The continued lack of backbone in amongst the alleged Democratic Congressional "Leadership" considering the wide unpopularity of Dubya, Cheney, & Co. is simply stupefying. Are they as out of touch as the idiot occupying the White House? Apparently so.

The DLC is like a tapeworm in the body politic feeding on money and destroying any progressive candidacies that try to confront it. At least our young people are getting a clue, even if the older voters aren't.

kathyodat

I would bet that all the dems in Congress and most of the moderate repubs got to their offices one morning and found a manilla envelope full of incriminating evidence of some sort or other setting there. Vote our way or else, a little note said. And this "evidence" was most likely attained from this administration's illegal spying program. cheney is more concerned with spying on us than terrorists. The sad truth is that probably 90% of Congress should be emptied, and 110% of this administration.

Once again if anyone ever needed a reason to back third parties, we have yet another example.

It's almost getting to the point that people would be better off voting for some crazed former KKK party. At least with them you'd know about all of the silly crap that was to come.

The Democrats deserve to lose another presidential election. And maybe, just maybe, after another four years of this junk the public will wake up. Pobably not.

Need to check out the Keith Olberman Video on the tactics of the president and our congress I saw it on www.larryflynt.com.

Daniel David,

Please tell us again how much better it will be next year with more Democrats in control. My scant faith is waining.

RandB, be careful what you wish for. faith-based reasoning (ignoring the record of what the Ds have done in favor of proclaiming what they will do if only...) is a tough slog for most of us.

Some poor soul, a fundraiser for the Democratic Leadership Council, called me at home wanting me to give them money in this important election year.

Poor guy got an earful from me: there is NO Democratic leadership, they've caved on FISA, Telecom, the War, Guantanamo, rule of Law, the Constitutional checks and balances, civil liberties, and now with the economy in free fall and the dollar's value plummeting, they're just as worthless. They do not deserve my money, and they're not getting one cent of it.

Maybe when the $ Faucet goes dry, they may get the message.

NateW March 3rd, 2008 11:52 am:

"Are they as out of touch as the idiot occupying the White House? Apparently so."

I would disagree with you there, Nate. Congress is very much in touch with what is going on. It is the public that has lost the plot. What I find more stupefying, is that most Americans still haven't started looking for alternatives. In this environment, the Democrats merely have to be fractionally more palatable than the alternative.

Consider two people in the jungle, confronted by a tiger. The first one starts to put on his trainers.

The second one asks - "What are you doing? You can't outrun a tiger."

The first one replies - "I don't have to outrun the tiger…"

What do the democrats have to fear? Even those constituents fully aware of their representative's complicity are going to continue their support. Those constituents wavering on the brink of rebellion will be frightened back in line. Do congressional democrats fear a contested primary? Ha, can you say, "Lieberman".

There probably is a solution, but things will have to get allot worse before it is seriously considered.

Training/running shoes. He doesn't have to outrun the tiger, just his"friend", who gets eaten by the tiger.

st john

The joke is that the American electorate is portrayed as a tiger.

Jay Rockefeller, Mr. Telecom $, endorsed Obama over the weekend. Following the money leads us to most every elected official. Dennis Kucinich is fighting for his seat tomorrow. Whew.

NateW: They are not out of touch at all but corrupt.

I call for enforcing the law! The Nurenmberg principles, accepted as US law, stipulate that conspiring to wage war when not attacked is a crime punishable by death. Either execute Bush and Cheney, or imprison them for life. That is what justice DEMANDS!

And once again I am ashamed of my country, something that is now a constant of every day of every breath

kathyodat,

I think some of us "oldies" are getting a clue and one thing we could do for the younger set is to point out the rocks in the rapids while helping them steer the boat.

I think you'll agree that younger voters like Bethany have the fire, but they can't do it alone and they certainly can't do it if their elders do nothing but throw water on their fire.

Paul Revere,

I think some in Washington are out of touch, others are corrupt, and some are both. Washington is a different universe, insulated from the rest of the world - and it shows. What's needed is more citizen representatives. We need to get the careerists out! We need term limits on all politicians and we need to move K Street to Guantanamo Bay.

sansf, it just means he wants to be seen with a winner. They all have dirty hands. What we need to do is only vote in clean hands.

When I was in high school long ago, we were taught that lobbyists simply presented information to our Representatives and Senators and monetary or other influence was illegal in their interactions with each other.

Then when I was a young woman my husband was in graduate school in Rochester New York and we lived in a slum neighborhood. Our neighbors were great. One of them told me when she applied for public assistance, she was advised it would be in her interest to register Republican. She told me "They can tell me how to register but they can't follow me into the voting booth". At that time I was shocked. But I hadn't shaken off my high school brainwashing - yet, that this was a free and fair country that played by the rules.

