This is truly bizarre from Jerome Armstrong (from MyDD from back in the day):
The oomph of the Democratic party in the blogosphere today can be summed up with a cursory glance at posts and comments on Balloon Juice, Little Green Footballs and Booman Tribune. They bend over backwards to justify the party bailing out banks, the nation going deeper into debt with global military expansion, and spying on citizens, yet they’ll nitpick that a libertarian is willing to allow abortion to be a state issue. They are more concerned with attacking truth-tellers like Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, and Edward Snowden than they are keeping anyone accountable or demanding transparency. That’s what they are really good at– justifying why the powerful should stay so and attacking the ones who challenge power. And, if needed, providing a handy social lifestyle issue to keep the division. There’s no energy left. Nothing that inspires people that are pissed off and want change. Just finger-pointing at the other team. It’s become pointless and principle-less tribalism.
I used to think favorably of Jerome, and maybe I’ll just attribute this to exasperation or something or misspeaking during an interview, but he clearly is not reading this website. Every single front pager here has been screaming for the prosecution of the banksters and the ratings agencies, we’ve been screaming about military expansion and the defense budget, and yeah, guess what- we (or at least me and a few others) have been screaming the NSA. The general consensus here is that Sen. Warren is the Messiah.
Others on the website don’t see eye to eye with me on Snowden and Greenwald, but I know I have not been attacking them.
So, Jerome Armstrong, what the fuck are you talking about?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Bitter PUMA has-been sez what?
Baud
Does this thread reach a TBogg unit?
Cassidy
That’s funny. If he actually read this place, he’d realize that three of the front pagers would love nothing more than a purity pony party gangbang from those three.
Thomas
John Cole, stop trolling!
eemom
Hi y’all!!
[waving to everybody on the intertrons]
EmanG
Yeah, that reads like “I need some semi lib blog names to throw around, let’s do a quick search before I slime the movement”. I too expect more from Jerome. Whom I met once and seems a nice fellow…
Redshirt
Dude-bros can’t see the hipsters for the fleece.
David Koch
BWHAHHAHHAHHHHAHHAHAHHAHAHHAHHHAHAHHAHAHAH
Loser racist PUMA says what?
Yatsuno
Maybe he’s talking about mirror-universe Balloon Juice? I dunno.
Dexter
But what does Larry Johnson think?
Baud
I love this line. It just rolls on the tongue.
Rex Everything
He’s talking about your commentariat. Duh.
Baud
Suzanne Somers wrote a more thought provoking piece.
Culture of Truth
The banks! The debt! The wars! The spying!
He does know Bush hasn’t been President for a while, right?
Chris
Who the fuck is Jerome Armstrong? For a second I thought I was just reading another it’s-always-projection wingnut.
schrodinger's cat
@Chris: Good question, I have no idea either.
TooManyJens
Sounds like he has that neurological disorder where the eyes see “You know, Greenwald’s playing pretty fast and loose with the facts on this NSA thing” and somehow the signal gets crossed and what arrives at the brain is “PLEASE SPY ON ME MORE, LORD OBAMA. HERE, LET ME INSTALL A WEBCAM IN MY BATHROOM FOR YOU. I HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE.”
There’s a lot of that going around.
Dexter
Jerome Armstrong is still around? I thought the whole MyDD crowd just gave up blogging after Obama’s election in 2008.
Xantar
@Chris:
He’s a PUMA.
No seriously. I don’t use that term lightly. He was always anti-Obama, and he quickly became irrelevant. I’m not sure why our blog host is reading what he says.
schrodinger's cat
As for who runs the intertoobz, the answer is simple, kittehs of course.
Karl P
LGFers are moderate republicans and embarrassed libertarians – they are no more the Democratic blogosphere than Sullivan is. But LGF makes fun of teahadis a lot, so maybe that’s where he got LGF and BJ mixed up.
Sly
Do these douchebags wonder why people call them “brogressives”? Because if they do, I have the answer.
Dexter
@Chris: A blogger at “progressive” blog called MyDD. He and a few others in that blog completely lost their shit at the end of democratic primary of 2008. I remember Jerome became a PUMA. Others can fill in.
Bill E Pilgrim
He’s talking about the commenters. “In the posts and comments” is definitely not right when applied to this blog, including the word “posts” is inaccurate.
It absolutely applies to the comments though. Yes, that’s a huge error and I agree that it makes it a pretty WTF post by him, but the commenters here, I’d say a majority of them, fit his description. In my opinion anyway.
Omnes Omnibus
He did say posts and comments.
Baud
I don’t get it. There’s a very good chance Hillary will be the next nominee. If Jerome is a PUMA, what’s with all the doom and gloom and burning of bridges?
J.Ty
I, for one, simply hold the executive branch to extremely low standards.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep. I think he’s wrong in terms of the posts. Witness the way that the bloggers who post them are so often accused of “trolling” the commenters.
Crusty Dem
Yeah, even when I was desperately seeking liberal allies and searching for anyone sane in the delusional Early Popular Bush era (2002-4), I never thought much of the myDD posse. A bunch of Dean-loving bros turned PUMAs.
Pass.
Redshirt
PUMAs won’t completely support Hillary in 2016, since a percentage of them (27%?) have been turned insane.
PsiFighter37
Dude, Jerome Armstrong is just bitter that he didn’t get a chance to lay his grift on either the Clinton or the Obama campaigns directly in 2008. Then he cast his lot with the Hillary camp for free, and when that didn’t go well, MyDD was turned into full-on PUMA/Firebagger Central for the rest of 2008.
And now MyDD flamed out (it looks like the last post at the domain was nearly a year ago)…so who knows what he does nowadays. But his opinion can be taken with less than a grain of salt, IMO. I would venture to say Markos doesn’t give two shits about the guy now, either.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Chris: @schrodinger’s cat: IIRC, he was one of the first liberal bloggers. I think he and Kos were hired by Howard Dean in ’04 and the Village was stunned to learn that this “internet” thing could be used in a campaign and declared them boy-geniuses. His blog became the chief gathering point for PUMAs after the Inadequate Black Male stole Hillary’s nomination, and of certain people who, I’ll admit it, had high times trolling them. After McCain let him down in the general election, he rented a cabin in the Adirondacks to weep and drink away his bitter sorrow, and turned his blog over to twenty-something Obama-hater who called Obama “the chocolate Jimmy Carter”. Half that sentence is true. I think his blog has now been taken over by spambot posters for herbalife.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Baud: It’s just possible that PUMA is an idiotic term used to slur him and has no actual meaning now, if it ever did (it did actually, I think, at one time). In other words asking “Why is he being a PUMA??” when it’s others who are calling him that is sort of pointless.
