Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Van observes, astutely, that "Sometimes the rabid right is a good source of information about the Dems".

But only about the Dems remember.

Everything the right (rabid or otherwise) says about anybody to the left of the Democrat party is wrong.

I'm still a bit confused though. Of course Pelosi and Harry Reid (although back then I guess it was Daschle) are knee deep in shit.

So?

If you're going to catch criminals, isn't part of the way you do it is to set them against one another?

The FBI's a bit smarter about this. They don't say "hey. We can't set that one faction of Panthers against that other faction because they're both bad."

If the Dems want to prosecute the Republicans for toture, let them. Then once they set the precedent, go after the Dems.

Of course they won't but that's because unlike in a real court of law, there's no transactional immunity for snitches.

i never decided if there was a worse: complicity from support or complicity from greed. if there were a way to verify an end to the barbarity maybe i'd flip a coin and "move on."

Michael: are you implying that Democrats are opportunists and change with the prevailing wind? I'm shocked, shocked!!

hce, my understanding is that Dembots are decided not opportunists who change with the winds, but rather dishonest collaborators who wouldn't actually walk across the street to actually represent those whose votes they harvest.

Nancy Pelosi is, was, and always will be a war criminal. She just sells herself differently, and less honestly.

And I meant to say that that was my understanding of what MJS argues....

Oooooooh! You're all soooooo naive! Don't you know that you have to set a criminal to get a criminal so you can prosecute that criminal after that criminal has caught the other criminal! That's what being a world-weary realistic democrat who really knows how to play the political game means and that's why TKT and I are sooooooo superior to you dirty lefty hippies! Haha!

that's why TKT and I are sooooooo superior to you dirty lefty hippies! Haha!

And there you go (as I predicted above).

Everything the right (rabid or otherwise) says about anybody to the left of the Democrat party is wrong.

Pure far lefty cynicism, lack of patriotism and lack of morals.

But just keep sucking on that bong. No skin off my ass.

It's fine with me if you lefties are in favor of letting Cheney off because Pelosi's "just as bad".

Patriot Americans of the left, right, and center will eventually get together and put both of them behind bars.

You'll still be fantasizing about "polarization" that leads to the Glorious Leninist Revolution.

I may even buy one of your commie newspapers if I have a quarter and I really feel sorry for you.

but rather dishonest collaborators who wouldn't actually walk across the street to actually represent those whose votes they harvest

Actually, the Democrats and Republicans DO represent the people they claim to represent because the American people in a sense represent a sort of "international imperial aristocracy."

As long as American jobs depend on Lockheed, Boeing, and the military it's going to be in the interests of the American people to keep the system humming. Lefty California gets as much contracts from the defense industry as redneck Missippi.

When the gangsters at the top start fighting among one another, it's something to enjoy, not stand in the way of. If the Democrats decide to throw a few Republicans to the wolves, great.

Unfortunately, there are no wolves. You big badass lefty activists don't scare anybody. So they'll get rid of Jay Baybee and celebrate over beers.

The only thing that will really put these people behind bars is a sense of morality and patriotism that transcends class interests. Americans in a sense have to vote to impoverish themselves, to roll back the American empire and get back to being a Republic again.

tkt
"The only thing that will really put these people behind bars is a sense of morality and patriotism that transcends class interests. Americans in a sense have to vote to impoverish themselves, to roll back the American empire and get back to being a Republic again"

borad axe
heart felt credo from the forest primeval
perhaps the call of the mocking bird here
comes from the sub-boho rentier rookery
of mighty manhattan
but its fronteerish never the less

settler virtues
first clear cut your hairy soul he cries
then come hoome for supper honey
republic redux

grizzly madames crying
'reform yeee johns of empire
or expire in mortal sin '

the military industrial complex
can become a silly procrustean complex
neither evil all nor cure all involved here

its economic determinism at the wrong level of causation

the sources run to the roots

the decisive motive for
empire in these times
or any based on
"private " commodity production thru wage labor
will emerge at all times from the core of
the civil society in our case the contemporary LLC 's

as my trotly titans
fetish word tell all hyper vaguely implies
t'is in the end all about
"uneven economic development"
a spontaneous social product
of capitalist global evolution =>
empires of the trans nat corporate kind
are an essential social product

the merchants of genoa and venice
had their crusades
sure landlord second sons played the field positions and were rewarded in plundered treasure
and artificial levantine "kingdoms "...
but the merchants were the key push from behind

so today our completely pacific
limited liability outfits
have produced
--seen at it's most transmogrified--
the afghan expeditionary force

that it has been corrupted into a two times to large three ocean armada ..well that's
the beauty of embellishment eh ???

the two heads of orthrus
make up the rules of inter party engagement as they go along

its like pro wrestling only double flex backed
they are each others heels
and their own electoral bases' baby faces

each party has a donor base mode and mean
that keeps em
not more then the well schooled dime apart

just enough difference
on the strategic issues
to create a dynamic center

the two have divergent tails of course
their respective social bases
play up the luche libre

ahh but in hard critical punishing times
can the center hold

or must the hive move to a new queen of a center

dangerou passages ahead if so

much might spill off the trays
carrying the jelly to and fro

Let's replay this tape: 1) MJS welcomes Van M (erstwhile critic) into the flock for some useful information about Pelosi, which makes predicting her future non-actions easy. If you haven't figured them out yet, go to Michael Rattner or Jeremey Scahill on today's Counterpunch. 2) TKT flies in waving red flags and red herrings, ends up suggesting MJS is actually AGAINST prosecuting Republicans for torture. 3) Smithee follows with a satirical mime of TKT, and 4) OP clears it all up in his usual inimitable , err, way. . .

Is there a mutiny here, mates? Well, then, declare yourselves! If not, then shut up and man the sails. We're all going in the same direction anyway.

You can't have a mutiny if you don't have a captain. Liberty Hall here, boys -- Liberty Hall.

Why
Give a shit if. They go after cheney ?

Because The torture trials
Might engage
Radio free kulack
In hand to hand With the bleeding
Soul Humanoids

Diversion?

What covered by
The MSM isn't

Paine speaks of "just enough differences on strategic issues." This is either sloppy language or sloppy thinking. The truth is that there are no significant differences on strategic issues--the only notable differences are on mediagenic demagogic social/cultural sidebars that divert attention from the essential consensus on strategic issues: immigration, choice, gay marriage, and even here the differences are often hard to pinpoint: e.g., Obama is against gay marriage, but McCain is REALLY REALLY against gay marriage, so vote for Obama, etc. The strategic issues are rarely in dispute and so are seldom discussed--almost never during the issueless "debates" and controversies of election campaigns.

So, Paine--strategic issues? What differences? No more of a difference than there is, say, between Paulson and Geithner, Hillary and Condi, Lieberman and Cheney, or Gates and Gates.

I thought that what Owen meant by "strategic issues" was "electorally strategic" -- i.e. the issues on which the consumer demographics of the two parties vary, and in particular the issues that get waverers to move back and forth -- rather than issues that are "strategic" for capital or for empire, on which the two parties are of course pretty closely lined up together.

Doug Henwood last year did an interesting piece that appears to demonstrate some slight differences in outcomes for working-class folks under Dem and Repub administrations:

http://tlrii.typepad.com/theliscioreport/2008/07/presidential-ec.html

I'd love if if somebody could refute his reasoning, but I'm not equipped to do it. If we accept Doug's analysis then we have to admit that the Dems at least aren't pushing the immiseration of the world quite so hard as the Republicans these days.

This doesn't affect my conviction that the Democratic Party is pure poison for anybody to the left of Madeleine Albright, but it does mean you have to construct the case on a slightly different basis -- you can't really claim there's zero difference. It may be zero to two decimal places, but not to three.

Michael--
I'm familiar with this argument, have seen it before. It's full of holes; I only scanned the Henwood piece, will take a closer look later when I have more time, but from just scanning the charts I can see several flaws:

First, the overall argument is basically post hoc--just because there appears to be an empirical association betwween better economic outcomes in various metrics and in various eras during Democratic ascendancy, one might conclude--quite erroneously-- that there must be some policy differences that underlie those better outcomes. But surface association is far from the equivalent of causal nexus: despite the relatively better-looking economic numbers during Clinton time, his policies were quite obviously even more reactionay and antiworker than Reagan's: WTO/NAFTA, rampant deregulation, welfare "reform," repeal of Glass-Steagall, etc., etc. The result is that the economic boomlets of Clinton time benefited the top 5 percent or so almost exclusively--there was no benefit for the mass of wage earners, whose income has been stagnant in real terms since 1973. (Pollin's book The Contours of Descent shows all this in detail.)

And look at some of the metrics Henwood cites: unemployment stats, for example, which are notoriously fudged to grossly underrrepresent real unemployment; stock market, which often has little or nothing to do with real economic growth (especially during bubbles such as Internet, housing, etc.); even GDP, which is skewed toward market/corporate criteria of "wealth" rather than other yardsticks that would be more revealing of the status of working and poor people and the environment.

So this is the essential weakness of this whole analysis, overall, it seems to me: post hoc in overall logic and use of misleading statistics, as can be clearly demonstrated by the test case of Clinton time alone, when superficially rosy but misleading economic stats (of the kind cited by Henwood) went hand-in-hand with aggressively antiworker, procorporate policies that exceeded even those of Reagan. So it's obviously specious to draw the conclusion that throwing these superficial numbers around confirms anything close to the idea that "the Dems at least aren't pushing the immiseration of the world quite so hard as the Republicans these days." In fact, actual policy analysis reveals quite the opposite--the Democrats have actually used their pro-working-class image to push through antiworker policies that it would be harder for the Republicans to get away with (notwithstanding the skewed and superficial upswing in some economic measures)--the old Washington scam (just as it was easier for Nixon to institute wage and price controls than it would have been for a Democrat, etc., etc.)

