Our political system has devolved into a cross between a bad Don Rickles joke and a high school fire drill during freshman orientation. Obama is at best a hypocrite and at worst Hillary in drag, only with less heavy eye-liner. Hillary seems to be going for Nixon Redux, and McCain is Fright Nightwith the Kewl Kids at the National Review Dorm, surrounded by an army somebody gave them for Xmas to play Dungeons ‘n’ Dragons with.

Not a pretty future we’re looking at here, and attention should be paid before it’s too late. Meaning, of course, that it already is. We’ve saddled ourselves with a crew of right-wing choices, all of them corporate stooges, all of them hawks to greater or lesser degree, and none of them have the slightest interest in challenging the Beltway status quo or the punditocracy’s assumptions. What to do?

I’ve given up the idea of getting anybody to pay attention to this because all the so-called “progressives” are all caught up in the Hillary v. Obama farce and will continue to track that ill-begotten game until it’s as stale as last week’s bread, pretending all the while that the primaries are “significant”. That they “matter”. That each candidate is “different” from the other.

Balderdash. We’ve been suckered into caring about this meaningless circus no less than conservatives have been suckered into believing there are radical Islamic terrorists hiding in their hydrangea bushes. I am ashamed of all of us. We have fallen for some of the oldest tricks in the book. As David Sirota put it a few months ago (via Thomas Nephew at newsrack blog):

And so this is what we get – a kabuki dance from candidates who pray that voters are too dumb to figure it all out. Here we have two candidates going before workers telling them they will really represent them by opposing sell-out trade deals, and then telling the elite political Establishment that actually, they will continue voting for those very same trade deals when they hit the floor of the Senate.

The point being that this is the same old bait-and-switch that George W has been using for 7 years, only we refuse to recognize it because “our guys” are doing it this time.

The fact of the matter is that it’s no better when we do it than when they do it, and if we don’t wake up to the fact that we’re being manipulated by a glitzy, rhinestone-studded extravaganza behind which lies the same Dark Angel of corruption and decomposition, we’re going to lose both our democracy and our freedom.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, it’s already happening, and the Democrats are in the thick of it.

What do you think of us now?

canuckgal (via eRobin) notes that the furor over Obama’s chief economic advisor assuring a Canadian official that BO’s anti-NAFTA remarks lately weren’t serious but merely whimsical, light-hearted, unserious “campaign rhetoric” has heated up. The Obama advisor was named by CTV as Austin Goolsbee after Obama and his camp denied the report. canuckgal wastes no sympathy on them.

Obama’s camp now sits silent, refusing to address the specific names and timeline that CTV can provide and support, trying to hide behind the Canadian Embassy Denial as opposed to going to the reported source(s) of the information, and in typical Obama fashion he is simply ignoring the fact that he has been caught lying.

Rob is so po’d she’s ready to vote for Hillary.

I think I have NAFTA Derangement Syndrome.   If the PA primary were tomorrow, I’d vote for Hillary.  How’s that for American voter crazy?

That’s a bit of an over-reaction but I know how she feels. If one looks past Obama’s rhetoric to his record, what one sees is, as Rob so poignantly says, that he’s as much a Republican at heart as Hillary. Make all the excuses you want, the fact of the matter is that once again the Left has no one to vote for. Neither of the two likely candidates is worth spit on a stick, with Hillary running a dirty, Nixon-ish, Roger Ailes-style campaign and Obama lying through his teeth every time he opens his mouth.

If we want to break the back of the corporate control of both parties, we’re going to have to fight both parties. Tooth and nail. We have no friends left in positions of power. We have few real friends left in any positions. Our options are shrinking. The strongest one we have left this late in the game?

Stay home.

“What? And give the election to McCain? You can’t be serious!”

Oh, but I am. We have nothing, repeat NOTHING, to lose.

In the first place, McCain isn’t George W (assuming the Emperor leaves office when he’s supposed to rather than declaring a national emergency and scrubbing the election, extending his reign into an FDR-like 3rd term; how does President for Life Bush sound?). At root he’s fairly pragmatic, and while he’s a slug, a hypocrite, and a slimeball, he isn’t an ideological fruitbat, nor is he stupid.

In the second place, he isn’t likely to win no matter how many committed lefties stay home. The Great Middle is going to go Democratic come hell or high water. They hate the GOP at this point and Bush & Co are doing their best to make sure that state of affairs continues.

In the third place, neither Hillary nor Obama is likely to be much better than McCain on either domestic policy or the war. That may be a hard idea to swallow – certainly it tastes awful and we’d rather not – but facts are facts. All three will continue the Iraq debacle, all three will hand corporations the reins of govt, and all three will either expand or at a minimum refuse to retard the Emperor’s assumption of autocratic powers. Oh, they’ll all make noise about “working with the Congress” and Obama already has his “bi-partisan compromise” schtick rolling along, a farcically “reasonable” proposal that virtually guarantees that the Donkeys will go right on surrendering to corporate and GOP loudmouths, but in the end nothing much is going to change and there won’t, in practice, be much difference between them.

So screw it. Don’t enable them. Work against them all or at least stay home. The day after the election we’re going to be fighting for our lives no matter who wins.

Two of the prime characteristics of stupid people and arrogant people is that a) they never learn and b) they never change either their beliefs or their actions no matter how often objective evidence proves them wrong. The prime characteristic of the modern Republican is an abysmal lack of any emotion except greed.

All three came together this week when George W Bush, the “compassionate conservative”, decided to kill the SCHIP program by executive fiat because he couldn’t use Congress to take away the health care program for poor kids.

The Children’s Defense Fund is reporting that “the Bush Administration has issued new regulations that will force states to make significant changes to their Medicaid programs.”

President Bush proposes to eliminate:

• 47 programs in the Department of Education
• Grants that provide important social services to protect children from abuse and neglect
• Programs that provide hearing screenings to newborns and emergency medical services for children

President Bush requests to cut funding for:

• Mental health and substance abuse programs for children and their parents
• Housing assistance
• Job training programs
• Energy assistance for low-income families

Despite the outcry against harming SCHIP, Bush and his Molochian Rangers have been trying to scrap the program because – as he said in a speech months ago in a burst of unusual honesty – it would hurt insurance companies who normally make money writing family health insurance.

The is such standard Bush that one barely blinks at the callous insensitivity, even cruelty, of it. That he is willing to ignore the Congress and issue Edicts from the Throne instead is likewise such a Bush SOP that no one has even bothered to remark on this latest insulting law-trashing. After all, as Emperor of the North he can do anything he want, right?

But this shouldn’t be shrugged off as just another one of Bushie’s Trash Acts wherein anyone who isn’t a $$$millionaire$$$ (at least) gets thrown to the wolves, sick kids first as they’re the least useful. He has used executive orders and regulation changes to do everything from subverting the Constitution to turning a war zone into a profiteer’s $$$ trough. He has ignored science in order to hand our environment to the very people who want to destroy it (for profit, of course). And he has tried to use these tricks again and again to put corporate and party flunkies on the nation’s highest courts, flunkies who will violate the law if that’s what it takes to get the Emperor what he wants.

