Editorial:
Put a Cork in It, Arianna
As usual, this morning Arianna Huffington sent me the links to the latest articles at The Huffington Post.Okay, it was not she, herself, who sent me the e-mail message; it was most likely a "cron job" the server does on a 24-hour cycle, but I still feel close to the big dogs when I get those early-morning reminders that she and her crew have once again written the definitive word for progressives on the events of the day.
Most of the time, I enjoy reading the latest articles at The Huffington Post. This morning, however, Arianna irritated me. In fact, she did so to the extent that I actually posted a comment to the article. Unlike John Dean, who a few months ago chose not to publish a comment I made to one of his articles at FindLaw, Ms. Huffington's people got mine up on the board after a few hours. That Ms. Huffington will never read what I had to say to her is pretty obvious; but that she is in dire need of having her journalistic pedestal brought down just a few notches is equally obvious, at least to me.
You see, her article was about Bill Clinton: she used the occasion of the former President's ass-mauling of Fox's Chris Wallace to let everyone know that she most decidedly is not suffering—O God forbid!—the awful disease of being all Soft On Bubba. The particular beef in her stew is that, although Mr. Clinton has now endorsed Ned Lamont for the Senate race in Connecticut, he still might have... uh, you know... certain... how should I put this... ummm... tendencies.
Yeah, that's the ticket: "tendencies." Even after the primary, even after the Democrats of Connecticut had spoken, the Big Dog might still have... gawd, but this is embarrassing... Feelings For Joe.
Now, let's get something straight, here. No one who is a regular reader of mine should have any doubt that I am delighted that Joe Lieberman lost the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. The man had become the poster boy for appeasement of bad, bad men and women who have for nearly six miserable years held a death grip of incompetence and mendacity on the reins of power in Washington.
At the same time, though, I'll take this opportunity for a quick side trip—a little detour for a scenic visit with that nice young Ned Lamont fellow who can get Arianna to show off her best sneer to boring old Bubba:
Sir, you'd damn well better be as good as your supporters think you are because, once a political base gets a taste for the blood of its own kind, it just might want another taste of the good stuff pretty quickly; so you'd better hope the next hunting trip we go on aims to bag a few more cowards in our midst—guys like Inouye, Rockefeller, Salazar, and Baucus, to name a few—and not you because you turned out to be a rich-boy campaigner and not a hard-working, brass-knuckles, long-haul representative of the people. In other words, Mr. Lamont, don't look all surprised when the revolution comes back to your door if you don't deliver in spades.Back to Arianna and me. She and some of her commenters annoyed me to no end. Proving how worthy she is of the Authentic Progressive brand label has worn thin on me; but Lord knows, I maintain decorum, even during the adversity of a Washington pundit who pumps her "blog" content promos out like the Weiner Mobile pumps out hot dogs at the ball park.
Having said that, godspeed to you, Ned.
Herewith reprinted is my comment posted on the thread for that article at The Huffington Post.
It seems that the latest fashion in objectivism among some Democrats is to claim they never really liked Bill Clinton or that they somehow are enlightened enough to understand how deeply flawed he now is or was as President.
Such hubris. Such utter hubris.
Perhaps someday, someone will find a candle he or she can hold up to Bill Clinton; but that won't be today or even tomorrow. Neither the small and hateful legion of incompetence on the Right nor the faddish, "I'm so intelligent that I'm objective" on the Left could muster a jury of Mr. Clinton's peers.
I would humbly suggest we set as our single, invariant goal the destruction of the Republicans as the ruling party.
When that glad task is completed, we might want then to purge the ranks of elected Democrats, specifically addressing those who groveled cravenly to the venal agenda of this extremist Administration for the past nearly six years.
Once that noble, if brutish, work is completed, we might want to turn our attention to shouting down the secular and religious extremists who have promoted with their mouths and their money the policies of this awful Administration.
Should we be successful in those worthy endeavors, perhaps from our ranks will then have emerged someone of such stature that he or she might sit in harsh and final judgment of Mr. Clinton.
But, again, that won't happen today, nor will it happen tomorrow.
And it certainly won't happen here.
By: DarkWraith on September 26, 2006 at 09:46am
In conclusion, then, Ms. Huffington, this is the bottom line: the next time you feel the urge to start braying about the failings of former President Clinton—those during his time in office or those of his current rank as elder statesman—try your best to think long and hard about how the period from 1993 to the end of 2000 compares to the past six years. Try your best to imagine that midget we now have for a President being anything other than a lying, venal failure for the rest of his life.
And if the stunning juxtaposition of Bill Clinton against George W. Bush can't get you to shut your cake hole, then please, Ms. Huffington, just do the right thing and put a cork in it.
