"Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Very few will argue that Bush years have been a disaster. The nation is weaker in every way; militarily, economically and morally. Our international influence has waned and we are at odds with practically everyone. The national frustration level is surging. That anger is being directed at the usual suspects.
It’s our fellow Americans fault for not voting or being too stupid, superstitious or lazy to vote their own interests.It’s the fault of the GOP for crossing the line between criminality and politics as usual and for their cultish adherence to outmoded ideology. It’s the PNAC neocons, egged on by AIPAC, that have dragged the country into senseless wars that suck the treasury dry. The plutocrats are despised for their pathological greed. Lobbyists are blamed for polluting the political process and slanting the playing field toward the narrow, dissolute interests of their employers. The corporate media are blamed for bundling the sacking of America into deceptive sound bites and entertaining lies.
But even a cabal as muscular as this might find it difficult to install an unpopular, felonius administration and implement an agenda that hundreds of millions of people reject. It takes a great deal to overwhelm the fundamental decency of most Americans. Enter the Democratic Party leadership and senior Congressional Democrats. The devolutionary, right wing owe their success to these unlikely allies. The Bush administration if it would have existed at all, has exceeded their wildest dreams because of the unflagging support of the Democrats.
It's a matter of public record starting with the 2000 election. Can anyone imagine the GOP or any reasonably robust political party walking away from a presidential election they won? Can you imagine them silencing their own membership to enable the theft? Twice? Do you think a real political party would stress over looking like “sore losers”? Can you imagine the GOP voting for legislation that gave control of vote tabulation to Democratic partisans? Can you imagine another political party not acting to remove the imposter when their victory was confirmed? The Democrats could not have more helpful toward the GOP if they were working for them.
When Bush came out of hiding after 9-11, the Democrats failed to ask any of the important questions. Why did all four agencies charged with our defense stand down? Where were our jets and why? Since when do Vice Presidents play war games and issue orders to shoot down passenger jets?The Democratic Senate even agreed not to have an independent investigation!
When pressure from concerned citizens and survivors became impossible to ignore, the Democrats allowed the Bush White House, a target of the investigation, to help select the panel, limit the scope of the investigation, withhold information and testify off the record. The complete report, such as it is, has yet to be released. The actions of the Democrats have shielded the White House from the consequences of the bloodiest screw up in our history, allowing them to remain in office and do their worst. The Democrats are continuing to shield them to this day by refusing to impeach, not only for the criminal neglect of 9-11 or worse but for the crimes and gross abuse of power committed in the wake of 9-11.
The Democrats just can’t do enough for the Bush White House. They enabled unconstitutional legislation that legalizes the criminality of the administration and their supporters. At the same time they are issuing get out of jail free cards to confessed felons, they are working to restrict our civil liberties in an unprecedented way. The Dems vote en masse for the fascistic Patriot Acts and the Democratic controlled House thinks it should be a crime to think bad thoughts about your government, effectively criminalizing most of the nation.
The GOP could never have ratified torture and extraordinary rendition, suspended Habeas Corpus and Posse Comatatis or ripped half of the Bill of Rights out of the Constitution unless the Congressional Democrats helped them. And help they did; front, right and center.
The Democrats didn’t have to give away the Supreme Court to corporate interests and religious zealots. They promised not to but they did it anyway. Very helpful, indeed.
It took about a year for the deception of the invasion of Iraq to be exposed and for support for the war to evaporate. Did the Democrats do as the Geneva Conventions and domestic law require and do everything in their power to end the illegal war? Did they filibuster, call up the Hague, take their case to the people and vote no in protest? Nope. They shielded the perpertrators in the White House and put the war on steroids. They voted for every appropriation the bloated the Pentagon's budget and lined the pockets of war profiteers, cheats and mercenaries. The only criticism leveled at the GOP by the Democrats was that Bush/Cheney and their assorted generals have failed to secure Iraq and steal their resources quickly enough and inexpensively enough. Since the Democrats have taken over both Houses of Congress there has been no investigation into criminal acts that pushed the country into war and no real effort to stop the bloodshed. It's a monstrous betrayal.
The Democrats response is unnatural in the extreme. Real political parties spend most of their energy jockeying for power. The Democrats helped their opponents increase theirs. The steppingstone to the executive mansion and legislative majorities is the exploitation of the other guy’s screw-ups. When a huge majority of voters are screaming for action, it is unheard of for a political party to put their noses in the air and walk away. Garden variety instincts of self preservaton have kept the nation from going off the deep end for several hundred years. There has been no cogent explanation for what appears to be self destructive behavior.
The Democrats didn't stop at throwing elections and helping the GOP to establish an imperial presidency and launch imperialistic wars. They joined the GOP in everything from reviving the worst polluters on the planet, the nuclear power and oily carbon crowd, to rescuing the feared military industrial complex from well deserved extinction. They gave corporations with bigger budgets than many countries more wealth in subsudies and tax relief. They gave them more rights than the people they exploit and poison. They participated wholeheartedly in Bush's drunken fiscal irresponsponsibility that dwarfed even Reagan's improvidence. They helped off shore your job even when the robotic GOP declined to do so. Sometimes they all joined the party, like the AUMF, the Patriot Act and Medicare D (a huge subsidy to big pharma) and sometimes they worked in small rotating cadres who pushed the steaming pile of legislation across the finish line. CAFTA, the draconian bankruptcy bill and the worst of Bush's nominees fall into that category.
Don’t buy the election rhetoric that feeds on the manufactured nostalgia for the prosperous Clinton era. Don't believe that all our troubles will be over if we put a Democrat in the White House and put more Democrats in Congress. Many of the worst transgressions of the Bushies had their inception in the Clinton White House while the new Democratic congress hasn’t been worth the powder to blow it up.
We don’t need any more Democrats like Lieberman, Landrieu, Emmanuel, Pelosi or turncoats like John Conyers. We certainly don’t need a president who is in bed with the military industrial complex or who thinks their Congressional oath to uphold the Constitution doesn’t matter. We don’t need a president that thinks corporations will solve global warming or that white-collar crooks don’t really harm anyone.
This year voters must step nimbly step over old party loyalties and the reject the well-funded corporate darlings. Rather than vote for a Party, voters must be highly selective. A candidate that doesn’t walk the talk, that hasn’t demonstrated they are willing to stand up for what’s right does not deserve your vote, no matter who they are running against. Unless we make it very clear to Party leadership that we refuse to help them be the instruments of our destruction, they are going to keep on playing us for suckers.
The Constitution made no provision for political parties. Right now all they do is stand between us and the candidates we want and government we deserve. Political parties are not part of the government. They are private businesses that have monopolized elections and left us out in the cold. I think we'd be better off without them. Across the board public funding would do a lot more to change the direction of the country than anyone with donkey or an elephant on their lapel ever did.
