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Karl Rove Resigning Aug 31
tetrahedrassface writes "According to CNN current Bush Administration political advisor Karl Rove will be resigning his post as senior political advisor at the end of August to spend more time with his family. Few if any prior senior political advisors to presidents have been the lightning rods for controversy that Mr. Rove has. Accused of running smear campaigns and celebrated for pioneering district level up campaigns that rely heavily on databases and fake grassroots origins, Mr Rove is one of the chief architects of the Republican Revolution."
Yes, he's leaving the White House, but that in no way means he's done working *with* the White House and the Republican Party. All it really means is that he'll be free of the restrictions on doing political work out of a government office.
Then again, if or when it hits the fan, any work he may have done after that date would not have the protection of his White house job or "Executive Privilege".
In any event, expect the dirty tricks to continue as usual.
One of the best political campaign advisers in the history of politics, has been released into the wild to prepare for next year's elections. In other words, this story has implications for both sides of the political aisle and it's not simply a 'ding dong witch is dead' deal.
If this slashdot post results in that many responses, then obviously this something we'd deem "stuff that matters."
you vote for someone based on their eyes and expressions?
Here in the UK, we had a blind home secretary for a while. his eyes went crazy all the time. I guess he would have lost your vote?
I'd be happy never to see a politician, or hear them, so I'm not influenced by such trivialities. What matters is what they propose, what they have done, and what they will do. Looks, Age, voice, style, I couldn't give a damn. the main job of a president or PM is to make the right decisions. You can be a 400 pound ugly son of a bitch who dribbles constantly and sounds like fozzy bear, but if you make the right decisions, I'll vote for you, and I won't care about your race, your gender or your looks.
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I wouldn't personally worry about Hillary. I don't think that she has a snowballs chance. What with the way that large parts of the country hating her and all.
I for one say good bye and good riddance to Rove. I mean seriously, he has done more to damage this country's political system than just about anybody since the British.
Pushing his radical agenda, which doesn't even reflect genuine conservative values, while making a complete mockery of the entire political process. It genuinely amazes me how so many minority view points have managed to permeate an administration, even after it has lost so much popularity.
The way of campaigning in recent years has been just appalling. The war in Iraq wasn't sufficiently important for congressional attention in '04, but trying to pass a anti-same sex marriage constitutional amendment was worthy of time. I don't get it, why exactly are Republicans so quick to pretend to be conservative? I mean I thought that conservativism had something to do with states rights, keeping the government out of ones business and cutting spending. I haven't seen any progress on any one of those issues in the last 6+ years. Embarrassingly enough, there was more progress on those fronts during the Clinton administration than in GWB's.
And I should probably just mod this down, because this is slashdot, and I'm sure that somebody will do me that favor. I mean, thoughtful posts should never be in the positive, right?
It is really stretching to say that this is news for nerds. Plenty of political news happens every day from both sides, yet the only ones that seem to matter to slashdot is when it only concerns Republicans?
This politics section is a joke. This is not news for nerds. This is raw meat for the digg/kos crowd. Remember when CmdrTaco said they would be fair? It's not even close. Trolls like kdawon and Zonk use this section as their personal soapbox. It's ridiculous when anyone says it's anything but.
...a balance and due consideration of all sides...
Ironically, in the middle of your effort to point out what's wrong with political discussion in the USA, you're encouraging one of the more insidious flaws in mainstream media coverage: the idea that "due consideration" will always be "evenly balanced". Sometimes the right way to "Teach the Controversy" is just to point out the objective facts which make the fringe side of the controversy look stupid, not to fill 50% of your story with flat-earther quotes and title the whole thing "Shape of Earth: Views Differ".
Most online discussion is even worse, since people have ten thousand popular blogs to choose from and so naturally gravitate to the ones that reinforce their pre-existing beliefs - so instead of reading stories that don't challenge our objectively questionable views, we get to read stories that don't challenge any of our views. By this standard, Slashdot's political discussions are actually pretty good - the tech crowd skews more libertarian than average, but because Slashdot is not inherently a political site there's still enough liberals and conservatives and socialists and such in the crowd to make things interesting, most of whom aren't just trolls. The nested comments are lightyears ahead of most sites for encouraging constructive debate, and if you set your threshold to 4 or lower you'll even get to read the most well-written anti-groupthink side of that debate.
