Letters to the Editor
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Time to stand-up
What I see with all of this,is that the DLC people are still entrenched within our party. I really don't see that much will change. In fact I view DLC Democrats as nothing more than good old fashioned Rockefeller Republicans; which is no real way to moderate Bush conservatives. No to Hillary, No to Obama, Edwards maybe, Dodd maybe, Biden who knows. I want my party back. Not a bunch of half-baked DLC Democrats who go along to get along.
Footsore
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Maybe we should have a police state
The American people probably don't deserve to live in a democratic republic. They could care less about democracy. All they want is an easy access to the mall, credit cards that go through and news that begin with Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and a double murder suicide. 90 percent of Americans don't own a passport and are completely ignorant of the outside world. Most Americans believe that Creations explains the birth of the universe. Most Americans aren't even aware of the FISA violations, of their ever diminishing civil liberties and of the Bush regime crimes, nor do they care to find out. Maybe they'll start craving a democracy only after a few years of living in a police state, but even that is doubtful.
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Frank Rich's column today
on "Patriots Who Love the Troops to Death," is a short catalog of the RWAs' attacks on those who place a higher priority on protecting the troops and ensuring their safety than on protecting the White House's reputation.
Too bad it's behind the paywall... he cites and provides a link to Glenn's post on O'Hanlon and Pollack:
But even more galling was the authors’ effort to elevate their credibility by describing themselves as “analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq.” That’s disingenuous. For all their late-in-the-game criticisms of the administration’s incompetence, Mr. Pollack proselytized vociferously for the war before it started, including in an appearance with Oprah, and both men have helped prolong the quagmire with mistakenly optimistic sightings of progress since the days of “Mission Accomplished.”
You can find a compendium of their past wisdom in Glenn Greenwald’s Salon column. That think-tank pundits with this track record would try to pass themselves off as harsh war critics in 2007 shows how desperate they are to preserve their status as Beltway “experts” now that the political winds have shifted. Such blatant careerism would be less offensive if they didn’t do so on the backs of the additional American troops they ask to be sacrificed to the doomed mission of providing security for an Iraqi government that is both on vacation and on the verge of collapse.Rich's column adds some historical context, contrasting Nixon's sycophant, "Baruch Korff, a small-town New England rabbi," with the vaster media resources available to GWB, beginning with Kristol. However, Rich notes considerable differences, notably:
Washington never drank the Nixon Kool-Aid. It kept a skeptical bipartisan eye on Tricky Dick throughout his political career, long before the Watergate complex had even been built. The charmed Mr. Bush, by contrast, got a free pass; both Democrats and Republicans in Congress and both liberals and conservatives in the news media were credulous enablers of the Iraq fiasco. Now a reckoning awaits, and the denouement is getting ugly.
Near the end of the column:
One person who has had enough of this hypocrisy is the war critic Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor of international relations who is also a Vietnam veteran, a product of the United States Military Academy and a former teacher at West Point. After his 27-year-old son was killed in May while serving in Iraq, he said that Americans should not believe Memorial Day orators who talk about how priceless the troops’ lives are.
“I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life,” Professor Bacevich wrote in The Washington Post. “I’ve been handed the check.” The amount, he said, was “roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning.” -
Kitt
Why get up in the morning? Well, I can't speak for you, but for me there are plenty of reasons. It's just that one of those reasons is not to vote for or back Dem candidates just because they have the 'D' by their name. As I've said several times in my posts, liberals need to stop voting for and stop giving money to Dems who aren't liberal. We show them our power that way and force them to pay attention to our issues. Otherwise they won't and, even a cursory glance at how elected Dems behave makes it crystal clear that they don't. Again, why would they?
There are clear and obvious steps to take to force a liberal conscience on the Dems and therefore on politics in America. Liberals generally are taking none of those steps although individual liberals of course do. Until we do, we have no one to blame but ourselves for the rightward drift of politics.
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Kitt again,
you say there's a disconnect between Dems voting for this bill and the fact that most people oppose the bill. There's no disconnect at all. The people who oppose the bill are mostly liberals and Dems know liberals will vote for them next election on the "lesser of two evils" theory. I happens every time, so why not now? That's been my point all along. Liberals give Dems no impetus to vote against bills like this. There are no adverse consequences at the ballot box for doing so.
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Political Kabuki?
"'Dodd, by his own candid admission, has no good explanation for the Democrats' behavior, which repeats itself endlessly.'
I find this hard to believe. Dodd is a career politician, a senior member of the senate, and a leader of the Democratic party. I suspect that Dodd must have a pretty solid opinion on this question. But there is no upside to Dodd to expose the dirty laundry, and lots of potential downside."
I agree completely with this.
My suspicion is that the decision to allow this bill to pass both the House and Senate was made at the highest levels of the Democratic Party. Then, particular congresspeople were chosen to vote for or against the Bill, depending on the electoral consquences in their home states/districts. Under this scenario, the vote of any particular congressperson says nothing about their own actual position on the bill.
This raises the question why the Democratic Party leadership decided to do this. Do they have some ingenious master plan? Or, as Glenn suggests, is it just stupid reliance on beltway political strategists coupled with capitulation to the Republican fearmongering?
"Terrists gonna gitcha! Terrists gonna kill your children in a MUSHROOM CLOUD! TERRISTS GONNA GITCHA!!!!" This is very powerful rhetoric.
And I am not by any means an expert on party politics, so I am interested if others have an opinion about whether the scenario I propose is plausible.