I always hated math in high school, mostly because I disliked the teacher; but I need to qualify that and say it was actually “higher maths” I hated – the second year of algebra and trigonometry. Prior to that, I was really rather good, especially in geometry.
If I remember nothing more from my geometry course, I remember this: that the base of a triangle is its broadest part. “Base” means that bit of a triangle or a building that supports the structure at its lowest level. It grounds or anchors said structure, so it must be that the base of a movement grounds or anchors said movement.
Now this is what I don’t understand: Poll after poll after poll has been taken throughouth the US, and consistently, the findings conclude that a full 20% of people polled identify themselves as either liberal or progressive, whilst 40% consider themselves moderate. We also know that roughly 40% polled call themselves conservative, and whilst the Tea Party element is truly proving itself to be more or less a fringe element, it’s pretty safe to say that the base of the Republican party consists of socially conservative religious people. So how can the media claim that the Democratic party’s base consists of a minority of voters. That’s really like turning a triangle upside down, but then, in a converse sort of way – considering the current Democratic kindergarten – wibbling, wobbling and falling is pretty much normal behaviour for its base.
Actually, I think the so-called progressive base of the Democratic party is something created in the mind of the media and promoted by them to feed the progressive addiction of not thinking critically. Many of these people seem to have forgotten the way our country was structured, by the Constitution, to govern – that each branch of government has certain obligations and duties and each branch keeps a rein on the other two. It’s why the President can’t legislate and has to keep himself above the petty squabbling of the politicos on the Hill. It’s also why those same politicos can effectively nullify an executive order.
But then, in our simplistic, time-saving, convenience-laden world, it’s all too easy to blame the President, especially this one.
Take the Gitmo kerfuffle, which is being blatantly presented in the press and media as the President reneging on a campaign promise, first to close the facility, and then to try all its inhabitants in the civil courts. Well, that’s another part of the Big Lie propaganda which seems au courant throughout our media-driven lives these days.
All of us remember that seminal moment when the President signed the executive order effecting the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year’s time, back in 2009, as his first act as President. In fact, throughout the 2008 campaign, that was one campaign promise both Obama and McCain pushed. The problem ensuing was basically logistical: Where would all these prisoners be housed until they were either tried or released? In fact, George Bush, the man who created the monster, had actually released some Gitmo prisoners, several of whom had rejoined their old Al Qaeda buddies.
Maybe some, if not all, of us remember the debate which raged throughout the spring of 2009 regarding the fates of these prisoners and where they should be housed post-Gitmo. Basically, the public, fuelled by the media, adopted a NIMBY approach – “not in my backyard.” When a disused maximum security prison in Illinois was put forward as the best and most logical place to contain these men, no less than Dick Durbin, DEMOCRAT, from the President’s home state, led the charge against that action. Apparently a maximum security facility in the United States isn’t enough to withstand the incomparable might of Al Qaeda – certainly not in the country where prisons are a big and effective business.
And maybe some, if not all, of us remember the following autumn, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, arguably the most important prisoner held at Guantanamo Bay and the mastermind of 9/11, would be tried in a civil trial in New York City, where his most devastating atrocity occurred. Almost immediately, some – if not all – of us remember Mayor Bloomberg lauding this decision. Who can forget Holder’s forceful rendering of this announcement, when he repeated the name of New York City twice, for obvious emphasis?
To say the all-controlling media were impressed with this decision would be an understatement, but almost immediately the backdraft began – led by Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, DEMOCRATS, of New York. Their chief concern would be that the cost would be far more than the city would be able to support; there was also the concern regarding businesses and private residences in the area where the trial would take place – access issues and losses of revenue. There would be congestion problems with traffic, coupled with a veritable circus caused by the convergence of the world’s media; then add to that the security risks, with the threat of, possibly, another Al Qaeda attack.
The list went on, whilst the DOJ searched for alternative venues for the trial and the Republicans pressed the argument about how these men should be tried by military tribunals. Pennsylvania was mooted, and Virginia, but both echoed the chorusof fright, uncertainty and doubt led by Schumer and Gilibrand.
