Attitude Problem

I was born a Democrat. My parents were Democrats before me. My father cast his first vote at 21 in 1936, for FDR. Four years later, when she turned 21, my mother did the same. She came from a long line of Democrats, going way back to Jackson, I suppose. When 1861 came along, some of her kin hiked on the blue uniform, and some wore the grey, even though all were Virginians. And after that, they all carried on voting Democratic.

They were Southerners and Democrats. They never wavered from the party, even when many of their friends, associates and even some close relatives, gulped and embraced the GOP at the time LBJ signed the Civil Rights' Act. As New Deal Democrats, they morphed into Kennedy Democrats. When 1968 saw a disastrous four-way split in the Democratic Party, they voted for Hubert Humphrey; but they would have voted for Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy all the same.

Both of them voted Democratic until their deaths, although my father was growing more and more disconcerted with some of the leaders emerging from the party's ranks. Although he voted for Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, in the Virginia primary, he supported Jesse Jackson.

Jackson, he explained to me, was a real Democrat, who cared about the working man and the working classes.

Of course, you seldom hear about the "working classes" these days. I don't expect to hear about them from the Republicans, although they use them to garner votes; after all, the Republicans were only ever about business, and the bigger the business, the stauncher the Republican support. But the Democrats were all about the working classes, or the public sector service industries, and - above all - the unions.

Nowadays, however, it all seems to be concern about the middle classes,a euphemism awarded like a gift with the Reagan credit de-regulations in the form of a credit card and an attitude that it's OK to use your property like an ATM, as long as it got you the same toys as the professional person who lived around the corner had. Our recent middle class, the one to which everyone allegedly belongs in its Reaganian reincarnation, is one built on debt and deception and living above our means.

I've never heard any politician of note - actually, except the President - reference the working classes; and even the President does so, within a quick and essential reminder that this really is about preserving the middle classes; but, by and large, we tend to sweep the working classes under a mythical carpet. The Right pulls them out, occasionally, dusts them off, fills them with whatever the current fear-of-the-day happens to be, and then sends them off to the polls every two years to vote against their own interests.

The Left, if they don't ignore them outright, derides them, assigning traits of stupidity and bigotry to them, especially if they happen to be Southern.

Lord, it's hard to be Southern and Democrat, especially these days, and especially amongst a current species of Democrat (usually from the West Coast, I'm sorry to say) who view themselves as morally superior to anyone hailing from flyover country or anyone coming from South of the Mason-Dixon line. Flyover people might be deemed "rubes" by their cultural betters, but my lot - whether they're fire-breathing, Fox-gazing Fundamentalists or real Liberals - are lumped together and described as "shitkicking inbreds," "Neo-Confederates," Secessionists, traitors or just plain common-and-garden bigots. All of us.

The hatred towards Southerners is a wonder to behold in reading some of the things you see on the Internet, much less on television; so much so, that many in the Democratic party, or many purporting to be Democrats, don't think candidates should venture into the South at all, that it simply isn't worth it, which is almost oxymoronic because these very people - probably the children and grandchildren of New Deal Democrats - were the real base, one time, of the Democratic Party.

Now, you can preach "Southern Strategy" all you want, but as late as 1976, the South went solidly for Jimmy Carter (with the exception of Virginia, but when Virginia does "stupid," it does "real stupid" - cf: Ed Schultz and Eric Cantor). What annoys me the most is the condescension people in this region suffer from the so-called Democratic "elites" to the point that they've become a point of ridicule and are often presented as the bigots in the equation when ofttimes, it's the real bigots who are levelling the accusations.

These people were part of the expendable hoarde, kicked to the political curb forty years ago by the "cool kids" who took over the Democratic Party. They were wandering in the political wilderness until the Republicans smelled blood and took them and trained them up to be their own brand of useful idiot.

The late Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting with Jesus, who hailed from my neck of the woods, says it best:-

In the days before the spine of the labor movement was crushed, back when you could be a gun owner and a liberal without any conflict, members of the political left supported ... workers, stood on the lines taking beatings at the plant gates alongside them. Now there is practically no labor movement, and large numbers on the left are comfortably ensconced in the true middle class, which is only about 20 per cent to 30 per cent of Americans ... From that vantage point, liberals currently view working whites as angry, warmongering bigots, happy pawns of the American empire - which begs the question of how they came to be that way, if they really are.