The Dark Wraith has spoken.
Published 9/26/2006 07:55:00 PM
<< 21 Comments Total
Good Evening Dark Wraith:
I have been suspicious of Arianna Huffington ever since I saw her campaigning in California with that empty suit shithead ex-husband of hers. Maybe it was my years out in the boonies, maybe it was all the time I have spent on stage in unfamiliar places playing for strangers, I don't know. I do know that the first time I laid my hired-hand musician eyes on Ms. Arianna the alarm bells in the back of my head started ringing hard and loud. I occaisionally go over there to follow a link to John Dean or Al Franken but rarely have I ever read anything there that resonates.
The Dems and progressives that feel a need to denigrate or minimize the policy and sheer personal impact of Bill Clinton are cowards. They can't muster up the spine to weather the blowjob attacks and calmly say "So Fucking What?" Where are the Democrats that are actually running to stand up and call bullshit? I agree that the situation politically calls for ruthless action.
I'm also looking forward to the 27th when Wes Clark comes to Phoenix to raise money for two Democrats. I got an invitation to attend that doesn't even involve having to perform with anything but my checkbook.
*Clap* *Clap* *Clap*
Wonderful response, Dark Wraith.
Clinton did a great job in presidenting the country, compared to the curret resident of the WhiteHouse. He's still a very popular and good man.
I was saddened that Al Gore felt he had to distance himself from Clinton, when he was running for president.
I don't understand why Arianna has a problem that Clinton might have tendencies for Joe. Even if he feels friendship toward Joe, if he already endorsed Ned Lamont, what's the problem?
I didn't go over and read her post:)
Good evening, Old White Lady.
Yes, I am troubled by the tone some of our own are taking. There are still those among our ranks who don't understand that Clinton was and remains to this day a master politician, a fellow who was able to keep even his bitterest Right-wing enemies at bay in a manner that rivals anything I have ever seen. As Alec Baldwin said to some neo-con wannabe on Bill Maher's old show, "You still just can't stand the fact that Bill Clinton kicked your asses."
Chris Wallace just found out that such an ass-kicking virtuosity becomes only better with age.
The Dark Wraith thinks Mr. Clinton should start selling franchises.
Good evening, Minstrel Boy.
Understand that I am dead serious when I ask this favor of you.
If you get a chance to actually talk to the General, tell him he should answer my e-mail messages to him. I have an offer for him (and other prospective 2008 Presidential candidates).
In the interest of fairness, you might want to tell him that I don't have any money. Come to think of it, I don't even have any bank accounts, so I couldn't write a donation check even if I wanted to.
Never mind that, though. We have a darned decent platform we could offer select politicians if they wanted to reach an audience out here on the blog frontier. It's not much of a place, but they might want to consider really getting their boots wet in the Blogosphere rather than imagining they're cyberspace whizzes when they send out mass e-mails or have dainty soirées with the giant soufflé graffiti bloggers.
It's just a modest idea if you want to pass it along on my behalf to General Clark.
Heck, I might even be willing to give the first politician agreeing to appear on Big Brass Blog one of my signature "The Dark Wraith Forums" coffee cups.
Yeah. That's a great idea.
The Dark Wraith just knows that'll bring the big dogs out of the woodwork.
This was wonderful, Wraith!
I would humbly suggest we set as our single, invariant goal the destruction of the Republicans as the ruling party.
Yes.
When that glad task is completed, we might want then to purge the ranks of elected Democrats, specifically addressing those who groveled cravenly to the venal agenda of this extremist Administration for the past nearly six years.
Yes!
Once that noble, if brutish, work is completed, we might want to turn our attention to shouting down the secular and religious extremists who have promoted with their mouths and their money the policies of this awful Administration.
YES!
If term limits were not in place, Bill Clinton would still be President. He's just that good. And the GOP knows it, and they fear him. Dogs attack those they fear.
Nice comment to Ms. Huffington, by the way.
Mixter
The man had become the poster boy for appeasement of bad, bad men and women who have for nearly six miserable years held a death grip of incompetence and mendacity on the reins of power in Washington.
And are as we chitchat pushing a bill through Congress that will permanently limit our access to the right of habeas corpus.....................
- oddjob
Not that I agree (or disagree) with Ms. Huffington. (I don't pay sufficient attention to Huffington or HuffPo to comment on that one way or the other), but I would respectfully submit for the consideration of all posters here, that, were you homosexual, you might not feel quite the same warm & fuzzies for Bill Clinton that I am now reading.
I don't for a moment discount his mastery of politics, nor do I on the whole quibble with the direction in which he took the country while president.
