Booman wrote a piece today (Fri., 1/25) regarding the so-called filibuster compromise. It was titled Senate Dems Abdicated Their Duty.
“Senate Dems Abdicated Their Duty???!!!”
Well…I guess you have to first define what their “duty” really is, Booman.
Which “duty.”
As evidenced by their actions today and over the last 50 years or so, they have certainly arrived at a definition.
Remember Paul Hackett?
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Lewis Hackett III (born March 30, 1962) is a lawyer and veteran of the Iraq War.
—snip—
Hackett on October 24, 2005, announced he would seek the Democratic nomination to challenge incumbent United States Senator Mike DeWine after rejecting a second run against Schmidt. Sherrod Brown, a congressman from northern Ohio and two-term Ohio Secretary of State, had rejected efforts by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to recruit him to the race in the summer of 2005 and had on August 17, publicly declared he would not run. But after Hackett’s announcement, Brown changed his mind and declared he would run, angering Hackett who claimed Brown had promised him he would stay out of the race, a claim Brown denies.
On February 13, 2006, Hackett announced that he was withdrawing from the race and ending his political career. Hackett told the New York Times that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and New York Senator Chuck Schumer recently had asked him to withdraw. He further contends that Schumer sabotaged his fundraising efforts and actively worked against his campaign.[3] Hackett said, “For me, this is a second betrayal…first, my government misused and mismanaged the military in Iraq, and now my own party is afraid to support candidates like me.”[4]
Here’s what he had to say after the whole fiasco was over.
Hackett, who says he would still like to help “retool” the Democratic Party, ends his meteoric political career with some advice for other maverick candidates. “They simply can’t rely on any of the party infrastructure to help them, and they must assume that people at high levels will work against them. These guys,” he says of the party insiders, “view the Senate as a club. They’re not gonna welcome you if one day they turn the key on the clubhouse door and you are sitting there with your feet on the table flippin’ them the middle finger. I understand that from their perspective. It works for them, but not for the rest of us out here.
I repeat…”These guys view the Senate as a club. They’re not gonna welcome you if one day they turn the key on the clubhouse door and you are sitting there with your feet on the table flippin’ them the middle finger. I understand that from their perspective. It works for them, but not for the rest of us out here.”
And there it is.
Their “duty” to the Senate…and by extension the UniParty/PermaGov which is the real source of their immense wealth and power…far outweighs their so-called duty to their constituents and to what we laughingly refer to as “the commonwealth” in general.
Bet on it.
To write so innocent a statement as “The Senate Dems Abdicated Their Duty” in a so-called political blog just about disqualifies the writer from consideration as someone who possesses any understanding whatsoever of how the power runs in DeeCeeLand.
You don’t have a clue, Booman.
Not a clue.
As long as they are backed by the government media complex they are in like Flynn, and if by any chance they do lose an election they are still guaranteed a lifetime sinecure within the PermaGov revolving door system.
Unless of course…like JFK, RFK, Paul Wellstone and a few others…they really, seriously cross the controllers.
Then?
Then it’s “Fuck with the bull, you get the horns.”
Bet on that as well.
Your favorite preznit understands this.
That’s why he’s still in power.
All smoke and mirrors, Booman.
All imaginary bits and bytes.
Not very nourishing for those who have to eat that and only that.
It’s like being on a McDonald’s diet.
You’re full a lot and it doesn’t seem to cost much, but…full of what?
Right.
Full of shit.
I read a wonderful article today by a friend…David Yearsley…who is a brilliant musician, music critic and societal critic. He writes a piece almost every weekend for CounterPunch and understands the following statements at an an almost cellular level. As I have stated so many times here, the Sufis say “As above, so below.” I would like to add to that idea something my own teacher told me. “After you reach a certain point it doesn’t matter if your read the newspapers or the comics.”
Yup.
It’s all interrelated.
Here’s Mr. Yearsleys’s take on the most recent Obama coronation:
The Music and Politics of Deception-Painful Paeans to America
by David YearsleyPanic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide scrub down; the huge American flags draped behind the podium with their ever-increasing number of stars tracing the brutal conquest of a continent; the howitzers, whose saluting blasts to the retreadPresident could easily have been mistaken for an action to quell a spontaneous revolution against the clichés raining down from the dais; and the fact that so many thousands went out of their way to act as a living backdrop to a spectacle that at every turn found new ways to violate reason.
No, it was the music that made me want to run to the nearest bridge and jump. Yet so creepily fascinating were the sounds and sights emanating from the television, that I, Odysseus-like, strapped myself to the couch and listened to the siren song of mortal schlock. The horror, the horror!