Hillary was the wife of a person that committed adultery. She handled it publicly and was very conservative with how she handled the public. In terms of popularity, she held on to her position as Senator of New York, so that has to account for something. About what her platform is based on, it's been pretty consistent even though I disagree with some of it. How it develops overtime is anyones guess.
I do know that I am ultimately responsible as a citizen of the US to educate myself about whom I would chose to represent us to the world. So instead of writing someone off because you have a superstitious feeling about them, try to make an educated unbiased guess before you concede to a nihilistic haphazard attitude. Stand up for once and stop saying that it doesn't matter. Apathy is the most ridiculous aspect of humanity sometimes. If you don't like someone, there has to be a reason why other than just superstitious intuition.
Colin Powell resigned as Secretary of State in 2004, and was the first high ranking Republican official to go on to testify on record about all the many mistakes were made leading up to the war, including the lies that were included in his speeches leading up to the invasion.
I'm not aligned either way, but in my opinion he's the *only* Republican that has an ounce of credibility left.
This is a man who had a well-known dream of creating a permanent Republican electoral majority and who really perfected the use of wedge issues to obtain and hold power.
The contention that we should be respectful towards him is absurd. He spent decades working as hard as he could to ensure that everyone's interests were not represented equally or fairly, and helping to destroy the middle ground, to make the "us versus them" vision of politics more deeply entrenched.
Sure, there have been power plays for a long time; Machiavelli wasn't born yesterday, nor was he the originator of all his described tactics. But that said, the fact that something is old does not make it desirable or excusable.
As such, I say "FUCK YOU" to Mr. Rove, and I sincerely hope that one of those dove's that he's planning on killing drops a turd right in his eye.
And a "FUCK YOU" to you too, you righteous asshole. This is a man who perfected the modern use of hate as a political lever. He shall reap what he was sown.
If Gore had campaigned on a platform of "keep doing what my predecessor did, except I'm faithful to my wife", he very well could have had an undisputable win in 2000.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Going by Clinton's approval ratings is misleading. Even against a lackluster candidate like Dole, Clinton was only able to muster 49.2% of the vote during his relection campaign in 1996, despite having around 60% approval ratings at the time. In other words, that high approval rating didn't translate very well into votes at election time. Also...Gore manifestly had a lot of problems:
1) He wasn't Clinton.
2) He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma. Where Clinton came across as your buddy, Gore came across as the condescending guy no one likes.
3) From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left. Politically, he went from being a fairly conservative blue dog Democrat as a Tennessee Senator to being a left-wing idealogue VP. This happened at the same time that the country, as a whole, was trending more conservative. To give you an idea of the impact, Gore lost his home state of Tennessee to Bush in 2000. Forget about Florida, if Gore had simply won Tennessee, he would be President today.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates his overall weakness as a candidate. Good candidates win elections, bad candidates do not. A fairly simple formula that people, especially party operatives, seem to forget. The Democrats electoral success in 2006 hinged in no small part to them putting forth better candidates than the Republicans (who, in many cases, actually ran to the right of Republicans on certain issues like immigration).
As an aside, the problem with Hillary is...she's not a good candidate. Not because she isn't effective at politics...she is. She is immensely talented, ruthless, and goal oriented. She has a great fund raising machine, and a lot of people owe her favors. The problem is a little over half the voting population won't vote for her under any circumstance. She's extremely polarizing. As popular as Bill was across demographics and party lines, Hillary has never had cross over appeal. Feminists love her, west coast and east cost liberals love her. And that's it. And you can't win an election on that alone.
One more note: I really wish that politicians of all sorts would stop using moral equivalence to justify their actions.
It's sickening how often I see somebody justifying bad actions by saying that the other side has done the same thing, or as is the case in your post, that the other side might want to do the same thing.
This moral equivalence argument has become so common that you even followed it up by calling me a hypocrite for not granting the argument against a pure hypothetical.
Two wrongs don't make a right. They never will.
Again, this is not a party-specific complaint, but the fact that you would make these comments, seemingly sincerely, goes a long way to showing how many people view democracy as nothing more than an "us versus them" game in which one side wins and the other must lose.