Not saying I agree entirely with him or his overall views, but assuming that this is all just refighting the 2008 election is, as you point out, pretty absurd.
Marc
@Xantar: Exactly.
Obama Derangement Syndrome broke out in the Dem primaries well before it migrated to the GOP. Jerome Armstrong just might be patient zero.
Belafon
@Bill E Pilgrim: I suspect its a block probably roughly the same percentage as most of the the active left – those who keep up with politics – not a majority.
Edited for clarity.
Kiko
What is interesting to me is that the specific blogs he called out were his enemies back in the day. BJ and LGF were wingnut factories and Booman was associated with Mary Scott O’Connor, who had a big feud with dKos, who was MyDD’s bestest buddy.
jl
Cole may not be ‘attacking them’, but he is attacking them, objectively speaking, and that is all that matters.
By all means, you want a blog where all the commenters and front posters agree about everything, that is the BJ blog. ‘specially spying and blowing stuff up. Everyone agrees with that here.
I told Cole endorsing the netti pot and the furrrrrrinator would be a mistake. Now does he see where his ideological iron fist has taken his poor defenseless blog? No, you are correct, I didn’t think so either.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Bill E Pilgrim:
BItches always whining about their rights and their healthcare and aren’t we people, too? Amirite?
Can’t remember if you said were in the States in 2004, but there was semi-serious discussion about throwing abortion rights under the bus in order to peel off a few libertarian votes. Fortunately, it was shouted down, but obviously there are still ostensibly liberal men like Armstrong out there who think that a government-mandated vaginal probe is less invasive than the government having the ability to read your e-mail headers even if they never do.
Aimai
In my experience they wont accept criticism of the presidents policies unless it includes ugly, personal, aspersions on the president himself and on the aca, the administration, and the democratic party. If you dint begin by asserting that Obama is worse than bush and a stalking horse for all that is evil then you are a dupe or a traitor..
Marc
@Baud: I suspect that for some PUMAs, it wasn’t about electing Hillary so much as it was about tearing down the Usurper.
I mean, you’re assuming Armstrong is a rational actor. Facts not in evidence, etc.
PsiFighter37
@Kiko: Oh man, that takes me back…MSOC was a piece of work back in the day. I just went over to see the blog she started, and it, too, is deader than a doornail.
Honestly, those are pretty poor examples of Jerome to take – they’re the few blogs that are still standing all these years later. Doesn’t it say something when BMT, BJ, and LGF are still going pretty strong, while MyDD and OpenLeft flamed out?
Narcissus
If the BJ commentariat were in lockstep about anything why are there constant giant multi-hundred post shit-fits about every little thing
scav
A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest . . .
He, Suzanne and the WSJ go to the same well of facts.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
from wiki
AxelFoley
@Yatsuno:
Does the Cole in that universe wear a goatee?
Omnes Omnibus
@jl: Neti pots are creepy. No way, man.
David Koch
This is a grifter who used run a political web site based on astrology.. Then he got caught by the SEC running a pump-and-dump stock grift. Then he was the lead blogger for well known Blue-Dog Mark Warner. If you ever come into contact with him, hold on to your wallet.
sharl
Huh, Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD.com website has been inactive since December, but is still an existing and accessible thing. Did not know that.
FWIW, what I loved about MyDD and openleft.com* back in pre-Citizen’s United days was the wealth of political information on local** political campaigns in the diaries and comments. It really helped me to make better informed choices for which campaigns to direct my limited funds toward (shocking truth: I am NOT Sheldon Adelson).
*That link works, but maybe not for long – it throws up a warning banner when you first go there, but once you click on ‘Proceed’ or whatever, you get in. (FYI, Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers, and Mike Lux started OL, with Stoller and Bowers leaving MyDD to do so. As I recall, there were some hard feelings on the part of a very unpleasantly surprised Jerome Armstrong.)
**Figuring that the likely Dem WH winner would need all the help from Congress that s/he could get, I tried to avoid the media noise of the Presidential campaign in 2008 and concentrate on strictly Congressional (mostly House) campaigns. Have you ever tried that? Everyone kind of knows that the national media gang-covers the campaign for Prez, but it really hits you when you try to focus your concentration elsewhere. Shutting out that noise is damn near impossible. And I’m in a solid Dem state! People in the “battleground States” must have wanted to wear earplugs during the worst of it.
White Trash Liberal
Ad hominem and strawman fallacy rolled into one ready to eat package!!
I love the way the jackass sneaks abortion in there as no big deal. Not compared his EARTH SHATTERING ISSUES!!1!!!1!!!1!!
Jesus Bouncing Christ on a crashing website, I agree with these assholes. I want a severe limit on the Pentagon budget. I want swords to plowshares. I want reform of FISA and the abolition of the PATRIOT Act. I want Glass-Steagal back and much more oversight of derivatives combined with a heightened consumer and labor advocacy in the federal government.
What I don’t want is this zealotry and aggressive disinformation. I don’t want to enter the echo chamber of Greenwaldland where truth is shifted to suit the occasion. Not even ten years ago, Our Man Glenn wanted a secure border, second amendment purity and thought Bush should be trusted.
Perhaps I should start a converse movement. I want prison reform, universal living wages, and urban renewal. If those issues aren’t yours, then fuck you, you are an authoritarian lackey that wants more poverty, rotting infrastructure and pot smokers in gulags.
schrodinger's cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Thanks, I did not know that.
AxelFoley
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Of course you feel that way, dudebro.
Omnes Omnibus
@White Trash Liberal: Righteous.
Baud
@AxelFoley:
The Cole in that universe finds his mustard.
Citizen_X
I’ll play.
