On Tuesday, September 28, 2004, at 03:30 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
The explanation for her behavior that seems most plausible to me is that it is a manifestation of Democrats, and DFL'ers in Minnesota, to treat each successive election as THE CRUCIAL ELECTION that will determine the direcion of the country's movement for a generation, as an election in which their candidate is pitted against the GREATER EVIL Republican.
Robert, you and I go back decades and remember the 1968, 1972, and 1980 elections. And my grandparents taught me well about the 1932 elections. In fact, for Minneapolis this election seems erily like the '32 election with a failed president who has lost nearly as many jobs as Hoover... Take a look at the hordes of unemployed men and women hanging about our Minneapolis streets if you don't believe me. But at least Hoover wasn't ordering our citizens to the other side of the world to secure his buddie's oil interests while forcing us to lay off cops and make our Minneapolis streets unsecure.
More sophisticated Democratic Party voters conceed that their candidate is the LESSER evil.
Robert, we have some quite sophisticated voters of all poliical stripes in Minneapolis and they pretty much seem agreed that while John Kerry may not be perfect, he is in no way evil. In fact, I don't even think George W. Bush is evil... he's just an untreated alcoholic diagnosed with several untreated psychiatric conditions that through some loophole managed to get appointed president.
We are stampeded with the claim every four years that this is the crucial election that determines whether the country goes fascist or not.
I've been active in the DFL for a couple decades have not heard such claims every four years, where were you?
2000 A.D. was THE CRUCIAL ELECTION AND NOW IT IS 2004.
I heard no such claims in 2000 and even after Bush stole our White House figured we'd have a placid 4 years before we Democrats retook that house and put our nation back on the path of progress. The 9/11 attack changed everything, giving Bush enormous powers to deprive us of our liberties and impose near martial law. The only thing holding him back is the need to delay his party's more draconian plans lest they loose this election. BTW, Republican strategist Karl Rove doesn't seen this 2004 election as keeping Republicans in power for another 4 years, he sees it as establishing a 40 year Republican reign.
I can remember reading all the hysteria in the CHICAGO DEFENDER during the 1964 election and it was as if some people thought that the ovens would be opening to receive African Americans if Goldwater got > elected.
Given the support Goldwater got from white supremecist groups the Defenders theory may have been right, fortunately Johnson was elected and that theory was never tested.
In 1976, I remember the lesser evil argument being used against even such an innocuous Republican candidate as Gerald Ford du
ring his run against Jimmy Carter!
Robert, you may be a bit older than me but I remember '76 well, and I never heard that claim.
The Minneapolis Issues list is currently full of postings about attempts by City politicians to take power away from Minneapolis neighborhoods by dismantling the NRP. These are DFL politicians who are attempting to gut the NRP. This desperation to make each successive election THE CRUCIAL election, whether local or national, by the Democrats might explain Kahn's unethical behavior. Particularly since, as the local example of the NRP illustrates, people are becoming less and less inclined to buy the Democrats, and the DFL's locally, greater evil hysteria in the light of the Democrat's and the DFL's successively greater evil.
We need to put things in perspective here- a few bits of litter left behind by Republican lit droppers and a politicly unattributed rumored restructuring of NRP are nothing compared to the Republican's current shenanigans.... as we speak Minneapolis and St.Paul autoworkers are laid off because after Bush's 25% tax credit for full size pickups their cheaper than the Rangers are local auto workers would like to build. Then take a look at the half empty employee parking lots at the airport- after 9/11 the Republicans pushed through Congress and Bush signed a muti billion dollar windfall for the airlines, who showed their gratitude by laying off thousands of workers. That was just their first bite- today Minnesota Republicans want to give a mismanaged Northwest exclusive use of the main terminal and over a billion dollars worth of improvements... for a corporation with a market capitalization of 700 million dollars!
But in Kahn's mind I can see how it might look. The Republicans have been blown up to represent such evil that they MUST be defeated.
We know not what was on Phyliss Kahn's mind that day in New Hope, but we do know that Fort McCoy can hold enough prisoners to consume a semi trailer load of bread a day. It's public knowledge that the Grand Forks air base can supply not only it's needs for water but a nearby city of 50,000 as well. And why has Volk Field had high barbed wire fence put up around the barracks? Never mind the Badger Army Ammunition Plant which hasn't produced anything since the Vietnam War but is still secured and maintained, with 1400 buildings on 7000 acres. Some of those buildings look like barracks....
What matter the little ethical lapse of stealing an opponent's literature when faced with the MONSTROUS and LOOMING threat of this GREATER EVIL and the DESPERATE URGENCY to defeat it?
It matters little.
Although this explanation touches on national as well as local issues, it explains the local example of Kahn's unethical behavior by putting it in this larger context.
And I' sure that when Hitler and his Nazis won election in the 1930s someone was more worried about some local progressives' petty misdemeanor, and campaigning for some Trotskyist with no chance under the excuse that it wasn't an important election. Have we learned nothing since?
from the high ground in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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