Kerry's Quagmire -- WP's Navarrette

[Khephra]

Kerry's Quagmire

By Ruben Navarrette
Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A35


DALLAS -- Every presidential aspirant knows there could come a moment when he must accept the fact that the game is over. For Sen. John Kerry, the man the Democratic establishment considered a shoo-in for the 2004 nomination, that moment might have arrived this week with the release of a poll that finds him trailing the Rev. Al Sharpton.

In a Newsweek survey of registered Democrats and other voters leaning Democratic, Kerry got 6 percent. Sharpton got 7 percent.

Not that it matters. Former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont leads the field with 26 percent.

Let us speak plainly: The last time John Kerry was engaged in this hopeless a mission, he was dressed in fatigues and running around Southeast Asia.

more...................

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31116-2003Dec25.html

[OrAnarch]

1. ouch

poor guy also mortaged his house. As much as I dislike many things he said and did, I feel genuinly bad for him.

[FloridaPat]

2. These senators voted for the war in Iraq figuring it would

help their campaigns. You would have thought the 100:1 letters and emails sent to the senators would have dropped a hint the public didn't want Bush to have the option. Kerry said he did it because he wanted the US to speak with one voice and he believed Bush would be the hornorable person. The Democrats just don't have a clue. Where in the world is their brains? The republicans are destroying this country and most of them do nothing.

[isbister]

13. Voting for war

When did anyone in Congress vote for the Iraq war? I am familiar with the IWR but am unaware of another vote.

[nightperson]

3. Attempted neocon dismissal of Kerry

This writer Navarrette seems to be a fairly raging fan of Mr. Bush, and the article reminds me of something I'd see in the neoconservative "Weekly Standard". Note how he equates "liberating the Iraqi people" with American national security, how he talks about Bush putting a "feel good" end to America's "Vietnam syndrome", etc., and how he presents Bush's oppositon as merely those queasy about "leading nations" "using military force to right wrongs", etc.. The "New York Post" isn't the only "Post" with neocons rhapsodizing about remaking the globe from their sofas.

[jburton]

4. Note about Navarrette

He doesn't write for the Wash Post. He's a syndicated columnist picked up by the Post.

He has actually been employed by the Dallas Morning News for years - note the dateline is Dallas in this column.

The DMN editorial pages are not exactly known for thier progressiveness. We get the occasional Krugman, Dionne or Raspberry column thrown in, but the local columnists suck.

[blm]

5. And yet another Bush loving columnist dumping on Kerry and pushing Dean.

No surprise, Frank Luntz put the word out last spring that Kerry must be stopped so Dean is the nominee.

[polpilot]

6. Pro-war Kerry bet the farm and now the house...bad bet tanked his

chances for keys to Air Force 1.

Dean '04...

[Padraig18]

7. He's not 'pushing' Dean.

He's merely pointing out how Kerry is tanking.

[mitchum]

8. deleted by mitchum (in the spirit of the season)

[Zomby Woof]

9. LOL

You're a nicer guy than I. :D

[UTUSN]

10. NAVARRETTE Is Another Affirmative Action Wingnut

Below is a re-post, from the Primaries forum. This dude is no friend of ours. Although the column is an all-KERRY hit piece, he also takes a swipe at DEAN:

"For those Americans who still are queasy with the United States using military force to right wrongs and save lives, the choice seems to be Howard Dean. For those who understand that this is precisely what history asks of the world's leading nations, there is George W. Bush."

**********
NAVARRETTE's headline writer succeeded in getting me to read the column, "Kerry may be facing the second quagmire of his life," in which he not only disses a distinguished senator and veteran, but also Vietnam vets and the whole Boomer generation.

NAVARRETTE is another one of those Affirmative Action dudes who, like Clarence THOMAS, emerged from their Democratic-sponsored hand-up apparently traumatized and self-hating, therefore committed to lashing out at anything Democratic and favoring every wingnut position.

Ostensibly, the angle that hooked NAVARRETTE is that Hispanics ought to be free agents, not be "owned" by the Democratic Party. The wee problem with this is that the alternative is to "belong" to the wingnuts, who just want Hispanics to be their (literal) yardmen and houseboys. Yep, there's something wrong with Affirmative Action, since those "Liberal" colleges turn pod minds into wingnuts. The suspect mechanism for teaching this supposed "independent thinking" is the devil's advocate gimmick, which tends to make the pod mind think it is very, very smart--smarter than the evidence supports.

