Motley Moose – Archive

Seriously, this is how he wants it to go down?  I respect the fact that Andrew Card has served this country.  Public service is an honorable and difficult thing and the chief of staff suffers some of the worst hours in the country.  But seriously, this is simply absurd!

The Oval Office symbolizes…the Constitution, the hopes and dreams, and I’m going to say democracy. And when you have a dress code in the Supreme Court and a dress code on the floor of the Senate, floor of the House, I think it’s appropriate to have an expectation that there will be a dress code that respects the office of the President.

Wenis.

This is simply depressing to watch.  They don’t get it.  They really don’t.  The Republican Party has apparently decided that moderation in the pursuit of victory is no virtue, and that fanaticism in the pursuit of ideological purity is no vice.  Anybody been watching the RNC Chairman race?  Michael Steele is as close to a “moderate” as there is in that race.  And hey, nothing against Steele (he seems a decent chap), but he makes the point.

I read RedState and still post there openly as a liberal.  It gives me some perspective as to what the Republican activists are thinking.  I think I’m more frightened now than I was just prior to the election.  They’re even more out of their minds now!

And I’m not the crying sort.  God bless these United States.  Every day we must struggle to form a more perfect union.  We will suffer reversals, we will fall short at times, but we must amble on, ever forward.

Here we go, folks:

“When I was face to face with him, my honest first impression was that I expected something more. I had heard so much about ‘his presence’ in the media that I was surprised to find that he seemed very average,” Mr. Wurzelbacher wrote in a live online chat on The Washington Times Web site.

“My gut feeling as he answered my questions? I was scared for America,” he wrote in response to a reader who asked “When you were face to face with Obama, what were you thinking and how did it feel?”

http://www.washingtontimes.com…

I’m in my last year of law school.  In my first year I made a good friend who’d had some time in IT before giving law school a try.  It didn’t work out.  The man worked like he was possessed by some particularly motivated demons, but it just wasn’t in him.  He moved to Pennsylvania and got a fantastic IT job, making more than he would have as an attorney.  We’ve remained good friends.

My friend considers himself a conservative.  He believes in a small government, low taxes, generally less regulation, and is moderate on social issues.  He’s a big believer in a strong national defense and he absolutely cannot stand the Clintons.  I mean at all.  He can go on for quite awhile about how much he cannot stand Bill or Hillary.

He’s voting for Obama and he’s made a donation to the Obama campaign.  And he ain’t the only one.

I swear to god I’m not making this up

You’ve no doubt heard about the wardrobe.

For anyone wondering if Mrs Palin’s trademark red jackets, the $2,500 (£1,530) Valentino outfit worn for her Republican convention acceptance speech, or even the $3,000 Louis Vuitton handbag that her six-year-old daughter, Piper, was holding on September 11, came from the wardrobe at her home in Wasilla, Alaska, they did not.

Okay, maybe it’s not Piper’s.  Maybe she was carrying it for her mom.  I dunno.  But this makes me madder than hell, and I want you folks to understand why.  That’s a Louis Vuitton handbag, and it cost $3,000.

I expect I’ll take some hits for this one, but it’s an honest conclusion that I’ve held for months.  Nothing has changed my mind and I don’t think anything will.  The only complaints are political, and I’m fighting for policy here.

Robert Gates, our current Secretary of Defense, is a foreign policy realist.  What this means is that he frames the whole of international relations as a question of what’s actually going on and what can this country actually accomplish.  We have interests, and those interests must be secured.  This will mean doing business with bad people in bad places, from time to time.  Remember, Gates is one of Bush 41’s people, and he was brought in to clean up W’s mess.  Gates did NOT want the job, and had turned down a prior appointment by President Bush just the year before.  He rather liked Texas A&M.

Our colleague Jerome Armstrong at MyDD had this brilliant bit of insight:

Any recent Dem would have won under these conditions, certainly Kerry or Gore, probably even Dukakis. Bill Clinton would probably have a 45 state blowout win.

Hell, Edwards, if he had gotten the nomination, even after having been exposed for his affair, might still be ahead.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2008…

I know, I know, we all expected the Republicans to sink insanely low, to try everything they could, to bring the heavens down on all our heads.  But let’s be honest – that was an intellectual and frankly esoteric expectation.

The McCain campaign has heralded the most disgusting campaign of my lifetime.  The campaign of 1964 is the only one in American history I consider dirtier (and it was our team that made it dirty – don’t forget that).  The McCain campaign is intentionally conflating Obama with terrorism and terrorists.  They’re playing the associations game, and we need to remember this down the line.

John McCain was scared today.  He was scared, and shocked, into acting like a decent human being again, if only for a moment.  He actually stood his ground at that rally and tried to do something human.  I applaud him for it.  We all should, even those of us who consider him little better than scum at the moment.  Seriously, turn off your campaign-mode rage for a second, stop judging the man, and just judge the act itself.  It was a good thing that he did.

But it took fear.  His “supporters” scared the shit out of him.  I don’t think he got it, really got it, until today.  A lot of these people are nuts and he’s feeding them.  The mumbling, grumbling, and murmuring around the edges became a roar.  Why?  He lent them legitimacy.  It’s his fault, and he must have realized it.