Motley Moose – Archive

A close friend of mine is an aide to Nydia Velazquez. She lives across the street from me in Brooklyn and was one of my good sources when I worked at ABC. We are spending the weekend among other friends here in Fire Island. She was with Nydia yesterday on the conference call with the President. Here’s what she told me.  

I sat a table tonight with five fairly liberal friends of mine who worked their feet raw last year for Obama. Today, as we sat around watching mixed martial arts, I brought up healthcare and mentioned that the right wing was outnumbering the Democrats and Obama’s plan may be defeated.

The response I got was “Gee, that sucks. I hope healthcare passes.”

What’s interesting when talking to Democrats is that you find out how out of touch much of the blogsphere is from the reality of the Democratic Party.

Many Democrats I know support torture, or are against gay marriage, think we should bomb Iran, that universal health care is bad, that labor unions are bad, etc.

As much as the blogs attack the Blue Dogs, the one thing we keep forgetting is that the Blue Dogs are a major part of the party’s voting base…the Democratic party is far more conservative than the Republicans are liberal.  

With health care the topic of the week, I found a friend of mine on Facebook…my old Republican foil at PBS…with an interesting status;

Obama wants universal healthcare solved by the august recess…HAHA how about we resolve THE ECONOMY FIRST so that WE can AFFORD healthcare…and the plan is to take money from the wealthy so the poor can waste time all day going to the hospital….AWESOME.

The thread the followed went for 30 comments and included mostly those in support of healthcare reform…but I got lumped into a spirited debate between my friend (titled as FRIENDS below) and some other dude (titled as OTHER GUY). Suddenly, I found myself in a scene remiscent of the one I was told occured in the 1960’s between Pat Buchanan and Hunter S. Thompson…minus the Wild Turkey.  

In the wake of the liberal outrage at Democrats, talk of a third party has popped up. Obviously most of it from Naderites and deadenders who never wanted a Democratic majority to begin with, but the talk is there.

But as much as I know some of you don’t want to keep pretending to be lackeys for the Democrats…third parties would be counterproductive and would hurt progressives more than Democrats. Here’s why;

This is my first diary, but I’ve been lurking around. I joined not only to be part of this community, but also to post this diary…because I was sick of getting in tussles with some egotistic self-absorbed poster over at MyDD, but nevermind that.

I had a conversation this weekend with a friend of my father’s who works at the Pentagon. My father is a former Major in the US Army. I chatted up my dad’s friend about DADT and got some interesting scoop as to what’s going on with it and why is it difficult to repeal