The assumption the right wing appears to have made is that anyone with an iota of intelligence wouldn’t vote for them anyway.
Watching teabaggers at town hall meetings shouting that they want the government to keep its hands off their Medicare, it’s hard to disagree that being unglued seems to be a large part of right wing credentials.
The massive obstructionism that the right has taken as its ploy against any representation of the public interest in government has become so pervasive that it has included minority party delays of, thus far, 300 hours added to the Senate’s time to get its work done. Cloture votes drag floor sessions into long sessions of unneeded work, and of course run up the costs of staffing and general operations which is a total waste of public funds. Funds which are now supplied by Continuing Resolutions because the right wing has stopped the work necessary to pass appropriations.
Mindless obstruction serves no purpose, and has been employed even against bills the minority actually supports.
Wrong. Mindless obstruction does serve a purpose, as does the disruption of the townhall meetings by rightwing loons, though it’s not necessarily their purposes that are being served. It keeps the Obama administration on the defence, disrupts the smooth working of government and helps foster an atmosphere of crisis, all of which in turn will make it easier to win the midterm elections and then the presidential elections, while minimising the “damage” Obama can do. It’s exactly the same as what happened to the Clinto administration, an attempt to obstruct and delegitimise Obama’s presidency.
That’s the main difference between the Democrats and Republicans: the latter know that winning the elections is only the start the battle and act accordingly, hammering their opponents when in power and obstructing them when not. The Democrats on the other hand still sort of kinda believe in all that loyal opposition and bipartisanism crap. Furthermore, they’re usually content to let the Republicans hang themselves rather than actively oppose measures they often(partially) sympathise with anyway. The two parties aren’t that far apart from each other after all when you take an objective look at their policies and ideologies; even more so when you look at the actual people elected as Democrats. The Democrats accept this and largely only mount a symbolic opposition to keep their voters happy, while the Republicans were smart enough to realise that it doesn’t matter if you oppose legislation you’d normally support: what matters is opposing Democratic legislation. While calling it socialist, fascist and all other bad names of course.
This is another big difference between the two parties. The Republicans are willing to inflate differences beyond all proporties, were the first party to realise that you can do this and were not hindered by any lingering sense of fair play or reasonableness. They’ve permanently put the Democrats on the back foot, who forever have to explain that they’re not fascists|Islamists|commies and that they too are patriotic true blooded Americans and who are still not clever enough to realise that either way they lose, being seen as either traitors or as weak sisters easily bullied. What the Democratic Party needs to do, but is unlikely to, is to carve out a strong, broadly supported leftist position and attack the Republicans from that, not to be the Republicans-lite.
The final major difference is of course the absence of crazies on the Democratic side. The Republican Party has a hardcore of genuine loons, not just amongst their voters but on their benches, who do believe Obama is an illegal alien, the Clintons murdered Vince Foster and healthcare for the poor is equal to nazi deathcamps. On the Democratic side, even mentioning that Al Gore actually won the 2000 elections is enough to brand you a loony, despite the overwhelming evidence for it. In other words, nobody is scared by the Democratic base, they’re too reasonable.
I don’t know why six religious nuts are allowed to ruin a holiday for a hundred kids. I don’t know why a relatively small pack of paranoid racists and Right Wing extremists are allowed to prevent everybody’s else’s kids from hearing the President of the United States advise them to work hard and stay in school. But I suspect that part of the reason is that sensible parents who may get mad don’t stay mad. They have other more important things to worry about and they move on to worry about them. The Right Wing nuts get mad, stay mad, and don’t let up. School officials who ignore the complaints of sensible parents know that by the end of the semester the sensible parents will have forgotten about the issue; but the nuts won’t forget, won’t drop it, and won’t let up—run into them anywhere, anytime and they’ll start screaming all over again. It’s just easier and it moves the problem off the desk more quickly to cave to the nuts, knowing you probably won’t hear a peep from the sensible parents.
As the old saying notes, it’s the squeeky wheel that gets the grease and the same goes for political change. You need people to either be afraid of you or think that it’s easier for them to give in to you than to resist you. Yes, this can backfire, but surprisingly less so than is commonly assumed. All great change happened through radicalism, civil disobedience and a refusal to be reasonable.
In a roundabout way, this is also why you don’t want to debate the BNP as much, as to make it socially unacceptable to support them. You can’t argue racist fuckwits into not being racist, you can scare them into not being openly racist.
