Spineless Democrats and The " Terror War "

  Check this article out from Black Agenda Report.

When a cowardly congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 last fall, many were quick say that in the House of Representatives at least, Democrats never had any realistic hope of stopping it. This anti-constitutional atrocity rolled the cause of human rights back some 800 years, legalizing secret imprisonment, torture, and evidence obtained by torture. It made possible life imprisonment with neither accusation nor trial, and absolved from prosecution all the recently active kidnappers and torturers on US government payrolls and contracts along with those who gave them orders.

But last fall’s good news, supposedly, was that the Republican congress was certain to be replaced in a matter of weeks by clear Democratic majorities in the House and Senate who’d stand up to the president, end the war, indict even impeach some of the malefactors, and begin to undo some of the damage inflicted by the most lawless presidential administration in the nation’s history. It hasn’t happened that way.

Instead, Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have ruled impeachment of Bush, Cheney or Gonzalez off the table. Congressional Democrats have increased the Pentagon’s budget by $100 billion over Bush’s request. They continued construction of an 80 acre embassy and the largest military bases in the world in Iraq. The end of 2007, a full year of Democratic control of the nation’s purse will see more US forces and mercenaries in Iraq than at the beginning of the year. Only last week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama declared himself ready to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and invade Pakistan. Democrats are scrambling to re-brand the fictitious “global war on terror” as their own, and to outdo Republicans at threatening the peace abroad and scaring citizens at home.

  This is one reason that we may have to fire some of our elected Democrats in 2008. They are not doing the job that we have been paying them to do and that is cause for dismissal, starting with Nancy Pelosi. It has become time to put her on the table if impeachment of Bush and Cheney is to remain off of the table.

   The above article in its entirety, crossposted from CommonDreams, is below.

Published on Thursday, August 9, 2007 by Black Agenda Report

“Terror War” Terrorizes Spineless Democrats

by Bruce Dixon

When Democrats compete to adopt the phony “global war on terror” as their own, and promise they can do it “better” or “smarter” than Republicans, they erase what little difference remains between the parties. “Terror Democrats” have abandoned the politics of hope for the politics of fear, and turn the political process into one that threatens to elect the candidates who frighten us the most.

When a cowardly congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 last fall, many were quick say that in the House of Representatives at least, Democrats never had any realistic hope of stopping it. This anti-constitutional atrocity rolled the cause of human rights back some 800 years, legalizing secret imprisonment, torture, and evidence obtained by torture. It made possible life imprisonment with neither accusation nor trial, and absolved from prosecution all the recently active kidnappers and torturers on US government payrolls and contracts along with those who gave them orders.

But last fall’s good news, supposedly, was that the Republican congress was certain to be replaced in a matter of weeks by clear Democratic majorities in the House and Senate who’d stand up to the president, end the war, indict even impeach some of the malefactors, and begin to undo some of the damage inflicted by the most lawless presidential administration in the nation’s history. It hasn’t happened that way.

Instead, Democratic leaders of the House and Senate have ruled impeachment of Bush, Cheney or Gonzalez off the table. Congressional Democrats have increased the Pentagon’s budget by $100 billion over Bush’s request. They continued construction of an 80 acre embassy and the largest military bases in the world in Iraq. The end of 2007, a full year of Democratic control of the nation’s purse will see more US forces and mercenaries in Iraq than at the beginning of the year. Only last week Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama declared himself ready to take up the “White Man’s Burden” and invade Pakistan. Democrats are scrambling to re-brand the fictitious “global war on terror” as their own, and to outdo Republicans at threatening the peace abroad and scaring citizens at home.

Last week both houses of Congress, including dozens of Democrats approved legislation granting the feds the absolute power to intercept phone, fax and email traffic of anyone, anywhere in the world without the bother of explanations to any judge or competent authority whatsoever. House Democratic leaders denounced it, but didn’t stop it. Senate Democratic leaders, including presidential candidates Clinton, Obama, Dodd and Biden if they mentioned it at all, decried the bill. But true to form, none stepped forward to lead a filibuster that might have stopped it.