Michael--
Just a quick follow-up:

If you use concrete policy analysis rather than post hoc manipulation of skewed economic stats, it's clear that the Democratic Party was less aggressively antiworker than the Republicans from 1932 through the mid-1970s. Since Carter initiated deregulation to the present, that is clearly no longer the case--in fact, as was evident during the Clinton regime, the Dems have been even more antiworker in some ways--the old wolf in sheep's clothing routine.

Just to expand a bit on the idea that it's always easier for Dems to implement reactionary measures and for the Repubs to implement even half-assed semiprogressive ones: I mentioned the case of Nixon--it was easier for him to push through wage/price controls and the EPA than it might have been for a Democrat (also easier for him to have initiated rapprochement with China than it would have been for a Dem). Consider that Democrats have not enacted a major progressive measure for nearly a half century, since the passage of Medicare and the Civil Rights Act since the mid-1960s. On the other other hand, the one major addition to the "entitlement agenda" in the past half century, was delivered by . . . George W. Bush, in the form of Medicare Part D drug coverage, as lame and half-assed and sold out as that was.

how many zeros in the "glass-steagall deconstruction tango"? twelve? thirteen, counting feedback loops and duration?

"minefield ahead: children play with caution" is DLC service standard: co-pay consumer protection. then the worser weasel pulls the signs and renames landmines "explosive growth."

"if you really cared, you would have hedged against your agent betraying you."

Talk about dime's worth of difference
If we're talking
Carter on...

We are all in the same choir here ..
for the moment

The questions and potential conflict will arise if
The dems do go into new deal mode

Ie turn their back
To the imperial project for a spell
and seriously restructure
the economy

Not sure the demands of empire will permit

The last chance
Died when harry replaced henry

Ps the origanal list of strategic
Issues gay marriage abortion
Even immigration seem precisely
The kulturkampf
Side show shit
Where the party platforms can costlessly fly different flags eh ?

Beware the french turn

Hapa

I'm at a loss. For a gloss

MJS, Van's two comments are too good to be left as comments. They deserve front paging.

Van, that's eloquent, concise and compelling. If you do have time to expand on it, I'll read it with pleasure. The second para of the first of those two is especially good.

Al
I must say there is a great deal of astuteness to wade thru
But rather thing paragraph one of post two is the best

I think they are sabotaging themselves on this one.

The modern American "realist" can accommodate a pretty wide range of immoral behavior so long as you pay lip service to certain ideals (Big Lies), but here they are forgetting to honor a Big Lie: "Americans do not torture". They're violating a carefully constructed ideology about the US as world policeman rather than imperial power, and going against decades of propaganda about POW abuse. They're sacrificing key parts of the imperial ideology just to save a couple of their friends. To me it appears short-sighted and desperate.

They should have went after scapegoats right off the bat, while feigning shock and outrage. There are more pictures due to be released soon and it's going to get worse. I view the unwillingness to offer up sacrificial lambs to the public as a sign of weakness and complacency among the elites. Same thing with the bailouts: if they were on top of their game they would have listened to Axelrod and taken a hard line on the banks. This torture thing is strike 2. I view their ineptitude in handling this situation as a cause for hope. Obama is no Slick Willy.

Bob
I think the option
To scape goat remains on the table
Though
Cheney seems as defiant as ever

His direct attack on ob is quite
A slap coming from the herr oberst of the covert
torture for freedom crusade

In the original posting, there was a note from this VM that "sometimes the rabid right is a good source of information about the Dems." Excellent - this must be a fun way to live,getting dirt from those digging up dirt on the dirt that digs up dirt on the other dirt.
As for the silly games of politocometrics, the website should remember that A. two (count 'em) wars of invasion are still in trillion-dollar effect, B. the globe is convulsed in a financial collapse of untold and epic effects that are being managed by the very conspirators who committed the accounting frauds C. the American rich have purloined the treasury in countless political machinations in broad and recent daylight. There's D. global environmental catastrophe and enough major social calamities to wrap around our way through the alphabet. You call Michael Hudson a "poseur," venerate a pro gas-guzzling scribbler, and yet there are wars of the supersytem's making on, as they have been throughout our natural life, and there is not a single sign of any social institution, anywhere, bound for marked improvement.
Not a single thing anyone has ever done has stopped our recent past and our present from being one of epic, inescapable shame. Any statement of imputed moral self-worth, from Doug Henwood or van Mungo or Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney, is a lie.

Van -- You make good points. A couple of thoughts occur to me in response.

1) Admittedly the unemployment figures are fudged. But is there any reason to believe they're more fudged under Ds than Rs? If the fudging is consistent (which seems like the null hypothesis) then any statistically significant difference between the fudged figures under Ds compared to Rs calls for explanation, doesn't it?

2) GDP I agree is at best a distant proxy for working-class household prosperity. But if GDP goes up, and inequality goes down or stays constant or even grows more slowly under Ds than Rs, then there is at least a prima facie case that the ordinary Joe and Jane have more stuff available. Doug has a time series for the Gini coefficient in that little paper, and indeed it either got lower under Ds or (in the case of Clinton and Carter) grew more slowly than under most Rs -- though again, Bush I and Nixon-Ford saw slower growth in the coefficient than Clinton and Carter, so the picture is interestingly mixed.

3) You suggest that something changed in '76, and Ds after that point are a different breed of cat that Ds before. That certainly agrees with my gut instinct and the Gini figures mentioned above seem to bear it out. (I got interested enough in this topic to dig up some Gini stats on my own and tinker with 'em; see http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3629/3472133670_2971acd7fa.jpg?v=0, and note that the jump in '93 is an artifact -- they started calculating the number differently that year.)

All that said, I would like to second Al's motion that you turn this into a post.

al-qaeda and hyperfinance have a strange relationship. "shock therapy" came only about a year before the first WTC attack. 9/11 was hastily grabbed to explain dotcrash-related airline failures and a variety of other imperial exchequer wardrobe malfunctions. and there was something about "the constitution isn't a suicide pact" that was eerily similar to the CSW, in the sense that ethics and pragmatism were suddenly hazardous to your health.

Hey mjoe
Pass me some of that

Good roll baby

Fopnik Clowning aside
Attention must be paid here

Stale congested hot house Answers to stale
Passe Questions should choke the throat voicing them no?

Hapa

That comment I grasp
And find the loveliest o weave to it

We. Are little more then side walk supers
So we might as well work on our stylings

When we deem it
Necessary to get down on all fours
With Clio's record book
Our stilted dwarfism becomes depressingly obvious even to ourselves....
Well almost ourselves

Father s

Seems to question
A piece or two of the anti henwood

I must confess on a second read
Ie once the dazzle of its
self- assured. Gate disipated
I too found minor points to quibble over
But I"l hold back
Pending
the full unfurling
Of the contra
dougometricon

MJS: hello. between LBJ and carter, or mcgovern and carter, is like night and day in american world power and american feeling toward government and economics. 1968-1976 was a LOT of bad news, including thought-provoking assassinations, riots, protests. to be fair to democratic party members, mondale and dukakis should be in the measurement.

Hapa
Hits clio's
wheelhouse
We passed over a cataract in 65

And it took till
1980
To realize who really won the election of 64

OP-
There's that "clowning" thing again. "Fopnik clowning"? What the hell? I'm dead serious, my man. Is there something Fopnikish I'm saying here?
Yes, "stale Answers" should not sit well with those that uttereth, but they do emanate: Ralph N. (his sister's his much better half), whoever this TKT dude is, van Mungo's sainted third parties, the Obamaculticians, the exactly-how-"Marxist" is-this guy? Doug H - if there are any Answers from them, they reside back inside the individual guru's peristalsis.
Or was I supposed to be the utterer of stale Questions? Either way, back to the main show - in crisis there is great opportunity, I heard Doug H. say. Ignore the futility, and you'll be fine, OP.

Hold tiger hold

Mjoe
It is exactly your
Serious none fopnik
Self I was trying
Ineptly to compliment

agh can't escape! every comment has another comment between read and publish!

ok earlier cribsheet:

"how many zeros" was about the two-to-tango nature of die banksplat -- the difference between "zero to two decimal places, not three", multiplied by the trillions, is painful.

"minefield ahead" was about the fine difference between using the power of black box finance for good or for evil. the only good thing in pandora's black box was "hope." so sometimes how i see it is, when a variety of democrats agreed to various "pinky promise" provisions in the 1990s what they were really doing was -- knowingly -- increasing the level of corruption in politics, by increasing the money finance would spend on politics. why they thought the train couldn't jump the rails with a different engineer is a mystery, possibly named "alan."

"if you really cared, you would have hedged against your agent betraying you." --this is maybe a little weird, as a way to restate you guys' blogtheme, because it's a little soft, but if we were to look especially at "new democrats" as a making a mistake, then at least part of that mistake is believing that "401(k) versus pension" can be generalized to all of society -- in other words, willfully/stupidly/conveniently, believing that ordinary people have all the same risk management capacities as your average harvard fund manager -- like, the powerful people picturing in their minds that voting -- or breathing -- is similar to signing away your investment in a hedge fund.

i thought greenspan seemed genuinely surprised that when atlas shrugged the world would fall and squash him. the world is very large and heavy; this is why many people thought they were paying taxes, to ensure that atlas could work in shifts with other titans so it wasn't all on the one set of shoulders.

