Still Hating America.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Adder
Huh? G3 said that these two bloggers would fit in around here. And I said, yeah, but none of us are really involved in politics, except, purportedly, you.

How does that involve me confusing you with George Will?

They've already livened up the board. Thanks, Ty!

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
When were the Ottoman's in Afghanistan? Did they get that far in the sixteenth century? Weren't the Safivids (sp) in the way? The extent of the Ottoman empire back then has alway been fuzzy in my mind. Or maybe you were referring the Ottomans in Iraq and not in Afghanistan?

Congratulations! You win!

You're now 1 - 65,535

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I don't understand how that one is anti-Catholic (any more than Christo-fascist, since there are plenty of Christofascist baptists and Lutherans out there).

The first rule of any campaign (just like being a Dr.) is first, don't do any harm. It was really stupid to not have any adult from the campaign look this stuff over. Anything that comes out from the campaign and anyone who speaks for the campaign should be completely vetted. That is just politics 101. This mistake happened during amateur hour at the Edwards campaign. And it is not like the guy can plead poverty in that he did not have the resources to check these woman out, or check out their posts.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
The first rule of any campaign (just like being a Dr.) is first, don't do any harm. It was really stupid to not have any adult from the campaign look this stuff over. Anything that comes out from the campaign and anyone who speaks for the campaign should be completely vetted. That is just politics 101. This mistake happened during amateur hour at the Edwards campaign. And it is not like the guy can plead poverty in that he did not have the resources to check these woman out, or check out their posts.

I suspect he did check them out - someone read their blogs and said, let's hire them. That means whoever hired them either (a) failed to realize there are Christofascist Republicans who would attack them or (b) failed to have a plan to combat Christofascists like Donohue.

So, you're at least half right, something over there was amateur hour.

1.5 - 65,535.5 for you! It's been a helluva day.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Congratulations! You win!

You're now 1 - 65,535

Why did I win?

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by taxwonk
I'm not suggesting that. I think we should have bankrolled the Northern Alliance or some coalition friendlier to the notion of preserving human life to the point where they could have taken down the Taliban.

If there was any lesson from Vietnam it was that you don't go in where you can't win. If the opposition is willing to fight to the last man standing, you need to motivate the people who live there to be willing to fight back.

This is pretty much what we did - we bankrolled the Northern Alliance and provided air cover, and we beat some loud war drums and sent in a few advisors. Once they won, we put boots on the ground to help with the clean up and stabilization.

The strength of the Northern Alliance is part of the reason that the war in Afghanistan has been reasonably successful. But the Taliban are persistent little buggers with a strong (even if minority) following in the country, and keeping them under control and building legitimacy for the government in the South will take resources, which we should be ready to give.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
Why did I win?

It's looking increasingly like you're eating TaxWonk's lunch today. What with getting the Ottoman thing right and understanding our role in Afghanistan a bit more.

But, I'm still betting on TaxWonk to come back in the later rounds with a K-O.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I suspect he did check them out - someone read their blogs and said, let's hire them. That means whoever hired them either (a) failed to realize there are Christofascist Republicans who would attack them or (b) failed to have a plan to combat Christofascists like Donohue.

So, you're at least half right, something over there was amateur hour.

1.5 - 65,535.5 for you! It's been a helluva day.

Are you kidding? I think it is like 85% of this country identifies themselves as Christians. Isn't that one group you didn't even want to come close to possibly offending? Why would any one put out anything from a campaign that someone who believes in Christian dogma would even find slightly offensive? Do you think the Clinton camnpaign would make such a stupid mistake like this? Giving your enemy red meat like this is just plain stupid.

[Adder]

Originally posted by Spanky
Are you kidding? I think it is like 85% of this country identifies themselves as Christians. Isn't that one group you didn't even want to come close to possibly offending? Why would any one put out anything from a campaign that someone who believes in Christian dogma would even find slightly offensive? Do you think the Clinton camnpaign would make such a stupid mistake like this? Giving your enemy red meat like this is just plain stupid.

I have not been following this closely, but based on the Will article you posted, I thought the criticism here was focused on the pre-campaign blog posting of these people, not something that was put out by the campaign. Nobody is quite so stupid as to have the campaign say anything antichristian.