Meanwhile, we have what my people see as the "liberal elite," the people still living the American Dream in relative economic safety. Yet the liberal elite - and verily they are an elite group - don't think of themselves as elitists. Overwhelmingly white and college educated, they live among clones of themselves. As far as they know, American life is about money, education, homeownership, and professionally useful friends. How can one blame them? Conditioning is everything, and how could they fail to believe their own experience or what they see every day, all of which suggests that their privileges are natural and deserved?

At the other end of the melanin-and-money meter are the blacks. And alongside them are low-earning, uneducated rednecks, bred from generations of low-earning, uneducated rednecks, clustered into neighborhoods of the same.

The middle class, both liberals and conservatives, are utterly dependent upon my people,the great throng of the underpaid, undereducated and overworked. This is not whining, just a simple statement of fact.

No Democrat or leftie seems to grasp that much of the working-class theocrats' eagerness to join the corporatists at putting the liberal yuppies in their place is revenge based. Working-class people can perceive the upper-middle-class snobbery toward them.

That last point is interesting, because it mirrors exactly the condescension of the Professional Left to the so-called plebs who make up their listening and reading public, whenever some potential ditto has an epiphany moment, wakes up and thinks for himself and dares to disagree publically with said hero or heroine, who take advantage of social networking sites to expound their self-perceived truths.

It's the same sort of privilege and entitlement that drives Salon editor Joan Walsh to sneer at the African American blogger LisaLV711, when Lisa politely questioned the fact that racism might be behind many of the onslaughts of criticism aimed at the President from various sections of the Left.

It's the same sort of privilege and entitlement which resulted in Boston Globe columnist, Charlie Pierce, actually calling me a TWAT on my Facebook page, when I, again, brought up the continuing question of Walsh's apparent racism, in her diehard defence of Hillary Clinton and her wet dream wish of a Hillary primary. Walsh is currently using reverse psychology to promote her Hillary dream - appearing to be at pains to say repeatedly that she doesn't want the President primaried, yet constantly reiterating a theme of "What would Hillary do?"

In her latest blog in Salon, I objected to the end of her article, which I felt was superfluous in many ways: It alluded to the personal conflict in which she's immersed herself in arguments with Obama supporters on her Twitter page, almost to the point that she appears to interject herself into private discussions in the guise of a concern troll. She also has resorted to the classic Clintonian line of defence that, even though Obama's been personally attacked, it's not nearly as bad as the real first black President got.

it's important for fervent Obama supporters to keep in mind that the GOP demonizes our current Democratic president much the way it did the last one.

Ummm ... not quite. Clinton was smeared by the Right, true; and most of it was blather - the drugs cartel thing, Vince Foster, travelgate ... but Slick Willie's philandering with women from the wrong side of the track was something that couldn't be denied, even if it all depended on what the definition of "is" was.

Racism gives the right wing more to work with, of course; on the other hand, they haven't called Obama a murderer yet.

No, but they've called him an alien, a foreigner, a Communist, a Socialist, an illegal immigrant posing as President. In Clinton, they tried to delegitimise him, based on faux crimes, the Right hoped the public would believe; in Obama, they've tried to delegitimise him based on the colour of his skin - and many in his own party have proven to be useful tools for the GOP in their relentless quest to impeach a Democratic President.

And if Obama critics over-personalize the president's problems, his defenders also over-personalize the criticism he gets.

This is rich, coming from Joan, who - until recently - claimed that Obama's defenders were actually GOP trolls paid by Andrew Breitbart. But I digress:-

One divisive claim is that white progressives, in particular, are racially clueless for demanding that Obama fight harder and maybe even show anger, because he'd be attacked as a menacing angry black man if he did so.

First of all, we won't know that the president doesn't ever get angry, as he so richly deserves to. Second: I think the argument is condescending and kind of dangerous. Insisting a black president can never show anger might suggest a black man should never be president, because sometimes a president needs to get angry. It also harks back to the 2008 primary, when the normal give and take of politics was too often framed racially. If you noted that Obama was relatively inexperienced when it came to national politics, you might sound like you were calling him a boy. If you observed that he sometimes seemed above the fray, especially at a time of economic suffering, you could be accused of calling him uppity. If you suggested he could appear detached from voters, you were playing Sarah Palin's game of questioning whether he's "one of us." Trying to erect a racial force field around the president, in which the normal terms of political debate are judged out of bounds and racist, hasn't helped anyone.

