The "wasted vote" myth

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Ry
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Post by Ry » Mon May 15, 2006 9:03 pm

My local paper suprised me by printing 3 or 4 articles I have written which were highly critical of Bush and the Neocon philosophy. My suprise was because my paper is a Gannett paper.
Hey do you think your paper would print something I wrote on 911? How short does it have to be I know they have word limits.
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ect
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Post by ect » Tue Jun 06, 2006 9:21 am

Neocons in the Democratic Party

[..]

Now, a generation later, as the crusading Republican neoconservatism espoused by Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol and others lies in the smoking rubble of Baghdad, a new generation of Democrats wants to dust off and rehabilitate those traditional Democratic principles, which they believe were hijacked by the Bush administration.

They want, in essence, to return to the beliefs that originally brought the neocons to prominence, the beliefs that motivated old-fashioned Cold War liberals such as Democratic Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson.

Where will all this lead? To an internecine Democratic war, of course. Just as Republicans are being riven by debates between realists and Bush administration idealists, so the Democratic Party is about to witness its own battle.

Just as the old neocons wanted to expel the McGovernites, so the new ones want to rid the party of the Moveon.org types and move it to the right. As Beinart puts it, "whatever its failings, the right at least knows that America's enemies need to be fought."

In "With All Our Might," scholars Larry Diamond and Michael McFaul — both Democrats — outline a comprehensive democracy-promotion program. For example, they imaginatively call for transplanting the 1975 Helsinki accords, which insisted upon human rights monitoring in the former Warsaw Pact nations, to the Middle East. "Freedom," they exhort, "is the fundamental antidote to all forms of tyranny, terror and oppression."

Other Democrats, who call themselves the "Sept. 11 generation," have formed what is known as the Truman National Security Project, whose avowed aim is to revive the "strong security, strong values of the Democratic Party — for Democrats of all ages."

Does this simply sound like Bush-lite? To the right and the left, it probably will, but the main opposition facing the would-be Truman successors will come from the latter. The battle will come from the generation of Democrats who came of age during the 1960s and who were instrumental in finishing off "Cold War liberalism" because of its failures in the jungles of Vietnam.

Vietnam, remember, was a liberal, not a conservative, war, undertaken by warrior intellectuals who were liberal at home but saw falling dominoes everywhere around the world. (The same lack of nuance plagues the Bush administration, which has been trying to depict a global kind of Islamic totalitarianism, when the foe, as in the Cold War, is really more diffuse and less of a monolith than American leaders are prepared to believe.)

The Moveon.org types are hardly prepared to go down without a fight. At the moment, with no end to the imbroglio in Iraq in sight, they — the populist left — are poised for their greatest influence in the party since the McGovern era.

The new Democratic hawks, like the old neoconservatives of the 1970s, represent an insurgency, a direct challenge to the establishment. And if they are to revamp the party, they will have to do a lot more than simply evoke the ghost of Truman and Co.

Still, it is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.
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Lever
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Post by Lever » Tue Jun 06, 2006 10:45 am

Ry,

Let me check with the paper nad see what the longest allowable oped is.

A coupls of mine were a bit wordy but printed anyway. I am more than happy to try to help get you in print here. My local paper almost expects to get articles from me monthly now.

The editor is nice enough to call me at the beginning of the week when they will run my article.

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