The gist of the whole Gitmo saga was simply that it was railroaded and the President blind-sided by what was possibly the only genuine act of bi-partisanship ever engendered by this Congress of cowards and fools.
Yet, it’s all too easy and disingenuous to blame the President and brand him a coward and a caver.
Well, I suppose he did cave on this one, because he reversed his former stand and authorised military tribunals to be the method of trial for these prisoners, including the star event concerning Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. Some, if not all, of us will remember how when the President announced this, earlier this year, he made a point of remarking that he had grave reservations about this procedure on two points, but Congress in their infinite wisdom and in waking from their slumber and remembering their role in the system of checks and balances, had rendered any thought of a civil trial virtually impossible.
In the meantime, the President’s running for reelection, and various pundits, reincarnations and natural inheritors of the old radical chic are managing to nudge and wink and subtly imply that there should be a primary candidate for the President. They’re worried, you see, about his abandoning his base for the more moderate of the party.
Do these people have a death wish for Democrats? Because by any mathematical calculation, 20% isn’t a very solid base. The people pushing the myth of Obama as the first post-racial President-cum-the Progressive’s singular disappointment are the natural successors and trust fund children of Tom Wolfe’s radical chic, the ueber rich, super-cool cafe society types who adopted Civil Rights seven years after the fact as an enhancement to their cutting edge image by supping with the real Black Panthers, who saw them for the phonies they were. The closest the ladies-who-lunch liberal pundits come to people of colour is when they’re seated at a discussion table on MSNBC with Eugene Robinson. The only Latino they know is Bill Richardson. The poor is only a vague idea, the working poor and working class morphed into the middle class at the end of the 1970s, and any Southerner is always a racist.
And Obama’s such a disappointment, because instead of getting John Shaft in the Oval Office, they seem to think they’ve got the lovechild of Dr Cliff Huxtable and Fred Sanford. So they’ve got this incessant need to tell and tell stridently what the President should do. They have to remind him of the dire consequences, should he abandon his so-called base. And when he doesn’t listen and achieves something far better than they ever imagined he would, they never recognise this; instead, they move onto the next point of criticism, or they sulk until the point that they can only see their talking point within the framework of the larger equation.
It’s always easier to rationalise that the President caved on extending the Bush tax cuts because they, personally, don’t know anyone who’s unemployed or a part of the working poor. It’s easier to ignore the fact that there’s a Republican majority in the House who pretty much stymie any imperceptibly progressive legislation. In fact, they’ve spent the past four months trying to undo everything that’s been accomplished under the previous Democratic majority, which – for the moment - is impossible, because there’s this slender majority of 4 Democratic Senators in the upper house, one of whom is Joe Manchin, which really makes the majority three.
This is why the silly rant issued by Bill Maher at the end of Real Time this past week about the President taking a stand and pushing for the repeal of DOMA, simply because Dick Cheney, Cindy McCain and Jenna Bush had spoken out in favour of gay marriage. Dick Cheney’s always believed in same sex marriage, but only because his daughter is gay. Otherwise, he’d be no different from any rank-and-file conservative. Besides, neither Cheney, nor Mrs McCain nor the Bush baby are in a position to legislate the repeal of this odious law. They are private citizens, with private opinions and little influence. In fact, I doubt Cindy McCain has any influence over the old maverick, himself.
I don’t know what the President’s opinion of same sex marriage is. I would imagine, open-minded individual that he is, he favourably views the repeal of this act; but pushing for this now is a non-starter, as long as such legislation has to be approved, first, by the House of Representatives. That just ain’t gonna happen, as long as the Speaker’s on a buzz from his martini, the birthers and the baggers are getting restless; and while it’s ok for the Republican majority leader to introduce a piece of legislation that’s a slap in the face of the Constitution in abnegating the upper house’s existence, should the President try a dictatorial style (so favoured by many of the Progressive Left), he’d be impeached, which would make the strange bedfellow pairing of Darrell Issa and Dennis Kucinich very happy.
The truth is, the radical chic set of society play-politicos who “reformed” the Democratic party 40 years ago, threw the real base under the political bus, only to have them rescued and nursed back to health by the very party who, formerly, were their rabid enemies: the Republicans. And they coddled and comforted them just enough for Stockholm syndrome to set in.