All of that is hopelessly banal evil and a scourge on our communities, our history, and our shared values. But when he abuses his power to murder the last hope of sick kids too poor to buy insurance, he has gone one toke too far on his personal odyssey to Hell. It is Social Darwinism run amok.

It must be stopped.

Learn more and email your Members of Congress today — tell them to stop these harmful Medicaid regulations from being enacted!

Please.

It was perhaps inevitable that once our political system was captured by corporate interests, there would come a time when virtually all the candidates available to us were hypocrites. We’re looking at that time now on the national level. All three candidates still standing are corporate conservatives. Two of them have flip-flopped so many times they could be IHOP icons featuring pancakes instead of faces. The third is your standard political hypocrite, saying what people want to hear but voting and supporting very opposite policies to the ones he claims to be championing.

I shouldn’t have to tell you at this point which is which. The NYT helped today by breaking down the Democratic hypocrites, particularly Hillurary.

First, they note that in a recent speech, TweedleShe seems to be attempting to channel John Edwards.

Mrs. Clinton, speaking on the eve of the Wisconsin primary but looking forward to primaries in Ohio and Texas on March 4, issued a 12-page compendium of her economic policies that emphasizes programs aiding families stressed by high oil prices, home foreclosures, costly student loans and soaring health care premiums.

In public appearances here and in her economic booklet, she took aim at hedge fund managers, oil company profits, drug company subsidies and trade agreements that she says encourage companies to export jobs.

Then they reminded readers (something they’ve rarely if ever done with Bush) that she hasn’t always been such a “champion of the people”. That in fact, it’s all pretty new to her.

But she has also sought, often successfully, to win support and campaign contributions from an array of business leaders, including John J. Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley and one of the Republican Party’s biggest fund-raisers. And she infuriated many liberals last year when she told an audience at the Yearly Kos convention of bloggers that she would continue to take contributions from lobbyists because they “represent real Americans.”

Obama, rightfully, doesn’t come off much better. First, the New and Improved Obama, sounding a populist theme he stole from Edwards:

Campaigning in Ohio before flying to Wisconsin for an election-eve rally, Mr. Obama said the wealthy had “made out like bandits” under the Bush administration and called for an end to tax breaks for companies that move jobs overseas.

“In the last year alone,” Mr. Obama said, “93 plants have closed in this state. And yet, year after year, politicians in Washington sign trade agreements that are riddled with perks for big corporations but have absolutely no protections for American workers. It’s bad for our economy; it’s bad for our country.”

Better late than never? Perhaps. Until this graf brings the truth home in startling style: it’s all just campaign guff.

Mr. Obama has laid out an economic agenda that is broadly similar to Mrs. Clinton’s. But until recently, he was the target of criticism from some liberals for not being more outspoken about what they see as the deficiencies in the nation’s trade policies. For the last week, though, facing tough battles in the Midwest, Mr. Obama has been emphasizing the economic upheaval that trade deals have brought to communities in Wisconsin and Ohio, and he has sought in particular to put Mrs. Clinton on the defensive over Nafta, the North American trade pact signed into law by Mr. Clinton.

(emphasis added)

About the only way one can read the bolded part is as a bad joke. Not that long ago, TweedleBam voted for two Bush trade deals – with Panama and Peru – that were worse than the NAFTA fiasco. The Panama deal is little more than a corporate scam to escape both US taxes and US law. The Peru deal is a deliberate trick wherein corporations evade workers’ rights and enmvironmental standards by appearing to refer to a strong document for its legal basis but in fact use a much weaker one that gives almost all the control over deciding what is or isn’t a “right” or an “environmental benefit” to the corporations themselves. And we all know what happens when they’re allowed to decide such things without outside oversight. (BP explosions, anyone?)

Both these deals are abominable giveaways to corporate interests. Obama voted for both of them. So, to their everlasting shame, did many Democrats, but Barack is the candidate for president, not Charlie Rangel. For him to be trumpeting a populist message and haranguing TweedleShe on her trade policies after helping the corps get illegal and unethical trade powers with his votes sends Democratic hypocrisy soaring to whole new levels.

It isn’t that Obama “lacks substance” that’s the problem. He lacks honor. He’s selling us a pig-in-a-poke, and because it’s in a pretty bag we haven’t bothered to look inside at an extraordinarily ugly pig.

While the political world is totally caught up in the primary Kabuki trying to figure out whether TweedleBam or TweedleShe will wind up as the Democratic nominee and acting as if it matters, Emperor Georgius is taking the opportunity to push the Senate Judiciary Committee to report out the nomination of one Richard Honacker to the Wyoming Federal District Court.

The nomination was made last March and has been hanging fire ever since. He obviously thinks that with the Senate bowing and banging its head on the floor in a rush to protect him and the telecom companies who blatantly broke the law for years and years from prosecution for their crimes, now would be a good time. You know, while they’re already in Surrender Mode.

Honacker is, of course, a Bush Lulu. Rabidly right-wing, he tried to get a law passed in Wyoming banning all abortions, and he has repeatedly insisted that US law should be superceded by Biblical law. On the former, Sharon Breitweiser, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Wyoming, wrote:

[W]hen an Associated Press reporter called for a quote [after the nomination had been made], I didn’t know where to start! Should I start with the list of anti-choice legislation he championed in the state legislature – such as the “Human Life Protection Act,” a bill he authored that would have outlawed almost all abortion? Maybe I should highlight the major role Americans United for Life played in developing his “Human Life Protection Act?” The group even paid for his trip to Chicago, where they advised him on how to advance this legislation! Or maybe it would be better to focus on his role with the “Unseen Hands of Prayer Circle PAC” – the group that was formed to try to push an abortion ban through the ballot process after it failed in the legislature? Honaker even represented the extreme anti-choice group before the State Supreme Court and succeeded in getting the measure on the 1994 statewide ballot – but fortunately, Wyoming voters overwhelmingly rejected the Honaker abortion ban by a 61-39 percent margin. Of all the Americans qualified to sit on the federal bench, this is whom George Bush picks?!?!?

Well, duh. Who else? And to be fair, Honacker’s theocratic credentials are just as strong as his anti-choice ones. Talk to Action’s Rob Boston notes that:

[Honacker] believes abortion is murder and that biblical law should trump the secular law. He said in one speech, “I came to know that if the Bible is true, if Christianity is true, then it is true in family life. It is true in economics. It is true in law, and it is true in all facets of human endeavor. I know that with only such a world view can Christians have any impact upon the culture around them.”