It was LBJ two years later that opened my eyes and I went from a docile housewife to outraged activist, complete with demonstrations and sitins.

kathyodat

kathyodat,

"When I was in high school long ago, we were taught that lobbyists simply presented information to our Representatives and Senators and monetary or other influence was illegal in their interactions with each other."

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school... ;-)

RichM March 3rd, 2008 12:42 pm:

"I don't get the joke about the tiger. Can you explain it a bit more? (What are "trainers"?)"

Hi RichM, someone above has already covered this. It just never ceases to amaze me that in a land where you can buy ten types of soft drinks and spend hours upon hours deciding what type of parabolic skis to get from among countless models, Americans are content with watching thirty second commercials and voting for tweedle-dum or tweedle-dee. It's not that this behaviour isn't replicated elsewhere, it's just that in the US it is on such a grand scale. Do you think the US is simply too big to be governed properly?

RichM March 3rd, 2008 1:30 pm:

"the Democrats have succeeded in putting executive branch crimes beyond the law, & in destroying constitutional rule"

It sure looks like that, doesn't it? Will Obama and the Democrats just quietly go back to business as usual? Who will make a fuss, the Republicans? I can almost hear the Republicans chanting "close Guantanamo now!! Bring our troops home!!". Not likely.

jlocke123,

"Do you think the US is simply too big to be governed properly?"

This is something that's crossed my mind as well. It seems feasible that with a country as large and diverse as the US, it would get increasingly difficult to govern it in a truly democratically representative way - hence, the increasingly fascist tactics.

I think new ways of governance, if not a complete restructuring of the country, may be in order.

And, still, there's one question that remains wholly unasked and unanswered:

Who the hell have they been illegally spying on for nearly EIGHT YEARS without oversight or supervision?

No terrorists caught, no sleeper cells uncovered, no major financing streams unearthed, no plots preempted, even the "anthrax killer" remains at large. With all this illegal spying, not a single drug kingpin nailed? Mafia Don? Parking ticket scofflaw?

Why isn't anyone demanding proof - any at all - of one, single, real result from EIGHT YEARS of unfettered, illegal spying? Hell, we're paying for it - what are we getting for our money? Everyday we're warned that no illegal spying means DEATH TO US ALL. Fine - all we ask is that you prove it.

EIGHT YEARS of illegal spying. Zero results. On that basis, why continue? Unless there's something else going on they're not telling us (stop laughing...)

Just when are these Demo-bastards going to get the message that we're fed up? I'm pissed and outraged. How do they go home and face their families at the end of the day, knowing that they're destroying America? Don't they want to leave some semblance of freedom for their own children?

iammyself, you are so right. I was part of the Redwood City napalm plant vigil and fast over the Easter weekend of - if I remember rightly, 1967. We had leafletted the workers coming out of the plant with photos of burned babies and they had turned their heads away and hurried past us and then it was dark and we were sitting around a campfire when there was an excited buzz. Saul Alinsky was coming to vigil with us and sat and talked with us for a few hours. He was a guru of community activism, and old. He was so wise, so calm and centered, we were so young and eager. There were only about two dozen of us who had stayed on for the weekend vigil. And he joined us for awhile, shared his wisdom, answered our questions, listened to our opinions. We felt thrilled to be in his presence. "We" mostly being Concerned Citizens of Palo Alto, started by a Quaker group which unknown to us became infiltrated by the FBI - as if they had anything to fear from Quakers, the most nonviolent bunch on the planet.

Hillary Clinton wrote her thesis on Saul Alinsky and Barack Obama modeled his community activism in Chicago after Alinskys' work. Hillary went on to create the DLC and Obama went on the reject the DLC. So it goes.

kathyodat

Makes you kind of wonder if they haven't perfected some kind of mind control device. It's just astonishing to watch this happening. It's kind of like before the war when the administration was making all these bold statements about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and imminent attacks. You assumed they must know something they aren't telling us or we're not getting the whole picture through our own sources. That the must have air tight proof of such things. It all turned out to be outrageous lies that they should have been run out of office for.
The only terrorists I see in this country our the ones running it. Now they make laws that retroactively protect themselves from justice. It makes me just madder than hell.

Democratic voters continue to get the Democratic politicians they voted for.

Democratic politicians remain confident that no matter what happens, Democratic voters will vote for whoever the Party offers up as a candidate. Absent a real threat from voters, the Democratic politicians are free to pander to the media and the donor class.