Van writes "the mass of wage earners, whose income has been stagnant in real terms since 1973". One hears this said a good bit. I took a look at the census figures and some graphs are at http://www.flickr.com/photos/anacharsis/sets/72157617183401195/. Not exactly flat, though fairly small potatoes especially at the lower end. And it's difficult to see much of an R/D pattern -- more like linear growth with some noise.

mjosef--
You made reference to "van Mungo's sainted third parties." Not sure what you mean--I have never canonized, much less sainted, any particular independent party or leader of one. I have argued--not surprisingly for this blog, I presume--that the Democrats are a dead end for the left and that therefore building some kind of independent left formation is necessary to contest corporate despotism--unless you contend that one ought to abandon the electoral arena altogether.

So what's the positive correlation of your aspersion against "third" parties? Stick with the Dems? Boycott elections?

You also write, "Any statement of imputed moral self-worth, from Doug Henwood or van Mungo or Dennis Kucinich or Cynthia McKinney, is a lie." Moral self-worth applies to what? The Democrats? If that's what you mean, nothing could be farther from my position. If you mean that simply stating the obvious--that the 1932-1976 Democrats were somewhat more permeable to working-class interests than the current version (if nevertheless skunky overall)--that's just a factual observation, not an ideological preference. Moreover, I think that the "old" Democrats were in many ways just as compromised as the current ones--but that's a bit longer story, and I don't have enough time to develop my thoughts on that tonight--will try later or tomorrow.

Michael--
The source you cite tracks inflation-adjusted income, not just wages. Income would include all forms of income, including capital gains, interest income, etc. Real WAGES have indeed been flat since 1973. On short notice I could find data only up to 1997, but the story is the same since then. (The real minimum wage is lower now than it was in 1968) See below:

ABLE 1A
Real Hourly Wages, All Workers 18-64, 1973-97
(1997 Dollars)
Year Percentile
10th 50th 90th
1973 6.07 11.61 22.22
1979 6.42 11.46 22.46
1989 5.39 11.18 23.46
1990 5.45 11.12 23.48
1991 5.52 11.12 23.49
1992 5.49 11.16 23.07
1993 5.44 11.03 23.33
1994 5.36 10.79 23.64
1995 5.33 10.67 23.54
1996 5.29 10.59 23.54
1997 5.46 10.82 23.90
Annualized Percent Change
1973-79 1.0 -0.2 0.2
1979-89 -1.6 -0.2 0.4
1989-97 0.2 -0.4 0.2
Source: Authors' analysis of CPS ORG data; inflation-adjusted using CPI-U-X1.

TABLE 1B
Real Hourly Wages, Men 18-64, 1973-97
(1997 Dollars)
Year Percentile
10th 10th 50th 90th
1973 7.16 14.08 25.74
1979 7.07 14.39 25.93
1989 6.17 13.07 26.12
1990 6.05 12.82 26.52
1991 5.91 12.71 26.28
1992 5.79 12.54 26.16
1993 5.72 12.37 26.34
1994 5.67 12.11 26.19
1995 5.78 12.24 26.20
1996 5.81 12.12 25.85
1997 5.92 12.19 26.44
Annualized Percent Change
1973-79 -0.2 0.4 0.1
1979-89 -1.3 -0.9 0.1
1989-97 -0.5 -0.8 0.2
Source: Authors' analysis of CPS ORG data; inflation-adjusted using CPI-U-X1.

TABLE 1C
Real Hourly Wages, Women 18-64, 1973-97
(1997 Dollars)
Year Percentile
10th 50th 90th
1973 5.05 8.89 16.07
1979 6.13 9.03 16.62
1989 5.02 9.55 19.33
1990 5.05 9.54 19.35
1991 5.13 9.52 19.66
1992 5.20 9.55 20.00
1993 5.20 9.61 20.15
1994 5.14 9.49 20.46
1995 5.10 9.39 20.19
1996 5.07 9.41 20.36
1997 5.15 9.63 20.61
Annualized Percent Change
1973-79 3.6 0.3 0.6
1979-89 -1.8 0.6 1.6
1989-97 0.3 0.1 0.8
Source: Authors' analysis of CPS ORG data; inflation-adjusted using CPI-U-X1.

http://www.csls.ca/events/cea1998/rtw.asp

Thanks, Van. This is very valuable. I have to make graphs before I can make sense of anything, but I'll graph these and add them to the flickr set I mentioned above.

Op
-my bad, not ineptness on your part. There is some Fopnik in me, I will have to admit now, and it may have been a shock of self-recognition that got me whirling around, looking all Fopnikesque.
Van the man - I tried Fopnicking around with you a while back about your wanting to "Do Something," and as for "abandoning electoral politics," it probably is about time to do just that. I mean, we can always come back, but the game is rigged, terribly and purposely, by big money,big war, and aided by deluded windbags who think that in their endless string of defeats is some kind of nobility.
It's a muckers game, inside and out, and if the alternative is an "independent left formation to combat corporate despotism," well, damn that would be just fine, and the only way out, but it isn't going to happen at any level above a few upper-collegiate redoubts. This recent election cycle was the absolute worst showing the Green Party and other thirtieth party possibilities had - we might as well bury that concept.
It is preposterous to me to look for "solutions" from within this current system or any past system. VM, you should give OP some slack - he's getting better and better at dealing with his wandering herd.

mjosef--
An independent alternative just can't be conjured into being at the moment one deems it right--there has to be something in place, however modest, to build on. I grant you that the Greens are a mess; Nader's campaigns have some value, but Ralph is too concerned with proceeding only with a tight-knit cadre of personal loyalists rather than building something broader that he doesn't necessarily control; he doesn't seem interested in establishing a political entity that persist and grow between his electoral campaigns.

I think it's important to pose an alternative in the electoral arena, notwithstanding the problems you mention, because it's still the best way of propagating a left program. During election cycles, the population's political antennae are at least a bit more extended, so it's better to try to reach at least some.

The Greens have a decent infrastructure of state parties in place, and the "Green" brand has good marketing potential with the looming climate catastrophe. But I can tell you that the Greens do not have a clue about organization and activism--they are a bunch of equivocating, clueless wet noodles.

Here's what I think would bring the best and fastest results: I wish that the relatively sane formations on the far left--groups consisting of serious activists--would undertake a systematic "entrism" strategy toward the Green Party. My sense--and it's only that--is that the ISO, elements of the Socialist Party, Solidarity, groups like that, should try to engage in some kind of collaboration around joining Green Party locals and getting on state committees and trying to turn the GPUS into a serious activist/electoral tool (not just running canidates but helping to mobilize activism around key issues such as single-payer, antiwar, union rights, minimum wage, etc., etc.)

Right now the GPUS just a feeble electioneering outfit that is only semi-independent of the Democrats. None of these aforementioned socialist groups has the cadre to jump-start a party on its own--better to orient toward the preestablished infrastructure and somewhat broader appeal of the Greens. If Nader could be persuaded to donate his mailing list toward such an undertaking, so much the better, but that's a long shot.

Hiding out in sectarian redoubts is a luxury the American left can no longer indulge. THe Europeans are way ahead of American leftists in getting serious about some kind of regroupment and common action: the Respect movement foundered in England, but it least there was an effort. Die Linke in Germany and the NPA in France are interesting models of what might be attempted here.

There are los of complications to this, I grant--but doing nothing is a surer recipe for impotence than trying to build something. Otherwise we might all just as well head for the caves and hills, etc.

Van, this is well-argued and rather original -- or it's new to me, anyway. Anybody have a better idea? I don't, frankly.

I'll give you the last word, VM, after this.

No one in this world alive "does nothing."
There are many ways to live, act, fulminate, work, all highly conditioned and circumscribed, but all of them should center on social truth. And in a contest between Democrats, Republicans, this Green 2.0 PArty, and a Christian Patriot Party, who would you bet on? What are the odds you give each one?

The D/R have a fantastic amount of money and pwoer. The Green Party, worldwide, has been a monumental failure - the lack of global environmental action is testament to that. Yes, there is lonely Ecuador and its worthy initiatives, but the dirty stain of oil is on the Latin American left's hands - Chavez in particular, as a story in Outside (admittedly a filthy corporate rag) attests.

This concept of a halcyon "Left" has been gurgling on the margins for decades now in the US, and there is not a damn thing to show for it. Start with that expression of impotence, constantly refer to that expression of impotence, and you will probably get a crowd of about two, but the numbers are right now irrelevant - millions marched before the Iraq War against the Iraq War, and every single plane has gone off on schedule.
I am not the only crank who has had it with contemporary "electoral politics." Disgust, even if it extends partly to the self, may prove to be a far more powerful social force than doomed club-starting. We can head to the hills, fine, but the world will still be right outside our door.

"My sense--and it's only that--is that the ISO, elements of the Socialist Party, Solidarity, groups like that, should try to engage in some kind of collaboration around joining Green Party locals and getting on state committees and trying to turn the GPUS into a serious activist/electoral tool (not just running canidates but helping to mobilize activism around key issues such as single-payer, antiwar, union rights, minimum wage, etc., etc.) "

"the ISO, elements of the Socialist Party, Solidarity, groups like that, "

".. engage in some kind of collaboration around joining Green Party locals and getting on state committees and trying to turn the GPUS into a serious activist/electoral tool (not just running canidates but helping to mobilize activism around key issues such as single-payer, antiwar, union rights, minimum wage, etc., etc.) "

"..doing nothing is a surer recipe for impotence than trying to build something. Otherwise we might all just as well head for the caves and hills, etc."
far from entering the caves
lets be off to pep up the emerald elves
"There are lots of complications "
well damn them rome wasn't built in a day

comes
the french turn........

oh could one have hoped for anything else ???

enter enter enter
pass out the pep pills
rally the class rage
open the blinking eyes
stiffen the rhetorical spine

make hardened cadre out of them
"equivocating, clueless wet noodles"

excellent notions all
particularly for u my son
end the hysterical blind self loathing
end the junior college library isolation

go get em pal
end the shiftless site to site para-biting

u mean not harm
only transformation

not middle brow
hortitory tutelage
but verbal acts of moral courage

go do it go go go
run baby run
u've spread the message here
now to the trench lines
report back on all of it
i for one would like to see
the coming green giant
militant decency insurection
from inside the cockpit
like the argos heros will gather
to your bugle

no doubt
leon will be arriving from turkey momentarily

paris will never be the same

vive la gauche

mjoe

a blend of vintage fluids in your response
to the dreary call
to once more into the breeeech comrades

i share your view
of marching en cadre
in the back door of green elf mansion

raspberry parade

I dunno... I doubt that the Green Party is the right kind of vessel.