However, I think if you look at the whole of the record, including his advice to Kerry last year, you'll find he routinely publicly talks about how homosexuals ought to have equal rights, and equally routintely - and out of hand - recommends throwing our access to such rights under the bus......
"Good" man? Not compared to a principled man like Jimmy Carter.
No. Not a "good" man.
Effective? Yes.
On the whole a net positive for the country? Yes.
A "good" man?
Not on your life.......
- oddjob
Clark makes me uncomfortable. I don't trust him.
- oddjob
(Correction: Clinton's advice to Kerry two years ago.)
- oddjob
Good morning Dark Wraith:
I will do what I can. I don't know if my donation levels have gotten me out of the handshake line yet. I will be wearing my lapel pin from the silver star. That attracted his eye once and might be the ice-breaker I hope for. General Clark's campaign also knows that I am a blogger, and they are getting ready to lay groundwork for his announcement of candidacy. He isn't going to announce until after the mid-terms preferring to spend his time supporting democratic candidates all over the country. I think he is showing the "insiders" of the party that he is a good soldier who can raise enough troops to take the hill. If not General Clark himself I am certain to have access to some of his staffers. I am attending an internet gathering before the rubber chicken.
I shall do my best with who ever is in front of me.
Good morning, Dark Wraith.
Beautiful comment to Ms. Huffington's piece. I'm old enough to remember when Ms. H was a shill for the Republican party; in fact, to the conservative wing of the Republican party. I've always wondered just how far she's come in her seeming 180 turn toward the left. Apparently not all that much.
I'm not a fan of Bill Clinton's either, I'm afraid. However, I was pleasantly surprised by his appearance on Fox News (no, I saw it on YouTube). I wish he could have been that person when he was in office. I realize that it wasn't possible, with politics being what they are; but still.
Politicians are politicians, after all. The best ones do what they can. I believe that Clinton tried to do some real good, which is more than I can say for the current resident of the Oval Office.
great graphic. and right on rant. bubba is still the one and only big dog. just look at the fallout from his "interview."
Greetings Dark One;
It's been a while since I visited here; I've been busy doing Dad the Realist duties.
As for Arianna sweetheart; I have read her blog, but I've never found it inspiring, or more informative than any other liberal / moderate blog site.
It amazes me still that after five and a half years, Clinton can still draw ire and awe all at once.
The people who still begrudge Bill getting his knob polished in office should also remember that if there is a Jesus-type kharmic judgement coming, not only will adulturers be punished, but false prophets, hypocrites, warmongerers and moneychangers also.
Dad the Realist is not big on religion, but he is a fan of Kharma and the Dharmic Path.
All professional politicans make me uncomfortable. So do Generals. There's something about wanting to lead that invites my disrespect.
Still, there is a definite gradient of depredation. The mistakes Clinton made were several orders of magnitude lower than the current pirates of the ship of state. The main difference is the desire of the present crew to rule instead of govern.
I would easily support Hillary for President if she would live up to her progressive veneer: assert a plan to end the Iraq war immediately, promote a real alternative energy agenda, and vocally vigorously oppose the current pretenders to the throne in Washington.
But Arianna? An entrepreneurial capitalist in the liberal blogsphere. How could anyone see her otherwise?
Good evening, Kelley B.
I share your general suspicion about politicians and generals, although I think the former tend toward a center of gravity in their self-serving nature while the latter can be much more varied (and therefore risky) in their motivations.
To some extent, it was always this way, even before there was a republic called the United States of America. At the same time, though, I honestly do know that in my own early years many men and women chose to serve their country as politicians with the same mission as they had served their country as soldiers during World War II. That era lasted into the Kennedy Administration.
Many were those of that time who really did have a mind that the best they could do with the remainders of their lives was to make their government better able to serve and to protect.
Among them were the genuinely noble, and among them were the misguided and harmful; but so many were there for the purpose of making a more perfect Union.
We don't have much of that anymore.
Perhaps a good example of a new generation with this mindset would be Paul Hackett of Ohio. Although I had serious misgivings about him stepping in front of Sherrod Brown to run for a seat in Congress, I think I see him somewhat differently now than I did when my reaction was more formal and, oddly, more rash. I wonder now if maybe he really is of that "old school," the one where you offer your all as a soldier and, God willing you live through that, you again offer your all as a leader of the civil society.
I am harsh with politicians and those who aspire to that profession. At some point, I need to lay off and see if perhaps, beneath what might be rhetoric contrary to my principles, there are among the aspirants truly worthy men and women.
I won't do that today, though: old soldiers do cry out for peace, but not in the midst of battle.
The Dark Wraith thanks you for commenting, Kelley B.
Good evening, OddJob.