It's interesting that Joan cites Sarah Palin here, because she's actually doing the same thing Sarah does so well - projecting that sin for which she's been exposed onto the people leveling the accusation. So Joan's not racist, it's the people who say she is who are. They are the ones who are condescending, especially regarding the President.

But it's interesting to note that Joan's perceived racism, albeit subtle, has been around for awhile, at least since 2008, when she blogged about the PUMA supporter, Harriet Christian, unloading on the DNC for choosing an "inadequate black man" over a white woman, a blog which actually ended up almost defending Christian:-

We saw the face of the angry white female backlash against Obama over the weekend, and it was hard not to turn away. On Friday, Geraldine Ferraro complained in a Boston Globe Op-Ed that she's been demonized for saying that Obama's presidential run benefited from his being black, and called her treatment "reverse racism." On Saturday, Harriet Christian replaced Ferraro as the overwrought voice of white female resentment. There she was at the Democratic National Committee meeting, screaming at reporters that Democrats were about to nominate "an inadequate black male who would not have been running had it not been a white woman that was running for president."

Beyond Christian's deplorable reference to Obama as an "inadequate black male" was a wail worth hearing. She also said, "I'm proud to be an older American woman!" I can feel her pain. Reading the sexist attacks on Clinton and her white female supporters, as well as on female journalists and bloggers who've occasionally tried to defend her or critique Obama, has been, well, consciousness-raising. Prejudice against older women, apparently, is one of the last non-taboo biases. I've been stunned by the extent to which trashing Clinton supporters as washed up old white women is acceptable.

These comments were enough to offend The Atlantic columnist Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the time, who responded thus:-

Walsh apparently thinks Harriet's description of Obama as an inadequate black male, "was a wail worth hearing." I'm physically sick reading that. I never much agreed with Walsh's take on the Clinton's, but for my money, she just fell into Pat Buchanan territory.Anyone who thinks there's something to take from someone who says it's fine to resent black people racially, who claims that there's something worth hearing in describing the first black man to ever win a major party's nomination as "an inadequate black male" is the moral equivalent of a racist to me.

I don't play these word games. I don't much care about what's in your heart. I don't make any distinction between people who think I'm less than, and the cowards who know the truth, but still run with bigoted fools anyway. There's nothing feminist about siding with worst impulses of white America. The fact is we're tied to each other. The same fuckers who've turned the incarceration of black men into a business, are the same fuckers who'd love nothing better than to drag women back into the dark ages.

... That said, anyone who'd be willing to put the health of women, the chance to expand childcare, the chance to revisit equal pay, on the line in the name of electing a dude who called his own wife a cunt, who laughed as one of his supporters referred to Hillary Clinton as a bitch, who would most assuredly appoint judges that would reverse Roe v Wade, is a joke. There ain't nothing feminist, or "empowering" about gambling on the future of our daughters. It's a ego and sore loser-ism writ large. If that's your angle, take a hike.

There is also an ugly subtext to that "unqualified" remark. Exactly how many terms in the Senate did John Edwards have? Was he also unqualified? Would we be hearing that label from Hillary-supporters if he'd won?

That said, the answer is clearly "no."

And this brings us back to the question of the South, and liberal Southerners, Democrats. The British columnist, Andrew Sullivan in his Daily Beast blog, entitled "The Daily Dish," often posts comments to his op-eds, worthy enough, in and of themselves, to promote comment thereof. Earlier this week, he posted the following, which is clearly a Northern liberal's take on the make-up of the Tea Party:-

No. There's no sign the "Tea Party" are actually against government. They're just against government run by anybody except themselves. And since "they" are the rump South, that "anybody" mainly means the feds: the Northerners, the liberals, the carpetbaggers, the negro-lovers -- and of course, worst of all, the negros themselves ("negroes" to include not just African-Americans, but all sub-human others, including gays and, now, Muslims).

You have to remember this is the planter class. The planter mentality. The foundation of the South, and so of this country, when one considers the fortunes of many (most?) of the founding fathers. We have been at war with ourselves from the beginning. 2008 was just one more battle: a nigger (radical, terrorist, illegal alien) up against a son of the South (patriot, military man, scion of the McCains, among the largest slaveholders in Mississippi before the Civil War, still owners of the original plantation "Teoc").

