Beto O’Rourke in talks with strategists ahead of likely 2020 bid

12 Comments

1. 

   JoelDanWalls on February 16, 2019 at 10:22 pm

   Oh goody, I can’t wait to see Voice in the Wilderness taking you down over you egregious identity politics.

2. 

   JoelDanWalls on February 16, 2019 at 10:31 pm

   But…but…but Arthur, the article you quoted concludes that O’Rourke is assembling a link of potential donors. That cannot possibly mean just people giving him twenty bucks. It must mean–gasp!!–people in a position to write big checks. Which is evil. Which is the corruption  you say has to be rooted out. Right?? And what about those “Democratic strategists” waiting to see if Beto gets into the race? Aren’t they also part of the corrupt DNC clique?

   • 

     centerfielddj on February 17, 2019 at 12:12 am

     “I don’t want to argue with you; just understand.”

     OK, taking him at his word.

     Arthur may choose to understand that there are big, big problems going on with our governance right now. The longest Federal government shutdown in the history of the United States took place recently. The President is currently attempting to contain the political damage caused by his corrupt, incompetent and immoral leadership by unconstitutionally and recklessly seizing appropriation powers from Congress through his national emergency declaration on Friday. It’s good that Arthur wishes to understand that we can see that his choice to post Beto fanboy post after Beto fanboy post while the Trump Administration loots the Treasury and tries to escape full discovery of their consipiracy with a hostile foreign power betrays his severe anxiety.

     Thanks are offered to Arthur for understanding that Beto O’Rourke has not declared his candidacy for President. Nor has O’Rourke established an exploratory committee. It’s valuable for AG to understand that the community is communicating loud and clear that we’re not interested in getting in a debate about the Presidential primary right now. We already have lots and lots of candidates who have declared their candidacies for the Party’s Presidential nomination, and we need to see the declared candidates and their campaign organizations perform for a while. If Arthur were to develop a keen understanding of the fact that tossing in all his chips hard for a single undeclared Presidential candidate can be seen by us as a clear attempt by to split this community, his newly developed understanding and desire to avoid arguments with us could motivate him to adjust his behavior moving forward.

     • 

       oaguabonita on February 17, 2019 at 12:42 am

        . . . are what ag’s Beto tongue-baths are.

3. 

   Arthur Gilroy on February 17, 2019 at 10:11 am

   As usual, the Past has been heard from in comments here. Thank you all. Your overall negativity is proof of what I have been saying, as is the rising tide of anti-O’Rourke bullshit in the Government Media Complex.

   One problem…the Permanent Government is not necessarily “permanent”!!!

   All things change.

   You too shall pass.

   When?

   And how?

   Ahhhhh…there are the questions!!!

   But the initial question remains:

   To fight or not to fight.

   Shakespeare wrestled with that question.

   So do I.

   You?

   Think on it.

   To [fight] or not to [fight], that is the question:
   Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
   The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
   Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
   And by opposing end them:

   —snip—

   For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
   The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,
   The pangs of despised Love, the Law’s delay,
   The insolence of Office, and the spurns
   That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
   When he himself might his Quietus make
   With a bare Bodkin?

   —snip—

   Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
   And thus the native hue of Resolution
   Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
   And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
   With this regard their Currents turn awry,
   And lose the name of Action.

   —snip—

   My own answer is clear, and has been so since the day after JFK’s assassination when…as a young man, sitting in an old Ithaca, NY cemetery…I began to realize what was happening.

   Fight!!!

   In my own way, with my own talents and understandings.

   You?

   And thus the native hue of Resolution
   Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
   And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
   With this regard their Currents turn awry,
   And lose the name of Action.

   Not so much, apparently.

   But always remember, you supporters of a bipartisanly diseased, totally corrupted government:

   The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. – Martin Luther King Jr.

   If there is a Hell…or even a Purgatory…they are surely populated by many who looked the other way, who “[lost] the name of Action” during times when enterprises of great pitch and moment were in their beginnings.

   “The times, they are a’changin’/You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing” wrote one of our own great bards.

   Still true.

   Bet on it.

   Naysayers…on both sides of the semi-nonexistent aisle…abound.

   They may win again.

   This time.

   But “the times???”

   They are a’changin’!!!

   Bet on it.

   I am.

   Y’all?

   Not so much, on plentiful evidence.

   So it goes.

   Later…

   AG

   • 

     centerfielddj on February 17, 2019 at 11:25 am

     “I don’t want to argue with you; just understand.”

     LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

     Arthur, tell us again about your belief that unemployment insurance saps personal initiative.

   • 

     centerfielddj on February 17, 2019 at 12:15 pm

     Arthur, in addition to receiving your wisdom on unemployment insurance, we would like you to further defend this view of yours that African-Americans were better off under Jim Crow laws:

     “If an entire, thriving culture…the urban black culture of the ’30s, ’40s + ’50s…has been decimated and replaced by gang warfare, sorry excuses for schools, rancid projects and some middle class black suburban ghettoes…because that’s what most suburban black neighborhoods really are these days, white flight made them that way…how effective has the Civil Rights bill really been, Nick?