So let the inverted triangle that’s the Democratic base continue to totter, let them come up with a patsy who’ll primary the President, and let them then be recorded in the history annals as the reason the Democratic party was rent asunder irreparably in the election of 2012.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
The Democrats as Scorpions: Always Stinging Their Collective Ass
So the President’s running for re-election. That should come as no surprise to anyone. Most Presidents aspire to a second term. Only natural, and we, as Democrats, should be pleased. Whatever you say, he’s accomplished a lot – more than his previous two Democratic predecessors.
So that’s that then. We should all rest happy in our beds. After all, we have a candidate, ready and waiting for whatever political personage the other side thinks to throw at us.
Only we’re not, are we? Come on, hands up, all you people, allegedly from the Left, who are wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ for a great white hope to rise up from the ashes and primary the President. Do I hear the Pumas wailing in the wilderness for Hillary to change her mind? How about Alan Grayson? He’s sending out duns for contributions, with the flyer “Elect Alan Grayson” attached – only he doesn’t say for what position he wants election. Do I hear Dennis Kucinich, preaching his interpretation of the Constitution to read that the President needs impeachment?
I was born two years into Eisenhower’s first term. I barely remember Kennedy’s election. I cast my first vote as an 18 year-old for George McGovern in his landslide defeat of 1972, during my first year at college. I can honestly say that at no time during my adult life can I ever remember a Republican party in such abject disarray and without any cohesive direction or guiding principle other than to undo maliciously any and all previous work accomplished by the Democratic Party, and this President in particular, since the Obama Administration inherited the shitstorm left in the wake of George W Bush and his merry men.
Immediately after the 2008 election, the media, who purport to know these things better than we, pronounced the Republican party dead in the water and rotting. Less than a year later, however, that selfsame media were all over the phenomenon that was the Tea Party like the proverbial bad rash. We know now, even with the debacle that occurred in November 2010, that was all an illusion. They, the media, and their corporate masters wanted us to believe in the power of the populist movement on the Right, even whilst some amongst them were exposing the real corporate roots of the monster, and we swallowed it like a bloated trout swallows bait.
The Tea Party is and was as strong as the media made them. Fox hired their poster girl, Palin, but various and sundry so-called Leftwing pundits, even those who retreat behind a comedian’s mask, constantly gave this willfully ignorant woman more airtime than she deserved, never ceasing to cite her, almost on a daily basis. They leant credence to her shallowness and made her a force to be feared.
Certain areas of the Democratic party, instead of fighting back against the Tea Party and their rhetoric, all of which was based on Big Lie propaganda and the relentless promotion of it, sought to vent ceaseless criticism in the direction of the President, himself, remorselessly for the entire first two years of his tenure. At first, this exercise was piously explained as an effort to show the lock-step Right that the Left was free to criticize their leaders, when they deserved it; that this criticism was intended to be constructive and was entirely for the purpose of guidance. We were “holding his feet to the fire,” making him perform to our specifications. How many times did we hear this explanation?
We heard it so many times that we were unaware that we were actually criticizing absolutely everything the President did or didn’t do, parsing every word he uttered and then screaming every word we demanded that he say, but didn’t. Nothing he did was enough to the point that we got confused about what it actually was he was trying to do, and we confused ourselves to such a point that many of us ended up believing and still believe that he’s accomplished nothing. It’s so ridiculous that many on the Left are so graceless that they’d rather choke than admit when significant achievements are actually attained by the President in the way he sought to attain them.
It’s not the President’s fault that he addresses us as adults and expects us to respond in kind, when the majority of this country are spoiled children dependent upon instant gratification. Change you can believe in is often slow, almost imperceptible change, to the point that such change becomes the norm before anyone originally opposed to it realises anything is different. Slow change means lasting change.
So two years were wasted rounding on the President whilst a fringe element that actually embarrassed normal Republicans ran rampant. They were handed power in 2010, and now a lot of people – possibly many who voted for them – are experiencing buyers’ remorse. Just look at events unfolding in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana if you want proof.
Now, the Democrats are being handed what any sane person would recognise as a sure-fire victory in 2012 – a second term for the President, a chance to strengthen the majority in the Senate and to recapture the House.
