Tom Coburn: Howard Dean of the right?

By Aziz P. -
I think I detect a similar pattern here - see my RedState diary for details.

I should clarify that I don't really care about Coburn being elected or not to the Senate - unlike most Daily Kos readers, I'm not on the Democrats Always Rule train. I don't think I know enough about Coburn to assess whether he really is a right-wing wacko r whether he's just coming off that way. We complained about the media filter alot around here when it made our guy look like a leftist moonbat - one has to at least acknowledge the possibility it works in reverse too.

My larger point is that Coburn seems to have the same ability to torpedo himself that Dean displayed. Remember Dean's refusal to open his Vermont records? Remember Dean's Confederate Flag in Pickup Trucks comment? We defended him as best we could but he did damage to himself. Coburn strikes me as remarkably similar in his tendencies.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A fair solution to Jerusalem

By Aziz P. -
I remember reading one of the books by Tom Clancy in which Jack Ryan was credited with coming up with a solution for Middle East peace which was pointedly never actually detailed in the novel. It was just a way to give his character some foreign policy cred, but ended up like that mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. I couldn't help but be reminded of that, though, when I read former New York mayor Ed Koch's innovative solution to resolving the status of Jerusalem . Instead of putting the hot-button issue of Jerusalem last on the agenda, the issue should be addressed first. If the Jerusalem question is solved, everything else should fall into place more easily. I believe there is a way to keep Jerusalem unified. I am talking not only of the old walled city, which is a very small part of the city of Jerusalem, but the whole city, east, west, north and south. [...] My suggestion is to situate the new Palestinian capital in that part of East Jerusalem that is occupied overwhelming...
Read more

Conservatism's shari'a, liberalism's ijtihad

By Aziz P. -
An interesting meta-debate by intellectual conservatives over conservatism's future is playing out. It started with David Frum's Waterloo essay, which led to his political excommunication. Julian Sanchez observed that this represented an epistemic closing of the conservative mind , a thesis that was validated by the retribution visited upon Jim Manzi for daring to suggest that conservatives will achieve more persuasion by using honest, strong arguments instead of weak, emotional ones. All of this has led John Quiggin at Crooked Timber to argue most wisely that as conservatism implodes, liberalism needs to find its own rationale that is more than just "not conservatism". Quiggin has a list of priorities for the liberal movement to address, and closes with the general plea, ...the left has to stand for something more than keeping the existing order afloat with incremental improvements. We need to offer the hope of a better world as an alternative to the angry tribali...
Read more