I love it when I have responded to an email, then realized I have created a blog post.
A friend sent me a piece of an article from the Richmond, VA Times-Dispatch, dealing with the Republican netroots  – or their efforts in that respect, to be more specific.
This excerpt refers to Republican presidential candidates shunned CNN’s YouTube debates:

“Republicans cannot write off the Internet” the bloggers wrote on the Web site. “If you approach the Internet from a position of paralyzing fear, you will be outgunned, outmanned, and out-raised at every turn. It is fundamentally unacceptable to surrender to the Democrats on one of the most important battlefronts of this election.”
In Virginia, many Republicans disagree that their party is behind the curve,
pointing to state legislators’ efforts in stumping for re-election. Even
former Sen. George Allen, with his blog, has stepped back into the medium that
shredded his re-election bid.
“Most Republicans want a policy debate,” said Republican Party of Virginia
communications director Shaun Kenney, who has also blogged about state
politics. “They don’t want to talk to a snowman.”
He said Republicans are not lagging behind Democrats in using the Internet,
but they are doing it differently. Republicans tend to look to pundits, he
said, which is one reason why talk radio has done so well for them. Democrats
tend to look for opportunities to be more active, he said.

Emphasis mine.
Shaun, do you realize what you just said?
Go below the fold.

Here’s what I banged out in response, or rather, what it turned into after I expanded on it for this venue.

Conservatism, by its very nature, requires complete, top-down message control to function effectively.
That’s the difference between us and them.
This is why, I believe, the Republicans will never, never be able to use the internet, and paricularly, blogging, to the efficacy that we do.
The concept of open discussion as it exists in the blogosphere works against the nature of their philosophy. They are conservatives; and by nature, resistant to changes in their thinking or the introduction of new ideas.
Preservation of existing paradigms takes precedence over whether they function effectively, and with benefit, or not.
This creates an effect that could be expressed by saying that not only do they not learn from their MISTAKES, they at times have trouble learning from their SUCCESSES.
They don’t seem to have learned from their one major success to date at netroots activism that I can think of: getting Bush’s immigration package shot in the head.
What drove that?
DISSENT from party-line, activist-driven people powered gate crashization.
But even with that mojo working, they still used a heavy memetic: the concept of “amnesty” – therefore the message control was still in place.
The only difference was, WHO controlled it.
On RW blogs, dissenting views are, as often as not, deleted, and their advancers are frequently banned by administrators.
The Democratic/lefty blogs, as a rule, go to LENGTHS to avoid doing this, preferring instead to implement community moderation systems a la Daily Kos, and the SoapBlox network of which this site is a part.
There is little room for dissent in conservatism, I’m sure you’ll readily agree that that operates on any number of levels.
Conversely, we are a big tent, encompassing everyone from Creigh Deeds, t3h Mudcat, and Jim Webb to oh, say, Dennis (goofball) Kucinich.
And I can call him a goofball on Daily Kos and survive.
Doesn’t mean I don’t LIKE him, I just think he’s goofy.
But God help anyone who dares utter a negative word about oh, say, Rush Limbaugh? on the winger blogs.
You’ll find your account deleted, like as not.
After you get called fifty kinds of terrorist.
Keith Olbermann showed pictures of the Frost children’s accident last night on MSNBC. Link in today’s Cobalt Corral.
If you read the comments in the MSNBC blog from the wingers, they echo Malkin, who’s on point on this (having been dispatched by McConnell’s office) practically word for word.
Polly wanna cracker.
Right wing bloggers don’t scare me.
They don’t get WHY it works.
They can’t offer anything different than what can be gotten from passively watching Fox News, for instance.

And that last is just it.
Shaun Kenney, ad redundum:

Republicans tend to look to pundits, he said, which is one reason why talk radio has done so well for them. Democrats
tend to look for opportunities to be more active, he said.

Blogging is a TWO-way street.
You have to LISTEN as well as talk.
Republicans don’t do that so well.

This is a review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, a detailed, journalistic history of neoliberalism which emphasizes its connection to “shock therapy,” torture, and other means of tearing down people and society so that they can be rebuilt along the lines of “perfect,” ideological models.  My review differs from others in that it focuses upon a sequential review of important themes and close analysis of key quotes within the book.

