This is an Atriotic post, but I am watching the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer (usually a source of basic American sanity). And I am quickly coming to the conclusion that the Establishment in this nation is in a deep funk and badly in denial. They’re trying to discuss the significance of Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation in the context of Robert McNamera’s. They’re also trying to suss out the significance of the midterm elections. One of them is saying that the election results are a vindication for Bill Clinton and his vision for the modern Democratic Party. Another is suggesting that everything will be okay once Baker and Hamilton release their report on Iraq. Overall, they seem be saying that the only problem is that the Center has been rejected by the two major parties and that once we return to Centrism things will be rosy.
I have news for you. First, despite the centrifugal pull of Beltway Centrism, and it is substantial, we have never had a more progressive House of Representatives in the history of this country. I have explained this at length and it has nothing to do with the election of three conservative Democrats from Indiana. It has to do with people that go by the names of Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers, Henry Waxman, John Dingell, Bennie Thompson, George Miller, Charlie Rangel, Nydia Velaquez, and Louis Slaughter.
Additionally, we all know that the real tectonic shift in the midterm occurred in Connecticut in August. It doesn’t matter a whit that Lamont lost the general election. Ask Jon Tester and Jim Webb about the netroots. Ask Jerry McNerney or Patrick Murphy. The DLC has never been a more dead commodity than it is today, and our country has never been better poised to question the Establishment figures that brought us the wars in Korea, the coups in Iran and Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, and Iraq.
Of all those conflicts, only Korea could be said to have accomplished something worth the sacrifice. I know that is a leftist thing to say. I also know that Americans, left and right, are starting to figure that out.
We will either embrace Bush’s platform of uniting rather than dividing and a more humble foreign policy or we will be further divided and further humbled.
British Petroleum said we had to go into Iran. United Fruit Co. said we had to go into Guatemala. The hotels and casinos (the mob) said we had to go into Cuba. ITT said we had to go into Chile. Halliburton and Bechtel said we had to go into Iraq.
We’re almost done listening to these people. We’re almost done listening to the Establishment. Give us health care. Do something about the cost of education. Clean up the environment. Take care of us for a change.
same old shit, just a new pile, Boo.
I highly recommend Kahli’s Cold Feet Diary, and Chris Floyd”s Empire Burlesque post from yesterday.
We, the Progressives, have a hell of a lot of work ahead of us. Like I posted in Kahli’s D…take some time to savour the victory, but it’s time to back these people up and demand change.
And which inside-the-beltway talking head is saying this?? Oh, we all know that Clinton’s view of the “modern” Democratic party was so successful that it beat back the repubs at every election since 1992!
These guys have got to stop driking RoveWater backstage! It is truly pathetic to hear this drivel.
And in the same vein, I looked in my NYT for some mention – however small – of the 50 state campaign, or Dean, and saw nothing. Perhaps it was there, but it was well away from central attention.
Sorry BooMan.
It’s been a long time since Jim Lehrer has spoken for “basic American values.” PBS was a no brainer for Karl Rove. Just buy out the network and subtley remake it as a mouthpiece for right wing punditry. Anyone with a spine (or a conscience) would have quit, but Jim Lehrer didn’t. Says it all right there. Especially clever of Rove, given the reputation of that report, earned over many years of being a voice for sanity in this country.
We quit watching the News Hour in about 2002. We still find a lot of interest in NPR, but there’d have to be a revolution at the News Hour for us to subject ourselves to it.
Yup. McNiell was the cool one. Jim Lehrer sold his soul to be allowed to moderate those debates. He may be ugly and old, but he’s just another star-fucking whore.
(Wow, ok, that was a bit harsh, but I really don’t like the perception that the News Hour is anything other than Beltway BS.)
We absolutely will not have a progressive House if Steny Hoyer becomes Majority Leader, he will undermine everything Pelosi and the honorable chairmen you name attempt to do for the next 2 years. I’m not a big fan of Murtha’s politics, but he is an honorable man with a military background who I don’t believe would stab his leader in the back. The fight between Murtha and Hoyer is critical if we really want oversight.
I agree with you on this one. Although I don’t like some of his positions, I think Murtha will work WITH Pelosi, while Hoyer will actively work to undermine her.
I’m tired of the lesser of two evils approach to government. why can’t Pelosi pick someone who’s a better fit rather than a retread?
Nice post – my only quibble is whether the Houses of the New Deal were more progressive than this.
Did anyone hear the thing on NPR by some linguist about the words ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’? I’d been calling myself a progressive (when I’m not calling myself a radical) for some time – and saying that liberals sucked. (because they couldn’t defend themselves – this covers the period from about 1972 to 2006). This guy on NPR said that ‘progressive’ meant two things: historical reference to the Progressive party, which very few people knew anything about, and liberals relabeling themselves after the Right trashed the ‘liberal’ brand.
I’m still thinking about this… one of his other points was that Mass America doesn’t give a whit about ‘progressive’, and that by not defending ‘liberal’ we’re letting the Rep brand-trashing stand.
