So what are Hillary and Schumer saying about Kerik now?

[Sara Beverley]

Just asking! I am so sick of our Dems in power who kiss butt all the time.

[GreenArrow]

1. heh heh heh

heh.

[Old and In the Way]

2. Maybe they were hoping to get Kerik into the confirmation process

and expose his "moral values" and mob connections?

[Forkboy]

3. Another Dem secret plan!

[Walt Starr]

5. Those Dem secret plans have really won us a lot of battles

NOT!

[Forkboy]

7. Daschle is ready to spring his any time now!

[Walt Starr]

8. I hear that Gephardt's plan will be sprung on January 6

Too bad he won't be in the House any more.

:eyes:

[lateo]

23. LOL!

He is just waiting for the right moment.

[shance]

10. LOL!! You made me laugh with that one.

n/t

[SammyWinstonJack]

16. LOL n/t

[autorank]

6. Maybe they are couple of political whores.

I thought Schumer had real guts challenging the NRA boldly as a member of the House. I do not and have not trusted Hillary (although I liked her politics). Now Schumer is a 'lets get along' senator and Hillary is no different from that consummate political whore, Diane Feinstein.

I think it's time to recognize that our leaders are weak, vapid, conniving, self-serving and incapable of expressing our will.

It's up to us, meaning the people of this country, to get things done without having someone to 'look up to.'

[Old and In the Way]

14. Silly me!

And here I thought that maybe they knew all the dirt about Kirek and would use this to expose more gross incompetence of this administration in nominating unqualified and immoral candidates for this cabinet position.

But obviously most posting on this thread have been privvy to Chuck and Hiliary's planned sellout.....

[autorank]

17. Not silly at all. I'd like to think that. But I'm disappointed again &

again. Have you heard either of those two commenting on our crappy election, on the disenfranchisement of blacks in Ohio (a core cause of our party--voting rights), on the death of civilians in Iraq, on looming eco-catastrophes. These are all issues that our 'representatives' should be hammering and pushing daily. Privatization is up to them but ignoring them is to their shame. Sorry, I've been around a while also and I remember these Democrats speaking out forcefully: Metzenbaum, Fulbright, Ervin, Bayh, Church, Hart (both of them), etc. I also remember Senators Wayne Morse (R) OR and Ernest Greuning (R) AK going bat shit over the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Viet Nam War.

We have a bunch of blow-dried, coiffed, cautions, chameleons who would like nothing more than to get re-elected. They do not believe in issues since the issue is their political perpetuation ad museum.

Love Maine, great state. Thanks for the votes. We tried here in VA and we'll do much better next time.

[No Mandate Here.]

4. It seems that a conclusion might be made...

that there are far fewer pols who care more about the common good for the majority than about themselves and being re-elected.

I have said many times that the choice in the past presidential election was between one who is exclusive and one who was a lot more inclusive. The exclusive, me first state of mind guy appears to have won that one.

[jobycom]

9. Just normal protocol, not some grand betrayal. I wonder about DU, sometime

Schumer and Clinton were just following standard protocol. Kerik was from their state, so they said nice things about him. We have no idea what they really believed, or what they were doing behind the scenes. They may have been the ones pushing Kerik's dirty secrets to the press. Or, they may have been stalling for time to review the man's record.

You don't attack people who are popular in your own state. You give the info to someone else and let them do it. That way you stay popular, and you still get the results you want.

Sometimes I think DU is a bigger help to the Repubs than the Dems. Dems can't even smile wrong without being labeled a Republican tool, a sellout, and a right wing DINO around here. Hillary got blasted once for smiling at Tom Delay at a photo op.

We have to let them play the game. And we have to remember that nothing is going to happen that will make us happy in the next four years. Bush will not nominate a liberal or moderate to any post. No point in two Democratic senators attacking a local figure and risking hurting themselves when it just won't matter. The guy they follow Kerik with won't be anyone we like, anyway.

True, Kerik was particularly unsuited for this job. But he's done, and we have no way to know whether Schumer and Clinton had anything to do with it. The part of politics we see in the open-- the Congressional votes and bill signings-- are just theater. The real decisions are made before these happen, except in very rare cases.

[PunkPop]

12. Who said anything about attacking?

How about withholding judgement on the choice of a President who has shown he is incapable of making rational decisions when it comes to the priorities of this country?

[jobycom]

13. Same thing

In terms of protocol, if you say "I'm withholding judgement," you've attacked. That was just done by the British Minister on Bush's "election."

[PunkPop]

15. Ah yes, the voice of reason

Sorry, but adherence to protocol has put the Dems (and this country) in a world of hurt. I think it's about time for a little less protocol from our leaders.

There's a real good article by Michael Moore along these lines on the homepage. You might want to check it out.

[jobycom]

18. What voice of reason?

You're responding to things I didn't say. I said if Schumer and Hillary had not followed protocol and had attacked a native son they would have been hurt politically, so they kept their attacks behind the scenes, and succeeded in stopping this nomination. You said they should have just not praised him. I said the rules of protocol mean that not praising him is an attack, thus, they avoided attacking a native son so they wouldn't be hurt politically, etc. Now you're avoiding my point and shifting over to another topic, while seeming to think your other topic weakens my point.

