Thread: Do the Dems Have Some Kind of Death Wish?

Howard dean is a socialist, through to the bone.

I don't know if anyone read or heard of this yet, but it's interesting:

WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (news - web sites)'s former finance director has been indicted on charges of filing fictitious reports that misstated contributions for a Hollywood fund-raising gala for the senator, the Justice Department (news - web sites) said Friday.

The indictment, rare for a political campaign, was unsealed in Los Angeles charging David Rosen with four counts of filing false reports with the Federal Election Commission (news - web sites). The charges focus on an Aug. 12, 2000, dinner and concert supported by more than $1.1 million in "in-kind contributions" — goods and services provided for free or below cost. The event was estimated to cost more than $1.2 million.

The FBI (news - web sites) previously said in court papers that it had evidence the former first lady's campaign deliberately understated its fund-raising costs so it would have more money to spend on her campaign.

While the event allegedly cost more than $1.2 million, the indictment said, Rosen reported contributions of about $400,000, knowing the figure to be false.

The indictment charged that he provided some documents to an FEC compliance officer but withheld the true costs of the event and provided false documents to substantiate the lower figure.

In one instance, Rosen obtained and delivered a fraudulent invoice stating the cost of a concert associated with the gala was $200,000 when he know that figure was false, according to the indictment. The actual cost of the concert was more than $600,000.

Each of the four counts of making a false statement carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines upon conviction.

Rosen's attorney, Paul Mark Sandler, did not return a call asking for comment. Mrs. Clinton's lawyer on campaign finance matters, David Kendall, had no immediate comment.

The businessman who hosted the event, Peter Paul, has told federal authorities that it cost more than $1 million and that he had been surprised when he saw that most of the contributions were not reported.

The money from the fund-raiser went to Mrs. Clinton's successful campaign for a Senate seat from New York, the Democrats' national Senate campaign organization and a state Democratic Party committee.

The joint fund raising made the rules more complicated because the gala raised both "hard money" — funds given to candidates subject to federal limits — and "soft money" that was unregulated and unlimited under the former campaign finance law.

Underreporting the cost of the event allowed the committee to spend less of the coveted hard money, contributions that unlike soft money could be used to cover Clinton's campaigning costs.

Federal law governing such joint fund-raisers was designed to prevent joint committees from circumventing restrictions on the contributions given directly to candidates.

Most allegations of campaign finance irregularities are handled administratively through the FEC, although the Justice Department has investigated such matters in the past.

During former President Clinton (news - web sites)'s administration, a Justice Department campaign finance task force charged more than two dozen individuals and two corporations with fund-raising abuses from the 1996 election cycle. Many of the charges involved Democratic fund raising.

In addition to his Clinton effort, Rosen has raised money for several other high-profile Democratic candidates, including former presidential hopeful Wesley Clark (news - web sites). Most recently, he was named to the fund-raising team of Donnie Fowler, a candidate for the Democratic National Committee (news - web sites) chairmanship.

"I'm sorry that that happened to David, but I don't think it's going to stop or slow down the campaign for chair," Fowler said in a telephone interview Friday.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...y_clinton_aide

Thirteen months since this thread was started and ended, but how 'bout THIS article to revive it:

February 2, 2006
State of the Democratic Party
By Tony Blankley

During an election campaign, political operatives are fond of seeking to induce in their opponent a negative "defining moment." That is to say a highly publicized moment when their opponent portrays everything that is wrong with him. In 2004, John Kerry provided that moment when he said he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it.

Surely, at the State of the Union address the Democratic Party provided such a moment when, as has already been well commented on by others, they wildly applauded President Bush's statement that Congress failed to pass Social Security reform last year.

As the party of reactionary inertia -- as the party that not only doesn't have any solutions to today's dangers and problems but denies that such problems exist -- the Democrats on the floor of the House Tuesday night demonstrated a flawless, intuitive sense of its new, disfunctional self.

The Democrats' wild applause on behalf of doing nothing was more than a merely tactical political blunder. It displayed a deeper truth about them.

