and yet when you look at black bloggers, and other bloggers of color, there is an almost unanimous agreement that her remarks were reprehensible. I also noticed that in the links being provided by blog authors and commentators at the primarily white blogs, to support their agreement or disagreement with the offensiveness of Sen. Clinton’s statements, all are to other primarily white blogs and white bloggers. I find this problematic because I’ve seen a lot of comments on these blogs to the effect of “anyone who thinks that her statement was truly offensive is paranoid, a nut case, delusional, incapable of rational thought, etc,” and this leads me to think that a lot of people just aren’t taking into consideration, let alone even reading and listening to the black and other bloggers of color that Clinton’s statement has affected not only on a political level, but on a deeply personal level.
As I was writing a comment, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. In spite of whether or not her quote had ill intention behind it, or whether she was referring to herself or Obama as RFK, her comment has helped push the idea of assassination further into mainstream discourse. Fox is apparently making cracks along the same lines (although they are decidedly more “fringe” in terms of content, in terms of reach they are effectively mainstream).
The other problem with Clinton’s remark is that it shares something reprehensible in common with John McCain’s jabs about who he imagines Hamas would like to see elected. The one thing that was utterly clear and unmistakable about Hillary Clinton’s comment was that she was saying we should structure our primaries based on the possible actions of violent racists. That we should be moved to action by fear, that is the lowest sort of pandering. It is the lowest sort of pandering because it debases us. It reduces us to animals, to prey, scrambling to avoid the predators without any care for who we scratch, bite, or leave behind in the process. It appeals to our feral nature.
When it comes down to it Barack Obama began as a candidate of convenience for me, the person I judged least likely to utterly betray Democratic ideals (and given his past support (with Clinton) of Lieberman during his primary, I was quite wary). But the man is doing what he can to elevate the national discourse. What Hillary ignores and McCain *sometimes* pretends to do, Barack Obama accomplishes.
When I think of the notions of liberty, and what it means to be an American, I think of bravery and an unwavering commitment to human rights and ethical principles. I don’t ascribe to the “what it should mean to be an American” school on this. This is what it has always meant to be an American, even if only a relative few people throughout history have seen it and lived it. If ever anything was un-American, it is an appeal to be ruled by fear. It is that appeal, in both McCain’s Bush-like “the terrorists want you to vote Democrat” and Clinton’s “we should have a backup candidate in case one is shot”, that is offensive on a visceral level.
We can do far better than that. We can appeal to hope and raise up our spirits and our innate courage. And we can win.
[Edit: Oops, the post was written by guest blogger Kevin, not Nezua.]
let’s review: in the wake of 9-11, it wasn’t just George W. Bush telling the world “every nation has to be either with us or against us.” It was Hillary, as you can hear for yourself.
In October 2002, during the debate about giving Bush authorization to invade Iraq, it wasn’t just Dick Cheney telling the world in that Saddam Hussein had links to Al-Qaeda. It was Hillary, as you can read for yourself.
And in February 2005, it wasn’t just John McCain claiming that democracy was taking root in Iraq, and that the insurgency was in its last throes. It was Hillary, standing physically shoulder-to-shoulder with John McCain, as you can see for yourself.
Enough.
When it comes to Bush, Hillary Clinton can’t draw enough contrast with John McCain to be a viable opponent. Barack Obama can.
The former first lady was winning 53 percent of the vote to 47 percent for her rival with 9 percent of the vote counted, and she hoped for significant inroads into Obama’s overall lead in the competition for delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
I’ve completely had it with news outlets claiming a 6 percent win projected with 9 percent of the vote is somehow “crucial” or “decisive”. This is irresponsible.
Fitness for the Occasion 