aarrrggghhh – Liberal Street Fighter
So, we find ourselves facing the confirmation of a Chief Justice to the Supreme Court, a radical who combines the worst that modern “conservatism” has to offer — religious extremism; a demonstrated willingness to elevate authority over rights; mindless celebration of corporate power and greed — all with a smiley face, a hair helmet and a conservatively tailored suit. There has been some belated gnashing of teeth from the quasi-official echo chamber for the Democratic leadership amongst the “important” blogs, so I thought it might be instructive to remember that some of us were warning of just this fiasco, this failure to change the terms of the debate in this country, many months ago. Below the fold, one of my greatest hits, and maybe some fresh improvisation on those themes.
Vichy Dems
There is something far more important in that AP article this morning than Espo’s lazy “CW” about the Dems motives. I had hoped that Biden was just talking out his ass on ThisWeek about a “compromise” on the judges, but it seems it’s an actual trial balloon as it has now shown up in an AP article, with some quiet support from a Reid spokesman.Sen. Joseph Biden (news, bio, voting record), D-Del., raised the possibility of a deal. “I think we should compromise and say to them that … we’ll let a number” of the seven judges “go through, the two most extreme not go through and put off this vote and compromise,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is open to compromise, his spokesman said Sunday. “There’s lot of concern among Republicans about the road Senator Frist is leading the Senate down,” Jim Manley said.
The Dems are winning the PR war on these issues, AND THEY ARE OFFERING COMPROMISES?!?!
Tell me again how great Reid is. Let’s hear the latest round of excuses as to why once again they will sell us out because they don’t want to feel uncomfortable when bumping into their “collegues” in the cloakroom, or is it because the lobbyists are asking for everybody to work together?
Tell me again that they are “fighting dems” and not spineless Vichy Bastards that hold the doors open while the Republicans and lobbyists rob us all blind.
This is, of course, a running pattern with the party leaders. Just enough of them cross the aisle to give the Republicans what they want while still giving everyone votes to cover themselves with the voters at home. Bankruptcy, ANWAR, Torquemada Gonzales … we all know the long, long list of failures and betrayals, yet we all keep hoping for the best, we keep cutting them some more slack, while the last appeaser Daschle settles into his cozy new job on K Street.
Support the real champions of the base, but stop cutting slack for the likes of Biden, Reid and the other center and center/right “leaders” so willing to work across the aisle. The continuing Faustian bargains with the right, the dividing up of districts so that both parties have “safe seats”, the elimination of alternate voices, the willingness of Schumer and others to sell out their base for “centrist” candidates … it’s all of a piece.
They are not fighting for us, and they won’t until we stop providing mindless support for the appeasement to the new one party state. posted originally April 24th, 2005
So here we are, almost exactly five months to the day after I first posted that, and we can see now the fruit of that early willingness to “compromise”:
Senate Panel Endorses Roberts’s Nomination as Chief Justice
The 13-to-5 vote, with 3 Democrats joining the 10 Republicans on the committee, put Judge Roberts in line to succeed the man for whom he was once a clerk, the late William H. Rehnquist. Judge Roberts is only 50, so he could be chief justice for many years.
Appallingly, even Senator Feingold, after giving Roberts one of the more damning grillings during the hearings, voted yes. Leahy and Kohl are old hacks, and I didn’t expect much out of either of them, but Senator Feingold should have known better.
The Democrats who backed Judge Roberts were generally more restrained. Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking minority member on the panel, said that despite his vote in favor of the nominee he was very disappointed in him for not being more forthcoming and with the White House for not consulting more with the Senate.
Another Democrat who voted “yes,” Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, said he had been persuaded because of the nominee’s “sterling reputation as a lawyer and a judge” and was therefore voting with “my hopes, not my fears.” Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Democrat also from Wisconsin, said he was voting yes because he considered the nominee “a lawyer’s lawyer,” not an ideologue.
Judge Roberts has “a record that few could top,” Mr. Feingold said. But the senator said he still differed with some of the judge’s views, and that the judge was not as frank with the committee as he should have been.
Senator Feingold may have irreparably damaged his hopes of running as the progressive candidate for the nomination of the party in the next Presidential contest. It’s too early to say, but this vote will haunt him.
We can parse this anyway we want. People I normally have NO respect for, like Biden and Feinstein, voted the right way today. Tomorrow they’ll sell us out just as fast when the lobbyists write the checks and offer up their “suggestions” on impending legislation. What we are left with is just a reinforced sense that there is no driving message to the Democrats in Washington DC. We are left adrift — the poor, women, progressives, humanists — no one champions a vision for our future. We’re left watching narrow attempts at tactics, pursued with little sense of any overall strategy, any reason for the party to BE a party. Only it’s small, weak, tenuous grip on little shards of leftover power and pork.