If one recalls, last year, the official position of the Democratic Party was not only that they opposed President Bush's Social Security reform, they argued there was no crisis -- no major problem that required rectification.

(In fact, Social Security has $4 trillion of unfunded liability, and if major changes are not made quickly, we will only be able to pay the retired baby boomers about 70 cents for each dollar of promised benefits.)

Social Security is the single most iconic Democratic Party issue of the past hundred years -- the Democrats created Social Security in 1935, and have won countless elections since then by beating up Republicans for allegedly not supporting it. It was the Democratic Party's sacred virgin. They would lie for it, die for it, steal for it, demagogue for it -- but never cheer its demise or harm, even sarcastically.

Their collective decision to cheer the failure of the body politic to provide for sufficient revenues to pay the benefits was an act of historic shame for the Democratic Party.

Worse than that for the Democrats, it shows how severely degraded their political instincts have become. Tip O'Neil's Democratic Party of 20 years ago would never have cheered the failure of Social Security -- even to try to make a small political point. To be sure, they would demagogue the issue ruthlessly, but never be seen to be walking away from the sacred program.

Until George Bush became president, the Democrats, for better and for worse, were a liberal party. Deformed by hatred of the current president, the Democrats have become a nihilist party.

It is one thing to oppose one's opponent's policies. After all, Benjamin Disraeli, the founder of the modern British Tory Party, once famously observed that the job of an opposition party is to oppose. But he also said they should oppose but not obstruct. And while in the minority he carefully proposed policies he would implement when his party came into power.

But today's Democrats largely refuse to even admit that the problems President Bush is trying to solve even exist. They offer nothing. And this mentality was also on display Tuesday night in Congress. On most of the president's major pronouncements regarding our war against radical Islam, the Democrats sat on their hands.

Or, in the case of Hillary Clinton when a non-response was politically impossible, she would, with an icy look that could freeze a furnace, applaud in a slow, robotic, menacing manner. Woe betide the object of that frigid esteem. On Iraq, on Iran, on intercepting terrorist communications, they have no positive proposals for success.

President Bush caught the essence of today's Democratic Party in a rather elegant double epigram: "Hindsight alone is not wisdom, And second-guessing is not a strategy."

I wouldn't be surprised to see that thought become the strategic negative communication theme for the Republican Party this campaign season. That is the trouble with being a rotten tomato-throwing member of the bleacher crowd. One may develop a small following amongst one's fellow complainers, but no large group of people are going to ask you to come out and lead the team.

But not satisfied to be a head in the sand, reflexively negative opposition party, an increasing number of Democrats and their supporters in the leftish fever swamps have started calling for President Bush's impeachment.

While I haven't seen any polls yet on the subject, I would guess that something less than 10 percent of the American voting public would look forward to seeing the last two years of the Bush presidency consumed with a Democratic Party-controlled Congress trying to impeach the president during a time of war.

Somehow the Democratic Party -- for 180 years the most electorally successful political party on the planet -- has now almost completely mutated into a party too loathsome to be seen in public, and too nihilistic to be trusted with control of even a single branch of government.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Com...2_2_06_TB.html

And another:

'I Hope She Drowns'
The implosion of the Democratic Party. Plus Tom Shales's snobbery and a tribute to Wendy Wasserstein.

Thursday, February 2, 2006 12:01 a.m.

The president's State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. He asserted more than he persuaded, and he chose to redeclare his beliefs rather than argue for them in any depth. If you believe, as he does, that the No. 1 priority for the American government at this point in history is to lead an international movement for political democracy, and if you believe, as he truly seems to, that political democracy is in and of itself a certain bringer of world-wide peace, than this speech was for you. If not, not. It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge.
It was the first State of the Union Mr. Bush has given in which Congress seemed utterly pre-9/11 in terms of battle lines drawn. Exactly half the chamber repeatedly leapt to its feet to applaud this banality or that. The other half remained resolutely glued to its widely cushioned seats. It seemed a metaphor for the Democratic Party: We don't know where to stand or what to stand for, and in fact we're not good at standing for anything anyway, but at least we know we can't stand Republicans.