From flickr

Kudos to Eirik Raude, Susan G,  MizC and itsmitch

The Shock Doctrine
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
By Naomi Klein
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
New York, 2007

This book fingers neoliberalism so thoroughly that, after reading it, you’ll think of Milton Friedman and the rest of the neoliberals as a collection of sadistic mad scientists, experimenting on the world with an abandon which we would normally attribute to the villains of James Bond movies.

The Shock Doctrine is a book written as journalistic expose, yet it goes further than most of its kind in presenting us with a full-fledged history of neoliberalism, from its ideological roots in the Mont Pelerin Society to the present moment.

Now, there are plenty of books written about neoliberalism.  Dumenil and Levy’s Capital Resurgent, for instance, or David Harvey’s book (mentioned in Lenin’s Tomb), as well as (for those who know my work here) Harry Shutt’s The Trouble With Capitalism.  But this is one of the best, because it documents the “neoliberal experience” so thoroughly that it will be difficult to make promises of neoliberal paradise seem real afterward.

Now, I recognize that there are plenty of reviews of The Shock Doctrine already out on the Internet and in the published presses; I wrote this as a foretaste of the review I’m hoping to get published, and to try to convey the sense of hidden riches located within the Klein book, a sense I’m not sure is fully conveyed in other reviews.

We start this book reading about corporations attempting to profit from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina (one comment from a bystander is priceless: “they’re not blind: they’re evil.  They see just fine.”).  We move swiftly in Klein’s narrative to Milton Friedman’s assessment of Katrina: Katrina, he suggests, is an opportunity to impose a voucher system upon New Orleans’ schools.  The introduction to The Shock Doctrine reveals neoliberalism, as a particular mode of capitalist development, was originally theorized by Milton Friedman, and that, moreover, the:

…idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning – this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance.  (9)

So, for Klein, neoliberal capitalism is disaster capitalism, and this process of moving into disaster areas in order to destroy livelihoods while sending fat paychecks to corporate overlords elsewhere is integral to its development.  It’s not merely a capitalist variant in which the financial sector has hypertrophied, or in which dollar hegemony prevails.  Now, mind you, Klein is no economist.  But she makes a persuasive case, and in that regard I’d like to hear from economists who have read this book on what they think about it.

There are three main aspects to neoliberalism as Klein describes it: disaster capitalism, shock therapy, and torture.  The first chapter is about the third of these, and Klein spends some paper and ink describing the history of torture as it was devised by psychologists and implemented by the CIA.  She interviews torture victims and reviews the history of Dr. Ewen Cameron, CIA employee and electroshock pioneer.

The second chapter reviews the activities of the “Berkeley Mafia,” who attempted to impose a version of crony capitalism upon Indonesia through the activities of mass-murderer Suharto.  But the real birthplace of neoliberalism, we are told in chapter 3, is Chile in 1973, with Pinochet.  Here, and in her coverage of Argentina, Klein connects the imposition of neoliberal “shock therapy” with the tortures visited upon the Left in both countries during the periods of dictatorial rule in which neoliberalism was imposed.  Now, Chile is commonly trumpeted as a neoliberal economic success.  But has it really worked?  Klein says no:

The country’s period of steady growth that is held up as proof of its miraculous success did not begin until the mid-eighties – a full decade after the Chicago Boys implemented shock therapy and well after Pinochet was forced to make a radical course correction. That’s because in 1982, despite its strict adherence to Chicago doctrine, Chile’s economy crashed: its debt exploded, it faced hyperinflation once again and unemployment hit 30 percent – ten times higher than it was under Allende.  The main cause was that the piranhas, the Enron-stile financial houses that the Chicago Boys had freed from all regulation, had bought up the country’s assets on borrowed money and run up an enormous debt of $14 billion.  (85)

As Klein said later in an interview, these people don’t really believe in the ideology they promote: “Ideology serves as sort of a cover story to rationalize massive personal enrichment.”  And, as she hints at now and then through the book and especially in the conclusion, neoliberal economics doesn’t work in the long run.

