Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll give you a minute to unbunch your undies.
……….
But with the sliding scale of Liberalism turning into the proverbial slippery slope….and the polls as they are….
Think about it….if the Repubs win the House, what will the reaction of the Congressional Dems be?
The same reaction they have upon waking up each morning….to move to the Right.
So as un-Liberal as Obama obviously is…and….
So other than a few ‘nuts’ like Kucinich…(who do such nutty stuff as suggesting we change things that are obviously NOT working)
Who would be more Liberal than, lol, Obama?
Not Reid, hell not anyone in the Senate, since Feingold, like the rest of us, have pretty much given up on rolling back the death of the Constitution. Maybe Franken?
We do have a few stalwarts in the House, in the Progressive Caucus. But of course the HIR fight showed just how tough and effective they are. They gave up their voice, their effectiveness and their power when they caved on the Public Option Holdout…and it is doubtful they will get it back.
So that leaves, LOL, Nancy “off the table” Pelosi and a few stalwarts….surrounded by people who have to start campaigning again right after this campaign ends….who will undoubtedly take the lesson of losing the House as telling them that they too have to move to the Right to win.
Sigh.
Times are tough when a guy who actively rejects the Liberal label is the, or at least one of the, most Liberal figures in government.
Let’s Hope the nihilists are right….I guess….and that if things DO get bad enough, The People will start to get radicalized.
Because despite the fact the “The Republicans will be worse” meme is a fear tactic talking point of the Obamacrats…it is also correct. And maybe that IS what it will take to break us out of the path we are on now. “Allowing” the Repubs to destroy what little Liberalism there is left in the government of the good old USA and intimidate the spineless Dems even further down the path to the Right. A path that makes lemmings look like fucking geniuses.
The current Republicans are perhaps the most hated political party in the history of the US. And this batch of democrats apparently can’t even summon enough substance or guts to beat these hated, lying, idiot, corrupt, torturers.
We need a miracle.
Either an immediate miracle of the Dems actually DOING something to turn this election around…or a long term miracle of a vast awakening by the American People, spurred by the Repubs gaining power, shutting down government and impeaching Obama, that will cause them to stir from slumber.
A slumber that…and this is just an amazingly absurd indictment of America as a whole, actually moves them to put Republicans back into any kind of power, just two short years after Bush.
Truly Amazing. Just how bad do you have to screw the pooch to have THAT happen? THAT is just exactly how pathetic these Dems are. They are actually going to LOSE to THESE Republicans.
Which, sigh, will just move the Dems….you guessed it…..even further to the Right. Making Obama look like, ONLY BY COMPARISON, some sort of flaming Liberal, even as he tries to prop up and save The Crumbling American Empire.
Wow, I am just flabbergasted at the thought.
What the hell do we do now?
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He’ll tolerate anything. Especially intolerance. And Neocons. And Imperialists. And Greed. And the end of the middle class. And abject poverty as long as it’s not happening to his friends. And Americans going hungry.
The danger is that such a realignment will be towards something more to the right. Huey Long would be a good outcome.
I have described our polity as “A Nation of Dumb Fucks” but I can hope that they are more ignorant and anesthetized than dumb. No Social Security for the seniors, no jobs for the working age and endless need to bail out the rich has got to get old, doesn't it?
Where we are going the elites are not likely to even want to bother with the expensive anesthesia they are currently administering so a lot of people are going to wake up in pain. We need a way to be there for them to explain what has happened to them and what can be done. We are not alone in this. Even paleocons such as Paul Craig Roberts and libertarians such as Ron Paul are alarmed by the erosion of the constitution, the actions of the Fed and the collapse of the economy, even when their recommendations were partly responsible.
We need a coalition of all who are prepared to take down the existing system. If we could assemble a blocking coalition of libertarians, paleocons and old line country club republicans, (such as Susan Eisenhower), civil libertarians and progressives that could block further bail outs it may be possible to crash the existing system when the next crisis comes, which is likely to be sooner rather than later.
It is risky, but it is the best chance I can see. There is an old maxim from Contract Bridge: "If there is only one lay of the cards that will allow you to make the contract, assume that that is how the cards lay and play accordingly."
First question: Are there better alternatives than bringing down the current financially suborned government under which we suffer?
is that you’re buying into the left/right scale. It’s not extremely significant that Obama is perceived to be a “liberal” or has a few “liberal” policies – he still adheres to the Washington consensus, left/right, conventional wisdom, industrialist, etc. point of view that so dominates politics and is very much what’s wrong with politics.
What’s appealing about people like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul is that they buy into this much less than the typical politician. That’s how I see it.
