The attacks on Kerry this week prove we live in a mad, mad world (A Rant)

[beachmom]

If you look through what has happened this past week, one only has to conclude that the world has gone mad. Let's examine the data:

1. Kerry courteously and "professionally" says yes to get photos taken with some girls who see him as he walks out of a restaurant. The pics get posted on Facebook, who then sell it to a sleezy gossip site TMZ.com (well, allegedly anyway). TMZ then makes up a story out of whole cloth, an unbelievably sleazy story. First the Senate office responds with the truth. A couple days later the girls themselves are interviewed by a local newspaper corroborating that truth. And yet it goes on, now hitting the Pittsburgh rag newspaper. I mean, people can talk all they want about how this is how it goes when you're famous. But that doesn't make it right. They lied about him in a mean spirited unfair way, and never admitted later that they were wrong when all evidence was revealed that they had lied. And the Boston Herald has run more articles on Kerry on this story than almost anything else they have done on him.

2. Later in the week Kerry appears on MSNBC and absolutely destroys Sen. Kyl. I mean it was an awesome appearance. So what is on the blogs? Nothing. Not a word from the Big Guns in the blogs.

3. This weekend Kerry rides in the Pan Mass Challenge raising a lot of money for cancer and for Ted Kennedy. We see an emotional appearance he makes as well as before and after the race. Anything on Blue Mass Group, the Big Gun blog of Mass.? Nope. Nada. That's right. The biggest blog in Mass. does not report on one of the bigger Mass. stories featuring their Democratic Senator, especially as it relates to Teddy. And this is a supposedly blue blog.

4. So today after biking yesterday, Sen. Kerry appears early in the morning to be on Meet the Press with Lieberman. He does a great job for Obama; not as good as against Kyl, but still very good. So what do the Big Guns on the blogs have to say? Screw Kerry for not defending .... Wes Clark. Well, what the hell? He is not a Clark surrogate, he is an Obama surrogate. The posts on this are just despicable and mean spirited.

Like this by Matt Stoller:

There are many reasons that Kerry, who these same hissy fit throwing establishment hacks backed in 2004, lost, and I'm not one to say that it was the Swift Boat Vets that were the only cause. It's hard to run against a President running during wartime, and Kerry got kind of a bad rap on the race. But it was the Swift Boat Vet episode during which it became obvious that as leader of the Democratic Party, John Kerry wasn't going to preserve his dignity and self-respect against a group of dishonest thugs, nor would he spend one iota of effort to preserve the millions of people in the party he was supposed to represent.

And he continues to secure this honorable legacy every day.

So the man who fought for his country, who came back and courageously spoke out against a war he thought was wrong, who has a life time of public service, and is still doing great things to this day .... has no dignity or self-respect? On a weekend where he raised money for cancer so that research can be done? I am sorry, but the above paragraph found on a fairly mainstream left blog, is just as bad as what the Swiftboaters did to John Kerry. It is a lie and impugns John Kerry's character. The truth is these scumbags on the left are no fucking better than the puny characters on the right. NO. BETTER.

I would like to know if there is room in politics for common decency? I am extremely disgusted with John McCain's campaign. But that has absolutely nothing to do with his time serving as a POW in Vietnam. But the Left doesn't get that!! They want to be as assholeish as the Right. And hey -- on a day like today, they have succeeded.

I have to face the possibility that if Obama becomes president, I will have to disengage from the blogs. Because these people are unserious about governing. Their anger worked fine during the Bush years, but those times are soon over. As it is today, I don't see them helping Obama right now at all. It will only get worse if he wins.

Meanwhile, one of the Good Ones (and there aren't many in politics), John Kerry, continues to be attacked or ignored, and I just lower my head in disgust.

P.S. And STILL nothing on Kerry's work lifting the HIV travel ban on the main left blogs.

[beachmom]

1. An answer comes, from Al Giordano:

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/how-dare-he-play-winning-card

... the exchange in St. Petersburg, Florida, yesterday between Obama and some African-American youths that stood up in the seats behind him and held up a banner that said "What About the Black Community, Obama?" was super interesting, because, reading between the lines, it wasn't really about race.

It was about tactics.

That protest, in fact, mirrored the FISA debate and some other matters (the latest being the silly and unproductive attempts to pressure Obama to put Wes Clark on his ticket as VP, just gag me, please) by white "progressives" (I put that word in quotes because so many that describe themselves as such are far more centrist, in ideology and style, than many of us that openly organize against a capitalist system; they lay a false claim to the word, in my opinion, boneheadedly false when they so often claim an upper hand or moral superiority in its use) when the real difference between them and Obama is not one of ideology or policy, but one of strategy and tactics, what the senator calls "framing."

