Yes indeed. But remember when being a peacemaker and dialog facilitator in this environment that no good deed goes unpunished.

By the way, as an addendum to my advice to muffet, I just ran across this in Huffpo. It seems that no less a figure than Chalmers Johnson agrees with me:

http://tinyurl.com/5ng4dr

And you know what? I’m really starting to get nervous.

Kunstler’s latest: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/86087/

The more I see of McCain in the media, even on Ellen for *&@*sakes, the more I think the fix is ultimately in for him.

To say I’m worried about the second half of 2008 is putting it mildly.

We may be raging in a closed room here. Just for perspective.

Jill: thanks for all you are doing in providing a forum for this discussion. I’m getting more out of reading your posts and these comments than in most progressive national websites combined.

About the temper tantrum analogy:

You are right. It isn’t the kindest analogy and I’m not sure it’s defensible, but here’s how I felt, as the blog author reading comment after comment after comment, all of them in capitals, that profess things like, “NO NO I WILL NEVER DO X!!!!!!!!!”

In blog-speak, in email speak – in cyberspeak – that’s basically kicking and screaming.

So – imagine, if you were face to face with an adult or a child who spoke to you the way those characters represent the tone and level at which they’re speaking. I believe you’d be watching someone have a tantrum.

So – okay – not nice on my part – but I’m not sure how else to express the extreme nature of that kind of “speak” in a comment, if others who frequent blogs or use e-mail know what I mean.

How about this insteaad, since it’s also true:

Okay, everybody in both camps stop acting like four-year-olds i.e., leaving comments that look like this: NO WAY NEVER NEVER NEVER OBAMA and SCOTUS/IRAQ YOU IDIOTS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS.

Now – if people want to continue to leave comments in all caps with all kinds of exclamations marks, they should realize that folks who converse will see that type of contribution as one that may properly be treated as shouting and possibly kicking and screaming – adult or otherwise.

Is that a wee bit better?

Hillary has absolutely nothing to do with this group but they are orchestrating the boycott in her name. If the last six months have taught us anything it’s that guilt-by-association stories are popular in the media and damaging to the candidate no matter how tenuous the association is.

Personally, I still think Hillary has a shot at the nomination. All that stands between it and her is credible evidence of a major slip-up by Obama. If the SDs believe he’s no longer a viable candidate, they’ll defect to Hillary en masse. If Obama has already made such a slip-up you can bet that there are no shortage of people looking to uncover it.

Ironically, the one thing that could prevent even a major slip-up from derailing Obama is the fact that partisan nutballs have already made so many bogus claims about him that a real one could very well be written off as bogus.

She is OBVIOUSLY a McCain operative pretending to be Democrat.

In any case, anger-management approaches probably aren’t going to work with people like me, who aren’t primarily angry, but primarily exhausted and uninspired (and I’m only 45). As I’ve described elsewhere, while a supporter of HRC I always believed, until fairly recently, I would be able, eventually, to get behind the, in my eyes, patently less-qualified Obama. The interior resistance emerged the day pundits prematurely pronounced the race “over,” and HRC’s image was removed from the television’s screen, leaving it split between McCain and Obama. Unexpectedly, the still-historic nature of the race did not leap out at me. What I saw, after all, was not so radically different from what I had been seeing since I was a little girl: two men, this time of merely adequate gifts. I felt (and still feel) incredibly . . . flat.

The challenge for the Obama campaign, relative to someone like me, is to inspire me; I would be happy for them to do it. I’m afraid pure rhetoric and emptily persuasive techniques aren’t going to work, though. If Obama is indeed the eventual nominee, to earn my vote he will need to move past vague effusions and into direct action. I’ve stated before my interest in seeing a strong VP selection who is also happens to be a woman. Other possibilities would be direct and public pronoucements of his plans to enhance the success of women in public life (e.g., a stated commitment to upping the fallen number of women on the Supreme Court), and, overall, a forceful willingness to confront gender issues and their role (which has been intense though not total) relative to the split in the Democratic Party. He will need to overcome his tendency to condescend; he will need, by god, to show conviction and courage in this area. While the jury hasn’t actually convened on any of this (because it can’t yet), my guess is he will not do any of these things, because a) he will be too worried about their ramifications for the GE, and b) he will believe my support to be automatic (where else is sweetie supposed to go?). You are sensitive enough to imagine how I’ll completely flatline confronted with such truisms.

So: absent concrete demonstrations by Obama, there is really very little you or others can do to convince people like me to vote for him. My best advice would be to address your “own” candidate (in quotes because I know and recognize the recent history of your support for him). I agree we must vote in the best interests of our country. I am, however, also a part of that country.

BTW, another long day: I mistakenly posted this comment to another thread first. Please feel free to pull it off that one if you want to.

Thanks, as always, for the great discussions.

Please elaborate — in what ways would it be better? Is McCain now claiming to be a strong proponent of women’s issues? Has he reconsidered his promise to stack the SC with strict conservatives? I suppose it’s possible he has as he seems to change his positions on issues about twice a week.

Indeed. Having her followers tank the election for a fellow dem certainly won’t help Hillary if/when she decides to run again and you can damn well bet that when the next woman runs for the nomination that she’ll have to do it while the pundits speculate on whether her supporters will react the same way if she faces defeat.