Ever since Barry and Donna kicked me out of the party that has been my home for over 20 years, I’ve noticed a distinct change in the way I feel about both parties. I also find myself mystified as to how otherwise sane and intelligent bloggers can turn into uncritical partisan cheerleaders like these three stooges did. Perhaps this article by Shankar Vedantam explains why:
“Party identification is part of your social identity, in the same way you relate to your religion or ethnic group or baseball team,” said Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. This explains why, on a range of issues, partisans invariably feel their side can do nothing wrong and the other side can do nothing right. By contrast, moderates don’t feel there is a yawning divide on issues because they don’t identify with one party or another. Moderates, in other words, are like people who are uninterested in sports and roll their eyes when fans of opposing teams hurl abuse at each other.
I am not a moderate, I am a flaming liberal, but I still don’t feel there is a “yawning divide on issues” between the Democrats and the GOP. In fact, I see no difference at all between the two parties when it comes to corruption, but I do see a clear difference between the two candidates.
Barack Obama is far more corrupt than John McCain.
Klownhaus 
Exactly. Corruption comes in all flavors. My eyes were definitely opened this year because of the primary season and what was perpetrated by our very own party. Enough already. To continue the cheerleading because of party identity is a validation of the corruption and subtrafuge. A pox on both their houses.
I don’t agree that Obama is more corrupt – how do you compare? That article though matches reality so well I think I will be reading this guy from now on.
Empty posits the assumption that all corruption is the same. And he does not agree that Barack Obama is more corrupt than John McCain. He then asks, how do you compare?
Well there is petty larceny, and then there is grand theft. There is manslaughter, and then there is murder in the first degree. There is John McCain, and then there is Barack Obama. That, in fact, is how they compare.
But don’t just take my word for it, because facts and figures are truly wondrous things. Such as how much each candidate has collected in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, notorious and now failed mortgage buyers. McCain has collected a total of $21,550 during his 27-year Senate career. Obama has collected $126,349 over three years. In fact, among the entire senate, Obama has catapulted over every other member of the Senate with the single exception of Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who collected 165,400 over 28 years! Anything about seem odd to you? Perhaps even a bit unseemly?
Want to meet Obama’s corporate backers? $398,021 from JP Morgan, $393,899 from Citigroup, $378,400 from UBS, $353,922 from (sadly now defunct) Lehman Bros, $352,603 from Viacom and Sumner Redstone. In case you have no reference points, these numbers are obscene. We’re talking a freshman Senator literally leading the entire Senate in three short years.
Step back through Obama’s past in Chicago and you will be buried beneath more mud than there is in the Louisiana swamps. No politician who has done absolutely nothing can collect this much money without selling his very soul and being bought and paid for right down to his shorty shorthairs.
Empty, Barack is perhaps the dirtiest motherfucker ever to come down the pike. Truly a man for his times. An exemplar of American ambition. And that is why he is probably going to be the next President of these United States. Heaven help us; because we’re going to need it.
makana:
You forgot, among other things, lying, caucus fraud, stealing delegates, astroturfing, and earmarks.
That was a good article you linked to and your right (I think) about the collective recoil so many of us have experienced in 2008. At The Common Ills C.I. always says think of 2008 as a huge disappointment or as vasting liberating and I get her point.
Sorry, “vastly liberating.”