Not only are the Republicans fielding a veritable ship of fools hoping to vye for the GOP nomination in 2012, they’re actually falling apart at the seams in the House they won last November.
At the moment, the potential Presidential candidate the GOP might offer the people could come from the likes of Sarah Palin, mistress of syntactical malapropism and eternal mean girl; Michele Bachman, history and geography revisionist, who would have us believe that the Founding Fathers didn’t rest until they’d eliminated slavery and that the first shot fired in our quest for independence occured in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts; Mike Huckabee, the “aw shucks” parson, who’d force us all at gunpoint to digest an intellectual diet administered by a sinister Dominionist faux history professor; Mitt Romney, commonly known as “Flipper,” but not as cute or clever; Newt Gingrich, trailing three wives and numerous ethics violations; Rick Santorum, homophobe; Herman Cain, living proof that a black man can aspire to the KKK; and Donald Trump, born-again birthe, corporationmeister and reality television star.
Did I forget anyone? Oh, yes! Tim Pawlenty, or rather PeeWee Herman pretending to be Tim Pawlenty, who panders to the Tea Party by introducing himself as “Tea-Paw.”
Pretty damned sickly, and in a normal world, the current President could easily beat anyone of that motley crew with a modicum of support from his party; but I seriously doubt he has such support – certainly from very few currently in residence on Capitol Hill and definitely not from a particular tranche of his own party.
Too many elected Democrats in both Houses have been too quick to demand that the President interpose himself directly in the job they’re elected to do – legislate. Like everyone else, they’re looking for a weird combination of Mr Goodbar crossed with Big Daddy. And the supporters keep on holding those Presidential feet to the proverbial fire.
We’re less than a week away from the first government shut-down since 1995. Most of us remember that. It left egg on the face of Newt Gingrich and proved, once more, that Bill Clinton really, really was the Comeback Kid. But Bill Clinton’s not in the White House. We’ve got a President whom his own alleged supporters are too ready to blame for everything that goes wrong, aided and abetted by a shallow and deliberately misinforming media. More importantly, we’ve got a weak and timid Speaker, nursing a drinking problem that’s no real secret and desperately trying to perform responsibly whilst pandering to the fringe minority of his party which is proving to be the tail wagging the dog. If there’s a government shut-down, as much as some of us realise that the fault lies squarely with the intransigence of the Republicans, our media masters, with a little help from various and sundry elected Democrats and a lot of complaining from many of the Progressive base, will only make the GOP’s whine about the shut-down being all the fault of the Democrats a perceived truth.
The events of last week should have been an epiphany for the Left, but it wasn’t. On the one hand, we had Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, introduce a bill that not only had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but also was blatantly unconstitutuional, as it purported to make legislation passed only in the House become the undisputed law of the land. When Cantor announced to an assembled press corps on Wednesday, his intent to introduce this legislation, not one member of the media covering Capitol Hill shouted out in protest against the total constitutional ignorance of such an act. More importantly, Cantor’s Speaker, John Boehner, stood silently in the background, to the right of Cantor, and expressed no surprise, no disbelief and no consternation at such a wantonly disgraceful act.
Indeed, the only media person who pursued this affront vociferously was Lawrence O’Donnell, who had formerly worked as a Congressional aide, and who obviously knew more about the real Constitution than anyone currently working in the media and certainly any elected official on Capitol Hill. When the bill was introduced on the floor of the House on Friday – appropriately April Fool’s Day – fourteen Republicans recognised it for the non-entity that it was, and voted against it, including such wingnuts as Ron Paul and Louis Gomert, the Gomer Pyle of government.
And speaking of the Pauls, Rand Paul was causing quite a stir, rivalling Dennis Kucinich, in darting to and fro, telling all and sundry about the illegality of the President’s participation in the Libyan no-fly zone initiative. Once again, O’Donnell stepped into the fray, the only media voice reminding people, again and again, that Rand had voted unanimously, along with the other 99 members of the Senate, on March 1st, on Senate Resolution 85, which called for the installation of an no-fly zone, for humanitarian reasons, over Libya. The Resolution was sponsored by such liberal lions as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders. Rand Paul not only voted for this resolution, when an MSNBC producer actually rang his office to query this, she was met by a very young and very adolescent receptionist, being audibly coached in a blatant lie by a senior staffer, trying to justify the Senator’s support for this resolution as something that really didn’t count at all.