The Democratic voters have bought into the unimpeachable logic of the Lesser of Two Evils, and the Two Parties Like it or Not System. But they are still claim surprise and anger at the inevitable unintended consequences of this voting strategy. They look for someone to blame (the DLC, the media, Nader, the Republicans...), but fail to acknowledge that, in agreeing to throw their weight into defeating Republicans in elections, that they have abandoned ALL other values.

Why then would they expect such values of the politicians they've elected?

And whose job is it to maintain the integrity of our constitutional republic if the voters have other priorities?

Barry

I used to get caught up in the debate over the Democratic Party. Were they complicit with the Republicans and just giving patronizing lip service to their followers or were they the spineless cowards that so many believe them to be? I came up with the conclusion that it doesn't matter. What does matter is that the Democratic party is useless. Absoulutely nothing has changed since the 2006 elections. Bush still gets everything he wants. The Dems are still always "afraid" of how they will be labeled so they might as well let Bush have his way so they don't get trashed. The result is that our democracy and constitution are melting away like the Antarctic glaciers. What a sad commentary on our so called leadership.

iammyself sez: "... we need to move K Street to Guantanamo Bay."

Bingo.

Perhaps Mr. Greenwald has sold the Dems short with this article. Maybe their recalcitrance on the telecom bill was simply a negotiating tool, and earned a few more zeros on their K-checks.

Then again, maybe some intern misplaced the Reichstag Model 1933 rubber stamp and it was just located.

The Democratic Party certainly has a knack for making it hard to feel good about being a Democrat.

At least Republicans make their sociopaths, hypocrits and fools like being part of that gang.

Good for you, STARTREKLIVZ!! I've responded in like in e-mail requests for money from the DLC and DNC. How nice to be able to say it to a human ear from someone asking for donations! They aren't getting one d*mn dime from me either. Only ones like Dennis Kucinich who REALLY represent me are getting my money.

I tend to think the problem with the Dems in our government (at least 99% of them) is that they are owned by the corporations. They care more about their careers being threatened than they do the American people. That's why they put up and shut up.

Someone like Kucinich and McKinney are not owned by the corporations and are true public servants as witnessed when both of them have lost their political seat (Kucinich when he was Mayor) in simply doing the RIGHT THING FOR THE PEOPLE.

None of the others would ever EVER put their selfish ego-building careers on the line for the people of this country or any other country. They care only about themselves and their ill-gotten gain.

RichM, great posting. But the mind control is not a sinister hidden thing. We call it the main stream media. They create the reality and everyone has to predicate their opinion around that reality, even if they vigorously dispute little pieces of it, as Chomsky points out.

Thus, all media, including Amy Goodman, treated the Iran NIE last year as great new info to help stop the invasion of Iran. Only some on the internet pointed out that there was no reason to believe that Iran had a nuclear weapons program in 2003, that we were told they had now stopped. The "left" accepted the NIE "reality" as a given.

Just as, five years later, Common Dreams still prints articles announcing that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! They lied to us! Well, many of us knew that in 2002, when the mass media and the Bush junta started the drumbeats of war. But they create the reality, and we are still patiently debunking it 5 years later.

Every once in a while, I post a comment pointing out that capitalism can't be fixed, that we need to move on to a cooperative sustainable economy based not on mining and destroying earth's resources, but on sharing them with each other and conserving them for future generations of humans and other beings.

When I come back, usually no one has commented on such a wacky vision. It is outside the bounds of permissible thought in America to suggest that capitalism is not the greatest system possible, so no one gives it a second thought.

It reminds me of a Reader's Digest story I once read about neighbors who each had a dog, with a fence between them. The dogs spent their days running back and forth and snarling at each other. One day, there was a hole in the fence, and the dogs got to it, and stopped and looked at each other. Then, they resumed their snarling and running.

When you say the House Dem leadership is 'self-destructive', you assume they have goals and objectives they don't have.

They seem to have two goals. One is to remain in power. While I would pray that they'd be replaced by Green party leadership after a massive voter rebellion this fall, I doubt that will happen. Their second objective is to rake in as much money as possible. Again, they appear to be successful. They went to the K-street lobbyists and announced that now they expected to be paid. They have been. Corporate donations to the Dems are soaring, even from sources like the weapons, nuclear and oil industries that normally one would think wouldn't support Dems.

If you think the Dems are still the party of the FDR New Deal coalition, what's happening seems wrong and incomprehensible. But if you think of the Dems as another corporate party with a center-right agenda, they are on track and doing just what they think they should be doing.

