Lieberman/Lamont Popcorn Watch
Nastier? The CT race is going to get *nastier*?
By Moe Lane Posted in Democrats — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
That's what TNR's Jason Zengerle says, and God knows that he and his magazine are not unacquainted with hysterical* people screaming at them:
If they didn't hate each other so much, David Sirota and Dan Gerstein might be friends. They certainly have a lot in common. Both are in their thirties. Both are Jewish. And both are Democratic operatives. But their greatest similarity is their shared love of vicious political combat. Sirota, a lanky 30-year-old who has worked on campaigns for Philadelphia mayor and Montana governor, once branded a political opponent a "No Talent A*s Clown." Gerstein, a thick-necked 39-year-old communications consultant and veteran Joe Lieberman aide, has been known to accuse those who disagree with him of being anti-Semites. Which is why, even by the no-holds-barred standards of a blog feud, the Gerstein v. Sirota smackdown was unusually nasty.
...The Gerstein-Sirota feud should have been just another rumble in the blogosphere, notable only for its combatants' particular brand of mean-spiritedness. But recently the mêlée spilled over into the non-virtual world. That's because in August, after Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, Gerstein was hired to serve as the communications director for Lieberman's independent bid; and on Labor Day, after the Lamont campaign realized it needed some more political pros for the general election, Sirota was brought on board to help with its research and rapid response. Which means that the Lieberman-Lamont race--a race that is already plenty nasty--is likely to get only nastier, as the Gerstein-Sirota fight graduates to a larger ring.
(H/T: RCP)
Now, if I was a nasty sort of person, I would pour gasoline on the fires by noting on the front page the helpful data point that Lamont's guy Sirota has worked for AIPAC in the past, which is traditionally all that's required to declare Candidate N a tool of the Zionist lobby. But I am a creature of sweetness and light, so I won't.
Read on.
Expect this one to get hardcore before the end, kids: this is going to be even worse than VA's race. There are too many people involved in Lamont's Senate bid who need to prove that they can actually win, and they all doubled down prior to the primary. If Lieberman wins, they look like fools and wastrels - and guess which one will damn them more in the Democratic Party's eyes?
October is going to be fun to watch, if you're the type to enjoy watching random explosions and property damage and dirt flying everywhere. And, really, whom among us does not?
Moe
*Take that any way you like.
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Lieberman/Lamont Popcorn Watch 12 Comments (0 topical, 12 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
and then we look around and we're working for some campaign or sitting at a keyboard when the house needs painting. I threw up my hands in disgust in an appointed position a couple of months ago and here I am; alternating between this place and the briefing memo for a campaign that I should be working on. It's the world of being a junkie.
In Vino Veritas
To go on the internet equivalent of Cold Turkey Quitting or maybe Methadone, because I couldn't care less about what these people think of each other. I sit here every day and I've become conditioned to think that all this stuff is actually important and it isn't. What's important is what some dude at the State Department wants to leak or some other jerk who has read the NIE and wants to leak to the NYT and there's nothing that I can do to influence that anyway.
I'm rapidly reaching the "who gives a flying fig?" about the whole thing. One party farts in another party's face and then there's a lot of stinkiness and people sit around and debate whose smells better. It's ridiculous. There are a million better things that I can think of to do with my time than listen to these fools sniping at each other. I am at the point now that I simply do not care to swallow any more. I've reached my feces quota.
became my watchwords when I was fully in the game. If it wasn't on my plate, at most I watched with amused interest. Here and in places more or less like this, you get everything from experienced professionals to the rankest neophytes to the political world. I'm always struck by the insistence on ideological purity by those whose names have never been on the door. Purity like war plans does not survive the first contact with opposition. Politics is the art of the possible; you take what you can get in the direction of your goals and principles.
Dealing with Democrats and their sycophants is particularly trying; first, they are utterly devoid of self-awareness; second, truth is a meaningless concept - they don't even believe it exists as most of us here would define truth. I just learned to follow their playbook, some deriviative of Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, and let them be themselves. Sooner or latter they'll overplay it, then you strike. GWB and Rove have been superb with this in using their "Rope A Dope" strategy of letting them run and run and run until the talking points are all worn out yesterday's news and then GWB saddles up Air Force One and goes out and pounds them back into submission.
It's a grand game; hang in there.
In Vino Veritas
That's fair. Every time I see a veteran talk about the need to give on everything, I have to remind myself of why we elect the chief executives, and need to give him more power to clean out the bureaucracy.
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If you're seeing shades of gray, it's because you're not looking close enough to see the black and white dots.
will is. This is particularly a Republican problem; first, it is almost impossible for a Republican executive to find enough loyal, competent nominal Republicans to staff the appointed positions in any government; second, very few Republicans are will to take the heat and guerilla theater associated with throwing out the holdover crats. Rest assured that the day you do it they'll have mommies with cancer who just lost their health insurance, foreclosed houses, and starving babies on the six pm news. And, third, and maybe as important, the lobbyists and players all have established relationships with the 'crats, so they're telling the new executive that the government just can't be disrupted the way it would if you cut them all loose. That is an outright lie; behind every appointee is an army of career employees who do the real work. The Very Hardest Thing you could do would be to try to stop a government from running. The only thing that would actually be disrupted is some lobbyist's Blackberry phone list.
Ds on the other hand go in with a meat axe and nobody says a word; they're "good people" after all. Had I been willing to stay for the end of the Murkowski administration and Knowles had won, I wouldn't have dignified them by letting them fire me, but had I not been willing to just walk away, I'd fully expect to be fired within a few seconds of his hand coming off the Bible. They do it every time they take power and it is donw without repercussion everywhere in the Country. For Rs even firing pure appointees is front page news.
In Vino Veritas
http://devine-gamecock.townhall.com
www.race42008.com
"Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face." - Ronald Reagan
http://devine-gamecock.townhall.com
www.race42008.com
"Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face." - Ronald Reagan
both Eddie Murphy and the WWE.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
Will find it newsworthy that this race is capable of getting nastier. Any nastier and this would be Hamilton/Burr.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
There. I said it. American politics is just a circus, it's the Eddie-Murphy Fart Game mixed with WWE Smackdown with a bunch of self-important publicists and hangers-on taking jabs at each other for the cameras and now, the blogosphere. If I hear one more stupid story about how one blogosphereic idiot hates another blogospheric idiot, I'm just going to take my own advice and amscre. The fights are adding nothing and they're doing nothing but wasting my time. Maybe it's really time to start the great Culling of the blogosphere that everyone knew was eventually going to happen. Time to thin the herd and cut back on the random noise factor.