The connections between murder, torture, South American dictatorships, and the Chicago School are tightened in Chapter 4, with Chapter 5 devoted to the propaganda effort to dissociate these things.  From these chapters, constituting the first two parts of the book, Klein’s narrative then flies outward, into a discussion of the Falklands war as a vehicle for Thatcher’s privatizations, and of IMF “shock therapy” as visited upon South America and Eastern Europe post-1989.  Chapter 8 discusses how the Chicago School took hold of the IMF and the World Bank, and how “structural adjustment programs” were used to force the national economies of debtor nations to subscribe to neoliberal prescriptions.  The recipe used was simple: manipulate commodity prices to force national economies into crisis, offer IMF loans as the price of economic stability, and force through “structural adjustment” and corporate penetration as the price of the loans.  Chapter 10 focuses upon the disaster in South Africa; after having defeated the apartheid regime, the ANC was made to kneel before the IMF and the GATT.  The result of it all is that, though the majority of South Africa is now free, the inequities of wealth have increased.  Cast off the political chains, fasten the economic ones.

Chapter 11 then shows how neoliberalism was imposed upon Russia.  Gorbachev wanted to integrate the Soviet Union into the world economy as a sort of Sweden; but he was told at the G-7 summit in London in 1991 that if he did not impose “shock therapy” upon his country immediately, they would “sever the rope and let him fall” from power.  (219)  This is in fact what happened.  The Russia chapters detour through a long narrative about Jeffrey Sachs until Klein’s list of neoliberal disasters picks up again with Chapter 13’s discussion of the 1997 economic collapse in Asia. 

The next few chapters, comprising Part 5 of the book, are about the Bush administration’s transformation of the US state into a corporate complex in which, in Klein’s words, “public service is reduced to little more than a reconnaissance mission for future work in the disaster capitalism complex,” as government has at this point become a conduit for corporate profit.  Part 6 is about Iraq as a “disaster capitalism” war, in which the troop strength is kept low to cut costs while the Iraqi economy is outfitted for corporate plunder.  This, once again, is connected to torture, this time in Abu Ghraib:

One factor that made the surge in torture tactics all but inevitable was Donald Rumsfeld’s determination to run the military like a modern, outsourced corporation.  He had planned the troop deployment less like a defense secretary and more like a Wal-Mart vice president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll.  Having whittled the generals down from their early requests for 500,000 troops to fewer than 200,000, he still saw fat to trim: at the last minute, satisfying his inner CEO, he cut tens of thousands more troops from the battle plans. (368)

The remaining troops were like frustrated teachers in overcrowded and rebellious classrooms, in which order must be imposed through terror tactics.

The next chapters, Chapter 19 and 20, are about the rebellion in Sri Lanka, the south Asian tsunami of December 2004, and Hurricane Katrina.  At this point in reading the book, I was guessing this: the “disaster capitalism” complex does not discriminate between disasters.  Any disaster will do, natural, human-caused, or (as was the case with Iraq) intentionally-provoked for fun and profit.  The sociological results, Klein concluded, were always the same:

Everywhere the Chicago School crusade has triumphed, it has created a permanent underclass of between 25 and 60 percent of the population.  It is always a form a war.  (405)

Chapter 21 is about Israel as a sort of “standing disaster apartheid state,” in which, after the dot-com crash, Israel positions itself as a “shopping mall for homeland security technologies.”(435)  Thus Israel forms a hub of the “disaster capitalism complex.”  But before Klein points this out, she solemnly announces that “disaster capitalism” is not the result of a conspiracy:

An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial.  The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis, and the dot-com collapse all demonstrate.  Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430 percent since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower-intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia, and Sudan), which in tern create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). (426)

Now, there’s a conclusion to Klein’s tale, in which she endorses “democratic socialism” (450) and details the global revolt against neoliberalism, but I want to conclude this review by looking at the larger implications of Klein’s disavowal of conspiracy theory. 

