Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Online, latter day Dylan hits another sour note and the Evan Blah lovers

As noted, we're moving quick. (Noted in the previous entry.) Patrick Healy contributes "Lieberman Rival Seeks Support Beyond Iraq Issue" in this morning's New York Times. The article upends previous Times' coverage on Ned Lamont. It also dubs him "darling of the antiwar left" but someone forgot to send me the poster.

We're not interested in Healy, we have other things to address.

Starting with the online, latter day Dylan who's looked in the mirror and seen . . . the faults of others. He's on a screech again (long gone are his melodic days) and, this time, no one e-mailing is aware of what tune he's attempting to sing?

Who knows? And who cares? But to get this topic out of the e-mails, latter day Dylan's not concerned with the war. Look at what he's chosen to write about day after day for three years plus now. He doesn't care. If you feel he's rushing to Joe Lieberman or Evan Blah's defense, you're probably right.

Lieberman was a problem before the war. The anger towards Lieberman has been building for years and years.

Whatever online latter day is writing about, who knows? Who can tell anymore? Who cares anymore? It's his valentine to the center. Is that a surprise from the man who praises William Kristol? Is that a suprise from the man who had a Tourette's episode over Joe Wilson?

He's useless. (And his "for the record" laughable since, for the record, he's for Hillary.) The most offensive thing about the piece that I'm seeing is that he's coming off, yet again, as the scold. Whining about the way centrists are treated. (He loves him some Joe Klein, but give it a few more weeks.) As though his own hands don't have blood on them? If anything, it explains his attacks on Nancy Pelosi (and make no mistake, those were attacks). His treatment of all women has been noted at length. He doesn't matter.

Just accept the fact that all he has is the oldies and that's all he'll ever have at this point. If you enjoy sweating to the oldies, keep checking him out. I was never someone who thought it was "funny" to listen to Rush. If I don't like something, if someone's thoughts (or "thoughts") have no value to me, I avoid them. Life's too short.

He may be attempting to address something larger than he has in months, who knows?

But, as he offers yet another 'tone' op-ed, he's useless. He's made himself so.

Now let's deal with the praises going to Evan Blah. A site's got two bits of praise to Evan Blah. That's the other big topic in the e-mails.

You know, we didn't need the hula hoop of "framing" in this community. But that site did push it. So it's shocking that they're praising Blah's hideous speech.

Wally addressed it. For those who missed it (and I don't think many did judging by the e-mails), Blah gave a speech to inform America that the Democrats needed to stop focusing on the poor and start going after the middle class.

Reality is that the Dems haven't gone after poor voters.

They've been the party of big business. DLC-er Blah offers more of the same and it gets praise. This is the same trash the DLC has been selling for two decades and you have to be an idiot (or in a coma) to praise it.

What he's doing is saying (again) that the poor don't matter to the elections. He's also (FRAMERS, pay attention!) trashing the Democratic Party by feeding into the stereotype that they are out of touch with the common person ("man"). It's not praise worthy.

That site and Dylan both seem to have a problem with reality. Dylan seems to think that if you're Democrat, left, liberal or progressive, you have to be a cheerleader for every centrist that wants to claim the party i.d. "Democrat." You don't.

In their own way, both are playing rallying around the party and offering cautionary tales of what might happen in 2008 (two years from now) if you don't. What will happen in 2008 if people start marching in lock step is that we'll have more of the same DLC crap that we've all had quite enough of.

For the framing crowd, they should be calling Blah out. He's attacking the party (his own party) with stereotypes. He's saying, "Yes, we were out of touch but now we'll be in touch." If you missed it, the Kerry campaign and the Gore campaign didn't target the poor voters. They weren't concenred with them. They weren't concerned with the working poor and they certainly weren't concerned with single working mothers.

But here comes Blah, feeding into every Fox "News" stereotype of the Democratic Party ("Bill O'Reilly was right! They aren't for the middle class!") and he's getting praise. That's a problem. People need to start thinking a little bit more. If this continues, we'll delink from that nonsense. (We'll keep Dylan for the archives.) They've already reduced the Middle East conflict to the most simplistic terms (at the start of the week) and now they're propping up a DLC-er.

Do they believe that nonsense? No. But they'd have to think first before offering their mini-summaries and, more and more, it appears thought is too much for them. (Which may be why they ignored Nancy A. Youssef's article despite the fact that Mike exchanged e-mails with them on this topic repeatedly.)

Evan Blah has done what the DLC does. It's coming out of his DLC mouth and not Al Frum's, that's the only difference. That ___ can't grasp that indicates that ___ is on a thinking holiday.
This is the same attack that the right's been making since the days of JFK, LBJ and Bobby Kennedy. (All of which were picked up by the DLC in the 80s.) That some on the left want to get behind Blah's nonsense is nonsense.

At a time when they're all so damn concerned about the 'values' voters, the 'vangical voters, they might also want to ask how damn selfish is Evan Blah that he's whining about (non-existant) attempts to help the poor? He's slashing and burning the party and he's also attacking John Edwards. (Edwards is making poverty an issue of his hoped for 2008 campaign. One more issue than Blah can find with both hands.)

Evan Blah doesn't deserve applause. Those wanting to feed into that nonsense are feeding into attacks on the Democratic Party (right-wing attacks) and they're also trashing John Edwards' campaign, whether they grasp it or not.

In the real world, 20 government employees have been kidnapped in Iraq. That matters. If we can all leave the useless to the useless, we can talk about some things that actually matter as opposed to those who delude themselves over Evan Blah or those who want to make tone arguments (and never thought to apply their argument to themselves).

The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.