With Congressional poll numbers nearly as low and the president’s the gap between Democratic office holders and Democratic voters has never been wider. At the same time, corporate donations to Democratic candidates are higher than ever. These are two sides of the same coin. The Democratic establishment’s uncritical embrace of the so-called “global war on terror” is exposing for all to see the widening fissure between the two Democratic parties — the Democratic party of voters who are called out once every year or two, and the permanent Democratic party of consultants, pundits, lobbyists and wealthy campaign contributors. It is this gap between the expectations of voting Democrats and the will of donors and leading Democrats that prompted Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate President Harry Reid to avoid last weekend’s Yearly Kos, where they would have faced pointed questions on impeachment, war and peace, or domestic policy from an ordinarily tame crowd of Democratic bloggers, consultants, campaign staffers and wannabees. Pelosi and Reid know who their real base is.

Bush and Cheney have already declared that their “global war on terror” will be the foundation of America’s domestic and foreign policy for the next twenty or thirty years. By following their lead, Democrats have doomed themselves to a cycle in which they will no longer compete with Republicans to offer a better vision of life for Americans and the rest of the planet, and have made the Republican politics of fear their own. Subsequent campaigns, including the 2008 presidential well underway will be contests to see who can scare us the most. And worse news still — they’re pretty good at it. Four out of seven Democratic presidential candidates declared their immediate readiness to undertake immediate US military action in Sudan, completely bypassing the African Union force option to which all the regional parties have agreed.

As former Alaska senator Mike Gravel remarked in more than one of this year’s presidential forums, “…all these guys up here scare me….” He should know. Gravel is a man well acquainted with scary times, scary politicians and exposing the lies they tell the public. As a US Senator back in 1968 Gravel risked his own safety and his political career by revealing to the the massive decade-long campaigns of lies to the American public that made possible the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia and the war in Vietnam, which killed two to three million Vietnamese alone.

“You won’t get change from any of these guys up here” said Gravel in Chicago last week. “For that you need a movement. You’ll have to get together and make some of your own policy, your own laws. Change doesn’t come from elections and political parties and politicians. It comes from movements”

We at BAR think this is uncommonly good advice coming from a presidential candidate. Our African American politicians are fond of describing themselves as sons, daughters and heirs of the Freedom Movement. It’s time we began to untangle that mess, to consciously separate those claims from reality, and see whose followers, whose heirs they really are.

Bruce Dixon, Managing Editor of The Black Agenda Report, can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com

© 2007 The Black Agenda Report

Technorati tags: Democrats, war on terror, Mike Gravel, george bush, dick cheney

Bipartisan Solutions?

   From the Daily Kos

We Can't Wait for Bipartisan Solutions

by DHinMI Tue Aug 07, 2007

"We need a consensus."

This is what Joe Biden said a little while ago, when asked by Keith Olberman if he would appoint a Republican to head up the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security.  I don’t have the exact language, but he seemed to imply that nothing would work unless it had significant support from Republicans.

I was floored.

If there is anything that has been apparent since the Democratic takeover of Congress, it’s that many and probably most of the current Republican members of Congress will NEVER work with Democrats for the good of the country.  Since the rise of Newt Gingrich, the majority of Republicans in Congress have demonstrated that they don’t care about the good of the country.  Grover Norquist is inadvertently one of the most honest of conservatives, and when he referred to bipartisanship as date rape, he wasn’t revealing just his own personal view, he was describing the mindset of much of the Republican Congressional caucus and it’s allies in think tanks, among campaign hacks and activists, and in a sizeable chunk of its electoral base.  

It’s a realization many of us had come to long ago.  It’s one of the reasons many of us ended up at Daily Kos, the knowledge that George W Bush, his allies in Congress and the people who push them in to power will use unscrupulous means to attain, maintain and exercise power.  They know they have to conceal their unscrupulousness from the public.  While the Republican party has veered farther and farther to the right, the American people haven’t really budged.  In fact, on individual issues, the American public is more liberal today than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and far more liberal than it was when Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election, which provided the mandate to enact our major civil rights legislation and the most major extension of the social welfare state since the New Deal and World War II.  Republicans involved in organizing and running elections and selling their policy positions to the press and the talking heads know that the American public is far to their left.  But they conceal their radicalism through clever marketing scams like Frank Luntz’ Contract on America and the pabulum of "compassionate conservatism."  

