| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"John Manning" |
| Date: |
01 Dec 2003 01:41:47 PM |
| Object: |
OT: The Bush opposition is kicking *****! |
Liberals finding their voice — and it's angry
By Kathy Kiely
USA TODAY, 11/30/2003
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-11-30-liberals-usat_x.htm
WASHINGTON — President Bush a "liar?" Donald Rumsfeld a defense
secretary who "betrayed" his troops? Republican leaders in Congress part
of a "concerted effort to erase the 20th century?"
Not since Richard Nixon left the White House have liberals felt so free
to be feisty. After decades of being shushed and shooed aside by
centrist Democrats who feared the party's left-wing image was turning
off voters, liberals have kicked their way out of the political closet.
They are loud. They are angry. And they've got a whole new attitude.
"We have been too nice. We have been too polite," says Ann Lewis, a
veteran strategist with the Democratic National Committee, where the
official party weblog is called "Kicking *****."
The sudden emergence of an outspoken left wing may be the most
surprising political development of the year. Until recently, liberalism
could not have been more out of vogue. But in the six months since Bush
appeared under a "Mission Accomplished" banner on a Navy aircraft
carrier, the political dynamic has changed. Some indicators:
•Five books attacking the president have been on the USA TODAY
bestseller list since August: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore;
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken; Bushwhacked by
Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose; The Great Unraveling by Paul Krugman, and
The Lies of George W. Bush by David Corn. Their prominence has matched,
at least for now, similarly angry tomes by conservatives. "There's a
rising tide of liberal ideas," says Joe Conason, whose book about
conservatives, Big Lies, was held back until Baghdad fell.
•The Internet has witnessed a surge of liberal activity. It's led by
MoveOn.org, a Web-based political organization that has grown to 1.8
million members since it was founded during President Clinton's
impeachment trial. MoveOn recently began a $10 million fundraising drive
to pay for an anti-Bush ad campaign. One ad earlier this year featured
Larry Syverson, a Richmond, Va., man with two sons stationed in Iraq who
claims Rumsfeld "betrayed" them by failing to have a better post-war plan.
•Nearly two dozen liberal groups have created Americans Coming Together,
an effort to coordinate labor unions, environmentalists and feminist
groups for the 2004 political campaigns. And John Podesta, Clinton's
former White House chief of staff, founded a think tank called the
Center for American Progress to counter conservative idea factories that
support scholars and churn out study papers. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton
appealed for contributions to the center at the group's launch party,
where she accused Republicans of trying to "erase the 20th century."
•International financier George Soros, who's worth about $7 billion, has
pledged $15.5 million to anti-Bush, anti-conservative groups. He's
giving $10 million to Americans Coming Together, $2.5 million to
MoveOn.org, and $3 million to the Center for American Progress. He's
also writing his own anti-Bush book. The Bubble of American Supremacy, a
critique of the president's foreign policy, hits bookstores next month.
Hillary Clinton's presence as a keynote speaker at the center's debut
party was a striking sign of the changing political times. Bill Clinton
helped found the Democratic Leadership Council to move his party toward
the political center and advocate policies appealing to voters who
Democrats were alienating: blue-collar workers, rural gun owners, fiscal
conservatives. He won the presidency twice by avoiding traditional
liberalism. On some issues, like crime, free trade and welfare, he even
tried to outflank Republicans.
In the presidential campaign this year, the most successful Democrat is
doing just the opposite. Howard Dean is leading in most polls and has
raised more money than his rivals by capitalizing on anger against Bush
that is so strong, it surprises veteran Democrats. Rep. Robert Matsui, a
California Democrat who has been traveling the country to raise money
and recruit candidates for House races, says feelings against the
president are running at near-vitriolic levels.
"I've had really intelligent people say, 'As soon as he gets on TV, I
turn it off. I just can't stand him,' " Matsui says. "It's kind of
stunning."
In conservatives' footsteps
Today's liberals admit they're trying to follow a trail blazed by
conservatives. Some political historians trace the beginnings of the
Republican rise to power to Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over
Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative, in 1964. Like the Democratic
liberals of the 1990s, conservatives then were viewed as troublemakers
for the Republicans — zealots whose doctrinaire views cost the party votes.
Conservatives worked hard to regain a foothold in Washington after
Goldwater's defeat. They founded grassroots organizations such as
Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. They struck up alliances with
conservative Christian organizations eager to oppose social policies
offensive to their members. They used an innovative direct-mail
fundraising system pioneered by conservative Richard Viguerie to find
like-minded Americans willing to finance the cause. In 1980, they
elected Ronald Reagan president.
But the conservatives didn't stop there. In the House of
Representatives, which Democrats had controlled since 1955, a
little-known Republican congressman from Georgia named Newt Gingrich got
the idea to put the televising of House proceedings to work for their
cause. Gingrich organized late-night talkathons in which he and other
brash young ideologues would expound their views before the nation.
Since the C-SPAN cameras never panned the chamber, viewers couldn't see
that the speakers were declaiming to an empty House.
Conservatives took advantage of another medium in the 1980s: talk radio.
Michael Harrison, editor of Talker, a newsletter that covers talk radio,
says conservative commentators became stars because they spoke for
Americans who didn't feel that their views were represented on TV
networks or in newspapers — "people who were really angry at the press."
Like the conservatives who helped lay the groundwork for the Reagan and
Gingrich victories, today's liberals are angry. They're still angry
about Clinton's impeachment. They're angry about the war in Iraq and its
aftermath. And they're infuriated that Bush got fewer votes than Al Gore
but, in their eyes, is running the country as though he earned a mandate.