I think it's becoming clear to most people (Including voters) that "Green" is a euphemism for "opportunist". It's just a bullshit fad that is attracting all of the worst types of charlatans in the world (T. Boone Pickens, I'm looking at you).

Nothing against environmentalism in general, but I find that the new "Green" movement is really just a confluence of self-serving opportunists with very little going for it beside a favorable marketing environment (which would dissipate quite quickly during a prolonged depression).

somewhere

the father of us all
sez something
to the effect
its not a matter of drafting up a message and getting it out

not for a rad alternative at any rate

its not about messaging
in fact the message has already flowed thru these dry plains a zillion times b4

what some warmed over trot toast can add there is well problematic

as to org skills

well are u joking

what mass org skills do the circles and sects bring that aren't already there

its confidence a false confidence in the we gota a more potent and far far better snake oil
that drives this "entriste" gibber
not mass orging skills

one by one presuasion
hell that doesn't even produce cadre
cadre are formed out of convinced souls
convinced by the mass struggle
and the learning by dopind
once in the harness of an apparat

come the upheavel mass orging will emerge

till then
its circle jerking
and
practique de jour
c'est massive engage
strictly on foot
prolly any mass struggle with legs
will do

Bob
I share your reaction to recent green conversions
But drawing opportunists is an index of trends moving in that direction
In short green and even green party activity has merit
As the vehicle of
A strategic alternative to the DR duopoly...

Unlikely

The dems are green
Face painting these days
Green consumption green energy even -- if not green manufacture--
has
Reached majority
Support

-- like single payer--

It's coming

now it is
a matter
Of how slow
how partial

what's coming? What is the corresponding victory that you have in mind for the Green movement? Cap & Trade?

I wouldn't really liken the amorphous green movement to the single-payer issue. That's just a US issue, where a clear panacea has been ignored for 40 years. It's a simple issue and the arguments are overwhelming. Environmental destruction is a global problem without any clear simple solution

To me the whole green movement seems like a never ending Clean Coal commercial... some feel-good corporate sponsored bullshit. When it comes down to it, I think there is very little real support or political capital there, as the Liberals found out with their "Green Shift" campaign last year.

Just a few short notes:

If anyone has a clue about what Paine is sputtering on about, please post a precis. What's he saying--build an independent third party, don't build a party? My impression is that he seems to radiate a strenuously contrived contempt for any notion that does not originate with him--just flip a switch and he starts squawking the usual sit-down routine of sarcasm and condescension (along with the de rigeur dollop of his deranged, compulsive, ignorant trot-baiting); coherency need not apply, and usually does not. Anything approaching concrete, meaningful action is like Kryptonite to this pompous pedant--hence his borderline-hysterical, manic-scattershot raving at the mere tentative suggestion of it. Heaven forfend that this blog should actually ever turn do a discussion of DOING something apart from parsing Paine's coded messages from the Andromeda galaxy. (Michael--I hope you can see now the extent to which Paine is a blight on this blog--why is he so furiously determined to dump gallons of cold water on even a small spark of activist discourse?)

mjosef--You belittle not only electoral activity but also demonstrations, etc., in what seems like a broadbrush denunciation of almost every conceivable form of left activism. So . . . we've now heard at length--at least twice--what you don't think will work. What do you think WILL work?

As for Bob's comments--the Green Party is not just part of some amorphous "Green" sensibility that's vaguely afloat in the political ether--it's a clearly and recognizably left political party--distinctly to the left of all of the European Green parties, which are mostly enviro-appendages to neoliberal/social dems.

Check out the party's Web site at http://www.gp.org/index.php. Read the platform. What you'll see is that it's the largest left party in the United States right now, but it is not really an activist party, and it is often inclined to cower before the Democrats (in 2004 they ran a cipher for president so as not to impinge on the Kerry campaign--that kind of thing). It is at least potentially fertile ground for growing a serious, militant anticapitalist party. Peter Camejo was trying to accomplish this task from within the Greens, but he is gone now.

Anyway, you should try to acquaint yourself a bit better with the past and present of the GP before dismissing it out of hand--a good source for this is Howie Hawkins, (ed.) Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate [Chicago, Haymarket Books, 2006]--Hawkins is a NYS Green Party activist who, I believe, is also a member of the Socialist Party.].

Paine wrote:
"come the upheavel[sic] mass orging will emerge

till then
its [sic] circle jerking]

This kind of spontaneist gibberish will no doubt set Paine's hero Lenin is spinning in his grave. Just how will the "mass orging" emerge--ex nihilo from a waive of Paine's manic/magic keyboard?

And talk about circle jerking--this pontifical nut job slings enough gunk per day on this blog to paralyze any conceivable movement, mental or physical.

Third party efforts are better than no effort at all, certainly someone has to tend to the business of information gathering and distribution and keeping the tiny little sparks alive, as it were.

Having done the democrats, and the third party thing for several years, I've respect enough for anyone who tries- from people who still have the patience to wade through the swamps of the "democratic" party, to people who continue to create the weekly or monthly meetings in the sects, whether it's the Greens or the WIL or the ISO or the communist party or whomever. By the same token, if we can't laugh at how absurd the situation we're in is, we're toast. For me, at least, the crisis remains what Marx identified it as, which is humanity being pulled around by the production technology and culture we set into motion, beset by the pretense that having is the same as living.

So I stick close to Bread and Puppet style politics, wherein the party is the party, celebration of what leisure hours we have is the guiding impetus to political formation, which we need desperately. I liked Jim Hightower's Rolling Thunder review effort, a few years ago, which made a concentrated effort to bring people from different political paths together, but with culture, from hip hop to Willie Nelson used as a building block for the political summit. Obviously art can't be decisive, because politics is real, but art, music, dance, takes the edge off of the poltical and cultural differences. I think there's a lot of truth to what CLR James used to say, which is that where the worker or the small merchant really want to be is away from the demands of the protracted work week, and cultural carnival is part of what keeps us focused on the reasons why we want technology for more leisure time anyway.

Even in lull, the effort is always rewarding, provided a person can keep their distance from the professionals and the careerists. Anyway, I've been blathering too long, I'm out of here.

What I wrote could hardly be more obvious

Join a mass movement
Forget about left party figmentation
Mass org is a method not an ideolgians fantasy
The job class. As a class is not now in motion
When it is mass org will be a task of the moment
Conditions are such
The job class might start moving
Till then live off. The movements that are
Stop traffic where u can
Efforts to build
An
Electoral party of the left now
won,t stop traffic

"Activist discourse"

Savor that wildly self important notion

Dingo do you seriously figure u've got a message for america's job class ?

A message they'll
Say "hey never knew that gee I better rethink my world view"

What could u add
In fact what could an gaggle o french turners add

You need to act
Not dialogue
Leave the word fencing to folks
That don't have fossils for memes

Workers
Re actionary

You string these over certified
Zombeee words
Together like they contain something
Vital

U are a bore son
A mimeo
from the lost trot past

Go join the greens
Morph em into
A left party

Oh and try out your call
to enter the green door
Over at lou proyect's list

As eric von s might remark

"Ach poor greens"

Mh

Refreshing to read the words of a soul that isn't
Just tar and gravel

I must say
Keeping the spark alive is highly over rated
In my estimation

Movements produce
Their own super structure for better or worse

The genetic code of some optimal
Social change organization obviously doesn't
Exist

The past is useful only by rough analogy

Inspiration provides no blue prints

Prepared only means practiced in the relevent processes
There's always a field of struggle

Some part of society is always colliding with instituted fetters

But its simple folly to be arming yourself
For a figment

In what sense is america about to
Develop an independent electoral party of the left
And to what purpose
As md suggests

Single payer card check

A name was dropped
A few comments back

The legacy of that man is relevent
But not here and at least not now

Revolution here is not 5 years away
As it was when he
Laid out his conception of a rev org and worked to bring it into immediate existence

One thing among many many this man
Did that strikes me as instructive

He welcomed leon T
Into the party
In 17

Despite 15 years
Of on and off wrong headed opposition

Deconstructing Paine, Part I:

Savor these truly incredible words from Paine:

"The questions and potential conflict will arise if
The dems do go into new deal mode
Ie turn their back
To the imperial project for a spell
and seriously restructure
the economy"

What this quotation shows--along with Paine's overall political quietism and his misleading and ill-informed propaganda for the DLC hybrid pro-HMO health plan--is that Paine has ZERO idea of what this blog is about. With his glaringly conservative political instincts, he converges precisely with the DLC agenda on several key points: health care, animosity to third parties, and hopes that the Democrat Obama will usher in serious, meaningful social/economic reform: in short, Paine stands in stark opposition to the fundamental purpose and outlook of this blog. Michael--why do allow a de facto liberal Democrat to run roughshod over this blog? Doesn't that really defeat your whole purpose?

Paine Deconstructed, Part II:

To DLC Paine--
Just to clarify:

I am not a Trotsyist.
The head of the California Nurses Association is not a Trotskyist.
Joseph Stiglitz is not a Trotskyist.
Paul Krugman is not a Trotskyist.
Ralph Nader is not a Trotskyist.
Solidarity is not Trotskyist.
ISO is not really Trotskyist.

