Kucinich: Because Fervent Hatred of Anyone Not Reviled By Mainstream Democrats is its Own Rationale

There are some people who want the Democratic Party to be more progressive. This is generally a good thing. These are the people who, for example, rather quickly ensured that the DNC chieftain race quickly coalesced around two staunchly progressive candidates in Tom Perez and Keith Ellison.

There are some people who want the Democratic Party to simply lash out in a blind fury against "the establishment". These are the people who, for example, went far beyond having a preference between Perez and Ellison and crossed into a groundless and seemingly random fervor insisting that Tom Perez was unacceptably right-wing because something-something-most-progressive-Labor-Secretary-in-recent-memory-is-neoliberal, and swore to dynamite the entire Democratic Party if he won (by the way, Democrats just picked up their 37th special election seat-flip since Trump was elected after swinging a Kentucky state House seat 86 points from its 2016 presidential margin).

The people who endorse Dennis Kucinich -- Dennis Kucinich!, shilling for Assad and Putin when he isn't playing the "Trump is speaking to real American outrage" card* -- over Richard Cordray for the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nomination are definitively in the latter category.

As always, the question isn't whether Cordray is perfect (though one expects the Jill Stein bait-and-switch -- laboring to make a mountain out of a molehill's worth of liberal heresy when the candidate is "establishment" while resolutely ignoring all the ways the "insurgent" is ideologically terrible in her own right -- is coming). But there's very little reason why a Elizabeth Warren-esque former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should be so unacceptable as to provoke a turn to a cartoon character like Kucinich (in this way, it's far worse than Perez/Ellison, as at least there the alternative candidate was perfectly fine in his own right). The motive rather seems to be just an undirected form of contrariness towards anyone who establishment Democrats are content with -- if they like him, then he must be unacceptable for ... reasons (probably something to do with neoliberalism). But that's not actually a way of building a progressive movement.

Loomis is too generous in saying it's a problem of progressives not being "smart" (though it is profoundly stupid). Independent of it being bad tactics, it's also bad on the level of ideals. It's difficult to know what to do with that sort of blind self-destructiveness (again, shades of the Stein voters who answered the question "why should I vote for the lesser of two evils" by electing to vote for the middle of three). The best thing that can be said about it is that so far, it hasn't actually had that much influence on actual Democratic voting patterns (which is more than can be said about the Republican Party, which has been entirely consumed by a pure id of reactionary anti-"establishment" ressentiment).

* Researching this post, I rediscovered that Kucinich was one of 12 Democrats to vote against the House resolution of "disapproval" after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) famously exclaimed "you lie!" in the middle of President Obama's State of the Union. So add that to the list.

NCAA and a Roundup of Other Things

I love the NCAA tournament. And I particularly love the first few rounds, with a billion games going on at once and buzzer beaters and upsets by nobody-seeds you couldn't find on a map. And then there's the fun of making fun of my Georgetown alumni. Unfortunately, this year I took pity on her and the Hoyas going to the Final Four. That turned out great -- teach me to be nice to Liz.

* * *

A retired US general has blamed the Srebrenica massacre on Holland allowing gays in the military. That's because this general is a prejudiced dick, with views that have no basis in fact, history, or logic.

Bibi Netanyahu has apparently listed off concessions Israel is ready to make after its serious diplomatic faux-pas that has strained US-Israeli (not to mention Israeli-Palestinian) relations. Essentially, it would freeze, though not cancel, the offending housing announcement, as well as release more Palestinian prisoners and reduce checkpoints in the West Bank -- even possibly expand the amount of West Bank territory under PA control.

Jon Chait quite properly eviscerates Juan Cole's attack on "people like Jeffrey Goldberg", and the general presumption of ascribing to any remotely pro-Israel figure sets of views that they don't hold. This is yet another example of the maddening vagueness that often typifies discussions about who believes what regarding Israel and Palestine.

It's a shame we don't do more racial profiling -- we might have been even less likely to catch this guy.

Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN) becomes the second "no-to-yes" switch on the health care vote (after Dennis Kucinich).

Don't blog on controversial topics you know absolutely nothing about, unless you're indifferent to spreading malicious and false insinuations.

Guess Who's Back?

With John Edwards' withdrawal today, progressives today ran a serious risk of having to vote for a non-White male. Fortunately, Ralph Nader appears ready to step in and save us from that eventuality. Nader specifically cited the absence of two other White men formerly in the race -- Edwards and pixie-stick Dennis Kucinich -- as motivating his exploration of yet another bid.