John Kerry: Sore Loser
By Erick Posted in Democrats — Comments (44) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Prior to the 2004 election, very few people outside of either Hollywood or Massachusetts had ever heard of or cared about John F. Kerry. He did very little in the United States Senate. In fact, when he ran for President he ran based on what he did in Vietnam as opposed to what he did in the U.S. Senate. Kerry claimed to have authored significant legislation. He actually authored very little and sponsored even less (he did co-sponsor many things, as Senators tend to do).
Despite the fact that voters decisively rejected Mr. Kerry in 2004, now he won't shut up. Mr. Kerry has, in the past few months, spoken of how the election was not stolen, but it sure didn't look good. Voters were intimidated, he said. Oh, and they were harassed and lied to (you know, Bush lies). Well, with the willing printers ink of the New York Times and non-partisan leftiness of the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, Kerry is at it again.
"Last year, too many people were denied their right to vote; too many who tried to vote were intimidated," Mr. Kerry said at an event sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts.
He cited examples of trickery. "Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday," Mr. Kerry said. "People are told in telephone calls that if you've ever had a parking ticket, you're not allowed to vote."
To make it even more ridiculous, Kerry always, as he did this time, adds this caveat: "Mr. Kerry . . . has never disputed the outcome of the election, saying voting irregularities did not involve enough votes to change the result."
The only thing voters hate worse than a sore winner is a sore loser. Kerry has become one in his bid to stay in the American mind so he can run again in 2008.
For my two cents: If you are stupid enough to believe you can't vote if you've gotten a parking ticket or that political parties vote on different days, you don't need to be voting anyway.
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but so should you.
"If you are stupid enough to believe you can't vote if you've gotten a parking ticket or that political parties vote on different days, you don't need to be voting anyway.
That these calls, all made by GOP operatives, were made to voters and neighborhoods of color, is offensive. People should be more informed, but tactics designed to depress the turnout based on race should be out of bounds. Period.
If you are stupid enough to believe you can't vote if you've gotten a parking ticket or that political parties vote on different days, you don't need to be voting anyway.
So who else shouldn't be voting? Maybe we should have a poll tax! If you are too lazy to get a job to pay the tax, you shouldn't be voting for the folks who spend tax revenues, right? Or literacy tests! If you can't understand the ballot, should you really be deciding the fate of our great nation? Wouldn't guys like Erick do a better job of picking your leaders for you, anyway?
With literacy tests, so long as they're not applied in a racially discriminatory manner. If you can't read, you probably shouldn't be voting. I'd also like to see some basic history and current events tests dependent on the races on which you're casting a vote, again, so long as it's not applied in a racially discriminatory manner.
Let's not overreact here, neighbor. I mean, sure, we'd wipe out seventy percent of Democrat votes if we insisted they actually read and understand political events, but if that's the price for an informed electorate, so be it.
that he is talking about are based in fact, they should be exposed, talked about and condemned...or do you support efforts to suppress or confuse voters? If the shenanigans have no basis in fact, that should also be exposed so we won't have to deal with Kerry again in '08. That being said...my prediction is that even if he runs in '08, he won't make it past 2/1/08 in the primaries (if he makes it that far). He had his shot and he blew it.
Maybe the types of people who would vandalize private property in effort to suppress GOTV efforts should be among those not allowed to vote.
To suggest voter suppression is a unilaterial action committed only by republicans is 1) old-hat and 2) patently false.
Despite the fact that voters decisively rejected Mr. Kerry in 2004, now he won't shut up.
I doubt that I like Kerry any more than you do, but 59 million Americans - 48% of the electorate - wanted him for President. Hardly a reason to run in the corner and hide. A Cloaked User also rightly points out that voter fraud should be investigated regardless of the result, period. A sore winner may be better than a sore loser, but it's still pretty petty.
I mean, sure, we'd wipe out seventy percent of Democrat votes if we insisted they actually read and understand political events, but if that's the price for an informed electorate, so be it.
