Throughout my life I've often had the feeling that I don't live on the same plane of reality as everyone else does.
Yesterday I watched the Democrats in the Senate play tough with Attorney General nominee Alberto "You Want a Cattle Prod With That?" Gonzales before their inevitable unanimous vote to confirm him. Then I watched as they hung Barbara Boxer out to dry. Instead of behaving like an opposition party, they allowed Boxer to be the only Democrat with a pair of testicles yesterday as she signed on to Stephanie Tubbs Jones' protest of the Ohio vote certification.
Boxer gets it. It was never about changing the result of the election. I think we all know at this point that John Kerry fucked up hugely on so many fronts that there's no point in putting ourselves through the pain again by enumerating them. Kerry would have had to run the kind of campaign that no one could possibly run in order to win, because the Republicans had the game rigged on more fronts than any army of lawyers could handle, with Ohio as Ground Zero. The many reports of voting machines that registered "Bush" when the voter selected "Kerry" (funny how there were no reports of mistakes in the other direction). Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell's obstacles to voter registration. Botched voter rolls that didn't have the names of people in Democratic districts who had registered legally to vote. Voting machines left collecting dust in storage as minority Democratic districts received an inadequate number of machines, resulting in the kinds of 10-hour waits we saw only in Democratic districts.
You've got to hand it to the Republicans...they leave no stone unturned. And in Election 2004, they covered all the bases.
And yesterday the Democrats let them get away with it.
Boxer is right: This was NOT about overturning the result of the election. It WAS about shining light on the way the Republicans won it....and the Senators who talked a good game yesterday but when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, they just didn't have the guts. Perhaps they thought they'd go along to get along, in the hope that maybe Republicans would throw them a bone. Maybe they thought they could keep the filibuster rule if they went along. Maybe they thought that Bush might send Supreme Court nominees to them who weren't hopelessly corrupt or religiously insane. I just have to wonder how much abuse the Republicans have to rain down on this bunch of pussies before they wake up.
Or maybe it's true that they're owned by the same corporations as the Republicans and they're just there so you think you have a choice.
Today, I don't know.
The one Democrat I felt badly for yesterday was Barack Obama. This shining light of the Democratic Party, who came out of nowhere and now is expected to carry this whole team on his skinny shoulders, looked profoundly unhappy that this was his debut moment in the Senate. It's clear that this was Obama's "gays in the military" moment, and while he spoke eloquently, when the time came to vote, he took the dive. He threw the World Series....and for what? Somebody please tell me for what.
Randi Rhodes was absolutely right on this one as she hammered home the last few days why it was important to force the House of Representatives to be the ones to certify Bush's second term. This Administration is claiming a clear mandate with 51% of the popular vote and 286 electoral votes. Richard Nixon won a mandate in 1972 with 61% of the vote and 520 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan won a mandate in 1984 with 59% of the vote and 525 electoral votes. Bush has not won a mandate, but he's going to govern as if he had. THAT's why it was important...to try to slow this runaway train down enough so that something resembling America can be sustained as we march towards the Fourth Reich.
Maybe it's just that I'm old enough to remember when Democrats won actual victories by standing for what was right. I'm old enough to remember Lyndon Johnson, a relatively conservative Texas Democrat, acknowledging that in supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he was probably losing the South for the Democratic Party...but he signed it anyway BECAUSE IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Just as yesterday, voting to decertify Ohio's vote would have been THE RIGHT THING TO DO.
On June 24, 1964, civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney were murdered in Mississippi. They are just three of the many people who died to ensure that black Americans would have the right to vote. And to watch the Democratic Party cower in the corner yesterday was disgusting -- and an insult to the memories of the many people in this nation's history who understood the value of the right to vote.
And yet today I go to other blogs, and I see intelligent people like Steve Gilliard claiming that what we saw yesterday was some sort of victory.
That's not how you make a point. You do that, nothing gets done in either body as grudges play out. There is a ton of shortsighted thinking here. I mean, it's not about your feelings, it's about politics. The objection surprised the GOP and sent a clear message that there is no mandate.
People are quick to cry sellout and rant, but how long have they worked in politics? A year? Attended a few Meetups, volunteer for Ohio or Florida for a few days. Well, it's not just about one day or even one election. It's every day.
A lot of these people so quick to rant need to shut the fuck up and listen. You have to think about the long term, and you cannot oppose the majority on everything. Why? Because, first of all, the majority of voters in this country are independents. They don't like partisan politics to begin with. You resist every idea, you condemn the Dems to minority status as obstructionists. Now, that may make you feel better, but that's not politics, that's a temper tantrum.
No, Mr. Gilliard, it's called standing up for a principle. You may be one of my favorite bloggers, and 99% of the time I find myself cheering out loud with every one of your blog postings, but here you're wrong. We've seen what the Democrats get out of "going along." The answer is "nothing." Bill Frist has already talked about the "nuclear option." What part of "We are not going to work with you" do you not understand? And now we're going to get another term of Terry McAuliffe as head of the DNC, and more craven weaselling by a party that doesn't give a shit about us. That's the reality, my friend. I wish it weren't. I really do, because I remember when it wasn't like this. But now it is.
Tim Grieve at Salon DID see the same sorry spectacle I did:
The protest put a hold on the vote certification so that each house could retire to its respective chamber for debate and a vote on the issue. But Boxer -- or anyone else who thought the protest would lead to serious discussion of election reform -- must have been disappointed by the sorry spectacle that followed. There was no sense of history being made, no sense that anything was really happening at all. Although a few hundred people protested in the drizzle across the street from the Capitol, the visitor galleries in the Senate were mostly empty. Fewer than a dozen senators showed up for the debate, and only the ones who spoke -- among them, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, in his first floor speech, Barack Obama -- seemed to take it seriously. As Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin made an impassioned plea for a bipartisan effort to improve the electoral system, Dick Cheney and Sen. Rick Santorum sat slumped in a couple of chairs on the edge of the Senate floor, talking and laughing. They weren't listening. With solid majorities in both houses, they didn't have to.
And the Republicans weren't the only ones who seemed to give the protest short shrift. Minnesota Sen. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, took to the floor to criticize Boxer for facilitating the protest, saying she would undermine the country's confidence in its democracy if the protest were to succeed and the election were thrown to the House of Representatives. And while Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid ultimately spoke of the need for election reform, he spent much of the protest debate on the other side of the aisle, kibitzing with Santorum and a few other Republican senators.
Think about that. The leader of the Democratic Party in the Senate was schmoozing with "Man on Dog Sex" Santorum" after giving mere lip service to a concept as important as fair and honest elections. That's your Democratic Party.
I wish I had an answer. I wish I could believe going to Meetups and grassroots activism could take our party back. But I'm sorry, I can't. I'm going to continue to fight for what's right, but I can no longer support a party that's sold us down the river every step of the way for the last 10 years. Progressives no longer have a home in this party. They don't want us. They want to make nice with Republicans and hope that it results in a few committee memberships and some corporate dollars flowing into the coffers. Progressives embarrass them. They wish we'd go away so that they can move further to the right. I'm just giving the Democratic Party what it wants. I'm going away.
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