Kos: Thank You, Sir - May I Have Another

Nothings reveals the unprincipled drive for power of the Progressive Left quite so much as their alliance with Virginia Senate Candidate Jim Webb (D):

From the perspective of the activist Left, [rednecks] are the greatest obstacles to what might be called the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness. And for the last fifty years the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions in order to make them, at best, irrelevant to America's future growth.
--from Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,
by James Webb (2004)

Webb is portrayed as going on to call them and other politicians today pussies, driving America toward a dangerous wussification in this excellent piece by Andrew Ferguson.

Yet, a look at DailyKos shows the effort those very Progressives have put into the Webb campaign, from defending his apparent chauvinist views to raising cash. And all the while, Webb has issued nothing more than bullet points in an effort to hide any serious stands on matters beyond Iraq. For example, take a look at immigration, where he says nothing at all. But in an interview I doubt the Webb camp wants widely viewed, he makes it clear he isn't even supportive of a guest worker program. That he is more like Buchanan and to the Right of Bush on immigration wouldn't play well with the Democrat base. No wonder the Washington Post isn't interested in issues in their on going campaign against George Allen.

When you take apart Webb's few known positions, even the few make no sense at all in a broader perspective. So much so, that one begins to suspect every position is simply a matter of convenience for candidate Webb.

And moderates and conservatives shouldn't take too much comfort thinking Webb's partly conservative views may lend balance to a Democrat controlled Senate. The idea that a freshman Senator with such conflicting and seemingly confused views is going to take on the entrenched Liberal elite like Clinton, Schumer and Feingold doesn't amount to anything more than a pipe dream, at best.

Yes, politics does certainly make for strange bedfellows. In this case, the only fun in a Webb victory for conservatives and moderates may be watching who it is in the Webb / Kos marriage of convenience that ends up getting screwed. My guess is Kos, as Webb would have rank.

Lastly, if nothing else, Lieberman must at least get a chuckle from the Netroots selfish hypocrisy, throwing over a solid liberal while embracing a relatively unknown writer who, given his not often discussed extremely short tenure as Navy Secretary (10 months) may well turn out to be the Left's unmanageable loon.

Sorry to readers who are veterans for the relatively unknown writer bit; however, I'm a bit tired of hearing what a prolific author Webb is when the fact is, most Americans never heard of his work until he decided to run for Senate. And it's increasingly obvious his strongest supporters haven't read any of it at all.

Comments

[jpe]

Lastly, if nothing else, Lieberman must at least get a chuckle from the Netroots selfish hypocrisy

There was an alternative in CT; there is none in Va. That's not hypocrisy, it's rational decision making.

[Dan Riehl]

there is none in Va

BS, there sure was. Oh, I forgot, he was Jewish.

[daveinboca]

Smokebiyotchswamp and the Kossacks are investing a lot of howling and froth-flecked mouthing on behalf of Lamont and Webb. Their penchant for losing gives me confidence that somehow they will drop the ball just before the final play.

Their emotional excesses do lead to bad execution.

[IllegalImmigrationIntroduction]

Democrats should take comfort in the possibility that one of those mentioned in the article (Walter_Tejada) might be able to move Webb more towards current Dem leadership (and GOP leadership) thinking. Here are just some of the top results forTejada:

washtimes.com/metro/20050331-104930-8163r.htm
washtimes.com/metro/20051230-102705-7862r.htm
washingtontimes.com/metro/20050329-125829-5926r.htm
tinyurl.com/yhcs7v

He's also a member and former director of_LULAC, a group that supports illegal immigration.

[Dan Riehl]

might be able to move Webb

lol Yeah, unlike Reagan when he was Sec Navy? I wouldn't count on that. The Netroots will be targeting him in six years, assuming he is there.

[Shalimar]

Kos isn't part of the progressive Left, he is an ex-Republican who calls himself a "libertarian Democrat". Basically, he is like John Cole, only he figured out how corrupt and un-American the Bush administration was about 3 years earlier. You really don't know your enemies very well. How do you ever expect to successfully divide and conquer if you can't tell the difference between moderates and real progressives?

[Phoenix]

He should stick to writing. The colonel in our ROTC program gave me "Flight of the Intruder" (Stephen Coonts) to read and I was hooked. He then gave me Webb's books, and I got hooked. Webb is amazing when it comes to wordsmithing. I'm not so sure how 'amazing' he is at thinking, though. Either way, to me, it is very funny no matter how you spin this, and I hope my fellow Virginians get off their one-trick ponies over this....er... um...that would be 'thoroughbreds'....

Laugh-out-loud funny from The Weekly Standard:

“And it explains the entire national convention of 2004, in which desperate Demo crats nominated an undistinguished career politician for no other reason than that he was a decorated war hero and then launched his campaign with ceremonies so martial they might have been borrowed from a Latin American coup: phalanxes of saluting veterans, crisscrossing color guards, brass bands pumping Sousa tunes--everything short of a firing squad to liquidate the opposition.”

“He supports a higher minimum wage and an end to "corporate tax breaks which cost American jobs." At the same time, though, he says he supports a cut in the capital gains tax, in case a redneck wants to sell his stocks.”

[MlR]

...Moreover, the sky is actually orange.

[MlR]

Above is a reaction to Kos as a moderate.

[Phoenix]

Sorry to say, I did not click on the Kos link. There is a huge disconnect from my brain to my fingers whenever I see a Kos link. I've been there before. His commenters scare me. I have never seen/read such rabid retardation in my life. Kos seems to thrive on it as he panders to it and the cringe-factor does me in.

Okay. I admit to succumbing to my 'avoidance' and 'denial of reality' syndromes.

[Purple Avenger]

"libertarian Democrat"

Those are mutually exclusive terms. Democrats are statists. There is no such thing as a libertarian statist.

[Oldcrow]

There is an old saying in India that goes something like this "The Gods pity two kinds of people, those who don't get what they pray for and those who do", the Dhimms are running a bunch of candidates who in my book are Buchanonites and if they take the House in NOV they will wake up to a majority with a bunch of Congressman and Senators that if they were Republican would be called Rino's, so what do we call them? Dino's maybe?

[Shalimar]

"Those are mutually exclusive terms."

Not to Kos they aren't. He wrote an article on the subject of Libertarian Democrats about a month ago in some national magazine. His model is westerners like Schweitzer and Tester. I didn't bother to read it, so I won't try to explain how he reconciles two ideologies that seem mutually exclusive to me too. My point was that Kos isn't a progressive, he doesn't even pretend to be, he is a moderate who is extreme only in his opposition to Bush, a description which fits many ex-Republican opponents of the administration. And yes, you can find many extreme left positions at Daily Kos if you look closely, it is a group blog where anyone can post. Markos himself isn't a progressive.

[Madman in the Marketplace]

Kos is no liberal. He's a former Republican who, like other center-right assholes like Webb, was unable to fight back agaisnt the further right. His site is a cesspool of misogynist, angry fanboys who pretend to be liberal while doing everything they could to drive actual leftist voices off of the site.

They have no principles because they worship at the DLC/NDN/Third Way alter, where selfish southern white boys and ignorant psuedo-libertarian refugees from the collapsed tech bubble go to lick their wounds and plot a way to cash in.

Sadly, those of us actually on the left are utterly ineffectual and unable to fight back ourselves, so the country slides dangerously to the right, with no principled and genuine political pressure on the left to act as a counterbalance to the worst excesses of a party run amok.