As the 2008 Presidential election approaches, Lib Dem Voice is looking to expand its coverage of American politics and the coming contest.
We’re particular looking to offer analysis and insight from a Lib Dem perspective. For example, will “states rights” (i.e. decentralisation) always be seen as a Republican issue? We know which party is more “liberal” in U.S. language, but which is more liberal by our standards?
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22 Comments
This feller has time on his hands these days and has previous experience.
What’s going on in those shorts?
I’ve just got back from the States, and it seems that the two with fresh momentum (this week) are Obama and Huckabee.
Somewhat off topic, but as a US resident it galls me that the Libdemvoice site is loaded with adverts (most of course politcal) many of whcih are for the sort of right wing nutters that would be laughed out of site in Britain but are taken seriously here. Is there no way that LDV can dispense with these ads for people like Ann Coulter and other poisonous scum?
4. Apologies ‘out of sight’, or ‘off the website’!!
I’ve never seen any adverts for Ann Coulter on this site (or indeed any advert for SM leather fetishism). Indeed much of the time the Messagespace advert space appears to be blank.
LDV does retain refusal over the MessageSpace ads, though I don’t think we’ve exercised it yet. Not sure we have control over the GoogleAds, which may be where Ann Coulter appeared.
Costs for running LDV have gone up in recent months, owing to increased bandwidth (thanks to our increasing readership). The ads enable us to pay for this, and for added functionality on the site.
I did notice an Ann Coulter ad a while back, I’m sure. I assumed it was ironic though 🙂 That’s the adaptive powers of international advertising, that is.
Google Ads can be geographically targetted, so overseas readers are probably seeing different adverts from readers in the UK.
Indeed – the current Google ads are “Why Mommy is a democrat” and “Guide to left wing wackos” and “free Newt! – sign up for free emails from Newt Gingrich”.
Two to one in favour of the right wing fascists….
Please help find a way to block this garbage
Why? Surely let the whackoes waste their money on preaching to the never-will-be converted!
Ever since the primary system was changed to allow Southern states to vote before populous Northern states, it has been more or less inevitable that a right-winger will win the Republican nomination.
Rudi Giuliani cannot get that all-important white rural support (ie, bedrock Republican voters), because he is (1) a Roman Catholic, (2) Italian and (3) comes from New York.
Huckabee may be unimpressive from a European perspective, but he fits all the minimum requirements of core Republican voters: he is white, he is Protestant, he is of Anglo-Saxon ethnic origin, he loves guns, he claims he doesn’t cheat on his wife and he doesn’t say “s**t” in front of his mother.
If the Republicans do nominate Huckabee (which seems likely), and he does win the White House (against a background of unease about Hillary Clinton), he will be yet another gormless marionette, like Reagan and Bush, with a key stuck in his back.
Whoever “wins” a Presidential election in the USA, the same people stay in charge – the billionaires, the families, the oil industry, the military industrial complex. The one President who won when he wasn’t supposed to was John F Kennedy, and he fell to E Howard Hunt’s bullet.
Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama know all too well that if by some peradventure they find their way to the Oval Office, and they step too far out of line, they go the same way as JFK and RFK.
One feels a degree of sympathy with the 50% of adult Americans who don’t bother to vote.
“Somewhat off topic, but as a US resident it galls me that the Libdemvoice site is loaded with adverts (most of course politcal) many of whcih are for the sort of right wing nutters that would be laughed out of site in Britain but are taken seriously here. Is there no way that LDV can dispense with these ads for people like Ann Coulter and other poisonous scum?”
Being a US resident doesn’t automatically confer Jack Kerouac status. Why is she poisonous scum?
“Rudi Giuliani cannot get that all-important white rural support (ie, bedrock Republican voters), because he is (1) a Roman Catholic, (2) Italian and (3) comes from New York.”
Or because he is not Catholic enough. These days, Catholics can be useful in making up the numbers.
Politics is about winning, and if the pro-life lobby is important, Catholics voters are also of value.
I seem to recall Catholic Bishop Thomas J. Tobin (Diocese of Providence in Rhode Island) decided not to meet Giuliani.
Hang on a sec Angus, I hate to dis a liberal icon but JFK was the product of the leading political dynasty of his day that was as rich as it was powerful. He also started the American military build up in Vietnam and was responsible for the Bay of Pigs – all of which I imagine kept the military industrial complex pretty happy (I imagine the spending on the space programme did too).
Problem is, America being a democracy an’all, it’s the people who put these guys in office. If they wanted something different all they had to do was choose…
Ed @ 15
Not quite. JFK was unwelcome to the elite for a number of reasons.
Firstly, it is an unspoken rule that a President must be a Protestant and of mainly Anglo-Saxon ethnic origin. JFK is the only Roman Catholic to have held the office of President and one of only two non-Anglo-Saxons (the other being Martin Van Buuren).
Secondly, JFK’s father was rejected by the elite. In his day, Roman Catholics were barred from Ivy League universities, rich mens’ clubs and Freemasonry. His lack of common purpose with elite interests was demonstrated by his dogged isolationism (he said “only Roosevelt and the Kikes” wanted war with Germany). Joe Kennedy made a lot of money (much of it through boot-legging), but he was never powerful. And the family was hardly a “dynasty” prior to the three brothers having successful political careers. Joe, who was basically a gangster, was the first Kennedy to get rich.
Thirdly, JFK allowed his brother, as Attorney-General, to launch a campaign against the mafia, even though the leading mafia bosses had helped him get elected.
