Tag Archives: Twitter

#TeaParty Patriot Founder: “Why do the politicians and media figures want us to hate each other?”

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Mark Meckler, one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots, spoke to a crowd of leftists at Seattle’s Citizen University conference recently (hat tip to Upworthy), and what he said resonates in a way with what I was arguing in my debate  with partisan Democrat Milt Shook yesterday on Twitter:

Meckler’s answer to the question above, if you haven’t watched this brief video, is that it profits politicians and others at the center of the DC power structure to maintain the false divide between left and right: the strategy is called Divide and Conquer. I’m thrilled to hear that Meckler is apparently refusing to play along. Imagine if all of us who were inspired by the occupy movement and all of those who were fired up by the Tea Party came to the same conclusion: our enemies are not among the people. Our enemies are the ones who think we owe them votes and viewership, who manufacture our opinions and sell them retail as the stuff of our national politics.

Here’s hoping this is another sign of a new phase of revolution, one that will enable us to take  back the democracy and make it work for people again.

Tortured Argument from a Straight Talker: On Democrats, Progressives and Centrists

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I’m in the middle (or hopefully, at the end) of a much more involved debate than I was expecting on Twitter with a fellow named Milt Shook, who operates a blog called, colorfully enough, Please…Cut the Crap. It’s on a topic that is bound to get a reaction from me: the question of whether progressives harm Democrats’ chances with centrists and other purported persuadables by criticizing the party’s standard bearers. He puts his case in a nutshell in the last graph of an article he calls “Stop Complaining About Dems. In 2014, Voters Will Still Only Have 2 Choices: Them or Disaster“:

Voters have two choices every November, and these days, the choice is between competence and disaster. When you trash “the Democrats” mercilessly, the Republicans gain. And if you don’t think we lose when Republicans gain, then you haven’t been paying attention. And we cannot allow 2014 to become just like 2010. We really can’t afford it.

Shook’s central point, it seems to me, is that the system may be severely flawed, but it’s the only one we have, therefore, progressives need to make peace with that and work with the one of only two (face it) parties most closely resembling (vaguely) a progressive one. Here’s how he puts it himself a the beginning of this post:

I know many of the people who read this blog would love to see a “third party” pop up. Unfortunately, our system is built in such a way that all a third party does is weaken one of the other two. This is why the progressive movement keeps failing; we keep hoping for things that can’t happen, and we look down on those things that can happen.

It’s important for everyone to realize that elections are the most important element in a democratic republic. They are the linchpin for everything. Marching and occupying is not, in itself, an expression of democracy. If such activism is not followed by effective campaign strategy that puts the best available people in office every single time, then it’s pretty much worthless.

That phrase is key. The BEST AVAILABLE candidate. In a democracy as diverse as ours, the best available candidate will almost never be far left, unless he or she represents a full-on left district. Sorry.

We might call Shook a “good-enough” progressive (since he identifies himself as a progressive and not a moderate–we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt). He sees the same rickety representative democracy we all see, the same crappy candidates, the same ineffectual institutions; but unlike his fellow lefties, he knows there’s no use breathing even a word of complaint against any of it (except the part to the left of him, perhaps). You might as well complain against the weather or our impending deaths. It’s written before we’re here. It’ll be here after we go. Roll with it, Henry.

It seems reasonable to ask Shook why he bothers to complain about progressives complaining about Democrats. Hasn’t that been going on (in some form or other) since the dawn of American political time as well? I think our friend Shook is concerned that we’re due for a repeat of 2010, which, I’ve just had confirmed by him on Twitter, he believes was “100%” the  fault of progressives rather than of any given Democrat:

I was a progressive working for a Dem in GOP district. I blame progs 100% for 2010.— Milt Shook (@MiltShook) April 16, 2013

Continue reading →

Underdog Democratic Opponent to Entrenched CA Reactionary Responds to Homophobia Charge

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David Secor, who is running as a Democrat in California’s 50th Congressional District based in San Diego against Republican stalwart Duncan Hunter, has replied at length to my previous post. I’ve decided to highlight it as a blog post unto itself rather than hope it will be read in the comments section. I recommend reading the previous post  first to get a sense of what exactly the candidate is responding to.  I won’t comment on Secor’s response here but will, rather, yield the floor to him and respond later.

