Tag: Democrats

I’ve been watching these two flirting while pretending not to flirt since about 2002. The elephant would watch the donkey all the time, and the donkey would watch back, while they pretended to hate each others’ guts. The donkey would pretend not to give a shit — not speaking to him, not returning his calls, but the whole time she’d look for excuses to be around while the elephant was in the room. It got to be pretty annoying after a while — the donkey would be flirting her ass off, and the whole time saying it was nothing, just a little bipartisanship, all in a spirit of compromise.

It only got worse after 2004 — the donkey practically throwing herself at the elephant, while acting all coy, like she didn’t even care, the elephant behaving like a cold bastard toward her, while anybody with half a brain in their head knew he really wanted to fuck her brains out.

The goddamn’ donkey got even worse around 2008 or so — smarmy coy looks, suggestive touching, soppy goo-goo eyes, all the time insisting there was nothing to it. Finally, about the time of the health care vote, she was all but falling all over the elephant, and it became insufferable. It was all I could do to keep from yelling “for crissakes, why don’t you two just get a room, already?”

Hat tip to political cartoonist Mike Flugennock for posting this at Corrente as well as at his own site.

As David Swanson noted on Wednesday:

You may have heard that our center-right nation got enthusiastic, formed a grassroots movement called a tea party, and overwhelmingly voted in a more rightwing party, sending hordes of nasty socialists packing as a result of their overly progressive performance, meaning gridlock between the righteous Congress and the infidel president for the next two years. There are some problems with this story, beginning with the fact that it’s completely false.

[snip]

As Karen Dolan blogged about immediately after Tuesday’s elections, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — over 80 members — lost only 3 seats. The Cut-Spending-Except-For-Killing Blue Dogs had 54 members and lost 26 of them, and those 26 were their true believers. Congress members, including one or two real progressives, didn’t lose by being progressive but by being Democrats. Alan Grayson was defeated by the largest investment of corporate money in any House race, but the obedient corporatist Democrat in the next district over lost too. And this was despite the Democratic Party funding and supporting the Blue Dogs, leaving the progressives to raise their own money.

Tea Party candidates, in contrast to progressives, did not have a successful day on Tuesday. Their nominees’ craziness cost the Republican Party control of the Senate. Yet the whole corporate-funded smoke-and-mirrors “movement” of the Tea Party pushed the Republican Party as a whole to the right, in a way that no well-funded institution has pushed the Democrats to the left or even tried to. And this is the key lesson: pushing the Democrats to the left would save them from themselves.

On Thursday Amy Goodman at Democracy Now spoke with CPC Co-Chair Raul Grijalva about the CPC not only holding it’s own with a loss of only 4 seats in the mid terms, but coming out of the elections holding the relative largest plurality of all groups in Congress.

The Democrats lost the majority in the US House of Representatives in Tuesday’s midterm elections, but what is the makeup of the new Democratic House caucus? The conservative Blue Dogs lost half their members, while the Progressive Caucus remains near eighty. We speak to its co-chair, Rep. Raúl Grijalva, who appears to have retained his seat in a close election in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District. Over the past year, Grijalva has received numerous threats, including having a suspicious package covered in swastikas sent to his office and having a bullet shot through his district office in Yuma, Arizona.

Democracy Now – November 04, 2010

about 10 minutes

..transcript follows..

(updated for coherencea and now available at DKOS)

Framing is not everything but it contains all the problems we speak of. I see several aspects of this problem:

1. History: the left and center-left in America have not created a historical narrative that makes sense to most Americans as an alternative to both the MSM corporate narrative that is radically ahistorical, i.e., they pick and choose historical facts to present a pro-corporate narrative simply because it is there. I include the MSNBC and Comedy Central pundits in this–the accept at face values unproven and clearly false historical facts as being accepted truths. Don’t ask me to list them right now–I’m not trying to prove anything here just to spur discussion and thought.
2. Class struggle: any framing of issues has to be done within the context of class-struggle which is very real in this country. The Democratic Party is very afraid of this because they are worried about cultural backlash–yes, there will be a severe cultural backlash from people who are obsessed with American Exceptionalism (the new buzzword on the right) but it’s time that progressives and liberals desacralize that concept–the data doesn’t lie, we are a deeply class-divided society with an entrenched oligarchy with relatively static social movement. What movement there is comes form immigrants who start out relatively poor and within a generation or half a generation return to whatever social class they populated in their native country, e.g., a doctor comes to the U.S and drives a cab until he/she can get their credentials here.
3. Pragmatism: the left/progressive movement should emphasize pragmatism as a deep American value and use it to frame issues as much as the class-struggle frame. The right in America has descended into a moment where it traffics strictly in fantasies. I’ve heard various discourses on the right in this country and they bear no relationship to reality. These notions can be dismissed easily. For example, their views on health-care are easily repudiated–why didn’t the left do its job? The “debate” that occurred had no basis in fact because the left, did not insist on using facts, studies and the scientific method but were suckered into the MSM narrative that the rest of the world does not exist and “nobody” really knows how to “fix” health care. There is no and was no ambiguity! The only way you fix health-care is through making it a public utility like the rest of the world does. The right-wing and centrist counter-arguments are basically the equivalent of saying the world is flat–disproving that contention is incredibly easy. There is no reasonable argument on their side! Now, as a counter-example there is a reasonable argument for Empire, there is a reasonable argument for authoritarian rule and social Darwinism thought the right doesn’t even bother to make those arguments except in private. People need to be forced to choose between reality and fantasy–the HCR debate was a debate that was entirely conducted in fanstasyland and for this the left bears a lot of responsibility.

Thomas Ferguson is Political Science Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a contributing editor of The Nation, and author of “Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political System”.

Back in April 2009 Ferguson was interviewed by Real News CEO Paul Jay, and at the time predicted that the Obama/Geithner/Summers economic/stimulus plans would be a “recipe for disaster” in more ways than one.

Today Ferguson again talks with Jay, and with the hindsight of the past year and a half now says both political parties are disintegrating, and that the American people will be the collateral damage.

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 This will be a relatively short essay.  No photos.  No links.  

 Someone brighter than me recently hit upon a simple but insightful truism regarding American “major party” politicians:  Republicans fear their base, Democrats hate theirs.

 Spot on.

 At least for the last generation, Republican politicians live in more or less constant terror that their base will rise up against them if they don’t take the hardest-Right, most frothingly partisan position available (or which they can create).  Or, if they’re already inclined towards John Bircherism, they cruise along in the smug assurance that they can be found with the proverbial “live boy or dead woman” and it won’t matter one whit to their forgiving base (as long as they, the politician, admit that he’s a sinner and rails against whatever the Democratic cause de jure is).

 Democratic politicians, on the other hand, treat their base like the crazy uncle who lives in the guest room and whose Social Security checks help pay the household bills.  They need them around in order to keep those checks coming in, but they live a life of dread and resentment:  dread that nutty Uncle Lonny will pick the lock on his bedroom door and shamble into the living room at the next dinner party and strike up conversations with the decent people in attendance, and resentment that they have to keep this burdensome and onerous relative around as the bills, alas, keep coming in and must be paid.

 Of course one of the ironies of this dynamic, of these relationships, is that these days the Republican base are much more likely to be radicalized, to resort to violence, to behave like political jihadists (which should embarrass or repel most people within shrieking distance), which your basic Democratic base member merely wants to be able to go to the doctor without risking bankruptcy, corrupt Wall Streeters to be held no less criminally culpable as petty pot dealer from whom he, the Wall Streeter, buys his grass, and wants gay people to not get beaten or bullied to death.  All in all, rather modest demands, as demands go.  Also, Democratic base members are more likely to spell check their placards before putting them on public display.

 Nevertheless, these principles hold true.  Thus the average Republican politician during the average election season has little trouble “firing up” his or her base because during the course of their life in public office, or, if they’re a newcomer, during the course of their campaign, they’ve said, “How high?” whenever their base has screamed, “Jump!”  The Democrat, on the other hand, has to “rally” their base and “fire them up” because during the course of their time in office they’ve kept that same base at arm’s length (at best) and when their Democratic base has yelled, “Jump!” their officer holder has said, “Sit down and shut up!.  And don’t forget to support me (read:  send money) come next election.  And don’t forget to vote!”

 So there you have it.

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