Democrats Lose Elections. Wake Up Little Susie, The Party's Over.
Imagine working in the media right now. Every single time they check their e-mail, they're wondering if they'll find a pink-slip with their name on it. The entire profession is being thrown out of work, replaced by pornographic-spewing paranoid schizophrenic rent-boys working at Rupert Murdoch's whore house. No wonder the media is so desperate to try to increase public interest that they resort to whatever worked last: Elections!
So we've seen much coverage in recent weeks about these "critical" elections taking place "around the country" (not really) and pundits talking endlessly about whether the election results will signal whether Obama and the Democrats are succeeding or failing in keeping the public's loyalty. Much like the daily polls that we are fed telling us how much the public has been deceived and manipulated by the corporations. Example: do you favor affordable healthcare? 67% say no. Then the politicians say: Well, what can we do, the public doesn't want it. What a con they've got going between the corporate PR system, Rupert Murdoch's whorehouse, and the other one in D.C.
What elections were being held? Pardon everyone if you failed to notice. A dog catcher here, commissioner of elections there, school superintendent in some other place. Do any of these people have the power or authority to get a national healthcare system for Americans, to end these illegal wars, to invest in our own country and create good paying jobs? No. Not at all. But we see the governor of Virginia and New Jersey moved from the D column to the R column. Is this significant? Who knows. Who cares?
I suspect the Democrats will claim that because of these "disappointing" election results, they will have to do even less than they have already done, and since they've done nothing, that's a real challenge. You know, bi-partisanship and all. They pretend that they want the Republicans' support, but only 20% of the public is Republican. The Democratic leadership is ignoring the Democratic voters, their own voters, the progressives, the people who elected them.
Here's my advice to the Democrats: Wake up little Susie, the party's over.
We already heard one of the Democratic leaders in Congress say that a vote on a healthcare system is unlikely by the end of the year. Why? Just vote on the pending proposals for medicare for all. Or just implement the same type of system they have for national healthcare in Israel. Get a xerox copy of it and vote "yes." They don't even have to do any real work, because other countries already have the blueprint for how to make it work.
Take Israel, for example. Doesn't everyone in Congress love Israel, or at least love all the money they get from Aipac, love the Israeli program of genocide against the Palestinians? If Congress loves Israel so much, why don't they just adopt for Americans the same national healthcare program that Israel provides to its own people? Which, by the way, includes dental for the kids. I think we should have dental for everyone, since it now is being shown that dental care is related to many serious health issues such as heart disease and diabetes.
But let's just start with free flu shots. Do you understand that there is a deadly pandemic that could kill millions of people, and our own government refuses to get vaccines and provide them free of charge to all American citizens? Why do they hate us so much?
The Democrats should not only lose the next election, they should be disbanded, their leadership thrown into prison or at least have their heads shaved and be sent into exile. Honestly, what else do they deserve? They had a huge percentage of the public out raising money, donating, campaigning to get them in charge. Then we have a strong majority in the Senate and House, control of the white house and many of the States. The Republicans are down to 20% of the population.
What have the Democrats done with this overwhelming public mandate for change? They've used their dominance to solicit bribes from the big corporations, wall street, and all the rich people in the country, to enrich themselves and ensure that they can continue to buy their position in future elections. They have conducted what can only be described as shake-down operations of every major financial organization involved in healthcare. Obama holds secret meetings with the insurance companies, promises not to pass single-payer or medicare for all, and in return the insurance companies pay huge bribes to the Democratic party. Repeat the same scenario with the doctors' groups, the drug dealers, the hospital owners.
What have the Democrats done for the public to "reform" healthcare? If they compel 40 million Americans to buy health insurance, that will be another $50 Billion a year (per Kucinich) or up to $200 Billion a year (my calculations) stolen from the public and given to the Medical Industry, to the insurance companies, to the doctors, to the hospitals. What do I get out of this "reform?" Not a thing.
What have the Democrats done to create jobs for the unemployed? Nothing. What have they done to end these illegal wars in the middle east? Nothing. What have they done to rescind the Bush/Cheney evisceration of the Constitution? Nothing. What have they done to bring to justice those who started these illegal wars, those who have engaged in a program of kidnapping, torture, and murder? Nothing. Any efforts to indict, prosecute, imprison the Wall Street criminals who have stolen our money, to seize their assets and really save the country and the world? Nope. The Democrats are too busy collecting "donations" from Wall Street to enforce any laws.
As far as I'm concerned, a lifelong Democrat, I will not vote Democrat next year, or maybe ever again. I would never vote for a Republican, but I'll either vote for a progressive independent or not vote at all. Something I've never done in my life. But these Democrats have convinced me there is no point in voting, the parties are essentially the same. Corrupt.
