Month: February 2008

The conversation over Democratic superdelegates goes on at Blue Oregon, and one of the crazies — who’s apparently a part of the local party apparatus — is doing his usual tin-pot dictator rant about how “everything iz good for the partei.” He says everyone who disagrees with him must think parliamentary democracies are not really democracies, and when I point out that the superdelegates — the ones who can make their own decision at the convention — are 60% male, meaning that unpledged men have a 20% advantage over unpledged women at the convention, he throws another fit.

Posted by: Steve Maurer | Feb 11, 2008 4:36:52 PM

OK, so in addition to believing most of Western Europe and Japan to be non-democratic, darrelplant is now saying he hates Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer for being white.

Because they must be all secretly members of the KKK or something; they’ve got this white dude mojo going on.

So obviously they’re going to vote for the white dude in this year’s nomination process.

This earlier comment was pretty funny, too.

Hunting jacket and blue dress

Shot in the face

By whom and with what?

Exxon says it’s owed

Three quarter billion

Sixteen times that frozen

A little follow-up on the 1972 Democratic Credentials Committee battle over California’s delegates from a contempory source, Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time, pages 218 and 218 from the section titled “Later in June [1972]”:

Any political party that can’t cough up anything better than a treacherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don’t hardly make ’em like Hubert any more—but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.

Castrated? Jesus! Is nothing sacred? Four years ago Hubert Humphrey ran for President of the United States on the Democratic ticket—and he almost won.

It was a very narrow escape. I voted for Dick Gregory in ’68, and if somehow Humphrey manages to slither onto the ticket again this year I will vote for Richard Nixon.

But Humphrey will not be on the ticket this year—at least not on the Democratic ticket. He may end up running with Nixon, but the odds are against him there, too. Not even Nixon could stoop to Hubert’s level.

So what will Humphrey do with himself this year? Is there no room at the top for a totally dishonest person? A United States Senator? A loyal Party man?

Well . . . as much as I hate to get away from objective journalism, even briefly, there is no other wayway to explain what that treacherous bastard appears to be cranking himself up for this time around, except by slipping momentarily into the realm of speculation.

But first, a few realities: (1) George McGovern is so close to a first-ballot nomination in Miami that everybody except Hubert Humphrey, Gene McCarthy, Shirley Chisholm, and Ed Muskie seems ready to accept it as a foregone conclusion . . . (2) The national Democratic Party is no longer controlled by the Old Guard, Boss-style hacks like George Meany and mayor Daley—or even by the Old Guard liberal-manque types like Larry O’Brien, who thought they had things firmly under control as recently as six months ago . . . (3) McGovern has made it painfully clear that he wants more than just the nomination; he has every intention of tearing the Democratic Party completely apart and re-building it according to his own blueprint . . . (4) If McGovern beats Nixon in November he will be in a position to do anything he wants either to or with the party structure . . . (5) But if McGovern loses in November, control of the Democratic party will instantly revert to the Ole Boys, and McGovern himself will be labeled “another Goldwater” and stripped of any power in the party.

The pattern is already there, from 1964, when the Nixon/Mitchell brain-trust—already laying plans for 1968—sat back and let the GOP machinery fall into the hands of the Birchers and the right-wing crazies for a few months . . . and when Goldwater got stomped, the Nixon/Mitchell crowd moved in and took over the party with no argument from anybody . . . and four years later Nixon moved into the White House.

There have already been a few rumblings and muted threats along these lines from the Daly/Meany faction. Daley has privately threatened to dump Illinois to Nixon in November if McGovern persists in challenging Daley’s eighty-five man slave delegation to the convention in Miami . . . and Meany is prone to muttering out loud from time to time that maybe Organized labor would be better off in the long run by enduring another four years under Nixon, rather than running the risk of whatever radical madness he fears McGovern might bring down on him.

The only other person who has said anything about taking a dive for Nixon in November is Hubert Humphrey, who has already threatened in public—at the party’s Credentials Committee hearings in Washington last week—to let his friend Joe Alioto, the mayor of San Francisco, throw the whole state of California to Nixon unless the party gives Hubert 151 California delegates—on the basis of his losing show of strength in that state’s winner-take-all primary.

Hubert understood all along that California was all or nothing. He continually referred to it as “The Big One” and “The Super Bowl of the Primaries” . . . but he changed his mind when he lost. One of the finest flashes of TV journalism in many months appeared on the CBS evening news the same day Humphrey formally filed his claim to almost half the California delegation. It was a Walter Cronkite interview with Hubert in California, a week or so prior to election day. Cronkite asked him if he had any objection to the winner-take-all aspect of the California primary, and Humphrey replied that he thought it was absolutely wonderful.

