Democrats take note

I hate to sound like a broken record, but the one thing that's made me angrier than Republicans during the last five years has been the complete unwillingness of Washington Democrats to stand up for what they believe in. From Hillary Clinton thinking she can get the anti-sex Christofascist zombies to vote for her because she has referred to abortion as "a tragedy" to John Kerry's prevarication on the Iraq war, Democrats are still laboring under the delusion that George W. Bush is some kind of colussus bestride the world.

Bob Herbert goes down the litany of Bush incompetence and Bush failures today, and exhorts Congress to finally step up to the plate and do its job:

The nation seems, very belatedly, to be catching on to the tragic failures and monumental ineptitude of its president. Mr. Bush's poll numbers are abysmal. Republicans up for re-election are running from him as if he were the bogyman.

[snip]

In the current issue of Rolling Stone, Sean Wilentz, a distinguished historian and the director of the American Studies program at Princeton University, takes a serious look at the possibility that Mr. Bush may be the worst president in the nation's history.

What in the world took so long? Some of us have known since the moment he hopped behind the wheel that this reckless president was driving the nation headlong toward a cliff.

The worst thing he did, of course, was to employ a massive campaign of deceit to lead the nation into a catastrophic war in Iraq — a war with no end in sight that has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and inflicted scores of thousands of crippling injuries.

When he was a young man, Mr. Bush used the Air National Guard to hide out from the draft in a time of war. Then, as president, he's suddenly G. I. George, strutting around in a flight suit, threatening to wage war on all and sundry, and taunting the insurgents in Iraq with a cry of "bring them on."

[snip]

Among the complaints in the Cato study is that the Bush administration has taken the position that despite validly enacted laws to the contrary, the president cannot be restrained "from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror."

This view has led to activities that I believe have brought great shame to the nation: the warrantless spying on Americans, the abuses at Abu Ghraib, the creation of the C.I.A.'s network of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition and the barbaric encampment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in which detainees are held, without regard to guilt or innocence, in a nightmarish no man's land beyond the reach of any reasonable judicial process.

The sins of the Bush administration are so extensive and so egregious, they could never be adequately addressed in a newspaper column. History will be the final judge. But I've no doubt about the ultimate verdict.

Remember the Clinton budget surplus?

It was the largest in American history. President Bush and his cronies went after it like vultures feasting in a field of carcasses. They didn't invest the surplus. They devoured it.

Remember how most of the world responded with an extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and support for America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11?

Mr. Bush had no idea how to seize that golden opportunity to build new alliances and strengthen existing ones. Much of that solidarity with America has morphed into outright hostility.

Remember Katrina?

The major task of Congress and the voters for the remainder of the Bush presidency is to curtail the destructive impulses of this administration, and to learn the lessons that will prevent similar horrors from ever happening again.

And yet, while Republicans are trying to distance themselves from this worst president of MY lifetime (with the exception of John McCain, who in his zeal for the 2008 nomination, is doing everything short of donning a blue dress and fellating the Chimp-in-Chief in the Oval Office), Democrats are still cowering in the corner, lest Karl Rove say mean things about them.

While the increasingly marginalized Howard Dean is still quietly trying to implement a 50-state strategy and compete for every seat, Barbara Boxer, whom I usually respect, is playing to the Bob Shrum/DLC wussy-ass playbook of only fighting for the seats that she feels are "winnable", instead of believing that any seat is "winnable" with the right candidate and the right message.

What Democrats have forgotten is that many of the aspects of American life they hold dear are the product of Democrats. Public schools, worker safety rules, Social Security, environmental protection laws -- all the product of Democratic ideas. In recent years, Democrats have allowed Republicans to paint them as the party of men kissing each other and abortion (as if we were trying to make it mandatory), and have never once pointed out that while the Republicans are saying to their Bible Belt constituents, "Look! Over there! Two men are kissing!" -- they've been pulling the wallets from their constituents' pockets and giving the few pennies in there to giant corporations.

Democratic values ARE American values -- and it's about damn time that the Democrats realized that and stopped settling for the scraps from the Republican corporate groaning board. They owe it to us, the people, do start representing us. Because when they don't, and they worship at the altar of corporate cash, presidents like George W. Bush and House Majority Leaders like Tom DeLay are the result.