I was shocked to see an Obama ad specifically aimed at Utah. I never thought I’d see a day that a Presidential candidate would care about how Utahn vote.

Why am I not surprised that ALL of the BYU democrates would fit in one apartment!

jjohnsen:

Obama’s only running ads here because his fight with Hillary is so close that every state counts. See here for an explanation of what’s playing out:

http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124735.html

I’ve actually thought about becoming involved in Obama’s campaign at some level.

Tossman, there are no circumstances under which I would work for, support or have anything nice to say about Obama’s politics. He is the most liberal member of the Senate:

http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/

His election would be a disaster that would make Jimmy Carter look like a triumph of wisdom and strength.

The president usually only screws things up with the help of the Congress.

I can’t see Obama being worse than GWB, sad to say, and maybe he would torture fewer people.

I think I would vote for him over McCain.

Purely from a “lesser of two evils” standpoint, in a McCain/Obama matchup, I would have to go for Obama. I disagree strongly with his economics, but at least we’d see a chance of getting out of Iraq, ending torture and abuse of civil liberties, and not nuking Iran.

Geoff: The two terms of the Bush administration make Millard Fillmore look like a triumph of wisdom and strength. At least Warren Harding had the insight to admit, “I am not fit for this office and never should have been here.”

Geoff- His election would be a disaster that would make Jimmy Carter look like a triumph of wisdom and strength.

Oh I totally agree. There’s reason to my madness. First the emotional- I so detest Hillary Clinton and want to see her go down, that Obama’s looking really nice.

Strategically, if Hillary gets the nomination, she’ll pick Obama for VP and they will be unstoppable. Then we have both the Clintons back in power, plus the most liberally rated member of the senate. Bad, bad news.

If Obama wins the nomination, he wouldn’t pick Hillary as a running mate, nor would she accept if he did. We’d just have Obama to beat, and I think in the end people would see that he’s an ignorant, radically liberal disaster. We have more of a chance of beating Obama.

So Obama’s my man!

By the way, Geoff, he’s totally with you when it comes to illegal immigration, so that’s maybe an incentive to jump on his bandwagon!

He probably wouldn’t like my proposal for a wall and a $10,000 charge for a visa.

I was just watching the Clinton/Obama debate over lunch. Mrs. Clinton was talking about the trouble small contractors have competing with outfits full of illegal immigrants. If it’s McCain vs. Clinton, Clinton will be to the right of McCain on immigration. I’ve wondered for some time when a Democrat would see such an opening and exploit it. It makes sense that it would be the senator from New York; if you look up “triangulation” in the dictionary, one of the definitions says “See Clinton, Bill.”

From a left/right, authoritarian/libertarian standpoint, there’s actually not much difference between Hillary/Obama and McCain/Romney. They’re all right of center authoritarians. Some are just more right and more authoritarian.

See:

http://politicalcompass.org/usprimaries2008

“His election would be a disaster that would make Jimmy Carter look like a triumph of wisdom and strength.”

On the bright side, Carter gave us Reagan. Who would a President Obama give us in 2012?

Mike P.,

The political compass you refer to is so confused on the authoritarian / libertarian dimension that it is worthless. The idea that the Democrats are more libertarian and less authoritarian than the Republicans is risible. No doubt Ron Paul would feel more at home caucusing with Clinton and Edwards. Not.

The authors really ought to read Jonah Goldberg’s latest work and try again.

Mike P. (continued),

The test (which I took twice), for example, places me at (1.50,-0.72) which is closest to the projectic metric for John Edwards and miles away from the projected metric for Fred Thompson, my preferred candidate, at (7.0, 7.0).

However, off the top of my head, I cannot recall any of Thompson’s political positions that I have a significant disagreement with, while I disagree with Edwards on just about everything.

So I cannot help but think that the projected scores for American politicans are little more than effective fabrications based on crude stereotypes and that the test itself is similarly defective.

Mark D, I agree with you on those tests. Not much value.

Those tests may be stupid, but hardly more stupid than the latest work by Jonah Goldberg.

Tossman, there are no circumstances under which I would work for, support or have anything nice to say about Obama’s politics.

So if it were Obama vs. Putin, you’d be supporting Putin?

Putin could certainly never be characterized as the most liberal member of the Kremlin.

Bill, thanks for the drive-by mudsling, but can you please tell us why Jonah Goldberg’s book is so stupid? Have you read it? (I’ll allow you some time to quickly google a Soros-funded rebuttal and a few negative Amazon reviews)

Tossman, don’t tell me that when you find a piece of garbage that you keep reading all the way to the end to confirm for yourself that yes, indeed, it really was garbage, every last page. If so, I feel sorry for you, because there are too many good books out there and so little time. I don’t need Soros or Amazon to form an opinion of Goldberg or Coulter and their ilk, nor do I need to heed every poisoned word that proceeds forth from their mouths.

I’m delighted with Obama’s momentum in the polls. I made my first contribution to his campaign almost a year ago, and was mentioning his plausibility as a candidate already in this thread from early 2005:

http://millennialstar.org/index.php/2005/03/08/religion_of_the_mormon_kind_becomes_an_i#comments

That thread is worth also rereading to see who was right about President Bush’s response to the Plame affair as well as the evangelical response to Mitt Romney.

Bill,

That was an unusually informative review. Goldberg is admittedly trying to establish a wider conception of fascism than is conventional - a definition more like totalitarianism.