All the Tea Party/Republican/Fox News actions since losing the election have simply been scorched earth warfare: deny the oppressing invader any sustenance, no matter what the cost to the country. Because first things first: destroy the usurper first, the alien, the radical, the invader, the liberal, the fed, the other -- then rebuild once the war is won. That's the game. No, they are not against government, or debt. They're just against any government or debt other than their own.

You see what I'm up against? Is that enlightenment? Is that intolerance? Pardon me, but Sarah Palin, to whom open race-baiting is but second nature, is from the snowy North. Michele Bachmann is from Minnesota, a Northern state. Did not New York choose Carl Palladino, a Tea Partier as their Republican candidate for governor? When a rather high-profiled blogger and California Democratic operative (and constant Obama critic) assails me on Twitter with an assertion that the South shouldn't be bothered with, because the people there "spit on Progressives" (that's "spit" as in "hock and ...")or when a well-known modern historian openly admits on his Facebook page that he hates Obama because he thinks he's "arrogant" (in Southern-speak, "uppity,"), you know Joan Walsh is not alone in her sentiments.

But Sullivan, ever the critical thinker, also provides a beautiful response to that afore-mentioned diatribe of assumptions, and I couldn't have expressed it better, myself:-

Okay, seriously, fuck this reader. As a Southern liberal who voted for Obama and gladly will again in 2012, I took offense to almost every word of that sanctimonious tripe.

I'd prefer to spend my life chained to the most backwards, Tea-Party, Limbaugh-listening, gun-toting, NASCAR-loving, backwoods hillbilly you've ever seen than to sit down for a single drink with this reader. It is one thing to be constantly condescended to by the rest of the country because we have funny accents and sweet tea. I am used to the constant reminders of the sins of our fathers (as if the sins were confined to one corner of the country). The Bible-belt moniker no longer bothers me like it used to.

However, one thing I will never get used to is the phenomenon of self-righteous Northerners talking about us as if we all love Jesus and guns and hate non-whites. Almost without fail, these are people who, other than the occasional trip to South Beach, have never been south of the Potomac; who have never lived in a small town; who have never seen a sunset in Texas; who have never never been to Shiloh, or Sharpsburg, or Mannassas, or Vicksburg; who think Faulkner is great because of his stylistic idiosyncrasies and who read the stories of Flannery O'Connor with horror and confusion rather than wonder; who have never loved their racist grandparents simply because family is family; who could not tell the difference between a Tennessee accent and a West Texas drawl; who have never seen the true devotion and love and warmth of the fundamentalist Christians they hate so vehemently.

When I was a boy, I loved the South. When I was a teenager, I hated it, wanted out. Now, I love it all over again, but for different reasons. I know the history of the place, and I know the mentality of so much of the Southern population. I know many Tea Partiers and NRA members and hard-line pro-lifers myself. I love many of them. Some of them are family. I love them too. I disagree with them, sometimes profoundly, but when you grow up with it, you learn to see beyond the caricature painted so crudely in the editorial pages and by your smug, self-satisfied reader. You learn that these people are every bit as capable of real compassion and sacrifice as any Northern son.

Your reader does not understand this place - does not care to try - because he/she does not like guns or Baptist churches or country music. That's fine. Your reader must sleep comfortably knowing that his fathers were on the right side of history. Well done. He/she sure earned his place atop the moral totem pole.

Your reader and I will likely vote the same way in 2012. Your reader, though, is an asshole.

And as for award-winning journalist, Charlie Pierce, he of the TWAT ad hominem, I leave you with his Esquire essay on the President's 2010 State of the Union address, complete with optional accompanying musical score ... The theme from Shaft.

I ask you, now, who's the real TWAT ... and something else? I'll just leave it at "asshole."

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.

Morphing on The Hill

Loads of people are in high-gear whine mode about the deal cut in Washington by the President with the Republicans last week. One of the lesser ad hominems being thrown at the President at the moment is the accusation that he's morphed into a Republican at last.

I beg to differ.

It's the fools on the Hill in the Democratic Party who are showing their true colours.

Pardon me, but I thought the deficit was one of the main GOP Rightwing talking points. You know, the spreading of the fear meme that if we don't get the deficit down and pronto, we're doomed to be roasted on a blazing spit in eternal hell or end up in international debtors' prison or something along those lines. Until last week, I thought the Democratic response to the GOP deficit war cry was, "Do not address the deficit at the expense of jobs."