Fourthly, JFK refused to provide air cover for the Bay of Pigs and thwarted more serious attempts to overthrow Castro.
Fifthly, JFK was reluctant to get more deeply involved in the Vietnam War.
JFK was hardly a liberal by modern UK standards, and I don’t claim him as such. He was assassinated, not because of his timid social policies, but because the elite wanted someone in the White House who would do exactly as he was told. As soon as Johnson got into the Oval Office he engineered the Gulf of Tonkin false flag incident and escalated the Vietnam War.
It seems that several key figures were behind the Kennedy assassination, including J Edgar Hoover, Meyer Lansky and Johnson himself, who was bragging that Kennedy would be gone by the end of the year. What is very clear is the fatal shots were fired by E Howard Hunt, a CIA operative and, as such, a servant of the state.
The dilemma for liberals is that if Guliani wins the nomination, he is more likely to defeat the Democrat, but at least will not be as bad as Bush. If Huckerbee wins the nomination, he is more likely to be defeated by the Democrats, but if he wins he will be a disaster.
Either way, I hope the Democrats win.
Geoffrey at No 17:
Giuliani appears less obnoxious than Huckabee, but he is just as fully committed to the neo-con agenda, probably more so. After all, the neo-con guru, Norman Podhoretz, is Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor. The elite won’t allow Giuliani to get the Republican nomination, despite his ability to pick up middle-of-the-road support, for the same reasons that rural whites in the South and Mid-West won’t have him. The Democrat the elite fears least is probably John Edwards (he’s a male WASP, though of humble origins), and I guess registered Democrats will drift in Edwards’ direction so fearful are they that neither Hillary nor Obama can win. So we will end up with Edwards (a clever courtroom advocate) against Huckabee (a hick religious nut). You bet if Huckabee gets his feet behind the Oval Office desk, the real power will repose somewhere else.
Giuliani is a nutter. If you listen to anything he says, it’s all ‘We must defeat the forces of Islamofascism, that the Democrats would allow to destroy our way of existence, so we must be ready to do whatever it takes’ etc. etc. Huckabee is an idiot, but he might be less of a Dr. Strangelove. I’m also hopeful his rise might be a sign the Christian right is starting to realise that unfettered free-markets don’t particularly reflect Christian values. Anyway, I’ll probably be voting Mike Gravel and then Green…none of the main candidates want to do anything much about climate change apart from subsidise Iowan farmers to starve the Third World, and the last place in America I lived was Massachusetts where nobody’s vote matters anyway.
The United States can’t afford to lose in Iraq the way the British were defeated in Basra.
The British allowed themselves to become POWs and negotiated with terrorists to be permitted to leave Basra.
The Arabs don’t (and didn’t) take the United States seriously, they felt before the invasion that there was no will for a long struggle.
It doesn’t really matter what the war is actually about, or why it was a stupid idea to begin with,..
the message of not being a push-over, has to be broadcast to clients, allies and enemies alike.
The Brits do not care about being humiliated and treated like a third rate power by Mugabe and African leaders.
That impotent status is not something the United States should accept.
Where is that going to lead, to the timorousness and delay associated with the Clinton administration’s strategy of allowing the Serbs to ethnic cleanse?
The EU is a super-state without soldiers, it will always be America which has to go into harm’s way to deter despots and genocide.
Martin Van Buuren was the first US President to be born in the United States.
Tazia at 20:
“The United States can’t afford to lose in Iraq the way the British were defeated in Basra.”
What you really mean is the United States ELITE cannot afford to lose in Iraq, although some would argue that they already have done.
“The British allowed themselves to become POWs and negotiated with terrorists to be permitted to leave Basra.”
Who is terrorising whom? Who was it who dropped more bomb tonnage on Iraq than was dropped on Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin put together?
Life for Iraqis is now far worse than it ever was under Saddam Hussein. Did Cheney and his gang intend this? I don’t know. Probably they didn’t care. The purpose of the war was to enable US big business to help itself to Iraq’s oil. That has been achieved, by and large, so perhaps the US really is winning the war.
“It doesn’t really matter what the war is actually about, or why it was a stupid idea to begin with,..the message of not being a push-over, has to be broadcast to clients, allies and enemies alike.”
Yes, this is exactly the script we heard from Asquith, Lloyd George and Earl Haig of the Somme as they sent 850,000 of their fellow countrymen to their pointless deaths. It is also precisely the line we heard from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as they systematically wrecked South-East Asia.
A story has it (apocryphal, no doubt) that when asked by a young lady why the US was pursuing the Vietnam War, Johnson replied by exposing his 10-inch appendage.
Only Henry V with his box of tennis balls could beat that.
“The Brits do not care about being humiliated and treated like a third rate power by Mugabe and African leaders.”
Which is presumably why we stood up to General Galtieri.
“That impotent status is not something the United States should accept.”
I thought Ike was the one who “could never get it up” (according to his secretary, that is).
“Where is that going to lead, to the timorousness and delay associated with the Clinton administration’s strategy of allowing the Serbs to ethnic cleanse?”
But it was OK, presumably, to invite Tudjman (an admirer of Hitler) to ethnically cleanse the Krajina Serbs?
The US elite didn’t give a stuff about the Jugoslavs who were killed, raped and ethnically cleansed. Only two things interested them: (1) client statelets in Croatia and Bosnia, and (2) the few profitable bits of the Serbian economy. Milosevic refused to hand over the latter, so he was ousted.
The White House is occupied by a brain-dead alcoholic halfwit. The question we have to ask ourselves is who are the forces that turn the key in his back?