Where is Senator Obama?

Josh Marshall, over at TalkingPointsMemo.com, asks about something I’ve observed and wondered about, too. That is, even though Sen. Obama leads in the Democratic primary, he has clearly lost the initiative when it comes to setting the national agenda; thus making it harder for his surrogates to go on the offensive on his behalf.

Here’s how Josh Marshall frames it:

His voice seems silent and has for a few weeks. Of course, he’s out in the field campaigning, not focusing on national media and catering to political junkies around the country. But what I really think this is that he’s not controlling the agenda. Hillary’s controlling the agenda, defining the race at the moment. And that’s made him recede into the background, even as he’s a constant topic of conversation.

Clearly it’s easier said than done, however, Sen. Obama needs to flood the national airwaves with a nuts & bolts summery of his agenda, and get away from another mere bio-intro (as candidates often do at this point in the campaign).

Coulter: Stevens Should be Poisoned

Nice to see that our homegrown Taliban, the same group that now exerts so much influence over the one party that rules our country, is still hard at work trying to liberate patriotic Americans from the vise of those evil doers in the Supreme Court. According to some reports, Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor were threatened with assassination after some Republican officials subtly (and sometimes not subtly) suggested that violence against judges was understandable, and perhaps excusable. Of course, these Republican officials made those statements at around the time of the 2004 Presidential elections, and they knew that such red meat comments would go over well with the Republican right wing base.

Here’s what the AP writes:

WASHINGTON (March 16) – Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she and former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor have been the targets of death threats from the "irrational fringe" of society, people apparently spurred by Republican criticism of the high court.

Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa last month that she and O’Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate "patriotic" killing of the justices.

[...]

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter joked earlier this year that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. Over the past few months O’Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.

You gotta love how the so-called Liberal Media excuses their conservative darlings whenever they "joke" about killing a federal official. I mean, let’s say that Michael Moore joked about poisoning a Supreme Court Justice, do you think that the mainstream media would cuddle him like they still cuddle Coulter?

Hard to believe that the same woman that called for the killing of a Supreme Court Justice graced the cover of Time Magazine around this time last year — she’s certainly Ms. Right, and a great representative of everything that’s wrong with that other party and its supporters.

Update: AMERICAblog has a nice round up:

Delay threatens judges

And, let me repost something I wrote in March of last year:

Examples of religious right anti-judge hate speech:

Today, I received this email from the religious right propaganda organ AgapePress:

Judie Brown of the American Life League says the court-ordered starvation of the brain-injured Terri Schiavo is the latest evidence that liberal judges are trying to take on the role of God. "The problem with the court system is that they are moving closer and closer to condemning severely disabled Americans, as a group, to death," she says, "and that ought to frighten everyone."

Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., chief sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment:

"Our nation has a set of activist judges in Massachusetts and a rogue mayor in San Francisco. It is evident that they will openly aid and abet the homosexual lobby. These events over the past week clearly show that gay activists will skirt the law to create a new privilege that has never existed in this country."

Republican National Committee:

In an e-mail message, Christine Iverson, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, confirmed that the party had sent the mailings. "When the Massachusetts Supreme Court sanctioned same-sex marriage and people in other states realized they could be compelled to recognize those laws, same-sex marriage became an issue,” Ms. Iverson said. "These same activist judges also want to remove the words ‘under God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance.

Grassroots to Dems: We Can’t Wait No More

Once more, it looks like the grassroots are ahead of the elected leadership when it comes to setting the pace and agenda. In a post that echoes many of the sentiments I’ve shared here before, for example, that:

To define the Republican party for what they are all one has to do is have the BALLS to go out there and do that, that is: Talk of Republicans for what they are and as they are — then repeat what you said, defend your statement and do it all over again. Of course, it helps if one has supporters and party members with a spine to back one up, and then magnify the message; and, pretty soon, that meme gets out there in the mouths of pundits and the public.