The idea that the left-liberal project is totalitarian in the way the conservative project isn’t is hardly an amazing revelation. Leftism is collectivism - that means big government, high taxes, large scale redistribution of income, and so on.

Goldberg documents the more severe features of left-liberal attempts to organize society around a singular vision. If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, right?

The excesses of Wilson, Hoover, FDR, the New Left, and Hillary Clinton in this regard are a matter of historical record. Goldberg describes them in detail. The claim that Goldberg doesn’t have a point is equivalent to a denial of history.

Remember, he is not claiming that left-liberals are fascists, but rather that left-liberalism bears a much closer genetic relationship to pre-mid-1930s fascism than anything remotely described as conservative does. This, again, is a simple matter of intellectual affinity - the left-liberal vision is totalitarian and the conservative vision is not.

Now perhaps someone could write a book entitled conservative fascism. There is certainly something that could go in. Wartime mobilization of any kind is not exactly libertarian, and post-Vietnam left-liberals have been against this sort of nationalism. Other than that the material is thin - it is hard to argue that abortion restrictions (now 35 years in the past) or obscenity regulations are the equivalent of the Palmer raids or as intrusive as a huge federal government.

Now perhaps someone could write a book entitled conservative fascism.

That’s just the problem, Mark D. Although I don’t know Bill, many people on the Left think that conservatism is only a half step removed from fascism, and that is why they react so strongly when someone fits them with the monkey suit.

Goldberg’s book is useful. It attempts to explore why it is chic to waer a t-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara, but not of Pinochet. After all, their body counts are about the same. That is the question that Bill and other people on the Left ought to think carefully about, but so far show no sign of doing.

So full of assumptions. Is someone who voted for Giuliani and Rick Lazio and contributed to John McCain’s 2000 campaign a person of the Left? It’s quite possible to be a independent-minded person, not swallowing the fringe arguments of either side. It’s quite possible to have read much more history than Jonah Goldberg, and yet have never worn a Che Guevara t-shirt. In any case, Goldberg is not making any serious arguments like you suggest. His main success was in prying away a few of your dollars.

Bill, if you want to convince people, you might actually try making an argument. Where’s the beef?

Bill,

Goldberg is indeed probably motivated to make money, just like anybody else who writes a book. So what? The question is a serious one, and you just sidestepped it. Why are we more tolerant of totalitarians from the left than from the right? Or do you disagree that we are?

Sorry guys, had to go to some meetings

In this article from five years ago

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg121302.asp

Goldberg pretty much undermines the logic of his later book, going on and on about how just because things are alike in some ways doesn’t mean that they are alike in other ways or all ways.

More coming, I’m just trying to find out what words are triggering the filter.

One thing he did mention in the article, however, is that Woodrow Wilson was a notorious racist (although he also said he was a virulent anti-semite, which is not quite the adjective I would use for someone who appointed Brandeis to the Supreme Court).

In fact, in many ways Wilson was much less progressive than TR, for example. He did have an idealistic foreign policy as we know. In some ways it might even remind us of the neo-conservatives in its ambition.

Wouldn’t it be an irony of history if, for example, ninety years later, a president who had never even heard of the Kurds (neither had Norman Podhoretz) unwittingly created the conditions for their sovereignty? (point twelve of the fourteen points)

What is the point? It could be that neo-conservatives are not really conservatives. Or it could be that “liberal”, however much it does or doesn’t apply to Wilson, didn’t necessarily mean the same thing then that is does today, and even today it’s meaning is subject to debate. But for a polemicist of the subtlety and finesse of Goldberg, mostly the word liberal just means always and everywhere anything bad.

The Palmer Raids were going after soc*alists, anarchists, communists, and other leftists, so I would hardly call a government engaged in such raids leftist itself. Woodrow Wilson, by the way, was incapacitated by a stroke by the time of the Raids.

All right, I’m just about done with this site. Any time I try to post more than a few sentences the comment comes back as invalid. Halfway through my very time-consuming experiments with rewriting so many times the server died. I’ll have to go back to drive-by mud-slinging.

Have you actually read his book, Bill?

You obviously didn’t understand comment 20

Bill, you seem like a reasonable man. We just finished up a century that brought us totalitarians of all stripes: Franco, Pinochet, Castro, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Some arose from the Left, and some came out of the Right. That seems like a routine, uncontroversial observation. The story here isn’t the liberalism can become fascistic, because that is unarguable. The story is that people have a hissy fit when you point it out.

btw, I include myself in that group. I live by a big University, and about once a week I see some misguided youth wearing his Che or Mao gear. It bothers me, but not as much as it would bother me to see a Hitler shirt.

Mark IV, thanks for your insightful comments.

Bill, I’m really, really sorry about our software filter. If it is any consolation, we are moving to another platform someday soon. Please don’t give up on us yet.

Bill,

My point is that you cannot reliably trash a book you haven’t read.

Re: Wilson’s leftist credentials:

After Wilson was elected, he vowed to “pick out progressives and only progressives” for his administration. Progressives were giddy about the prospect of getting into the Great War, on the grounds of the opportunity it afforded for socializing the economy, which is exactly what they did. Fifteen or so years later FDR et al. resurrected war rhetoric to get the support to do the same thing all over again - in the absence of any real war the second time.

It is important to note vehement disagreement with other leftists does not imply somebody is a non-leftist.

I think if it comes down to McCain and Obama, Obama wins. He just emphasizes a lot of the things that are wrong with McCain. And the Left would be far more energized than the Right. I think McCain is a loss.