Maybe I’ll post someting on nihilix about it…
Ignore the talking heads. Or look at it this way. We should embrace the centrist label. If they persist in characterizing the new Democratic look of Congress as centrism, it’s all to the good. Thus will universal health care, public education, and environmental protection be rightly viewed as fundamental Murrican values when put forth by the new “centrists.”
<feeling optimistic and it feels weird>
First raise the minimum wage. Money in peoples pockets that need it. They spend it on essentials and as an added benefit some of it goes to the treasury as tax receipts. Much needed revenue. We’ll be liberating the money from grubby corporate hands. Then roll back the tax cuts on unearned income such as capital gains. Lets start freeing money. Thats the freedom I’m talking about. Corporate America needs to understand they live in a society and we are in this together. Consider it a family with the rest of the world as an extended family. Let the human revolution begin.
You nailed it. Guys like Jim Lehrer (whom I don’t really like very much to keep the record straight) have been operating in the old regime mode so long that they can’t absorb the changes that have been occurring since around 2002, when out of desperation at what was happening to our country, we actually met each other here on the net and created a means by which ordinary people can affect policy. I come from the elite, and my ties into the Washington bureaucratic establishment are (more under Clinton) wide and deep. But I find this venue more powerful than any old-boy connection I might have had.
Lehrer and Coke don’t get it. Lehrer is o.k., but Cokie’s day is done. Guys like Webb just won’t put up with her shit, and it’s going to come as a big surprise.
Nice sentiments, but awfully naive. In this great “wave” election only 40 percent of Americans, facing the total destruction of their nation, bothered to vote.
My pessimism has retreated several notches. We killed hundreds of thousands pacifying the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, which nobody knows about, and the Filipinos love us. Maybe it will eventually be more or less that way with the Middle East.
But we’re not “almost done listening to the Establishment.”
As I argued in my diary yesterday on the Rumsfeld firing, the Establishment (what I like to call the Powers That Be, channeling Arthur Gilroy) have just risen up and performed a coup d’etat, firing Cheney and installing old-school realists. And everybody applauds (as we should).
I’ve spent about 10 hours reading blogs and other news outlets since yesterday, mainly interested in discussions about the Rumsfeld firing. I simply cannot believe that all the high-domed pundits casually assume that George W. Bush made the decision!
And I repeat: Cheney is gone within six months. He has just had his nuts cut off in public.
If Cheney is gone within six months it will be because either he really does have health problems or because Henry Waxman has effectively destroyed him as a political force. He’s not going anywhere because some power-that-be got sick of him. He is the power-that-be and cannot be told one thing.
On your other point, the old media was able to take us into Panama, for example, based on basic truth and indifference. The public is not going to stand for that bullshit again for some time. No WMD, an the rise of alternative media, killed their ability to brand any foreign policy decision as apple pie.
I hope you’re right on your second point, but I doubt it.
Regarding Cheney, I disagree. Cheney has had his legs cut out from underneath. Libby is gone. Cambone is resigning. He cannot dictate at the Pentagon any more. He is losing high-level access. I don’t think this is being orchestrated by W, much less Rove. And I don’t think H.W. and Baker have the chops to accomplish this by themselves.
I’d sure like to see the White House list of who spoke to Bush late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, and who spoke to H.W. and Baker Tuesday night.
It’s easy to imagine names like Viguerie and Scaife. But just as likely it was some guy we never heard of calling from the central bank in Beijing.
if you haven’t yet figured out that Cheney and Co. answer to no one, then god help you.
Oh I should stop, but that’s really just silly.
What bothers me the most is ignoring the high probability of not being able to straighten out the mess in Iraq. No amount of human capital, either American or Iraqi guaranties more than what is there now (chaos or civil war). But the elected seem to be falling into the Bush chant of we just can’t leave.
Why should we forget Vietnam. It wasn’t winnable without a total war against China and the USSR – and a war like that would have become nuclear. Are we going to draft enough people, commit to decades of occupation, be on the edge of using nuclear weapons to bring order and stability to a region that has been unstable since 700 AD.
How many more lives for this rant of we just can’t leave? Will we give up 5000 more or maybe 10,000. Our great political minds are full of themselves and usually don’t sacrifice anything but their dignity while others give their lives and livelihood.
Hi,
I’m new to posting, but I’ve enjoyed the blog for a long time BooMan.
Gwen Ifell (sp?) is tolerable but Lehrer lost me when we lost McNeill.
That’s when I became a DemocracyNOW convert.
DemocracyNOW.org is available on the web as well as Pacifica radio, DISH, DirectTV, and a lot of cable and PBS outlets, and has grown from about 75 outlets to some 600+, which goes to show us just how much Americans are desperate for non-corporate MSM. (Between that and the blogosphere, there really is hope for us all, as long as we can maintain net neutrality.)
