The Get Tough View From The Left

That’s what passes for an off color joke these days? Allow me to fix…

If Hillary gave Obama one of her balls, he’d have two,” Carvilled said. Pause. “And so would she.”

Now THAT’s how you tell an off color joke.

I’m actually pretty happy with that.

support among key moderate Democrats
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Why is it “moderate” to fail to allow tax rates to return to their 1990s levels, in order to add $700 billion to the debt?

Villagers have no real concept of what the moderate word means. You could be a radical hawk on bombing brown people. If you are a democrat, that makes you a “moderate”.

You may want to give the rich a lap dance and cut benefits for the poor and middle class. That again makes you a “D.C.” moderate.

It’s become a non sensical word in village speak. Moderation has nothing to do with it.

Speaking to Newsweek back during the 2008 campaign, in an article about Obama’s relative political toughness compared to Clinton, Carville said: “If she gave him one of her cojones, they’d both have two.”
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“Well, you know, James Carville is well-known for spouting off his mouth without always knowing what he’s talking about,” Obama said on Nightline. “I intend to stay focused on fighting for the American people because what they don’t need is 20 more years of performance art on television. And that’s what James Carville and a lot of those folks are expert at … a lot of talk and not getting things done for the American people.”
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/carville-if-hillary-gave-obama-one-of-her-balls-hed-have-two.php?ref=fpi

Wah. Outwitted by old Carville!

In this context ‘Moderate’ is a synonymn of ‘Unprincipled’

I think Obama needs to get off center, move a little to the left and toughen up a bit, but I am no more impressed with talk of cojones and off color jokes than I am with the TP/Republicans trash talk.

“This criticism, about Obama’s alleged lack of toughness, is a rising theme on the left”
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Seems the left is confusing toughness for clueless. We have a Community Organizer which at its core is a job to go in and raise a ruckus then walk away. As a Senator he voted present. As a Presidential Candidate he was given a pass on his radical past and extreme political leanings. The MSM were cheerleaders. It is not he is not communicating, it is not he isn’t tough, it is not he is a moderate. It is he is an extremist and the country is not. Despite the daily rantings about conservatives and Tea Party the country voted for them and against Obama and his re-distribution agenda. All the rest is liberal delusions

Michael Scherer:
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Wait a second…regardless of what he says (stopped clock telling time twice a day, and all that), you’re not suggesting that James Carville is in any way representative or indicative of the left, are you?
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That would be a sick joke…

“…not a refudiation of liberalism…”
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FTFY

FTW

Hillary is a hermaphrodite? That explains alot. Bill’s behavior, the voice…
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Their best idea is class warfare. Create envy, jealousy, division, and hate, that’s the Democrats alright.

It’s so true that Obama is an extremist.
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He’s an extreme centrist.
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I wish the guy and his Administration were more moderate, but they’re obviously not.
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Centrist ideology apparently rules the White House in an almost fanatical manner.

As usual, Carville shows that he thinks with his gonads.

“Key Moderate Democrats” refers to the minimum number of Democrats needed to “defect” so that they can extend the tax cuts (which is what they really want to do) while still able to blame the Republicans for it.

Scherer,

You realize that there is another view from the left that’s in ascent, that it has nothing to do with balls or backbone and everything to do with ideology. That many of us don’t condemn him for spinelessness b/c, well, that’d be ridiculous. He’s been spectacularly successful … at advancing neoliberal policy.

Sadly, this view (knowing the enemy within) is hardly unanimous on the left. Too many are blinded by tribalism to acknowledge that their party leadership is stone-cold complicit with the oligarchy.

In either event, balls or simply mistaken policy beliefs, he’s going to have a tremendously difficult time inspiring either camp to come out in two years for another round of “yes we can.”

stuart: That was my initial reaction. This is the man who stood beside his wife, on CNN, Mary Matlin, crying that the government wasn’t doing enough about the oil spill. He should have turned to his wife and asked how her ex-boss Cheney enabled the oil companies to cause the crisis. This is not a liberal I recognize.
It is the usual Village incest and opportunism. There is no real belief system.

Sorry SZ but that’s crap. Just because he can’t get it passed doesn’t mean the extreme agenda is not his goal. There are Freudian slips since the campaign through now where he wants to control industry, people’s lives and distribution of money.
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There is nothing centrist about it. What that may do however is just show how extreme the progressive left is, if that is the opinion of Obama.

But did he get the Obama administration to fudge the report on the oil spill?

James Carville is a sorry waste of space. If Mary Matalin gave him one of her balls, he’d have one.

For starters, the problem with Obama isn’t that he lacks balls. He is perfectly willing to lay the smack down on “the Professional Left” and arm-twist Dennis Kucinich.

Obama just won’t take that attitude with Wall Street bankers or Joe Lieberman. That’s because he LIKES Wall Street CEOs and corporatist Senators.

