Five Before Chaos

I’ve been spending Vermont mud season in SW Florida. Works for me. Biking, kayaking, tacos, beachin’ and cheap Mexican beer.

Been keeping an eye on the HCR thing. As much as there’s a lot wrong with it, I figure if it’s making Republicans go ballistic and it’s making my dad more cranky than usual, there must be something good in it.

The big thing I’ve taken from all this is that it’s finally come to the point where the teabaggers finally took the mask off. Yelling racial epithets at black and Latino congressspersons has finally made it so even the MSM can’t polish this vile turd anymore.

The Rude One’s got a good one about how the Dems need some sack:

If Republicans had wanted universal health care, you would have seen commercials with heartless insurance agents stabbing babies and drinking their blood. You would have seen ads with desperate, laid-off old men offering to blow people for quarters so they could afford their insulin. You would have seen ads about how sad it is that a depressed middle-aged woman with a dream of a scrapbooking store is now suicidal over not being able to follow her small business dream because if she left her shitty office job, she’d lose her health care. The ad would have ended with a gunshot in darkness. People would have been begging for health care reform because Republicans would have made it seem like the world would fall apart without it.

As much as I wanted to keep quiet, I can’t.

At first, I thought I’d freak out, but then a few things occurred to me. First off, Scott Brown’s got three years. He’s a friggin’ wingnut teabagger, something, to his credit, he kept pretty well hidden during this campaign. When he actually starts opening his mouth, other than the angry white guy demographic, he’s not going to be too thrilling.

Second, as to this “Dems losing their supermajority” stuff. It’s not like they’ve been able to accomplish shit with 60 votes, so what the hell’s the difference? Bush got just about everything he wanted, even with a minority, fer chrissake.

What’s scary is that Dems will continue not to learn from this, completely misreading this as “we need to be more conservative” instead of “we need to actually take off the gloves, grow some sack and accomplish something good”.

I think there’s a silver lining in those teabaggers who now smell blood in the water. As I said, Brown, due to both Coakley sitting around with her thumb up her ass, and the relatively brief nature of the campaign, (not to mention him being dismissive or denying the teabaggery), was able to conceal how batshit insane he really is. In next year’s elections, they’ll be of the more normal variety, which gives people a better chance to look at the records of who they might be voting for.

The Dems are gonna get their asses kicked, regardless. In my almost 39 years of life, I can’t think of a bigger example of such deep, prolonged incompetence demonstrated by an organization.

And so the outrage fatigue continues. Peter Daou has an excellent bit on all of this at HuffPo that you should take a look at, too.

…that the Dems would cave in on the public option with hardly a fight, could they? So unbelievably shocking, eh? Whoda thunk? Especially since they’ve been fighting so hard to fix things in this country for the last few decades years weeks minutes seconds… ah, fuck it.

And in the other side, nobody could ever have imagined this:

Congress should cut the top marginal tax rate for individuals as its newest stimulus, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said Tuesday.

The conservative senator said that not only should the Congress keep in place the tax cuts enacted earlier this decade by President George W. Bush, but also cut the top rate even further…

Congress wants to really create jobs, it should slash the 35 percent rate currently faced by the wealthiest individuals and corporations (i.e., with an income in 2009 higher than $373,000).

The one thing Republicans seem to have no problem telling the truth about is their raging hard-on for the plutocracy. Seriously, there could be an asteroid heading for Earth, and these fucktards would propose “more tax cuts for the rich!” as the solution.

This time it’s from the Rude One:

God, it must suck to be a Democrat in Congress right now. Elected as a triumphant mega-super-duper majority in 2008, now you have been coerced into rethinking the very positions that got you that majority by an unsilent minority of easily-duped yahoos, driven to madness by a steady diet of shitty food, unemployment, and hard right media figures. It’s like the end result of a long-term contingency plan by Karl Rove: if everything else goes to shit, send forth our zombie armies. Set upon in this way, you go into retreat mode, putting aside truly revolutionary goals for merely mildly reasonable ones. And you more or less hand power to the most frightened, the Democrats who actually believe the Republicans will act as honest partners in any compromise action. Yet, dear sucking Democrat, what you are merely doing is enabling the destruction of the Obama presidency because of a misguided notion that the nation is comprised of the mewling children who pollute our airwaves and whose minions have the time to go to your townhall meetings.

As expected, most of the media narratives over yesterday’s contests, are, well, for lack of a better word, retarded. Still reminds me of a bad reality t.v. show. But the headlines of the day for me is undoubtedly the “Hillary open to Obama as running mate” thing.  Kinda funny for someone who’s still over 100 delegates behind to be putting that out there, dontcha think? Aside from the fact that I doubt either candidate’s ego could deal with that scenario (regardless of who the #2 is), it’s showing to me something we’ve known along – Hillary still believes her own inevitability bullshit. It really still hasn’t sunk in yet that she’s not entitled to this.

Well, as you probably know by now the lefty blogs are all twittered about the Dem-led House actually standing up to Bush for real this last week, both in not caving on FISA and in issuing those contempt citations for Bolten and Meirs. And the word is that Bush was actually caught off guard because he (as well as most of us) was so used to them caving over and over again. What took ‘em so friggin’ long? I’m withholding excitement for now, because we’ve often seen a pattern of toughness followed by the inevitable backdown. It sure would be nice if they’re really getting that spine transplant we’ve been hoping for for so long.