A lot of Klein’s discussion is a detailing of key figures: Milton Friedman, Jeffrey Sachs, Donald Rumsfeld.  To a certain extent (besides the occasional interventions of the Clinton administration on the side of neoliberalism), we might allow ourselves to imagine that this is all a Republican conspiracy (with the help, perhaps, of the Conservatives and of New Labour in the UK).  No, says Klein, “disaster capitalism” is part of the social set-up in which we find ourselves at the turn of the 21st century.  And, if some of the disasters are intentional, this becomes necessary to pre-empt the movements toward democratic socialism (or even social democracy) which would otherwise take neoliberalism’s place:

The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections.  They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures.  (450)

So this isn’t a conspiracy theory, but rather the beginnings of an explanation of the current situation in political economy, in which, since capitalism itself has become increasingly dangerous and obsessed with the short-term, powerful “shocks” must be applied to allow the system itself (and especially its neoliberal vanguard) to continue to exploit an unwilling public.  With The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein has created a history of neoliberalism that may be merely journalistic, but which in important ways adds real-life grounding to the analyses compiled by economists, political scientists, sociologists, and world-systems theorists on this topic.  At the same time, Klein’s book is relatively quite easy to read when compared with the deliberations of the academics; if we are looking for a text that will motivate people around the world to put an end to neoliberalism, we must employ writing and speaking of the sort that overflows here.  Klein takes us through every step of neoliberalism’s triumph, without using academic shorthand.

And, sure, the large blockquote above points to things the global public failed to learn in the 1970s and 1980s, thus why it was not sufficiently capable of resisting neoliberalism in the multitude of diverse countries given in The Shock Doctrine, and elsewhere.  For instance, “progressives,” democratic socialists, “liberals,” and other anti-neoliberals have yet to master the economics (and the social dynamics) of an ecologically sustainable society, and this (among other things) makes the public vulnerable to the neoliberals.

And although it doesn’t really get to the economic secret of “disaster capitalism,” The Shock Doctrine does make some firm connections between neoliberal capitalism and the bad end we can see up the road a bit.  (The corporations don’t really profit off of the disasters per se, as disasters provide important pretexts for corporate penetration and government subsidy.)

We can now add Arizona to the long list of states in which recent studies prove that the current influx of immigrants, both legal and undocumented, have contributed far more to the economy and tax base than they receive in government services.

Joining studies from California, Texas, Florida, New Mexico, Washington DC, and Long Island, NY, a new report from Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at The University of Arizona looks at the contributions and costs of Arizona’s immigrant population and finds not only an overall net gain for the state, but that the loss of this population would likely cause long term economic problems.

At a time when states like Georgia,  Oklahoma and Colorado, and municipalities large and small all over the country, are passing harsh legislation intended to drive off their immigrant populations, this Arizona study concludes that, in the long run, these restrictionist tactics will end up creating economic disaster for certain segments of the economy and an overall loss for all residents. These finding don’t bode well for the state which already has some of the toughest anti-immigrant laws in the nation.

The study is also unique in that it breaks out the non-citizen population from the rest of the immigrant population and still comes to the same overall conclusions.

This is a important development, since one of the restrictionst’s chief weapons in their war of misinformation has been the lack of information on the contributions of the undocumented versus the larger immigrant population. This has allowed them to wrongly discount or discredit many of the previous studies by claiming that the undocumented are somehow different than the broader immigrant population in their use of services or contributions.

Arizona’s foreign-born population has grown dramatically since 1990 when there were about 268,700 foreign-born persons in the state. By 2004, the foreign-born population had grown to 830,900. This is more than a 200 percent increase. The vast majority of these new immigrants are in the non-citizen category, which went from 163,300 to about 619,800, an increase of almost 280 percent. Most immigrants are of working age and have come to the United States seeking employment. This fact is central to their impacts in Arizona.

The likelihood that many of Arizona’s non-citizens are undocumented immigrants has fueled anger over lawlessness and made discussion of immigration in Arizona politically contentious….

… It is not the purpose of this study to address the myriad issues surrounding illegal immigration (but rather to) focus instead on a broader examination of all immigrants’ impacts on Arizona’s economic and fiscal health. By so doing, we hope to create a more thorough understanding of the economic costs and benefits of immigration and of the tradeoffs involved in setting and enforcing immigration policy.
Immigrants in Arizona: Fiscal and Economic Impacts

Based on this study, the total state tax revenue attributable to immigrant workers was an estimated $2.4 billion, of which about $1.5 billion came from for non-citizens. Balanced against estimated fiscal costs of $1.4 billion (for education, health care, and law enforcement), the net 2004 fiscal impact of immigrants in Arizona was positive by about $940 million.

