I first became aware of “politics” when I was ten years old, watching the Vietnam war, and the protests of the Vietnam war on my teevee.
In the 41 years since then I have watched the Democratic party fold, cave, capitulate, chicken out, take dives, sell out, panic, flee, and openly kiss the ass of the Republican party and its Criminals like Reagan and War Criminals like Bush.
They have sold out not just “the base” but every goddam American so many goddam times it is impossible to keep count, let alone remember every incident. All for no good reason.
Unless of course you call Corporate patronage and special interest bribe money good reasons.
And now, unsurprisingly, they are doing it again, this time in new and creative ways. Who could have anticipated that they would come up with a plan to regulate the bankers who have destroyed the economy for working and middle class Americans by making those bankers stronger? By making them even bigger, when the problem was supposedly that they were too big?
Who could have anticipated that they would come up with a plan to “reform” the Health Care system that has also wrecked the economy AND is causing deaths for profit….by passing a law that says every American has to pay some sort of homage to those very same, unregulated and and Anti-trust protected Insurance companies who again….are the very folks who created the problem.
It simply boggles the mind.
Let alone their continuing to follow the Old Democratic Maxim: The best way to achieve peace is to escalate a war.
Maybe, just maybe, the best way to achieve peace is to STOP GOING TO WAR???
Just a thought.
Every time, EVERY TIME the Dems have lost the WH or a majority in Congress it has been because they have made promises to HELP The People….and then turned around and screwed The People.
EVERY.
TIME.
They promise the world…or Hope, or Change…or whatever they think will “sell” this electoral season.
Then they turn around and screw us.
Again.
Then The People finally get disgusted and vote them out of office.
And then the Mainstream Dems point to The Left and say….YOU are destroying the Party by criticizing us. You are a Circular Firing Squad and YOU destroy the Party.
Every time they commit suicide, they say that. Every time they fuck things up by trying to accommodate the Right Wing while screwing the base they say that. Every time they screw the American People, and they screw the American People EVERY time, who do they blame? Themselves? For doing the same goddam thing over and over again with exactly the same results?
No.
They blame the people that tell them over and over and over and over, for at LEAST my 40 years of watching politics…that if you keep screwing The People in favor of Corporate Interests they will vote you out.
And then they screw the people again.
And then they get voted out.
And then they blame the Left.
And then The Republicans screw up even worse and SINCE THEY HAVE NO CHOICE the People put the Dems in power again.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Is it obvious enough yet that the problem is not a Firing Squad from the Left of the Dem Party, but the Suicide Squad at the Center of the Dem party?
I guess we will find out in November.
There is only one hope to stop this madness, Pressure From The Left.
And when the newly minted centrist Democratic voters and the Obama “supporters” finally realize that, finally realize that unless We The People MAKE them stop committing suicide, and unite with us grizzled vets of the political wars to apply UNITED pressure from the Left….
Pressure designed NOT to destroy, but to IMPROVE the party and to prevent it from committing suicide AGAIN….
….well we MIGHT actually get somewhere.
We have the tools, we have the smarts, we have the strategy.
All we need is the WILL to put aside the petty personality stuff and ignore the relatively minor DISTRACTIONS of arguments over methods and tone and credentials and keep our eyes on the prize….working together for change.
Because it turns out that the REAL firing squad comes from The Centrists….the Centrists picking apart and attacking the activists over details so inconsequential as to be laughable in the Big Picture.
Oh and we need one more thing. We need the centrists to realize that we don’t need them.
We will keep doing what we have been doing all along, no matter what, no matter how much the Dems blow it or how big of a war criminal the Repubs put in….after the Dems blow it and after the Centrists Dems excuse that War Criminal, or that Illegal Arms provider. Or that Repub that got us into yet another war that they have no idea how to win.
We will keep being RIGHT.
And we will keep fighting for what is RIGHT.
No matter what.
While they keep committing electoral suicide again and again.
MAYBE, someday, they will get tired of it. MAYBE, someday, they will realize it is not The Left that is the Problem With Democrats, that is in fact The Center…the gooey, caving, capitulating, cravenly and cowardly CENTER that keeps committing suicide by screwing the American People…as they are doing again right at this very moment, the is the REAL Problem With The Democrats.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Albert Einstein
Maybe.
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re f’ing dacted!!!!!!
what I’m starting to figure out is I’m not about politics – at all. Or maybe it’s about anti-politics, recognizing politics as a simple means to an end.