Dunderhead Paine has slimed all of the above as "trots" because they either (a) support building an independent alternative to the Democratic Party (me, Nader, ISO, Solidarity) or support single-payer health care instead of the corrupt HMO-sponsored Plan B for which Paine has become a shill (me, Nader, Krugman, Stiglitz, Solidarity). Also, I suppose that any far leftist not enamored of one-party states and consigning political opponents to mental hospitals, gulags, or death is also, in his book, a “trot”—which would make “trot” synonymous with “sane, decent human being” and would make "Paine" synonymous with "authoritarian creep."

Beneath the swirl of inch-deep erudition Paine flashes at the slightest provocation, there is nothing. No real depth or sharpness of thought, no ability to focus on an argument, no analytic talent--just a boiling bellyful of bile that erupts in explosions of vicious personal attacks, every day, in nearly every post: Fopnik, trot, bore, idiot savant (that one was for Stiglitz), folks that don't have fossils for memes, wildly self-important, mimeo, snake oil, circle jerking, etc. This guy has NOTHING except a bloated glossary of second-grade epithets--look at this lasts several posts: that's all he's got.

Every time Paine even momentarily strays from name-calling to venture a substantive point, he falls flat on his crimson face. Paine’s rare gallumphing into serious argument invariably issue in bizarre incoherency and/or laughable error: the standard hallmarks of the pompous fraud. For example, above Paine orates as follows:

"Revolution here is not 5 years away
As it was when he [Lenin] Laid out his conception of a rev org and worked to bring it into immediate existence."

The Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party was founded in 1898--not FIVE years before the revolution but NINETEEN, and the Bolshevik faction was founded in 1903, FIFTEEN years before the revolution (here's an "economist" who has trouble with counting single digits--where's your abacus, Opie!). If Lenin had waited, say, until 1912 before deciding to DO something, there would have been no revolution. As I recall, there were maybe a dozen people at the first meeting of that group--only nineteen years before that party led a revolution that shook the world.

But the pseudo-Marxist ever-timid centrist liberal Paine wants everyone to hush up and temporize and do essentially nothing: don't build an independent party; settle for the hybrid Stark plan (keeping the HMO thieves in the game is fine with Paine!); and hope that Obama will magically morph into Roosevelt/Marx/Lenin, thereby absolving Paine from getting off his fat ass and doing anything aside from typing “trot” on his keyboard every fifteen minutes.

Michael--why do allow a de facto liberal Democrat to run roughshod over this blog? Doesn't that really defeat your whole purpose?

Nope. It's precisely his purpose.

If both the Republican and the Democratic Party are "gatekeepers" then they're gatekeepers for different kinds of people.

The Democratic party keeps the college professors, the union bureaucrats, the peace activists, the trial lawers in line.

The Republican party keeps gun lovers, Christian fundamentalists, military families in line.

If you want to recruit Professor Smith on Central Park West into your third party movement, then you want to raid (and ultimately destroy) the Democratic party.

If you want to recruit Billybob in the Ozarks into your third party movement, then you want to raid (and ultimately destroy) the Republican party.

The title of this blog says this:

The American Left may not be much, but it won't be anything at all until it ditches the Democrats.

It does not say:

The South will never rise again until you ditch John McCain for Ron Paul.

Concluded therefore: The owners of this blog want to recruit left wing democrats, not conservatives, and not commies. You can't recruit liberal dems unless you can talk to them.

And that's why, ultimately, nobody really comments here until I drop by to stir things up. The boring project of pealing off elitist liberal Dems from Obama is, well, boring.

Who would you really rather have a beer with? Me? Or Eric Alterman?

Ha Ha

TKT wrote:
Who would you really rather have a beer with? Me? Or Eric Alterman?

Response: If those are the only two alternatives, I'd rather be waterboarded.

OOO. A torture joke. Just a little lefty humor in between purge trials, eh comrade?

No humor, no purge trials--just an honest preference.

Wait--how about seeing you and Eric Alterman waterboarded at the same time? That actually would be my first choice.

You've put a lot of thought into this, haven't you comrade?

But you see, in a way, that was my point. The "purpose" of this blog is to recruit Eric Alterman, and Todd Gitlin, and Markos Moulitsos, and Rachel Maddow, and the entire staff at the Nation into some sort of lefty third party.

Has it ever occurred to any of you that Billybob out in the Ozarks is a lot more likely to want to pick up a gun and start shootin it out with the government (especially now that Obama's in charge) than some Whole Foods Shopping, Film Forum attending, latte sucking Manhattan liberal?

Apparently not, because Billybob don't care about the Democratic Party. To recruit him, you'd have to wreck the Repubican party.

In the end, I'd say, MJS is probably an ex Bob Avakianite trying to recruit that whole "middle strata of people of disproportionate influence" instead of the working class.

Kick out the foundation holding up the Democratc Party and you FREE the middle strata of elite intellectuals.

i have a confession to make...
if anyone is bored enough
with their real lives
to be reading this silliness...

at any rate
here's the confession:

nothing delights me more then the attentions of one time trot now not exactly or really a trot vandingo
can't help it ..its like being yipped at by a
an old ladies lap dog
the miniature fury of it
and of course moi as its focus ...

despite the very suspect quality of the job
i could read my de construction
by ding
through a thousand parts ...at least
no matter how boring
to the rest of the world
to me its swanee river

it's precisely why i invited herr mange
to a private exchange

but the site needs to return
to less tedious stuff eh ???

btw
ding you seem to have misplaced a revolution
along the op de construction trail

need i say more ....
----

i know it was a disgrace
for me to bring mr L
into this mouse vs frog mockery
he obviously deserves
much much better
than anything i can produce
but somehow i knew it would force ding into a blunder

Bad news for the war effort TKT - nobody wants you for to join their alternative political party. In fact, nobody want you for any fucking thing. Why? Because abso-tootly-ootly needs a useless, yellow ass, do-nothing, whining little turd like you sitting in the back of the hall yelling loudly that everybody isn't listening to your tiny fisted temper tantrum. Why don't you go try Dkos or Freeperville instead. They're both jam packed with screeching little weenie-wagging losers like you.

Bad news for the war effort TKT - nobody wants you for to join their alternative political party. In fact, nobody want you for any fucking thing. Why?

Because you're the typical lefty wannabe untenured petty tyrant, a 60 year old balding hippie in a ponytail who's still trying to get undergrad girls with "Obama" patches on their knapsacks to listen to you talk about how you did hash with Jane Fonda and Ho Chi Minh back in the 60s. And you know I'm the annoying geek three rows down who sees through your tired act 5 miles away.

Tell me how close that was.

oh look, there's a world outside the window

" MJS is probably an ex Bob Avakianite "
come now tkt
and i was just about to
meet you for that beer

"trying to recruit that whole "middle strata of people of disproportionate influence" instead of the working class.

Kick out the foundation holding up the Democratc Party and you FREE the middle strata of elite intellectuals."

see dingo it ain't hard to be
both enlightening and entertaining
u just have to learn not to be so flat footed
and fossilized

bravo tkt

"..people of disproportionate influence"
kool ..

alas
my application for a dlc stipend
was ignored
so i guess
that will never be me

hell i can't even
learn to spell

Deconstruction of Paine, Part IV

Paine wrote:

an old ladies lap dog
herr mange
trot, trot, trot

More of the same. Just the same old snarling, barking, and bluffing. I am not now and never have been a member of a Trotskyist party, Senator McCarthy Paine.

There's no blunder--Paine is just bluffing again. He can't count. The revolution that overthrow tsarism and capitalism in Russia took place not FIVE years after the founding of Lenin's party, but seventeen years. Where's your abacus, Opie--Opie the ECONOMIST is only off by about a DOZEN years.

Doesn't know history, doesn't know how to argue, just types dumbass prose poems and pretends to be an intellectual.

Notice what Paine doesn't address: he is at one with the DLC in wanting to keep the HMOs in business, in opposing an independent third party, and in holding out hope that Obama the Dem will bring about serious social/economic reform. Paine doesn't answer those points because he cannot answer them--so he diverts with his asinine, infantile, rage-choked name-calling.

Paine--do you think there's anyone left out here, MJS included, who does not consider you an empty, ridiculous blowhard? Forget it--splatter invective all you want, you're finished here, even if you post and bait and foam at the mouth all day long. You might as well hang it up, Paine--you've been busted as an inept, vicious, pontifical Stalinist dumbass. Game over.

Alternatve Script:

Bad news for the war effort TKT - nobody wants you for to join their alternative political party. In fact, nobody want you for any fucking thing. Why?

You're a 30 year old wanabee Williamsburg Hipster who's had to move to Bushwick.

The more apparent it becomes to you that your career as an "artist" isn't panning out the more you compensate with lefty political extremism to prove how "intense" and "tormented" you are about the state of the world.

Your professors in college got through their undergrad years because there was no way their professors back in the 60s would flunk them and send them to Vietnam. They poisoned your mind with new lefty and neo-marxist history that you forgot all about when you thought you'd be able to make it as a filmaker but which is now flooding back into your tiny little mind with increasing frequency.

You supported Howard Dean back in 2004 because your girlfriend made you. Then she dumped you.

TKT wrote, a little higher up:

The "purpose" of this blog is to recruit Eric Alterman, and Todd Gitlin, and Markos Moulitsos, and Rachel Maddow, and the entire staff at the Nation into some sort of lefty third party.

Has it ever occurred to any of you that Billybob out in the Ozarks is a lot more likely to want to pick up a gun and start shootin it out with the government...

