While Daily Kos conferenced with the candidates, our democracy took a huge step that much closer to totalitarianism.
I pose this question to the netroots: just how influential are we when our democracy can be pulled out from under our feet, at the same time that a huge group of progressive bloggers are holding a celebrated (in some quarters) conference replete with presidential candidates?
Just who is being played here?
And now Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with revealing symbolism, cancel their scheduled appearances this morning at Yearly Kos because George Bush ordered them to remain in Washington in order to re-write and expand FISA — a law which he has repeatedly refused to allow to be revised for years and which he has openly and proudly violated. Congressional Democrats know virtually nothing about how the Bush administration has been eavesdropping on our conversations because the administration refused to tell them and they passively accepted this state of affairs.
There was a massive collision between illusion and reality yesterday. Certain illusions have been dispelled. For example, yesterday’s vote in the house all but takes impeachment off the table. One wonders if it was ever really on the table.
A Congress that votes sweeping new powers to the executive branch to spy on Americans will not vote to impeach that same president.
We’re all reeling from this. Go here to see who failed us, and test of democracy, in Congress.
If there was an illusion that Congress would save us from Bush and the march of totalitarianism, here is one who is hoping that this illusion is dispelled. We’ve seen it time and again: it is the citizens themselves who must meet this fascist march head-on, and take it on, face to face.
Get ready to take it to the streets. I leave you with Woody Guthrie’s timeless lyrics:
All You Fascists
I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose
Race hatred cannot stop us
This one thing we know
Your poll tax and Jim Crow
And greed has got to go
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose…
People of every color
Marching side to side
Marching `cross these fields
Where a million fascists dies
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!
Woodie is long dead. His ideals and willingness to step up and be heard are long dead in this swamp of a country. The Reverand is dead. Emma and the power of the American worker is dead. There ain’t gonna be any taking to the streets. And the few who do will get their cracked skulls paraded on the MSM for the sheep’s entertainment.
I keep hearing that there is no viable third party. The goddamn truth is that there’s NO viable party left in this country. Even here, a small bastion of so called left leaning resistance, you have Clinton pushers doubling up on the rec list and the fucked blue dogs and anti-abortion woman haters that were pushed by the front page ramming their fascist shit down our throats day after day after fucking day. These scum aren’t capitulating. They’re enabling this greased slide into the political, legal, and social abyss.
I’m goddamed ashamed to call myself a born American. Fucking ashamed.
Who’s gonna be in the streets? Just who?
Ya got me.
btw Duranta,
you’ve got my complete respect for your efforts in New Orleans. It’s still almost incomprehensible to me that our people, our American brothers and sisters, were abandoned by their own. Shame and disgust don’t begin to explain what that fact does to my heart.
It’s a dark day, but don’t give up. There have been darker days in the world’s history. Democracy herself was born out of darkness. This is all going to give birth to something much better. You can be an active participant, or sit on the sidelines…either way, change is going to come.
I don’t ever give up. But my priorities do change. And i am an active participant. It’s the millions on the sideline that get me down and set me off. Then there are the enablers, of all forms….
You’re right that things will change. It’s the nature of the change that worries me the most.
Peace
I was thinking the same thing on Saturday … who is fiddling while America breaks into a million pieces?
dont you think the far right fundys feel the same way about the republicans?
the people on the fringe always feel this way.
the trick is to not get so unempowered that it renders you useless and ineffective as an agent of the change you seek.
Your implication that the comments in this thread represent the fringe is simply empirically wrong. A majority of Americans want Cheney impeached, want to get out of Bush’s war in Iraq and his war against our Constitution through his perpetual war on terror. Also, those you characterize as “far right fundies” are the Republican Party. They have excommunicated those who aren’t.
I’m curious about your strategy, short of the one taken in 1776, about staying “empowered.” In a republic, we are, theoretically at least, empowered by our representatives who are to enact the will of their constituents as expressed through elections. The 2006 election and the capitulation of the Democrats in Congress to a lame duck, lying, little rich boy fascist in the White House has destroyed that notion. So let us know what the strategy for the change we seek should be.
yesterday’s vote in the house all but takes impeachment off the table. One wonders if it was ever really on the table.
A Congress that votes sweeping new powers to the executive branch to spy on Americans will not vote to impeach that same president.
Let’s not turn this into a self-fulfilling prophesy. The number of Congressmen who have signed on to impeachment keeps on increasing.
David Swanson, The Dumbest Thing the Washington Post Could Print:
We need to keep on applying the pressure.
To think that Congress would vote for impeachment after voting more powers to this president…just flies in the face of logic. Now its good to hear that more are signing onto impeachment. Its a lot easier to do now that the issue seems safely tucked away behind new spy measures.
I hope you, and the rest of Congress, prove me wrong.
Now what it would really take to get impeachment off the table, in my view, is taking to the street and in their faces. Let them know we disapprove of the strengthening of FISA. No more executive orders that potentially deprive Americans of their constitutional rights. And…end the war now, bring the troops home, and rebuild Iraqi and American infrastructure.
Impeachment happened to Nixon because their was a very strong anti-war movement, and there was a lot of street action. Now we have the netroots to bolster our position. But as we can now see, it isn’t enough.
We need the street action. No question about it.
I encourage the occupation of the offices of members of Congress who voted for the strengthening of FISA for purposes of spying on Americans.
Yes, the netroots are no substitute for street action. That is quite clear by now.
But it’s not just the netroots that our Democrats ignore. It is also public opinion: a majority of Americans want Cheney impeached.
