Months ago, I predicted that the 2008 general election would be between Mitt Romney and John Edwards, anticipating a celebrated match-up between two talented, articulate, and strikingly good-looking candidates.
I’m not sure if my prediction will hold true, but on this eve of the Iowa caucus, let me be clear once more that I am endorsing John Edwards for the Democratic nomination. Of the top-tier candidates, he has the boldest and most progressive platform. His willingness to talk about the widening gap between rich and poor is refreshing; of all the major candidates, he promises to be the most aggressive in standing up for environmental and economic justice.
On the Republican side, it’s an easier call. John McCain is the class of the field. Unlike most of his fellow GOP candidates, McCain has not given in to the anti-immigrant xenophobia sweeping the party of the elephants. He is the only Republican to acknowledge the reality that global warming is largely a human-made phenomenon, and he has earned the enthusiastic endorsement of Republicans for Environmental Protection. Though far from being progressive in any real sense of the term, McCain’s willingness to buck right-wing orthodoxy and his commitment to the preservation of wild spaces earn him my vote.
McCain has not given in to the anti-immigrant xenophobia sweeping the party of the elephants.
He held out for a while, but he eventually gave in. A month or two ago he made a big deal of going around and saying “I used to have marginally reasonable views on immigration, but then I listened to the people, and they told me to hate on the illegals, so hating on the illegals it shall be.” I can’t find the link right now, though I clearly remember laying it out in the Dispatch.
FYI, you have a huge pile of spam links hiding in your headers. It looks like there’s none hiding in your footers or sidebar, though I didn’t check carefully. Have you left permissions too free on your templates?
Gosh, I haven’t the faintest idea what “permissions” are in this instance, or “headers”. I have very little wordpress skill…
Under your banner image, at the very top, are a bunch of links using spammy terms (drug names, mostly) going to a spam site. They’re in blue and hard to see.
The header is the stuff that appears at the top of every page — your banner. You don’t seem to have any at the bottom (footer). Permissions means that certain people do or don’t have the right to edit a page.
I had this problem because I left the permissions wide open (anyone can edit!) so I could edit my site’s looks in wordpress itself. If you go to your admin page, you used to be able to see the permissions in the presentation/theme editor page, but it seems like I cannot anymore — maybe this is just the version I have, you have an older one.
I’d probably ask Lauren (she did the redesign, right?) to remove the spam (1 minute work) and change the permissions for you. It’s incredibly easy, so anyone with some general css/html knowledge and an ftp program can do it for you, if Lauren can’t. (I can do it, but I recommend giving it to someone you know and trust, unless you’re comfortable changing your passwords afterwards.)
Hugo, if you want a democratic presidency, you ought to be rooting against McCain. On some abstract level, he’s the least appalling of the bunch, but he’s also the one of them whom I can plausibly see pulling off a victory in November. I’m totally with you on Edwards, but I’m way more invested in Romney beating McCain than I am in the Democratic race, because it’s far more important we make damn sure the GOP is sent into the electoral wilderness for a quite a while. McCain’s decency on some issues is outweighed by his warmongering.
DJW, I hear ya. But while I do want the Democrats to win in 2008, I want to see the GOP transformed. I want two parties that stand for reproductive freedom, two parties that take environmental stewardship seriously, two parties that see the need for campaign finance limits and sensible immigration policy. Voting for McCain (who drives the social cons batty, even though he’s fairly solid on their pet issues) is the best vote to help get the GOP to a common-sense position.
Of course, if we could get a candidate with Huckabee’s views on prison reform and poverty; McCain’s views on the environment; Ron Paul’s views on the Iraq war, and Rudy Giuliani’s views on abortion, we’d have an excellent Republican indeed!
I’m anxious to see the GOP transformed as well, but I suspect being sent into the electoral wilderness a decade or so is a necessary precursor to such a transformation.
I’m curious, which primary will you vote in?
I’m a registered Republican, DJW, so I’ll vote for McCain. But the money goes to John Edwards.
If McCain is the least appalling of the bunch, it’s a pretty appalling bunch. He made Ugly-Chelsea-Clinton jokes, than which it’s hard to go lower.
1. Could it be that, just maybe, one need not be xenophobic to want to know exactly who is coming into this country, and to want each person to do so legally?
2. Those hundreds/thousands of scientists who question the supposed “reality” of human activity influencing climate change — would the Republicans for Environmental Protection not listen to what they have to say?
Could it be that, just maybe, one could want to know exactly who is coming into the country and wanting to do so legally, without then descending into xenophobic, hateful rhetoric?