Paine wrote,

"see dingo it ain't hard to be
both enlightening and entertaining"

Oh, this is rich--just read through your ludicrous doddering prose poems, and you'll see just how hard that is, Paine.

By the way, Paine--FIVE years before the revolution? Where's your abacus, Opie?

And, Paine, does MJS know that you're waiting for "The dems do go into new deal mode
Ie turn their back
To the imperial project"? MJS? Did you really know that Paine was 180 degrees in opposition to your stated purpose for this blog, that he expects the Democrats to create another New Deal and renounce imperialism?

Just wondering . . .

"oh look, there's a world outside the window"

ya hapa ..i just noticed that and
took a look see

report:
it's not all its cracked up to be

btw
thank for the gloss
indeed its compactness
contained an intricate coherence

ding
you bat
come on ..
there was a rev in russia in 05
right ????

or do you only count wins ??

Paine wrote,

"thank for the gloss
indeed its compactness
contained an intricate coherence"

This from someone who has not yet managed to perpetrate a single coherent sentence on this blog--good one, Opie! Where's you abacus, Opie? In what year are the Dems going to turn his back on imperialism, Opie? DO TELL!

I just knew it--once a Stalinist toady of the Democrats, always . . .

Van, gotta say -- you're thought-provoking and well-informed on the topics of moment, and I'm very grateful for your contributions here, but campaigning against Owen is gonna get nowhere with me.

We're old pals, joined at the hip, and I wouldn't be who I am if he weren't who he is. You don't have to like his stuff, but it's futile to tell me it isn't worth while.

OP and I don't see eye to eye on all topics, but I'm still his biggest fan. Go figure!

Billybod isn't necessarily the fun loving redneck of the urban American liberal's imagination. He isn't necessarily Burt Reynolds in "Smokey and the Bandit".

Billybob's current digital home is in the comments sections of a number of major daily newspapers.

Billybob likes to flood crimes stories (especially if the criminal is black) and immigration stories with comments and push them up to the front page.

Billybob might even live in Jersey or Long Island. Billybob might even have some low level PC tech support job where he gets picked on by young hispanic immigrant women who treat him like their slave.

Billybob didn't like Ron Paul because Ron Paul didn't want to kill enough people. But he loves Steve Lonegan and Glenn Beck. He listens to Pantera.

Unlike the majority of people on this blog, Billybob actually interacts with blacks and hispanics. He doesn't consider himself a racist. He probably doesn't own a gun.

But he doesn't like the chief negro in the White House. He probably wouldn't believe that none of you support Obama. He thinks Obama is America's chief socialist and Hillary is the Queen commie of the western world.

If you told Billybob that you hate Obama as much as he does, he'd think you were making fun of him.

Billybob may have taunted Van Mungo at an Internaional Answer rally with a sign that said "You Never Protested Terrorists" or "Code Pink is Code Fink."

Paine--

As a socialist, I was referring--obviously--to the only significant revolution of that period, the one that shook the world by leading to the working class taking power for the first time. If you, DLC liberal that you are, wish to consider 1905 more important and make that your benchmark, that just stands as another sign that you're just a liberal democrat.

So, Paine, tell us: when is the next "1905"? You know, the momentous uprising on K Street when your DLC comrades--the ones who like you consider privatized health care just dandy--"go into new deal mode Ie turn their back To the imperial project" When will the centrist Dems become social reformers and anti-imperialists? Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party.

this is really not fair
father smiff will put me on suspension
if we keep this tedium going here

its not fair ding
you're just too too devine and delightful

you keep pulling me back in
with your yips

the lure of the spot light and all

i dodder forth to bask
....i'l get suspended
suspended i tell u
stop stop

If MJS decides to suspend you, it's because you're out of the closet as a cheerleader for the Democrats, Paine.

So, Paine, tell us: when is the next "1905"? You know, the momentous uprising on K Street when your DLC comrades--the ones who like you consider privatized health care just dandy--"go into new deal mode Ie turn their back To the imperial project"? When will the centrist Dems become social reformers and anti-imperialists? Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party.

"As a socialist, I was referring--obviously--to the only significant revolution of that period, the one that shook the world by leading to the working class taking power for the first time"

oh...then of course ...i understand

damn !!!!

see you did it again
this time with a crossing post

why u socialist mutt u

boy am i in dutch this time..

i can almost hear father smiff now
preparing the suspension

his head slowly moving
from side to side

he uses rag paper
and writes in long hand....
with a peacock quill

MJS wrote,
"Van, gotta say -- you're thought-provoking and well-informed on the topics of moment, and I'm very grateful for your contributions here, but campaigning against Owen is gonna get nowhere with me."

Again, Michael, you have this exactly backwards. There was an interesting civil exchange going on here until Paine unleashed his stream of ad hom abuse. I felt impelled to expose the emptiness of his posturing, his essential oneness with the Democrats. But the abuse started with him, as always. He can't stand not to be center stage with his absurd Olympian dribbling.

So you might consider redirecting your upbraiding. And maybe you should consider some surgery for that hip problem of yours. If you really prize the stated purpose of your blog, there doesn't seem to be much sense in handing over 75 percent of your space to someone who obviously does not share that purpose.

Paine--
Stop dodging with your sophomoric, inept wordplay--James Joyce, you're not; e.e. cummings, you're not; a strident Stalinist poseur, you are. Sorry--and that's all you are, you grandiose self-assessment to the contrary notwithstanding.

Now, Paine, let's get to the point: tell us, when is the next "1905"? You know, the momentous uprising on K Street when your DLC comrades--the ones who like you consider privatized health care just dandy--"go into new deal mode Ie turn their back To the imperial project"? When will the centrist Dems become social reformers and anti-imperialists? Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party.

So, Paine, tell us: when is the next "1905"? You know, the momentous uprising on K Street when your DLC comrades--the ones who like you consider privatized health care just dandy--"go into new deal mode Ie turn their back To the imperial project"? When will the centrist Dems become social reformers and anti-imperialists? Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party

Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party.

This is amusing. The typical angry American white guy out in suburbia "criticizes the Democratic Party" all the time and he doesn't need to prove his credentials. The idea of two elitist interlecturals having a pissing match about who can hate the Democrats more would just be surreal.

Debating about whether the Revolution of 1905 or 1917 is more important would is a little bit like putting on lipstick, a pink dress, and hitting on guys. The only thing you both have in common is that you're members of the out of touch party.

Why not argue Aquinas vs. Abelard instead?

If you, DLC liberal that you are, wish to consider 1905 more important and make that your benchmark, that just stands as another sign that you're just a liberal democrat.

But I think that maybe I along with Mel Gibson am a Pius IX Socialist.

I think that you and op should translate your debate into Latin.

It would mean just as little to 99.9999999999999999% of the American people.

But it would have an air of mystery and authority.

now
tkt
u really must pay attention

the point i think quite obvious really
if a huge upheveal sic
is less then 5 years ahead
having a rev org in place is quite a benefit
if there is no serious chance of a similar upheveal sic
then perhaps we are not in a rev party forming context

now an electoral left party
is a reformist entity
for revs of clear mind
they realize the rev orgs are still just circles
the distinction isn't really that complex eh ??

tkt
i love u as i love dingo

but at least try to respond to the flow
you seem to want to wrench it around
to suit your very grand simplification
state <=> socialism

where as
anti state <=> fronteer tkt bubbah ism

trading skins for ears of wild corn
no doubt
quite picturesque

like your anti pode dingo
u seriously misjudge folks here
don't use me the local jester
as a metric of other folks

if you think you bring light to them
let alone lightening
you and the dingo are mistaken

u seem to follow each other around

do u smell each others offal ??

fun to roll in it eh ???

can you two go on alone ??

the tree line of 100 comments is just up ahead

what a slim harvest we are making for here...so far
see if my backing out elevates

the activist discourse

err
the socialist activist non trottled discourse that is...
with his shavian opponent
doc sardonicus
the scholar in rat skins

Maybe your figure on which workers are or aren't interest in socialist history is extreme, TKT. Like you, I don't think the working class is much interested in active discussion about Russia between 1905 and 1917. But I don't think that means they're always going to be uninterested in bolshevism, or that they can't recognize the importance of the victory of 1917, or the importance of working class leadership in any political formation that may emerge. The liberal historian Richard Rorty used to argue that radicals in this country needed to take their language from the radical movements that led this country, Bowles and Gintis made the same argument at the conclusion of their anti-capitalist tract "Schooling in Capitalist America". They came down on the side of reworked Debsianism. But Debsianism was bolshevism at its end, and it did find a following in this country even in the midwest in the teens and twenties, among some of the very regions of the workforce that you claim are uninterested. Time will tell, and the more reactionary sections of the white working class are neither as decisive or as reactionary as they used to be. Obviously the atomization of organized labor will be a nullifying effect, but the jury is still out. We'll see what happens.

Paine's new peak of analytical acuity:

"do u smell each others offal ??

fun to roll in it eh"

(Gee, Michael--no public reproach to your pal for this one? How about the other sergeant-majors of the decorum brigade? Not a peep? I'm SHOCKED!)

I'm amazed Paine didn't manage to work in one of his classical allusions into his offal fest--how disappointing. Your pompous blowhard stature is slipping, Paine.

You know, Paine, it's obvious that you've never really thought much at all about real politics in the real world. A left party can do both propaganda in the election arena AND agitation in the activist arena. SHOCKER! Just because you can't shit and chew gum at the same time, Opie, don't impute that handicap to the rest of the human race.

And please do tell us exactly how you plan to scientifically gauge when the revolution is exactly five years off so we'll know when fat-ass do-nothings like you will no longer have an excuse to put your deeds where your pretentious words are. Please explain how to gauge that five year interval with absolute precision. Boy--you are quite the dumbass.

