Kerry began his speech by making the point that Bush and his crew are rotten. He then went on to make the point that Bush and his crew are loathsome. In the third section of the speech, Kerry left the impression that Bush and his crew are evil.
Now we all know people so consumed by hatred for George Bush that they haven't had an unpredictable thought in five years, but in Kerry's speech one sees this anger in almost clinical form.
Hey Brooksy, thinking Bush is rotten, loathsome, and evil doesn't mean you are consumed by hatred of him. He is rotten, loathsome, and basically evil. And I'm tired of this "clinical" bullshit. Bobo, diagnosing people who think Bush sucks (now basically a majority of Americans) as crazy is Krauthammer's job, not yours. You don't even have the dusty credentials for it.
And you really are misrepresenting Edwards. In fact, most of what you're doing is misrepresenting. Democrats should be tougher. After all, Republicans only win elections by appealing to fear, hate, and gullibility. Bush only beat McCain in the primaries by lying about his sanity and appealing to the racism of South Carolinians (it works, by the way). Bush only beat Kerry because gay-hating and opportunistic Republicans put Gay Marriage bans o the November menu in several states.
Democrats who vote against Roberts aren't doing it just to show they mean business, but because he's a stealth nominee they think will work to infringe our privacy rights and overturn Roe vs. Wade. And Brooks is either totally unclear about what partisanship means, or is merely disingenuous in the way he uses the term.
The Democratic party doesn't have policy problems, not the way Brooks means it. Never has. Despite the avalanche of bullshit ideological enforcement of this mythic "conservatism," most Americans prefer the actual policies of Democrats. What the Democrats are is always on the defensive and out of power, and this means they never really talk about policy. Nobody does. Columnists like Brooks spill buckets of ink writing about style. This very column, in which Brooks decries Democratic obsession with style over policy, doesn't talk about policy. When Brooks praises Edwards, it's for weaving a moving story, not for his policy prescriptions. This is just another "Democrats should be like this" column.
But yeah, we should be more like Edwards than Kerry in this instance. Democrats have an opportunity here, among the manifest failure and unpopularity of the Bush team and its allies, to talk policy. Not so it will be implemented. If the idiot Republicans want to build the world's largest trailer park to permanently house survivors of Katrina, it will happen. No, the Democrats need to forge their identity. Bush and co. are too busy trying to save their own asses to deliver attacks on liberal weakness, impugn our patriotism etc. with their characteristic effectiveness. Go, talk equality, fairness, giving up these stupid tax cuts for the rich, improving FEMA etc. Do it!
But don't listen for one moment while Brooks first mischaracterizes Edwards as non-partisan, and then warns us to be Clintonite centrists (as if a centrist could avoid being termed a fire-breathing liberal if he/she were running) or else. Brooks has one political aim above all, to keep his party, whose base regards anything resembling Brooks, ie. semi-intellectual, culturally urban, and Jewish, as well beneath contempt, (but this is typical for the Republican party, whose media symbols and representatives, like Armstrong Williams, Michelle Malkin, Anne Coulter, Krauthammer again, Sullivan, even George Will who, despite being thoroughly WASP is a pencil necked geek, are all basically Chickens for Colonel Sanders in a party that is decreasingly accepting of anyone who isn't white, straight, evangelical Christian, if not male at least submissive to male authority, and dumb as a sack of rocks) in power. Would you trust someone like that to tell you the directions to the nearest gas station?