There are people for whom politics is inherently interesting, that it’s an end unto itself. And there are other people for whom politics is a means to get what THEY want. That is what they personally want .. politics as a means for furthering individual greed for personal power or money.
What we have now is a system that doesn’t leave people alone and simply let them exist in peace or allow them to build the kinds of structures and civilizations that serve them and not these others.
There are ways to go about fixing it. One is to reform the system which doesn’t really address the main issue — it just makes life a little less bad. Another way is to undermine the system or create a new system that works for the benefit of peoples and communities and insulates such new systems from depredation.
We can try to fight or we can try to build from within. Or, I guess, a little of each.
In one sense, with what is going on, I like the cancer model more and more — that is, becoming a cancer within and of an inherently corrupt and broken system — until the “cancer” is the life form and all that remains.
Or maybe one is the yin to the other’s yang. Heh.
But we are RIGHT goddammit!
Everything would be hunkey dorey if those stupid annoying people would just STFU and let us run the show. Cuz we’d be, ya know, nice!!! 🙂
lol.
okay where were we? Oh yeah. So how do we convince them to hand over the gun, the pills, the keys to the car?
Buhdy has described the seed of self destruction within every progressive, left, activist organization I’ve been involved in for over 40 years — “the petty personality stuff.”
A year after she left the Peace movement in the Spring of 2007, Cindy Sheehan wrote a letter explaning why she had quit. She said it was because she became totally frustrated with the petty little ego battles and silly in fighting which served to defeat the movement’s goals.
Ego gets in the way. The attitude that “I want to put MY idea forth. MY idea is the best.” It’s done for the sake of the self, of the ego, and not for the good of the common goal.
I see this tendency even here on the blogs. It is the need to be right, the need to have one’s own views seen as the totally correct perspective and therefore defended with adamant invectives.
As it says in the Lojong and Bodhisattva teachings of Buddhism: The need to be right is quite dangerous and destructive.
Sometimes perhaps a slightly less “correct” approach is better than insistence on “The Right” approach, as that frequently results in the failure of the whole action which then falls apart and eveyone walks away frustrated and angry.
So, let go of “The Need to Be Right” and learn to give and take.
Thanks buhdy. I know we all want to change the course of this world now. And we all need to contribute whatever we can in good faith and in excellence.
for some interests!
Hmmm?
who moved my Cheese?
Right now, our only power is to primary Obama in 2012.
Make him dance.
It’s a win-win. Either we get his butt out of office and replace him with someone who actually represents us, or he changes his tune and starts acting like he does represent us.
He will completely ignore us otherwise, as he is now doing.
Yet when people at Kos mention this there are GASPS of shock, like the person suggested burning down the White House or something.
It’s weird.
Also, so many people seem to think they can come out and say “I will vote for Obama in 2012 no matter what …”
THAT just gives away whatever power you may have had.
People are idiots.
That’s the only conclusion I can reach. Way too many people are idiots.
But we don’t have the cohesion, and we don’t have the tactics. And frankly, we don’t COLLECTIVELY have the strategy.
Marxism once offered a common framework that — for all its failures — gave some common understandings. I’m not suggesting a return to Marxism.
The SDS concept of participatory democracy, while flawed and a too syndicalist-fragment concept for today’s electronically intertwined world, was a framework that people could work with. It had a pretty good run as these things go.
I’m not suggesting a return to the glory days of SDS, either. They weren’t all so glorious, anyway.
But we need something around which tactics and organization can be deduced.
You point the way to a philosophy of struggle. Vague, but a start. What tactics, then? I don’t mean to fetishize tactics, because that can lead to excessive attention to one’s shoelaces, but it’s a corrective to today’s state of the left.
What tactics?
Then you quote Einstein:
Here’s the cycle. Issue comes up. Progressives usually know what needs to be done. Progressive leaders say “trust us,” and then sell us out. We are outraged, some quit, some scream, it dies down.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
How do we break the cycle? I’ve put out a few ideas. But frankly I’d rather — at this stage — have more people putting out more ideas (other than targetting the worst Democrats as we’ve doing since there were ever Democrats), than just agreeing with my ideas. The latter is easy. The former is a serious challenge.
Friday morning… scanning the sphere and I just have to jump in somewhere,here seems appropriate, and urge y’all to go read greenwald this morning. Spot on the mark re some of our discussions here.