Martin posted earlier about the proof emerging that Democrats did know and did approve of the unconstitutional domestic wiretapping of their fellow citizens.
Martin described the Dems’ complicity in the outrages of the War on Turr as a ‘clusterfuck of corruption’. So I thought I’d quote from this post of mine from April 2007, which tried to describe just how big a clusterfuck it actually is. It’s not just the spying or the torture and it’s not just the Democrats. Very few are clean.
“[…]
Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.
Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull. That’s where the spying comes in. One ill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo…
It doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.
There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo‘s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example.
Such is the venality of politicians that most involved walked right into what was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA, but they did it anyway. Have penis, will follow.
That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country. I expect there’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.
Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly upright people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.
[…]
Since the days of Reagan, networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.
The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why? Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.
A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.
Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?
Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president.
If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they?ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.
Was I right or was I right? I could link back to or repost the many posts we’ve written over the past 7 years about the complicity of Democrats in the corporate coup, but no need, they’re all in the archives over to your right. Feel free to browse and be disgusted.
Senator Harry Reid just spoke to reporters after the private caucus meeting with Dems over Joe Lieberman’s fate, and he confirmed it: Lieberman will not be stripped of his Homeland Security chairmanship, because the “vast majority” of the Democratic caucus wants him to stay.
“This was not a time for retribution,” Reid said, adding that “we’re moving forward.”
Lieberman was removed from the Environment and Public Works Committee, a largely meaningless punishment since it’s a topic (unlike Homeland Security) on which he has no differences with Dems.
Asked about liberal “anger” towards Lieberman, Reid said: “I pretty well understand anger. I would defy anyone to be more angry than I was.”
But he added: “If you will look at the problems that we face as a nation, is this a time we walk out of here saying boy did we get even?”
That’s what you get for insisting that supporting the Democratic Party is the only way for leftists to have any influence in American politics. This is a message that the left might support the Democrats, but the Democrats like Lieberman more than you.
Woah, what a night. How was it for you, Ron Paul supporters?
Ah. Maybe I shoudln’t have asked.
I have to say myself I’ve never been so glad to say I was wrong; wrong, wrong, wrong, double underlined wrong, in illuminated letters wrong. The Republicans didn’t ratfuck the election, martial law was not declared, no-one was assassinated, the American people spoke up louder than this cynic could ever have hoped and finally, the right thing was done.
After 8 years of unbelievable criminality and ineptitude, there’s a breath of hope in the air.
But while we’re all sharing a metaphorical post-coital cigarette and basking in the afterglow, let’s not relax too much; that’s always the moment when you accidentally roll onto the wet patch.
The wet patch in this instance is a proper conundrum and it’s a key question for the incoming Democratic administration – what is to be done about George Bush? Will he, his sidekick Dick Cheney and their many criminal associates be allowed to walk away from their numerous crimes? Will Bushco ever face any kind of justice? If you listen to campaign rhetoric, the answer’s yes:
In an Obama-Biden administration, we will not have an attorney general who blatantly breaks the law,” Biden said at a town-hall meeting in West Palm Beach, Florida, his voice at times drowned out by applause. “We will not have a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution. And I will not be a vice-president who thinks he’s not part of any of the three branches of government.”
Biden ripped the Bush administration for wasting a chance to unite the nation in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“George Bush and his administration are going to be judged harshly by history,” said the Delaware lawmaker. “Not for the mistakes they made, but for the opportunities to unite America and the world they squandered.”
Biden also promised to go through the Bush adminstration’s records with a ‘fine-toothed comb’ for criminality:
.
“If there has been a basis upon which you can pursue someone for a criminal violation,” he said, “they will be pursued, not out of vengeance, not out of retribution – out of the need to preserve the notion that no one, no one, no attorney general, no president, no one is above the law.”
What I would want to do is to have my Justice Department and my Attorney General immediately review the information that’s already there and to find out are there inquiries that need to be pursued. I can’t prejudge that because we don’t have access to all the material right now. I think that you are right, if crimes have been committed, they should be investigated. You’re also right that I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of Republicans as a partisan witch hunt because I think we’ve got too many problems we’ve got to solve.
