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.

A Well-Informed Electorate Elects a Responsible Government? Ask Eric Cantor

“Reckless Eric” Cantor is a marvel to behold.

As a Congress, consisting of Tea Partying ignorati and well-heeled, corporately-funded and criminally-intentioned spivs on one side and spineless and cowering Mr Pooters crying out for nursemaids on the other, dithers and dathers about finalising a government budget, our Eric steps manfully into the fray to annouce that, should the Senate not decide to come to the table and submit a budget proposal for consideration before the approaching deadline of April 6th, then the budget passed by the House – the one which cuts Federal funding for such dangerous organisations as Planned Parenthood and NPR – will automatically become the law of the land, fiscally.

Our Eric says that with certainty. He says it, not only with certainty, but with clarity before the nation’s news media, who scribble away furiously on their notepads and raise nary a query about his pronouncement.

Well, our Eric is wrong. And with that arrogantly simple-minded statement, he proves patently that he’s unfit for the office of Congressman from the 7th District of the Commonwealth of Virginia, ne’mind Majority Leader for the House of Representatives.

Somewhere, in some nether world, James Madison, who shares a common Virginian heritage with Eric and me, is screaming from beyond the grave. If you cup your ear, you can probably hear him.

What an insult to the author of the Constitution, that not only a Congressman, but also a leading politician from Madison’s home state, should be so ignorant of Congressional and Constitutional procedure!

I’m a product of the public school system in the Commonwealth. Way back in the dark ages, when Richard Nixon was President and VietNam was still in swing, as a high school junior and as part of my curriculum, I had to take a year-long civics course, simply entitled “Government.” Every high school junior and senior in the Commonwealth had to take the course, and we all had a red and blue textbook, with the title “U S Government” emblazoned in white across the front.

Up in Fauquier County, my teacher was a retired Army officer and avowed libertarian from an old Virginia family, named Col Slater V Marshall. We spent the entire first semester, studying the Constitution and the government, its three branches and their functions and how they related and policed one another in the system of checks and balances. We learned about elections. On Fridays, we discussed events current in the news and debated the hot topics of the day. When we’d finished an exhaustive study of our own government, at some point in the school year, we learned how a parliamentary democracy works, and we also studied how the then-Soviet Union was set up to govern.

One of the things we learned, whilst studying our own government, is how a bill becomes a law. As part of our exam process, we had to reiterate, in essay form, the passage of a bill from the moment it was introduced to the moment it became law.

Eric Cantor attended one of the most exclusive private boys’ schools in the Commonwealth. I can only imagine that they didn’t do a very good job of teaching civics there; and if they didn’t, I’m astounded that he didn’t pick this sort of information up during his undergraduate tenure at George Washington University or later in his law studies at William and Mary.

Now I’m not the biggest fan of Eric’s, but I give him credit where credit is due, for being able to be consistently re-elected to what is largely a very rural constituency. And I have to be honest. Virginians are Virginians. I’m as proud of Eric being Majority Leader of a party I don’t support as I’m as proud of Norfolk-born-and-bred Ed Schultz being a predominant political voice of the Left in the media. But anyone of my generation, and that includes Ed, would have choked chewing their cabbage to hear Eric pronounce that if the Senate didn’t act on presenting their version of the budget, then the House’s version becomes law. Without passing through the Senate. And I have to wonder how many people of subsequent generations, including those populating the political news media now, realised the enormous faux pas the House Majority Leader made in asserting that.

Because it’s simply not done.

Put simply, fiscal legislation begins in the House, is approved by the Senate (or is diddled with, sent back to the House to be passed) and then sent to the President for his signature or his veto. In asserting that the House rules supreme and supersedes the Senate, Eric’s either patently ignorant or pandering patently.

Which one?

I think the latter, and I think it’s just another in a long line of scare tactics which have become normal behaviour for the Republican Party. The fact that Reckless Eric blatantly made this statement on the record and in front of the nation’s cameras, and the fact that the news media covering the event, blithely recorded it and made no attempt to refute (or, indeed, “refudiate”) the assertion, is simply indicative of the collective ignorance pervading the country at the moment. In fact, the only media personality who actually picked up on Eric’s misguided assumption was Lawrence O’Donnell, who skewered Eric for his ignorance on last night’s The Last Word.



I don’t presume to know why none of the newshounds shadowing Eric didn’t pick up on his error. Maybe they were ignorant of the procedure, themselves. If that’s the case, they have precious little business covering events on Capitol Hill. Or maybe they knew and allowed this to be broadcast, in hopes that the informed viewing public would pick up on the discrepancy and howl in indignation at what was tantamount to a gross error in legislative procedure made by a senior member of the House majority party, which is probably assuming too much and giving too much credit to too many members of the viewing public, themselves.

More than likely, it’s probably a case of mutual and cynical pandering on the part of both Eric and the press. As we say in Virginia, Eric’s hankering for a full-on government shutdown. He’s so thirsty for it, he can barely resist licking his lips. He knows this isn’t 1994 – although if the GOP get absolute control of the government, as they have in some of the Midwestern states, it will be worse than Orwell’s 1984 – and he knows that, with the aid of a corrupt and compliant corporate media representing both the Right and the Left, blame for any government shutdown will be laid firmly at the President’s feet.

If that be the case, that’s not just shameful, it’s shameless and immoral. Not only does it show the disrespect evident for the President by various elected officials, it also shows the same on behalf of the media, who used to be trusted, reliably, to inform the public – and even worse, it shows the low regard with which elected officials and the media regard the general public.

Whose fault is that?

Well, it was yet another Virginian, the author of the Declaration of Independence, himself, who confidently asserted that a well-informed electorate can be trusted to chose a responsible government.

How long, then, is that piece of string?

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