The Party? I seem to remember it being both parties, being during the Bush Administration and all. And as much as I don’t like it, was there any alternative, other than “Let the world economy collapse”?
Uh, ending two wars, and lowering the deficit? Yes, drone attacks have expanded–which I don’t like–but that doesn’t begin to outweigh 100,000 troops coming back home.
which I don’t like, either.
(Fuck you)^100. Or, as he amplifies his cluelessness,
Shorter douchebag: “What mean white male privilege? Y U mad?”
Keith P.
How did he write this post with his arms crossed? “Waaaaa, not ideologically pure enough! Waaaaa!!!”
Just picking one of his problems – attacking Edward Snowden. I like to think that most people here (left-wing) didn’t attack him because he stole NSA data and published it, but rather that after he did, he ended up in frickin’ Russia.
jl
@AxelFoley:
” Does the Cole in that universe wear a goatee? ”
Goats!? Someone say goats? In that universe the evil communist glibertarian Cole has a monopoly on goat generators, all hidden way up the holler.
ruemara
@jl: Christ. Is Palinism a fucking disease, because that’s an amazing verbal diarrhea of tossed salad.
JC, why the fuck would you even care? This guy’s throwing out the names of sites that are still popular so he can grab some eyeballs for himself. Outrage brings eyeballs. It’s hating with a purpose; credibility and cash. Nothing more, nothing less.
Gin & Tonic
@AxelFoley: Can’t keep up with all the new teams in the league. What’s a dudebro?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
OT: I’m getting a John Cornyn re-election ad. “Keep Texas Pro-Life”
Narcissus
That astrology link is something else. Everybody should take a look. (I’ve tried to quote it twice but apparently WordPress has something against me)
different-church-lady
Jeezus, it’s like a disease.
LAC
@Bill E Pilgrim: who cares? Please, another dude-bro trying to readjust his pork pie hat and pretend he is cool and progressive because he can list all the things he will sit out elections for. Thank God there are commentators here that do push back on the dour depressing world’s coming to an end and let’s do the Circular firing squad dance again.
different-church-lady
@jl:
Yeah. Sure. Except for fuckin’ Cole himself. And a bunch of other people. Other than that you’ve got it exactly right.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
More like a syndrome.
MikeJ
I’d love to see the bankers guillotined, but don’t pretend that you could have a trial that ended with anything you would call justice. The reason why the collapse was so galling was that almost everything they did was legal.
If you want extra-judicial executions for them, I would give a very hearty tsk-tsk and make sure I had an extra bottle of gin for the party.
different-church-lady
@Bill E Pilgrim: Yeah, we all march in lock step. That’s why there are never any arguments here.
PsiFighter37
@David Koch: I vaguely remember the astrology shit, which was kinda weird when I first read about it. The pump/dump stock stuff is just pathetic, it’s really fucking lame.
I’m surprised he didn’t try to fleece Markos out of some cash based on that history. Must wonder how much it eats at him that Markos built a sustainable business out of dKos, while MyDD swirled around the Internet’s toilet bowl.
April
I got banned from MyDD. Not by Jerome. One of the other guys. I pointed out that he was using one of Karl Rove’s techniques in his post–I think he was repeating the empty suit meme. Anyway, to my surprise, that was that! Banned!
magurakurin
@AxelFoley:
please. No way Cole is Spock. I mean come on. He’s McCoy. That’s so clear. In his dreams he might be Kirk, but never Spock. And in the light of day, “I’m a blog host, not a Pulitzer Prize winner!!!!” or “I’m just an old country blogger, Mr. Stuck.”
RSA
@Kiko:
I noticed that, too. So the strength of the Democratic Party is in Republican apostates? That’s pretty much a #slatepitch.
Omnes Omnibus
@magurakurin: It’s funny ’cause it’s true.
different-church-lady
Oops, there’s the tell: it’s about red meat for the left. We’re not spending enough time whipping people into the streets.
Personally I’m getting sick of politics that cater exclusively to people who are perpetually pissed off.
nellcote
Still waiting for that accountability and transparency from Greenwald, Snowden and Asssange.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@PsiFighter37: Wow. I vaguely remember I once had a very strong opinion about Mary Scott O’Connor, but I can’t for the life of me remember why or what it was.
Jerome Armstrong
Well, this was a comment I made that got front-paged into a post. So I can confirm that the intent was to point to the community of commenters here. I mean good-god John, look at this spew above. It’s like I entered into a time-warp and transported back to the ’08 primary. Just a bunch of attack dogs.
BJ’s, be happy.
AxelFoley
@Gin & Tonic:
This should cover it:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=DUDE%20BRO
Citizen_X
Eww.
Double, triple, quadruple eww. Sorry I took this asshole seriously for a microsecond.
scav
@RSA: Some of us being pre-natal apostates, busy juggling the (rusty) hammer and sickles carefully on the way out, but sure, lockstep parallel universes work like that.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I remember the flame wars about her when I was still at GOS. But I also can’t recall what that was all about.
eemom
Ya know Cole, freakin Bill Keller (former editor in chief of the NYT) published an exchange of letters with Greenwald today titled Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?
You could have done better than this obscure schmuck for a thread like this, ‘zallImsayin.
j
I figured him out in 2008, when he became a total Hill-Bot; almost PUMA like with his constant mewling about how “If the Democrats ran their convention and primaries like the GOP, then Hillary would be president…WHAHHH!” bullshit. I stopped reading that site he ran (and I can’t remember the name now, something like “Open Left” and then called “Open something like left”??)
It got too painful to watch the same whimpering rant repeated every time Obama won another primary and Armstrong had to come up with another excuse for why it was Obama’s fault, and it was so unfair that Hillary ran a shitty campaign and blew over $15 million bucks before Iowa even had their coffee klatches.
She lost and he never got over it. He’s always been an ass in my opinion. His claim to fame was co-writing a book with the GOS and he tried to ride that pony all the way to irrelevance. He’s no different than Sarah Palin, he had his time in the spotlight and he wants it back again now that Hillary might run again.
He’s angling for a job on her campaign staff.
Chris
@different-church-lady:
For a very peculiar definition of “left,” which doesn’t appear to include women, gay people, or nonwhite people, but does include deficit scolds.
