“Progressives and liberals have done nothing for the past 25 yrs BUT compromise.”

While I’m not a liberal, I did vote (after I shotgunned two stiff G&Ts to drown my violated sense of principles) a straight Democratic ticket durning the midterm elections because I was trouble by the growth in government spending and — frankly — pissed off and fed up with the Iraq war. The Democratic party talked a good game and seem to be a light at the end of a very long and very dark tunnel, at least when it came to the Iraq war.

Two years after I did this — where the hell are we on Iraq?

Well, you can read my vent and disappoint and pessimism here:

The War & the (Probable) Sad Delusions of Obama Supporters.

Actually he didn’t. Clinton’s balanced budget was based on projecting social security dollars to ten years of future interest, as if benefits wouldn’t be paid. The second Bush took the oath of office Clinton’s “balanced budget” mysteriously disappeared. Two months after Bush took office, before he had proposed his first budget, there was already a recession. Clinton’s policies were still in effect, that down turn was his, and the disappearing surplus disappeared because it never existed in the first place.

Clinton was not the steward for Reagan. Clinton worked hard to destroy not only Reagan’s principles, but his actions. Clinton weakened national security, raised taxes, increased unemployment, increased welfare handouts, and compromised the integrity of the Presidency. The most compassionate action a person can take is to trust in the abilities of others and to motivate them to act. Reagan’s legacy was trusting in the ability of Americans to fend for themselves. Reagan’s legacy was stepping out of the way, the government burdening people less so they could take care of themselves. Clinton acted for the opposite.

Handouts motivate people to do nothing but depend on the government, and are based on the idea that people are incapable of achieving and of caring for themselves. The money for “health care for all” comes from the all. Filtered through the government it buys less. But the key thing it buys, key to people like Clinton, is power. The more people depend on government in the name of compassion, the more power that government has over people. Reagan was not about that.

The costs of a handout society are incredible. Workers are expected to work more and more for the benefit of others. Workers become slaves, seeing less and less benefit while providing not only necessities but luxuries for those who don’t work as hard and don’t achieve as much. Hard work and achievement are penalized on an ever increasing scale. The more you work, the more you achieve, the more your hard work goes for the benefit of others. The only result is discouraging people from working.

That’s what the Obama-nation represents. Because when you get through the empty rhetoric of “change” and “hope” you get to the policies. Those are higher taxes, more handouts, less defense, and the hardest workers treated more and more like slaves working to benefit others.

Obama’s advisers, by contrast, are likely to point you toward his speech at the NASDAQ, which highlighted his desire to transform our economy through the application of moral leadership. There, Obama went before an audience of bankers and stockbrokers and spoke, not of our growth numbers or our credit problems but of our economic values:

Clinton’s great successes, the ones he and his wife tout on the campaign trail, were really the fulfillment of Reagan’s principles. It was Clinton, after all, who declared, “The era of big government is over,” and was able to back that up with actual decreases in the size of government. It was Clinton who actually balanced the budget, who reformed welfare. Reagan set the politics; Clinton played the steward. This is not, it should be said, an attack against Clinton. He governed in a difficult ideological atmosphere—in Reagan’s America, not his own. And in Reagan’s America, Newt Gingrich and his followers were intent on enacting a far crueler version of Reaganism. Clinton, sensing their threat, smartly co-opted their principles and refashioned them as part of a relatively progressive and unquestionably compassionate agenda. In doing so, he succeeded in making some admirable policy advances (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a rise in the minimum wage, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit) and staving off their most dangerous initiatives.

I don’t think they’ve capitulated. How does it go? They didn’t sell out, they bought in. Here’s how I remember it in very broad strokes: Reagan did a lot of damage to the establishment left, which was fragile at best anyway. While he was killing the poor and undermining the middle class, the Dems were dazzled by his electoral success and, not being original thinkers and having been traumatized by the Iranian hostage crisis, figured that they’d join a winning team. So you ended up with the DLC. Those assholes are all Reagan Democrats, which is to say they are low-information Republicans whose voting interests are rooted in greed and fear.

After the looting and tax shifting of the Reagan years, we had the predictable economic slump and when it came time to have the Dems come in and clean up, the DLC were right there to enact their Reagan-esque policies. The non-establishment left wrongly figured they had a savior in Clinton and even when they saw him doing bad things, they either didn’t or couldn’t stop him. It was eight years of peace and prosperity, right? Who could complain? Except the loony right took those eight years to test out their new media machine and found out that it worked better than they could have imagined - especially with an administration in place that wanted to keep that big table coalition and their corporate collaborators getting along. And in there maybe Clinton really believed that NAFTA really could be fixed by a President Gore and maybe he really believed that giving in to every one of the global corporatists demands w/o protecting American workers really was the best way to create a tide that lifted all boats. He didn’t strike me as a stupid man but who knows? At least we were all happy and getting along. Except when the right wing noise machine and the establishment media and Congress - including members of his own party and of his administration - were conspiring to destroy the president, making him vulnerable to every accusation of playing politics with crucial policy decisions to save his skin. You know, except for that we were all reachin’ across the aisle and lovin’ life.

And so we got people thinking that there’s no difference between Dems and the GOP - b/c there really wasn’t. And we got people thinking that drinking beer with presidents is more important than having a president who fights to protect the economy of the country s/he leads. And we watched Al Gore - no saint, but no BushCo - get savaged by that media machine. And we got eight years of BushCo, eternal war and irreplaceable time lost in the fight to create a new energy economy thrown away with both hands.

My greatest fear is that Obama (if he can beat McCain, which I doubt) will bring us back to those times and that sort of bi-partisanship that only lets the power elite and their interests have a seat at the mythical table since neither part of the bi-partisan coalition has the interest of working, working poor and poor Americans - or the interests of the American economy - at heart. My greatest hope is that he is talking all this post-partisan nonsense to fool enough people to get elected and that once in office, he’ll become the champion we need. I figure we’ll get something closer to the first option and have to work like heck to move him to the other.

The thing about change this year is that you have people talking about changing the system and people talking about changing policy. I think you and I are talking about changing policy by using the system like a bludgeon b/c there ain’t going to be any changing the system. The same system that has us believing that Carter was a failure b/c of his policies instead of the system that killed them, the same system that allowed Reagan and BushCo to make huge policy gains and kept Clinton in a moderate GOP box AND still tried to destroy him just because he had a D after his name - that system will not melt away before Obama’s awesomeness. It will be waiting to crush him and force him to accommodate the same policies that are currently destroying the country. That leaves us alone to be our own champions and to pressure Obama or Clinton to do the right thing. It’s daunting and depressing but it’s also exhilarating I suppose. No, it’s mostly depressing. But we still have to do it.

Oh - did you see that the stim pack is marginally less horrible today? I’m hoping the food stamps will still make it up from the floor. I haven’t posted about it yet but if I can get to it, I’ll drop the link here.

How long have you been fighting this battle? Seriously, how many years? And how far have you gotten with that?

What’s really happened is simply that Democrats have capitulated, while the hardcore base abandons them largely in favor of slamming their heads against the same damn wall, over and over again.

All due respect, you’ve been fighting your way into a corner the whole time, and I’m not really amped on that strategy.