Blogs For Victory

From northjersey.com:

Meet Caren Z. Turner, a Democratic fund-raiser, a devout supporter of Hillary Clinton, and a lobbyist with a 25-year Inside-the-Beltway career.

Now Turner, who shuttles between Washington and her home in Tenafly, may include this entry on her political résumé: defector to Republican John McCain….

Q: What did you think you would accomplish by meeting with a McCain representative?

The people involved in Together4Us have a general discomfort with the way the Democratic process and the Democratic caucus system went down, with the Florida, Michigan representation, with apportionment, generally.

I think we also have a great discomfort with the misogyny that was expressed by the media during the entire election and the deafening silence by the DNC and the Barack campaign in the face of such denigration of women generally.

Q: Can you give me some examples of the misogyny that most angered you and your colleagues?

MSNBC was the worst that got me. The most was the Chris Matthews interview or discussion where he said, ‘Let’s face it. I’m going to be blunt here,’ he says. ‘The only reason she became a U.S. senator is because her husband messed around.’ She is a Yale Law graduate, She is a brilliant woman. She is enormously talented, and that is just horrific.

Q: You mention his lack of protest or his standing up to denounce misogyny in the media. Is that it? Is that the sole reason, at this point, why you are not comfortable with Obama?

This is another example of a less-qualified male getting a promotion over a more qualified female. I have been in Washington and doing federal legislation longer than Senator Obama has. That’s not very comforting. Frankly, from a war perspective and a national security perspective, I don’t feel safe with him…. I’m not comfortable with the people who he has chosen to affiliate with – the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, et cetera.

Q: Why not support Obama if the differences between Hillary and Obama, on most issues, are marginal?

His positions seem to shift…. He has shifted on campaign finance and he has shifted on FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] … and he has shifted on a whole bunch of things, so I don’t know where he is.

I can tell you where McCain is. I can tell you where Hillary is. And for good, bad or ugly, I know where they are. I can agree or disagree, but I know where they are…. Him? I don’t know where he is. We’ve got a moving target here.

Q: Some Democrats might suggest that by backing McCain, you are backing the continuation of Republican rule that they believe has brought discredit and damage to this country.

I would say that all Democrats are not created equally and all Republicans are not created equally. George Bush and John McCain are not the same. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not the same. And so to label Bush as the same as McCain is sloganism. John McCain is about as centrist a Republican as one can find. Hillary Clinton was the most centrist contender for the presidency.

Q: What do you say to your harshest critics – I’ve seen this on the blogs – that this is a kind of petulant, lashing out of a sore loser?

This doesn’t have to do with Hillary Clinton. This has to do with fixing the Democratic Party, which is not functioning properly…

The whole key to making the Democratic party mainstream revolves around getting the left out of the loop. For far too long the far left, working with corrupt party hacks who are given a free ride by the left in return for political power, has been forcing the Democrats further and further from the American mainstream. While Democrats can still win (and may win this year) they are forever incapable of building up a long-term majority because too many Democrat positions – prescribed by the left – are out of step with American life. Just as soon as Hillary – or someone – figures out that ditching the kook left is the best move, just that soon will the Democratic party start to be cured.

I mean, come on – lets think about this for a moment: Does Joe Sixpack union worker really want federally funded abortion on demand? Is a single mom trying to get a college education really thinking that what the nation needs is gay marriage? Is the retired veteran on fire to ensure that we bug out of Iraq come what may? Is a struggling son of immigrants convinced that what America needs is yet another grant for a sacriligeous art display? Of course not – and the thing is that each one of these people can hold John McCain and the GOP in utter contempt, and yet be entirely out of tune with that far left which rules the roost in Democratic Presidential politics.

Hillary is a liberal’s liberal but you know what beat her? She wouldn’t denounce her vote in favor of liberating Iraq – she went as far as calling it a failure and saying we had to get out, but she couldn’t bring herself to say that the vote she cast in 2002 was in and of itself a wrong thing to do. Somewhere in Hillary is that bedrock of human decency which prevented her (but not Edwards, for instance) from lying about herself on that basic a level. Ideological purity is paramount in the intellectually incurious kook left – they don’t care about much else; as long as you are pure in your leftism, you can do whatever you wish. Obama was the purest leftist on the most vital issue for the left – opposition to the liberation of Iraq. Back in September of 2007 I took the measure of this and noted that Obama was likely to emerge as the nominee – it wasn’t an act of great insight on my part, just the understanding which comes from two decades study of leftwing thinking.

These Hillary supporters – certainly liberals to a man and woman – are, perhaps, having an awakening. It is just possible that they are re-learning the lesson America’s liberals learned in the 40’s and then forgot in the 60’s: leftists use liberals to provide respectable political cover for the wickedness of leftwing ideology. Once upon a time, hard as it is to believe, the ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action was a hard core anti-communist group – in other words, it was liberal and wanted liberalism, but it has no truck with the kook left which is destructive in all things. It’d be better if the liberals would draw the entire conclusion – anything not of conservatism is inherently wrong – but if they can at least understand that the heirs of Marx are not just wrong, but wicked wrong, then much good will be done.