…
I cant subscribe to the idea of…. let them have it and have it get so bad that people finally wake up.
maybe it’s time to Dump Obama. Use it to build a movement rather than quivering like helpless spectators watching the dinosaurs fight like in 1,000,000 B.C.
Lesser-evilism leads even the best of progressives to abandon their principles lest they be subjected to the Obamacrat fury.
Make the War in Afghanistan the issue and this ticket could draw quite a bit of attention. I’m sure the campaign would be unsuccessful but the Left could re-inject some anti-war sentiment into the Democratic Party.
A peace prize for continued war. Islam as the replacement enemy for Russia.
A global carbon trading Bernie Madoff bank to “save” the earth.
An engineered financial depression, mandatory toxic flu shots and the building of a police surveillance state which analyzes your very thought process.
No wonder Farcebook is becoming hatebook.
http://www.naturalnews.com/029…
Only not at each other but at the businesses and the press they have bought off that suck up even the most honest pol.
Seriously, there is no other way.
And while we’re yelling at the press and the businesses that are killing us, we could stop identifying with a party that doesn’t want us.
Just go “no label” and maybe the fuckers will come to us on our terms.
are writing in a context in which not only politics should get better (more Liberal) but the world needs to focus on human rights and social justice.
Are you assuming that there is a political answer to the political problems in the US? I don’t believe that political solutions can become operational beyond one believer or a small group. (and not very long for any group)
So if you are a Liberal, a leftist, a socialist, a human rights or anti-war activist, how can that specific political agenda solve the problem of universal cynicism? That is the triumph of conservative ideology yet I continually hear people putting this into a political context.
I don’t think that miracle has to be a supernatural epiphany.
As you say,
maybe that would involve using their reelection campaign funds to rebuild local communities rather than wage divisive politics that only benefits the culture of the two parties.
Are you talking about the present political system that people describe in various terms depending on what behavior they are highlighting and what agenda they have?
One example: “It is capitalism that is evil”, but it was not capitalism that brought economic collapse, it was the departure from capitalism into undemocratic profiteering. This then becomes a conflict of ideologies rather than strategies that people have adopted to live in a civilization.
By the same token, political systems need to arise from the way society has agreed to organized itself. You know, like the founding documents. They were not imposed but arose from struggle. The last unifying struggle in this country was the civil rights struggle.
Political enthusiasts want to put everything into the political box. Profiteering, free market types want to put everything into an economic box. Religious types want to put everything into the God box.
But a spiritual failure need not be in any of those boxes yet people try to claim these boxes to encase government. This system has no name, it is everything that anyone wants to claim it is at any discrete moment. Spiritual failure is the result of a government that is alternately contradictory, conflicted, corrupt morally and economically. It is politics that does not serve a democratic function but politics for the sake of achieving political power, on the right and left. Politicians cannot compromise because they have accommodated en masse to non elected power and money interests. After accommodations are made in Washington, there is no room left for compromise. Without compromise in democracy, politicians are worthless.
This administration is a case study of that phenomenon. Obama is not just the commander-in-chief but the corporate attorney in chief. His personal politics are meaningless if he sees his job as restructuring the economy for the highest bidder. What he says and what he does do not match.
… do you remember a few years ago when a bunch of us at GOS put together that amazing series “Restoring Our Constitution”? And how we all had such hopes that this theme would be the guiding principle of this administration? Yeah, yeah, I know, we’re all dying of laughter now, only so we don’t weep. And I really don’t think I’m all that off-topic.
I really think we’re doomed to see this devolution you describe. You do realize that the teapartiers have co-opted that phrase, “Restoring Our Constitution”? Given the work that you and me and Major Danby and Turkana and Unitary Moonbat and Jay Elias and all the others put into that series, to see the entire theme corrupted like this just royally pisses me off. I was and still am so proud of what we accomplished with that series.
There was a big discussion today in http://www.dailykos.com/story/… about the teabagger hijack of the themes we championed then at GOS, and this is what someone posted in reply to my tirade:
This is why you’re probably going to be proved correct in a month and a half when you say Obama may soon be the most liberal figure in our national politics. There is no way the netroots alone can outspend these bastards. In the face of that much money, what the fuck do we do? Goddess alone knows we’ve talked and talked and talked and written and petitioned and even marched in protest of the abuses of power, the crony capitalism, the sweetheart deals, etc., etc., only to have low-info voters become as distracted as a two-year-old by the bright shiny lying fairy-tales. When all our work and heart and activism can be undercut by a gajillion dollars poured into astroturf, What. The. Fuck. Do. We. Do???????????