     Sure, 10%…or even 20% or 30%…of the black population is living better than were their equivalents in the pre-“Civil Rights” days, but what about the 70% or 80% that’s still stuck in gang-infested, drug-infested ghettoes? What’s it done for them except trap them on yet another set of mean, dead-end streets? The state of urban America is a thousand times worse than it was in the ’40 s and ’50s. Murder rates are skyrocketing, the entire educational system is breaking down, the prison population is soaring and children are being shot in the street by other children.

     It ain’t working, Nick.

     Not by a long shot.

     Things have certainly changed. They have regressed.“

     Those of us living in the fact-based community recognize as true the statement made by a community member in response to you at that time:

     “The black community is much better off now than pre-Civil Rights on a whole hosts of measures: high school graduation rates, poverty rates, college graduation, infant mortality, and so on–and for most of these measures, they are better for the majority of African-Americans, not some small percentage.
     That doesn’t mean there aren’t huge problems still to overcome, but to suggest that black folks are worse off now than in the ’40s and ’50s is nonsense. Even areas that worsened post-Civil Rights, such as out-of-wedlock births, incarceration rates and violent crimes, have been declining since the 1990’s.”

     Thank you for attempting to defend this view of yours, and for not arguing with us; just helping us understand.

     • 

       oaguabonita on February 17, 2019 at 2:35 pm

        . . . extremely well how dishonest purity trolls like ag serve regression. The trolling syllogism goes like this:

       1. Dishonest description, falsified as needed to serve the narrative being promoted. In this example, even ag acknowledges some progress — though of course he downplays and lowballs it because it doesn’t serve his narrative — then adds a string of completely factually unsupported (and quickly rebutted) false assertions that he pretends support the preposterous conclusion to the narrative, i.e., that the result of civil rights legislation has been “regress[ion]”.
       2. That false conclusion then becomes the premise of the almost invariable core of the “argument”, i.e.: because the progress that quite obviously has occurred (ag’s false narrative to the contrary not withstanding) has not been complete, total, perfect, finally solving and totally eliminating all problems that they attempted to address and delivering us all to Utopia; . . .
       3.  . . . therefore those responsible for what progress has occurred and those working consistently to extend it are “centrist”, “neocentrist” (whatever the fuck that’s even supposed to mean!), “bipartisan”, [etc., blah blah blah blah] traitors.

       It’s often been said that “we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. But doing exactly that is ag’s entire, regressive “program” (to the extent anything as coherent as a “program” can be deciphered from his dishonest, often self-contradictory, incoherent blather full of falsehoods).

   • 

     oaguabonita on February 17, 2019 at 8:01 pm

      . . . “is blowing”. Leave it to the self-impressed professional musician to neither know the song he mis-quotes by “one of our own great bards” nor get that the mis-quote completely destroys — and so obviously doesn’t work with! — its rhythm.

     And while I’m here, please do document the existence of “the rising tide of anti-O’Rourke bullshit in the Government Media Complex” that you proclaim here.

     I’m not a consumer of “the Government Media Complex” (if such a thing even existed!), so perhaps such a tide in such a mythical beast really does exist, and I just have missed it. Could be! (Though I doubt it!)

     But my impression from the bits of *WtUCM that come to my attention is that they’re actually quite “Beto-curious” (if I may coin that term), and not remotely Beto-antagonistic that I have seen/heard. So enlighten me (if you can)! (Should go without saying that this means linked direct, verbatim quotation, not declarations from you, which history shows to be completely worthless.)

     Or is this, as usual, just more of the same ol’ same ol’ spewed bullshit, pulled straight from your ass?

     *Worse-than-Useless Corporate Media (excluding, obviously, the rightwing media propaganda echo chamber)

     • 

       JoelDanWalls on February 19, 2019 at 2:03 pm

       It’s also ironic that Arthur Gilroy, scourge of identity politics, likes to describe his professional relationships in terms of his colleagues’ ethnicity, and to describe Beto O’Rourke’s alleged political appeal in terms of racial or ethnic blocs.

4. 

   Arthur Gilroy on February 17, 2019 at 2:27 pm

   A group…or perhaps better, a cadre…of people on this site have tried everything in their power to discourage criticism of the Democratic Party as it stands today. They automatically downrate such posts and have endlessly attacked several posters as liars, fools, pro-Trump trolls and/or spreaders of Russian propaganda. When effectively rebutted, they simply ignore the rebuttal and repeat the same attacks. These McCarthyite tactics are intended to exhaust the patience of the attacked posters and discourage others from reading or posting similar material. It has worked on a few posters, who have simply given up. It has not worked on me. I initially answered their attacks with attempts at reason. After realizing that this was a total waste of time, I have pretty much stopped replying to them. My comments and articles on this site are my replies. Read what I have to say; consider what they have to say and how it is said, and then make up your own minds. Thank you-AG

5. 

   JoelDanWalls on February 19, 2019 at 2:00 pm

   Arthur, still waiting to hear your explanation of why it’s OK for Beto O’Rourke to have his list of potential donors and relationships with professional political consultants, but evil when other candidates do likewise.