Liberals are convinced that their views are being systematically
excluded from the mainstream media. They feel surrounded by hostile
think tanks, cable TV hosts and newspaper columnists. "The conservative
right has out-organized, out-researched, out-written and out-talked the
liberals to the point where they're almost intimidated into silence,"
says former senator George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat who lost
the 1972 presidential election in a landslide to Nixon.
Fanning their outrage: The sense of powerlessness. Republicans control
the White House, the Senate and the House. Liberals are convinced that
Bush is out to pack the courts with conservatives. Ralph Neas of People
for the American Way, a liberal lobbying group, says Bush wants to undo
the work of Democratic presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt.
Other liberals apparently share his fears. Franken is so angry about
Bush that he's taking a detour from his career as a comedian. "I may do
a radio show," the funnyman-turned-polemicist says. He promises he'll be
as outspoken as the conservative talk jocks: "My contribution to the
civility of the dialogue has been to get down and say, 'You're lying,
and we're going to call you on it.' "
Playing catch-up
Liberals seem a long way from achieving the conservatives' success.
Fewer than 20% of the people who respond to USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Polls
regularly identify themselves as "liberal." About one-third call
themselves conservative. By commercial measures, conservatives appear to
be on top, too: On the Talkers' list of top dozen radio talk-jocks, none
are liberal.
Another concern: Will a candidate who fires up the Democrats' liberal
base alienate independent voters in November? Even as staunch a liberal
as McGovern says their new aggressiveness could backfire. "It can be
overdone, this pounding on the table," he cautions. "It could create a
backlash."
Groups like America Coming Together and the Center for American Progress
are part of the effort.
At least two attempts are under way to put more liberal voices on the
radio. Tom Athans, the husband of Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., is
trying to find and promote liberal radio talent. He and other liberals
think part of the reason for their absence from the radio is that they
have been, in Neas' words, "too earnest, too wonky" for prime time.
Another group, led by former America Online executive Mark Walsh, hopes
to buy radio stations and fill their airwaves with liberal programming.
Just as frustrated conservative activists did in the '80s and '90s,
liberals have found a technological end-run around the established
media: the Internet. Web-based connections helped transform MoveOn from
a small group of disgruntled Democrats during the Clinton impeachment
into a fundraising powerhouse. They helped turn Dean from an obscure
governor of a small state into the man to beat for the Democratic
nomination. Another innovation: weblogs. They're Internet sites that
feature daily, even hourly, commentary by writers and publicly posted
responses from readers. They're becoming incubators for a new generation
of political activists, most of whom have little connection to party
establishments.
"This is a technology that just clicks for them somehow," says Josh
Marshall, the 34-year-old author of Talkingpointsmemo.com, a
left-leaning weblog. Marshall says he gets about 40,000 readers a day.
His recent appeal for contributions to finance a reporting trip on the
New Hampshire primary yielded $4,864 in less than 24 hours. "I never
thought I'd say this, but no more contributions!" Marshall wrote on his
site.
Other liberal bloggers report similarly enthusiastic responses. Bill
Scher, a 31-year old publicist who runs LiberalOasis.com from his
Brooklyn home, says readers come to his site as an alternative to the
mainstream press. "I think a lot of people felt the media was giving a
pass to Bush," he says. Michael Stinson says he's had 60 million hits
since founding Takebackthemedia.org in January. Says the 50-year-old
Santa Barbara animator: "I've never seen so many people come together
since the '60s."
Some conservative strategists see parallels with the situation they
faced and the tactics they used when the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions
were in their infancies. Most of all, they recognize a similar energy
and tone.
"Republicans had better worry," says Paul Weyrich, a veteran
conservative organizer. "Angry people are motivated to get out to vote.
If they can channel that anger into something constructive, they can
literally upset the presidency."
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| User: "Confusious" |
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| Title: Re: The Bush opposition is kicking *****! |
01 Dec 2003 06:10:30 PM |
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BW wrote:
THIS man perhaps best demonstrates The Face of today's Democrat Party:
And this is their seal
http://excaliburfilms.com/demoseal.htm
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| User: "John Manning" |
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| Title: Re: the Democrats proving themselves to be angry, capable of nothing |
01 Dec 2003 02:03:17 PM |
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Bow wow wrote:
"John Manning" <jrobertm@terra.com.br> wrote in message
news:3fcb9a41$0$60263$a32e20b9@news.nntpservers.com...
Liberals finding their voice — and it's angry
Exactly. The face of today's Democrat Party is pure hate. They can't lead,
they can't offer America anything useful. All they can do is spew hate and
anger. They are very, very sick people.
Uh... you mean like Republican hateful bigot Ann Coulter?
"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders
and convert them to Christianity."
....Ann Coulter
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| User: "David" |
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| Title: Re: The Bush opposition is kicking *****! |
01 Dec 2003 06:53:17 PM |
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Coward
"John Manning" <jrobertm@terra.com.br> wrote in message
news:3fcb9a41$0$60263$a32e20b9@news.nntpservers.com...
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| User: "Kevin Zoellner" |
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| Title: Re: OT: The Bush opposition is kicking *****! |
01 Dec 2003 11:29:02 PM |
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Let me condense the situation down for you, John.
There are so many closet conservatives that are furious about the
immoral takeover of our country that they are coming out. The tide is
changing, and ***** liberals is an indication of the truth of this,
and is a sign of the times.
Pack the courts with conservative judges..... Please
Bush got fewer illegal votes, Gore got more illegal votes, the Supreme
court had to step in and say that they couldn't keep recounting until
the got the result they wanted. Therefore, Bush got more *legal* votes.
Clinton did not "advocate policies appealing to rural gun owners", where
oh where did you get such an assinine idea?
lies, lies, lies more lies, and then for the coup-de-gras, another lie.
Is that the best the Democraps can do?
--
Kevin
GySgt USMC (retired)
United States Marine Corps... When it absolutely, positively, has to be destroyed overnight.
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