You have read my comments on my misgivings about Wesley Clark. A central and very real problem I have with him is that he is to this very day, as far as I know, a defender of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, formerly known as the School of the Americas. That latter link will take readers to SOA Watch, where anyone unfamiliar with that monstrous, long-enduring operation at Fort Benning can get a chance to be well fed with horror about one of the simply ghastly ways we've been degrading the world for years and years.
Understand, OddJob, that a soldier does not have a knee-jerk reaction to condemn his own. Group cohesion is not advanced by taking every opportunity to stand on a self-righteous rucksack and damn the actions of others in uniform. You might have noticed that in my somewhat oblique reactions to the prosecutions of soldiers in Iraq for what are, quite honestly, horrific acts. That does not mean I am not sufficiently horrified, but it does mean I see the issues somewhat differently (and maybe wrongly) from how civilians see them.
To that extent, I might understand why the General would be less than vocal and enthusiastic about launching into a proper and altogether righteous tirade against something as bad as SOA. However, that he openly supports it most decidedly goes beyond what I can understand of a soldier acting in an unspoken code of silence to the outside world about bad military ops.
I want to ask Mr. Clark about this.
I also want to ask him point blank about what he would do as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States concerning homosexuals in the military.
The two issues above are very much related, you see. I want to know if General Clark is the kind of leader who thinks "boys will be boys" or if he's the kind of leader who thinks "boys need to grow up."
Speaking from personal experience, it's a whole helluva lot easier to lead by the former philosophy, but it's a whole heckuva lot better for the future to lead by the latter.
As long-winded and obtuse as this comment has been, OddJob, that's where I stand on Wesley Clark. And in analogous ways, it's where I stand on a whole slate of possible Democratic candidates: none of them thoroughly impress me, but some might be able to.
The Dark Wraith should probably leave a more thorough survey of the candidates to a full-blown post.
Arrianna is just an opportunist.
Someone earlier made mention to her running in the CA special eleciton. A publicity stunt.
This too, a publicity stunt, an easy one.
I too as many did, blogged about Clinton's interview. Though I just though Clinton Kicked ass plain and simple.
And yes, by including Clinton Fox News Interview somewhere in your post title or body, you would have gotten hits from technorati, google blog search etc.
I didn't read her article, I won't read it.
Usually when I talk about Clinton with people I find myself reminding them that during the Clinton Years we had the luxury of discussing a President's personal sex life because everything else in the country was going quite while.
We had the luxury of having the classic Democrat vs. Republican debate such as public schools vs. school vouchers, small gov vs. big gov, universal healthcare, and we actually had some form of fiscal discipline.
Now all we have are Authoritarians versus people who value freedom.
The score is like 800 to 0 Authoritarian vs. Freedom Lovers and we are about to lose the game as Habeas Corpus goes by the wayside.
Good Evening Dark Wraith:
I don't know what General Clark's stand is on homosexuals in the military although he was a full supporter of "don't ask don't tell." I haven't heard it from the General himself, but I was privvy to some scuttlebutt (which should be taken only as scuttlebutt) to the effect that when the policy was being formulated he suggested a Truman style "I'm Commander In Chief, I order you to quit discriminating against people because of sexual orientation." I also know from a friend who served under Clark and is still serving now that the policy has gotten very little support since Clark's retirement. Again, I am not sure. The SOA is a very touchy subject. There were some very shocking and unacceptable things that came out of there that we are still paying a heavy price for. I was not aware of Clark's support or involvement. It is something that will absolutely cause me to take another, closer look at him.
Thanks for the heads up.
I have my impressions of the fund raiser thingie posted over at 3B's
The thing that bothers me most about Clark, because it's what I'm most aware of, is how poorly he handled himself when he was serving as NATO commander. He hogged the spotlight and showboated, enough so that the Sec. Def. (former Sen. William Cohen, a truly class act who was a moderate Repub. from Maine serving as Clinton's Sec. Def.) forced him into early retirement.
I remember noting at the time how weird that was.
It has given me pause for thought regarding Clark ever since. I know he's not well regarded by the brass who have worked with him, but I don't know enough about military culture to evaluate that very well. He dismisses that as jealousy, and for all I know he's correct.
But acting so much the politician when you're a general is to my mind a troubling thing. It suggests poor character, or judgement, or something.
- oddjob
I was surprised at how poorly I thought he did in the debates, sometimes I judge people by how quick they are on their feet. I do believe that General Clark is sharper by about 400% that any idiot currently in the misadministration, but the art of communication is critical. Listening to the shrub recently doing several ss-ss-ss on any word ending with an s made me think of Sylvester the Cat. Hell, he'd be better than the shrub. Maybe we would catch the mouse. George.