There was only one unforgettable moment, and that was in a cutaway shot, of Hillary Clinton, who simply must do something about her face. When the president joked that two people his father loves are turning 60 this year, himself and Bill Clinton--why does he think constant references to that relationship work for him?--it was Mrs. Clinton's job to look mildly amused, or pleasant, or relatively friendly, or nonhostile. Mrs. Clinton has two natural looks, the first being a dull and sated cynicism, the second the bright-eyed throaty chuckler who greets visiting rubes from Utica. The camera caught the first; by the time she realized she was the shot, she apparently didn't feel she could morph into the second. This canniest of politicians still cannot fake benignity.





Maybe she knew the habitués of the Daily Kos, and other leftwing Web sites, were watching. Conservatives are always writing about the strains and stresses within the Republican Party, and they are real. But the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.
The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.





On the subject of political passion Tom Shales, longtime TV critic of the Washington Post and possessor of occasional eloquence, wrote a piece this week that deserves comment. I don't mean his State of the Union review, which began, "George Bush may or may not be the worst president since Herbert Hoover . . ." I mean his attack last Monday on "Flight 93," the A&E television movie on that fated 9/11 flight. Mr. Shales said it was shameful that vulgar dramatizers would "exploit" the pain of those on the flight and those they left behind. Or as he put it, he had, innocent that he is, thought it "unthinkable" that "even the sleaziest producers" would "exploit any aspect of a nightmare that the nation had witnessed in horror."
By exploit I think he means "remember." There is nothing vulgar, low or unhelpful about remembering the particular heroism of Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick and dozens of others. Their action--they stormed the cockpit that day, forced the plane down and kept it from hitting a Washington target, presumably the Capitol or the White House--was a moment of courage and sacrifice, and we all owe them a great deal. Imagine if the particular wound the hijackers meant to inflict had been successful that day. Imagine how much worse it would have been,

Remembering the men and women of Flight 93 isn't a self-indulgence but a duty. One senses in the Shales review the sneaky little suggestion that those who would remember, and who would tell this story (based by the way on the surviving telephone and other harrowing tapes of that flight) are in fact being political. But one suspects it is Mr. Shales who is being political. Maybe he fears those stupid Americans will get all emotional if they revisit part of the horror of that day, and go out and do something bad. Let's not speak of it lest the rabble be roused.

What a snob.

You wonder at the intemperance of angry young lefties and then think of the example set for them by exhausted old lefties.

I just love your "revivals."

Yeah, I had higher hopes for the Democratic party this year. I really didn't think they would jump into the Lefty volcano but rather continue to dance on the rim a bit.

Instead, it's been an almost perfect swan dive into the caldera this last year, hasn't it?

So when the Democratic party splits into a hard left-wing faction and a centrist JFKennedy party, who gets named what? Corporate wisdom says that they let the crazy lefties and Communists have the "Democratic party" name, as its now too sullied by reactionary idioacy, but what should they re-brand themselves as for the future?

-dale

Maybe the leftwing nuts of the Democratic party can split and form their own party and they can call themselves "the Know Nothings."

Originally Posted by dalem

Yeah, I had higher hopes for the Democratic party this year. I really didn't think they would jump into the Lefty volcano but rather continue to dance on the rim a bit.

Instead, it's been an almost perfect swan dive into the caldera this last year, hasn't it?

So when the Democratic party splits into a hard left-wing faction and a centrist JFKennedy party, who gets named what? Corporate wisdom says that they let the crazy lefties and Communists have the "Democratic party" name, as its now too sullied by reactionary idioacy, but what should they re-brand themselves as for the future?

-dale

JFK a centrist?

Oh, that's rich.

Well, what he means is, JFK actually OPPOSED our enemies, and was nominally an enemy of communism. He actually cut taxes (radically so), and wasn't for unilateral disarmament and pants-wetting every time Kruschev raised his voice.

Compared to today's 'centrist' Democrats, JFK was a veritable war-mongerin' corporate shill that hated the Poor.