Bye Bye Bérubé from Roxanne - @ Rox Populi 08 Jan 2007 12:52 pm
[Leftopia]
I have a feeling he'll be back. And probably when and where we least expect him.
Leftopia archives
Contributing from Roxanne - @ Rox Populi 07 Jan 2007 12:53 pm
[Leftopia]
Dear Left/Liberal/Progressive Consultant Class: from Roxanne - @ Rox Populi 15 Nov 2006 4:53 pm
[Iraq War] [ MESS '0' POTAMIA (with apologies to Jon Stewart)] [ Leftopia] [ 2006 Mid-Term Elections] [ 2008 Elections]
Unlike so many others in Blogtopia, I'm not one to automatically cream my jeans each time Howard Dean sputters a handful of nouns and verbs. Yet it seems to me the combination of his 50-state strategy, along with the dozens of other initiatives to get more Democrats elected this year, worked.
Could we have done better? Sure. Fine. Gather the players, rent out a fucking room at the Watergate for a month, hire a Who-Moved-My-Cheese facilitator and figure out how we can improve, based on facts and evidence. And leave the rest of us out of it. This fucking bullshit of prospecting for new clients on the airwaves is boring the fuck out of me and, I suspect, the majority of Americans who put the Dems on top in '06.
There is serious work ahead. Countless lives are at stake. And your unfounded grandstanding is a distraction from ending our long national nightmare.
Cafeteria Ideology from Roxanne - @ Rox Populi 15 May 2005 8:44 am
[Leftopia]
I don't think I've met a single person who is a strict adherent to a single political ideology in the way that some folks, such as fundamentalist Christians and Muslims, are strict adherents to a religious dogma. This is especially true for the people I know via the Lefto-sphere.
Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum are all-too-often, in my view, keen to compromise on civil (i.e. abortion) and Libertarianesque rights. Oliver Willis is infamous for his qualified support of torture. Amanda Marcotte and Norbizness have committed the crime of fighting the smoking-ban in Austin.
While I consider myself a progressive, others do not because of my qualified support of NAFTA and other programs that could, if implemented by a certain kind of sort, "lift up" folks in the economically-developing world. I'm also not a big fan of modern American trade unions.
What accounts for these deviations from the party line? I'm assuming that in most of the examples cited above, none are core stakeholders in the divergent views they take. So, it's not necessarily self-interest as the driver.