Speaking before convention of homeschoolers in Wyoming in 2005, Honaker said, “[I]f taught accurately, history can teach us that the greatest American patriots and leaders were Christians, and that there is indeed a Christian basis for American institutions of law, government, and business.” In the same address, he attacked the Supreme Court because it “no longer talks about America as a Christian nation or about the Christian underpinnings of the law.”

Questioned about these rather unusual views, Honaker replied that no one should worry. A higher court could always step in and overrule him. “The losing party [could] appeal to the Tenth Circuit, and perhaps on to the United States Supreme Court, and nobody would remember what the trial judge did anyhow,” he said.

Right. Vote for me because even if I’m a flaming idiot and far-right fruitcake, Federal judges aren’t important and can always be over-ruled. Vote for me because it doesn’t matter.

What a platform.

The Senate Judiciary Committee ought to end this NOW by rejecting Honacker categorically and demanding that Bush send them a nominee who doesn’t think the Constitution is something to wipe his ass with.

When it comes to top-heavy management, it would seem that even the Boy Emperor surrounded by his Band of 100 Bigots has nothing on Osama bin Laden. Between Al Qaeda and the Taliban, Washington and Islamabad have claimed the capture or killing of nearly 300 men described as being “close to OBL”, “top bin Laden commanders”, or having “close ties” with AQ’s elusive leader. The latest is Mansour Dadullah, whom Pakistani Army Maj Gen Athar Abbas says was taken in a firefight in Afghanistan’s mountain province of Baluchistan.

(“Confidence is not high, I say again, NOT high…”)

Aside from the fact that Pakistan, in the early days of the Second Gulf War, swept the streets of Islamabad rounding up political enemies of Gen Musharraf and telling US forces that they were, without exception, “high level rebel terrorists close to bin Laden” (which turned out to be fabulously untrue), thus gulling the abysmally ignorant Bush Administration into throwing hundreds of innocent men into Gitmo without a trial, there is the minor problem that most rational intelligence estimates of AQ’s actual strength are somewhat smaller than the number of OBL “advisers” supposedly dispensed with – one way or another.

Not, of course, that the Pakistanis – or the Emperor himself, for that matter – would ever lie about such a thing. Dear me, no. Gen Musharraf’s military leaders may be trusted implicitly. The Bush Admin, which understands this, will undoubtedly follow quickly with confirmation of Dadullah’s importance, perhaps even finding – Ach du lieber! – that he was closer to O than even the Pakistanis thought. His brother, maybe. At least a cousin.

“It is a big capture, and it works in favor of the security forces to find these miscreants and deal with them,” Abbas said.

Some news organizations reported that Dadullah had died while being transported to a hospital, but Abbas insisted he was alive.

Though it’s likely Dadullah is scheduled to die, probably accidentally, during transport. That would explain the confusion.

The operation against him unfolded a week before national parliamentary elections in Pakistan. The run-up to the vote has been marked by increasing fears over security at the polls and an upsurge in violence in the country’s northwest. On Monday, a suicide bombing in the town of Mir Ali, in North Waziristan, killed at least eight supporters of the opposition Awami National Party.

Naturally, it goes without saying that the confluence of attack and election was purely co-incidental, as no doubt was the election and the “capture” of Dadullah. It stands to reason that no ally of George Bush would EVER use war for political purposes.

Still, it leaves us with an important question: Is everybody in Al Qaeda and the Taliban a close friend and confidential adviser to Osama? They’d pretty much have to be to get those numbers, wouldn’t they?

Kyle’s post, “What Hope and Change Really Mean“, is a beautifully written and crafted synopsis of the Obama Pitch, and is also most likely a pretty good summation of his (Obama’s, not Kyle’s) appeal. The fact that it’s both wrong-headed and at the same time amounts to little more than wishful thinking and generational warfare shouldn’t undercut the importance of having these sentiments out in the open where they can finally be addressed.

Kyle begins by acknowledging that there is some (minor) justification for cynicism on the part of critics but then promises that “there is reason to believe, reason to hope, that this time, it’s different.” And what reason would that be?

“We can change.”

Well, yes, but what reason does he have for thinking we will? You know, the reason he promised to provide? Of that there is nary a trace. He claims toward the end that:

…this is the kind of change that Barack Obama represents.  It is a change that is at once idealistic in its hope for unity, but pragmatic in the understanding that we are at our strongest when we compliment and suppliment each other, that those who oppose us can make us better, can help us succeed where we would alone fail.

So, after knocking critics for claiming Obama is all rhetoric and no substance, Kyle responds by invoking…Obama’s rhetoric. But he has no substance to offer. If we take that rhetoric away, what makes him think Obama represents any sort of change at all? He doesn’t say, maybe because he can’t. As Paul Street wrote last year in “The Obama Illusion“, (via the incomparable eRobin at Fact-esque), Barack has a long history that we ignore at our peril.

Never mind, for example, that Obama was recently hailed as a “Hamiltonian” believer in “limited government” and “free trade” by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having “a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.” Or that he had to be shamed off the “New Democrat Directory” of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator (Bruce Dixon, “Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List,” Black Commentator, June 26, 2003). 

Never mind that Obama (consistent with Brooks’s description of him) has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and “other Wall Street Democrats” to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” the Nation, June 26). Or that he lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman’s (“D”-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Or that Obama has supported other “mainstream Democrats” fighting antiwar progressives in primary races (see Alexander Cockburn, “Obama’s Game,” the Nation, April 24, 2006). Or that he criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Never mind that Obama “dismissively” referred—in a “tone laced with contempt”—to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as “something of a gadfly.” Or that he chose the neoconservative Lieberman to be his “assigned” mentor in the U.S. Senate. Or that “he posted a long article on the liberal blog Daily Kos criticizing attacks against lawmakers who voted for right-wing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts.” Or that he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Or that he told Time magazine’s Joe Klein last year that he’d never given any thought to Al Gore’s widely discussed proposal to link a “carbon tax” on fossil fuels to targeted tax relief for the nation’s millions of working poor (Joe Klein, “The Fresh Face,” Time, October 17, 2006). 

Never mind that Obama voted for a business-friendly “tort reform” bill that rolls back working peoples’ ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Cockburn; Sirota). Or that Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry—at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield (Sirota). Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards? Should the U.S. maintain the illegal operation of Iraq and pour half its federal budget into “defense” because of all the soldiers and other workers that find employment in imperial wars and the military-industrial complex? Does the “progressive” senator really need to be reminded of the large number of socially useful and healthy alternatives that exist for the investment of human labor power at home and abroad—wetlands preservation, urban ecological retrofitting, drug counseling, teaching, infrastructure building and repair, safe and affordable housing construction, the building of windmills and solar power facilities, etc.? 

While that piece is a year old, there is nothing in Obama’s recent performance (remember, we’re not talking rhetoric now) to suggest anything has fundamentally changed in his outlook. Despite howls of protest, he nevertheless enthusiastically supported Bush’s terrible anti-worker, anti-environment, pro-corporate trade deals with Panama and Peru, the latter over the strong objections of Peruvian labor leaders, and that was a bare two months ago.