First came the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, the women in their red jackets with fake-fur ruffs and cuffs, the men in blue coats and red scarves. It’s an ethnically diverse megachoir from an ethnically diverse megachurch whose message is pure whitebread. (The latest sermon available on the church’s website is entitled “The Sword,” the latest installment in the pastor’s Spiritual Warfare Series. Do not expect profound theological thought.)
—snip—
The choir was introduced by emcee New York Senator Charles Schumer, who was so out of himself with joy at having the national attention focused on him that his grin threatened to spin from his face and slice through the crowd like a tire flying into the stands at Daytona Speedway. Schumer mentioned only the choir and its director, not the accompanying band. That was the giveaway–as if any were needed–that the back-up was pre-recorded, presumably lifted wholesale from the aforementioned track now available for a mere ninety-cents on iTunes. The orchestral accompaniment had martial trumpets, Hollywood strings, and angelic bells that chimed, most preciously when soloist Alicia Olatuja let loose her angelic clarion of a voice. The instruments were being piped in without the pretense of suggesting live performance. All accepted, if tacitly, that this was choir karaoke.
—snip—
In spite of the half-live–and therefore half-dead–performance of the Tabernacle choir, they gave an accurate account of the musical state of the nation, a fitting soundtrack for politics lite. That saccharine beat is a defining feature of Christian Praise Music as practiced in the megachurches of this land. On the Mall on Monday John Brown’s truth didn’t go marching on, but instead shuffled by with a sexy swish of the hips. The fury of the Abolitionists has been reduced to easy listening.
The Charge of the Lite Brigade continued when James Taylor limped up to the mike, was handed his guitar, and began to croak out America the Beautiful. He added in a few mildly piquant harmonies–as if even heaping tablespoons of musical spice could have made this bland anthem to Manifest Destiny palatable. Fortunately, like a tooth pulled expertly, it was over quickly. This performance appeared to be real–inasmuch as that designation has any meaning at a Presidential Inauguration–as could be heard in the ecstatic straining for which Taylor’s voice is celebrated and reviled, depending on one’s tastes. I guess Taylor was supposed to channel Woody Guthrie and his songs of the downtrodden, but there was none of Guthrie’s grain and guts. It may have been live but it was still lite.
—snip—
At least the inaugural impresarios got one thing right: they saved the worst for last: Beyoncé. Here again Schumer introduced the musical marines and the camera gave them some time. But they were simply going through the motions, like good soldiers. Beyoncé then went into routine. Though with limping scansion, she played the first bits straight, letting the Marines buttress her with rustle of snare and the swell of brass that imbued this musical benediction with seriousness of purpose. As she got to those bombs bursting in the air she let loose her own rockets of ornament, dramatically yanking her earpiece from beneath her highlighted tresses as if it were a shackle.
Of course she was lipsyncing it. People continue to attempt valiantly to be outraged that performances at these ceremonies are regularly faked, forgetting somehow that the late lamented Whitney Houston did the same at the SuperBowl half-time show two decades ago. It is almost quaint that even pop fans can still muster any indignity at this longstanding normality. Patriotic types tried to work themselves into a lather that the fakery was done to the nation’s sacred song, but that, too, is by now the standard operating procedure of hyperreality.
Four years ago the music for Obama’s first inauguration at least made an attempt at creative ambition and grandeur with the commissioning of John Williams’s classical chamber music quartet “Simple Gifts.” As only emerged after the fact, that performance was also faked, recording in the same Marine Corps studio used by Beyoncé for her latest covert musical operation.
This time around the repertoire consisted exclusively of patriotic hymns, reformatted according to what is held to be the lowest common denominator of prevailing taste. The generically awful arrangements all shared a penchant for the deceptive cadence where expected harmonic closure is skirted and deferred. It’s a technique used to great effect by many composers over the last few hundreds years. So frequent and foolish was the device at the inauguration that the unexpected became the expected. These musical feints provided a useful metaphor for America: What we had on the Mall on Monday is a music and politics of deception. To those gathered in Washington it may all have sounded like a celebration of new beginnings. To me it sounded like the end.
There it is.
America the One Party.
America the Overdub Party.
America the LipSynch Party.
America the Lie Party.
America the land of the deceptive cadence.
Nothing is ever truly resolved, stuff just goes ’round and ’round in a big circle. From war to war, from fiscal cliff to fiscal cliff, from PermaGov preznit to PermaGov preznit.
Long may it rave.
As long as it takes for them chickens to come home to roost, I guess.
As long as it takes.
AG
