.I will pee in your pool
"From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale".
.
Posted on 10/15/2007 3:25:56 PM PDT by P.O.E.
IN THE summer of 2005, a seat on the Supreme Court fell vacant. George Bush was obviously going to nominate a conservative to fill it. MoveOn.org, an online protest group, was determined to block whomever he named. Since MoveOn was emerging as a thunderous voice in Democratic politics, Matt Bai, a New York Times Magazine reporter, went to meet some of its 3m members. He was taken to a house party in Virginia. More than 1,000 such parties were being held that night in America, all organised by volunteers connected via MoveOn's website.
Mr Bai asked his host, Chuck, a prosperous ad man, what motivated him. Was it the Iraq war? Or the fear that the Republicans might ban abortion? No, said Chuck, it was because he couldn't stand his Bush-supporting neighbours. “The rage just builds up inside me...I can't even go to parties around here anymore. I can't deal with it.” He had to do something. He considered peeing in a Republican neighbour's pool. Instead, he hosted a MoveOn party.
Mr Bai has stumbled on how the internet has transformed grassroots politics. It has allowed new groups of angry people—the most reliable footsoldiers of any political campaign—to find and talk to each other. The religious right has always been able to rally its troops through church pulpits and mailing lists. Now the anti-Bush left is doing something similar online. And most of the “netroots” (internet grassroots activists) are not, as you might imagine, tech-savvy 20-somethings. They tend to be like Chuck: middle-aged suburbanites alienated from their neighbours. “If college kids wanted to commiserate with someone over the fear and misery of life under Bush, all they had to do was walk across the hall,” notes Mr Bai. “For affluent boomers, there was MoveOn.”
His book is engaging and painstakingly reported. Mr Bai sets out to uncover the forces shaping the Democratic Party behind the scenes, both within and outside the party hierarchy. He spends time with howling bloggers, billionaire donors and the politicians who try to accommodate their impossible demands. He is instinctively sympathetic to anyone on the anti-Bush team, but he can't help noticing what ghastly people some of them are.
He meets Hollywood luminaries who wail about being oppressed and disenfranchised, moneymen who think that money is everything and voters are morons, and bloggers who think that profanity is an adequate substitute for thought. He is clearly shocked to discover that Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a blogger so influential that party leaders prostrate themselves before him, knows practically nothing about policy or anything that occurred before 1998. He also treats his fans with disdain and coldly urges the Democratic Party to do the wrong thing if it might be politically advantageous.
By far the nicest and most reasonable folk in Mr Bai's account are the politicians themselves. He describes how Barack Obama was hounded for advocating politeness towards people with whom one disagrees. And he watches Mark Warner, a moderate and popular ex-governor of Virginia who is hoping to run for the Senate, try but fail to woo the netroots. At a bloggers' convention, Mr Warner denounced the Iraq war, a stance he thought progressive bloggers would applaud. Instead, they harangued him—because he, like Mr Bush, had suggested that Iran was a threat. “To the bloggers”, says Mr Bai, “if Bush said the sky was blue, then it was green.”
All this leaves Mr Bai somewhat dispirited. The Democrats' stunning capture of Congress last year left nearly all the characters in his book claiming credit. But there was not much evidence that any of them deserved it. People had voted to punish the president and his party, not to endorse any big idea of the Democrats'—because, he concludes, they have not got one.
Conspicuously absent are those who fund these loonies: Soros, with Hildabeast machine minions....
Idiots.
“The rage just builds up inside me...I can’t deal with it.” “He had to do something. He considered peeing in a Republican neighbour’s pool.”
These people have problems, very serious problems. Thank God he didn’t shoot anyone.
These people have problems, very serious problems. Thank God he didn’t shoot anyone.
We have the guns.
“The rage just builds up inside me...I can’t even go to parties around here anymore. I can’t deal with it.”
Must be bored with the men’s room at the bus station.
If the GOP doesn't fully understand that point, and why the voters wanted to punish the President, they are toast. Here's a hint: Do what you were elected to do, and avoid doing what you were elected to prevent.
Pretty obvious once you read a few posts by him though...
First, he wouldn't know which end of the gun to use. Second, he'd probably end up shooting himself, which, on the surface wouldn't be bad, and the whole anti-gun BS would get nuts, (or, nuttier) yet again!
He tried. But he couldn't figure-out how to push the cartridge into the muzzle of the barrel.
Classic BDS. What a loser.
.I will pee in your pool
"From hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee. Ye damned whale".
.
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