Anya
@Baud: Obama’s anti-women thugs will destroy Hillary’s chances because Obama doesn’t want her to succeed him. I heard it from my aunt who’s a PUMA.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Hang on, let me get out my Blogosphere Superstar media guidebook, try to refresh my memory on why she was somebody once…
These people act far too much like hard-core Trekkies at a convention for my taste. Closed society, only at least Trekkies realize it’s not important to anyone but them.
PeakVT
They bend over backwards to justify the party bailing out banks,
Because nobody ever gets hurt when the contradictions are heightened.
Omnes Omnibus
FWIW the commentariat on this blog probably covers the gamut of Democratic Party opinions. Probably fewer minorities than are in the party, but the voices are here.
Botsplainer
Hey, Jerome? I wouldn’t give a shit if Putin decided to give Snowjob a polonium enema, Obama drone-struck Griftwald and his boy toy document mule in the middle of afternoon Mai-Tais on the beach and the Brits do a quickie act-of-war raid on the Ecuadorian embassy in order to do in rape boy Assange…
gian
Wow he trolled the host into a post. This kind of bullshit is always an interesting thing to deal with. Ignore it because its trolling or smash it and give the troll attention it desperately needs to resurrect a failed online career?
Suffern ACE
@AxelFoley: Cole already has a goatee. We actually are in the mirror universe. Sorry – I thought you knew.
PsiFighter37
@Baud: She was extremely melodramatic, very polemical (kind of like One Pissed Off Liberal, but with less pictures), but also unafraid to mix it up in the comments. Pretty much at the center of any worthwhile pie fight/flame war back in the post-2004 days at dKos. I think she may have had some mental health issues (that she discussed openly as well), but to be honest, this is the first time in FSM knows how long that I’ve even though about her.
Ash Can
The word for this garbage is not “bizarre.” The word for this is “unacceptable.” Preferably with the additional word “fucking” in front of it.
Armstrong can take his butthurt male privilege and shove it straight up his ass with a cinder block. Apart from the fact that he’s obviously thoroughly ignorant about this site and doesn’t have a clue what he’s writing about, he’s a flaming douche tanker. Fuck him and his maggoty fake righteousness.
Omnes Omnibus
@Botsplainer: It is quite possible that you are the source of much of Armstrong’s material.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t think we have a lot of blue dogs here.
Jenny
I think the Teabag-racist hate began at MYDD
MyDD-The-Cesspool-of-Hate
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Omnes Omnibus: no shit.
Botsplainer
@eemom:
It looked too much like a circle jerk turned into a bukkake party for me to try to follow.
Ash Can
And newsflash for Boy Genius here, there’s certainly a term for someone who steals classified American national security information and runs straight to the Chinese and Russians with it, but “truth-teller” ain’t it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I like to think Hillary Clinton would have been really embarrassed by some of her on-line supporters. The vitriol directed at Ted Kennedy at MyDD when he endorsed Obama would’ve done Glen Beck proud.
Belafon
@Baud: And I doubt we have very many truly far left people here. As much as we fight here, most of the time its more about time frames and expectations than goals. I didn’t say all the time, but most of the time.
Botsplainer
@Omnes Omnibus:
That’s pretty sad. I’m just a solitary slightly left of center commenter.
Baud
@Belafon:
I agree. Although I would guess that blue dogs make up a larger share of Democrats than “truly far left.”
Citizen_X
@Ash Can: I have a slight correction to Armstrong:
Did you pick up on it?
different-church-lady
@Ash Can: Here, let me ‘bag-splain it to you: Snowden is little guy. Little guy is always right. Every word he says is truth to power, because that’s how it is.
Suffern ACE
Because what says “I wanna fuckin’ destroy those powers that be” more than supporting Hilary Clinton in 2008.
Belafon
@Baud: Agree.
different-church-lady
@Belafon:
And thank god for that, because apparently those people have gone absolutely nuts.
Botsplainer
@Baud:
Remember those heady days of 2009-2010, as the blue dogs were treated with scorn by paid progressive activists, their attempts to decipher public opinion in town halls (so they could effectively govern) being shunned by those progressive activists while stupid conservatives took over?
mai naem
Does Kos still get along with Armstrong? I’ve been to DKos, maybe three times in the past few years, but I don’t seem to remember Kos mentioning Jerome beyond the book.
PAC Man
@sharl: You will love the Daily Digests (especially the comments) on http://www.dailykos.com/blog/elections (formerly Swing State Project) if you don’t know about it already.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus:
You goddamn right, Omnes. FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT!
Polk/Dallas ’14
Omnes Omnibus
@Jewish Steel: Hey, I am a John Quincy Adams guy, so don’t blame me.
scav
@Belafon: There are at least a few that have just learned not to to pout and scream because ‘merca ain’t going to be nationalizing things given the existing voting population. Apparently even that is impure. Only oxygen-deprivation blue is truly blue
PAC Man
Why would Armstrong feel that Clinton was in any way connected/beholden to the Netroots? Because she hired Peter Daou, because that’s the only thing I can possibly think of. She was everything the netroots was against in the party from being establishment/DLC/iraq war supporting, etc.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
Moving the Overton window.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus: Actually, for annexing Texas he could be history’s greatest monster.
amk
cole, now you are going to be pissed off by some has-been’s ‘critique’?
driftglass
Jerome seems to be spending time in the comment thread of Ian Welch’s post about how the Progosphere is dead because everyone but The Usual Heroes are despicable sellouts.
A sample from the post in question:
“Unlike the Tea Party, most left wingers don’t really believe their own ideology. They put partisanship first, or they put the color of a candidate’s skin or the shape of their genitals over the candidate’s policy. Identity is more important to them than how many brown children that politician is killing.”
http://www.ianwelsh.net/a-brief-note-on-why-the-progressive-blog-movement-failed/
After this crew informed me back at the 2007 Year Kos (and many times since) that us noobs were NOT welcome in the inner sanctum of their Church of Netroots I kinda stopped listening to much of anything they had to say.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jewish Steel: Adams wasn’t president in 1845.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus: Polk ran on FIFTY-FOUR FORTY OR FIGHT! That’s who I was talking about.