With no track record to prove it, they somehow think that they know better how to win a presidential election than, well, the guy who's been winning it all year.

(he then shows that video of Obama dealing with the protesters, who although they are black, are actually like the white bloggers I've been tearing my hair out over all day)

I'm personally loving this: As a longstanding community organizer, journalist and foot soldier on the left (with the scar tissue upon scar tissue and a string of hard-won victories to prove it) my frustration with the ineffectiveness of so many that consider themselves also of the left in the United States in recent years has boiled over. I am so sick of having to be lumped in with those masturbatory practitioners of bad performance art that they call activism. Really. I had to leave the country 11 years ago to find better change-agents worth reporting on.

And suddenly, along comes a political candidate inside the United States - a category of person from the last place I expected this to come from - giving a nationwide teach-in and lesson-in-civics about how to effectively organize for change.

Here's an unspoken little secret: The success of Obama's campaign challenges those that still subscribe to broken patterns of activism - whether the zombie-like attempt to repeat the completely coopted street protest tactics of 1968 (or of 1999) or the academic purity troll approach that complains without even attempting to organize real people - and is driving various of them absolutely crazy with envy.

To every fellow and sister of the left that, practically on automatic pilot, bemoans that Obama has taken center stage when it comes to organizing for change in the United States (I've heard your whispers about "We can't wait to see Al disillusioned in 2009! That'll show him!" as if you're actually hoping for bad news), I say: Show me the better plan.

Show me how you are effectively organizing real people. Show me how you stopped the Clinton machine in the 1990s from auctioning off the Democratic Party (oops, too late!). Show me how you stopped the war in Iraq. Show me a single political battle you that have won with your tired old tactics and "framing" of "issues." Then I'll take your complaining more seriously.

The skinny kid with the big ears that don't look like the men on dollar bills is doing, right here, right now, what none of you complaining about him have accomplished: He's built a nationwide grassroots organization - and trained thousands in the nuts and bolts of how to do it on the local level - in a way that facilitates simultaneous horizontal organization and that can sustain the kind of pluralism that says: hey, you don't like the way I'm doing it? Do it yourself then!

It is Matt Stoller who has organized that ridiculous Clark website to promote him as VP. Ha! I love Al. He really represents the best thing to come out of the blogosphere since ... Kerry Vision.

Oh, and when they attack John Kerry, they are in essence attacking Obama because JK is Obama's surrogate. That is what we have to remember. And John Kerry defeated their candidate in '04, so that makes them doubly mad.

[Inuca]

4. Wonderful, wonderful quotes

from Giordano.

When I discovered sites like DU and Kos back at the end of 04, it felt so good for a while to be able to share thoughts and information with other similarly minded people. I needed that so much back then. Unfortunately, people are people, and many (most?) of them are narrow-minded, have a herd mentality, are mentally lazy, etc. Very "elitist" of me, I know, but unfortunately I think it is true. And it makes no difference (well... a small difference) if they are of the right or of the left. I am doing my best to avoid being too cynical and disillusioned (cynicism is not in my nature, pessimism unfortunately is), but it is not easy. Anyway.... thanks for the read, Giordano's and as always yours as well.

By the way, never heard of the photo incident you mention in your OP, I kind of guess from what you wrote what it was about... silly.

[beachmom]

7. Mass had a post on it:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=273x150925

It was a tabloid story; even the conservative blogs didn't do much with it and the liberal blogs, of course, ignored it. Unfortunately, there is a wider audience for tabloids than blogs.

[wisteria]

2. It's amazing isn't it. Many of the blogs anymore are more about taking people down rather than

promoting and supporting our own. I really think many of these meansprited people don't really have causes or even defined opinions on anything. To them, it is all about trashing and winning. They are lazy, uninformed and ignorant. I don't even bother trying to reply to them, they don't want to hear the truth anyway. And, I bet after all this they don't even bother to support or vote for our candidates anyway.

Senator Kerry had an unusual week, from bad - silly allegations that are utterly ridiculous, to the good- making his best time ever riding in the Pan Mass Challenge and raising a phenomenal amount of money for cancer research and dedicating his ride to his good friend- Ted Kennedy. Personally, I think the good out weights the bad.

Good news seems to always get a bad rap- pushed to the side and ignored.

