Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
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Glenn - We don't have the power - or the time
[Read the article: Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We have, at best, 49 votes in the Senate. Out of 100. That's not a majority. We got lucky and have nominal control of Congress, but not enough to do any damn good. Yes, this bothers me, but it's reality. We are limited by the Constitution to certain roles. We have a court system that has been packed with partisans by Republican presidents. We have a media who willingly pass on right-wing talking points as the truth. We have a populace that has been brainwashed into believing that everything is okay, and they don't really need to vote, and any politician who tries to make waves is a radical. This isn't going to go away because the Democrats have a nominal majority.
I remember how things were after 9/11, as I and the people of my nation descend into a world of fear. I remember being afraid every "special day" that this was going to be the day when we got attacked again. I still check the news every morning before leaving the house, just to be sure that nothing has happened overnight. I never did that before 9/11. I remember wondering if my family was safe. I remember being afraid of flying, for the first time in my life. Finally, I realized that my fear wasn't natural, it was being created by people who stood to gain by making me afraid, my manipulating the news so that we lived in fear and could be manipulated for their own gain. Democratic politicians were as subject to that fear as the rest of us, but they had the added burden of being responsible for ensuring that our fears didn't come to realization. They voted for some stupid things. I hate Bush and his cronies for feeding that fear as much as I hate Bin Ladin for creating it. Bin Ladin is a psycopath. The right-wing are greedy idiots who are willing to subvert a Democracy to feed their own power. They fed us fear, and only recently are people finding out that their fears are worse than anything that could be done to us.
It's going to take a while to fix this. A long time. But the Democratic Party is the only chance we have to do it right now. The right-wing has shown that they have no scruples and will always choose their own sickening path, regardless of what happens to the nation as a result.
I don't have blinders about the Democrats. I know that they are human beings with weaknesses, and that any politicians who gets elected to a high position has had to make compromises that I don't approve of. But I reserve my anger for the people who chose to take a national tragedy and turn it into a political tool. Blaming the Democrats won't solve anything. We don't have time to create a 3rd party right now. We don't have time to hate our own people. The strategy of hatred worked for the right, but it took them 30 years to get enough extremists into Congress to make a difference. Meanwhile, the Democrats weren't destroying the nation. We don't have that luxury. In 30 years the Republicans will turn this nation into an oligarchy.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing the Dems. But please don't try to put their responsibility on a par with the right-wing. We can work on moving the Dems to the left after we take some kind of real control.
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I refuse to believe that Daily/YearlyKOS is the voice of mainstream Democratic support...
[Read the article: Cheerful boos for Hillary]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...any more than FreeRepublic is the voice of mainstream Republican support. One is as radical as the other and if you accept the roar of the extremists on the left with an appreciative ear, then you must grant the same boon to those on the right. The DNC candidates who show up to meet the Kossaks at YearlyKOS are going to be greeted much differently when they show up for the DNC convention. The vociferous masses attending that event are likely to be more mainstream and more likely to vote Democrat instead of pouting and taking their ball home if they don't hear what they want to hear. Those vociferous masses are the ones that already realize that compromise is necessary to the well-functionning of any democracy, and that sacrifices have to be made sometimes for the common good.
The vociferous wing of DailyKOS who attended YearlyKOS, and who - judging by the reports - appear to be the majority of representatives there, are the same brand of self-absorbed blowhards that voted for Nader in 2000 despite knowing that the country's future hung in the balance. They're the same gang of narcissistic fools who would rather say anything, than be heard saying something. As far as I'm concerned, they are just as responsible for the mess BushCo has got us into, as the people who voted them in.
The sad truth is that, if they continue to blindly maintain that the only way to save the country is "their" way, by avoiding compromise and pushing only their agenda to get the neocons out of power, they'll be just as responsible as the Republicans for electing Thompson, or Giuliani, or Romney in 2008. And the truly, truly, sad part is that they still won't have learned the main lesson which is: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (Insert major deity or paradigm of personal belief here) help us all then.
ejb