Drinking in the ruins – Liberal Street Fighter

We could argue forever about when it happened: about whether it was the threat of communism; the rapid growth of Evangelical Corpo-Fundamentalism; the courts insisting to white America that it should actually share this country equally with ALL Americans (at which point we started to tear apart everything we were supposed to share), but plainly the shambling horror that stalks the world now is only the re-animated corpse of the nation born of a dream that was the United States of America.

It is driven by the base instincts to consume and destroy, personified in the modern Republican Party. However, those instincts are enabled and sustained by the sad and pathetic Democratic Party, recent signs of resistance notwithstanding, a party marked by its cowardice, duplicity and willingness to go along with just about anything as long as it gets to keep its place at the table. A lazy and voracious parasite, made even more dangerous by the fact that its mere existence makes direct resistance nearly impossible.

Jan Frel sums up the sad state of affairs nicely over at Alternet with Democrats Fiddling as the World Burns:

It’s time for the Democrats to seize the political advantage, right? Every single political branch in D.C. is on fire. The world is also on fire, or drowning: the American public has clear, massive majority positions on Iraq, Katrina, our $8 trillion national debt, world poverty, $3 gallon gas and rapid climate change. Yet what we’ve gotten so far from the Democratic leadership is meaningless sloganeering.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and power-hungry Hillary Clinton’s big rhetorical banner for 2006 — as good an indicator to the Democrats’ predictions of where all this scandal and disaster is going to take them in the next election as any — is, America Can Do Better.

There was much rejoicing this past week at the use of a parliamentary rule to force the Senate into closed session, but of course the important word there is closed. The sovereign force in this country, the people, have no idea what was said, though promises came out that the Intelligence Committee will do something about an investigation into the warping of intelligence by the Bush/Cheney White House leading into the Iraq War.

Frel continues:

Here’s where I part from those who have taken the time to criticize the D.C. Democrats for such a feckless response. Step back and look at the political climate for a moment before passing judgment on America Can Do Better. The legal investigations listed above have been the driving engine of the political process for months now. Political advantage is currently determined by the ups and downs of pending cases; we’re bringing the courts into the political process on a comprehensive scale far beyond what we saw with Ken Starr in the ’90s — a trend that, if treated by political leaders as appropriate politics, as the Roman historian Tacitus attested, is proof of a deceased republic.

Democrats and their partisan supporters are relying on prosecutors to do what they couldn’t at the ballot box. Patrick Fitzgerald would not be in the spotlight today if John Kerry hadn’t been such a squeamish collaborator in our rush to war in Iraq, and such an unrepentant coward leading up to the 2004 election (and he still is a year later).

And there’s a price to pay for making prosecutors like Fitzgerald the hero of the moment; it gives further incentive for the Democratic Party in Washington, wraith of the New Deal coalition that it is, to languish and let legal investigations do their “work” for them.

America Can Do Better is the fitting and perfect motto for the Democratic political class. What’s sillier are the expectations of slogans about Iraq, corporations or the environment, given the sick state of our political system. This hasn’t been lost on the public, which, despite giving an approval rating of 40 percent to congressional Republicans during these months of scandal, gives the opposition a rating that hovers under 50. Is it fair to expect that the public will view Scooter Libby as simply a Bush-serving Republican villain when it comes to light that he was a lawyer for Clinton pardonee Marc Rich?

As for that “squeamish coward”, Mark Crispin Miller let fly with a little bombshell on Democracy Now today:

Speaking of John Kerry, I have some news for you. On Friday, this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a fundraiser to give him a copy of my book. He told me he now thinks the election was stolen. He said he doesn’t believe that he is the person who can go out front on the issue, because of the sour grapes, you know, question. But he said he believes it was stolen. He says he argues about this with his Democratic colleagues on the Hill. He had just had a big fight with Christopher Dodd about it, because he said, you know, `There’s this stuff about the voting machines; they’re really questionable.’ And Dodd was angry. `I don’t want to hear about it,’ you know, `I looked into it. There’s nothing there.’

Well, there’s plenty there, and let me add one thing: This is not a criminal case, okay? We don’t have to prove guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is our election system, right? This is a system based on consent of the governed. If many, many millions of Americans are convinced that they got screwed on Election Day and couldn’t vote, or if 3.4 million more Americans claim that they voted than the actual total of voters — this is what the Census Bureau told us last May – this is grounds alone for serious investigation, and I think Mark would agree with me here. We have to have serious investigation.

What else is there to say? Rising discontent amongst the citizenry is more and more apparent, whether you judge it by polls, by the anecdotal daily experience of talking to other people or by the increasing number of protests that our wholly corrupt media steadfastly refuses to cover. The way that we the sovereign people are SUPPOSED to exert our will, the ballot box, is as rotten through as the piles of garbage strewn about the gulf coast. Protests are ridiculed and ignored. Only dollars speak, and even interest groups that ordinary people use to express their political will are increasingly ineffective. Enormous effort is spent on branding of one viewpoint or another, leaving only empty plastic shipping popcorn inside the pretty packaging in place of ideas.

ALL of our institutions seem broken: the press, political parties, the court system, churches, military … ennui, corruption and the Peter Principle are the rule. Compare the resultant mess to Falling Rome perhaps, or perhaps we’ve all become the zombies in 29 Days Later, a chaotic army of hungry ghouls lashing out in violent consuming lust. Those of us sane enough to try to stop the disaster have to spend much of our energy trying to just not be eaten, let alone work together toward a cure to our electoral pandemic. Perhaps all that is left is to try to survive, as I’m not convinced that last Tuesday’s action was anything more than a fit of pique from an old man pissed off that he wasn’t paid a courtesy call before Scalito was annointed as the new Associate Ayatollah.

We’re in survival mode time here folks. Regroup, work locally, support the few courageous leaders of the New Deal Coalition still working in Washington, but quit looking for a quick fix. Fitzgerald isn’t going to come striding along in a hazmat suit to administer some exotic anti-Liddy antidote to save us. There is no magic bullet, no magical “framed’ slogan to be chanted, no White Knight or inspired Joan d’Arc is going to ride in and rally the troops. A long hard slog by a peasant army, a political resistance, is in front of us. Resist the cheerleading when the feckless elected elites do something once in a while … drop them a line, perhaps, but keep the heat on.

Of course, you could just watch the ongoing decay. George Carlin will be offering his thirteenth live concert on HBO this Saturday. In a profile in the NY Times, Carlin says:

Mr. Carlin’s new 75-minute HBO show is an extended meditation on the three aspects of life that have preoccupied him for nearly a half-century: the little experiences we all seem to share, the words we use and our penchant for doing one another (and the world around us) harm.

In that last regard, he is, on camera as well as off, the bystander who is usually rooting for the 10-car pileup, at least partly because it’s good for business.

“This place is eating itself alive,” he said in an interview a few days before the Dayton show. “I like applying the entropic principle from science to this country, this civilization. I think it is slowly disintegrating.”

“For me, it isn’t the fact of the disintegration so much as the act of it, watching it, seeing it,” he added. “It is a freak show. And in this country you get a front-row seat. And some of us have notebooks.”