Belafon
@scav: Well, you know how effective holding your breath was for your parents. It’ll obviously work for the country.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jewish Steel: Oh, that makes much more sense.
Jewish Steel
@Omnes Omnibus: Word to your Whigs.
Jose Arcadio Buendía
@RSA: Markos is a “Republican apostate” himself, too.
Basically, Jerome stopped adapting to the world about 10 years ago, about when the world stopped adapting to him. Werfless.
sparrow
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: MyDD sounds like an advertisement for fake boobs to me. Glad I never heard of it.
Narcissus
@Botsplainer: I’ll not have you besmirching the good name of either practice, thank you.
MattR
@driftglass: There is a certain amount of truth to what Jerome says in that excerpt about putting partisanship first except it ignores the extreme, bat shit insanity of the Republican party at this particular moment in history. I am probably wiling to forgive more from Obama because I am so terrified that any sign of disunity will encourage those lunatic morons. And god forbid they actually end up in control of the Senate or win the Presidency. If the opposition was a bit more reasonable (and the media acted like real journalists), I would probably feel free to be more critical of Obama from the left.
The suggestion that race or sex have something to do with it is both mistaken and disgusting, though no longer surprising from Jerome.
AxelFoley
@Suffern ACE:
Dammit, you’re right. I forgot he already wears one.
sharl
@PAC Man: Oooh, I did NOT know about that (sub)site – kinda drifted away from Great Orange Satan years ago.
I will definitely check it out. Thanks!
Ash Can
@Citizen_X: What gasses me is that libertarians never used to be anti-abortion, or even mealy-mouthed states’-rights about it. The libertarian line used to be individual rights, period, for both men and women. To a fault (and well beyond), to be sure, but it was across the board, no exceptions. I’d be willing to bet money that the change happened when Republicans who were embarrassed by Dubya stopped calling themselves Republicans and insisted they were libertarians instead, and basically co-opted the whole libertarian movement. Libertarians used to be unrealistic, unempathetic, and indiscriminately anti-regulation. Nowadays they’re still unrealistic and unempathetic, but they’re just fine with certain kinds of regulation, as long as it’s limited to women and other people they think are icky.
different-church-lady
@PsiFighter37:
WTF?? Why keep posting one open thread after another when literally nobody comments on them?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Rex Everything: Thats the same sorta logic that has people hating on soup kitchens.
batgirl
@Baud: And it always seems to by a guy — let’s leave women’s control over their own bodies to the states!
Chris
@Ash Can:
1) Isn’t libertarianism simply “I don’t care about women’s rights to an abortion?” They’re not socially liberal, they just don’t care one way or another and are just irritated with the people who keep making a big deal out of these issues (whether it’s the mouth-breathers in the GOP or the obnoxious do-gooder Dems talking about “rights”). Wasn’t aware that they’d ever been anything else.
2) To be fair, didn’t abortion itself used to be far less important among conservatives, too, before the 1970s? It was something for Catholics to worry about and not really anyone else.
Omnes Omnibus
@Just Some Fuckhead: Where else would a person make soup?
Rhoda
Barack Obama built an online army and didn’t need him, hire him, or cater to him in any way. And he’s pissed off. That’s my take. He’s a political consultant that didn’t get his candidate and didn’t latch on to the winner and got frozen out when he officially threw in with the libertarian candidate for president.
Smart guy, hasn’t gotten paid enough, saw someone come in and execute “his” brilliant idea of a grassroots/netroots movement. Bitter.
Just Some Fuckhead
Jerome just isn’t aware of how many Savvy commenters there are here at Balloon Juice, otherwise he’d be congratulating them for the Awesome Savviness instead of throwing stones.
JWR
Jerome Armstrong?! Oh geez, I went through that shit-fest of a primary once, and remember it well. (Bill Clinton? In a primary? Gimme a break.) Please, let’s never do that again. Also too, FDL!
karen
Jerome? You stayed home in 2010? Fuck you, your family and everyone you care about. I’m guessing you have money because most of your ilk does but the poorer people in red states are suffering because of your little hissy fit.
PUMAJerome, you remind me that the first Birfers were PUMA friends of Hillary who clung to that as a way to guarantee that Obama would be disqualified.
Scum like you should just get into bed with the Tea Party because you’re exactly the same. Racist pigs.
You really called Obama an “Inadequate Black Man?”
He’s got more brains in his pinky than you have up your ass.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Neti pots are awesome. I use them on Spawn the Elder when she has a cold. One time, she had so much snot slide out that it looked like she had green shoelaces hanging out of her face.
Come to think of it, that snot had much in common with this Armstrong tool’s point.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Just Some Fuckhead: Hey, are you being sarcastic?
karen
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Am I wrong or aren’t his views your views?
catclub
@MikeJ: If you could actually get started on that project, it would go a long and terrifying way. I am glad it is unlikely to start.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: It seems like self-waterboarding. I won’t be a part of it.
White Trash Liberal
@driftglass:
I feel like I need a shower after reading that.
Tripod
@PsiFighter37:
She still posts at myleftwing.com. Last I checked, she’s in Michigan, grinding through a teaching degree and considering a placeholder Congressional run.
I didn’t pay much mind to her at the GOS, or whatever prompted her to GBCW, but I thought the hatchet job WaPo did on her was undeserved, exploitative, and a really a shitty thing to do.
lol
@Rhoda:
The same is true for a lot of Professional Left types but Armstrong was explicitly not hired when all the Warner folks went to Team Obama.
Xboxershorts
I gave him an earful….even used my real name
http://www.ianwelsh.net/jerome-armstrong-on-the-failure-of-the-netroots/#comment-51588
Just Some Fuckhead
@karen: My views are my views, usually. Sometimes not. I don’t actually know anything about Jerome other than he’s usually late to the Firebagger meetings we have every Thursday night.
Ash Can
@Chris: Libertarians very definitely used to be completely socially liberal. It’s why I was able to marry the guy I did. When I met him he was a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian, subscribing to Reason Magazine (which also used to be different than it is now — fucking stupid overall, but different) and everything. We actually found a great deal of common ground on the socially-liberal aspect. He hasn’t changed, but libertarianism has changed (e.g., he stopped subscribing to Reason a long time ago).