Further obfuscating the dangerous radicalism of a main current in current Republican politics is that most of their office holders, at least in the past, appeared to the keepers of beltway conventional wisdom as genial men, the type who David Broder or David Ignatius wouldn’t mind chatting up at the Safeway in Georgetown or while waiting for a flight at National.  They seemed like good guys, and on the major organizing principle of our politics after World War II—the Cold War and the long fight against communism—they made common cause with Democrats.  While nasty people like Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were scurrilous red baiters, and the Republican party was full of people who made common cause with reactionary Southern Democrats to fight unionization and the full inclusion of blacks in to our nation’s public and economic life, they weren’t fundamentally hostile to cooperation with Democrats on any and all issues.  

But Bob Michel retired, Bob Dole was attacked by the right for doing his job and actually passing legislation, and Newt Gingrich became the leader of the Republican party.  People like David Broder never saw or understood what happened and continued to indulge their idiotic fixations on making a fetish of bipartisanship.  Joe Lieberman and his ilk confused moderation with centrism; as the Republicans moved farther to the right, Joementum followed them, thinking there was virtue in being equidistant from the middles of both parties, but showing that someone who’s deepest principle is appearing to be above a passionate partisan love of our country can be played like a rube from the backwoods facing his first big-city grifter.  And people like Joe Biden, who haven’t figured out that the hatred that fearful conservatives mustered against commies and blacks has now been directed at tolerant and non-authoritarian Americans, and that these haters control and intimidate all but a few of the once proud Republican moderates, act as if we’re still in the Cold War and everyone in Congress is committed to a higher good.  

Senator Biden, please look around, and realize that the solutions to our nation’s woes, the answers to our challenges, aren’t bipartisan.  The involvement of people looking for solutions and to meet our challenges could eventually be bipartisan, but current evidence suggest otherwise.  No more than four House Republicans have voted for any of the most meaningful pieces of legislation dealing with Iraq.  Only four Republicans have joined the Senate Democrats on Iraq.  The Republican Study Group in the House engages in delaying tactics almost every day; to see one reason why the House—which has passed significant legislation—isn’t doing more, look at how many bullshit procedural votes the Republican offered last week.  In the Senate, the Republicans continue to use the filibuster and cloture votes to bottle up almost everything the Democrats try to accomplish.  The Republicans go along with just about everything Bush and Cheney shove down our nation’s throat.

And unfortunately, a consistent minority of Democrats buckle under and accept what Bush and the Republicans shove down our throats.  

A few weeks ago, in his dissent in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, which partially rolled back Brown v Board of Education, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote of change on the Supreme Court:

The Court has changed significantly since it decided School Comm. of Boston in 1968. It was then more faithful to Brown and more respectful of our precedent than it is today. It is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today's decision.

Stevens was discussing a change in American politics in which so-called conservatives have become radicals whose views are now divorced from the mainstream of American politics and life.  The same radical turn that Stevens observed on the Court is evident in the radicalism of the Bush administration and its allies in Congress and the Republican party.

In electoral and representative politics, those of us at Daily Kos have known about this change for some time; as Markos (justifiably) crowed this morning, we’ve been right on just about everything for five years, while the establishment drones and too many timid Dems tried to find the truth in between where we were—and we were eventually joined by about 80% of the country on the war—and where the Republicans were.  But the Republicans’ politics are so skewed, they have gone so far from reality, that we have now arrived at the point where it’s probably impossible to have any reality-based solutions to our national problems and challenges that can be accepted by the Republicans.  

As Stevens pointed out in the Seattle schools case, as we see on the Iraq votes, the majority of Republicans are radicals, or are too beholden to their radical leadership, radical money interests and radical activist base to step up and do what’s good for the country.  Democrats like Joe Biden, who’ve served a long time in public life, have a hard time recognizing that the Republicans no longer can or care to act in the interests of the country.  Therefore, we must recognize that until the Republicans change, the answers to our nation’s most pressing needs and challenges—getting out of Iraq and fixing our foreign and defense policy, combating terrorism, addressing global warming and environmental devastation, changing out energy policy, implementing universal health care, shoring up the economic security of the middle class, expanding opportunities for the poor and disadvantaged, and undoing the damage of the "unitary executive" and the assault on our civil liberties—will not be bipartisan.  Demanding bipartisan solutions to our problems requires us to wait for the Republican party to heal itself.  We can’t wait, and it’s time all our Democratic politicians and policy wonks and pundits and campaign and strategy people stop expecting the Republicans officials and party leadership to join in and work for the good of the country.  

I’m floored that this is still a mystery to Joe Biden.

Technorati tags: Bipartisanship, 2008 elections, President, Primaries, Democrats, Republicans, Joe Biden