Fiscal costs of immigration

Estimates of the incremental fiscal costs of immigration were derived from a variety of sources. In summary:

• Education: For this analysis, English Language Learner (ELL) enrollment was used as a proxy for the number of immigrant children in Arizona’s public schools. The 2004 cost of ELL education in Arizona was about $540 million of which about $350 million (65 percent) was incurred in Maricopa County.
• Health care: Total uncompensated care costs (reported as bad debt) for hospitals in Arizona was about $420 million, of which an estimated $150 million (32 percent) was incurred by immigrants. Of the $150 million in uncompensated care costs associated with immigrants, nearly $140 million was incurred by non-citizens.

  The total cost in 2004 of Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), Arizona’s Medicaid program, was $4.3 billion, of which an estimated $640 million was incurred by immigrants. Of the $640 million in AHCCCS costs associated with immigrants, about $480 million was incurred by non-citizens.

• Law enforcement: In the area of law enforcement, the cost to the Arizona Department of Corrections of incarcerating immigrants in 2004 was $91 million, of which $89 million was for non-citizens.

The 2004 total economic output attributable to immigrant workers was about $44 billion, $29 billion of that coming from non-citizens. This output included $20 billion in labor and other income and resulted in approximately 400,000 full-time-equivalent jobs.

Immigrants as consumers

As consumers, immigrants bring considerable spending power to Arizona’s economy. This spending contributes to Arizona’s overall economic performance, and, in turn, generates tax revenues for the state.

• Jobs and income: Consumer spending in 2004 by naturalized citizen households in Arizona was an estimated $6.1 billion. Approximately 39,000 full-time equivalent jobs can be attributed to this spending along with $5.9 billion of output in the state’s economy.

  This output included labor income of $1.2 billion, and other income (defined as rents, royalties, dividends, and corporate profits) of $900 million.

  Consumer spending in 2004 by non-citizen households in Arizona was an estimated $4.4 billion. Approximately 28,000 full-time equivalent jobs can be attributed to this spending along with $4.3 billion of output in the state’s economy. This output included labor income of about $930 million, and other income (defined as rents, royalties, dividends, and corporate profits) of $560 million.

• Tax revenues: Consumer spending in 2004 by Arizona’s naturalized citizens generated tax revenues of approximately $460 million, consisting of personal taxes of about $49 million, sales taxes of about $210 million, and business taxes of $190 million.

  Consumer spending in 2004 by Arizona’s non-citizens generated tax revenues of approximately $320 million, consisting of personal taxes of nearly $36 million, sales taxes of $150 million, and business taxes of about $130 million.
  Immigrants as workers

  Immigrants in 2004 were 14 percent of Arizona’s workforce, and were a larger proportion of low-skilled labor in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and certain service industries. High-skilled immigrants were a large percent of the workers in specific areas of medicine and science.

In low-skilled occupations in Arizona:

• Agriculture: Immigrants were 59 percent of the workforce in farming occupations and 22 percent of the workforce in food-preparation-and-serving occupations.
• Construction: Immigrants were between 35 percent and 41 percent of the workforce in certain construction trades such as brick masons, flooring installers, and cement masons. They were 27 percent of the workforce in all construction trades.
• Manufacturing: Immigrants were 35 percent of the workforce in food-related manufacturing, 46 percent of the workforce in textile-related manufacturing, and 22 percent of the workforce in metal-working manufacturing.
• Service industries: Immigrants were 34 percent of the workforce in occupations providing services to buildings, 51 percent of the workforce in landscaping-services occupations, and 38 percent of the workforce in building-and-grounds maintenance. Immigrants were 26 percent of the workforce in traveler-accommodations occupations, 23 percent of the workforce in restaurant-and-food-serving occupations, and 33 percent of the workforce in private-household help.