As for conservatism and abortion, that’s something I have no insight into. Yes, it’s always been a Catholic issue. I kind of assumed it was always a fundie evangelican issue too, but I don’t know for sure.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Omnes Omnibus: A souper bowl, duh.
Omnes Omnibus
@Just Some Fuckhead:
No, that’s the thing from which one eats soup.
MikeJ
@Ash Can:
The Southern Baptist Convention publicly praised the Roe v Wade decision. Abortion didn’t become a protestant religious issue until it became a political issue.
Tripod
Is Joe Trippi still alive? Is Pat Caddell available for a flame war? Will no one carry the white man’s burden in the 2016 Democratic primary?
The grifters really could use a candidate like Howard Dean again….. to burn through $50 million for no tangible results.
Remember when Marcotte got fired off the Edwards team for that bad Plan B snark? In hindsight I guess we can see why they were a bit sensitive to the whole subject of knocking someone up….
Bobby Thomson
Shit, Armstrong jumped the shark even before the Great PUMA Wars of ’08. I didn’t know he was even still alive. Even Whitey Tape is more relevant.
I never thought much of him before, and I doubt that I’ll think much of him tomorrow, either.
Eric U.
the only commenters here that are in lock-step are the ones that pretend we are all NSA-loving, drone-condoning obots. I don’t think they are trolling, I think they have lost the plot due to outrage overload. Fix congress and a lot of the problems that Obama “causes” are going to go away.
Tripod
@MikeJ:
John Dolan of Ward Nerd fame wrote a pretty good bit on being a dumb anti-abortion kid in the late seventies. It was definitely a fringe Catholic thing until St. Reagan needed those white Catholic voters. Until then the GOP, aka mainline Protestants, had a long held faith in eugenics.
Bobby Thomson
@Baud:
You didn’t think those PUMA types were really pro-Clinton, did you?
Bobby Thomson
@Redshirt:
I fixed that for you.
Chris
@Ash Can:
This story’s achieved some note in progressive circles, though it’s been forgotten everywhere else: Paul Weyrich, crusading right-wing Catholic, claims that he toured the country in the mid-seventies reaching out to fundiegelical preachers and trying to put together a conservative Christian coalition to push back against Roe v. Wade (a “religious right,” you might call it). His offer was met with little to no interest. Later on, though, the federal government decided to revoke the tax-exempt status of “Christian” (read: all-white) academies in the Deep South that remained a bastion of segregation. And right after that, all of a sudden, the people who’d ignored him on the abortion issue started calling back. Make of that what you will…
Thanks for the libertarian explanations, too.
eemom
@karen:
Splendiforous comment, all of it.
Soonergrunt
Honestly this is the first time in years that I’ve thought of Jerome Armstrong in any context whatsoever. And it turns out to be no different than the last time I thought of Jerome Armstrong.
Frankensteinbeck
Wow. That is just crazy. This guy is assembling a giant strawman army to conquer the world. That anyone here, even the most conservative of us, supports the giant defense budget is probably the least accurate of these delusions, but the one that stands out to me most is:
Has this even come up? I mean, yes, the vast majority or everyone here would spit on someone like that, but we’re too busy spitting on Libertarians for other reasons. The only time I can think of it being mentioned is in the context of explaining that Ron Paul is actually a religious conservative. If he’s a Ron Paul supporter, do we even need to know more?
EDIT – @MikeJ:
Oh, right, this! My mother grew up a fundie in a small fundie town. She assures me (and it fits with everything else I know about the religion) that they always disapproved of Roe vs. Wade. The mantra cited was ‘You play, you pay.’ That is, abortion encourages sluts. It just wasn’t a big issue that they would put political energy into.
some guy
@Botsplainer:
now that is some good old fashioned comedy right there. why do all the conservaDems around here fancy themselves “left of center” ?
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
As I said, I have no prior knowledge of this Jerome character. But now it’s going to be hard for me to avoid picturing him as Christopher Lee in his Saruman regalia, rousing the strawmen troops from the top of Isengard.
“Tonight, the earth will be stained with the blood of Balloon Juice… TO WAR!!!!”
… while an incredulous Wormtongue ponders “how can straw undo stone?”
amk
@some guy: That’s because the loony left aka firebaggers moved the famed overton window into the rw territory?
Chris
Also, too.
@Frankensteinbeck:
I trust they were equally inflexible when it came to demanding the father support the pregnant woman and their child for the next twenty years? Or did that one get filed under “boys will be boys” with a wink wink nudge nudge?
Frankensteinbeck
@Chris:
No, actually they were pretty damn inflexible about that. Ever heard of a ‘shotgun wedding’? You had a kid in wedlock. By force, if necessary. They might be unfair to women in general, but fornication was Bad. Period.
The prophet Nostradumbass
BooMan has responded as well. Heh heh. Choice quote:
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Well, at least that’s something, I suppose.
fuckwit
The main problem I have with libertarianism is that, as James Madison put it, men are not angels.
Libertarianism is stupid for a similar reason that communism is stupid: it’s ivory tower and conveniently ignores important aspects of real life.
The problem with libertarianism is that, if there were no government, the power vacuum would get filled by the douchiest alpha male available. At the moment, that means corporations and the 1% (and maybe the megachurches). This would explain why corporations and the 1% love funding libertarian thinktanks. Said douchbags would then become absolutist totalitarian dictators. This is what happens with power vacuums.
If there were no government, we’d either become a theocracy or an even worse banana republc than we are now (or both!).
The Framers of the Constitution weren’t idiots. They’d read the history of the Greek democracies, of the Roman Republic, in the original Ancient Greek and Latin, too. They were well aware of the convulsions of recent British history, Oliver Cromwell, etc. They knew: you MUST have government, and it must be powerful enough to keep the douchbags under control, but not so powerful that it becomes the douchebag itself. A delicate balance, and they did a pretty good job of it. We do have some corrections to do, but, at the moment, they need to be in the area of MORE government involvement in the commons– equalizing the economy and protecting the environment–, and less involvement areas of personal privacy/morality and military adventures. We can accomplish these adjustments via elections, it just takes time, and that slowness was part of the Framer’s plans anyway.
