Imagine if ANY Republican had this in his background and was running for President:
Basically, in the early days — before he was running citywide, let alone nationwide — Kucinich’s political schtick was posing as the champion of the ‘forgotten’ white ethnic voters over against the rising force of black political power. Sort of a great white hope type, or great Slavic hope, if you will.
Would Josh Marshall write this:
People do ‘evolve’ politically — and not just in the euphemistic, wink-wink kind of sense. People really do change. And they change their style of politics too. But usually, for this to work, or be legitimate and believable, the pol in question has to make some sort of public accounting for why circumstances changed or why he or she did.
Given that Kucinich is now making a play for the votes of dyed-in-the-wool liberals, a bit more of such an accounting seems in order.
Would Atrios write this:
I’ll have to learn more to know if he’s attoned for it enough for it to not still matter.
Quit laughing.
Many Kudo’s to Kos for writing this:
I don’t know enough about Kucinich to say one way or another whether he’s made amends for his “youthful indiscretions”, but this kind of past automatically disqualifies a candidate in my book.
Josh, Atrios, -follow Kos’s lead. He is right. There is no room for this, period, although I am sure the Atriettes and the DU fruits will spend a couple of weeks doing the usual tap-dance- “Hey this is only one story,” or “the paper has an agenda,” or “but he’s changed.,” or “but he is so right about the war being wrong.”
*** Update ***
Full disclosure- I should mention that I want Dennis Kucinich in this race to the very end. I think he is great- for Republicans.
*** Update #2 ***
It gets even better. Now the conspiracy twits are out, and the Kucinich story has only come out because the Bush White House wants it to (Josh Marshall, ari Fleischer’s puppet, you know):
Marshall posted another link. The article he links to was very unprofessional, in fact its just awful, and all over the place like someones first draft–basically I thought it was crap.
If Marshall has something else he wants to offer up, I’m sure we will read it. Mean while Richard Cohen trashes Dennis Kucinich like he was a French import.
Why? Because Kucinich use the O word (as in this war is about OIL) on “Meet the Press” whereby Richard Perle called Kucinich a “liar”.
Get that- this is a hack job, because Kucinich was having success in his anti-war crusade. Muahaha.