And when I read that Pew survey that showed that the youngsters and young at heart got their news from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, it warmed the cockles of my heart. (Those guys keep me sane.) They make it funny, but they also tell you more in 30 minutes than CNN or Fox does in 24 hours. And they do lampoon the 24-hour outlets in some hysterical ways.
People are onto the fact that we have a de facto state-run media (including the news programming on PBS, which is regulated through the Repub board of the CPB; I stick pretty much to POV and Independent Lens there these days). So while we might have to cobble together different viewpoints (I balance the more liberal DN with several blogs that are progressive / libertarian), I am so grateful for DemocracyNOW and Amy Goodman. And to be fair, I’ve heard some excellent interviews that included neo-cons like Kristol and Perle – and one with a Carlyle group rep that was a classic. John Dean and Kevin Phillips are voices of moderate (and true) conservatism that appear regularly and often get the whole hour. Wall Street Journal Reporters are interviewed as well as LA Times Reporters. Other regular visitors run the spectrum from Noam Chomsky to Howard Zinn to Studs Turkel to Bill Moyers to George Galloway to the lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights. But the best interviews are the ones with regular people suffering through some of the horrors, the mothers trying to keep body and soul and kids together during the FEMA mess following Katrina, watching Amy Goodman interview every official that drove by a dead body in New Orleans one day to see who was going to take the poor soul to the morgue. DN followed the Haiti coup with members of the CBC and ultimately did an interview with Aristide when he was on his way back from Africa for his short stay in Jamaica. The CPC is a regular resource too. (One of the few outlets that actually interviewed all the 2004 pres. candidates on a regular basis, INCLUDING Dennis Kucinich, who was the only candidate to get votes at the convention.)
Another regular guest is Tariq Ali, who has just published a new book about Latin America called “Axis of Hope” – and shortly before that she interviewed Evo Morales, which was fascinating. It is so good to get unvarnished news about Latin America, I get so angry at the MSM for perpetrating the myths that Latin America is full of boogeymen all the better to enable more horrible corporate foreign policy there. (God forbid another nation be self-governing, they don’t even like it that ours is. I don’t think Bush with his 91 IQ is the devil Hugo Chavez said at the UN, but he does understand just how evil the foreign policy is. So thank goodness Chavez is standing up to these neo-cons – and to neo-liberal economic policy.)
As a media aside: European media has been hoping that this election marks an end to our adventurism and nation-building. HA! Considering that we’ve been doing it – Unconstitutionally – for 150-odd years – I think we’ll need a Constitutional amendment and we’ll actually have to use impeachment as it was intended before that happens. If we can salvage the Republic in the meantime.
Back to Amy, she regularly interviews citizens and bloggers in the middle of all the horrors in the Middle East. It’s amazing how much more you can understand the situation when you hear the background from the people living it. (And the incursion into Fallujah made for some harrowing reports, as did this summer’s mess in Lebanon, which was reported regularly by Robert Fisk.) Thanks to DN, I understand that the sectarian violence is limited, and we used the Salavdor Option to encourage it. (That’s thanks to two other regulars, the New Yorker’s Sy Hersh and Jane Mayer.)
Her co-host a few times a week is Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News, and he brings his investigative work with him, and it’s always fascinating.
Sorry to sound like an ad, but I’ve been in a place similar to what you described, and finding FreeSpeech TV on DISH was a candle in the darkness.
elizabeth in ND
P.S. I just previewed and this is long, sorry. I’ll be shorter next time.
P.S. I also recommend Empire Burlesque, and TruthOut does a good roundup for those days when you don’t have time to visit all your trusted sites.
Hi Erose001,
thanks for this comment that wasn’t long at all :o) Alternative media is the only way to go if you want to have clear idea about what’s really going on. NPR lost me for good when they forced Bill Edwards out in what, 2002, or 03? I cannot stomach Neil Conin (sp?) and his prostrate fealty to right wing talking points. On a side note, Democracy Now! did an interview with my mother, who happens to be a member of one of the anti-war Quaker groups that was spyed on by the Dod in Lake Worth, Fl. last year. There was little to nothing about that anywhere else.
Peace
Hi there,
Thank you so much for the kind welcome. I must’ve seen your mom, because I remember that interview vividly. I have some friends who are Friends, and I was really shocked and dismayed that your mother’s group was spied on.
Now, sadly, it seems like a fact of life. Will it change? Conyers is backing off impeachment because Pelosi apparently doesn’t understand its necessity or significance, so I guess time will tell.
Anyway, kindness to you and thank you.
Thank you too,
Actually her interview was done on the phone as one of a group of different nationally wide spread activists that were victims of the same. My mother has a tendency to run on a bit :o) so I was a little tickled when Amy Goodman had to finally interupt her, LOL.
Take good care…
Hi erose001, and welcome. Come on over to the Froggy Bottom sometime and chat.
Changing the subject from these serious discussions: I think you meant “centripetal”. Centrifugal is about things flying away from the center.