What Kyle’s argument, passionate and eloquent as it is, boils down to is that Obama says he wants us to change and we are capable of change and therefore we will change. But he must know there’s more to it than that. What kind of change? To what end? What can we actually, realistically expect? It is one thing to hope, another for that hope to have a legitimate basis. What Kyle is asking is not just for us to have faith, but for us to have faith that compromise can finally be made to work.

What Kyle – and much more dangerously, Obama himself – completely fail to acknowledge is that the radical GOP’s idea of  ”compromise” and “bi-partisanship” is “My way or the highway”. They have not and will not budge one iota from their extremist agenda. Why should they? If they stand firm they know they can count on the Democrats to “compromise” by giving them everything they want. That’s what they’ve been doing for 12 yrs and for 12 yrs it has been a winning strategy thanks to the Dems’ Blue Dog conservative coalition.

The “cynicism” that Kyle so glibly dismisses is the result, as cynicism always is, of continuously disappointed hopes and consistent betrayals. Kyle’s – and Obama’s – fantasy is that there is some mystical, magical “center” where everyone can meet and where everything could be worked out by reasonable men and women if those damn hardline progressives would just get out of the way and STFU. In this view it is partisanship itself that’s the problem.

There’s still a laundry list of stances on issues, and if you don’t agree, there’s something terribly wrong with you.  I don’t disagree with disagreement upon principle, but there is something disturbing with how hardline some of these folks can be.  They will sacrifice progress for the sake of being progressive; any compromise on any issue is a de facto failure.  A selling out of our liberal or progressive values. 

With all due respect Kyle, do you have any idea what you’re talking about? Progressives and liberals have done nothing for the past 25 yrs BUT compromise. We have sacrificed progress on virtually every front in the name of “getting something done” only to see our own representatives betray their supposed beliefs in order to pander to corporate sponsors and their Beltway pundit-supporters in the conservative press. Welfare “reform”, NAFTA, GATT, the slicing-and-dicing of social programs until even the bones are picked clean, the disemboweling of education funding, worker protections, environmental protections, labor rights – do I really need to go on? Because I could. For pages.

What you and Obama are asking sounds good on tv but it is seriously unrealistic. Neither party can be trusted to let the cat in at night, no matter how pretty their words are. Worse, they are consummate scam artists, selling soap with poison in it. What you are asking us to do is “trust” people who have shown by their actions that they will distract us with snake-oil pitches and pie-in-the-sky promises while the hand we’re not watching picks our pockets. Again.

Why would we do that? Why would anyone smart enough to get out of bed in the morning do that?

Enough. We’ve been screwed too often, betrayed too often, lied to too often. It stops here.

And one more thing.

Thus we are faced with this strange paradox where progressives often seem uninterested in actually making progress, and are instead more concerned with the idea that their soldiers hold the line.

That’s also called “having the courage of your convictions” and “fighting for what you believe”. Where we are after 25 yrs of Pub rule and Dem “compromise” is on that line, fighting to hold together what little is left of the social contract, fighting to keep any more children from starving or dying of curable diseases because they don’t have food or health insurance, fighting to keep the air and water clean, fighting to keep corporations from callously killing workers in order to save a little $$ on safety equipment, and on and on and on.

If being willing to fight for those things makes me an uncompromising extremist, then so be it. I don’t think I care for the price the “center” is willing to pay to avoid that fight.

Glenn Greenwald drove the point home in his Salon blog this morning that the Democrats remain, under DLC leadership, tied to playing monkey-see/monkey-do with the GOP despite the fact that Republicans and their policies are reviled throughout the country.

Substantial attention has been paid to the historic unpopularity of the Bush presidency, but relatively little attention has been paid to the accompanying collapse of the Republican Party’s credibility. The latest Washington Post/ABC News poll reveals that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle every issue of any significance, including — by a now fairly wide margin — “the U.S. campaign against terrorism”…

***

From a purely political perspective, one would expect that Democrats would seek to highlight contrasts with such an unpopular and discredited party, not to emulate and capitulate to it. Republicans are distrusted across the board, and thus — as the 2006 election demonstrated (in which Karl Rove made Terrorism-exploitation the campaign’s centerpiece) — the GOP’s standard fear-mongering tactics and accusatory attacks are plainly impotent, even counter-productive.

***

But this is where the real lesson is to be found. The approval rating for Democrats in Congress has plummeted steadily since the American electorate gave them control of Congress in early 2007. Early on, ratings for Congressional Democrats were consistently near 50% as Americans had high hopes for their willingness to change the course of the country and place real limits on the deeply unpopular Republican policies. But as Congressional Democrats became more and more characterized by capitulation and an unwillingness to stand up to Republicans, their approval numbers steadily dropped to its current mark, just one point away from their lowest approval rating of the last 14 months.

Greenwald quotes polls and opinion surveys – and has been doing this for months – that track the deep unpopularity of the Pubs. It simply cannot be that the Democratic brain trust of pollsters and marketers are unaware of the numbers he cites, so what is the explanation for the Donkeys continual cowardice?

Simple. It isn’t cowardice. It’s Democratic Leadership Policy. Roped and hog-tied by a Likkud-thin minority of Blue Dog extremists, the Democratic party is currently in the virtual control of conservatives who think the way George W Bush thinks and want the same things (whatever they are) that the National Association of Manufacturers and the Corporate Chamber of Commerce want. If the Dems are deliberately ignoring increasingly unfavorable and unambiguous polls, it isn’t because they don’t understand them. It’s because they, like the Pubs, don’t give a damn. The party’s marching orders don’t come from us any more, they come from Rahm Emanuel’s list of corporate donors.

IOW, the “primary season” is now a Class A farce. We’ve been whittled down to two candidates, one a DLC Founder and the other the DLC’s latest Poster Boy, neither of whom has ever managed to vote against the Pub line whenever it mattered. They may talk a Good Game but when the rubber meets the road, they know who owns the car.

We, the people, no longer have an opposition party in the US because we no longer have a legitimate political system. It is owned and operated by MONEY, and no matter who the president is among this pathetic crew, s/he will know enough to do as s/he’s told.

A lot of people are kidding themselves that Hillary is a liberal and Obama is a breath of fresh air. They aren’t. They’re the same old show – with a new star and a new set, maybe, but the same old producers churning out the same old stale crap. Leno or Carson, The Tonight Show is still The Tonight Show with the same tired shtick.

It’s time for Greenwald – and the rest of us – to face the music:

Nobody’s representing us any more, and clearly no one is going to no matter who wins the Kabuki competition we’re laughingly calling an election. So what do we do now?

Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, two of the Washington Post’s most reliable (and least trustworthy) boosters of Bush’s disastrous economic policies, have combined forces for a piece today about the so-called “stimulus package” that approaches fantasy.

Their first fairy tale is their claim that “Senate Democrats tried to block the permanent extension of the government’s authority to eavesdrop on terrorism suspects without warrants.” In fact, as Glenn Greenwald has amply shown, a majority of Dems in both the Senate and House have gone out of their way to make sure the extension passes with the immunity provision firmly attached. Harry Reid has personally and with the aid of his now-cohort Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) taken the few Democrats courageous enough to threaten a filibuster to the woodshed, belittling their action by claiming it’s a childish attempt to “talk this thing to death”. Greenwald:

Harry Reid — who has (a) done more than any other individual to ensure that Bush’s demands for telecom immunity and warrantless eavesdropping powers will be met in full and (b) allowed the Republicans all year to block virtually every bill without having to bother to actually filibuster — went to the Senate floor yesterday and, with the scripted assistance of Mitch McConnell and Pat Leahy, warned Chris Dodd, Russ Feingold and others that they would be selfishly wreaking havoc on the schedules of their fellow Senators (making them work over the weekend, ruining their planned “retreat,” and even preventing them from going to Davos!) if they bothered everyone with their annoying, pointless little filibuster.

To do so, Reid announced that, unlike for the multiple filibusters from Republican colleagues, he would actually force Dodd and company to engage in a real filibuster.

(emphasis in the original)

Now West Virginia Dem Jay Rockefeller, Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a man owned and operated by the telecom industry, is turning himself into knots defending the immunity by arguing both ends at the same time.

Rockefeller is flailing around with such dishonesty that his two principal claims are completely contradicatory. On the one hand, he claims that telecoms did nothing wrong because they were “compelled” by the President’s orders to cooperate in his warrantless surveillance programs and had no choice. On the other hand, he claims that without retroactive immunity, telecoms won’t cooperate in the future.

Those two claims plainly contradict one another. If (as Rockefeller claims) the President can force telecoms to cooperate, then there can’t be any danger that, in the future, they will refuse to cooperate, since they don’t have a choice. None of this makes any sense but the fact that his two primary arguments are in total contradiction to one another illustrates the level of his dishonesty.

The second comes when they equate letting Myers and Josh Bolton off the contempt hook with Cheney being less nasty than usual, as if the voluntary surrender of Congressional power was a sacrifice equal to Dick not snarling maniacally and lying his ass off for 5 mins.

There were signs that both sides were trying to avoid at least some provocations until an economic package is passed. House Democrats decided to hold off any action on contempt citations against White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers over the investigation of the firings of U.S. attorneys. And Vice President Cheney avoided his usual red-meat attacks in a speech arguing for the surveillance measure.

Well, that’s an even trade, ay?

Finally, after a year of Democratic subservience to Bush that has outdone even the puppet Republican Congresses of ‘01-’06, who at least occasionally refused Bush some small item on his All-Time Corporate-Conservative Wish List, by giving the Boy King everything he ever wanted, they have the temerity to claim that the Emperor “risked the ire of Senate Democrats by renominating Steven G. Bradbury as assistant attorney general despite lawmakers’ refusal to confirm him because he signed off on memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects.”

I’m sorry. Risked the what? Ire? At first I thought it was a joke but in fact Baker and Weisman are desperately trying to maintain the fiction that the Democrats oppose Bush policies when the plain simple fact is that “[f]or an entire year, Congressional Democrats have won absolutely nothing. They’ve given in to the White House on every one of its demands.”

THERE IS NO OPPOSITION PARTY in America any more. The Democratic leadership and the Bush Administration are hand-in-glove compadres in the race to authoritarian fascism and corporate dominance of our used-to-be democracy. They’re all on the same page. When they argue, it’s only about how fast and how far they’re going to abandon democratic principles and their constituents – and for how much moolah from the corporations.

I’m afraid that says what you think it says. The London Times Online is reporting that a British lawyer hired by the Bush Administration is arguing in a British court that the US has the right to kidnap anyone it decides has broken its laws without the dreary formality of extradition and haul them back to America to stand trial. (Via Libby at The Reaction.)

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

***

Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.

The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.

This is straight Empire-stuff, the Bush Admin treating allies like client states because Imperial Law (meaning Bush whims) trumps any little local laws that might impede Imperial desires. Allan Jones, the lawyer representing the Admin, claims the “right” to kidnap goes back to – tell me again the Bush template isn’t the Robber Baron 19th century, go ahead – bounty hunting laws written just after the Civil War, and that the SCOTUS, as recently as the early 1990’s, sanctioned it in the case of one Humberto Machain, a suspected Mexican drug dealer who was kidnapped by the DEA and flown back to Texas for trial.

Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.

***

Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. “The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.

He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”

Mr Justice Ouseley, a second judge, challenged Jones to be “honest about [his] position”.

Jones replied: “That is United States law.”

(emphasis added)

Justice Ouseley’s surprise nee skepticism is understandable. He obviously doesn’t realize that Bush/Cheney has turned the US into an autocratic Empire run by fascist ideologues and latent dictators for whom “the law” is a minor inconvenience defended only by wimps and losers. Or that their “unitary presidency” assumes the powers of an 18th century monarch in what used to be a democracy.He was obviously under the outdated impression that the US is a civilized nation of laws, not the banditocracy of a brigand state whose “foreign policy” consists largely of illegal military “interventions”, kidnapping, torture, extortion, and blackmail.

After this, I suspect he’s up to speed. Bush and Cheney have made America the Giant Economy-Size version of 19th century Berber Morocco. In those days, Teddy Roosevelt threatened to go to war over the kidnapping of Mrs Eden Pedecaris by a Berber sheik. Now we’re the ones doing the kidnapping.

Given the inch of “extraordinary” rendition, Bush/Cheney has now taken the mile of “whenever, wherever, and whoever we want to” rendition, and applied it to the entire planet. This is typical. Given the inch of “surveillance with warrant” handed over in the PATRIOT and FISA Acts, they take the mile of “surveillance on anyone without warrants or judicial oversight of any kind” sanctioned by no one. Given the inch of “habeus corpus suspension” in the case of “enemy combatants” by the MCA, they then take the mile of claiming that an enemy combatant is anyone they say it is, and that they can ignore court orders to the contrary.

I would say that their outrageous stance in a British courtroom arrogantly dismissing British law by claiming that only the US President’s personal “law” counts make us officially a rogue nation, compatriots with the likes of Burma, Libya, and the old South Africa. It’s time for Britain – and the rest of the world – to wake up. They’re up against an Empire and there’s no guarantee a Democratic president will do more than mitigate that prevailing doctrine. They better start figuring out how they want to handle an Imperial America because ignoring the new reality isn’t going to work forever.