Ben
@Tripod:
The one thing I hold against Harold Washington (God rest his soul) is hiring a young Pat Caddell to advise him on his 1983 mayoral campaign. Gave him credibility among fellow Democrats…
David Koch
The first time I heard about birtherism was on MYDD. They had some nut job actually go to Hawaii and dig up the birth announcements in the local papers (they were so sure it didn’t exist).
When they found the birth announcement in multiple papers, they couldn’t accept the findings and they theorized that information was telegrammed from Kenya so that baby Barack wouldn’t have the stigma of being a foreigner when looking for work as an adult (I wish I was kidding).
After such disgusting behavior who are they to lecture anyone on what it takes to be a good liberal.
taylormattd
Oh Christ. Why is Mark Warner’s former paid agent in the blogosohere still droning on about people failing to sufficiently loathe Obama?
Seriously Jerome, shut the fuck up. Obama thought you sucked and didn’t want to hire you. Its been like 4 years. Get over it.
Or maybe you would be happy if we bought you a chocolate fountain ala Warner’s bribe at first Yearly Kos? Would that help?
taylormattd
Or did Markos deep six your idea for aother terribly shitty book?
Are Larry Johnson and Jane Hamsher refusing to return your calls?
piratedan
isn’t Jerome the guy who held Morris Day’s mirror in Purple Rain?
Mike E
@piratedan: What time is it?!
priscianus jr
@Baud: There’s a very good chance Hillary will be the next nominee. If Jerome is a PUMA, what’s with all the doom and gloom and burning of bridges?
By his logic, if she becomes the nominee, he’ll have to turn against her. “Power corrupts”, and all that.
Kay
@Rhoda:
I agree that that’s where some of the vitriol and resentment comes from. They were raising a billion dollars for campaigns and they weren’t hiring everyone who thought they deserved a job.
The campaign industrial complex on the Democratic side was a bloated, ineffective, grifter-filled mess in 2004, or that was how it looked from the local end. It was like Mitt Romney in 2012.
Whatever Barack Obama did to shake that up was all to the good. I wish he had done more of it, gone further.
Baud
@priscianus jr:
I have seen the enemy and it is us.
Ramalama
@different-church-lady: I’m probably in Noam Chomsky territory as far as being lefty goes, but I do enjoy the company here even when I disagree with a buncha youse.
Baud
@Kay:
Judging by this screed, Obama made a fine executive decision.
Kay
Democrats had 4 years, from 2000 to 2004 to put in a voter protection plan in Ohio. It was an absolute mess in 2004, and again in 2006. It didn’t come together until 2008 and that was Obama’s campaign.
They couldn’t even manage to run a volunteer-lawyer campaign to protect their own voters! After Bush v Gore!
Kay
@Baud:
It’s just dumb. You can’t go back. You can’t go back to Howard Dean and the pickup truck with the flag, and “What’s the Matter With Kansas” or whatever. They can’t stay frozen in amber in 2004. It had completely changed by 2007. It’s sort of depressing that the internet, which is supposed to react with lightening speed (allegedly!) has it’s own brand of nostalgia and conventional wisdom.
Baud
@Kay:
It’s all ego. Seems to happen a lot, sad to say. People think the world needs to stick with them rather than that they need to adjust to stay relevant.
Trinity
What an unbelievable asshat.
lol
@Chris:
With the Internet Libertarians (ie: Reddit) at least, abortion seems to get tied up in a lot of Nice Guy resentment against women who won’t fuck them.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
A Libertarian accusing others of political expediency, that’s rich.
Kay
@Baud:
There’s just this yearning in the Democratic Party that there is some route, some strategy, where they can re-capture The Reagan Democrats. They can’t. Those people haven’t been Democrats for a long time. Reagan was a long time ago.
It’s corrosive (and a little insular and clueless) because it does something else. It sends a message to the newer coalition that they are somehow “less than”, replacement voters, the second choice after the coalition that fell apart after Reagan.
There is no “Democrats” other than the present reality, the actual people who make up the Party.This isn’t abstract.
Marc
@The prophet Nostradumbass: Heh. I didn’t know Armstrong was an Edwards supporter before he jumped ship to Hillary but that explains a lot.
I always suspected that a fairly high percentage of Edwards supporters were progressives who were convinced that a black man or a white woman couldn’t possibly get elected president – in other words, not really progressives at all, just Democrats who were used to getting punched in the face. Armstrong seems to fit the type.
Matt McIrvin
Objecting to the state forcibly sticking a probe up someone’s vagina is a nitpick.
Matt McIrvin
@priscianus jr: I get the definite sense that for most of the diehard PUMAs it was never really about Hillary Clinton in the first place. Clinton herself certainly got over losing the primary pretty quickly.
Jim, Foolish LIteralist
My own pet theory is that “Reagan Democrats” were really “Nixon Democrats”.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish LIteralist:
The way it comes off, the way it sounds to me, is that there are white men who the Democratic Party “lost” and all of the rest of us are interest groups, or replacement voters for those “lost” voters.
I hear it when “we” talk about the south. We “lost” the south. Actually, “we” didn’t. Black people in the south vote for Democrats. So are they not part of the “we” or what?
One can’t set up “white male vote” as the default standard and then ask everyone else to measure against that. I didn’t agree to the standard. Everyone else isn’t an interest group that some imaginary “base” are allowing a voice.
Anyway, that’s how it always sounds to me, and that’s why it’s insulting and vaguely alienating.
Cervantes
@Ben: The one thing I hold against Harold Washington (God rest his soul) is hiring a young Pat Caddell to advise him on his 1983 mayoral campaign. Gave him credibility among fellow Democrats…
It’s not clear to me how much credibility among Democrats Pat Caddell needed to gain in 1983. FYI, he had worked for George McGovern’s 1972 campaign and Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign, and spent four years in Carter’s White House — long before he was hired by Harold Washington’s media people to help with the Democratic primary (1983).