In 2002, he was lecturing the Democratic Party on "loyalty" to Victor MORALES, the MORALES who later refused to support the Democratic nominee in the general election. I don't remember his opinion of the other MORALES, the one who openly turned coat and endorsed Governor Goodhair and who is now in the pen, but Dan holds a lesson for "independent" houseboys.

NAVARRETTE is a lesser version, in the bottom tiers, of wingnuts, never to be so big as HANNITY, who also likes to give advice to the Democratic Party--and certainly not in the class of intellect of PAGLIA and BUCKLEY, the masters of the wingnut pretzel trick: Twisting themselves into rhetorical convolutions about wingnut scoundrelism only to emerge ALWAYS on the wingnut side of things, the way BUCKLEY would ALWAYS end up blessing NIXON. In a lesser way, NAVARRETTE pretzels himself only to come down, miraculously, against every traditional position of his home minority group and on the side of Shrub.

In his spewing about KERRY, he plays a lesser, no wit and intellect, Maureen DOWD, and only shows himself as just mean---and LYING ("wife's money" and Shrub "logging time"). He's also insufferably irritating on the subject of the Vietnam experience, managing to lash out at the whole Boomer generation. This dude is on NPR and in the Washington Post as, you know, one of those INDEPENDENT members of a minority group. Once again, as with the AA deal, he manages to parlay Liberal sponsors into tools for his wingnut houseboyism.

NAVARRETTE should get a clue: AA gave him a chance at a better, more groundbreaking career than just to be a shill. But think of the irony---the more he pretends to "independence", the more he is owned.

[UTUSN]

11. Here's a Fair & Balanced (Really) Synopsis of His Harvard Yrs

******QUOTE*****

http://www.digitas.harvard.edu/~perspy/old/issues/1995/sep/stolen.html
.... Examining the effect of affirmative action on how he was seen by himself and others, Navarrette describes the horns of a dilemma: "I always suspected that high-powered minority students were too often motivated not purely by an intellectual thirst for knowledge but instead by a desperate compulsion to disprove their critics." And: "he question of unworthiness endures like a stale odor. You begin to believe old critics, assuming that you have come to this bizarre place not by your own merit but by the grace of a government handout." ....

Navarrette accepted "the implied expectation that I serve as a cultural ambassador to sheltered white people." He is aware that his acquiescence may seem "strange, even degrading"--one would certainly hope that Navarrette could take pride in his culture without seeing himself, condescendingly, as only an exponent of it. ....

...he was grateful to discover RAZA, the organization dedicated to the support of Chicano students at Harvard. ....

Noticing the "rows of light-skinned, middle-class kids, many of whom between them could not put together a phrase in Spanish" at RAZA meetings led him to ask how well RAZA catered to their interests and whether he resembled them more than the "authentic" Mexican Americans that the group prima facie represented. Reflecting on his distance from the culture that Harvard seemed to want him to share, he writes, "The insane irony behind...affirmative action was that the light-skinned, English-proficient grandson who was acceptable to Harvard because he was most American and least Mexican was then oddly expected, upon arrival, to be less American and more Mexican." ....

...his final criticism of affirmative action as practiced today: it does not do too much to help members of disadvantaged groups, but too little. ....

*****UNQUOTE****

[UTUSN]

12. At Least, No PC n/t

[isbister]

14. Re: Kerry's Quagmire

This paragraph:

The futility of this venture hasn't made Kerry any less willing to put his wife's money where his ego is. The Massachusetts Democrat announced last week that he was lending his campaign $850,000 and mortgaging his Beacon Hill home.

...accuses the Senator of violating the campaign finance law by accepting money from his wife above and beyond what is allowed. Should Ruben Navarrette be doing this without any proof?

[isbister]

15. RE:

This person said:

...underestimating of the guy from the Texas Air National Guard who, since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has proved he knows more about leadership and achieving military objectives than many Democrats assumed.

and

...By liberating the Iraqi people and then capturing Saddam Hussein, President Bush has shown himself to be quite capable when it comes to national security. More important, his administration, with its response to terrorists and rogue nations, may finally have put an end to the country's Vietnam syndrome.

Is this a sane person? Who's writing we should... believe or even read?