And it sounds to me like you expect Obama and the Dems to bring about this revolution anyway, right, Opie? So tell us, Paine when is the next "1905"? You know, the momentous uprising on K Street when your DLC comrades--the ones who like you consider privatized health care just dandy--"go into new deal mode Ie turn their back To the imperial project"? When will the centrist Dems become social reformers and anti-imperialists? Do tell, Paine! Just don't expect anyone to every take you seriously ever again when you pretend to criticize the Democratic Party. You keep dodging this one, Paine.

"the Orwell Prize? I have not yet had an opportunity to remonstrate with Patrick about accepting a trophy etched with the name of a police informer"

often there's a passage like that
waiting deep in the thickets
of an alex C column
tiger like
ready to pounce

perhaps the the big O award
goes to
sturdy prose purveyers
who never mix a metaphor unlike me
or
strike with over certified "wet noodle "phrases
like van clingo

-----------
adventures of our new
"left party"

"... do both propaganda
in the election arena
AND
agitation in the activist arena"

my my two bitter mouth mints in one ...

perfect

get the superior message out
to the beknighted potential social base
b4 lunch
awaken
the pinkish cadre from their siesta
after lunch

busy busy busy

ach those poor goo goo greens

with the onset
of a hyper trot
militant agitprop regime

i nom van to be put in charge
of local monitoring
of party activists
agitation time

"comrade daisy holt -bippens
stand up sister
and show the comrades
what a petite bourgeois slacker looks like "

i hope
visiting this gentle eddy of a site
isn't the full extent of your agitprop
these days
comrade yingo

the left party of mass appeal awaits
the trottle make over
it seems
inside the frumpy feckless haunch
of the green configuration

i suggest you let loose
your flying sparks
far and wide
never know
where dry tinder might be out there somewhere

ding

no activist has the time for one on one goofing around playing virtual parlor tricks
like you pull here

what are you
that isolated ??
why you poor old grit bag you

teaching composition by contract
at a junior college

do u even have a job ???

if you were student age
this pointless nannering here
would be ..well indulged

father S
might put the guiding hand to the eager
callow knee
so to speak

but you gotta be what 50 plus ???
judging from various indications

you recite your baldly worded catechism
your utterly rutted down
set of talking points
then proceed to jounce up and down
like a caged ape

unwilling to take this bun in your pants
you've developed for me
off sight where it belongs

obviously you must realize by now
i'm enjoying the needling and mocking
and how it agitates you
and provokes ever more frantic
absurdly threatening
attempts to drum me out of here
as if this were a local "party " unit

tkt plays willingly for whatever reasons
the role of random gizmo
round here
but what is it u try to do
is this agit or prop

he lumps us all together ... even me and u

where as you you poor lonely fool
want to chase off the nasty bits
like me here

do you harbor some lone ranger fantasy

do you come loaded for bear
spoilin for a scrap
--projected fiercely onto others of course--

its really a shame verbal scraps don't produce the obvious results a fist fight produces
then again
if one is a prisoner of necessary delusions

even your own broken teeth can be counted as nuggets collected in the struggle

bar fighters hate themselves fingo
no one ever seems to respect them
enough
and you aren't even up to their the consequences
of their raw actions

try to end your isolation pal

far from a whole party

you could benefit from three cell mates

can you actually work with people van ???

something tells me you have trouble with that

whether you let yourself
notice it or not

for all your chitter about entry
got any close comrades in arms van
to bring in with u ????

count em

my guess u have close to ah ....zero
or you wouldn't come knocking
at father's door
daring him to respect you

and when in an act of generosity he encourages you with patronizing praise
you leap at the strokings
but ahh
the mange is loathsome to the touch
and of course the need to scrap never rests for long

my lord you're ready to turn on
father S in a second
if he fails to follow your advice
accept your analysis

i can't make you stop
the needs are too crucial to your
self disguise

a simple
get lost dip shit
won't work on you
obviously

you smell bad but you gotta lie down
next to some one anyway
nothing is more intimate then
a scrap
but hey
your wirse are crossed my friend

i love you and am filled with compassion
when i allow myself to feel my way inside u

but fuck it life's too short

i gotta leave you to your self and your mangey rage
bye bye little mutt

you send tkt for a water boarding

i suggest you join a local production
of
"no exit"

to resume the forward flow hee

mh

i agree
debs is ..well he's like the mlk
of the american labor movement LM

all wage class roads pass thru him
on their way from the past to the future

"Debsianism was bolshevism at its end"

i agree
and yet i suggest he was rife with internal contradictions
quite enough of them in fact
that we ought let
non bolshy LM ers
share him with "us" bolshy types
and of course
with "us " menshy-bolshy types as well

gene is for all of us

come on you two
funny guys

lady 100 waits

remember the dlc mummy has spoken

this is

the last turkey tango .... in paris

get it all out here now

that is
if you want a response from moi

the paine personal receiver shuts down after this thread

no more mistah nice guy

you both
become invisible to me from here on out

or is it inaudible

Debs, nothing. I still want to see what the petty boojwah Daisy Holt- Bippens looks like. I think I used to go out with her cousin Nasturtium Dukey-Morton when we were both members of the Revisionist Liquidationist Brigade. Aye, frothing mad dog that I am, I couldn't keep my nose out of the girl's offal or the lord of the manor's haggis. A cruel man he was, Lex Luthor Skeletor McGuidalilly. You must remember him, he played skip every winter down on the curling ice. He could throw the rock, he could. Ah, those were the days.

Tkt taunts
But who?

If his point is
The kulack wagery
Have no facts of their own life
To learn from
A red green agitprop
party
Of course he's
Correct

This same set of class strata tkt shakes at us
With odd witch doctor like
Absurdity
are most times and places
not in search of
An electoral alternative
To their local two party
Rep district candidates
They may cry
A plague on both your houses
But a left alternative party
As opposed to an occasionally tempting
independent
Peoples candidate

This cynicism of theirs
Is an index of their sub critical plight...to date
I like others see
A change in the class winds

Tkt's job smurfs and wage kuylacks
might respond to job site orging

the intensity of the corporate lobby agin card check
At least shows
The tower trolls ain't. Taking any chances on that

Similarly
A serious
public option in any med insure reformation package
May be a hot button within
med pri sec
Circles
Yes
Relevent corporate and professional outfits obviously
Won't sign on willingly to a suicide pact

But here unlike
Card. Check
The vast majority
Of corpo types
Will compromise
If it means a potential
off loading
of the cost
Of the med system on its victims
Whether only In part or in whole

Ideologians on either side of the great divide not with standing

So that was u
Took my dear nasty from me

u loathesome
liquidating
Revisor u

Here I was agit prop in hand ready to convert her to
The Pol pot was right after all
Society...

Paine, The Insane, Deconstructed, Part V

From the "Paine the Insane Book of Aphorims," of "Dr. Seuss as Stalinist Mad Dog," or "Watch Paine's Emotional Breakdown Before Your Very Eyes" or "I Can't Think But I Sure Can Foam at the Mouth":

Chapter 1--Dr. Seuss as Stalinist Mad Dog:
ding
ding you bat
dingo
mingo
van clingo
comrade yingo
fingo
goo goo greens

Chapter 2--"I Can't Think but I Sure Can Foam at the Mouth"
get lost dip shit
you smell bad
bye bye little mutt

Chapter 3--"Watch Paine's Emotional Breakdown Before Your Very Eyes"
nothing is more intimate then [sic]
a scrap
but hey
your wirse [sic] are crossed my friend
i love you and am filled with compassion
when i allow myself to feel my way inside u
but fuck it life's too short
i gotta leave you to your self and your mangey [sic] rage
bye bye little mutt [SICK!]

Michael, seriously--if this thousand-megawatt, rage-addled nut case Paine is really your friend, you should be earnestly encouraging him to get some psychiatric help--both for his benefit and the benefit of your blog.

If anyone knows Paine personally and dares approach him while he writhes in his straitjacket, please attempt to elicit the following information: How will left activists know when the clock has struck precisely five years before the revolution so they can get about their work of building an independent left alternative to the Democrats. In Paine's World, such clairvoyance is essential to the work of the serious activist--paging Kreskin!

In the meantime, since Straitjacket Paine has not yet sounded the five-year warning, I guess we can all just sit back, relax, and wait for the DLC corporate-owned Democrats to usher in New Deal 2.0 (complete with still-privatized "hybrid" health care--just as good as single payer, sez Mad Dog Paine!) and, as Paine dribbled, "turn their back to the imperial project."

Who needs Lenin when you have Paine's revolutionary icons Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, and Al Fromm? And while awaiting the centrist Dems to usher in this epic social/political transformation, who even needs the motto of this blog: "The American Left may not be much, but it won't be anything at all until it ditches the Democrats." The American left doesn't have to be much, in Paine's World: the Obama Democrats are going to do it all for us!

The dems are green
Face painting these days
Green consumption green energy even -- if not green manufacture--
has
Reached majority
Support

I do not see why you and Van Mungo are fighting since on this you both agree.

Van Mungo in fact pointed out to me a poll that concluded that most Americans are socialists or at least trending towards socialism.

My objection was that by "socialism" the polls respondants meant "New Deal Liberalism."

Now Van Mungo is taking my position and op is takin Van Mungo's.

But as we know, history does not move in a slow and steady progression.

On September 10th, 2001 you would have predicted a slow, stately movement towards the anti-globalist left. But one terrorist act later, the American people rushed headlong down into a form of extreme statist militarism that lasted at least until Hurricane Katrina.

The answer is not to "build a revolutionary party". It's to break down the elaborate system of state and ideolical control that's stripped Americans of their republican (small r) heritage and made them vulnerable to the kind of manipulation they were subjectated to by the neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003.