But Carville would have us believe that Hillary would be different. Even though Hillary had Mark Penn run her campaign, defended lobbyists to the liberal base, and surrounded herself with DLCers during the primaries.

“Just because he can’t get it passed doesn’t mean the extreme agenda is not his goal.”
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Right, I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.
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I’m trying to say that he does have an extreme agenda, especially some of the more radical ideologues in his Administration, it’s just that it’s different from either yours (right) or mine (left).
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It’s an extreme, ideologically centrist agenda.
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You’re doing what the reporters do, you’re conflating “moderate” with “centrist,” when those two terms describe very different ideas.
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There’s nothing “moderate” about what the DLC wants to do to the country, even though they are centrists, and have completely different goals than movement conservatives and movement liberals.
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That’s the point. It’s extreme centrism.
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You think it’s extreme (“There’s a government mandate!“), people on my side think it’s extreme (“…to buy private insurance from virtual monopolies!“), and it is extreme.
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It’s just not recognizably right or left, because it isn’t either of those.
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It’s ideological centrism.

There are Freudian slips since the campaign through now where he wants to control
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It’s never about actual policy proposals and results with the GOP/Tea Party. It never gets any deeper than resentment and psychological projection.

FTW.

Needs a pair to do what, follow the same failing centrist policies the Clinton’s have always represented? I think the country has had it’s fill of those, which is why they have had it with Obama because those are the same policies he follows, contrary to all the propaganda telling us he is a Leftist.

“You think it’s extreme (“There’s a government mandate!”), people on my side think it’s extreme (“…to buy private insurance from virtual monopolies!”), and it is extreme.”
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Sorry SZ but forcing people to buy something they don’t want is not extreme centrism it is plain extreme or (let’s not argue of technical definition) socialist.
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How do you call buying private insurance a monopoly but wanting a government take over option (that’s what single payer is) not a monopoly. Especially when you mandate purchase, control prices and tax you at all ends. That is the definition of extreme and not centrist and those who believe otherwise are a definite minority.
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“It never gets any deeper than resentment and psychological projection.”
. It does you just reject it out of hand and then say they offer nothing. Same whine we heard during HC, same whine with Ryan’s budget proposal.

That’s funny the Individual mandate wasn’t socialist when it was being put forward as the Republican alternative to Hillarycare.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/23/90948/that-health-mandate-gop-is-suing.html
You may think you can use whatever labels you want but some of us are old enough to remember that your full of it when you do so.

I also remember when seat-belt laws were considered a horrible encroachment on individual freedom as well.

Child labor laws, Medicare, women’s suffrage, an income tax, the FDA, Social Security, citizenship for Chinese people, school integration, laws against pollution– all of these were imagined by conservatives to bring about America’s destruction. http://www.tnr.com/article/womens-suffrage-and-other-visions-right-wing-apocalypse?page=0,1
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“[The Act represents] a step in the direction of Communism, bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism.”
—The National Association of Manufacturers, in 1938, condemning a national minimum wage and guaranteed overtime pay
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The new wrinkle, of right wingers calling things “socialism” today that one’s own party has been proposing for nearly two decades, shows that there are no policy beliefs behind the name-calling, just a desire to lash out at perceived enemies.

The female Democrat has male anatomy and the male Democrat lacks said anatomy.
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Gosh I wonder if Carville’s line will end up in MoDo’s column.

Here’s a frightening thought: Obama’s extreme liberal leftist label is accurate. When viewed from the TPRepublican/Fox corner. The scary part is that the right wing believes the lie. And all while they question a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with Russia. What next? An overwhelming resolution, joined by the centrist Democrats, that non-proliferation is not in our best interests? The guerilla wars are for wimps, let’s step it up a notch.

The problem is really not that Obama doesn’t have balls of his own, it’s that he’s never learned to bust the balls of others. The guy’s a conciliator, always has been.

Villagers think moderate is halfway between what the Democrat wants and what the Republican wants, no matter how insane one side might get.
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If a Democrat, a Republican and a Broder-like Villager all sat down for dinner, and the Democrat suggested they order a pizza and the Republican suggested they eat broken glass and anthrax, the Villager would recommend a moderate position of a pizza topped with glass and anthrax.

If a sick, psycho-sexual pseudo-analysis can be drawn from any political event or phenomenon, that perverted psychotic will fantasize it into print.
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As has been said many times, Maureen Dowd is a deeply disturbed, frustrated, amateur fetish sex worker:

File under: Another Modo “Beautiful Agony” column.
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Reading Maureen Dowd’s piece in the NYT, “Shake, Rattle and Roll”, shed absolutely no new light on the subjects it alleged itself to be about: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guiliani.
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None.
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But that clearly wasn’t the point. Because what it did accomplish, very effectively, was to let Ms. Dowd peel herself down to her taxi shoes and nipple clamps and walk giddily around the block in front of a whole bunch of people.
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Stripped of what passed for its context, here is the just the vocabulary she used in her column; just the subtext, staked out spread-eagle for your prying eyes.

