One More Persuasive Argument for John Edwards as Our ONLY Choice in 2008

DaLittle Kitty

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Tue Jan-01-08 04:56 PM
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One More Persuasive Argument for John Edwards as Our ONLY Choice in 2008

This appeared on Huffington Post and is in my opinion represents just one more extremely persuasive argument for John Edwards as opposed to ANYONE else! The other two are "Corporatists" and are the candidates most desired by Republicans as their opponent. That is... HilBill and Obama are the most easily defeated by ANY Republican GE opponent which has been repeatedly substantiated by polling on GE match ups.

Gotta be John Edwards! :)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-welsh/the-edwards-imperative-
b_b_79015.html

The Huffington Post
The Edwards Imperative: Because The Politics Of Compromise Have Failed
Ian Welsh
Posted January 1, 2008

Edwards should be Democratic nominee because he is the most
progressive and electable of the top three candidate and the only one
who understands that entrenched interests like the telecoms, banks,
credit card issuers, health insurers and oil companies aren't
voluntarily going to make some sort of "bipartisan happy consensus"
that costs them billions of dollars and a ton of power, whether doing
so saves millions of lives, trillions of dollars and makes the
country prosperous and safe or not.

Just is not happening.

And anyone who thinks it is (hello, Mr. Obama) is both living in a
fantasy land and certainly is suffering from amnesia, because
nothing, nothing in the last 30 years, indicates that
megacorporations are giving up any power, even a small amount,
without a fight to the death.

Strike you as over the top? Why then, for example, did oil companies
insist on continued subsidies when they were making record profits?
When was the last time health insurance companies were okay with any
expansion of universal health care, unless as with the Medicare drug
benefit, it was going to make them even more money? And let's all
remember the record industry, who think that they own music you
bought, and that you're only renting it and can neither give it away,
sell it or even, much of the time, copy it for your own use.

The filthy rich haven't become richer than any time in U.S. history
because they were willing to give any sucker an even break, and only
a sucker would expect folks like Scaife, Mellon and Murdoch
to "compromise" when they've been winning by not giving an inch.

We could go through policy positions and compare the candidates, one
to an another, and the end result would show that Edwards is slightly
more progressive than Clinton and Obama: a slightly better Iraq plan,
a health care plan that is about equivalent to Clinton's and better
than Obama's, a much better rapport with labor, and so on.

But that's not what this nomination battle is about. All three
candidates are offering basically progressive policies, minus the big
promise to definitely get out of Iraq post-haste.

And the question isn't even, really, do you believe them, though for
the record I have real doubts about Clinton and Obama. However others
don't, and that's fine -- in most respects its a gut-check thing, all
of them have checkered pasts with some votes that are less than
sterling, so in every case each of us has to decide, "Do I really
believe this candidate this time?"

Instead we need to ask, while taking them at face value, does their
plan to actually push through a progressive plan make sense?

Clinton says that she's got the experience to make it work. Even
granting that being the first lady allows her to take credit, the
fact is that the Clinton years saw the Democrats lose both the House
and the Senate and saw Bill Clinton put through many bills that were,
to put it kindly, essentially conservative in nature. And Hillary
Clinton's one big moment in the sun, healthcare reform, ended with
her being given a resounding drubbing by the health insurance lobby.
She was never given such an important policy position again by her
husband. Voting for Clinton is taking on an old scarred fighter with
a bad win/loss record. And all of this is before we get to Mark Penn,
the union-buster, being her chief right hand man.

Then there's Barack "Consensus" Obama. It's hard to even take this
seriously. In 2007 the Republicans in Congress killed, through
technical filibusters, almost twice as many bills as any Congress
ever has. For the last 7 years, George "I won the vote that matters 5-
4" Bush has ruled the country by running rough-shod over the
opposition party, giving them essentially nothing. There has been no
consensus-driven voting or decision-making in the U.S. in 7 years,
and there wasn't that much in the '90s, either. Oh, sure, I
understand that Obama and many Americans would like to go back to the
land of consensus-driven politics, where there's a center and where
everyone works for what is best for America by splitting the
difference. It's a pretty picture. But there's no middle left.

There's no room for splitting the difference between torturing and
not torturing. There's no room for splitting the difference between
selling illegal wars based on lies and not selling illegal wars based
on lies. There's no room to split the difference between respecting
the Constitution and not respecting the Constitution.

There's no middle left and anyone who thinks that the vast majority
of Republican Senators will respond to good will is living in a world
of denial. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in Republican behaviour in
the last 7 years indicates that will happen. Just as nothing in the
behaviour of oil companies and health insurers indicates they're
interested in "compromise" when not compromising has done so very
very well for them and taken them from victory to victory.

Which leaves us with John Edwards: who wants to kick ass, take names,
and help the middle class stop getting reamed out by credit card
companies, banks, oil companies, Wall Street and all the other
invertebrates whose existence is based on sucking blood from ordinary
people while denying they have any responsibility for how pale and
weak the middle class has become.

Can he do it? Many Democrats, used to having their teeth kicked in
for years by Republican bullies, say no. They reason that without 60
votes, they'll still have to compromise with Republicans and so they
want a Compromiser-In-Chief sitting in the White House.

But compromise, tried for damn near 20 years, has gotten us nothing
but our teeth kicked in, our lunch money stolen and thousands of
soldiers and probably a million Iraqis dead. And strangely, despite
not having 60 votes at any point during their period of rule, the
Republicans got through most of what they wanted.

So perhaps the key to getting Republican votes isn't to come forwards
sniveling on ones knees asking what the price for the votes is. I
suggest the key is to have a president aggressively make the case
that the American people want health care, want lower oil prices,
want fairer credit card policies -- a president who is willing to go
the wall over it.

That's what John Edwards is offering. What Obama and Clinton are
offering is, in effect, nothing more than what has already been tried
and failed. Clinton's experience amounted to, at best a tie, and more
realistically, to a decade where the right wing got much of what it
wanted. Obama's "compromising" is exactly what Daschle, Reid and
Pelosi have tried to do, leading to spectacular failure and ending in
a Democratic majority Congress which Republicans like more than
either Democrats or Independents.

It's time for a new approach, and amongst the three front runners in
the Democratic field, that means Edwards. As with FDR, if his
approach works, he will be both the most loved and most hated man in
America, and some will wring their hands about how divisive that is.
But if "unpleasantness" is what is needed to stop going to war
illegally, to end the shredding of the Constitution and to stop the
destruction of the Middle Class, so be it. An unwillingness to really
fight means that those who will, the Republicans, will walk all over
those who won't.

The time for the failed politics of compromise is over.:nuke:

Now it's time for John Edwards.:woohoo: