Chief Fired By Palin Speaks Out

This accusation is about typical Republican behavior. This seems tame compared to the illegitimate Bush administration and, therefore, one of their chief enablers, John McCain.


Abuse of power? Nah, just politics as usual in the GOP. The Democrats are also pretty capable in this area, especially in the Southland. But those Democrats are now Republicans, or Blue Dog Democrats. What the hell is a blue dog anyhow?


Washington Post

29/08/08 "Washington Post" -- - The July firing of Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan by Gov. Sarah Palin, who was announced as John McCain's running mate on Friday, has unearthed a stream of soap-opera-like details about Palin, her husband, her family and top state appointees. The controversy has also cut against Palin's reputation for holding an ethical line and standing up to colleagues in the Republican Party over matters of principle.


Monegan, 57, a respected former chief of the Anchorage Police Department, said in an interview with The Washington Post's James V. Grimaldi on Friday that the governor repeatedly brought up the topic of her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten, after Monegan became the state's commissioner of public safety in December 2006. Palin's husband, Todd, met with Monegan and presented a dossier of information about Wooten, who was going through a bitter custody battle with Palin's sister, Molly. Monegan also said Sarah Palin sent him e-mails on the subject, but Monegan declined to disclose them, saying he planned to give them to a legislative investigator looking into the matter.


Palin initially denied that she or anyone in her administration had ever pressured Monegan to fire the trooper, but this summer acknowledged more than a half a dozen contacts over the matter, including one phone call from a Palin administration official to a state police lieutenant. The call was recorded and was released by Palin's office this month. Todd Palin told a television reporter in Alaska that he did meet with Monegan, but said he was just "informing" Monegan about the issue, not exerting pressure.



"She never directly asked me to fire him," Monegan said.


But he said Todd Palin told him Wooten "shouldn't be a trooper. I've tried to explain to him, you can't head hunt like this. What you need to do is back off, because if the trooper does make a mistake, and it is a terminable offense, it can look like political interference.


"I think he's emotionally committed in trying to see that his former brother-in-law is punished."


The allegation against Palin, "undercuts one of the points they are making that she is an ethical reformer," said Democratic state Sen. Hollis French, who is managing a $100,000 investigation into the firing of Walter Monegan.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Liberal Bloggers Brace For Victory?

I'll express some thoughts in the next post about this topic, as I have had some thoughts wandering around the old synapses as of late.

Naturally, I'll post some shorter thoughts throughout the following article about the so-called Netroots. It's an important subject; far more important than than even the people at its center realize.

Obama's Prospects Pose New Concerns for Netroots

By Jose Antonio Vargas
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, July 21, 2008; C01

AUSTIN, July 20 -- "Yep, the way it's looking, we might actually win this thing . . ."

That's Markos Moulitsas talking, a.k.a. "Kos" to everyone here at Netroots Nation, the four-day liberal blogapalooza that ended Sunday at the Austin Convention Center. He's got a head cold, which explains his hoarse, strained voice, and by "we," he means the Netroots and their candidate of choice, Sen. Barack Obama. If the Netroots can be compared to high school -- still maturing, somewhat cliquish but definitely a community -- then Obama, as the presumptive nominee, had been voted Most Likely to Succeed.

That's a very good analogy. It certainly rings true in my experience. As an independent with many ideas and beliefs that one would certainly consider liberal, even progressive, with others most would consider conservative to moderate, I constantly get verbally whacked in the comment sections of blogs from both ends of the political spectrum. I don't know much about party politics, but it seems to me that insulting people, whom one does not know in the slightest, based on one comment, doesn't do much for one's cause, whatever that might be. It's never wise for either political party to insult a politically involved independent. The blogosphere still has a long way to go if it is to reach its potential as a political tool.

Hardest Worker and Best Dressed honors went to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who kicked off Saturday morning's program with a freewheeling 40-minute "Ask the Speaker" session. ("Damn, Nancy looks grrreat in that pantsuit," a blogger was overheard saying.) Most Popular would go to Al Gore, who brought the crowd of more than 2,000 conventioneers to its feet with his surprise appearance, repeatedly asking bloggers to visit WeCanSolveIt.org, home to his new group, the Alliance for Climate Protection.

True, Pelosi looked good in her pants suit. She also, from a number of pictures I've seen, looks a bit haggared; an appearance one develops while experience term stress. Anyone wonder why? I do.

I seem to remember Bill Clinton saying that that he wanted to base his ex-presidency on that of Jimmy Carter. I have no idea what Bill is doing with the exceptions of raising money for his presidential library, campaigning for his wife, flying around the world with and sharing sailing weekends with G.H.W. Bush and pulling in the big bucks with speeches. Whatever his causes, his ex-presidency, so far, looks nothing like that of Carter. Seems it's Gore, whose ex-vice presidency is one of service to not only his country, but for the entire planet, who resembles Carter, in the years after holding high office in D.C. Good on Mr. Gore.

Both men have my highest admiration.

But Obama, who leads Sen. John McCain in recent national polls, is Topic A among the Netroots, his fate somewhat married to theirs. Five years ago liberal bloggers made a name for themselves at a time of defeat; Republicans controlled not just the White House but both houses in Congress. They craved a fight, and President Bush was their punching bag.

The liberal, democratic bloggers weren't the only ones who wanted a fight. I was one angry-as-hell individual. I was ready for a freakin' fist fight.

But these are changing times, and Obama, in his calls for getting past blue vs. red America, and in his recent positions on issues such as telecom immunity, is somewhat of an enigma. With the Dems taking back Congress in 2006 and the prospect of an Obama victory come November, many in the influential Netroots are left in a precarious, ambiguous position. The question is, who needs whom: Does Obama need the Netroots, or vice versa?

Kos, never one to mince words, is blunt.

"It's not a question of who needs whom. Fact is, the Netroots are not going to be the decisive factor," Kos says, fidgeting with his iPhone as he sits on a lounge chair at the Hilton, across the street from the convention center. "But having said that, we're an activist set of people: We're engaged, we give money, we put boots on the ground. That's why when many of us had a genuine disagreement with Obama on FISA" -- Obama voted for a bill that provided retroactive immunity to telecom companies -- "we let him know about it."

He's got that right, in a way. The people of the Netroots will not decide who the next president is, by voting on election day. Nevertheless, the Netroots are having more of an effect this year than we did in 2004. I can't say that that is because of anything the bloggers are doing differently than we did then. More likely it is because there are more small community news aggregators than there were 4 years ago. More people are getting at least some of their news from the blogosphere. The biggest reason the Democrats are facing victory (unless they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, again) is George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their gang of constitutional and international criminals.

Though his site, Daily Kos, is arguably the liberal blogosphere's most popular hub, Kos is not the Netroots. He's just at the center of the quad, with other blogs filling the rest of the always packed, often clangorous hallways. And with each passing year, the crowd gets bigger, the tent wider.

At the first confab, then called YearlyKos and held in Las Vegas, some 1,200 attended, most of them blog jockeys who knew each other only by their online names. Last year at least 1,500 attendees made the trek to Chicago, including all but one of the eight Democratic presidential candidates, who sat down for a 90-minute forum. Among those present were bloggers, pols and their minions, policy analysts and think tank reps.

This past weekend, those same types showed up, plus tech firms such as Wired for Change, hawking an online product called Salsa that helps groups engage people through e-mail lists. There's no denying that the gathering has crossed the mainstream threshold when swag bags, complete with El Sabroso Salsita salsa chips, were handed out alongside condoms from the Center for Constitutional Rights.

As in any community, as in many high schools, Netroots can appear both self-segregating -- black bloggers at one table, Latinos at another and gays at the next -- and not diverse enough. After the Q&A session with Pelosi, in which the first questions asked were about impeaching President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the FISA bill and abstinence-only education, some black bloggers complained that they weren't enough questions about rising gas and food prices.

The "black bloggers" are right. There are people all around me who can't tell you who their senator is, let alone what "FISA" means. But they do understand that gas prices are breaking their economic backs. High fuel prices, food prices, the housing/credit crisis, the healthcare crisis (and there is one; a huge one) and other main street issues are issues that effect the largest percentage of the voters and do so in a very obvious, non-deniable ways. They sure as hell know what corporate welfare and political cronyism are. They have seen it in action, at least since Katrina, when over-worked, over-extended people started paying attention, en masse.

I'm not saying that FISA isn't important. It is immensely important. So is accountability! Nevertheless, those issues will not put Obama in the White House.

"It reflects a bit of skew," Cheryl Contee, a member of the convention's advisory board, says of the questions to Pelosi. Contee, who is black, runs Fission, a social media consulting firm. "Folks in the convention have to keep in mind that not everyone who considers themselves a part of the Netroots is here, and many of them aren't as concerned about, say, FISA or impeachment. They want jobs."

Amen!

Obama's standing here, especially with big-name bloggers such as Matt Stoller of OpenLeft, has proved complicated. Two years ago, frustrated by bloggers' reaction to two Democratic senators who voted to confirm John Roberts as chief justice, Obama wrote a posting on Daily Kos:

"According to the storyline that drives many advocacy groups and Democratic activists -- a storyline often reflected in comments on this blog -- we are up against a sharply partisan, radically conservative, take-no-prisoners Republican party," wrote Obama, who voted no on the Roberts confirmation.

Last year, at the height of the primary campaign, Obama often placed second behind former senator John Edwards in the monthly and unscientific Daily Kos straw polls. In October, he fell third behind Edwards and Sen. Chris Dodd. When Obama examined former president Ronald Reagan's legacy earlier this year and said it "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not," a blizzard of comments hit blogs, many of them critical.

This describes the kind of knee-jerk, unthinking reaction easily found on either side of the political fence in this country. Obama was absolutely right in what he said. Reagan did change the political landscape in the U.S. and in such a way that there is no going back and in a way that Nixon and Clinton did not. Not all U.S. presidents should or could be transforming presidents. Those kinds of presidents only come along every 20 year or so. They are transforming personalities who recognize a movement among the people before anyone else does. Perhaps that is because they agree with the basic tenets of that movement; a movement born out of a great necessity of the time. I believe that Obama is going to be a transforming president.

A few weeks ago, after Obama's upcoming vote for the FISA bill provoked angry comments on his own social networking site, My.BarackObama.com, Obama posted an explanation on his blog. "Democracy cannot exist without strong differences. And going forward, some of you may decide that my FISA position is a deal breaker," Obama wrote.

I admit that I have not read the FISA Bill in its latest incarnation. If Russ Feingold thinks it stinks and must be fixed in future and Hillary voted against it, my guess is that the new FISA Bill isn't all that better than the last one. Nevertheless, it can be fixed, but that won't happen during a McCain administration.

"Think about it: Netroots was born at a time when the Democrats were in opposition, and it's learning how to be a force of good when the Democrats are in power -- and could have more power next year," says Simon Rosenberg of the New Democrat Network. A speaker at the confab, Rosenberg is a bridge of sorts between Official Washington (he worked in the first Clinton White House) and New Washington (he wrote the foreword to "Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics," which Kos co-authored).

How hard can this be? Anyone who has the power to do so should hold their elected officials feet to the fire. They should also pick their battles and realize that if democracy is to be ressurected in America and the constituion restored, D.C. (and the country) must move toward concensus governance. If that takes a multi-party system, as I believe it will, bloggers need to be prepared to lead the way in making that system a reality and stop clinging to the two major political parties, neither of which seem to stand for anything these days..

Adds Andrew Rasiej, also a speaker at the convention and founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an online think tank that analyzes how the Internet affects politics: "For most everyone in the Netroots, the main goal right now is get Obama elected. Period. Now how the Netroots and Obama move forward after November, if he is elected, is another issue."

The mood between Obama and the Netroots has warmed in the past few months. Obama, who's on his first overseas tour since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, sent a 10-minute video greeting to the conventioneers.

"We've had some disagreements in the past, and we'll have some disagreements in the future," Obama says in the video. "I promise to continue to listen to your concerns, take them seriously and discuss them respectfully."

....and again, the loudest voices are heard.

The audience claps warmly, and among those watching are Edmundo Rocha, of Houston, and Manuel Guzman, of Tucson, Ariz., Latino bloggers who recently launched The Sanctuary, a site written by a multi-ethnic group of bloggers concerned about migrant rights and immigration reform. The group sent a list of detailed, pointed questions to Obama. They're still waiting to get adequate responses, they add.

"I've been waiting to see just how much he's going to involve the Netroots in the way he thinks about policies," says Guzman, who voted for Obama during the primaries but says he was "disappointed" with Obama's FISA vote.

Obama is a senator right now. If he isn't who we think he is after his inauguration that will be the time to be more than just disappointed.

"The Netroots are not going away. It's only going to get bigger," Guzman continues. "We're all learning to live with each other."

Let's hope so.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Hillary Drinks The Political Hemlock

Like nearly everything else in politics, one's outward reaction to Hillary's latest lollapalooza will largely depend on which side of the partisan partition one stands.

Her defenders will again rail against the biased, sinister forces who plot disingenuously for her political demise, blah, blah, blah; her detractors will launch a fresher and higher intensity of outrage, such as Keith Olbermann's last night which damn near achieved orbit, blah, blah, blah.

But inner reactions, I suspect, are far more closely aligned, even to the point of superimposition. Her detractors would privately confess the mitigation of exhaustion and sleep deprivation having undoubtedly scrambled Hillary's brain; her defenders would privately confess that her comment was, nevertheless and sure enough, unmitigated evidence of a calculating, cold-hearted mind.

Both sides would agree that what she said was a damn stupid and inexcusable thing to say. Period.

Excluding Mr. Olbermann's, initial reaction from the universe of cable punditry, which presented a mixture of the above, was a fascinating thing to watch. They were the Astaires of commentary, dancing with unprecedented grace around the obvious.

From Chris Matthews to E.J. Dionne to John Harwood to Rachel Maddow, cable's voices of authorized observation intoned, one after another, that they just couldn't bring themselves to believe that Hillary had in mind the happy prospect of triumph through elimination, rather than the chronological lethargy of past primary seasons.

Only the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson -- based, that is, on my circumscribed viewing -- finally encountered reality in a rousing flurry of disgust and disbelief.

To paraphrase Robinson: What in God's name are you people talking about? She said it. It's right there on tape. "Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June." What other interpretation or spin could one possibly put on it? She was saying, point blank and in plain English, that it's not nearly too late. Stuff happens, dear troops, so don't give up hope.

A few years ago, when I was engaged in research for a historical manuscript on American demagoguery and the rise of the New Right, a wise rhetorical studies professor offered me this advice: Don't assign motive when none is clearly stated. Don't play psychiatrist or psychohistorian.

Or, at least I, said the professor, can tell you that we rhetorical studies professionals have stopped doing so. All we can know is what a politician says. Why he or she said it is beyond our scope. Only what is said can be competently analyzed.

And that is all Mr. Robinson was doing.

The professor's advice, in the world of partisan politics, is exceedingly difficult to follow with any consistency -- except against one's enemies. When we strike the assignment of rhetorical motive from our arsenal of analytical weaponry, we also sit by and watch all the fun slowly drain from the possibilities of assault or counterattack.

We have known for years why George W. Bush did what he did and now know why John McCain says what he says, even if what we have known or presently know doesn't always square with what's recorded in print. In the absence of such unshakable knowledge, political commentary and partisan firepower would evaporate overnight.

Still, there are always those fortuitous occasions upon which we claim, with considerable justification, the purest of objectivity. Yesterday's was one of them.

Hillary said what she said, just as Eugene Robinson said what she said, and there simply aren't any two ways about it. It transcended mere stupidity. It exceeded the forgivable boundaries of the effects of sleep deprivation. It soared far above and beyond mere historical, chronological analysis.

It was, rather, quite simply a chilling public admission of what swims in any desperate politician's mind: "My opponent might die, so there remains hope."

That is, indisputably, what she said. It's on tape. No interpretation is required, no creative assignment of motive is necessary -- not when it's right there, in printed black and white or video color, right in front of you.

It would be the height of naivete to claim that "normal" politicians don't think such things. Of course they do, all of them, just as any of us would if we were in their racket and, in this case, in Hillary's shoes.

But there's an insurmountable problem with that as an excuse: such a thing is simply not said in public. For countless reasons that rule is perhaps the last, absolutely inviolable rule in the political book. You violate it and you're out. There is no appeal.

The only question remaining: Will Hillary finally have the personal class to concede the obvious -- that she's got to go, now, for having transgressed that one unalterable law of political life.

Hell no. Hillary will go on "'til the last dawg,"(or political opponent) dies or maybe until the whole damn party is dead. Who cares? It is all about the Clintons and their absolute right to the White House, after which they will pass it off to Jeb.

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Clinton Is Going To Tie The Democratic Party In Knots.

Maybe she will do for the democrats what W. has done for the republicans or, at least, start the process.

Glory Hallelujah.

Here is America's grand opportunity to escape from the dualistic lie of the two party system. We had better be thinking of a way to capitalize on it within the next 2 to 4 years.

By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON—Commentators trying to discern the Hillary Clinton campaign’s endgame strategy have posited any number of wheels-within-wheels scenarios worthy of a spy novel. The simple truth has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with instinct: Keep moving forward until you drop.

It’s not that she’s making a calculated play for the vice presidency or trying to set herself up for another campaign in 2012 or 2016. To those who know her, it’s that she really wants to be president, and that she has come tantalizingly close, and that she’s going to keep moving toward that goal even if there’s no obvious way to reach it. At this point, her campaign is about getting to tomorrow, and then getting to the next day, and then getting to the day after that.

Long ago, the Clinton campaign took to heart the Talking Heads’ advice to “Stop Making Sense.” Back in January, the campaign’s position was that amassing delegates was the only true measure of who was winning the nomination. But when Barack Obama surged ahead in the tally of pledged delegates, winning 11 primaries and caucuses in a row, the Clinton brain trust started making a case for “the popular vote” as the most reliable indicator of the party’s wishes.

Does an aggregate count of votes mean anything when some states held closed primaries where only registered Democrats could participate, some states held open primaries where independents and/or Republicans could also vote, and some states held caucuses that basically involved a show of hands in gymnasiums and community centers?

It means nothing. But the Clinton campaign has found a way to claim that if for some reason you did this ridiculous exercise of lumping together apples, oranges and bowling balls, and finally came up with two numbers, hers would be greater than Obama’s. Since Obama now leads substantially in both pledged delegates and superdelegates—and since he has enormous leads in fundraising and the number of states won—the spurious “popular vote” metric is all that Clinton has. So she’s playing the hand she was dealt.

Even this tenuous advantage, however, requires counting all the votes cast for Clinton in Michigan, where Obama wasn’t on the ballot, and in Florida, where neither candidate campaigned. A few months ago, Clinton had no problem with the fact that votes in those two states—which defied Democratic Party officials by moving their primaries up in the calendar—wouldn’t count. Rules, after all, were rules.

Now, maybe rules aren’t rules after all. Keep moving forward until you drop. In a speech Wednesday, Clinton evoked the Declaration of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights struggle and the campaign for women’s suffrage as she demanded that the votes from two unrecognized primaries be counted.

“Over the top” is an inadequate characterization of the speech Clinton gave in Boca Raton, Fla. She spoke of “a shared civic faith ... equal justice under the law ... extending the frontiers of our democracy,” and even the men and women who “knelt down on that bridge in Selma to pray and were beaten within an inch of their lives.”

“Now, I’ve heard some say that counting Florida and Michigan would be changing the rules,” Clinton said.

Yes, it would be.

“I say that not counting Florida and Michigan,” Clinton went on, “is changing a central governing rule of this country—that whenever we can understand the clear intent of the voters, their votes should be counted.”

Any Democratic politician who goes to Florida and rails about the “clear intent” of voters is making a not-so-subtle reference to the post-election mess in 2000, when the nation learned more than it ever wanted to know about hanging chads.

It won’t work, though.

Clinton knows that even the disputed delegates she “won” in Florida and Michigan won’t get her to the magic number she needs to win the nomination. Some commentators have speculated that she wants to have the votes counted simply so that she can semi-plausibly claim to have had more popular support than Obama, a distinction that would serve her well if she ran again in four or eight years. I say dream on; the Clintons don’t do moral victories.

Hillary Clinton is after the White House, and if that means using the Florida and Michigan “issue” to tie the party in knots until the convention, so be it.

If that’s not what party leaders want, they’d better do something. Because Clinton is going to keep moving forward.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Think There Are No NeoCons In The Domocratic Party?

Think again!

P.M is right on as usual.

Most of us I.U are old enough to remember the bad old days that led to the horror that was Chicago '68. Many of us then chose a more spiritual kind of politics and chose to be independents, and we remain so today. We are not independents because we don't care. We are independents because we do care.

The parties mean nothing. They are both big lies. We need political parties that mean something; that are honest about who they are and what they stand for. Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats come anywhere near that.

And that's why we are independents; independents who will now crawl over hot stones to vote for Obama. He is really our only hope.

The headline, "McCain Profits in Iraq as Democrats Brawl," was followed by a textual emphasis on only the brawling. Such is news.

The Arizonan's tremendous good fortune in the primaries -- his ultimately revealed and colossal mismatch against a pathetic horde of ultimately revealed and colossal blockheads -- was, I'm sure, enough to convince him of the power of his assorted superstitions.

Now, however, I imagine the senator believes that he's transcended the rewards of mere superstition; that, indeed, God Himself has partisanly aligned by celestially commanding, "Let Democrats be Democrats."

For when afforded such divine permission, Democrats are sure to fill the hard-copy news with phrases like "Democratic infighting," "the campaign fracas," "their warring," and as "the Democrats feud," Republicans "profit."

And are they ever profiting: "In a hypothetical match-up against Clinton, a weekend Zogby poll gave the Arizona senator 45 percent to her 39 percent. Against Obama, McCain led by 44 percent to 39." Juxtapose that with match-ups of but a month ago, when Obama led by a margin of 12.

Then juxtapose that with this remembrance as well: This was to have been the year of the Great Conservative Crack-up. Social conservatives, economic conservatives, foreign policy conservatives -- they were all at each others' throats, a much-anticipated if not inevitable development springing from the historically uneasy construction of the Great Conservative Synthesis of the early 1960s.

George W. Bush may have engineered the train wreck, but John McCain was sure to bring it home. When the neoconservative McCain wasn't insulting social conservatives he was offending economic libertarians, or at least his history of doing so was both unforgettable and unforgivable by the insulted, offended constituencies. Conservatism's uneasy alliance was shattered: the 2008 general election would be more mop-up for Democrats than match-up.

What Democrats failed to remember, however, was that their own party, since at least 30 years before the conservative synthesis, has also been an uneasy alliance of competing political sentiments, if not actual ideologies. Their unifying difficulties -- their repeated inclination to scatter philosophically hither and yon -- run much deeper than mere organizational disorderliness.

Beginning in the New Deal era, throughout the Great Society battles and now, to today, the tensions within the Democratic Party have been, in the most sweeping terms, those between its progressive elements and the older-school conservatives. Reaganism appropriated most of the latter in the 1980s, only to have its hold attenuated somewhat in the '90s by the triangulating Bill Clinton, and whose wife now wishes to call them home en masse.

But whose home? The progressive dwelling erected by FDR and furthered remodeled by visionaries such as Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern and Paul Wellstone? Or the conservative Democratic home of Scoop Jacksonism, which tosses a socially progressive bone now and then but adheres to the fundamental electoral attractions of a globally muscular and intrusive America.

And let there be no mistake: the latter is precisely what Hillary Clinton represents, and that representation is precisely what lies at the heart of Democrats' modern disunity.

The representative's gender, along with her opponent's race, has merely complicated the divisive equation. Older white women, especially, would no more reward with their votes a white, neoconservative, Democratic male in 2008 than they would write in a vote for the late Jerry Falwell. They have to know that, and the energy required to suppress the knowledge must be as exhausting as it is embarrassing.

I'm not unsympathetic. As a male, I try my best to keep in mind the allure to women of a woman candidate, no matter how unprogressive some of her past may be. I would hope, however, that if I were a woman I would also wait till a genuinely progressive one came along, rather than throwing in with the Democratic neoconservatives for gender's sake.

Hillary's Iraq speech yesterday was intended to alleviate widespread concerns about her voting past, but to me it only drove the pain home. As Reuters summarized it: "She said the war has sapped U.S. military and economic strength, damaged U.S. national security, taken the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans and left thousands wounded."

In other words, Hillary reminded us that the war has produced exactly what progressives predicted in 2002 that it would produce. Mrs. Clinton was a knowing voice in the institutional body that handed Mr. Bush a blank check to prosecute this militarily and economically sapping, security-damaging, life-taking and human-disfiguring war, nevertheless she knowingly sided with the neocons -- and all for the Scoop Jackson-, Joe Lieberman- and Ronald Reagan-Democrat vote.

Some political acts are so cowardly, so callous, so cynically motivated and lastingly harmful as to shut down any consideration of forgiveness. Hillary's was one of them. Absent it, her admittedly overplayed "35 years of experience" would have blown away Barack Obama. This would have been no contest.

Her gender and her opponent's race now keep her afloat, but again, let there be no doubt that at the core of the party's modern-day split is the deeper historical and ideological division between long-term, visionary progressivism and short-term, opportunistic neoconservatism.

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Just Blind Demolition

We couldn't agree more.

She says it herself, constantly, "I," "I," "I,"..........

That's what it's all about. Hillary. Hillary and some odd sense of entitlement. Any time there is a sense of entitlement to office, it is un-democratic. No one is entitled to any office, except when the voters say so.

Being and independent, I frankly don't give a damn if she tears the Democratic Party to shreds. The Rethugs have already imploded and I consider that a fine thing. The sooner we can get away from two party politics the better. That alone will loosen the grip of big money on our electoral process.


P.M. Carpanter

Unless Hillary Clinton has secretly contrived some sort of doomsday deliverance of not merely breathtaking but literally unimaginable genius, then today's primaries and beyond are not an exercise in democracy, but demolition.

Her party's structural stress is showing, and nearing the breaking point. Laughing in the face of deadly mathematical odds may lend Hillary the appearance of that old Clintonian determination, but it amuses and benefits only the opposition and journalists who love horse races.

But Hillary's party is no longer laughing. And it most definitely is not amused.

Of no surprise, of course, is that in making the Sunday talk-show rounds Barack Obama's more prominent supporters called for -- begged for -- Hillary's withdrawal at the crack of sunlight, March 5. Speaking on CNN's "Late Edition," Senator John Kerry said "Hillary Clinton has to win a big victory in both Ohio and Texas ... not just winning a little bit ... she’s got to win a very significant victory." Senator Dick Durbin, on Fox, was a bit more specific, defining Hillary's challenge as the need to score "extraordinary percentages" in all the remaining primaries just to catch up. And by "extraordinary" he meant insurmountable, even fantastical.

Then, revealing his and others' extraordinary frustration, Durbin said, simply, "I hope after Tuesday her decision is made on the basis of the unity of the party."

Adding that "I just think that D-Day is Tuesday," unaligned Gov. Bill Richardson said on "Face the Nation": "The concern that I have is the bickering that took place between those two very fine senators is going on too long." So much for his non-alignment.

But, Hillary's supporters say: Of course those guys would spew such unenlightened garbage, given that they're on the wrong side of "What-if?" history. What these Clintonites intentionally ignore, however, is that even their own guys have been out there, conceding the same. From chief Clinton supporter Bill, to past Clinton mouthpiece James Carville, to current co-chief Clinton strategist Harold Ickes, and most recently, the chiefest strategist of them all, Mark Penn, who now barely recalls having even visited the Clinton headquarters -- all have effectively bailed, pre-March 4. It seems they can add.

In rebuffing the Sunday choir of reason, Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson did his duty on "This Week," "offer[ing] no hint ... that Mrs. Clinton was considering whether to drop out of the race if she did not win on Tuesday." Good boy. You snatched at least one more paycheck.

With no personal financial interest in extending the agony, however, was Hillary the next day, which would be yesterday. Speaking in Houston, she let loose a few words that surely horrified the true party faithful: "I think we’re going to do well tomorrow," she said. Well, that wasn't so bad. Whew. But then it came, the denial, the fantasy, the laughing against deadly mathematical odds: "Then it’s on to Pennsylvania and the states still ahead. I’m just getting warmed up."

One could almost hear Democratic hearts thudding on floors all across the land. She's kidding, right? Tell us she's kidding. Please.

And who knows? Maybe she was. There's no sense in demotivating supporters on primary eve, even when those primaries are essentially meaningless. What we do know, however, is that the GOP is praying harder than anyone that she was not, in fact, kidding.

Hardcore Republicans are now her biggest supporters, her most devoted boosters. Echoing the likes of predatory opportunists such as Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan, Karl Rove also spoke Sunday on Fox for the right-wing "You-go-girl" crowd: "I think it's a mistake for [Obama's] campaign to be calling for her to drop out," he said, with laughably feigned indifference. "It’s up to the delegates at the convention to decide who wins and loses." Them, and snickering GOP strategists, I guess.

Naturally the GOP understands as well as objective Democratic strategists that Hillary's odds of success now stand at near absolute zero. Numbers are numbers, and they're furiously stubborn. You can move them around, shift them sideways and yank them up and down, but they'll still total what they total. God didn't play dice with universal mathematics, and He hasn't exempted Hillary's crunchers.

She's lost. And today is but a manic exercise in party demolition. Mrs. Clinton may indeed still score some victories, but if so they'll remain far short of the needed "extraordinary percentages" to shift the balance of overwhelming power and momentum that is Obama's. It was over yesterday, is over this morning, and will be just as over on the morning of March 5.

All Mrs. Clinton can accomplish now is the brutal strafing of party resources and desperately needed unity. That, and the provisioning of John McCain with the best of both worlds: providing him the resources he otherwise lacks to effectively diminish in the electorate's mind the Democratic Party's all-but-officially nominated nominee.

Some might say, Well, that's a Democrat for you, always self-serving. But in this case, there's no longer any self or cause to realistically serve. It's just monstrously blind demolition. True, the theatre of it all may be enjoyable, but its ultimate consequence might not be.

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Dem. Meltdown?

Maybe I'm the only voter in America who loves nastiness in every election year, but I really do hate it and would vow to vote for anyone who said they were not going to be nasty, little mudslingers, especially within their own party, and kept that promise, unless, of course, another candidate said something so hideous that it had to be answered. Still, it doesn't have to be answered in-kind.

We have been watching what we call the American cold-civil war for a long time. Maybe the Dems are gonna heat it up faster than we thought.

This might be interesting, if so much didn't depend on it.

Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War

By FRANK RICH

WHAT if a presidential candidate held what she billed as “the largest, most interactive town hall in political history” on national television, and no one noticed?

The untold story in the run-up to Super Tuesday was Hillary Clinton’s elaborate live prime-time special the night before the vote. Presiding from a studio in New York, the candidate took questions from audiences in 21 other cities. She had plugged the event four days earlier in the last gasp of her debate with Barack Obama and paid a small fortune for it: an hour of time on the Hallmark Channel plus satellite TV hookups for the assemblies of supporters stretching from coast to coast.

The same news media that constantly revisited the Oprah-Caroline-Maria rally in California ignored “Voices Across America: A National Town Hall.” The Clinton campaign would no doubt attribute this to press bias, but it scrupulously designed the event to avoid making news. Like the scripted “Ask President Bush” sessions during the 2004 campaign, this town hall seemed to unfold in Stepford. The anodyne questions (“What else would you do to help take care of our veterans?”) merely cued up laundry lists of talking points. Some in attendance appeared to trance out.

But I’m glad I watched every minute, right up until Mrs. Clinton was abruptly cut off in midsentence so Hallmark could resume its previously scheduled programming (a movie promising “A Season for Miracles,” aptly enough). However boring, this show was a dramatic encapsulation of how a once-invincible candidate ended up in a dead heat, crippled by poll-tested corporate packaging that markets her as a synthetic product leeched of most human qualities. What’s more, it offered a naked preview of how nastily the Clintons will fight, whatever the collateral damage to the Democratic Party, in the endgame to come.

For a campaign that began with tightly monitored Web “chats” and then planted questions at its earlier town-hall meetings, a Bush-style pseudo-event like the Hallmark special is nothing new, of course. What’s remarkable is that instead of learning from these mistakes, Mrs. Clinton’s handlers keep doubling down.

Less than two weeks ago she was airlifted into her own, less effective version of “Mission Accomplished.” Instead of declaring faux victory in Iraq, she starred in a made-for-television rally declaring faux victory in a Florida primary that was held in defiance of party rules, involved no campaigning and awarded no delegates. As Andrea Mitchell of NBC News said, it was “the Potemkin village of victory celebrations.”

The Hallmark show, enacted on an anachronistic studio set that looked like a deliberate throwback to the good old days of 1992, was equally desperate. If the point was to generate donations or excitement, the effect was the reverse. A campaign operative, speaking on MSNBC, claimed that 250,000 viewers had seen an online incarnation of the event in addition to “who knows how many” Hallmark channel viewers. Who knows, indeed? What we do know is that by then the “Yes We Can” Obama video fronted by the hip-hop vocalist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas had been averaging roughly a million YouTube views a day. (Cost to the Obama campaign: zero.)

Two days after her town-hall extravaganza, Mrs. Clinton revealed the $5 million loan she had made to her own campaign to survive a month in which the Obama operation had raised $32 million to her $13.5 million. That poignant confession led to a spike in contributions that Mr. Obama also topped. Though Tuesday was largely a draw in popular votes and delegates, every other indicator, from the candidates’ real and virtual crowds to hard cash, points to a steadily widening Obama-Clinton gap. The Clinton campaign might be an imploding Potemkin village itself were it not for the fungible profits from Bill Clinton’s murky post-presidency business deals. (The Clintons, unlike Mr. Obama, have not released their income-tax returns.)

The campaign’s other most potent form of currency remains its thick deck of race cards. This was all too apparent in the Hallmark show. In its carefully calibrated cross section of geographically and demographically diverse cast members — young, old, one gay man, one vet, two union members — African-Americans were reduced to also-rans. One black woman, the former TV correspondent Carole Simpson, was given the servile role of the meeting’s nominal moderator, Ed McMahon to Mrs. Clinton’s top banana. Scattered black faces could be seen in the audience. But in the entire televised hour, there was not a single African-American questioner, whether to toss a softball or ask about the Clintons’ own recent misadventures in racial politics.

The Clinton camp does not leave such matters to chance. This decision was a cold, political cost-benefit calculus. In October, seven months after the two candidates’ dueling church perorations in Selma, USA Today found Hillary Clinton leading Mr. Obama among African-American Democrats by a margin of 62 percent to 34 percent. But once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought. In an effort to scare off white voters, Mr. Obama was ghettoized as a cocaine user (by the chief Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, among others), “the black candidate” (as Clinton strategists told the Associated Press) and Jesse Jackson redux (by Mr. Clinton himself).

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

That time went instead to the Hispanic population that was still in play in Super Tuesday’s voting in the West. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles had a cameo, and one of the satellite meetings was held in the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s smart politics, especially since Mr. Obama has been behind the curve in wooing this constituency.

But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.”

It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.”

If that was the intent, it didn’t work. Mrs. Clinton did pile up her expected large margin among Latino voters in California. But her tight grip on that electorate is loosening. Mr. Obama, who captured only 26 percent of Hispanic voters in Nevada last month, did better than that in every state on Tuesday, reaching 41 percent in Arizona and 53 percent in Connecticut. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign’s attempt to drive white voters away from Mr. Obama by playing the race card has backfired. His white vote tally rises every week. Though Mrs. Clinton won California by almost 10 percentage points, among whites she beat Mr. Obama by only 3 points.

The question now is how much more racial friction the Clinton campaign will gin up if its Hispanic support starts to erode in Texas, whose March 4 vote it sees as its latest firewall. Clearly it will stop at little. That’s why you now hear Clinton operatives talk ever more brazenly about trying to reverse party rulings so that they can hijack 366 ghost delegates from Florida and the other rogue primary, Michigan, where Mr. Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. So much for Mrs. Clinton’s assurance on New Hampshire Public Radio last fall that it didn’t matter if she alone kept her name on the Michigan ballot because the vote “is not going to count for anything.”

Last month, two eminent African-American historians who have served in government, Mary Frances Berry (in the Carter and Clinton years) and Roger Wilkins (in the Johnson administration), wrote Howard Dean, the Democrats’ chairman, to warn him of the perils of that credentials fight. Last week, Mr. Dean became sufficiently alarmed to propose brokering an “arrangement” if a clear-cut victory by one candidate hasn’t rendered the issue moot by the spring. But does anyone seriously believe that Howard Dean can deter a Clinton combine so ruthless that it risked shredding three decades of mutual affection with black America to win a primary?

A race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.

Are the Dem-bulbs going to give the rethugs another 4 years of mental instability in the W.H. so they can blow themselves to smithereens? Do they know that they do this at all our peril?

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Dem Outraise Gooppers 2 to 1

Democrats Surpass Republicans in Fund-Raising

By MICHAEL COOPER

The Democratic presidential candidates continued to raise significantly more money during the last three months than their Republican counterparts, according to official and unofficial third-quarter fund-raising tallies that were released yesterday.

Senator Barack Obama, the Illinois Democrat, raised at least $20 million over the summer, more than $19 million of which could be spent on the primary — showing that he continued to be a formidable fund-raiser. It was unclear whether he still led in fund-raising, as he did this spring, because Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not release her tally. (Her aides had said that they expected to raise a similar amount.) John Edwards raised $7 million, and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico raised $5.2 million.

By comparison, Mitt Romney, who has been one of the strongest Republican fund-raisers this election, raised only about half of what Mr. Obama raised this summer, according to a senior adviser who was granted anonymity to discuss the campaign’s finances. The adviser said that Mr. Romney brought in about $10 million from donors, and that he used more than $6 million of his own money for his campaign.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, who replaced his chief fund-raiser at the end of the quarter, did not release a tally, but said over the weekend that he thought he would “do as well as the other Republicans — maybe we will do better than some.” Fred D. Thompson raised at least $8 million in his first quarter as a candidate, according to people involved with the campaign — less than the other leading candidates raised early in their campaigns.

And Senator John McCain of Arizona raised more than $5 million, according to a Republican familiar with the campaign’s finances.

Strategists in both parties said that the fund-raising imbalance showed that Democrats, and their donors, are more energized this year as they battle to reclaim the White House after nearly eight years of Republican rule. And they said President Bush’s sagging popularity is hurting the Republicans who are vying to replace him.

“This just shows the difficult political climate that Republicans are facing,” said Scott Reed, a Republican strategist. “The bright side is that next spring, the Republicans will have plenty of money to give the candidate who goes up against Hillary Clinton.”

The imbalance is not lost on the candidates themselves. Mr. Giuliani said over the weekend that the ability of Democrats to raise money this year has been “phenomenal.”

All of the campaigns who gave their tallies reported drop-offs in contributions in the third-quarter, which is considered a difficult time to raise money as many well-heeled donors get out of their offices and off the fund-raising circuit to go on vacations and to their summer houses. And the campaigns often have already tapped their donors to the legal limit in contributions. But the Democrats still appeared to weather the summer months better than the Republicans.

Mr. Obama’s take brings his total for the year to nearly $80 million. He attracted 93,000 new contributors to his campaign, aides said, which raised the total number of donors to 352,000. Mr. Obama has focused on building a big base of small donors whom he can repeatedly tap into for new money.

But the fact that it was his smallest take of the year led to at least a whiff of worry for some supporters, which his campaign manager, David Plouffe sought to tamp down yesterday. “Many in Washington have spent the last weeks declaring the outcome of this race to be preordained, and the primary process a mere formality,” Mr. Plouffe said in a statement. “Yet, in this quarter alone, 93,000 more Americans joined our campaign, because they desire real change and believe Barack Obama is the one candidate who can deliver it.”

The Edwards campaign said that with the $7 million it raised over the summer, it has $12 million in cash on hand — which could result in $22 million once it received the public matching funds that it has applied for. The matching funds will give the campaign a needed infusion of cash, but will limit how it can be spent.

Edwards campaign officials said that the matching funds would not only help them in their quest for the nomination but would help distinguish Mr. Edwards from other Democratic candidates, particularly Mrs. Clinton, who are opting out of the public matching funds program, which limits spending. They portrayed it as a continuation of Mr. Edwards’ criticisms of Mrs. Clinton for accepting donations from political action committees and lobbyists — donations he does not accept.

“The American people will have a choice, a sharp distinction between us and Hillary Clinton,” Joe Trippi, a senior Edwards campaign adviser, said in a conference call with reporters.

The $8 million that Mr. Thompson reportedly raised — campaign officials said they were still counting checks — suggested that there was no huge pool of donors who were unmoved by the rest of the Republican field and were eagerly awaiting his entrance into the race. But his supporters said that many of his donors — there were more than 70,000 of them — did not give the maximum allowed, meaning that they could be tapped for more donations.

Reporting was contributed by Michael Luo, Marc Santora, Susan Saulny, Leslie Wayne and Jeff Zeleny.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Democratic Party and the Infantile Omnipotence of The Ruling Class.
By PhilRockstroh 06/26/2007 10:16:46 PM EST

This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they've disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest -- he's their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it's damned entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.

Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public?

Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It's the world's way of delivering the life lesson that it's time to shed the vanity of one's innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here's lesson number one for political innocents:

Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It's that simple.

Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they're entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they're better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.

Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they're better than you. When they lie and flout the rules and assert that the rule of law doesn't apply to them or refuse to impeach fellow members of their political and social class who break the law -- it is because they have convinced themselves it is best for society as a whole.

How did they come by such self-serving convictions? The massive extent of their privilege has convinced them that they're the quintessence of human virtue, that they're the most gifted of all golden children ever kissed by the radiant light of the sun. In other words, they're the worst sort of emotionally arrested brats -- spoiled children inhabiting adult bodies who mistake their feelings of infantile omnipotence for the benediction of superior ability: "I'm so special that what's good for me is good for the world," amounts to the sum total of their childish creed. In the case of narcissists such as these, over time, self-interest and systems of belief grow intertwined. Hence, within their warped, self-justifying belief systems, their actions, however mercenary, become acts of altruism.

The elites don't exactly believe their own lies; rather, they proceed from the neo-con guru, Leo Strauss' dictum (the modus operandi of the ruling classes) that it is necessary to promulgate "noble lies" to society's lower orders. This sort of virtuous mendacity must be practiced, because those varieties of upright apes (you and I) must be spared the complexities of the truth; otherwise, it will cause us to grow dangerously agitated -- will cause us to rattle the bars of our cages and fling poop at our betters. They believe it's better to ply us with lies because it's less trouble then having to hose us down in our filthy cages. In this way, they believe, all naked apes will have a more agreeable existence within the hierarchy-bound monkeyhouse of capitalism.

This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they've disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest -- he's their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it's damn entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.

By engaging in a mode of being so careless it amounts to public immolation, these corrupt elitists are bringing the empire down. There is nothing new in this: Such recklessness is the method by which cunning strivers commit suicide.

Those who take the trouble to look will apprehend the disastrous results of the ruling elites' pathology: wars of choice sold to a credulous citizenry by public relations confidence artists; a predatory economy that benefits one percent of the population; a demoralized, deeply ignorant populace who are either unaware of or indifferent to the difference between the virtues and vicissitudes of the electoral processes of a democratic republic, in contrast to the schlock circus, financed by big money corporatist, being inflicted upon us, at present.

Moreover, the elitist's barriers of isolation and exclusion play out among the classes below as an idiot's mimicry of soulless gated "communities" and the pernicious craving for a vast border wall -- all an imitation of the ruling classes' paranoia-driven compulsion for isolation and their narcissistic obsession with exclusivity.

Perhaps, we should cover the country in an enormous sheet of cellophane and place a zip-lock seal at its southern border, or, better yet -- in the interest of being more metaphorically accurate -- let's simply zip the entire land mass of the U.S. into a body bag and be done with it.

What will be at the root of the empire's demise?

It seems the elite of the nation will succumb to "Small World Syndrome" -- that malady borne of incurable careerism, a form of self-induced cretinism that reduces the vast and intricate world to only those things that advance the goals of its egoist sufferers. It is an degenerative disease that winnows down the consciousness of those afflicted to a banal nub of awareness, engendering the shallowness of character on display in the corporate media and the arrogance and cluelessness of the empire's business and political classes. It possesses a love of little but mammon; it is the myth of Midas, manifested in the hoarding of hedge funds; it is the tale of an idiot gibbering over his collection of used string.

What can be done? In these dangerous times, credulousness to party dogma is as dangerous as a fundamentalist Christian's literal interpretation of The Bible: There is no need to squander the hours searching for an "intelligent design" within the architecture of denial and duplicity built into this claptrap system -- a system that we have collaborated in constructing by our loyalty to political parties that are, in return, neither loyal to us nor any idea, policy nor principle that doesn't maintain the corporate status quo.

Accordingly, we must make the elites of the Democratic Party accountable for their betrayal -- or we ourselves will become complicit. The faith of Democratic partisans in their degraded party is analogous to Bush and his loyalist still believing they can achieve victory in Iraq and the delusion-based wing of the Republican Party who, a few years ago, clung to the belief, regardless of facts, that Terri Schiavo's brain was not irreparably damaged and she would someday rise from her hospital bed and bless the heavens for them and their unwavering devotion to her cause.

Faith-based Democrats are equally as delusional. Only their fantasies don't flow from the belief in a mythical father figure, existing somewhere in the boundless sky, who scripture proclaims has a deep concern for the fate of all things, from fallen sparrows to medically manipulated stem cells; rather, their beliefs are based on the bughouse crazy notion that the elites of the Democratic Party could give a fallen sparrow's ass about the circumstances of their lives.

In the same manner, I could never reconcile myself with the Judea/Christian/Islamic conception of god -- some strange, invisible, "who's-your-daddy-in-the-sk y," sadist -- who wants me on my knees (as if I'm a performer in some kind of cosmic porno movie) to show my belief in and devotion to him -- I can't delude myself into feeling any sense of devotion to the present day Democratic Party.

Long ago, reason and common sense caused me to renounce the toxic tenets of organized religion. At present, I feel compelled to apply the same principles to the Democratic Party, leading me to conclude, as did Voltaire regarding the unchecked power of The Church in his day, that we must, "crush the infamous thing."

Freedom begins when we free ourselves from as many illusions as possible -- including dogma, clichés, cant, magical thinking, as well as blind devotion to a corrupt political class.

I wrote the following, before the 2006 mid-term election: "[...] I believe, at this late hour, the second best thing that could come to pass in our crumbling republic is for the total destruction of the Democratic Party -- and then from its ashes to rise a party of true progressives.
"[...] I believe the best thing that could happen for our country would be for the leaders of The Republican Party -- out of a deep sense of shame (as if they even possessed the capacity for such a thing) regarding the manner they have disgrace their country and themselves -- to commit seppuku (the act of ritual suicide practiced by disgraced leaders in feudalist Japan) on national television.

"Because there's no chance of that event coming to pass, I believe the dismantling of the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in order. It is our moribund republic's last, best hope -- if any is still possible."

I received quite a bit of flack from party loyalist and netroots activists that my pronouncement was premature and we should wait and see.

We've waited and we've seen. Consequently, since the Republican leadership have not taken ceremonial swords in hand and disemboweled themselves on nationwide TV, it's time we pulled the plug on the Democratic Party, an entity that has only been kept alive by a corporately inserted food-tube. In my opinion, this remains the last, best hope for the living ideals of progressive governance to become part of the body politic.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

It Takes The Non-aligned Grassroots!

In the 60s and early 70s, independents were re-born by the bus-loads.

Why?

Because a Democratic president lied us into an escalation of the war in Vitenam, after which casualty rates soared. Then A Republican president, promising to end the war with honor, broadened the damn thing, causing near revolution in this country. Neither party held any moral high-ground on Civil Rights. It did seem, however, that the Dems moved forward and the Rethugs moved backward, where civil rights were concerned in the decades that followed.

They were the party of FDR and JFK, after all. (of course, neither of these guys were perfect, but we do not expect perfection. St. Francis of Assisi is not likely to throw his cowl into the political ring anytime soon.

Still, we remained independent.

We saw the writing on the wall. We witnessed enough corruption to last a life time and we saw political courage that has inspired us 'til this day. Good thing, too. It has rarely been dupilicated since.

But it is about to be.... the universe and the human spirit willing.....and the 60s generation of independents will walfk the path of the American Political Tao.

-----------------------------------------------------

After several months of empty posturing against the war in Iraq, politicians in Washington have made what Democratic congressman James P. Moran called a "concession to reality" by agreeing to give President Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the increasingly detested war that has made Bush the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.

This is the outcome that we warned against two months ago when we wrote "Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?" In it, we criticized MoveOn for backpedaling on its previously claimed objective of ending the war in Iraq immediately. Anti-war sentiment was the main factor behind last year's elections that brought Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. Once in power, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a "compromise" bill, supported by MoveOn, that offered $124 billion in supplemental funding for the war. To make it sound like they were voting for peace, the Democrats threw in a few non-binding benchmarks asking Bush to certify progress in Iraq, coupled with language that talked about withdrawing troops next year.

Understanding how legislative processes work, we expected then that even those few nods to anti-war sentiment would be eliminated in due course. Bush had already said he would veto the Pelosi bill and pledged to hold out for funding without restrictions of any kind. Moreover, there was little doubt that the Democratic leadership would eventually cave to his demands.

Notwithstanding their stage-managed photo ops and rhetorical flourishes for peace, prominent Democrats signaled early that they would give Bush the funding he wanted. Barack Obama even went so far as to state publicly that once Bush vetoed the original bill, Congress would approve the money because "nobody wants to play chicken with our troops on the ground." (Two weeks later, MoveOn announced that it had polled its members, and Obama was their "top choice to lead the country out of Iraq.") In effect, the confrontation between Bush and the Democrats was a high-stakes game of poker in which the Democrats went out of their way to make it clear that they would fold once Bush called their bluff.

Not everyone saw this coming, of course. Back in March, Salon.com called MoveOn's Eli Pariser "shrewdly pragmatic" for backing Pelosi's original supplemental war funding bill. It quoted Pariser predicting that after Bush was "forced to veto" Pelosi's bill, "That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people."

Similar "shrewd pragmatism" came from blogger and Democratic campaign consultant Matt Stoller at MyDD.com, praising MoveOn's "dedication to practical results" and calling the Pelosi bill "a major step forward ... Moveon was true to its members in helping this happen." Stoller criticized us by name for our naiveté in thinking otherwise:

John Stauber, who is an ardent critic of Moveon, comes from a different generation of liberal activism. ...

Stauber isn't used to a non-Southern Democratic Party. It's nothing he's ever known, and it's frankly nothing that any of us have ever known. None of us know how to wield power in this new political world, where the public is liberal, the military industrial state is cannibalizing itself, and the political system is (slowly) reorienting itself around this shocking new paradigm.

Stauber is also not used to the idea that activist liberals actually like the Democratic Party. He believes that Moveon members would not support Democratic leaders if presented with a different set of choices, without acknowledging that Moveon members have traditionally supported Democratic leaders when the questions are tactical in nature.

A "tactic," as the dictionary explains, is "an expedient for achieving a goal." If the goal is to end the war in Iraq, the Pelosi bill was never a tactic that had any chance of succeeding. Its provisions had no teeth and it was clear that too many Democrats never intended to see the fight through. As this week's betrayal by the Democratic leadership demonstrates, ending the war is simply not their goal. Their goal is to continue the war for the time being, while giving themselves just enough distance from it that they can run as the anti-war party in next year's presidential and congressional elections. Stoller seems to have belatedly arrived at this realization himself.

Responding to this week's news, he writes:
We're in Iraq because the political system, the public, and all of us became unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood. We're still in Iraq, and will be there until the public is genuinely convinced to leave. Right now, we're not there. I know what the polls say, but I also am watching Clinton, Edwards, Obama, Giuliani, Romney, etc running for President, and not one of them is calling for a full withdrawal. Not one. Clinton, the leading nominee in a supposedly antiwar party, is a hawk and doesn't even think that voting to authorize the war was a mistake.

Amazingly, the conclusion that Stoller draws from these facts is the following non sequitur:
So do not tell me that Pelosi, Reid, and Moveon are doing a bad job. They are not. They are persuading a country and a politics that is used to lazy bullshit that kills a lot of people to think twice about it, and resist.

Here's the point that Stoller seems to have missed: There is a difference between what the public wants and what politicians do. Just because the high and mighty politicians don't get it yet, don't assume that the average American doesn't. It is not "the public" that needs to be persuaded. The politicians, their marketing campaigns, and the bloggers who join them may be "unable to distinguish between truth and falsehood," but the public at large fully understands that we need to get out of Iraq. The question is simply how to translate that public awareness into effective pressure that will force the politicians to change course. As we wrote in March, "When politicians and advocacy groups like MoveOn play anti-war games of political theater while effectively collaborating with the war's continuation, they merely add one more deception to the layers of lies in which this war has been wrapped."

Since 2003 we've co-authored two books on Iraq, and we have been reporting on the war for over five years now, since we began to dissect the Bush administration's propaganda push almost immediately after 9/11. We've been reporting on MoveOn for almost as long. And by the way, we are not "ardent critics" of MoveOn, as Stoller claimed. We are trying to constructively criticize an organization whose leaders mean well, even though they have been selling a flawed strategy. MoveOn has emerged as a powerful political player with a massive email list of more than three million names and the ability to raise millions of dollars for Democrats while waging innovative PR campaigns around the environmental, political and social issues they promote.

The bottom line, however, is that MoveOn until now has always been a big "D" Democratic Party organization. It began as an online campaign to oppose the impeachment of President Clinton, and its tactical alliances with Democratic politicians have made it part of the party's current power base, which melds together millionaire funders such as George Soros and the Democracy Alliance, liberal unions like SEIU, and the ballyhooed Netroots bloggers like Matt Stoller, Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of the Daily Kos. At a personal level, we presume the members of this coalition genuinely want the war to end, but their true and primary priority is winning Democratic Party control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Now that the war in Iraq hangs like a rotting albatross around the neck of the Bush administration, it has become the Democrats' best weapon to successfully campaign against Republicans. From a "shrewdly pragmatic" point of view, therefore, they have no reason to want the war to end soon.

Some Democrats (not the top politicians, of course) are saying this openly. Here, for example, is how one blogger at the Daily Kos sees things:
I know, that means more American casualties, more Iraqi casualties, more treasure and lives wasted.

But I think you've got to keep in mind the big picture here. ... [B]y the end of September, people will be beginning to pay real attention to the next election...

I think this does give the Democratic party a tremendous opportunity to crush the Republicans for perhaps a couple of decades to come. Iraq, and the Republican support of it, may well do for the Republicans what Vietnam did for Democrats — make the public suspicious for decades about the party's bona fides on foreign policy.

In this analysis, "more treasure and lives wasted" are the "little picture," while winning elections is "the big picture." Democrats like Russ Feingold who oppose the Iraq supplemental do not share this strategy, and it is never explicitly stated even by the Democratic politicians who are signing on this week to fund the war, but it is implicit in their actions.

If you visit the MoveOn website today as we write, the top item on the page is a request for people to sign a petition against price gouging by oil companies. They're focused on the "big picture" of using the current spike in gasoline prices as an opportunity to build their email list, while the little picture of ending the war has fallen from the top of the page. Yesterday MoveOn began a campaign calling on Democrats to vote no on the Iraq supplemental. MoveOn is also talking for the first time about supporting primary challengers to Democrats who "ran on ending the war but vote for more chaos and more troops in Iraq." This belated spark of independence, however, is too little and too late to stop a deal that has already been struck, in which politicians that MoveOn has been supporting have just surrendered ground from a position of strength to a president and party that is weakened, on an issue of utmost importance to their country.

MoveOn is expert at marketing, PR and advertising. Their emails to members convey a friendly, informal style and a sense that "they" are just like "us." But there are important differences between the organization and many of the people who sign their petitions and give them money. MoveOn has not been primarily a movement against the war. It has been a movement of Democrats to get the party back into power.

We do not doubt that MoveOn's leadership sincerely believes they are pursuing the most practical and effective course to improve America's political problems by vanquishing the Republicans and getting Democrats elected. However, when given a choice between building a powerful grassroots movement to end the war, versus exploiting the war for the benefit of getting Democrats elected, MoveOn has repeatedly chosen the latter while probably believing there is no difference.

There is an organized anti-war movement in America that is not an adjunct of the Democratic Party. Up until now, it has been weak and divided and unable to organize itself into an effective national movement in its own right. In its place, therefore, MoveOn and its Netroots allies have become identified as the leadership of the anti-war movement. It is vitally important, however, that a genuinely independent anti-war movement organize itself with the ability to speak on its own behalf.

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the civil rights movement was most definitely not an adjunct of the Democratic or Republican Parties. Far from it, it was a grassroots movement that eventually forced both parties to respond to its agenda. Likewise, the movement against the Vietnam War was not aligned with either the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which claimed to have plans for peace while actually pursuing policies that expanded the war.

That's the sort of movement we need again, if we wish to see peace in our lifetime.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.