Instead of focusing on these totally dishonest and irresponsibly acts by the Republican party last week, instead of bringing them to the forefront in defiance of the media, the Progressive Left still nitpick, criticize and second-guess the President’s every move. It’s now come to the sorry situation that, if they don’t have a media stick with which to beat him about the head, they go about making stuff up. It seems they’ve learned well from Arianna Huffington, as much as they try to distance themselves from the ratfucker that she is. Some – at least one, blogging on the Daily Kos – have taken a leaf from Huffington’s Jayson Blair Journalist of the Year, Sam Stein, and created a potential situation from nothing more than the rantings of one Glenn Beck, who seems to be targeting Presidential advisor, Samantha Power, in a new witchunt.
In a blog posted on Daily Kos on Sunday entitled, “Obama, Don’t You ******* Fire Samantha Power!”, this person ranted and railed against the fact that, on the strength of Beck’s latest obsession, the President might even be thinking about sacking Power, when nothing in the media, not even by Stein, had emerged even speculating about this. And this came in the wake of yet another blogger demanding that Elizabeth Warren mount a primary campaign against the President.
I was weaned on the Democratic Party, by parents born with the Democratic gene as part of their DNA make-up. I seriously don’t know now, which is worse – the Tea Party blindly allowing themselves to guided to perdition by the Koch brothers, or the Progressive Left, espousing a hatred of all things Obama that would rival that of the Teabaggers. We really cannot see the forest for the trees.
If, for some reason, the White House is lost in 2012 – and that reason would most likely be a primary challenge – then the country really is lost. The scorpion is an insect which kills itself by repeatedly stinging itself to death with its tail, and that’s the sort of political suicide being effected by the Democratic party, especially when we continuously miss the lemons being thrown at us by the Republicans at our own expense. If the dark side regain the bully pulpit in 2012, we won’t see a Democratic party in power for a generation, and we’ll be increasingly demonised by corporatists and dominionists, whose intent is to create a theocratic nation of ignorant and undereducated serfs.
But ne’mind … we can always blame Obama.
So that’s that then. We should all rest happy in our beds. After all, we have a candidate, ready and waiting for whatever political personage the other side thinks to throw at us.
Only we’re not, are we? Come on, hands up, all you people, allegedly from the Left, who are wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ for a great white hope to rise up from the ashes and primary the President. Do I hear the Pumas wailing in the wilderness for Hillary to change her mind? How about Alan Grayson? He’s sending out duns for contributions, with the flyer “Elect Alan Grayson” attached – only he doesn’t say for what position he wants election. Do I hear Dennis Kucinich, preaching his interpretation of the Constitution to read that the President needs impeachment?
I was born two years into Eisenhower’s first term. I barely remember Kennedy’s election. I cast my first vote as an 18 year-old for George McGovern in his landslide defeat of 1972, during my first year at college. I can honestly say that at no time during my adult life can I ever remember a Republican party in such abject disarray and without any cohesive direction or guiding principle other than to undo maliciously any and all previous work accomplished by the Democratic Party, and this President in particular, since the Obama Administration inherited the shitstorm left in the wake of George W Bush and his merry men.
Immediately after the 2008 election, the media, who purport to know these things better than we, pronounced the Republican party dead in the water and rotting. Less than a year later, however, that selfsame media were all over the phenomenon that was the Tea Party like the proverbial bad rash. We know now, even with the debacle that occurred in November 2010, that was all an illusion. They, the media, and their corporate masters wanted us to believe in the power of the populist movement on the Right, even whilst some amongst them were exposing the real corporate roots of the monster, and we swallowed it like a bloated trout swallows bait.
The Tea Party is and was as strong as the media made them. Fox hired their poster girl, Palin, but various and sundry so-called Leftwing pundits, even those who retreat behind a comedian’s mask, constantly gave this willfully ignorant woman more airtime than she deserved, never ceasing to cite her, almost on a daily basis. They leant credence to her shallowness and made her a force to be feared.
