Today's Daily Schadenfreude: Peggy Noonan

Former Reagan speechwriter and ongoing Reagan casket humper wanna-be* Peggy Noonan -- I'm pointing and laughing at you today ... I mean, I like pointing and laughing at you all the time, but today you get special recognition as I'm reminded of a typically slobbering, grotesque column you wrote in the Wall Street Journal following the 2004 election. You remember it, don't you, Nooners? It's the one where you said:

The Democrats have lost their leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle. I do not know what the Democratic Party spent, in toto, on the 2004 election, but what they seem to have gotten for it is Barack Obama. Let us savor.

An old, rancid pile of dog vomit is more desirable than you, Peggy, and twice as intelligent.

I'm not going to "savor" anything that you suggested in that column, Peggy -- not your allegation that the "nonelites of Old Europe" celebrated Drunky McStagger's election; not your suggestion that people who worked hard for Kerry (as I did) were paid volunteers like the "Hessians of King George III's army;" and especially not your drool-covered adulation of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Gag.

No, instead, I'm going to savor the fact that what, according to you, the Democratic Party spent in 2004 will be bringing us our next president. That's right, Peggy -- President Barack Obama. I hate to mix metaphors regarding stupid wingnut pundits, but: Suck. On. That.

Oh, and Peggy? Suck on this, too: today's Blast Off! Daily Schadenfreude is for you!

(h/t res ipsa loquitur)

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* Seriously. Read just about anything Noonan's written, especially about Reagan. It's disgusting. If it weren't for the fact that Nancy Reagan was so busy humping her late husband's casket at his funeral, Nooners would have been all over it.

Huggy Bear's past

Well, as long as folks are taking a look back at some noteworthy history of Huggy Bear (like when he joked about rape? Good times), I thought I'd join in the fun.

For example, here's a look back at Huggy in 2000 and 2004 -- the difference is a big reason why I maintain that the man has absolutely no integrity whatsoever.

Senator John McCain, February 15, 2000 (Quick Time movie), to then Governor George Bush, after describing attacks against his service in Vietnam:

You should be ashamed.

From an interview with Senator John McCain, June 2000:

Dadmag: During your campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination Bridget became something of an issue in South Carolina didn't she?

McCain: Yeah. There were some pretty vile and hurtful things said during the South Carolina primary. It's a really nasty side of politics. We tried to ignore it and I think we shielded her from it. It's just unfortunate that that sort of thing still exists As you know she's Bengali, and very dark skinned. A lot of phone calls were made by people who said we should be very ashamed about her, about the color of her skin. Thousands and thousands of calls from people to voters saying "You know the McCains have a black baby?" I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.

[...]

From a Boston Globe article, June 21, 2004, by Richard H. Davis, McCain's 2000 campaign manager:

Having run Senator John McCain's campaign for president, I can recount a textbook example of a smear made against McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary. We had just swept into the state from New Hampshire, where we had racked up a shocking, 19-point win over the heavily favored George W. Bush. What followed was a primary campaign that would make history for its negativity.

In South Carolina, Bush Republicans were facing an opponent who was popular for his straight talk and Vietnam war record. They knew that if McCain won in South Carolina, he would likely win the nomination. With few substantive differences between Bush and McCain, the campaign was bound to turn personal. The situation was ripe for a smear.

It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster" determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

Some aspects of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied, "Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there aren't any?"

And now the punchline:

Sen. John McCain, August 11, 2004:

On September 14, [George Bush] stood in the rubble of the Twin Towers, and he put his arm around one of the heroes and said the world will hear from us, and they did! ... The world is safer, Iraq is safer and America is safe. President Bush has not wavered. He will not waver. We will not waver. Under his leadership, we will win this war on terror.

Wait a second. Huggy Bear has a brown child? You'd never know it from the news today.

Huggy Bear, you're such a fuckin' hypocrite.



(h/t Atrios)

Is Florida getting bluer?

The answer is a definite ... maybe.