Anyways, poking around reading about it, I came across this letter to Bush from House intelligence committee Chair Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) via TPM. What he says, and with the authority he says it needs to be the de facto method of dealing with Bush from now on, and more importantly, it needs to be the public face that the Dems need to put on if they ever expect to be taken seriously by the public (emphasis mine):

If our nation is left vulnerable in the coming months, it will not be because we don’t have enough domestic spying powers. It will be because your Administration has not done enough to defeat terrorist organizations – including al Qaeda — that have gained strength since 9/11. We do not have nearly enough linguists to translate the reams of information we currently collect. We do not have enough intelligence officers who can penetrate the hardest targets, such as al Qaeda. We have surged so many intelligence resources into Iraq that we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a result, you have allowed al Qaeda to reconstitute itself on your watch.

You have also suggested that Congress must grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies. As someone who has been briefed on our most sensitive intelligence programs, I can see no argument why the future security of our country depends on whether past actions of telecommunications companies are immunized…

I, for one, do not intend to back down – not to the terrorists and not to anyone, including a President, who wants Americans to cower in fear.

We are a strong nation. We cannot allow ourselves to be scared into suspending the Constitution. If we do that, we might as well call the terrorists and tell them that they have won.

TPM has the whole letter. What I’m wondering is if that little light bulb went on somewhere after all of this and perhaps the House leadership might actually feel good and more importantly, emboldened by standing up to Bush. In the past, even when making feeble attempts, it’s always been with a modicum of embarrassment or something as though they felt like thy needed to be ashamed for doing the right thing. i’m not holding my breath on this one, but at the very least it’s a good development and they should be commended for it.

UPDATE: additional thoughts at the bottom.

NOTE: the database at my server host was having some problems for a bit, which unfortunately I learned after spending an hour writing this post up and then losing it. So here’s stab #2. Also, for those of you checking back on this thread, I went back and divided it into two pages, ‘cuz it’s so freakin’ long.

Yeah, it’s been a while. Last week, I went off in to fundie-bashing land and got sorta distracted. It’s so fun, and so easy, isn’t it? So for you nutty people that still find what I have to say marginally amusing, hop below the fold for my latest thoughts on the election, interspersed with my philosophical ramblings. I’m hoping to get a discussion going here from all sides, something that’s been occurring more frequently here at FBC, a welcome development. Righties and radicals, join in please. Its a long one, so crack a beer or go get a cup of coffee, you’ll need it.

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Yeah, Edwards is out, too. That’s a bummer, since he’s the only Dem (short of Kucinich) that seems to get it. If he’s smart, he’ll hold on to those delegates, and work out a deal at the convention to get himself an AG spot. It’d be nice to have an AG that took his job seriously, and wouldn’t be squishy about going after corporate crime, too.

So this presents a real problem for me in the primary. Neither Hillary or Obama are palatable options from where I’m standing. Neither are trustworthy. I don’t trust Hillary, simply because of her DLC-triangulation history, and I don’t trust Obama because he’s big on rhetoric, short on specifics, and his approach is incredibly naive. I think if he gets in there, the GOP will hand him his ass until he learns what “fighting” is all about.

So I really don’t know what to do. One of them will more than likely be President. And big props to Edwards in staying above the childish behavior that HRC and BO have let the campaign devolve into. Let’s hope that the nudge he’s given the other candidates towards a slightly more populist slant will stick.

I’m pretty sour on the Obama campaign at this point of the juncture. I’m baffled about the hype. Liberal white guilt? Some so beaten by 7 years of Bush that they latch on to anyone selling “hope”? People that buy into the “American Dream” b.s. rhetoric? And Obama supporters are undoubtedly the most uncritical supporters of any candidate on this side of the aisle The guy can do no wrong in their eyes. It’s ridiculous, like he was Jim Jones or something. I tend not to like candidates that have that cult of personality thing going on, because if he wins, and pushes through bad legislation or ideas, his most ardent supporters are going to go along for the ride, unquestioning. We already have that with Bush. I don’t want it with Obama.

He’s positioned himself as the ‘change’ candidate, yet just about everything he talks about is middle-of-the-road, and play-it-safe. I really don’t think the word “bold” is in his eloquent vocabulary. And that’s what irks me so much… at this point in the game, we need a fighter, not someone who tries to be everything to everybody. There’s a war going on here, and I’m not talking about Iraq. So the only thing he’s got going for him in my eyes is that he’s not Hillary Clinton. Hardly a ringing endorsement.

I’ve been trying to avoid writing about the Presidential election, at least in terms of the Dems, because although the roster is certainly a bit stronger than it was in recent elections past, I still think they’re all a bunch of corporatist hacks to varying degrees. I suppose that they’d be an improvement over what we have now, but I’m not expecting any substantial move forward from any of them. Just look at Hillary’s new healthcare plan… it still includes the insurance companies as a major player. That’s like having guys who still beat their wives working on a task force to stop domestic violence.

Anyways, back to the hype. What prompted this little tirade is something in the WaPo this morning, about Obama going out and touting his antiwar speech from 2002. Now, Obama seems to forget that he’s also a Senator, and is in a position to raise a lot of hell, should he find those balls of his that are seemingly absent. He also fails to realize that by doing something bold in the Senate now, whether it be forcefully introducing some antiwar legislation or filibustering the living shit out of some toothless proposal, he will force the other candidates to step up their antiwar positioning as well. This ‘don’t have the votes’ crap is getting old. Although it may be true, there is no reason to give up the fight, because the more attention brought to it, the more the GOP owns the war, and therefore, the bloodier the bloodbath in November. This is incredibly significant, because there are two other candidates, Dodd and Clinton, who are active members of the Senate. It’d be so nice to see them trying to outmaneuver each other in the Senate to be the most antiwar candidate. Obama talks a good game about how he’ll end the war, if elected. Why do we have to wait? He has the power to throw a major wrench in the works and change the dialog, right now. But that requires courage, something that doesn’t seem to be in Obama’s character at this particular time. He’s too busy enthralling his uncritical supporters and trying not to offend anyone. Audacity of hype, indeed.