Certain areas of the Democratic party, instead of fighting back against the Tea Party and their rhetoric, all of which was based on Big Lie propaganda and the relentless promotion of it, sought to vent ceaseless criticism in the direction of the President, himself, remorselessly for the entire first two years of his tenure. At first, this exercise was piously explained as an effort to show the lock-step Right that the Left was free to criticize their leaders, when they deserved it; that this criticism was intended to be constructive and was entirely for the purpose of guidance. We were “holding his feet to the fire,” making him perform to our specifications. How many times did we hear this explanation?
We heard it so many times that we were unaware that we were actually criticizing absolutely everything the President did or didn’t do, parsing every word he uttered and then screaming every word we demanded that he say, but didn’t. Nothing he did was enough to the point that we got confused about what it actually was he was trying to do, and we confused ourselves to such a point that many of us ended up believing and still believe that he’s accomplished nothing. It’s so ridiculous that many on the Left are so graceless that they’d rather choke than admit when significant achievements are actually attained by the President in the way he sought to attain them.
It’s not the President’s fault that he addresses us as adults and expects us to respond in kind, when the majority of this country are spoiled children dependent upon instant gratification. Change you can believe in is often slow, almost imperceptible change, to the point that such change becomes the norm before anyone originally opposed to it realises anything is different. Slow change means lasting change.
So two years were wasted rounding on the President whilst a fringe element that actually embarrassed normal Republicans ran rampant. They were handed power in 2010, and now a lot of people – possibly many who voted for them – are experiencing buyers’ remorse. Just look at events unfolding in Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana if you want proof.
Now, the Democrats are being handed what any sane person would recognise as a sure-fire victory in 2012 – a second term for the President, a chance to strengthen the majority in the Senate and to recapture the House.
Not only are the Republicans fielding a veritable ship of fools hoping to vye for the GOP nomination in 2012, they’re actually falling apart at the seams in the House they won last November.
At the moment, the potential Presidential candidate the GOP might offer the people could come from the likes of Sarah Palin, mistress of syntactical malapropism and eternal mean girl; Michele Bachman, history and geography revisionist, who would have us believe that the Founding Fathers didn’t rest until they’d eliminated slavery and that the first shot fired in our quest for independence occured in New Hampshire and not Massachusetts; Mike Huckabee, the “aw shucks” parson, who’d force us all at gunpoint to digest an intellectual diet administered by a sinister Dominionist faux history professor; Mitt Romney, commonly known as “Flipper,” but not as cute or clever; Newt Gingrich, trailing three wives and numerous ethics violations; Rick Santorum, homophobe; Herman Cain, living proof that a black man can aspire to the KKK; and Donald Trump, born-again birthe, corporationmeister and reality television star.
Did I forget anyone? Oh, yes! Tim Pawlenty, or rather PeeWee Herman pretending to be Tim Pawlenty, who panders to the Tea Party by introducing himself as “Tea-Paw.”
Pretty damned sickly, and in a normal world, the current President could easily beat anyone of that motley crew with a modicum of support from his party; but I seriously doubt he has such support – certainly from very few currently in residence on Capitol Hill and definitely not from a particular tranche of his own party.
Too many elected Democrats in both Houses have been too quick to demand that the President interpose himself directly in the job they’re elected to do – legislate. Like everyone else, they’re looking for a weird combination of Mr Goodbar crossed with Big Daddy. And the supporters keep on holding those Presidential feet to the proverbial fire.
We’re less than a week away from the first government shut-down since 1995. Most of us remember that. It left egg on the face of Newt Gingrich and proved, once more, that Bill Clinton really, really was the Comeback Kid. But Bill Clinton’s not in the White House. We’ve got a President whom his own alleged supporters are too ready to blame for everything that goes wrong, aided and abetted by a shallow and deliberately misinforming media. More importantly, we’ve got a weak and timid Speaker, nursing a drinking problem that’s no real secret and desperately trying to perform responsibly whilst pandering to the fringe minority of his party which is proving to be the tail wagging the dog. If there’s a government shut-down, as much as some of us realise that the fault lies squarely with the intransigence of the Republicans, our media masters, with a little help from various and sundry elected Democrats and a lot of complaining from many of the Progressive base, will only make the GOP’s whine about the shut-down being all the fault of the Democrats a perceived truth.