[beachmom]

3. Well, I was referring to "life on the blogs", which I think was quite bad.

The good stuff was not mentioned and the bad stuff was everywhere. But you are right that in the scheme of things, the good of course outweighed the bad.

[karynnj]

5. There almost seems to be a connection between Kerry doing very

good things and getting very negative action on the blogs, left and right when he does. I read this yesterday and waited to post - because you beautifully said everything I think all of us felt this week. There is a stunning contrast between what Kerry really did the last two weeks and that garbage.

Bush signed the housing bill as well as the AIDS bill. The four provisions that Kerry introduced that are now law will make a huge difference to many people. The Affordable Housing Fund is a very major accomplishment that Kerry, Barney Frank, Dodd and Reed deserve credit for. No one person ever creates something this big, but Kerry was the person who fought for this and was the one whose office led the effort to get activists behind it, which can be seen because it was to his office that they directed people for more information. Kerry introduced this several times this decade and its implementation will do more against poverty than anything John Edwards has yet done. (and certainly more than he did in the Senate.) I was stunned by the reaction to helping people in financial difficulty on this board.

In addition, though as President, Bush gets to claim it, the person who was the first to really fight to have the US step up the fight against AIDS in Africa was Kerry - so his credit, with Biden, Lugar and others goes to more than the HIV ban removal. Like you, I am mystified by the left blogs lack of interest in that.

In addition there was the work in Committees. If you haven't seen the Finance committee hearing on the Cayman Islands (July 24) - it is really worth seeing. Kerry and Jack Blum cut through to the heart of the issue - it is an international transparecy problem. Kerry is again attacking the richest most powerful people in the world - if he could get that transparency, in addition to making cheating the IRS more difficult (but people will find ways), it could prevent another BCCI. (Could that be the root of the recent attacks?) So, in the last 2 weeks - 2 major Kerry efforts bore fruit and the ground work of a third was clearly there. Show me anyone who had a better last two weeks - in terms of accomplishment.

Then there were the two incredible speeches - neither of which got the attention they deserved on the blogs. I see them as very connected. The security one rests on the values expressed in the religion one and advocates for a major shift in foreign policy. The cool thing is that though it is far more mature and detailed, it is coming from the same place as his 1966 Yale speech and the end of the 1971 speech. Though the blogosphere ignored it, it might influence foreign policy makers in an Obama administration.

The ugliness of this week is discouraging and painful, but the reality of the week is what makes defending Kerry worth spending time defending him.

[MBS]

6. I think about the unfairness, and destructiveness, of this every single

day.
As Karynnj wrote here, it's particularly bizarre (and egregious) that Kerry always gets the most flack when he does good things. And people wonder why we don't have good leaders.. .. well, the first job is to support those brave few that are really fighting for us,and for our country instead of tearing them down or ignoring them. Baffling, and infuriating.

If it's any comfort, the local Cape Cod public radio station (heard by lots of people), WCAI, has reported Kerry's bike ride in its PMC reports this morning, and over the weekend. Each time, it was noted how much money he'd raised (apparently now more than $120K!), that he was riding for Teddy, that he'd ridden 100 miles, etc etc. And that nice pre-race NECN interview with Kerry is now on the Boston.com (Boston Globe) website, too.

[beachmom]

8. Thanks, MBS. That is good to know. Thank you for your local report.

[rox63]

9. Kerry's PMC ride got excellent coverage on NECN

And a lot more people around here watch NECN than post on BlueMassGroup. So while the blogs may not talk about it, lots of people have seen positive coverage of his ride.

[WildEyedLiberal]

10. The lefty blogs have always been hateful, petty, small minded and childish

It's a good thing I absolutely loathe everything conservatism stands for, because the typical left-winger would sure as shit drive me as far away from their "movement" as possible otherwise.

[MBS]

11. nice to hear from you, WEL

You have this gift of cutting through the s___ and just saying what needs to be said!
Are you still in England??

[WildEyedLiberal]

12. Haha, thanks

Cutting through the shit can get you in trouble when you step on certain toes or offend certain sensibilities, but the people who get offended are 95% of the time people whose opinions are irrelevant to me, anyway.

I am still in England. I've been here for three months, and am currently working at a B&B in a small town in the countryside. It is WONDERFUL here. I could easily see myself living in the UK. But I'll be back home in time to vote for Obama, so no worries :D

[MBS]

13. Great. Wonderful signature quote, btw. There is truth there! n/t