dominatrix
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disciplining
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upstart
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flick the whip
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unapproachable
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voice, gaze and body language
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punishing
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brought to heel
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mesmerizing display,
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iced them.
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responds
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belittling
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strong woman
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keep him in line
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master
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the art of (the) loving
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refused to meet his eyes
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she owned him
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tortured
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brazenly
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cut
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dragged
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control freak
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letting her take control.
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all the vulnerable places
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Without ever uttering her name
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laced
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spank

Now it is a little hard to suss out whether or not Ms. Dowd is trolling for a new lover or telegraphing her erotic shopping list her to an existing one, but from her perch atop the NYT she is without doubt doing one or the other.
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And while I have my very strong impression of which side of the stockade she wants to be on, whether she likes to be the one on her knees and trembling, or the one circling slowly and whispering is still a trifle ambiguous.
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What is not difficult to figure out — regardless of which end of the leash she yearns for — is that Ms. Dowd very much likes the idea of being put through her paces in front of a crowd.
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Very, very much likes the idea.
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And while I respect all of consensual, adult Roads of Excess that lead to the Palace of Naughty, Bad Fun, I really do wish Ms. Dowd would quit twisting reality, bending the politics of people she clearly despises over a barrel, and then flogging it to a pulp just to suit her barely sublimated need for a particular brand of gratification.
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Write mediocre erotica, Ms. Dowd, or write about politics.
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Or write both.
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But as thrilling as it may make you feel down in the ol’ Dowd Fun Area, please quit using your column to badly trick out one and pretend it’s the other.

It’s incomprehensible that Maureen Dowd’s editors pay her money for her to have her staff produce these sorts of Voice escort ads.

Great, I have always loved James Carville’s sense of humor. I would like to add that not only one come from Secretary of State Clinton, President Bill Clinton should donate one also so bamawama could have a set. The White House is enraged? Why? Has he not enraged us Democrats and the American public? By the way I think Sarah Palin should donate one of hers also-what I’ve seen of bamawama he will loose those too. From one Cajun to another, Carville you are the best!

Before you wax poetic about Carville, remember that it was his hero, Bill Clinton, who, because he couldn’t keep his pants zipped and his gonadal tendencies under control, gave us George W. Bush for eight years. Carville and the Clintons are a whole chapter in the book about the decline of American politics.
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Obama, on the other hand, is a president we can be proud of, for his private conduct and for his public conduct of the presidency and its achievements under his leadership.

“…remember that it was his hero, Bill Clinton, who, because he couldn’t keep his pants zipped and his gonadal tendencies under control, gave us George W. Bush for eight years.”
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Actually it was the Republicans of the Supreme Court who gave us George W. Bush, after we chose Al Gore by half a million votes. It was also Republicans who insisted on parading a stained blue dress around for partisan political gain. BTW, ever kept your “pants zipped and your gonadal tendencies under control” for eight years straight?

SZ-nice!
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That is all.

Why is it that the beltway bubbleheads always say that democrats need to move to the middle but, not the republicans.
They want the democrats to try to be more republican and think it perfectly fine for republicans to go far to the right (so far they are falling off the cliff)
That’s your ‘liberal’ media. They want everyone to go more to the right. More conservative.
They always blame the democrats for not being bipartisan enough and never, ever, fault the republicans damaging obstruction.
I will not be surprised to see the media excuse the right while managing to blame the democrats and especially Obama for Jon Kyle’s dangerous games over the Start treaty.
They won’t tell the public about how dangerous this is and that the republicans are playing inexcusable games.

Carville is way off base with his comments. Do I detect a bit of racism from this Southerner?

I don’t totally disagree with Green, though the politics were always more complicated than “get tough”, and they’re that much more complicated now.

That said, I’d love it if, when Carville goes off on one of his pro-Clinton rants, if someone would ask him for some evidence of Hillary Rodham AUMF Lieberman Clinton’s alleged “balls” being used to fight Republicans. I know she, and her husband, and Carville were enraged when Obama had the temerity to run a better primary campaign, thereby denying her the opportunity to lose to McCain-notPalin. Never saw any of them bring that much anger and energy to the fight against Bush.

That’s a disgusting smear.

anyone ever seen or read anything about Obama sticking to or upholding his principles? i just read saw this link in politico . it’s got this weird feeling about it.
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im sure he won’t compromise on extremely egregious pinciples or anything. but i just never know what to expect. i mean the tax cuts used to be something where you “knew” what to expect from him, until the republicans wanted something else…
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as far as carville is concerned, the dude is a dlc’er. these guys (democrats talking heads) make their money finding a way to disagree with their party leader, and do it as loud and nasty as possible. raises their profile. makes them look moderate while they undermine their own party. how hillary would have more principles than obama is just beyond me.

“class warfare”

There it is. You throw it in about every three days, whether it’s relevant or not.

You can check it off on your Glenn Beck calendar now.

Good to know that you are obsessed Herby.