Thomas, I really think we'd lose a huge chunk of the Republican voters, too. Let's not kid ourselves. Many voters aren't that tuned into current political events beyond the usual 10 second talking points. I think both parties would shed the same percentage of voters.
a lot of the voters on Afghanistan and Oraq with this litmust test, Thomas:
" If you can't read, you probably shouldn't be voting."
I'm sorry, but literacy is not a requirement for participatory democracy, unless you somehow believe that someone who cant read is somehow intellectually your inferior.
Especially where modern American politics is concerned. There is no inherent right to vote.
how does this position square with supporting universal human liberty?
Seriously, if you could elaborate on this, I would appreciate it, because it is jarring to me in light of your passionate defenses of the Pope's record of defending human freedom against tyranny.
If you do not have representation in your government, you are at its mercy. The right to vote is an essential piece of true liberty. All citizens have a right to vote. To argue otherwise seems to me to be aslippery slope leading towards Jim Crow.
To suggest voter suppression is a unilaterial action committed only by republicans is 1) old-hat and 2) patently false.
Would be, were it so suggested. Now, back to the actual discussion at hand...
Or representation. Merely that the right to effect that liberty or that representation through a given mechanism is not inherent.
You have an inherent right to liberty. You have an inherent right to a government that governs only with your consent. You do not have a right to turn in a punchcard.
if Thomas gets his way.
Literacy tests were an end-run around the 15th Amendment prohibition on racial disenfranchisement. For Thomas to endorse literacy tests and in the same breath recommend requiring that voters have a knowledge of history is ironic, to say the least.
Mea culpa vis-a-vie the inference on my part. Read much more into your words than are actually there. My bad.
Cheers.
Just aware that the 1950s are long past us. Sorry they're not for you.
About GOP deceptive, misleading, telephonic targeting communities 'of color', etc., etc.?
please further elucidate how the consent of the governed is excercised in the absence of the right to vote.
Is "ascertained."
Good question. Give me a bit on that. I can think of several ways to do it off the top of my head, but I'd have to think through their practicability.
I add, as I forgot to upthread, that I can think all sorts of things are exceeding good, without thinking they are inherent rights. For example, I have no inherent right to eat deep-dish pizza.
Thomas says before flying off simultaneously in all directions.
Some of these exchanges are very cogent and, to be sure, excellent reading. However, as intellectual swordplay they are becoming predictable - by generally resulting in someone falling upon their own swords in the process of skewering Thomas.
I mean, its okay with me - I'm having fun on the sidelines - but I suspect there must be a lot of pain out there.
at phrasing eth question correctly in a clarifying way :) yes, ascertained is what I should have written.
I did not, however, argue that I have a right to a good thing. I do have the freedom to pursue good things. Freedom is the enabler of seeking good things - pursuit of happiness, after all.
Liberty, the freedom to pursue good things like eating deep dish pizza, is a more basic axiom from which the good things are derived. You cant equate the two because one is cause and the other effect.
And I write that as a native chicagoan, so you know I antrying to be objective here. Had the Constiutution explicitly mentioned deep dish, I'd be scarcely happier, especially living in a pizza-drought-stricken region like Houston.
There's even a Godfathers -- or was, five years ago -- that serves it the old-fashioned way, which is to say, as thick as your thigh.
Admittedly, you have to hunt. Much easier to find great Tex Mex and BBQ.
Who are you kidding?
That we are happily rid of some of consequences of the worst policies of the 1950's is hardly an argument for reinstituting them.
To cultural changes.
I never said we should have racially discriminatory voting tests; quite the contrary. Please try to stay on-topic.
Although they were widely applied in racially discriminatory (and thus illegal) manners, the whole point of the literacy tests was that they were not, prima facie, racially discriminatory. They provided cover for well-meaning folks to rationalize de facto racial disenfranchisement.
The cultural changes and the changes in law went hand-in-hand. If you wish to impose restrictions on the franchise that have as a consequence, intended or not, the disproportionate disenfranchisment of certain minority groups, expect cultural changes to follow from that as well.
Most were imposed as a means of making Jim Crow a working option. Mine are expressly to be used without regard to race. Never, ever fail to impute animus where you can avoid it, huh?
They went hand in hand because the cultural changes made the legal changes possible.
