Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Today In Both Sides Do It: Matthew Dowd


It just never stops.

15 comments:

Paradoctor said...

"Sure, -my- guy is a killer and a thief, but -your- guy is a serial jaywalker. So both sides do it, and don't come whinging to me, you hypocrite!"

Mr XD said...

Bill Clinton-the last Moderate Republican~

Robt said...

* The problem with Both sidering the shit out of it is that one political party uses the shit as fertilizer.
I report and you decide which side grows salmonella stooges and stays in business.

Long legacy of both sider. The myth created that George Washington said when asked who done it?
"Young George said, "I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree".

So you see, even our founding fathers lied. He never said that. So give the white supremacists the benefit of the doubt. Like they do with Black Lives Matter.

How about asking the Dowd, to "provide actual examples of his own commuting of "both sides do it"?
If both sides do, then Dowd has a side and does it. Unless of course Dowd omits Independent, Give-Me-tarian and the white supremacists, KKK Nazi partys
of bothsiderism.

Does he have some voodoo pin stuck in the head of a doll that resembles him that makes him exempt from the depths of his own deep dark state?

Grung_e_Gene said...

What about the tan suit and the dijon mustard?!??!?!? You thought we forgot! Checkmate Libs!

Cirze said...

Hardly moderate.

Considering the FCC deregulation activities and Glass-Steagall defenestration.

Zak44 said...

At the time, I thought Clinton should have let the impeachment play out to failure, and then resign for the sake of the dignity of the office. What he did was, in the words of Talleyrand, was "worse than a crime; it was a blunder." He was coming to the end of his presidency anyway, and to leave it under those terms would have raised his standard in history more than any accomplishment he had left. Moreover, it would probably given Gore the White House, since it would have robbed Bush of his main message—that he would "restore dignity and honor to the White House, Bill Clinton was fun while it lasted, but his deregulation of banking (which led to the financial collapse in 2008) and his deregulation of telecommunications (which opened the wat for rightwing domination of media) are second only to Vietnam and the Iraq War as two of the worst presidential decisions in American history.

Unknown said...

Still waiting for the first of these complicit shitheads to offer a mea culpa instead of rationalizations and half-assed epiphanies. As for Clinton, giving into those fucking fascists was the worst thing he could possibly have done. Clinton left office with a 60-plus approval rating and assigning Gore's ``loss'' to Clinton is bullshit revisionist history. Colossally so.

Lit3Bolt said...

The Centrist Paean:

"Where oh where is my magical political Presidential wishpuppet who believes everything I do and does everything I want? Why is reality not conforming to my delusions??"

Zak44 said...

I voted for Clinton twice, but I'm at a loss to think of any long-term good he did. Gore ran a terrible campaign, but yeah, I still think that Bill's blowjobs did him in. Plus, if Clinton had stepped down, Gore would have had the advantage of running as an incumbent.

Maybe the best last word on the Bill and Hillary belongs to F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby":

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

nowadaysclancycantevensing said...

Isaac, the deregulation of banking you speak of was sponsored solely by 3 Republicons, Gramm, Leach, and Bliley during a Con dominated Congress in 1999. It is still referred to as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 or The Financial Modernization Act. Yes Clinton signed it but this was a wholly Con sponsored act during a Republicon dominated Congress. Clinton was the fool who signed it but it was the Cons who were and are the originators.

Robt said...

Issac,
That is absolutely no reason to force me into surviving through the machinations Of GW (Sherman) and his dog Mr Vader.

Zak44 said...

The banking deregulation act was, of course, a Republican initiative. So was the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Both were designed to serve corporate, not public, interests. But Clinton had a choice. And he chose...poorly. Don't forget that his strategy in the wake of the Democratic losses in the 1994 midterms, Clinton followed the advice of the execrable Dick Morris and adopted a strategy of "triangulation." In theory, this was supposed to place him in the middle ground between left and right; in practice, it put him the the conservative camp. (If proclaiming that "The era of big government is over" isn't a repudiation of the New Deal, what is?)

And the Clintonites are still at it: today's NY Times features a piece co-written by Clinton advisor Mark Penn and Andrew Stein once again insisting that, for Democrats, the promised land lies in the blessed middle: "The path back to power for the4 Democratic Party today, as it was in the 1990s, is unquestionably to move to the center and reject the siren calls of the left, whose policies and ideas have weakened the party."

I had hoped that the one quantum of solace we could take from the 2016 election was that we could finally close the book on the Clintons and their circle. But it looks like it's not gonna be that easy. I don't know what the path forward is, but we'll never find it by looking backward.

OGIC said...

When assessing politicians, particularly when encountering people who are dissatisfied because of particular mistakes, and yes, Bill Clinton made many, I follow the directive of Pierre Trudeau, whose Liberals were very much far from perfect, but who rightly observed: "don't judge us against the almighty, judge us against the alternative." And the Big Dog, for all that I didn't care for, stood head and shoulders above the alternative.

I always hope that we have better alternatives. But, although I voted for Bernie in the Ohio primary, I remain appalled at the way some of my fellow Democrats and Progressives treated Hillary, and I am apt to put it down to an abiding misogyny.

Stentor said...

Yah Isaac, & if Monica had just swallowed, we wouldn't be in this mess, shoulda, woulda, coulda. Beside, stop assigning blame to Clinton for GOP legislation. Go read up on recent history & quit embarrassing yourself.

Zak44 said...

Stentor—

Thank you for your gratuitous insults. I'll match my knowledge of history (recent and otherwise) with you any day. But I'm not letting Clinton off the hook. Sure, it was Repuglican legislation, but Slick Willy could have vetoed it. He didn't. And that's a historical fact.