The Nutroots Chronicles

P.T. Barnum is alive and well and goes under the name of Markos Moulitsas.

Being the mirror image of Free Republic isn't exactly progress, Kos.

Do you think the Palin pick was a game changer, whether good or bad, and how do you think this will affect the election long-term?

There's no doubt that it was a game changer. All you have to do is go to Daily Kos and see that we haven't written about McCain in a week now, right? It's a singular obsession with Palin. She's the gift that keeps on giving. To me, it seems pretty obvious that McCain wanted [Tom] Ridge or [Joe] Lieberman but he's too weak within his own party to get the candidate he wanted, so he had to go with someone to appease the right wing.

They saw that Obama was going to be able to rally the Clinton supporters with Hillary Clinton's help. They probably saw Obama's speech and saw how incredible and dynamic and how powerful it was and realized that a safe pick wasn't going to give them any hope of victory in November so they had to shake things up. They threw a Hail Mary with Sarah Palin, they didn't vet her, so they had no clue who she was. They saw that she was attractive and very popular in Alaska -- remember, Alaska is actually a swing state. It was in play; Obama was competitive in the polls. So they locked down Alaska. And she's clearly popular with the right and they've embraced her because of her radical right-wing views on the role of religion in government, and it completely, utterly, on that Friday, took Obama off the airwaves.

Well, Kos, does ANYBODY even remember that sorry excuse for a speech? They didn't "vet" her, yet Obama was NEVER VETTED.

It is HILARIOUS to think right-wing Alaska, almost as red a state as Idaho and Utah, was considered to be in "play" for Democrats before Palin was nominated. What absolutely delusional shit is this?

Once Obama goes down in the trash bin of American history, the party will HAVE to purge themselves of people like this who do NOTHING for Democrats at all.

The Nutroots Chronicles

In addition to swarms of PUMA protesters and delegates to Denver, the nutroots promise to play a starring role at the Democratic convention.

Call it the "last hurrah" of the nutroots. When Obama goes to certain defeat, and believe me, when Massachusetts and Michigan are considered tossups (provided Romney is on the GOP ticket), it's not only over for the Democrats, it's probably over for the bloggers, too.

Their track record has been miserable as it is in electing anybody worth a shit. And then to be SO gullible as to swallow the media hype over Obama and trash Hillary Clinton is really beyond the pale. Treating a right-leaning "Democrat" with privatizer/neocon advisers as a "progressive hero" while trashing real Democrats makes me ask a lot of questions as to WHO these "progressive Democrats" REALLY represent.

Somebody was paying these people off to spew 24/7 propaganda on behalf of Obama and against Democrats.

And if readers didn't see this effort to push AP to remove Ron Fournier from the presidential beat for daring to spew the inevitable Republican talking points about Obama, they should. Dumb shit Hamsher has a history of doing stupid stunts like promoting Ned Lamont and driving Joseph Lieberman out of the Democratic Party (when the party couldn't afford defections), and trying to deny Larry Sinclair a hearing at the National Press Club on his allegations against Obama and thus drawing attention to him. This is just another one of her dumb stunts.

Gee, Jane, you mean you didn't see it coming at ALL? Little old me, who makes nothing on this blog and gets relatively few hits, saw this shit coming more than a year-and-a-half ago. If you weren't so much in the tank for Obama, if not financially in the tank for him, you would have seen it.

But the nutroots have never been known for astute thinking or for thinking at all.

When Did the Netroots Become the Nutroots?

Here is an explanation of what went wrong.

Actually, there were signs LONG before "Obama" came on the scene; the nutroots started almost from the beginning when they called themselves the "netroots." They started going off the deep end in 2004 when they promoted what to me were totally ridiculous candidates for president, namely the Mouth and Wesley Clark. They started getting notions in their head they were big players on the scene and that they would create their own brand of machine politics. You saw people like Kos trash traditional Democratic principles such as public financing of campaigns when they endorsed the Mouth and Clark going off public financing. This was stupid in light of the fact they were going up against somebody who had an unlimited amount of cash to draw upon (John Kerry). Their losses didn't stop them, though, in their wrongheaded quest to be major players in the Democratic Party. The party has been further damaged because of their stupid antics.

The Mouth, Wesley Clark, Paul Hackett, Ned Lamont, and now "Barack Obama" are just a few of their successes on the machine front. A lot of this support stemmed from the nutroots trying to relive the 1960s' antiwar movement. What all of these people had in common, at least to the nutroots' eyes, was they appeared to be antiwar. Nothing else mattered. With "Obama" especially it took a contortion act to try and paint this right-wing "Democrat" with University of Chicago connections into a "progressive." Since these rebels without a cause ranted and raved against the DLC, not knowing what the DLC actually was, they went against Hillary Clinton, wife of Mr. DLC himself. They went after her recycling old right-wing lies, recycling lies about the IWR vote, which was NOT a license for our dictator to go to war, and so forth. It was truly bizarre to watch, for Hillary Clinton was to the left of Obama.

But there's been manipulation along the way, by the media, by the GOP, by the Obama campaign, with a lot of these nutroots being on the take. Now that "Obama" has all but been officially declared the nominee of his party and revealed his real positions, positions that were out there all along if people had just done the research, they are crying foul.

"Obama" is not a "centrist" Democrat; he's not even a Democrat at all.