As a matter of fact, locally in Chicago, the Democratic Party leadership opposed (for obvious reasons) its own (official) mayoral candidate in the general election — so Caddell definitely burned those particular bridges by continuing to work for Washington’s campaign. (He may have since re-built those bridges; I can’t say.)
Incidentally, Harold Washington’s victory in 1983 was a watershed event. It altered the mood in Chicago so significantly that, within months, both Barack Obama and David Axelrod were drawn into politics there.
celticdragonchick
@Baud:
I am probably one of the few here who could possibly be described as a blue dog Democrat (I live in North Carolina and I trend towards the center on some issues, although I veer hard left on social issues and I would be happy to see the banksters taking a tumbril ride to Madame Guillotine…)
celticdragonchick
@fuckwit:
This this this. Best comment I have read in awhile…and it shows why temperamental conservatism (not to be confused with winner take all neo liberalism/Austrian school economics which we are plagued with today) is actually valuable.
The Founders were revolutionaries. Many of them were also that rarest of beasts…a conservative revolutionary…just for the reasons you described. The ghost of Oliver Cromwell was certainly haunting Constitution Hall in the mid 1780’s, and the Framers had likely all read Leviathan by Thomas Hobbs. They knew perfectly well that even if man cannot be perfected, then government can protect against his base impulses to some degree.
That is were the tea party idiots get everything utterly wrong. Hamilton won the argument on the size and scope of the government. Jefferson lost.
angler
When Hillary is on our masthead for 2016 PUMAs will be, what?
Vlad
@Jerome Armstrong: It’s interesting that you’d call the people in this thread “attack dogs”, when none of them had probably given you two thoughts since 2008, right up until the point you wrote a big thing about how they were corrupt tools of Big Brother and big business. And now you’re shocked and hurt that they’d respond negatively to that?
Also, you shouldn’t really be surprised that people here would view you with a suspicious and jaundiced eye, given some of the racist claptrap that went up on your site back in the day. That’s going to stick to you for the rest of your life, and deservedly so.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I’m in the nasal squirt bottle camp, and reject neti pot as a lifestyle distraction.
ellie
@Kay: Thank you. I completely agree with this. This thinking is why I get so infuriated when someone casually talks about allowing Southern states to secede. What about the Democrats who live there? Government should be for everybody not the people with biggest mouths and wallets.
patroclus
I don’t consider destroying women’s liberty rights at the state level to be a “nitpicking” kind of issue.
Tim C.
I know this rehashes a lot of the 2007-2008 primary drama, but I’ve never really gotten how the purity progressives think Hillary would have been much better than Barrack on most of their pet issues. Health Care? You think somehow she would have gotten the public option though the Senate? How? You think she wouldn’t be running drone strikes or massive eavesdropping programs? Why? You think somehow she would have more leverage and change the political forces at work when it comes to closing Gitmo? How?
I’m on board with most of the criticisms of Obama, I’m just not seeing any specific info that Hillary would have done anything different or better. In fact, my primary reason for going for Obama was Hillary’s war vote. She went along with the conventional wisdom when that wisdom was obviously, dramatically wrong.
I used to read myDD back in the day too, he lost me in the spring of 2008 when he did this absurd piece about how Hillary was going to dominate the last ten primaries when all the polling said exactly the reverse. Kind of an ‘unskewing’ before it was cool. I need a dose of reality in my political commentary and being totally wrong about things without any self awareness or contrition evident after the fact is a quick way to get ignored.
karen
@Tim C.:
YES! A zillion times YES! PUMAs complain about Obama’s drones and wars but did they not realize that Clinton was is SOS? That means, more than likely, she had input on Obama’s decisions and actions overseas.
Another Holocene Human
@driftglass: Okay, that’s funny because Markos kinda nuked the old “user number” on dKos a couple of months ago because he said it was giving too much weight to lower number commenters, that in fact some of them were being transferred between people, and he wanted new users to feel equal to everyone else. If I recall his comments correctly.
Another Holocene Human
@MattR: I think some people don’t know how to criticize the admin in a productive way. They just jump to vilifying Obama. I don’t think that when Summers name was being floated that the people who went all circular firing squad on the Democratic brand and Obama in particular really accomplished anything. (the whole “I can’t trust this president!” crap) However, the constant drumbeat about what a shit Summers is, and the claim that Obama was just giving him this position b/c he owed him (making Summers a lead weight around Obama’s neck), and going on about how great Yellen was and how sexist the choice is (another dig at Summers who famously dissed female academics while he was at Harvard), that was effective. And Summers couldn’t take it any more (or Obama couldn’t) and bowed out.
Obama knows the power of public pressure… hell, he’s said as much, repeatedly. Some people are listening, like the environmentalists who marched on Washington in great numbers opposing Keystone XL. Some don’t want to listen and just cavil about Obama on the internet, because that’s effective.
Seanly
@Baud:
Suicide by moderately popular quasi-liberal blog. If any of the sites reach a TBOGG unit, it’s tha same as hitting him with a .45 right between the eyes.
If the guy is a PUMA, isn’t attacking Obama for defending bankers kinda stupid? He’s smoking some weapons grade stuff if he thinks the Clintons, king & queen of triangulation, would’ve gone all Warren on the bankers.
I love mixing BJ, Booman & LGF together. Nuts & gum together at last!
JWR
@Tim C.:
This was what really freaked me out about people like Taylor Marsh, people who really should’ve known better. But just like the tea partiers of today, they were drawn to this very odd belief that somehow showed them winning all along. I even saw Krugman use one of their “facts” in a column one time. I avoided him for the rest of the campaign, too.
Tim C.
@JWR:
I never heard of Marsh until she was an obvious lunatic. Was she better before the 2008 primary?
Another Holocene Human
@karen: righteous! ooo, that was satisfying.
ranger3
Deep down I know you’re a neoliberal sellout, which is why I love you. Now that’s settled, why the fuck would Big Ben burn a timeout with the clock stopped? It made no fucking sense, man. None.
Ned Ludd
@Ash Can: Ron Paul was the Libertarian Party presidential candidate back in ’88. He was then, as always, anti-choice and quite vocal about it. There are many people identifying as “libertarian” who apparently believe whole-heartedly that the individual right of the fetus always trumps the rights of the mother. This is not new.