You hardcore lefties, to your credit, opposed it when it counted.

But now that the "normal" corporate statists have replaced the extreme neoconservative ones, you seem to have fallen into bickering and sectarianism, into long, bitter Maoist style shouting matches inviting one another to "self criticize".

Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Democratic Party?

And on that note, much to what will surely be your great pleasure, I will leave you. I have nothing to learn here.

I take no pleasure in crossing swords with Paine. But consider the circumstances--there was a perfectly civil and interesting discussion underway on two related topics: (a) the relationship between Democratic ascendancy and antiworker government policies, and (b) ideas for generating an alternative to the Democratic Party.

Discussion (b) triggered some feral atavism in Paine, and he began trampling that dialogue like a rhinoceros on methedrine, snorting vulgar, vicious abuse in all directions. There is no justification for this kind of steamrolling/bullying. The problem is that Paine's behavior in this thread is only a magnified version of his standard know-it-all sniffing and snickering at everyone else's comments: in this case the standard sniffing simply accerlated into snorting and roaring.

Sniffing and snorting are modes of posturing--they are not modes of dialogue or discussion. Hence Paine's posts--sniffing or snorting--have a chronically stifling effect on this blog. The idea is that his pronouncements are final, and any contestation, no matter how restrained or civil, invites facile ad hom dismissal or a riot of insult, but never earnest, serious discourse.

My suggestions about building a left party were merely that--suggestions, thinking out loud. Paine treated them as though I were issuing a manifesto. Somehow Paine treats all manner of non-Paine opining as a threat to his monumental sense of self-importance (the symptom, of course, of a dangerously fragile and unstable ego).

I hope that Paine will, in the future, take a more--dare I say it?--comradely and respectful attitude toward the ideas of other commenters so that this blog can fulfill its potential as a forum for dialogue and civil debate about the shortcomings of the Democratic Party (and, correlatively, possible alternatives to it?). Otherwise, it will continue to degenerate into Paine's vanity press.

Yango is gone
That leaves only
Yingo

Btw
I agree with herr yang I have no conception of what
Substantive issues
Remain for him or
Yingle berry
to learn
Or teach any one here

Single payer
Is well understood and well supported here
Read the site's lefty pledge

And french turns
Are a common enough trot RX
Third party chitter new here?
No

What more is contained in your
Canister of boiled turnips
I want to be fair
To you

Btw how much of the 3 and a half years worth of material have you read

U have less then nothing to offer

I'd love u to prove me wrong
But you can't
U are as sterile
As a spelling coach

See what I mean? See Paine's post above.

Just more of the same rancid garbage.

It's hopeless.

Michael--can you try to inject this guy with Xanax or maybe just some Nice Serum? Otherwise, your blog is in trouble as anything but a sounding board for Paine's megalomania.

By the way--single payer is NOT "well supported" on this blog to the extent that Paine tramples all over it.

In an extended discussion in a previous thread, Paine made it clear that he's happy to settle for the Stark hybrid plan, the main purpose of which is to keep the HMOs in place sucking resources out of the health-care system, ballooning costs, and failing to cover everyone. Such a proposal is bound to SABOTAGE single payer because it torpedoes the benefits of risk pooling in an exclusively single-payer system. The only argument to the contrary Paine produced was a study cosponsored by a subsidiary of an HMO! LOL!

Paine's support of this proposal puts him clearly in league with a broad swath of DLC corporate Democrats,as does his optimism, declared earlier in this thread, that the corporate-owned Dems will magically morph into New Deal anti-imperialists.

Paine's torrents of personal abuse are matched only by his recurrent dishonesty about his own political positions, which, once teased out from the blizzard of pretentious babble, place him firmly in the same boat as mainstream Democrats and thus 100-percent at odds with the stated outlook of this blog.

I have a prediction
If I leave van mingle to his devices
He won't act up

So I'll leave off hear
Van feel free to
Blast away at my posts and comments at least so far as I'm concerned

And this I pledge
If u teach me something I'll try to be the first to congratulate u

Conyer v stark
Is in preparation

Sharpen your finger nails

This is the fourth time that Paine has promised to stop babbling in this thread.

His honesty on this score is just as debased as his honesty about his pro-Democratic Party politics.

Paine wrote:
"I have a prediction
If I leave van mingle to his devices
He won't act up"

English translation:

"If I, Paine, stop piling up dung heaps of invective in every thread in which someone has the temerity to dispute one of my Olympian pronouncements, this blog will be a better place."

Finally . . . we agree.

Paine vs. Smith:

One more on Paine's chronic dishonesty--the following occurred to me, so I thought I would note it for the benefit of anyone still following this thread:

Paine, in his next-to-last comment:
"And french turns
Are a common enough trot RX
Third party chitter NEW here?
NO" (emphasis added in caps)

Smith, commenting on my thoughts about socialists regrouping to enter the Green Party (farther up this thread):
"Van, this is well-argued and rather ORIGINAL -- or it's NEW TO ME, anyway. Anybody have a better idea? I don't, frankly." (emphasis added in caps)

To be clear here
The thesis is simple enough

Hysteria aside
Any public option
Plan will evolve into single payer...over time

Will that mean wasted resources on hmo/health org administrative payroll
of course
But we have slack right now
As keynes pointed
Out paying peoppl
To bury dollars
For treassure hunts would not
Be a waste of resources
When in aggregate
An equal value amount of resources would otherwise be idol

Would single payer
Now be greatly
Superior...
of course

Is stark's plan
as now drafted
A disaster
Not even close
And
No amount of hysterical gibber will make it so

The real fight will be over price
Controls

Perhaps
the mark up market model
Could find implementation here

As I've suggestd
Here several times Before
One years worth of sector wide price increases probably exceed the cost savings on administration

Single payers monopsony position
Is far more important then its admin savings

Yes
Suggesting a bunch of rad groups pre gather and resolve to march into the green party
Brass band playing is indeed new to this site
I think you'll find third party talk might include other possible
Approaches
That have drifted thru here form time to time

As to promises
Read my comments and u'll find one that said this is the last thread
Where I'll respond to your comments
This one is'nt over till it's over eh?

U really must learn to read more carefully
And try not to
Create straw dogs

I know u may not want to confront what is actually written
But it might run a little more smoothly for. U if u do

As to faher S's
Comment
He'll have to speak. For himself
Obviously
But I suspect he was stroking u
In the hope u might calm down if
U were
Treated better then u deserved

Again I can't speak for mr S
But I found your proposal
Naïve at best

Paine vs. Paine (or, Paine has a chronic problem with the truth)

Paine 9:05 a.m.
you both [TKT and VM]
become invisible to me FROM HERE ON OUT
or is it inaudible [Caps emphasis added] [NOTE: no conditions or qualifications specified]

Paine 4:52 p.m.
So I'll leave off hear [sic]
Van feel free to
Blast away at my posts and comments at least so far as I'm concerned [NOTE: no conditions or qualifications specified]

Paine 5:48 p.m.
[NOTE: no conditions specified]
As to promises
Read my comments and u'll find one that said this is the last thread
Where I'll respond to your comments
This one is'nt over till it's over eh?

Ergo, Paine is a chronic liar. QED.

Paine vs. Paine (or, Paine has a chronic problem with the truth)

Paine 9:05 a.m.
you both [TKT and VM]
become invisible to me FROM HERE ON OUT
or is it inaudible [Caps emphasis added] [NOTE: no conditions or qualifications specified]

Paine 4:52 p.m.
So I'll leave off hear [sic]
Van feel free to
Blast away at my posts and comments at least so far as I'm concerned [NOTE: no conditions or qualifications specified]

Paine 5:48 p.m.
As to promises
Read my comments and u'll find one that said this is the last thread
Where I'll respond to your comments
This one is'nt over till it's over eh? [Condition suddenly introduced by Paine the Liar]

Ergo, Paine is a chronic liar. QED.

Paine the Liar Redux

Paine wrote:
"As to faher S's
Comment
He'll have to speak. For himself
Obviously
But I suspect he was stroking u
In the hope u might calm down if
U were
Treated better then u deserved"

There was no acrimony in this thread at that point. There was amicable, civil discussion of the point at hand. All the ugly, hysterical muck in this thread was initiated by you, as usual, in your post of 7:19 p.m. of April 25 in this thread: "excellent notions all particularly for u my son
end the hysterical blind self loathing
end the junior college library isolation
go get em pal end the shiftless site to site para-biting"

This is your usual substitute for dialogue--your customary hurling of much to distract people's attention from the glaring facts that you (a) can't write a coherent sentence (b) can't sustain a rational argument. So you snarl and growl--that's all you've got. You're a vicious attack dog who would rather destroy this blog as a vehicle of dialogue rather than see your delusional pre-eminence questioned for even a moment. There is no limit of abuse or mendacity to which you will not resort in your desperate effort to retain your self-appointed Chair of Omniscience.

The people on this blog have now had a bulging eyeful of your nastiness, your bluff, your chronic lies, the whole manic charade with which you attempt to conceal your intellectual and ethical void. Thanks for making my task of deconstructing Paine so easy.

Mini mouse
Check out comment around 9;22 am
Today
Again read more carefully

The bye byes are
Merely nasty
Sorry if they got your hopes up
I suggest u take another tack then liar
I have no need of lying here my little friend
Here I feel among
Ship mates
Even u yindle even u
As vic m sez in
Gunga din
"Just playful chidren"
Your just a playful child after all right?

Oh, sure--you change your tune every fifteen minutes when it suits your momentary spasms of spite.

You promised to stop responding twice, without conditions. So you came up with another version later on. That still makes you a liar. QED

Now I understand "San Francisco values".