That said, I have little doubt the campaign staffers could be stupid enough to have reviewed the blog entries in question and not found them offense. It has to do with the type of person that wants to work on liberal campaigns. They tend not to get bent out of shape over people insulting the religious.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally posted by Spanky
Are you kidding? I think it is like 85% of this country identifies themselves as Christians. Isn't that one group you didn't even want to come close to possibly offending? Why would any one put out anything from a campaign that someone who believes in Christian dogma would even find slightly offensive? Do you think the Clinton camnpaign would make such a stupid mistake like this? Giving your enemy red meat like this is just plain stupid.

In a Democratic primary, mainstream candidates can and should attack Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and William Donohue and make hay of it. A candidate running behind the pack, who needs to get attention, could rationally decide that attacking right-wing Christianity as a whole makes for good politics, but it's a move for the behind-the-pack guy, not a front-runner.

It was amateur hour there, indeed, but hiring them might have worked for some candidates IF thought about first. For example, I don't think Howard Dean would have fired them, he would have dismissed some of what they posted and refocused the discussion on his appeal to youth, his general personal vanity, and William Donohue's anti-semitism. And then they would have shown up a few weeks later in an independent bloggers-for-Dean group that he could disavow or embrace depending on what day of the week it was.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
It's looking increasingly like you're eating TaxWonk's lunch today. What with getting the Ottoman thing right and understanding our role in Afghanistan a bit more.

But, I'm still betting on TaxWonk to come back in the later rounds with a K-O.

I asked Taxwonk a question. How was that eating his lunch? Either he meant to say Iraq, which was a simple typo, or he knew something about the Ottomans that I didn't. I had heard that during the sixteenth century (or maybe the seventeenth century) that the Ottomans had tried to hook up with their Turkish brethren in Central Asia (the Uzbeks) to fight the Persians while the Persians controlled Afghanistan. They would hit them from the north while the Ottomans hit them from the west. There is no question that the Uzbeks and the Persians went at it in northern Afghanistan (at the same time the Ottomans and Persians went at it), the only question is whether they coordinated, or even had help from the Ottomans. The Ottomans and the Uzbeks were Sunni and the Persians were Shiite, so there was a religious reason and an ethnic reason for them to join up. I heard once that the Ottomans sent the Uzbeks troops and technology (when I was reading about Turkish nationalism - Landau’s book Pan-Turkism) but since then I have never heard about it again (I was never able to find a reference to it on the internet nor did Pope mention it in his book "Sons of the Conquerors). In fact I have never heard much about that war (Uzbeck v. Persian), but the Turks must have been somewhat successful because there are a lot of Uzbeks and Turkmen in Afghanistan now (I have also wondered why the Ottomans, in all the conquering, didn't focus more on bringing in more turkish lands into their empire). Since that happened before the British were there, I thought maybe that was what Taxwonk was referring to when he said the British must have learned from the Ottomans. Or maybe he was confusing the Ottomans with their Uzbeck brethren - hell, I don't know, that is why I asked the question.

[SlaveNoMore]

Replaced_Texan
That was the point of hiring bloggers. Neither one of them were involved with politics before they joined the Edwards campaign. They were just bloggers. It's not like they had any more special insight than any other ordinary person. They just write well and have large audiences. They're particularly interesting because they're women in a largely men dominated arena, but they didn't have any special access or knowledge to anything political outside of the blogosphere. Pandagon certainly is one of the larger liberal blogs out there, but it's no Kos or Atrios. It's more of a Crooked Timber.

ETA: and quite honestly, their political naivete is probably what most got them into trouble. They should have been prepared for the attacks, or at least had a ready answer for them. Frankly, I would have thrown that asinine WRONG leaflet back in the faces of the people attacking them, and redrawn the issue, but the attacks were pretty vicious. Marcotte got death threats from some good catholics.

What is lost in all her clamouring is that the rightie blogs initially took her to the woodshed because she went back and edited a fair number of "controversial" blog entries - not including the one's that just disappeared - right after she joined the Edwards campaign.