Theories, Theories

There are many theories floating around trying to explain what looks to be the disintegration and even the destruction of the Democratic Party. This post does a good job in implicating the nutroots, and so does this post. But the nutroots don't exist in a vacuum. I still submit the mainstream media, in cahoots with the GOP, much more than the nutroots, played THE major role in damaging the Democratic Party. The nutroots would NOT have joined the Obama bandwagon in the first place were it not for the 24/7 media propaganda pumping this fraud up as the next MLK, JFK, RFK, Lincoln, or Jesus Christ. They came relatively late on the scene.

Sure, the shit got much worse AFTER Iowa and AFTER Edwards was forced out. But how did Edwards GET forced out? Who was responsible? How did Biden, Dodd, and Richardson get marginalized? Who was responsible? Did the bloggers do that? No, it was the media. The bloggers had NOTHING to do with that. It was only after the two weakest general election candidates, Clinton and Obama, were left that the nutroots attacks began. THEN you saw the viciousness of the so-called progressive blogosphere directed towards the Clinton supporters. Lies about the Clintons were being perpetrated, and the worst of all was shitting all over them by helping Obama play the race card.

And why did they do this? Mostly it was a result of the massive propaganda campaign in favor of Obama, and partly it has to do with the relative age and political experience of the so-called left blogosphere. Basically these people are very susceptible to propaganda and few remember the ratfucking of yore against the Democratic Party (e.g., 1972). Some of these idiots pulled on Hillary Clinton exactly what they did to Joe Lieberman back in 2006 and shit all over him because of the Iraq War and pumped up an idiot to run against him. That was the first sign of trouble, when so-called progressives were willing to hound Democrats out of the party because they didn't kowtow to their notion of what a Democrat is. They began to shred to pieces the big tent of the Democratic Party. In 2008, these same fools actually believed the crap Obama was anti-war, but he wasn't. Not at all. But they didn't care what the truth was. What they knew was Clinton was supposedly pro-war, and they were going to work like hell to defeat her. Moreover, the nutroots didn't care the guy didn't appear to stand for a goddamned thing except give little Hallmark platitudes about getting along with the fascistic right. He got away with a lot of shit in all honestly because of his racial background. He was saying things and is STILL saying things nobody else would get away with because of it. He knew that and played it up to the hilt. The danger signs surrounding Obama were there for ANYBODY to see; the nutroots simply refused to see it.

The one thing missing from the analysis is the fact the media are in the tank for McCain. The media also manipulated the Republican voters into selecting McCain, despite many voters' misgivings. The manipulation went on with both sides, although it was MUCH worse with the Democrats.

We also cannot leave out the structural problems with the primary and caucus system which made it VERY easy for the GOP to manipulate. And manipulate they did to benefit somebody they felt would be very easy to beat. Many Republicans may despise McCain, but they were willing to put up with him as their party's standardbearer in hopes they can manipulate him. And perhaps many of them feel as I do McCain would serve just one term anyway and look for a running mate a little more in tune with their own goals.

So did the Obama campaign manipulate the nutroots or did the McCain campaign? Well, both I suppose, but the GOP-leaning media created the manipulation in the first place by force feeding the two candidates on voters to the exclusion of much better candidates (at least on the Democratic Party side).

Finally the party apparatus itself joined in the mess and ultimately forced Hillary Clinton out, just as they had forced John Edwards out when it looked as if he would actually gain traction for Super Tuesday. They wanted to "make history" because the media were pushing that narrative, but more important, they were afraid of offending a key constituency and never mind the constituency would have supported any Democrat regardless.

Yes, the nutroots played and still play a key role in the division of the Democratic Party, but the GOP and the GOP-leaning media laid the groundwork for the division. They will continue to manipulate our elections until we wake the hell up.

We've got a mess, and yes, once Obama is defeated I want the nutroots purged once and for all from the Democratic Party. They were and are either willing or unwitting tools of the GOP/GOP-leaning media propaganda machine.

Campaign Insanity.

Although it was ALWAYS out there Obama was far to the right of any of the other Democrats running for president in 2008 and for that matter not even a real Democrat, the nutroots chose to ignore the truth about him and projected their own beliefs and neuroses on the media-marketed messiah.

Now the truth about Obama being just another crooked, craven, lying, scheming politician in the pocket of neocons and Wall Street has proven to be a bitter pill for them to swallow.

If the nutroots have any sense, which they don't, they would join the PUMAs and others totally pissed off with the Democratic primaries and begin a "dump Obama" movement before Denver. Instead, they are bellyaching those who saw through the Chicago Shitbag are Republican stooges.

No, it's Obama who is the GOP stooge, the ringer pumped up by the media's 24/7 propaganda and the GOP's dirty crossover voting in order to divide the Democrats along racial, gender, income, and age lines. The DNC bigwigs later followed suit in pumping up this fraud in order to not offend a key constituency and perhaps to deliberately throw the election to McCain in hopes of getting back the White House in 2012.

Far from helping the party, the nutroots have done untold damage to it. They need to purged and sent back to their parents' homes or find real work. Anything to keep them away from politics.

While John Edwards

has yet to issue an official retraction over his unbelievably stupid remarks on "mandated" checkups, and Obama keeps gaffing like he always has, Hillary Clinton continues to maintain her wide lead.

And despite all the talk about the "netroots," they haven't done much to stem the tide.

It's Time For Round

1,978 of the war over the netroots.