The events of last week should have been an epiphany for the Left, but it wasn’t. On the one hand, we had Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, introduce a bill that not only had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, but also was blatantly unconstitutuional, as it purported to make legislation passed only in the House become the undisputed law of the land. When Cantor announced to an assembled press corps on Wednesday, his intent to introduce this legislation, not one member of the media covering Capitol Hill shouted out in protest against the total constitutional ignorance of such an act. More importantly, Cantor’s Speaker, John Boehner, stood silently in the background, to the right of Cantor, and expressed no surprise, no disbelief and no consternation at such a wantonly disgraceful act.
Indeed, the only media person who pursued this affront vociferously was Lawrence O’Donnell, who had formerly worked as a Congressional aide, and who obviously knew more about the real Constitution than anyone currently working in the media and certainly any elected official on Capitol Hill. When the bill was introduced on the floor of the House on Friday – appropriately April Fool’s Day – fourteen Republicans recognised it for the non-entity that it was, and voted against it, including such wingnuts as Ron Paul and Louis Gomert, the Gomer Pyle of government.
And speaking of the Pauls, Rand Paul was causing quite a stir, rivalling Dennis Kucinich, in darting to and fro, telling all and sundry about the illegality of the President’s participation in the Libyan no-fly zone initiative. Once again, O’Donnell stepped into the fray, the only media voice reminding people, again and again, that Rand had voted unanimously, along with the other 99 members of the Senate, on March 1st, on Senate Resolution 85, which called for the installation of an no-fly zone, for humanitarian reasons, over Libya. The Resolution was sponsored by such liberal lions as Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders. Rand Paul not only voted for this resolution, when an MSNBC producer actually rang his office to query this, she was met by a very young and very adolescent receptionist, being audibly coached in a blatant lie by a senior staffer, trying to justify the Senator’s support for this resolution as something that really didn’t count at all.
Instead of focusing on these totally dishonest and irresponsibly acts by the Republican party last week, instead of bringing them to the forefront in defiance of the media, the Progressive Left still nitpick, criticize and second-guess the President’s every move. It’s now come to the sorry situation that, if they don’t have a media stick with which to beat him about the head, they go about making stuff up. It seems they’ve learned well from Arianna Huffington, as much as they try to distance themselves from the ratfucker that she is. Some – at least one, blogging on the Daily Kos – have taken a leaf from Huffington’s Jayson Blair Journalist of the Year, Sam Stein, and created a potential situation from nothing more than the rantings of one Glenn Beck, who seems to be targeting Presidential advisor, Samantha Power, in a new witchunt.
In a blog posted on Daily Kos on Sunday entitled, “Obama, Don’t You ******* Fire Samantha Power!”, this person ranted and railed against the fact that, on the strength of Beck’s latest obsession, the President might even be thinking about sacking Power, when nothing in the media, not even by Stein, had emerged even speculating about this. And this came in the wake of yet another blogger demanding that Elizabeth Warren mount a primary campaign against the President.
I was weaned on the Democratic Party, by parents born with the Democratic gene as part of their DNA make-up. I seriously don’t know now, which is worse – the Tea Party blindly allowing themselves to guided to perdition by the Koch brothers, or the Progressive Left, espousing a hatred of all things Obama that would rival that of the Teabaggers. We really cannot see the forest for the trees.
If, for some reason, the White House is lost in 2012 – and that reason would most likely be a primary challenge – then the country really is lost. The scorpion is an insect which kills itself by repeatedly stinging itself to death with its tail, and that’s the sort of political suicide being effected by the Democratic party, especially when we continuously miss the lemons being thrown at us by the Republicans at our own expense. If the dark side regain the bully pulpit in 2012, we won’t see a Democratic party in power for a generation, and we’ll be increasingly demonised by corporatists and dominionists, whose intent is to create a theocratic nation of ignorant and undereducated serfs.
But ne’mind … we can always blame Obama.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
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