Before I turn the blog over to Secor, I want to thank him for taking the time to explain himself. I also want to say a word about why I think this dialogue is important. This conflict interests me because it points to some of the less visible strains running through progressive discourse in the US. Here are two “opponents” (I refer to Secor and Mike Flynn) who inhabit more common ground than this personal antagonism between them would suggest, notably on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) that Secor refers to here. But beyond the personal disagreement is a political one, over the notion that the system as it stands is capable of change or whether a new counter-system is required to effect real, meaningful change.  This is a conflict that has raged on the left for a long time–and on the right, as well–but only recently has it come to be a vital, relevant debate beyond the merely academic.

So thank you, again,  to David Secor for his contribution to this dialogue. It follows in full after the jump: Continue reading →

Homophobia in CA District 50

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I’m shocked and a little shaken by something going on in a Congressional district far, far away from my own, here on on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t decided a couple of weeks ago to follow @MikeFlynn14. I don’t remember why I chose to follow Mike, or how our paths crossed, but it was clear to me his politics were sympatico to mine, in the #occupyWallStreet domain of the spectrum. A couple of nights ago, this Tweet from Mike caught my eye:

That certainly looked like a slur to me from this David Secor, whoever he was. I clicked through to Secor’s Twitter page expecting to find a Tea Party member and was surprised to find a Congressional candidate instead. For some reason, Secor doesn’t make his party affiliation terribly clear in his self-description (“House Candidate CA D-50.” You can easily miss the D there, as I did) but the politics he promotes there (“End Gridlock, Xtremist Control. GetMoneyOut! I take NO $ over $100! JOBS, ProtectRights4ALL,Women+,Vets+,PubEd+,Build USA RTs a +”) were confusingly left of center for someone who seemed to have just sent a homophobic taunt over Twitter.

I tweeted to Secor:

@davidsecor2012 @mikeflynn14 You’re really running for Congress? From CA? With an attitude [like] that? So you even have a chance?

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Blasphemy, Islam and Free Speech: A Twittersation

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This afternoon, I had a very interesting conversation with Shabbir R Hassanally on Twitter about events of the last week in Libya and Egypt.

This raging mess in American relations with the Islamic nations, which has, as Michelle Obama might say, “revealed” more about both candidates’ character and abilities in foreign policy than either may have wished for, was alleged to have begun when a trailer for an intentionally inflammatory anti-Islamic film called “Innocence of the Muslims” made in California in July was translated into Arabic and posted on YoutTube. Thus, it became known to Egyptian Islamists who consequently rioted at the American embassy, starting a chain reaction of anti-American protests around the Middle East and beyond. According to the New York Times, the fatal attack on Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Benghazi was the premeditated work of a Libyan paramilitary group with links to al-Qaeda that took advantage of the chaos over the riots against the film to execute a planned attack in retaliation for the drone-strike killing of a Libyan-born Qaeda official.

Huffington Post reports that the auteur behind the offensive film is one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Egyptian-born Coptic Christian with a background that includes bank fraud and possibly meth manufacturing among  other enterprises. Though the story is weird and complicated, it seems Nakoula, in cahoots with a group of radical right-wing Christian Islamophobes, hired a bunch of actors to shoot a script they were told was about a fictional character. After the cheapie was shot, Nakoula dubbed in the offending dialogue denigrating Mohammed as a clueless sex maniac, pedophile and with various other Nakoula-like interests. When the story broke on the afternoon of September 11, Nakoula’s identity was not yet known. He was hiding behind the pseudonym “Sam Bacile” and claiming to be an Israeli-born American who was working with contributions from a hundred Israelis. In the Muslim world, word spread quickly that Israel and the US had colluded on the film, that it reflected not just the opinions of a nutty director but official US policy, as dictated to it by Zionist Israel. Why Nakoula tried to implicate Israel in his offense is not known (as far as I know). (Was he trying to give the Apocalypse a little boost? If so, maybe he succeeded better than he expected.) Continue reading →