Glenn Greenwald takes a shot at one of Rob's and my personal bugaboos - the cry from Obama and the DLC/BD Caucus of conservative Dems that there's been too much hyperpartisanship in Washington. Glenn wants to know "What partisanship?"
Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much about? Just examine the question dispassionately. Look at every major Bush initiative, every controversial signature Bush policy over the last eight years, and one finds virtually nothing but massive bipartisan support for them -- the Patriot Act (original enactment and its renewal); the invasion of Afghanistan; the attack on, and ongoing occupation of, Iraq; the Military Commissions Act (authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, abolishing habeas corpus, and immunizing war criminals); expansions of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity; declaring part of Iran's government to be "terrorists"; our one-sided policy toward Israel; the $700 billion bailout; The No Child Left Behind Act, "bankruptcy reform," and on and on.
Most of those were all enacted with virtually unanimous GOP support and substantial, sometimes overwhelming, Democratic support: the very definition of "bipartisanship." That's just a fact.
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As The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin observed at the end of last year: "Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed." How much more harmonious -- "bipartisan" -- can the two parties get?
He's right, of course, and regular readers will know how worried we've been around here about BO's naive insistence on what he calls "bipartisanship", which almost always turns out to mean "doing what the the GOP/DLC/BD Conservative Cabal wants done because they refuse to compromise." There has been hyperpartisanship, alright, but not on a Pub-Dem split. It's been coming almost exclusively from the Right along a Conservative-Liberal split - the conservatives in both parties scream about how ANYBODY who doesn't go along is hyperpartisan. Mention a liberal policy like SCHIP or note how the Medicare Advantage program is little more than a give-away to Big Pharma and suddenly you're a hysterical partisan who refuses to face reality and compromise [translation: surrender].
This is very bad news for those who still harbor hopes that BO will turn out to be less conservative than his record thus far and it all but destroys any legitimate reason for FDR Democrats to support the Congressional Dems, or Obama for that matter.
I am not a Democrat anymore. As soon as possible I’m switching my party registration to Independent. If party loyalty means absofuckinglutely nothing to the leadership of the Democratic party, then it means absofuckinglutely nothing to me.
It’s not a party anymore, it’s a competition to see who the oligarchy will use as their preferred tool for transferring wealth to the wealthy.
I despair of Obama fixing any of this, but I will put my hope in him, not the party.
Fuck the Democratic party leadership. Fuck them to hell and back. The Left should now be at war with the Democratic party and if that sounds like a joke, it won’t be come 2010.
So it would seem that TMiss is now where I've been for months. I begged him and everyone else to make their demands clear and strong before the election to make certain BO knew what he was being elected to do and who his supporters were, but no. That would be "disloyal". I warned that loyalty wasn't of interest to the DLC/BD-ruled Dems, that their response - and it was quite naked and open - was "we don't have to listen to you because you've got nowhere else to go".
Now it's too late. Now we'll have to attack every single conservative move Obama tries to make. We can't give him any leeway because he's listening to people who say we don't count. That means we have to do what I've been saying all along we'd have to be prepared to do: defeat BD Democrats at the polls. There is no other way short of a third party or having FDR Democrats split off from the Blue Dogs and form a splinter party, which would be preferable but is extremely unlikely as things stand now. (If the Lieberman vote had been close, we might have had a chance to convince the FDR Dems -who are numerousn - to take a hike and go it on their own; that it wasn't tells us exactly what we're now dealing with.)
Nobody wanted to talk about it before the election. OK, wanna talk about it now? Or are you waiting for some further sign from Gawd or Harry Reid that the current crop of conservatives running the party are a lost cause? Are you ready to consider dumping Dems at the polls? Including BO in '12 if he doesn't get the message? Because that's what it's going to take.
NOTHING LESS WILL DO.
To Mark's credit it seems that's what he's now prepared for.
Fuck the Democratic party leadership. Fuck them to hell and back. The Left should now be at war with the Democratic party and if that sounds like a joke, it won’t be come 2010.
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Quarter should be given only to those senators who denounce this vote TODAY. Tomorrow is too late, it was a secret vote and I only trust those who demonstrate their anger with it in real time.
This is not me being radical, something I’m quite prone to. This is me being a rank and file Democrat being turned out of my own party. For this there can be no forgiveness because today the Harry Reid led Democrats showed that there is no party, only a confluence of special interests and establishment financiers.
Crush all incumbents in 2010 and 2012. Purge the party of those who represent money, not people.
(emphasis added)
indeed. Dump the BD Dems, and if that means dumping the party itself - and it probably does - DUMP EM. There's no other way to prevent an only slightly saner govt than Bush's from arranging to keep the corporations in power for decades more with every awful result for our society, citizenry, economy, and even our democracy that that implies. A plutocracy run by conservative Democrats instead of Republicans is still a plutocracy, not a democracy, not even a republic. If the that beast eats you alive used to be your make it OK to eat you alive? Does it make him less dangerous?
Of course not, and only somebody in deep denial would think so. Are you?
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