The Palm Beach Post offers some evidence that America's Wang™ indeed may be trending bluer ... but I believe the data might be a bit deceptive.

You can get to the interactive maps here, featuring county-by-county statistics by scrolling over the desired county. You also may click on each map below to go to the interactive one. But I've captured them for you here in a static format for discussion purposes.

First, county-by-county voter registration as of August 2007. Of course, blue counties are majority Democratic, while red counties are majority Republican.

To me, the surprise is the central panhandle and, to a lesser extent, the center of the state. Look at all the blue there! And the raw numbers are even more surprising, with Democrats holding a 2-to-1 majority or more in many of those counties. For example:

Taylor County: 8,770 Dem, 2,695 Rep
Baker County: 8,438 Dem, 3,879 Rep
Liberty County: 3,325 Dem, 370 Rep
Glades County: 3,801 Dem, 1,692 Rep

But what happened in the elections? You undoubtedly remember:



In the actual election results, the only blue counties left in north Florida are Gadsden, Leon, and Jefferson, around Tallahassee -- the home of FSU and FAMU; and Alachua, which contains Gainesville -- the home of UF. And the center of the state? Pretty much all red.

The numbers are rather startling. Let's look at our four counties again:

2000
Taylor: Bush 4,056, Gore 2,649
Baker: Bush 5,610, Gore 2,392
Liberty: Bush 1,317, Gore 1,017
Glades: Bush 1,841, Gore 1,442

2004
Taylor: Bush 5,467, Kerry 3,049
Baker: Bush 7,738, Kerry 2,180
Liberty: Bush 1,927, Kerry 1,070
Glades: Bush 2,443, Kerry 1,718

So, what gives? Democrats have a modest majority in registration, 4.1 million to 3.8 million ... but the Republicans dominate nearly the entire state (save basically for the three large counties of southeast Florida). Ultimately, I think there are three key factors at play here:

First, voter turnout. In both 2000 and 2004, it seems that every Republican voter went to the polls, while many Democrats stayed home. Of course, that's not likely to be the case, but an argument certainly can be made that the Republicans did a far more effective job of GOTV (get out the vote) than did the Democrats. That, quite simply, is an organizational issue that the Florida Democratic Party must address in 2008.

Second, the social conservatism of rural counties. The high Democratic registration of Florida's rural areas is a vestige of history. Most of those residents have lived in those areas for generations, and their parents and grandparents were Democrats in the mold of FDR or LBJ. These are largely agricultural areas, which tended to be controlled by Democrats for much of the last century because Democratic politicians presumably were for the "little man," the family farmer and the small storekeeper, that kind of thing.

However, these are also areas where faith, specifically Christian faith, imbues every town and hamlet along the way. "Family values" resonate here as they do in so many places in the deep South, for indeed, rural Florida is just as "deep South" as any part of Alabama or South Carolina or any other state you'd choose. So while there are a lot of "Democrats," we would recognize them today more as "DLC Democrats" at best, whose tolerance for different religions, different races, and different lifestyles typically is extremely limited. They surely are not "progressive" in any real sense of the word.

Finally, unaffiliated or "other" voters. There are 2.3 million registered voters who are neither Republican nor Democrat, and in this swing state, they hold the balance. Presumably the overwhelming numbers for Bush in 2000 and 2004 in many nominally "blue" counties were helped by an influx of unattached or "undecided" voters, who voted their social mores ahead of their economic well-being and chose the Republicans.

If Florida truly is going to be bluer, the Democrats must address these three key areas. They have to find a way to increase voter turnout, to make progressive stances more palatable to the rural voter, and to attract the unaffiliated voter by emphasizing economic issues and the war, on which we on the Left are clearly in the majority. Certatinly as society becomes more and more tolerant and open-minded, the social issues will be easier for the Democrats to "win." But I believe that is going to be the main front in the battle for 2008 and beyond.

Is Florida really bluer? It depends on your definition. Are there more Democrats? Yes. Are they progressive, modern Democrats? Absolutely not. And that's where we must focus our energies.