Omelettes.
Most were imposed as a means of making Jim Crow a working option. Mine are expressly to be used without regard to race. Never, ever fail to impute animus where you can avoid it, huh?
I frankly don't care what your motives are, Thomas. They are about as comforting to me as the 15th Amendment must have been to a disenfranchised voter in the Jim Crow south. When you hand a bank robber a gun, knowing that he has a history robbing banks, and knowing that guns are handy in doing so, it is no defense to swear up and down that you thought he wasn't going to rob a bank this time and that you told him to only use the gun for some legitimate purpose.
You would hand those who see a political advantage in keeping African-Americans away from the polls a political weapon that has been used in the past for that very purpose. And I have only your word that they won't do the same thing this time around. Yeah, sure.
They went hand in hand because the cultural changes made the legal changes possible.
And vice versa. Removing the legal impediments to African-Americans participating in democracy accelerated advances in racial equality. Surely you don't dispute this?
Because I'm pretty sure where you're coming from now.
When you hand a bank robber a gun, knowing that he has a history robbing banks, and knowing that guns are handy in doing so, it is no defense to swear up and down that you thought he wasn't going to rob a bank this time and that you told him to only use the gun for some legitimate purpose.
You would hand those who see a political advantage in keeping African-Americans away from the polls a political weapon that has been used in the past for that very purpose. And I have only your word that they won't do the same thing this time around. Yeah, sure.
Well, as there are many fewer Democrats running the relevant places, and because almost all of the Democrats who pulled that malarkey are, you know, dead, you'll have to excuse me if I ignore you as you wander off into neo-left conspiracy theories and broad slurs against whole political parties and regions of the country.
Cuz, you know, us Southerners ain't never seen a colored we didn't want hung, right?
I see the moral short bus crowd is still at the driver's wheel on your side of things.
As to the rest: Not in any measure close to what the social changes that made those laws possible yielded.
Bull Connor? Lester Maddox? Or maybe you prefer George Wallace?
I know, I know, it's a cherished myth among Donkeys that you lost the South over the franchise for blacks, not for selling your party to the loons of 1968. And I encourage that belief: It means you won't be anywhere near competitive in the region for decades.
When he had the lady reporter in the restroom with him, or when he decided to show off his appendectomy scar?
Or when he went to war with churches for having the unmitigated gall to disagree with him?
Try another patron, neighbor.
It doesn't suddenly become right when it's your guys.
Yes, the Dixiecrats were perpetrators of Jim Crow. That the Democratic party was split on the issue, and that many of the offenders eventually defected to the Republican party in the wake of the civil rights movement and Nixon's Southern Strategy, of course, escapes your notice, but never mind. I'm not even overly concerned about which parties would benefit from the disenfranchisement of racial minorities, but that any would benefit. It is telling that you are the one arguing party allegiance here, while I'm the one arguing against repeating the abuses of members of a previous incarnation of my own party.
Cuz, you know, us Southerners ain't never seen a colored we didn't want hung, right?
That you would lecture a born and bred North Carolinian who has never lived north of the Mason-Dixon line nor west of the Mississipi on bigotry toward the South is pretty rich, Thomas. Spare me such presumptions in the future. You'll only risk further embarrassing yourself.
I see the moral short bus crowd is still at the driver's wheel on your side of things.
When substantive argument fails you, you fall back on insults. What is left to say?
Is wholly representative of your entire argument? That you lack even the common sense to see that the world is ever so slightly different than in 1950? That the Southern Strategy line is the unvarying fallback whine of millions of irritated Democrats? That you can't possibly avoid charging millions of folks for whom Jim Crow is a vocabulary term from a history primer, with a burning desire to re-enact that particular evil? That the culture has changed too much even in the South to make your skittish little nightmares even remotely possible? That it's not an insult if it's true?
I could go on. I won't. We're wasting each other's time. You have a straw man to construct. I have breath to draw.
Well, even though I am a proud Republican from the South, I think the answer is a little more complicated than that.