In high-skilled occupations in Arizona:

• Medicine: Immigrants were 38 percent of medical scientists and 19 percent of physicians and surgeons.
• Science: Immigrants were 36 percent of astronomers and physicists, 16 percent of computer-hardware engineers, 18 percent of computer-software engineers, and 17 percent of electrical and electronics engineers. Immigrants were 15 percent of economists.

Economic contributions of immigrant labor

Approximately $15 billion, or four percent, of the state’s output can be attributed to naturalized citizen workers, resulting in about 120,000 full-time-equivalent jobs. This output included $4.9 billion in labor income and $1.9 billion of other income in the state. State tax revenues resulting from this economic activity were approximately $860 million.

Non-citizens, for their part, contributed about $29 billion, or eight percent of Arizona’s economic output, resulting in about 280,000 full-time-equivalent jobs. Their output included $10 billion in labor income, and $3.3 billion in other property income. The state tax revenues resulting from this economic activity were approximately $1.5 billion.

The study also looks at what impact the removal of as little as 10-15% of the immigrant workforce would have on the state’s economy. Over $.5 billion in tax revenues would be lost, 125,000 jobs and $13.5 billion of lost economic output.

The role of immigrants as workers can be further understood by analyzing the potential consequences of this source of labor not being available. In other words, what would be the impacts if immigrant labor were removed from the economy?

To this end, this study used a series of computer simulations to examine the impacts of reduced immigrant labor on the industries that employ relatively large numbers of immigrants. The study focused on industries employing low-skilled, non-citizen workers because this is where recent growth in Arizona’s immigrant population has occurred and because we know that significant numbers of these workers are in the country without authorization. Thus, the simulations are designed to estimate the economic consequences of eliminating this segment of the workforce.

• Agriculture: A 15-percent, immigrant-workforce reduction in the agriculture sector would result in direct losses of 3,300 full-time-equivalent jobs, and losses of about $600 million in output including lost labor income of about $200 million, and lost other income of about $110 million. The lost direct state tax revenue would be approximately $25 million.
• Construction: A 15-percent, immigrant-workforce reduction in the construction sector would result in direct losses of about 56,000 full-time-equivalent jobs, and about $6.6 billion in output including lost labor income of about $2.6 billion and some $450 million in lost other income. The direct lost state tax revenue would be approximately $270 million.
• Manufacturing: A ten-percent reduction in immigrants in the manufacturing workforce would result in direct losses of about 12,000 full-time-equivalent jobs, and about $3.8 billion in output including lost labor income of about $740 million, and lost other income of nearly $290 million. The lost direct state tax revenue would be approximately $100 million.
• Service industries: In the service sectors analyzed, a 16-percent reduction in the immigrant labor force would translate to direct losses of 54,000 full-time-equivalent jobs, and lost output of $2.5 billion including reduced labor income of about $900 million, and reductions in other income of about $270 million. The lost direct state tax revenue would be nearly $160 million.

Clearly, lawmakers from statehouses to city councils across the country should examine this study before they begin to contemplate the adoption of restrictionist tactics and harsh legislation when addressing this issue. …..like the old saying goes:
“Be careful what you wish for  …  or you just might get it.”

Read complete report

– as in, decomposing?

You know – rotting away?

The ones in office are “retiring” or changing parties, the ones who would otherwise vote Republican are defecting in huge numbers – hell, even the ones who should be manning the ramparts, the architects of the Thousand-Year Republic Majority, those who you would think would form the bulwark of Republic stalwartness – BushCheney’s Republican Guard, if you will – are shedding their uniforms and melting into the general populace, in Shock and Awe at the reversal of their fortunes.

It won’t be long before the indignant retort, “I was never a Republican!” will be heard throughout the land.

As my friend clammyc points out in his diary today, Republics are tripping over themselves in a frantic effort to exit stage left.

What are they running from?

The rotting corpse of the Republic Party.

Yes, the Republic body politic has turned ripe, and it’s gotten to the point where nobody wants to be in the same room with it anymore.

It’s like in the movie, Weekend at Bernie’s: The BushCheney administration has killed the Republic Party, but many in the GOP desperately want to carry on as if nothing has happened.  Obviously some Republics don’t know or don’t care what has happened; they’re still sitting in the room with the corpse, ignorant or in denial of its true condition. They’ll either continue to hang out with the cadaver – going to country club fundraisers or obstructing healthcare for children, all the time stupendously unaware that it is in fact dead – or else they’ll be feverishly hoping that no one notices the worsening stench.

