Democrats exploiting Republicans? You bet.

So. the frayed ends finally rip and tear. It finally becomes clearer: most Democratic politicians aren’t interested in being courageous. They are, however, interested in cash, campaigns, and power. They love to wordsmith and dazzle progressives with fabulous politicSpeak: yes, they do. More and better words delivered by more, but not necessarily better, Democrats.

Perhaps it is just plain decency that Democrats lack… the decency to stop playing both sides of issues. The decency to stop exploiting Republicans. Yes. You heard me. The Democrats have been the minority, the majority, with and without a sitting president and STILL the fucking Republicans are road blocks? It’s always the Republicans’s fault? No matter how it is sliced and diced, the Dems are always having their hands tied by some outside force.  I’m not buying it.

cross posted at writing in the rAw and Daily Kos

And another thing: Democrats don’t have the true courage to enact a truly progressive agenda. But they are indecent enough to lie to Progressives in order to get their votes and stall them from moving on their own.

I don’t think the problem is the Republicans . . . .The problem is the Democratic Party.  This is a party that has told its progressives …to sit down and shut up.  That’s what Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff at the White House, in effect told progressives who stood up as a unit in Congress and said: “no public insurance option, no health care reform.”

And I think the reason for that is — in the time since I was there, 40 years ago, the Democratic Part has become like the Republican Party, deeply influenced by corporate money.  I think Rahm Emanuel, who is a clever politician, understands that the money for Obama’s re-election will come from the health care industry, from the drug industry, from Wall Street.  And so he’s a corporate Democrat who is determined that there won’t be something in this legislation that will turn off these interests. . . .

^{Bill Moyers interview with Glenn Greenwald, 29 August 2009}

It becomes clearer… the bad guys are still in charge. Who’s stopping them? Who’s probing them via grand juries?

Eric Holder announces investigation based on Abu Ghraib model

… the scope of the “review” is limited at the outset to those who failed to “act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance” — meaning only those interrogators and other officials who exceeded the torture limits which John Yoo and Jay Bybee approved. Those who, with good faith, tortured within the limits of the OLC memos will “be protected from legal jeopardy.”

As a practical matter, Holder is consciously establishing as the legal baseline — he’s vesting with sterling legal authority — those warped, torture-justifying DOJ memos.  Worse, his pledge of immunity today for those who complied with those memos went beyond mere interrogators and includes everyone, policymakers and lawyers alike…

^{Glenn Greenwald, 24 August 2009}

It becomes clearer that without decency in Washington, without courage to make the powerful accountable to the law, all the legislation churned out will have very little to do with most of us 300 million Americans. It will have even less to do with the real perils facing all of us earthlings collectively.

I’ve said it 100s of times before: those we elect and appoint to uphold our laws must be held accountable to those laws. They must be accountable to enforce the law and to obey the law. It’s basic. It even borders on being simple.

We are dealing with people who don’t believe there are any consequences to their actions. While they have most of us worrying about Glenn Beck and the out-of-portion coverage of men hoisting guns at presidential speaking engagements… let me scream this out: THEY ARE NOT OUR PROBLEM. ARE YOU LISTENING?

Those directing the politics and policies devastating our treasury, planet, jobs, and way of life are the problem. The red necks or whatever you want to call them are in the same boat as we are: the exploited.

It’s time to focus. It is time to pray that a places like Daily Kos et al will start to use their clout to give life to citizen coalitions that work at local levels and regionally to

• stop ill conceived development projects

• overturn the eminent domain laws poorly interpreted by the Supreme Court

• insuring that water is a public utility (key)

• take back school boards and start implementing education and not testing strategies in our schools

• fight the use of plastics and reduce use of them drastically

• ethical treatment of farm animals… and all creatures… but revamp industrial farming

• take hormones and antibotics out of our food

• air/water/soil… fight for responsible industrial processes and start to expect people to be honorable and do what they say they will do

• yeah. that’s part of it. we all need to up our expectations. that means Dem or Repub, no more lying is accepted FOR WHATEVER THE REASON.

I could go on and on. Not more democrats. God forbid, not more republicans. But citizens and neighbors, some pro life and others pro choice… some pro gun some not… but together in coalitions fighting against the bad guys … coalitions of people who begin to see the BIGGER picture here.

We need evolutionary thinking. We need better questions, better thinking, and a far better understanding of scale of our actions, from buying an SUV to buying plastic lawn chairs. And I know it’s hard work to even imagine how to begin talking to those guys toting guns at President Obama’s events. But we have to deal with it. Because it’s gonna take all of us to fight the few who know how to keep us fighting the wrong fronts.

This train-wreck-of-a-decade happened becauses nobody addressed the criminals in Watergate, Irangate, and the real crooks of the S&L debacle… again, I could go on, but maybe you get my point? That since we breathed a sigh of relief in 2006, after the Dems were in the majority again, we have been continually disappointed, given excuses, and lied to. The Iraq war never got defunded… rather it just moved to Afghanistan. Our economy has tanked and what did we do? We gave trillions to the guys and gals who tanked it and then we feel better when the corporate media says the stimulus worked. Sure it worked… for the few who got the rest of the money out of treasury. But the only way to have a healthy economy is via JOBS.

In fact, our country is more frightening, and people are a bit more whacky. We still have signing statements and nobody has revoked FISA or the Military Commissions Act (where I, as a citizen, can be named an enemy combatant). Nobody. Has. Yet.

This isn’t about one man. Or a political party. This is about gravity-defying politics… trickle up politics.

This is about us, folks.