I'm irritated with Kos

You know, it irritates me to see how low the highest among us will sink once we lose.

Kos posted some crap about how Kerry isn't the right candidate, blah blah blah, he had his chance, blah blah blah, and it really got under my skin. So I responded (http://watchingthewatchers.org/index.php?p=143).

We need to do better than slamming our candidate because he lost the election. This is ridiculous, and it's one of the reasons we keep losing.

~A!

There are candidates who have lost the presidency once and won it twice.

There are candidates who have lost the presidency once and won it twice.

i thought we were shipmates...

:cry:

It really hurt....

I hope he comes back with hardtack information before the deadline....

I've given up on Kerry. I don't even think about him anymore. I think it's up to us to fight on.

I hope he'll come back and fight for us, but I'm not counting on it.

Kerry's campaign was by no means perfect. I thought then, though, that it would be good enough.

There were cultural forces working against us. The Democratic Party needs to reorient itself. That's going to take time and likely will mean a few more painful losses.

But I don't think Kerry could have done any more to fight against these historical forces. No one could have done better, things being what they are. Maybe not even the Big Dawg.

This election has less legitimacy than the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Smack Down series. The script was pre-written, the outcome fixed, and the aftermath an example of crass theatrics.

The least a strong Democrat, i.e., KOS could say is that we have to bear down hard and bear down now to make sure this never happens again.

I've seen damn little on his site since the election to call attention to the panoply of problems and possibilities of fraud.

Therefore, any criticism of candidates is ill-considered since our candidate may very well have won.

Tired of self-appointed smart asses with the intellectual gifts of a gnat pretending to be pundits with the intellectual gifts of flies.

KOS, get it together and stop being an Ass-Clown!

------------------------
Corporate America controls the media and we get manufactured news.
Corporate America now controls the voting machines and we get manufactured elections.

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

But let's calm down. I don't want you to explode! Take care! And let's not hurt each other.

But every word of your point is well taken. You make sense. And this is how I feel. I refuse to second-guess the candidate, the campaign, our choice, our platform, or whatever.

We lost because of voter intimidation, shennanigans,and the fact that most voter are complete idiots.

I'm dealing with it. Let's heal. And then let's come out supporting our principles (standing by them) and fighting!

there will really be any healing until we win, whenever that may be.
Or at least until we prove that there WAS widespread voter fraud. Too many of us showed up at the polls to have the result that we have been given.

But I didn't want to calm down last night, when I wrote it. I read it five times before I posted it, accoding to that old Abe Lincoln rule, and still thought it said what needed to be said.

We need to work together, and I know attacking him doesn't accomplish that, but I refuse to cowtow to the "big bad blogger", if ya can dig it.

~A!

You wrote to Kos:

" They don’t constantly revise their stances on the issues, and they don’t start beating on their losing candidates before all of the votes are counted."

They do in fact revise their stances on issues: some switch from pro-choice to anti-choice (e.g. Bush Sr.), some switch from isolationist to war hawk (e.g. Bush Jr.), and they frequently turn their back on candidates, they just do it in a more mafia style way (e.g., Darrell Issa virtually funded the recall of Gray Davis in CA, but was told in no uncertain terms to get off the ballot to make way for a certain Austrian actor whose grandparents were Nazis).

They have never had a candidate pre-concede (i.e., before all the votes were counted), so maybe we will never know how they would respond to such a person.

I understand your points, but I think that loyalty to party, principle, and ideology is more important than loyalty to any one individual (unless that person has done something to earn that extra loyalty or bond of friendship). I think people lean left because they oppose the notion of a cult of personality--they like the message, often regardless of messenger.

I saw great unity this year, perhaps greater than ever before: the convention was completely bland, glossing over real differences between DLC-types, progressives, and Blue Dogs. Also, the Nader vote defection was what, a mere 10% or so of his vote in 2000? As a party, we gave more to Kerry and the DNC than ever before. We tried and we united behind Kerry, even if our preferred candidate was Dean, Clark, Kucinich, whatever.

However, now Kerry has abandoned us. He caved like a ground hog afraid of its shadow, without waiting for ALL votes to be counted. And in the process, he has set a precedent that the person who is behind in the count as of noon the next day MUST concede. Why could he have not set a precedent of patience? Why couldn't he have stood for accuracy of the vote count and not speed of the vote count?

We have the right to criticize and ask for more. And we'll get better next time only if we speak up. I for one will not be silenced on some pointless altar of unity during failure.

They always come across as solid and unified. The American people, scared sheep that we are, gravitate toward those cults of personality you mentioned. It's in the nature of our species as humans, more likely than not.

I see your point, and I'm not advocating, nor would I ever advocate, shutting up to preserve unity in defeat. My post proves that all by itself. I just think it's hypocritical to work that hard for someone, to commit everything you have to getting them elected, then kick the hell out of them in a public forum afterward.

And he LOST the election. There is no conceivable way to prove he won, no matter how many times we recount the fraudulent electronic ballots, so what was he supposed to do? Fight it with lawyers that couldn't do anything about it?

~A!

although everyone on DU seems to assume so.

I think he could have and should have just remained silent. IF a statement were necessary (and I'm not sure that it ever is; people should ignore the media more often), his staff could have simply said that it would be a disservice to all the folks who came and waited for hours to vote to announce anything until every last vote had been counted.

By just remaining silent, he would have set a precedent of patience--if Afghanis can wait a month to get their votes counted (a mere 10 million of them), why can't we?

Plus, I don't know if you have gone to all the other threads and seen the weird stuff about more votes than voters in OH, several Dem Counties in FL going 75% for Bush, etc. While it is true that some of this may not be funny business at all, and even if it all were, it might not be enough to flip the tentative results, at least the press would be looking into it . As it is, they can ignore the reports with impunity because "It's over. Kerry already conceded." They moved on.

All I'm saying is that it is not a black and white world of immediately concede or engage in legal battles. There is a whole universe of choices out there. And the Dem leaders seem to have forgotten that.

at this moment.

regardless of the election's results, kerry should have at least done us the kindness of making sure diebold's (ES&S, etc) machines didn't disappear the vote.

...I think one of the weaknesses of our party over the past few decades has been that, once someone has run as our candidate and lost, they basically are expected to disappear.

Sometimes, an election loss doesn't mean the candidate was "damaged goods" -- it merely means that the circumstances of that particular race were bad. Furthermore, candidates can grow after a loss, and return with greater experience and judgement.

Andrew Jackson lost the first time he ran as his party's nominee. So did Richard Nixon. When Abraham Lincoln ran for the presidency the first time, it was against a man who had defeated him for an Illinois Senate race two years earlier. By modern Democratic standards, all of these would have been swiftly relegated to the dustbin of history, while searching frantically for a new "fresh face" for next time.

I'm not saying that I'd back Kerry next time around -- it would depend on who else was running. But I am saying that it would be wise for the Democrats to have both Kerry and Al Gore in the mix for 2008, and not to automatically dismiss either because "they had their chance."

I think it was Gore who ran off to Europe and abandoned us to work on his beard.
Rather than "expecting him to disappear," there were a good many of us who wanted him not only to stick around, but to stick big, dogging W's every step and showing the press what a true loyal opposition looks like.

Imagine how different this election would have been had Gore commented upon every single mistake, misrepresentation, and lie of the Bush Admin for the last four years and then ran for Pres in 2004!!!

He coulda' been a contender.

Well, it's a theory anyway!

That would have been something to see, wouldn't it?

~A!

that's all