What we have here is nothing less than a major deficit in democracy, and the Democratic Party is very much a part of the problem. This has been a growing problem ever since the end of the post-war liberal era in the early 1970s. (The country was still liberal under Nixon, since he created the EPA and said, “We are all Keynesians now.”)
Evidently, we have’t yet figured out how to solve the problem, and events like the yearlyKos aren’t going to help us solve it.
A good step in the right direction would be for the view that both parties work for the same interests—corporations, the wealthy, and empire, not the people—to become the consensus in the netroots.
Incidentally, this is a problem in European countries as well, but it is much worse in the US.
after the proceedings of the past three days, l have nearly given up any semblance of hope that there will be impeachment proceedings against anyone in this administration. duranta’s right on the mark, imo. to even mention impeachment and the fisa debacle, which gives BushCo™ free rein do whatever they choose for anothe f.u. in the same breath is the definition of cognitive dissonance.
l’d like to think the d‘s are going to grow a pair of bolas grandes in the next six months, but l have a better chance of being struck by lightning.
after watching this kabuki for 61/2 years,l have come to the same conclusion as silberon this one:
hope springs eternal, but l don’t believe in miracles.
lTMF’sA
I think there’s another, deeper reason why the Dems are against impeachment: it would go a long way to curing the democratic deficit I spoke of above. Related to this is a reason I suggested earlier:
But I still greatly admire and appreciate the work of people like David Swanson who continue to push for impeachment.
as do l, and l will continue to advocate for it. l think your comment regarding “empire” is spot on, and further would argue that until people are in the streets, en masse, demanding change, it is very unlikely to happen.
l would even edit your comment above thusly:
“A good step in the right direction would be for the view that both parties work for the same interests–corporations, the wealthy, and empire, not the people–to become the consensus.”
unless or until the consensus of the people, as a whole, recognizes this fact, we will not see any widespread civil uprising. this isn’t the 60’s, there’s no movement(s) to coalesce around, the media is compliant, the reich wing spin machine controls the airways, and the corporate, read oligarchy’s, grip on the reins of power is increasing daily.
perhaps forty years of/ head against wall/ has compromised my ability to maintain a positive approach to such matters. but the reality is inescapable; outside the narrow confines of the progressive left blogosphere, the majority of people respond to polls, express their discontent, and then go back to their struggles, dumbed down and sedated by the latest adventures of jack bauer, and a myriad of other diversions.
lTMF’sA
Let’s stop making excuses for one another, the dumbing down of America, etc., too much TV. Be the one to organize the first protest to this measure in your hometown, wherever you are.
We’re meeting this Tuesday night at Rue de la Course coffeeshop in New Orleans to begin discussion as to how we will respond to this.
it is not an excuse
it is a statement of the reality of the situation as l view it.
given your involvement with the aftermath of katrina in nola, and the somnambulate response of the country at large after the initial shock, l’m surprised you would make such a statement, and frankly, l find it’s inference insulting.
we all do what we can, and some of us do time.
but l will pass the invitation to your coffee klatsch along.
g’day
lTMF’sA
The reason I said the netroots specifically is that that is the only means we have of bypassing the corporate media propaganda machine. Opening the public’s eyes has to start with the netroots; that was my point. If prominent progressive bloggers can’t see the fundamental problem, how can you expect a large portion of the public to?
Yes, the powers that be have learned very well how to manage public opinion. The way this is done in the US is incomparably more sophisticated than how it was done in the USSR.
I read more of that blog you quoted from. It turns out that Silber (whom I was not familiar with) has about the same position I do.
I think he gets high-profile progressive bloggers’ “central articles of religious faith” exactly right:
I think this is true to large extent of Booman too, by the way. Silber completely exposes the basic problem, of which he gives an excellent illustration: digby’s remark that “Obviously, I’m not the only one who can’t for the life of me figure out why the congress is doing this.”
The reason is of course quite simple: the Dems, just as much as the Rethugs, want the US to be an empire and not a republic, much less a democracy. Until this becomes the conventional wisdom in the blogosphere, we are not going to get anywhere.
its not the fascists….its the zombies.
All You Zombies
Who are you calling “zombies?”
the people who allow the leaders to be fascists.
when the people lead, the leaders follow….when the people zombie out, the leaders can do anything they want….the people get what they deserve.
half the people in this country who are eligible to vote dont.
these are the consequences.
With that said, I agree with you. At first it looked like you were calling folks in this thread “zombies.” Glad I checked that out.
Bullseye.
I’m not making any excuses for these bastards. If you walk the walk…
We were sold out yesterday by a huge portion of our elected “leaders” in Congress. Read this article that explores that most democrats (the electorate not the politicians) are leaning left. Why do you think so many presidential candidates rushed to be at the Daily Kos conference?
I’ll venture this viewpoint: if you wait on electoral politics to solve the problem, you’ll miss the boat.
Taking back our country means just that: taking it back through a whole host of actions, not the least of which is protest. I’m less concerned with the lack of involvement in electoral politics, than I am with the lack of involvement in community issues in your own home town.
It starts at home, then build from there.
I challenge each one of you who wants to spend time condemning the electorate, to rise up and initiate some sort of action in your own home town, whether it be to “visit” your congressperson’s office, senator’s office, or meet and stage a letter writing campaign in response to the FISA vote.
Do something. Don’t use the excuse that people are zombies. Don’t be a zombie. And let us know what you are doing, if you care to.
Zimbabwe: Mugabe enacts law to spy on phones, ‘net, mail