I don’t have to remind you that credit card companies have become in the last few years little more than loan sharks. Their interest rates are usury, the hidden fees and fines are out of control, and sudden, invisible rate hikes have shocked consumers pretty regularly. A friend of mine had a total of $7000 on 3 cards, and when she added up the charges, she discovered that she had paid $12,000 – nearly double what she owed – and still had almost $4000 left outstanding. Even if she tripled or quadrupled her monthly payment, it would virtually all be interest, leaving the principle balance almost untouched. She also noticed for the first time that there were large late fees tacked onto her payments even though she regularly mailed them the week before they were due.

That graf barely scratches the surface of the tricks, cons, and scams lenders have developed in the past 8 years to increase their already massive profits. And it isn’t like you can, you know, free-market-style, change your provider for a better deal. Nearly all the lenders who dish out cards do the same things. Some may be marginally worse than others, but they all pretty much use the same tricks to inflate what you owe them beyond all reason, and this despite interest rates that would make John Gotti blush. Well, WaPo business reporter Carrie Johnson writes today that the Democrats are preparing legislation to put a halt to the worst of the abuses.

Senior Democrats on Capitol Hill want to ban excessive credit card fees. Bank regulators are on the verge of forcing companies to give more notice before raising interest rates. And New York’s attorney general, whose investigations transformed the student loan industry, now has his eye on conflicts of interest in the credit card sector.

After years of complaints about abusive practices that trap borrowers in an endless debt cycle, federal and state officials are shining light on the most controversial practices and preparing changes that would make card companies’ policies more consumer-friendly.

The fight between consumer advocates and the banks that issue credit cards has been simmering for decades. But a rise in cardholder complaints and the ascension of Democrats in the House and Senate is pushing companies to engage in preemptive damage control and is setting the stage for what could be the most significant changes to the industry in more than two decades.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) said he will hold a hearing this week focused on card companies that raise interest rates for consumers who comply with the terms of their original agreement. “It is becoming increasingly difficult for the credit card industry to defend this type of unfair interest rate increase,” he said.

Well, it’s a start. With the abuses so similar and so widespread that one would be justified in suspecting collusion and conspiracy at an industry-wide level, Democrats could hardly ignore them, not with an election coming up and their popularity in the dumper because it has taken them a full year to get around to challenging Bush on Iraq. People are pissed.

Dennis Kocik of Charlottesville said he canceled one of his longstanding credit cards after reading the fine print and noticing that his interest rate almost had doubled. Kocik was so angry about the issue that he said he wrote a complaint letter to the Federal Reserve Board, the chief bank overseer. He said he is outraged on behalf of thousands of people who don’t scrutinize the leaflets that arrive with their card statements.

“Nobody reads that stuff,” Kocik said. “The banks that issue credit cards are like pigs feeding in a trough. . . . If the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, you get a fee.”

The card companies are not, of course, taking this threat lying down.

Card companies and banks are spending millions of dollars to hire well-connected lobbyists to argue their case. They say card issuers need flexibility to assess the risks posed by customers who may be on the verge of defaulting — and taking card companies along with them.

The American Bankers Association recently enlisted Jonathan Orszag, a former economic adviser to President Clinton, to research and issue a paper arguing that more federal oversight of the card industry would be counterproductive and would only hurt borrowers by reducing their access to credit.

New restrictions under congressional consideration, the companies say, would harm the consumers who pay their bills on time by subjecting them to a one-size-fits-all approach to fees and interest rates. More than 95 percent of customers stay current with their payments, said Ken Clayton, managing director of card policy at the ABA.

In fact, the possibility that Democrats may take on the credit crisis by slamming new regs on the finance industry, along with the rest of the corporatocracy’s flim-flammers and con-artists, has corporations in a real sweat. The corporate lobbyist industry is booming.

Business lobbyists, nervously anticipating Democratic gains in next year’s elections, are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor.

Hoping to lock in policies backed by a pro-business administration, poultry farmers are seeking an exemption for the smelly fumes produced by tons of chicken manure. Businesses are lobbying the Bush administration to roll back rules that let employees take time off for family needs and medical problems. And electric power companies are pushing the government to relax pollution-control requirements.

***

Randel K. Johnson, a vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce, said, “I am beefing up my staff, putting more money aside for economic analysis of regulations that I foresee coming out of a possible new Democratic administration.”

At the Transportation Department, trucking companies are trying to get final approval for a rule increasing the maximum number of hours commercial truck drivers can work. And automakers are trying to persuade officials to set new standards for the strength of car roofs — standards far less stringent than what consumer advocates say is needed to protect riders in a rollover.

(emphasis added)

And we all know how susceptible Democrats are to lobbyists. Negotiations will by flying fast and furious all over town. So it’s anybody’s guess whether any of this legislation will ever see the light of day or how useful it will be if it does. Still, that the Donkeys have corporate honchos running scared can’t be entirely a Bad Thing. Some good may come of it. At least we can hope….

Norman Vincent Peale has a lot to answer for. His gospel – that the “power of positive thinking” overcomes all obstacles – infected the executive and investor class in the 50’s and was magnified by the conservative corporatocracy for the next 50 years. They institutionalized it and then grafted it onto their own beliefs, defining “positivity” or optimism as the fulfillment of their wish list. Since they tend to be bi-polar thinkers with little tolerance for, say, nuance, that meant that everything contrary to their beliefs became, ipso facto, “negative”. “Thinking positively” came to mean being positive about their ability to depress wages, subvert regulation, shove their expenses onto the govt and the rest of society (a la Wal-Mart) so they could pocket more of their profits, freely exploit the labor and resources of other countries without blowback, and so on.

Unfortunately, it also meant developing a rigid denial of the inevitable consequences of all that unrestricted self-interest. Global warming, economic stagnation and growing poverty for a majority of the population, peak oil, massive debt, Bush – all of those ticking time bombs and many more were simply denied recognition. “If we don’t see them, they don’t exist.”

That attitude has now infested Wall Street. According to the NY Times, this week’s rally is primarily the result of “positive thinking”.

As Wall Street rallied this week, it seemed that investors were taking comfort in the notion that the economy had become so imperiled by the crumbling housing market that it was forcing the government to finally mount an aggressive rescue effort.

Investors found reassurance yesterday in talk that the White House was brokering a deal with banks that could diminish a looming tidal wave of home foreclosures. Soothing words from the Federal Reserve earlier this week revived the hope that more interest rate cuts are on the way, drowning nervousness in a din of buying.

?The market now feels comfortable that the Fed has come to appreciate the severity of the situation,? said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the brokerage and advisory firm ITG. ?The bad news gives you the blessing of lower interest rates.?

IOW, they’re congratulating themselves for having created a crisis so dangerous to the health of the national economy that they figure the govt will have no choice but to steal even more of our tax money to bail them out. The reality – that we live in the 2-tired system that they’ve created where the wealth is all at the top, much of it untaxed, while personal incomes are falling and you can’t get blood from a stone – is swept under the rug, ignored, or vehemently denied.