Armando, over at DailyKos.com, quoting from Anonymous Liberal, arrives at the same conclusion:

What Democratic politicians fail to understand–and this is particularly ironic given the Democratic party’s historical association with the labor movement–is that this is fundamentally a collective action problem. The term “reasonable” has no objective meaning, at least in the realm of politics. Whether an idea is deemed “reasonable” has little to do with the merits of the idea and everything to do with the prevailing political climate as interpreted by our national media. GOP strategists like Karl Rove long ago realized that the national media will treat any talking point that is repeated by enough people as ipso facto “reasonable,” and conversely, will treat any idea that is not repeated by a sufficient number of people as “unreasonable” or “extreme,” no matter what its objective merits. It’s a very crude calculus and one that is easily manipulated by shrewd partisans.

. . . What Republican strategists have learned is that when a party speaks in unison, it has the power to define what is considered reasonable in the eyes of the national media, and in turn, the American public.

Democrats, however, cannot seem to internalize this idea. They approach politics as if the rules of reasonability and civil discourse are immutable or have been set by some neutral referee. When someone like Howard Dean steps over this arbitrary line, Democrats join the GOP in immediately calling “foul.” When a Republican steps over the line, however, more often than not his Republican colleagues act collectively to move the line. Suddenly we find ourselves in a debate over whether outing a CIA agent is actually a good thing, or whether a law that has been on the books for three decades and repeatedly reaffirmed by this President should be violated. It doesn’t matter what the consensus was five minutes ago. Talking points that would have seemed totally absurd days earlier suddenly become credible and reasonable, and for no other reason than they are being repeated by a chorus of Republican politicians, pundits, and bloggers. In this way, the definition of “reasonable” can be changed dramatically overnight.

And now to wait for the leadership to catch up to the rest of the us.

Senator Dole Tells Me to Piss Off

Senator Dole, a former Republican presidential candidate no less, writes, “I’ll bet you are an extreme member of the left wing just like Terri Gross.”

Frankly, I was a little surprised to read what Senator Dole had written, on two counts: one, he actually responded to a letter I’d addressed to him and, two, I was surprised and disappointed at the schoolyard level of his missive — though, to his credit, he did stop short of calling my mom names.

Of course, continuing with the schoolyard tone of his response, that good ‘ol stand-by taunt is almost audible — So-and-So, Sitting in A tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G — as Senator Dole naturally concludes that Terri Gross and I “deserve each other.”

So, aside from that little blue pill, what could’ve possible gotten such a rise out of Senator Dole?

(That was a cheap shot, I know — but, come on, it was high and slow… I had to take a swing.)

On April 12 Senator Dole was on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” hawking his book “One Soldier’s Story : A Memoir.” The host, Terri Gross, was extremely accommodating and gave Senator Dole ample time to discuss the book and his life’s story; however, as a responsible journalist, the host asked Senator Dole to comment on some current events, specifically: the nuclear option and Rep. DeLay’s alleged ethics violations. Of course, as expected, Senator Dole immediately resorted to the partisan talking points on both issues; however, to my hear, the Senator went too far when he completely dismissed the allegations against Rep. DeLay as merely an attack by Democrats and their allies in the “liberal media” — including NPR. Now, I don’t have the transcript of the interview, so I cannot post the exact quote, but you can hear the interview here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4587202.

What was even more infuriating is that Terri Gross, of course, did not question Senator Dole’s unfounded accusations and simply let his ridiculous charges rest. Subsequently, Senator Dole insisted that he was on the program to talk about his book and was not there to discuss politics and, of course, Terri Gross acquiesced.

Well, right after I heard the radio interview with the Senator I shot off this letter to his Washington, DC, office:

Which motivated the Senator to respond with:

I like how the good Senator, a former representative and public servant, which at one point had hoped to represent all Americans as our president, basically told me — an American citizen that, to boot, has worn the nation’s uniform — to go piss off. Of course, all is forgiven, since the Senator does close by invoking god’s grace on America — now, as for the rest of the planet, if my reading between the lines is correct, it can simply go piss off.