There are many who take umbrage at the use of terms like “vichy”, “quisling”, “sell-outs”, “spineless” and et cetera (my new favorite is “lickspittle”), but what ELSE should we think of a party, a supposed OPPOSITION party, that can’t find within itself the will to combat a terribly corrupt regime? We hurtle back in time to a social order most resembling a feudal state, only the castles now are surrounded by concrete “parks” with protective emplacements dressed up to look like giant flower pots. David Sirota sums up the sorry state of affairs really well:
I can’t decide who is more pathetic: the mainstream media, or unnamed D.C. strategists/aides/beltway-gliterrati-types and the Democratic Party they’ve run into the ground? The former’s reporting on some of the most important issues has become so silly and divorced from reality that you’d think you were reading/hearing/watching something that was deliberately fiction. The latter regularly spews such inane drivel that you’d think the Democratic Party was actually trying to lose elections and embarrass itself. […]
And that gets us to the Democratic strategists et al whose whole strategy has been to go easy on Roberts and not focus on letting the public know about his extreme positions. This cabal of seemingly ever-present, ever-quoted unnamed sources has made a living off of spewing out the same “strategy” that has created, justified, and perpetuated the decline of the Democratic Party for the last decade. In the latest display, the New York Times today quotes “Democratic strategists” saying that “with Roberts widely expected to win confirmation, members of their party should vote for him in order to appear open-minded and save their ammunition for the fight ahead.”
Yet, it was the same Democratic strategist class that helped create the perception in the first place that Roberts is “widely expected to win confirmation.” If you recall, the very first day after the Roberts nomination was announced, Democratic strategists (most likely before they even gave a cursory review of Roberts’ record) pitched a front page story to the Washington Post headlined “Democrats Say Nominee Will Be Hard to Defeat.” Great strategy for a party that is perceived to stand for nothing: lead the biggest debate with an admission that you don’t have enough guts to even make a fight of it. […]
This last capitulation is particularly embarrassing when you look at the recent shenanigans. Hours after one Democratic leader tried to lead his party in a strong direction, other Democratic Senators were – as usual – undermining him. Meanwhile, still other profile-in-courage Democrats were running all over Washington publicly handwringing about how they will vote. And then, what do you know, come next election, these same Democrats will wonder how come America doesn’t know what we stand for? For the love of god, they will bellow, how come no one thinks we are strong, and take strong positions? What a hilarious, laugh-out-loud, piss-your-pants joke it would all be – if it wasn’t so sad.
Ok. In the course of writing this, I’ve found my answer. As pathetic and braindead as the media is in only being able to see their narrow, insulated little playground of Washington, D.C. in terms of inaccurate stereotypes that reflect nothing of the actual real world, the current state of Democratic Party affairs is more pathetic. And it is time for all of us to let them know it, or the party will never change, and never win another national election.
I’d like to say I think we have a chance of making the “leaders” of the party understand how badly they’ve fucked up once again. I’d like to think that there were enough reliable progressives we could appeal to (thanks again for the kick in the gut Russ). I’d like to think that it isn’t going to take DECADES to either rebuild the party or build a new one, but each day those hopes get dimmer.
However, I would like to say to the bully boys who attacked those of us calling for a real fight months ago: YOU HELPED MAKE THIS HAPPEN. So excited to get marching orders from the Congressional leadership, to demand loyalty oaths, to tell us to not attack Democrats. Another year where we could have been changing the political conversation has been lost to the cozy Washington elites, waltzing about the Dauphin’s court and waving their perfumed hankies under their upturned noses when confronted by the righteous anger of the grassroots. They quickly roped some of you into the fold to play digital ward heelers over the rest of us, we “women’s studies types” and “dirty hippies” and “tin hat conspiracy theorists”. You bullied and screamed and tore apart vital communties so that you could “help” the “fighting dems” to go down in flames once again.
Congratulations. Mission accomplished.
Our last best hope is perhaps the least predictable: a grieving mother who sat down in a ditch in the hopes of getting a simple question answered. All of the learning, the law degrees and grand speeches and elaborate promises offer us nothing, shamed by this angry, passionate and brave woman who stood in a ditch, amongst the heat and the bugs and facing down a lazy press and the howling attack dogs of the right.
Shame on you, Vichy Dems, and shame on your housebroken blogheelers. The stage for this latest loss was set oh those many months ago.