In fact, many Democrats, both on the Hill and off it, who were critical of the President, often said in hindsight, that perhaps the first two years of his Presidency should have been devoted to job creation, instead of healthcare reform; in fact, that's one of the nicer criticisms two of the more bitchier self-proclaimed professional political pundits have levelled.

But that's all water under the bridge. The President effected a compromise with the recalcitrant Republican party to allow the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens to be extended temporarily for the next two years, in exchange for the tax cuts to be extended permanently on people earning less than $200,000 per annum ($250K for couples), a 13-month extension of Unemployment Insurance, a year's moratorium on payroll taxes and several other bits of legislation beneficial to the working class, the middle class, the working poor and their children (especially if those children wish to attend college or university).

Now, all of a sudden, it's a matter of the highest dudgeon that the exchange concerned the two-year extension of tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens. That and only that. That the revolt was led on the Hill by various and sundry elected officials in reasonably safe seats, and included members of Congress who rank amongst the wealthiest on the Hill - four of the five richest elected officials in Congress are Democrats - was truly astounding.

Not that they shouldn't want or expect to pay more taxes. That's fully in line with the Democrats' altruistic principles; but also, as career politicians, many of whom have been around the political block more than enough times, they should know that, in the free world, politics consists of compromise and compromise isn't pretty and doesn't make people happy. Even that great arm-twister, Lyndon Johnson, recognised that. So did FDR, who effectively compromised away any inclusion of African Americans in New Deal benefits in order to keep the Southern Democratic Senators sweet.

I cut my teeth in a Democratic cradle on the mantra that Democrats looked after the poor, the working poor, the working people, that Republicans helped only the rich and big business.

I guess nobody looks after those people now, except, maybe the President; and if Congress keeps throwing an idealogical hissy fit, that'll pretty much mean no one will.

But then, why should we Democrats worry about a bunch of toothless, uneducated rubes who sit agog in front of Fox News and always vote Republican anyway?

A couple of points amidst all this adolescent angst taking place at the moment:

The President told the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House that he wanted the tax cut situation addressed on the Hill when Congress returned from its summer hiatus in September. He wanted the tax cuts to feature in the midterm campaigns. If they'd passed for the middle classes, with the wealthiests' expiring, then that was a positive point to feature in any Congressional campaign; if they'd been defeated by Republican intransigence, then there was all the evidence a Democrat needed that the GOP cared only for the rich and their corporate masters.
Both Reid and Pelosi refused to consider this, informing the President that they would be addressing the tax cuts after the midterms, as there were too many who were up for re-election whose districts contained quite a few people above the arbitrary $250 point. Sticky subject. In fact, Russ Feingold personally lobbied to President not to press this issue until after the mid-terms. Well, Feingold lost his seat, and so did 65 Democrats in the House. Had this issue been addressed when the President originally asked, who knows what this might have wrought?

With that in mind, had more people actually got up off their asses on November 2 and moseyed along down to the polls, there may never have been need of such an odious compromise.
And, finally, thinking ahead to 2012, if the President should choose to try for re-election (and I wouldn't blame him if he didn't), the fact that the Republicans were all for using the moot point of reducing the deficit at all costs, to be more important than addressing the unemployment issue, would lend itself to being a very strong campaign point ... only now, the Democrats have boarded the deficit bus to ride along the road to 2012 with the Republicans, it seems.

And with the highest hypocrisy.

Suddenly, the tax cuts for the wealthiest, which she supported in 2001, have become distasteful to Senator Mary "Louisiana Purchase" Landrieu, who had to be bought like a high-class Big Easy hooker in order to sign onto any healthcare reform.

The longer this bus ride continues, the more ammunition the GOP have to throw back in any Democratic candidate's face in 2012, included that venerable saint, Howard Dean, who sounded off on this same note today.

And by effectively validating the deficit argument as the single most important issue that must be addressed in Congress, with rejecting this bill outright as contributing to that deficit, doesn't this sorta kinda (forgive the Palinese) indirectly validate Simpson-Bowles?

The political bus these recalcitrant Democrats are about to board at their own risk doesn't stop until the deficit's been addressed, and, like all means of transport, it doesn't do flip-flops, no matter how regrettably short the voting public's memory is. Any moving vehicle which flip-flops, as we all know results in its occupants suffering inevitable fatalities.