As a New York State Democrat who donated to the Spitzer campaign and volunteered my time to get him elected, I am writing this diary to say:
Stop making excuses for Eliot Spitzer, people.Spitzer brought this disgrace on himself, and he should have known better.
Spitzer set himself up as Mr. Clean and as a crusader against corruption. He promised us that he'd fight for higher standards and expectations from public officials in Albany.
In his diary, The Lying Game , Matt writes about the ineffectiveness of simply revealing that a political claim is a lie, and people's mistaken reaoning about this:
Both Yglesias and Klein see this as depressing. Klein thinks that this puts campaigns unwilling to attack at a 'severe disadvantage', and Yglesias thinks that it means that telling your own lies might be necessary to 'fight fire with fire'.
In my experience handling attacks in campaigns, both issue-based and candidate-centric, neither of these is accurate. In order to deal with lies and misrepresentations from an opponent, you can't just call out the lies and misrepresentations, you have to call the opponent a liar. You have to tell a story about why you are being attacked instead of just illustrating that the attacks are untrue, and you have to use this story to reveal the character of the attacker. Political contests are contests of values and character, they are primary trust contests.
This is so obviously that it shouldn't need to be debated or discussed. And yet, it is equally obviously that barely one Democrat in a 100 who holds high office understands this. Here I want to revisit Matt's post, and expand on it in certain ways, because I think it's one of the most important discussions that we need to have amongst ourselves, and to spread to a wider audience.
Above all, what this means is engaging in a whole set of related ideas that conservatives have somehow corenered the market on, while liberals (and pseudo-liberals) have convinced themselves they're not really important. The big three are character, narrative, and values:
Pointing out that falsehoods are falsehoods, without any underlying narrative, is like discussing torture without pointing out the authoritarian nature of the regimes that use it as a tool. It becomes an isolated and irrelevant fact, a tragedy like a natural disaster. Lies are also not always bad; sometimes they are social lubricants and used to spare people's feelings. Lots of people say things that aren't true, in fact, most of us break our word to ourselves on a regular basis (check your New Year's resolutions list if you don't believe me). You have to use their lies to tell a story about their character.
The problem with calling a politician who lies a liar is that we not only all lie but we understand that all politicians lie, and that they expect the audience to know that, and to sort out which lies make their adherents feel good, and which lies will make the opposition feel bad. We are in effect expected to judge all political races as lying contests, just as we have been taught in western culture to judge all debates and other adversarial proceedings as lying contests.
Thus to call any politician a liar is begging the question of whether he is a bad or good liar, and whether his heart is nevertheless as pure as our own. We in fact will sometimes judge a good liar as potentially more effective than a persistent truth teller.
You touched on this when you discussed lying as a reflection of character and trustworthiness. Trustworthiness is the key word or factor here - if you label someone a liar, it has to be clear you mean he lies because he is at bottom untrustworthy, rather than he is untrustworthy because he lies.
And I seconded this by linking to a column that George Lakoff wrote in September, 2003, "Betrayal of Trust", in which his core argument is stated right up front:
The question of the L-word keeps coming up. Did the president and his chief advisors lie? I think this is the wrong question to be asking. The real issue is betrayal of trust.
This is my first diary entry. I am a lifelong liberal/progressive democrat who has been reading, without comment, liberal/progressive blogs for several years, now. I feel compelled tonight to comment on the Democratic congress and the passage of the FISA "reform" bill.
I've been puzzling over what happened, why the Democrats would ever give this, or any, President, and this, or any, Attorney General the kind of power over all Americans that this bill represents. I've concluded that it means many things, but 3 that I think are most important:
1) They are the real hypocrites. The Republicans may be the moral/sexual hypocrites, but it is the Democrats who display astounding hypocrisy where it really matters - in the legislation they pass. They say they are against the war, but they pass the funding bill President Bush wanted. They say they are for improved gas mileage, but they pass an energy bill without stricter CAFE standards. And now they say they are against warrantless wiretapping but they pass an egregious FISA bill exactly as requested by an ever more imperial President. They are the worst hypocrites where it really matters, in making law.
2) They're as power mad as President Bush. It occurs to me that the Democrats fully expect to win both elective branches of government in 2008, and they want this nifty new, unconstitutional, power for themselves. And they are willing to subject the American people to this enormous loss of constitutional rights to get this power in the next election. (They'll do so without my vote!)
3) A final point, made more clear by the coincidence of this egregious legislation passing a Democratic congress even as the progressive web movement busily pats itself on the back at YKOS. Please explain to me again just how important the netroots are? We are still at war, we still have an outlaw administration, and now we've handed the crooks even more power at the expense of "the people".
Thank you for tolerating my rant. I think tonight is probably the lowest point for this country in my lifetime. And I'm 56 years old.
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