So this is an area where I would want to exercise judgment — I would want to find out directly from my Attorney General — having pursued, having looked at what’s out there right now — are there possibilities of genuine crimes as opposed to really bad policies. And I think it’s important– one of the things we’ve got to figure out in our political culture generally is distinguishing betyween really dumb policies and policies that rise to the level of criminal activity. You know, I often get questions about impeachment at town hall meetings and I’ve said that is not something I think would be fruitful to pursue because I think that impeachment is something that should be reserved for exceptional circumstances. Now, if I found out that there were high officials who knowingly, consciously broke existing laws, engaged in coverups of those crimes with knowledge forefront, then I think a basic principle of our Constitution is nobody above the law — and I think that’s roughly how I would look at it.
Experience teaches us different. It’s become customary for incoming presidents to pardon their predecessors’ crimes; presidents can even indemnify against crimes yet to be committed; the person pardoned need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime.
Many pardons have been controversial; critics argue that pardons have been used more often for the sake of political expediency than to correct judicial error. One of the more famous recent pardons was granted by President Gerald Ford to former President Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, for official misconduct which gave rise to the Watergate scandal. Polls showed a majority of Americans disapproved of the pardon and Ford’s public-approval ratings tumbled afterward. Other controversial uses of the pardon power include Andrew Johnson’s sweeping pardons of thousands of former Confederate officials and military personnel after the American Civil War, Jimmy Carter’s grant of amnesty to Vietnam-era draft evaders, George H. W. Bush’s pardons of 75 people, including six Reagan administration officials accused and/or convicted in connection with the Iran-Contra affair, Bill Clinton’s pardons of convicted FALN terrorists and 140 people on his last day in office – including billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, and George W. Bush’s commutation of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s prison term.
I see the outgoing President Bush has already started on wangling for his own presidential pardon, inviting President-elect and Mrs. Obama to the White House. Although he has, in effect, already pardoned himself, it’s thought to be unconstitutional to do so:
But there’s one person at least who won’t let Bush leave without a reckoning and that’s former mafia prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi:
I may be sounding presumptuous to you right now, [Amy and Juan], but I?m telling you this: I am going after George Bush. I may not succeed, but I?m not going to be satisfied until I see him in an American courtroom being prosecuted for first-degree murder.
[…]
we know?not ?think,? but we know?that when George Bush told the nation on the evening of October the 7th, 2002, Cincinnati, Ohio, that Hussein was an imminent threat to the security of this country, he was telling millions of unsuspecting Americans the exact opposite of what his own CIA was telling him. So if we had nothing else at all, this alone shows us that he took this nation to war on a lie, and therefore, all of the killings in Iraq of American soldiers became unlawful killings and therefore murder.
But it gets worse. October 4th, three days after the October 1st classified top-secret report, Bush and his people had the CIA issue an unclassified summary version of the October 1st classified report, so that this report could be issued to the American people and to Congress. And this report came to be known as the ?White Paper.? And in this White Paper, the conclusion of US intelligence that Hussein was not an imminent threat to the security of this country was completely deleted from the White Paper. Every single one of these all-important words were taken out. And the question that I have is, how evil, how perverse, how sick, how criminal can George Bush and his people be? And yet, up to this point, unbelievably?and there?s no other word for it?he?s gotten by with all of this.
Indeed he has. It’s not enough for me, and I doubt it’s enough for everybody else either, that Bush be out of office, out of the White House and out of power: there has to be a reckoning too. Some crimes stink so high that there has to be justice – and if the new president won’t do it, then the people, even in the person of Bugliosi and who knows how many other outraged lawyers, will have to.
Bugliosi again:
This is a very real thing that we?re talking about here. I?ve established jurisdiction on a federal and state level for the prosecution of Bush for two crimes: conspiracy to commit murder and murder. On a federal level, we?re really only talking about the Attorney General in Washington, D.C., operating through his Department of Justice. But on a state level, I?ve established jurisdiction for the attorney general in each of the fifty states, plus the hundreds of district attorneys in counties within those states, to prosecute George Bush for the murder of any soldier or soldiers from their state or county who died fighting his war in Iraq. And with all those prosecutors?
Well quite, if only all that collective pent-up outrage doesn’tget swamped by the big, pink, fuzzy wave of post-election euphoria. However, there are encouraging signs that the sins of George Bush have not been forgotten, that there may well one day be a reckoning, even if I don’t live to see it. The people (and not just the American people) will see that it’s so: and if anyone should respect the power of the people to do what they say, it’s Obama.
Martin posted 