BooMan recently wrote a very well reasoned and careful attempt to continue his pas de deux dance with dKos without either surrendering his own integrity OR calling a spade a spade and thus hurting the power of the netroot based so-called “new middle” in the coming midterm (s)elections.

Here. (Orange versus Green)

I have many disagreements with this tactic, and a comment by the always brilliant economic and energy analyst Jerome a Paris in the thread that followed that diary helped me to focus some of those disagreements into a somewhat cogent…if on first glance a little mysterious…argument.

I wrote a reply to his comment which, as is my wont, jes’ grew like Topsy.

So now it’s a stand-alone diary.

Read on for more, if you so desire.
Jerome’s comment.

DK is the loudspeaker. It can be used for many different things… Use it.
It is what YOU make of it.

No, Jerome.

Be honest, please. You are too smart to say that in good faith.

It is what its bosses ALLOW “us” to make of it.

Is their tactic a winning one?

We shall see.

I doubt it.

It will be Plan A or Plan A Lite in both 2006 and 2008. BOTH Blood For Oil, economic imperialist strategies. Just different tactics.

And BOTH paths suck.

Could ANY tactic short of a complete break with the mainstream, corporate owned American system be a winning one if it opposed the far right/center/don’t-give-a-shit-just-don’t-wake-me-up  coalition which is held together here in the U.S. by the glue of a bought and sold media? {SUPER glue, it is, if you have not noticed.)

I doubt it very much.

A really well put together third party headed by some kind of true political genius with a great common touch might pull it off, but that would still leave both houses of Congress, the courts and the money/media of the country in the same place.

The new president would be a four year-long lame duck, followed by “See? We TOL’ ya he couldn’t do anything” and outta there.

Jimmy Carter v.2.

Could a complete break “work”?

Not unless it toppled the economy.

Which job the enemies of America are doing fairly well without any help, according to all of the evidence that I can see in my own daily life.

So…what to do?

The I Ching says of this state:

Persistently ill, and still does not die.

Here enthusiasm is obstructed. A man is under constant pressure, which prevents him from breathing freely. However, this pressure has its advantage–it prevents him from consuming his powers in empty
enthusiasm. Thus constant pressure can actually serve to keep one alive.

“Persistently ill, and still does not die.”

Yup.

Sound familiar?

So, prevented from forward movement…if we have any sense at all…we wait.

NOT consuming our energies in empty posturing or useless internal debates.

Not allying ourselves with those who are prone to take inefficient, halfway measures.

And of course the usual answer to this is…”But we cannot surrender!!!

No, we cannot.

But we CAN wait.

More from the I Ching:

Evil is not
destructive to the good alone but inevitably destroys itself as well. For evil, which lives solely by negation, cannot continue to exist on its own strength  alone.

And also:

Here the climax of the darkening is reached. The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must itself fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consumed the energy to which it owed its duration.

There is more. Much more. About halfway measures and how they do not work; about being aware of the evil in our own lives and actions, about choosing well the battles that we DO fight. It basically says that we should wait until they fuck up SO big time that they topple themselves. Now the risk here, of course, is that nuclear weapons and global ecological collapse will do us ALL in if we wait, but…

Ya gotta believe.

Tug McGraw was right. As were Rumi and Hafiz and Francis of Assissi and Moses and Gautama Buddha and Lao Tse Tung…

Ain’t over yet.

Not by a LONG shot.

Patience.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Martin Luther King Jr.

And continued resistance.

Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Frederick Douglass

VAYA!!!

AG

P.S. And BY NO MEANS ally yourself with the halfway guys.

Why?

…a compromise with evil is not possible; evil must under all circumstances be openly discredited.

Economic imperialism IS “evil”.

Evil personified.

The Blood For Oil War is an INSTRUMENT of that evil.

Warner…and ALL the others who do not openly oppose it?

Dark side, baby.

Dark side.

What’s that I hear?

That’s just superstition?

Everything is relative?

There IS no “evil”?

Here is my sole answer to that.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I rest my case.

Do you remember…well, not “remember” exactly, but are you aware of that old anti-Prohibition song that went “Sixty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong?”

Well..the “liberal left” may very well be one of the few segments of successful civilizations in the history of mankind that by and large does not seem to believe in the existence of large forces of “good” and “evil” being engaged in eternal in battle here on earth and throughout the rest of the universe as well.

How many people have lived here since human beings first stood upright and worshiped the sun?

Hundreds of billions of human beings cannot have been wrong, either.

Bet on it.

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