Her (disgusting) anti-Catholic and anti-Christian vitriol was seized upon later on by the MSM as being at the heart of the matter, but that is not really where it started.

Now Marcotte is dismissing all of that as "server error" - which, although ludicrous, would seem to infer that she shouldn't exactly be the person in charge of the blog for a serious Presidential candidate.

PS - You actually think she writes well? To me, she reads like a HS newspaper columnist.

[SlaveNoMore]

Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I suspect he did check them out - someone read their blogs and said, let's hire them. That means whoever hired them either (a) failed to realize there are Christofascist Republicans who would attack them or (b) failed to have a plan to combat Christofascists like Donohue.

Um, quite a few folks from the "silent minority" of Christian Democrats lambasted Edwards as well.

Brian O'Dwyer, a New York lawyer and Irish-American leader, who attacked Edwards the first time round, just came out with a statement:"The blogger’s continuing hostility to Catholics and other Christians, especially in the centrality of the Virgin birth, is both morally wrong and, for Senator Edwards, politically stupid. Senator Edwards was horribly flawed in refusing to see the importance of how offensive the blogger’s earlier comments were to people of faith. This latest so-called review, published after Edwards refused to fire her for earlier anti-Catholic writings, should now wake him up and lead him to finally do the right thing as his campaign tries to move forward. Bigotry of any kind should have no role in the Democratic Party, or in any presidential campaign."

O'Dwyer, also, is hard to cast as a GOP hitman. He's the chairman of the National Democratic Ethnic Leadership Council, the Democratic Party's official white-ethnic grouping; close to some labor union leaders; and a leading member of a prominent New York democratic family.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Adder
I have not been following this closely, but based on the Will article you posted, I thought the criticism here was focused on the pre-campaign blog posting of these people, not something that was put out by the campaign. Nobody is quite so stupid as to have the campaign say anything antichristian.

That said, I have little doubt the campaign staffers could be stupid enough to have reviewed the blog entries in question and not found them offense. It has to do with the type of person that wants to work on liberal campaigns. They tend not to get bent out of shape over people insulting the religious.

I think they posted that stuff before Edwards brought them on board. However, their stuff should have been reviewed before they were allowed to speak for the campaign. Deciding who gets to speak for the campaign is a huge issue in any campaign. Screwing this up happens on new campaigns all the time. Groups that form the base push their people, and to please them, an extremist is hired and then they embarrass the campaign. That is why you never hire an outspoken zealot from a special interest group. It is much easier to not hire someone without offending them, but it is hard to fire someone without offending them. That is the problem the Edwards campaign faced. Once they were hired, he couldn't make a move without offending someone. If they had never been hired in the first place he would have never had this problem. But once they are hired, if you fire them you tick off your base.

You say you can understand staffers that would not get offended by this. Well of course, but the staffers aren't there to secure their own vote, they are there to secure other people's vote. These people are not hired to push a single issue; they are there to help him get fifty percent of the vote (in this case delegates) plus one. This was a pretty amateurish screw up for a second presidential run.

[SlaveNoMore]

Replaced_Texan
Is Christofacist more vulgar than Islamofacist?

When millions of so-called "Christofascists" openly advocate either your conversion to their religion or death by beheading, then no. Until then, the term is idiotic.

Speaking of Islamofascists, you gotta love womyn's rights in Dar-al Islam

LAHORE, Pakistan (Reuters) - A suspected Islamist zealot shot dead a Pakistani woman provincial government minister on Tuesday because he believed women should not be in politics, officials said.

Zil-e-Huma, social welfare minister of the Punjab government, a women's activist and supporter of President Pervez Musharraf, was about to give a speech to dozens of people when the lone attacker shot her in the head. She died later in hospital.

The gunman, identified as Mohammad Sarwar, was immediately arrested.

Punjab Law Minister Raja Basharat told Reuters the gunman had been implicated in six previous murder cases but had never been convicted because of a lack of evidence.

"He is basically a fanatic," Basharat said. "He is against the involvement of women in politics and government affairs."

"He considers it contrary to the teachings of Allah for a woman to become a minister or a ruler. That's why he committed this action," the police said in a statement.

Yes, one term is more vulgar than the other.