Democrats Behaving Badly
by paradox
An unfortunate burden of being part of the reality-based community is never denying, as members of the netroots and Democratic Party, what are own problems are and what issues we face in making ourselves more attractive to voters. Sometimes it feels as if I write nothing else, and surely few other works cause me as much internal grief and anger when writing them.
The paradox of virulently loathing Bush and the Republican Party and yet mainly writing about Democratic Party problems (when writing about federal politics) is simply avoidance to an extremely dangerous trap: examine and criticize others too much and ego-inflation and self-superiority will soon follow, along with a varying diminishment of self-analytical abilities.
Mind your own farking business, in other words, and have the sense to work on your own problems before wasting time figuring out how others are screwed up. America knows how screwed up Bush and the Republicans are, oh yes, and our mission as Democrats is to desperately try and become more attractive to rectify the appalling 29% we pulled in for the 2004 election. So we openly acknowledge our problems in the quest to get better.
I blather on so, please excuse me, for I can’t recall writing a more damning, more alarming litany of Democratic betrayal and incompetence that is to follow. A warning what is to come is very grim, yes, but mostly a plea of understanding that I hate writing work like this but it’s totally necessary. I’d enjoy nothing more than to be a happy team player performing a tiny act in a vast army of the netroots coordinated from Pelosi’s office this morning, but the fact is we aren’t there yet, and we must be aware of our problems to get better.
The first villain in our murderer’s row of Democratic incompetence is an old, old familiar member of the team, one Senator Dianne Feinstein. This time it was a knife in the back to her party and people by voting for a quack Bush judge, but her record of betrayal and terrible errors have long ago launched the issue of Feinstein into a study of denial and political invulnerability to any accountability.
No matter what she does she is ignored by the California “journalism” corps. Her record is as precisely heinous as Joe Lieberman’s with the sole exception she doesn’t go on television to rub it in our faces, yet there was not a whisper of a primary challenge to her and she walked to one of the most easily won elections I have ever seen in 2004. Feinstein doesn’t get put on the shit list for this, she’s been on the list for Worst of All Time for a very long time, yet another traitorous knife in the back bleeding bitterly in California yet again.
Far more terrible news has arrived on the start of netroots hero Jerry McNerny, CA-11. He is not Richard Pombo, no, but then being better than Satan’s whelp is no big accomplishment in this lifetime. He earned the title liar in my book by calling himself a “moderate” after getting elected, never mind all the times he called himself a “Boxer Democrat” in the election, then made two appalling mistakes that still make me flinch in pain and embarrassment: he voted against forbidding federal agents from busting medical pot growers in states that have democratically approved of them, and then really walked off the cliff with a horrifying announcement he’d been suckered by the Iraq Pentagon dog’n pony show, willing to give that lying killing animal Patreus all the years he needs to take our country under.
That McNerny would be so stupid, so clueless as to buy right into two of our most flaming current public policy disasters—the war on drugs and terrorism—is a bitter, painful blow, and I’m alarmed and sorry for all the plain little people Californians who busted their asses for McNerny in 2006. One faintly hopes that Pelosi can lead and step in somehow, hell her district is 40 miles away, but every day with no word or act salts in the betrayal with more aching finality.
Incredulously, it gets even worse: somehow the Senate allowed itself into being bullied into expanding Bush FISA powers, after all this time of horror, in all the cries for impeachment, in all the demands of justice for the dead and maimed, Jesus, Mary & Joseph these…these…creatures actually scurried around to meet the demands of the worst of all time, they just enabled him more!
How is this not utter insanity? It defies belief that Bush would have the nuclear arrogance to stand before anyone and demand anything, let alone keeping Congress in session, but it’s even more stupefying—if that were possible—to see the Senate actually hop to it on what this lying killing criminal animal of a President wants.
This last act has whapped the anger out of me to a breathless semi-stupor of incredulity, coupled with an extremely unfamiliar stab of a rarely felt emotion: fear. Jesus, the Republic has been smashed and this is surely is a terrible act of yet more self-destruction of a country on the way down.
There is no other way to put it, and I implore with all the earnestness I can muster to our leadership (Party and netroots both) in Chicago and Pelosi’s office: something has gone horribly, horribly wrong in Washington DC, Bush is berserk and the Senate is boogying right along with him on FISA, along with all the horrors inflicted upon the country.
Some way, any way, I’m begging you, ring all the urgent sirens and alarm bells we possess to scream the word we are in trouble, so much trouble it almost leaves me breathless in a fear for the Republic’s survival I have never felt before. A Democratic Congress cannot actively destroy the country with Bush, please, somehow get Pelosi to crush this FISA insanity right now, today. Please.