Character is precisely the issue. The past seven years have proven that no one in Washington, including Obama, has the character to stand up for common sense and point the USA in a better direction.

"The American genius is about bringing out the extraordinary in ordinary people."

I pray that this spirit is in the air.

Thank you, Arianna.

Fear is not an American value.

Courage and competence are the values that helped us prevail in WW2.

Arianna Huffington first got my notice in the 1990s. She was among the worst of the worst members of the right wing fear movement that she now decries (and pretends is some sort of new thing). If she didn't have money she'd have no place in the progressive movement right now. She was forgiven because she's rich and most of her money comes as the result of her sham marriage to a homosexual politician.

It's amazing to me that progressives have given so much weight to a woman who tried to a professional beard who tried to undermine us when it counted.

She hasn't earned the right to lecture progressives about character. It's really sad how well she and to a lesser extent David Brock were able to so easily reinvent themselves so that they can profit from the very progressives that they spent a decade trying to destroy.

It's also sad that none of the participants in this book club took Arianna to task for her hypocrisy. I won't buy her book and I won't visit Huffington Post. There are plenty of real progressives out there who deserve our patronage.

Just before the 1968 election Christopher Lasch wrote something very similar to what Arianna is now saying:
"Ever since the Cold War began," Lasch wrote in the NYRBooks (Oct. 10, 68), "the Center in American politics has increasingly had to adopt the policies and outlook of the Right. Thus the Truman Administration, after first ridiculing the rightist myth of an internal communist conspiracy, set up a loyalty program based on the premise that this myth was a reality. Similarly, the Eisenhower Administration outmaneuvered Joseph McCarthy by making his anti-communist crusade official policy, in the form of Attorney General Brownell's security program. In foreign policy, liberals of the Center adopted as their own the theory that mililtant communism, bent on world domination, had to be contained by armed force, even though the policy of containment, as originally formulated by George F. Kennan, had not been intended to be exclusively military in its emphasis. When right-wing politicians launched their hysterical atttack against Castro, Kennedy obliged them, in spite of his own last-minute misgivings, with the Bay of Pigs. When Goldwater demanded the liberation of South Vietnam, Johnson denounced him as a demagogue while secretly (and later not so secretly) putting Goldwater's foreign policy into practice.
"The dynamics of Cold War politcs demanded of centrist liberals a continual effort to outmaneuver the Right by preempting it. This strategy, however, far from putting down the Right, merely contributed to its amazing growth."

Is history merely the same carnival that comes to town year after year, in which only the players and the motives change?

Political Lilliputians is right.

I mean, how can a lickspittle, corporatist flack-pol actually appear to be a brave leader? How many of our bought-politicians are leading us all a grand, merry charade? They are actually just Busines ButtBoys yet we see them as heroic, straight-spined, far-seeing protectors of the people?

BushCheney want us all to believe that bailing out Bear ('it's too big to fail!') Stearns is an economic policy, that strutting on an aircraft carrier deck is macho, and that outsourcing torture is 'manly'. All they offer us are more delusions on a rapid downward spiral to self-destruction.

Could we please cut to the chase here?
It shouldn't take megadoses of character OR leadership to hand the sorry, self-pitying, preening asses of these GOP clowns to their owners on a very bright, shiny platter in 2008.

Dem should look every single GOP candidate in the eye and ask, "Why are you affiliated with a party whose Vice President is implicated in outing a CIA agent and made millions from no-bid contracts in Iraq?" And then follow up with, "Why are you affiliated with the Rove-led, Abramoff funded GOP?"

And any Dem who doesn't truly believe that the GOP have imploded into a deceitful, self-delusional cabal of corrupt, bleating weenies shouldn't be running for office in 2008.

This year shouldn't require the Great Statesmanship of a Washington or a Lincoln; a modestly sane, unflinching person with the ability to read and ask a lot of questions about budgets should be sufficient.

The only way to cut through GOP fear mongering is the way Barack is doing it: "I want to campaign the same way I govern, which is to respond directly and forcefully with the truth."

So powerful is this strategy, that it's not only neutralizing all the standard "Democrats are traitors" garbage, but it's also doing a great job defending against the "Be Afraid of this Black Guy with an Arab name and crypto-Muslim beliefs bent on terrorizing America from within with his hypnotic Kool-Aid Speeches" line of attack.

Calling bull$hit on Republicans and responding like an adult with truth is really something else.

I love the Obama campaign.

The Huffington post censors its blogs with a heavy hand as a matter of course, often delaying comments for hours while the censors determine what does or does not meet some standard which is far more strict than the published policy. What is the Huffrington Post's agenda? What ideas are being supressed? Is that really appropriate for a Progressive American Website?