Adherence to protocol hasn't hurt the Dems. In this case, it helped us. If Clinton and Schumer had blasted away with both barrels, the Republicans would have gone into full defense mode, and none of Kerik's issues would have even been raised. The whole issue would have been how the mean, nasty Democrats attacked a poor, defenseless hero, and people would have shut out any facts. By downplaying it, the facts became the story, and Kerik is done, and the whole affair has hurt Guiliani, at least, and maybe Bush-- though MSM will prevent him from being hurt much.

What has hurt the Dems are a MSM owned by the other side, and a lack of leaders who know how to get things done. If you are saying that protocol is the wishy-washy need to appease Republicans, that's not what it is. Dems are hurt because they don't argue for their own beliefs, because they concede the argument to the other side by trying to pretend they don't really disagree with Repubs, etc. Some Dems are hurt by never standing up to the Repubs. None of that is protocol. Protocol is just the way you phrase your public comments.

[sangh0]

19. stop confusing them with facts, jobycom

you're interfering with their hate.

[IrateCitizen]

20. RE: What has hurt the Dems...

What has hurt the Dems are a MSM owned by the other side, and a lack of leaders who know how to get things done.

Actually, outside of Faux Nooze and Talk Radio, I would disagree with you on this. I have come to the conclusion, after reading Mark Hertsgaard's In The Eagle's Shadow, that the Dem's leaders are largely to blame for this. Allow me to explain.

Political news in this country is confined to the terms of the Beltway discourse -- i.e., mainstream reporters only report on what officials on the Dem and Repub sides of the aisle are saying. With this being the case, the news will only be critical of one side when the other side is being strident and vociferous in their criticisms. When the opposition party largely rolls over and plays dead -- as the Dems have done on several fronts dating back to the Reagan era -- the mainstream news outlets will not, themselves, be critical of the party in power. Conversely, when the opposition party is loud and continuing in their criticism (i.e. the Clinton years), the news media will pick up on it and run with it.

I realize that this is an overgeneralization, but I believe that the rule largely holds true. While we cannot, in the current climate, expect fair hearing from the MSM (especially TV news), our leaders had better damned sure realize the need for them to go on continual offensive against the Republicans, if for no other purpose than to push the press in the direction of being critical of Republican proposals.

[jobycom]

22. I know what you're saying, IC, but I don't agree completely

I'm not claiming that the Democrat leaders shouldn't speak up more, but I don't agree the media would report them if they did, for two reasons. First, I've watched too many stories where the media obviously lies. The whole Gore fiasco comes to mind. All networks and several papers were going to extremes to paint Gore as a liar and exagerator. They repeated Republican fantasies about Kailey Ellis, Love Canal, Love Story, etc, long after the facts had proven each story bogus. When you can point at specific issues where the media repeated lies they knew were lies, and all those lies are in the same direction, you can assume that the media is more interested in the message than in the truth. I got into a long discussion with an editor for the NYT over the Kathleene Seelye and the Love Canal story. There was no question of there being a political bias.

Second, Democrats were screaming at the top of their lungs during leadup to the invasion. Byrd and Kennedy especially were blasting away on the Senate floor against the invasion, and Democrats were sending stories to the media discounting a lot of Bush's reasons for invading. The media was almost completely silent on this, and CNN even had memoes leaked which gave instructions to their reporters to not show too many bodies, to not show anything that would paint the US in a negative light (that memo was over the Afghanistan invasion).

So I don't agree. I do agree that the Republicans are more aggressive at trying to spin the message, but I don't agree the media doesn't have an agenda. It isn't just Fox and Talk Radio. MSNBC, NBC, and CNBC are owned by GE, whose chairman was in the studios on election eve in 2000 calling for his tv stations to call the election for Bush. CNN is owned by AOL/Time Warner. Colin Powell was once on the board of AOL, and the Democrats tried to block their merger. ABC is a bit less right wing, but not as respected for news, and CBS is certainly left leaning, but again, not as respected.

There are other factors, of course. Media outlets try to keep expenses down by not doing their own investigating, and all the networks use the same basic rules to determine their stories, so none of the networks does anything independent of the others. It used to be that a network would try to be different with their leads, but now, the networks are embarrassed if their leads aren't the same as the other networks, barring the rare exclusive story.

And another angle is corporate sponsorship and fear of lawsuits. Corporate sponsors do control the message to some degree by threatening to pull adds if spin doesn't go their way. These same corporations can threaten to sue if a story goes against them, as well, and that, too, plays into politics.

Check out "Into the Buzzsaw," or read some of Greg Palast's dealings with the media. he had info dead to rights on the Florida election, and was told point blank that the American media was no longer going to cover election stories because they didn't want to stir up trouble. At one point, that was considered their job.

Democrats can scream until they are blue in the face, and many do, and the media flat out will ignore them. Ask Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy.

[paulk]

21. another thing to consider

Clinton and Schumer may have backed Kerik because they felt, as a New Yorker, he may have been able to spring more National Security money loose for them, something NYC (especially) needs.

[Redleg]

11. Me too. Why do some Dems go out of their way to get along with Rethugs?

I think that Dems need to pick their battles. If they didn't feel it politically expedient to criticize Kerik for his many failings, at least they could have chosen to not say nice things about him- they should have remained silent.