“So even if you lose out here—if you lose all 271 delegates—you wouldn’t challenge the winner-take-all rule?” Cronkite asked.

“Oh, my goodness, no,” Hubert said. “That would make me sort of a spoilsport, wouldn’t it?”

Letter to the Oregonian.

It’s been a long time since 1972, so perhaps David Sarasohn’s memory of
the fight over the Democratic convention delegates from California can be
forgiven for being a bit hazy. He wrote in Sunday’s discussion of
historical clashes over delegate credentialing that “new McGovern rules
suggested” that California’s delegates should be divvied up
proportionately rather than all going to the winner of the most primary
votes.

Reforms after the 1968 convention to the delegate apportionment procedures
overseen by first Sen. George McGovern and then Rep. Donald Fraser did
establish proportional delegate distribution in many state contests. But
the McGovern-Fraser reforms did not require that states change to
proportional systems by 1972. California’s winner-take-all primary had
been approved by the Democratic National Committee more than a year before
the election and all of the candidates knew long before the primary what
was at stake.

Just before the California primary, McGovern’s chief contender, former
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, told Walter Cronkite on CBS that he
wouldn’t challenge the rule if he lost: “That would be changing the rules
after the ball game is over.” Of course, that was when Humphrey thought
that he would win California, which was the only way he could win the
nomination by then. After losing all of California’s delegates to
McGovern, Humphrey did precisely what he had decried, causing weeks of
turmoil over a credentials challenge that might better have been spent,
say, vetting a vice presidential candidate rather than settling for the
late Sen. Thomas Eagleton.

Director John Schlesinger’s movie Marathon Man came out in a different era of film-making. Although it’s certainly an iconic movie, with stars like Dustin Hoffman, Sir Laurence Olivier, and Roy Schieder, it was only nominated for a single Oscar (Best Supporting Actor, for Olivier). It did well at the box office, but Marathon Man‘s not something you see on television as often as its Academy Award co-nominees: Rocky, Carrie, Taxi Driver, All the President’s Men, Network.

I wonder if that’s in part because of the change in the attitude toward torture in America over the past three decades. Maybe we don’t like tobe reminded of just what it is ot the kinds of people who have used it historically. During one of the DVD retrospectives, William Goldman, who wrote the book the movie is based on and the original screenplay, said that at one of the screenings he attended, somone stood up and denounced what they vieweed as gratuitous violence in the movie, which is remarkably tame by today’s standards, although there are moments that should make almost anyone squirm.

The most famous, of course, are two short dental torture scenes, in which Olivier, as Nazi war criminal Christian Szell uses simple dental instruments to torture “Babe” Levy (a grad student in history who was played by the 39-year-old Hoffman). The acts depicted in the scenes involved nothing more than physical restraint and procedures carried out in any dental office in the land, just without the benefit of anesthetic. They were clearly intended to be recognized as torture when Goldman wrote them in the early ’70s. They were clearly recognized as torture when the movie came out in October of 1976. They looked like torture to me again when I watched it the other night. But a little nerve pulp drilling certainly wouldn’t qualify as pain equal to organ failure. It wouldn’t even cause the feeling of suffocation and imminent death that waterboarding does. I wonder if Attorney General Michael Mukasey would consider having his own teeth drilled without anaesthetic to be torture.

Weeks of snow and rain

Now sunny in Washington

Who will go caucus?

My last fundraiding call from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee didn’t go so well, what with the woman who was trying to get me to donate yelling at me that my preferance that Democrats cut off the war funding would end up with troops starving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They’ve got my number again, but the caller wasn’t as belligerant this time, just relentless. I told her right off the bat that my donations — apart from specific candidates — were as “off the table” as impeachment and that the spigots (such as they are) were closed to the DCCC until hearings began.

She tried to tell me that they’d just send an envelope for my $150 and that they were doing lots of good stuff, that there were investigations going on, that they’d gotten a minimum wage hike, etc.

In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee put together a study group to ascertain whether there were grounds to impeach President Richard Nixon. It took them less than a month to prepare their report. It’s been more than year since the Democrats took control of the House, and even that step — having a group of people look at and discuss the potential rationale for impeachment — hasn’t been undertaken.