To your point Thomas, the South was starting to slip from the Democrats prior to '68. In 1964 Goldwater, a non-Southerner, won 52 electoral votes--of those 47 votes came from Southern states (Ala.--10, Ga.--12, La.-10, Miss.--7, S.C.--8). Of course, King's march on Washington occurred in '63, and the murder of three civil rights workers in Miss. in the Summer of '64 (with the resulting attention from the FBI and the media), no doubt led at least some white Southerners to abandon the Democractic party, which, to their mind, was increasingly being led by liberals like Hubert Humphrey, as opposed to conservative Democrats like Sens. Thurmond, Harry Byrd and Richard Russell and Governor Wallace. Moreover, at the time, LBJ was not exactly seen as soft on Communism, so I don't think Southerners had yet come to associate Democrats as doves on national defense.
By '68, after passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Democrats, at least at the Presidential level, were destroyed in the South. Moreover, Nixon and the Republicans were not necessarily the direct beneficiaries of that change. George Wallace received 46 electoral votes that year, all of which came from Southern states (Miss.-7, La.-10, Ga.-12, Ala.-10, Ark.-6 and NC-1). So to say Southerners left the Democrats primarily over issues other than race strikes me as a bit simplistic, particularly given that the immediate political beneficiary of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was Wallace, whose appeal was primarly based on racial fear.
Though, in fairness, I certainly think the events at the Chicago convention and the Democratic ticket, consisting of the liberal Northerners Humphrey and Muskie, did not help the Democratic cause in the South.
Thomas, I would agree with your point if you are talking about the Republican party of today in the South. Without the basis of looking at polling data, I suspect white Southerners now vote Republican at the Presidential level primarily because of issues such as national defense, crime, taxation and family values. Race, at least in my perception, is no longer "the" issue in the South.
That I don't doubt that some folks left the Donkeys because of the civil rights movement. No issue there.
My problem is with "Southern Strategy" as a shorthand for Republicans' current domination of the South. Race doesn't really enter it. Guns. Honor culture. Family values. Abortion. The perception (with no small amount of truth) that Democrats can't be trusted in wars (and the South will always be all about wars) and to a lesser extent with crime and criminals.
My parents were Southern Reagan Democrats. They voted for him, and almost every Republican thereafter, because of abortion. That's it. Beginning and end. To impute racial animus to them and those like them is just a stupid rhetorical trick that makes the speaker feel better about himself, and charmingly keeps him from ever being competitive in the region.
In looking at the electoral data for the '68 race I learned that Humphrey/Muskie won Texas in '68? Now thats wierd. I guess it must have been some lingering effect from the LBJ presidency, which is even more ironic given LBJ's disdain for Humphrey.
My Dad was a Reagan Democrat from Louisiana and a former Army captain. With good reason, he did not trust the Democrats at all on national security issues.
You know, I find it interesting that the South, which is the only region of the country which ever sought to leave the Union, is probably one of the most patriotic parts of the country today.
Also, relative to your comments about LBJ, while I think the guy was a scumbag (though a very politically skilled scumbag), he probably did the South the greatest favor since Lincoln (and I mean that sincerely). By pushing through the Voting Rights Act, LBJ was able to start a process that has largely led to race being a much less defining issue in the South. That is a good thing for all Americans.
Kerry got snookered. The story about "Democrats vote on Wednesday?"
Check this out: The Onion
You've solved it! Thanks for the investigating on this one. Anytime one can cite the Onion or the Daily Show in this forum, it's time well spent! Even the obligatory references are great, but this one was actually pertinent! Nice job!
It goes without saying. I think there was intimidation and misinformation in Ohio and other places. It's not being a sore loser, I think it's a stretch to say that about Kerry. Granted he should have said something a lot earlier especially after his and Edwards retoric about making sure all the votes are counted. They gave up way too early even though there was plenty of evidence of irregularities.
I think 90% of this stuff is him talking to himself, trying to justify how it happened that he, John Effing Kerry, did not get something he wanted.
This is a guy who has a very high opinion of himself. His self-image does not accommodate losing. So if he lost, there must be some reason other than the other guy getting more votes. It had to have been a trick. John Kerry does not fall down. John Kerry does not lose.