Looming large over the landscape is uncertainty about the size of losses still confronting banks and other financial institutions as they reckon with bad mortgages along with credit card debts, auto loans and the complex detritus of an era of loose money now over.

?It?s a sucker?s rally,? said Nouriel Roubini, a former Treasury official who runs an economic consultancy, RGE Monitor. ?The market is essentially hoping the Fed can rescue the economy. But they are discounting the onslaught of really lousy economic news.?

***

But the lower [oil] price also reflects the view of investors who now expect a substantial American economic slowdown, which would ease the pressure of the rising demand for energy.

?The market is realizing how much of a train wreck the economy is right now,” said John Kilduff, an energy analyst at MF Global in New York.

Even the metaphor – and from a critic – is a form of denial. This wasn’t an accident. The economic train didn’t inexplicably jump the rails through no fault of theirs. They deliberately removed the track in order to sell it, then convinced themselves with “positive thinking” that the train didn’t really need tracks and would run just fine without them. Now that the train has crashed and the ground around it is littered with bodies, they are – like all spoiled elites – blaming the victims and assuming their butts will be saved from facing the consequences of their despicable selfishness.

The “era of loose money” was always based on denial. And debt. Millions are in over their heads after years of keeping the economy humming with borrowed money. Foreclosures are up – way up – bankruptcies are exploding, and buying has slowed to a crawl. Why? BECAUSE NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY. It’s all at the top of the pyramid. Our credit cards are maxed out and our incomes never grew as we expected – and were promised – they would.

[M]any of the forces gnawing at the economy remain in place, and actually appear to be intensifying. The trajectory was reinforced by data released yesterday, which showed that Americans now have less money in their pockets and are less inclined to spend.

Personal income grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 0.2 percent in October compared with September, the Commerce Department reported. That was only half the rate expected. Consumption grew a paltry 0.2 percent, dropping from the 0.3 percent increase registered in September. Construction spending plummeted at double the anticipated pace.

Look at that again: while executive salaries have been skyrocketing into the multi-millions, even for execs who have been responsible for massive failures, the incomes of ordinary folk went up a measly 2/10ths of a percent, 10X less than the rate of inflation, and they’re surprised we’re “less inclined to spend”. Gee, I wonder why.

Buried at the bottom of the page, though, is some confirmation of what I’ve been saying for 3 years – that the highly-politicized and unethical Bush Admin has been cooking job numbers to make the employment situation look considerably better than it actually is.

Perhaps more ominously, a government report released yesterday suggested that the number of jobs created in the spring was far smaller than previously assumed.

“Assumed”? That “assumption” was based on Labor Dept statistics passed along by ex-corporate lawyer and Bush devotee Elaine Chao, who oversaw their development and release. Ever since she became the Sec Labor, job creation numbers have been consistently misleading, each quarter’s stats having to be “adjusted” – lower – some time after their ballyhooed announcement, with that adjustment conveniently buried on the back pages, all but invisible to the major media. And therefore us.

Writhing under a mask of rising debt, we have been in a recession – us, not Wall Street, which has thrived on inflated values, stock manipulation, overseas exploitation, mortgage scams, and cheap accounting tricks – ever since Bush started bad-mouthing the economy as president-elect to justify his tax cuts for the rich. Finally, unable to make any more than we are or borrow any more than we have, the recession is threatening to hurt the very people who created it. Born in and nursed by denial and “positive thinking”, greed and disinterest in the social costs of greed are on the edge of sending the world economy into a tailspin. And the response from our financial masters, the geniuses of Wall Street?

More denial and wishful thinking.

Well, really, what did we expect?

Talk about Alice in Wonderland. Like the Red Queen’s, BushLogic tends to circle back on itself to become its own opposite, canceling itself out as well as violating all its previous positions. An item in today’s WaPo illustrates just how far down the rabbit hole we’ve fallen under the Shrub.

El Supremo has decided to fight the Democratic budget bill – you know, the one tied to troop withdrawals – by whining about how his not signing it will hurt (are you ready for this?) the profits of the military-industrial complex.

President Bush warned Congress yesterday that the Pentagon will soon have to start laying off civilian employees and reducing operations at U.S. military bases unless lawmakers send him an emergency war funding bill that does not mandate troop withdrawals from Iraq.

Escalating a dispute with Democratic lawmakers over his request for $196 billion in supplemental funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush complained that a delay in providing the money is jeopardizing important military efforts.

So is the argument for continuing the occupation now that ending the war will hurt the economy and cost us jobs in the MI sector? The economy as a whole is on the verge of collapse because of financial industry shenanigans in the subprime mortgage business and he wants me to worry that civilians on military bases and working for defense contractors who’ve been raking in megabucks for 4 straight years might – might – get laid off? Is he kidding?

In contrast with his complete lack of interest in the massive lay-offs caused by his tax give-away the very first year of his reign, his concern for MI employees is almost, well, touching. Of course, it does send the collateral message that only military-industrial complex employees are worth worrying about and he isn’t losing any sleep over the millions of workers trashed by a corporatocracy that considers any day without wage cuts and employee lay-offs a wasted day. But never mind. Those war-workers are important to the nation. The rest of us are a drag on the economy. We don’t spend enough and we don’t do anything, you know, important. If we’re not making bullets and bombs, what good are we?

But the uncharacteristic concern for employee jobs is, as we all know by now, just a cover for what he’s really worried about: stop the war and you stop the flow of easy money to his buddies in the MIC. Defense contractors are BIG campaign contributors. Mustn’t hurt them by allowing something silly, like peace, to break out. It’s their profits he’s protecting, not their workers’ jobs.

Of course, as transparent, self-serving, and elitist as this argument is, that won’t prevent the Dems from caving in to it. If the Bush GOP has learned one thing the last 7 years, it’s that the Democrats won’t challenge any argument Bush makes about anything right up to and past the points of outright gibberish, inanity, and/or insanity, no matter how unambiguously he states his biases. Consider his argument against SCHIP: that we shouldn’t help sick kids get medical care because it might hurt insurance industry profits. This is the very same argument. It simply replaces one fat-cat sector for another, one set of contributor profits for another. The Democrats fell for the first, why shouldn’t he expect them to fall for the second?

Not that they’ll listen but fwiw, down here in the trenches Bush’s stance doesn’t play very well. In fact, it doesn’t play at all. Nobody cares about high-salaried defense workers losing their jobs. Nobody cares about fat cat contractors losing their bloated govt funding. Nobody cares if MIC stocks take a tumble. We’re too busy hanging on by our fingernails to homes we’re about to lose and trying to find affordable health care for our kids. We don’t really give a shit that a few MIC managers might have to live on unemployment for awhile if the Iraq war-and-occupation ends. It seems to us a small price to pay for bringing our sons and daughters back home alive and well.