Call it, Weekend at Boehner’s.

And the more the corpse decays, the harder it is for any Republics to show solidarity by remaining in the room.  Unable to tolerate the putrid stench, and realizing that they, too, are taking on a sweet sickly odor, more and more Republics are being sent fleeing from the party, screaming.  Eventually the only ones willing to remain with the horribly decomposing carcase will be the maggots, the necrophiliacs and the vampires – which, although still forming a sizeable proportion of the Republic Party, do not constitute a significant voting bloc among the general electorate.

American voters don’t like the stench, either: they are running from the GOP’s ghastly cadaver as fast as they can. They are fleeing the deceased frantically in every direction, intending to vote in 2008 (if they vote at all) for Anything But A Republic. But they will need a reason to vote for a Democrat. Unfortunately, it will not be enough for Democrats to be Not Stinking Republicans. The Democrats will need a better campaign slogan than,

Democrats: At least we’re still alive

– or,

Democrats: We smell better than the Republic Party

– or,

Democrats: There ain’t no flies on us

In talking with my independent friends about this, it’s clear what Democrats need to do to attract those voters:

Democrats need to show some spine.

This might begin by actually, you know, doing something about Republic corruption and abuse of power, which, after all, is the main reason voters put Democrats in power in November 2006 in the first place.

Unfortunately, what’s happened in the last nine months has mostly consisted of congressional Democrats trying to pal around with rotten Republics, thinking that “bipartisanship” is the same thing as “formaldehyde.”

It’s not.

See, the problem with hanging out with a rotting corpse is that pretty soon you start to smell pretty gamey yourself. In fact, it doesn’t take long for your own aroma to become indistinguishable – to the average voter, anyway – from that of the maggoty morgue-bait you’re associating with.

So rather than palling around with what’s left still clinging to the bones of the Republic Party, Nancy Pelosi should do the responsible thing and conduct an autopsy of the corpse: Roll up her sleeves, pick up her scalpel, make the “Y” incision, peel back the layers, probe around among the disgusting putrescent, cancer-ridden organs within, and lay out for all the world to see the full, awful, stomach-turning vileness that has taken over every cell of the Republic Party.

Once she’s done that – once Congress has conducted a thorough, sober, serious, comprehensive investigation into the laundry list of criminality perpetrated upon the people of this country and the world by the BushCheney administration – compelling, as is its Constitutional duty and prerogative, testimony from any party necessary – and displayed the disgusting details of it, just how many Republics do you think will want to stick around, and risk getting some of that putrescent, gelatinous slime all over them? Not many, would be my guess.

In spite of what many of the more cautious among us have steadfastly maintained, Democrats have nothing to fear from the impeachment process.  The American people are not so stupid as to believe that a significant investigation into the many wrongdoings of this current administration in any way constitutes a political witchhunt. (That’s just a high-falutin’ way of saying that they’ll be able to tell the difference between a sober examination of the wrongdoings of the current gang of criminals in the White House and environs, and a tabloid-hogging orgy of hypocritical and jealousy-fueled mock righteous indignation over a blue dress.)

To the contrary, what I consistently hear even among my friends who classify themselves as independents, although they lean to the right, is that in the last nine months, the Democrats have shown themselves to be no better than the Republicans they replaced in Congress. What these independents pine for is not More Of The Same, but More Of My Country.

Exit polling from last November’s election showed that the number one issue among voters nationally was corruption.  One could therefore reasonably infer that voters sent Democrats to Congress not to do corruption better, or to hide it more effectively, or to spread it around more equally, but rather simply to Clean. It. Up. To hold accountable those who are guilty of it.

Please bear this in mind, Madame Speaker:

The Republic Party is a joke – a foul-smelling, nonresponsive, unfeeling, cold, lifeless, unfunny joke.

The American people don’t want it – in fact, they are clamoring for its foul, rotting corpse to be removed from the American political landscape. The American people sent you to Congress to do a job.

Please do it.

Cross-posted at DailyKos