Tag Archives: Politics

No legitimate number to be had

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In regards to the Democratic primaries and the meeting today of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules meeting today, here in Washington, on the topic of seating delegates from Michigan and Florida:

I’m not sure how one can make a fair extrapolation of those states’ primary election results because of the conditions they were held under.

I’m not partial to either of these candidates, and I am not a Democrat. I am befuddled by what seems like a fanciful wish by more than just Hillary Clinton to extract a legitimate number from a process that was officially abandoned.

The Party punished those two states, fairly or unfairly, and secured pledges from its presidential candidates not to campaign there. Clinton had a higher profile by default, and did project an additional presence there more than Obama, although technically not campaigning there (she seemed to just hold fundraisers and getting more media attention for it, if Obama did the same he didn’t benefit the same).

Whether the rules are fair or not is moot at this point — they were put in place and agreed to. People made decisions and overt commitments based on these rules.

Obama, wishing to compete effectively and obeying the rules, spent his money and time elsewhere so as to not even get on the ballot in one case. If he had made an effort there, had the rules allowed, there almost certainly would have been a different outcome in those elections. He certainly would’ve succeeded in getting on the ballot.

Clinton doubled-back on her commitment to these rules after the fact and when the overall vote appeared closer and, presumably, her campaign became a little more desperate. She began to join the state parties in overtly agitating for retroactive representation, pleading in the language of democracy. While the disenfranchisement wasn’t so democrat, the re-enfranchisement she has pursued is not any more democratic.

A fair election that presented all the choices did not happen in these two states, and Clinton seems to have acted duplicitously.

I’d say that the party members in Michigan and Florida have valid reason to protest the tactics and rules of their national party, but I don’t see how the vote that happened under the circumstances it did could be considered fair and anything to base a delegation count on with any credibility. If the party decides to give the states representation at the convention, and assign delegates based on those primary votes, I would think it would only secure in many minds that this party is even more schizophrenic or a farce.

The capital-D Democrats seem to have little to do with democracy. (And this is hardly the first cause to inspire that observation.)

Is Muqtada al-Sadr anti-American? NPR thinks so.

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A friend, independent journalist Brian Conley, posted to Twitter about a use of the term “anti-American” by JJ Sutherland on NPR that I also questioned. Brian noted his disappointment that the term was used when “anti-occupation” would be more accurate, and obviously true. Since then I have picked-up on more seemingly lax and inaccurate uses of the term. It seems like a trend, maybe even an editorial policy.

You may parse the term anti-American differently than I, and if it is truly that subjective, I think that only gives more cause to use the term sparingly. To me the terms signifies a general disdain for all things American: Americans, American culture, the actions and policies of the US government. I’m not convinced that is accurate in the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. When you can isolate the sentiment to some subset of those categories a more accurate term can almost always be found, or qualifiers need to be deployed.

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Of course it’s political

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A declaration that something is not political in itself will highlight the politics of the thing.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.