Not that a movement conservative Republican cares about that sort of trifle. They’re about the Glory of War, not about the costs paid by those who have to fight them, especially dirty wars like this one. (From A Tiny Revolution, via Norwegianity)

Lance Corporal Jeffrey Carazales:

Do you think people at home are going to see this?all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain’t even a real Texan.

Lieutenant Nathaniel Fick:

Worst of all were the accolades and thanks from people “for what you guys did over there.” Thanks for what, I wanted to ask?shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people’s homes?

Evan Wright:

As Graves steps back in horror, his boot slips in the girl’s brains. “This is the event that is going to get to me when I go home,” he says.

Voices you never hear. These are the guys fighting the Emperor’s oil war. These are the guys dying to increase the worth of stock portfolios owned by war profiteers in the MIC. These are the guys Bush wants to ignore in his determination to make sure MIC fat cats get to stay fat.

Seriously twisted, this Bush. Makes the Red Queen look like a paragon of sanity and common sense, don’t he?

I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night because there’s no point to it. They’ve established a pattern and it’s always the same: 2 or 3 of them get into a vicious fight over who’s most like a dictator, who’d violate the Constitution the most often, who’d break more laws, who’d give the oligarchs the most tax breaks, who’d torture more innocent people, who’d invade the most Muslim countries, and/or who’d make sure a maximum number of the poor would starve, freeze to death, and end up homeless, roaming the streets.

And just to be sure we’re clear, those aren’t attacks against their opponents. They’re boasting.

Last night it was apparently about who would be most likely to marginalize, arrest, condemn, and otherwise be the cruelest to immigrants.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani immediately set the tone for the combative event, using the first question to continue a weeks-long feud they have waged on the campaign trail. Each accused the other of ignoring laws against illegal immigration and distorting one another’s record on the issue.

Giuliani accused Romney of having a “sanctuary mansion” by employing illegal immigrants as lawn workers and of being “holier than thou” on the issue. Romney accused Giuliani of ignoring the laws and of welcoming illegal immigrants to New York. “That’s the wrong attitude,” Romney charged in a lengthy, heated exchange.

They weren’t entirely alone, of course.

Former senator Fred D. Thompson accused Romney of flip-flopping on immigration and said Giuliani had gone to court seeking to overturn a bill designed to ban sanctuary cities. “I helped pass a bill outlawing sanctuary cities,” Thompson said. “The mayor went to court to overturn it. So, if it wasn’t a sanctuary city, I’d call that a frivolous lawsuit.”

Romney and Huckabee, who are in an increasingly tight battle in Iowa, clashed over whether children of illegal immigrants should receive college scholarships. Romney said Huckabee was wrong to support such a measure in Arkansas, to which Huckabee replied: “In all due respect, we are a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.”

McCain, whose campaign was damaged by his support for comprehensive immigration legislation, promised along with others that, as president, he would secure the borders, but he called on his rivals to tone down their rhetoric on the hot-button issue. If he becomes president, he said, “We won’t have all this other rhetoric that unfortunately contributes nothing to the national dialogue.”

In this group, Huckabee’s statement is as close to rationality as we’re likely to get.

But what comes through most clearly every time I listen to – or read – what these monsters say is that it doesn’t really matter which one of them wins. As president every single one (except Paul) is promising to be a bigger, meaner, more anti-American and dictatorial autocrat than Bush. It would seem that the fundamentalists and rabid ultraconservatives who now comprise the Republican base have driven out every lick of common sense, decency, and non-fear-fed hysteria from the party. Based on the candidates’ approaches and selling points, the GOP must now be almost exclusively limited to theocrats, racists, plutocrats, corporate puppets, xenophobes, eliminationists, mindless war-mongers, and Constitution shredders. Every so-called policy, foreign and domestic, seems to be based on greed, fear, and hate.

What this all means, added together, is that the vision the Republicans have for America’s future under GOP leadership is unrecognizable as America. It would be a walled-off, armed camp run by corporations and the military, led by the whims of a dictator, in which there would be only two economic classes – the rich and servants of the rich. It would be an empire plundering the world’s resources and exploiting the weak, leaving the old and the sick to die because they weren’t savvy enough or lucky enough to accumulate a pile of dead frogs. I used to say it was a vision that harked back to and longed for the late 19th century era of the Robber Barons, before unions and income taxes, before the 40-hr week and child labor laws.

But listen to these guys and it’s worse than that. They want a return to the feudal system of the Middle Ages backed by the military technology of the 21st. They want a monarchy. They even want all science not involved with creating war hardware regressed to a point pre-Darwin or even pre-Copernicus and replaced by Bible-science.

They have occasionally been called “the American Taliban” as hyperbole, a reference to how far back it would appear they wanted to take us. But every time they open their mouths, they make it plainer and plainer that that description isn’t hyperbole. It’s a fair and accurate assessment of what they actually want. They want a Xtian war against Muslims on a global scale; they want concentration camps for anyone who isn’t white, rich, and/or a particular brand of Xtian; they want women returned to baby-making and housework; they want to live in a monarchy/dictatorship under the rule of a single leader; they want a two-tiered economy with themselves at the top and peasants below; they want to hijack all the goodies of the world and lay waste to the planet to enrich themselves. In short, they want to re-create the Roman Empire or at least pre-Magna Carta Britain under, say, Ethelred the Unready. Or perhaps a less legal-minded, more religion-friendly Henry II.

It’s a frightening picture they draw. Like the Taliban and wahabists, they want a hell-for-leather charge back to a feudal 10th century society of aristocrats and serfs, lords and nobles, kings and empires. They want peasants bowing to them in the street and the right to whip, imprison, or kill the ones who won’t. They apparently consider that their not being born in that time is a correctable mistake and that now is the time to fix it. In point of fact, after 12 years of a Republican majority and 7 years of Bush Rule, they’re very near to getting what they want.

IOW, every one of them is a clinically, certifiably batshit-crazy lunatic.

It’s not a land an American could stand to live in, and if they manage to steal their third straight election, I will head as far away from them as I can get. The next Pub Pres is liable to start WW III just to prove how manly he is, and I for one don’t want to be anywhere near here when he does. If Rudy Giuliani is going to end the world, I don’t want to be in Peoria when he does it.

If we fail to impeach, we have condoned and left unpunished a course of conduct totally inconsistent with the reasonable expectations of the American people. We will have condoned a presidential course of conduct designed to interfere with and obstruct the very process he has sworn to uphold. We will have condoned and left unpunished an abuse of power totally without justification. In short, a power appears to have corrupted. It is a sad period in American history, but I cannot condone what I have heard, I cannot excuse it and I cannot and will not stand still for it.

~ Rep M Caldwell Butler, R-VA, in 1974 on the impeachment of Richard Nixon 

Hard to imagine a Republican voting for his country over his party these days.