The Dems have abandoned us. We need to figure that out and quit trying to cling to them and make them something that they abandoned 20 years ago.

Vote Green!

When people vote for lessor-evil, why are people then surprised when the people they elected are evil?

Paying taxes to the US government is a crime—and it's immoral.

The whole thing is a complete fraud.

You guys are all jealous because the 2 party system really is working.

How else could the rich have kept getting richer over the last 40 years, widening the income gap to pre-depression levels?

You have to control 2 parties to do it and the corporate oligarchy has done just that while letting us think we have had a choice when we really did not.

We should have understood why the rich haves started hiding in secure gated communities in ever greater numbers in the late '80s and early '90s.

The Dem support of the repuglican administration and its policies since 2006, has finally made public the real state of affairs.

And the Sheeeepies keep wagging their tales behind them.

Martin Luther King tried to tell us what was happening, especially his talks in the year he was assassinated.

We ignored his words at our now peril.

What else can you expect in a nation that loves its one-party system, a nation that whines and complains and sulks about Ralph Nader's desire to add a touch of competition to the presidential race?

I think we should all start wearing -GREEN SHIRTS- for the next 4 years so they can see their fate.

A 4 year GREEN PARTY !!!

And they have the courage to blame Nader for the mess we're in. Let's never forget that Democrats are responsible for Iraq, and everything else, as much as Bush and Cheney are. They could've stopped Bush if they wanted to, Democrats had at least 40 senators for every second of the Bush presidency and could've filibustered each and every one of his criminal enterprises. But no, they chose to be Bush's co-conspirators.

Democratic voters are just like those battered wives who keep going back to their wife-beating husbands. They never learn.

BigStinky: "Just when are these Demo-bastards going to get the message that we're fed up? I'm pissed and outraged. How do they go home and face their families at the end of the day, knowing that they're destroying America? Don't they want to leave some semblance of freedom for their own children?"

Is that a rhetoricle question? If not the answer is that your don't matter and they don't give a sh*t about voters or America.

re:
"I doubt there are very many Americans who expect at this point that the Democratic leadership will take a stand against the President due to any actual beliefs. But shouldn't politicians be at least a little bit shrewd about their own political self-interest? As craven and ugly as their capitulation will be, the political "strategy" they chose is actually just more self-destructive than it is anything else. Obviously, they have no real political principles, but don't they have any strategic instinct at all?"

The Dems don't need any strategic instinct so long as there are oceans of volunteers to solemnly declare that voting Democratic is the only sensible, permissible choice.

I'm not a democrat. I'm an independent. I only voted once for the lessor of two evils - in 2004. I thought I would NEVER do that again. I supported Kucinich, and then rather reluctantly supported Edwards. I used to think that my primary vote mattered. But it really doesn't because by the time I get to vote in the primary in May, my vote for my choosen candidate is for one who is no longer running. So I'm going to vote for Kucinich in May.

The longer this discussion goes on about the dimms v.s. the repugs, I am becoming more convinced that it dosen't matter who wins anymore. Nothing will change. The fundamentals of our government are so screwed up at this point, it really doesn't matter who is pulling the levers of power because the right and left hands (d's and r's) are both connected to the bloated body of the corporate fascists.

Given that nothing is going to change for the better no matter who gets elected, I'm no longer afraid of the outcome. McCain? Hillary? Obama? It really doesn't matter anymore. November? Probably McKinney. If Kucinich isn't nominated for his seat, maybe we can get him to run Green!

""Just when are these Demo-bastards going to get the message that we're fed up?"

When we stop electing them!

Vote Green. Vote Independent. Just don't vote Dem. The one thing we most certainly have the power to do is to end these people's political careers. We can send them home. We might not be able to win ourselves, but we can damn sure make sure they lose in most contested races.

Its win-win for us. We actually get to work for and vote for candidates who truly share our beliefs. And we get to send a very powerful message by kicking these fools out of Congress.

The problem the left has is that it has not demonstrated any real political power in decades. We constantly vote for these pro-war, pro-candidates that always sell us out. Then we turn around and whine that they don't listen to us. Why should they? They get our votes for nothing.

Take away our votes. Watch them lose elections. If you want to send a message to any politician, make them lose and send them home!

seriousprofessor wrote, "The Dems don't need any strategic instinct so long as there are oceans of volunteers to solemnly declare that voting Democratic is the only sensible, permissible choice." tetti_tatti wrote, "Democratic voters are just like those battered wives who keep going back to their wife-beating husbands. They never learn." Rebel Farmer wrote, "Given that nothing is going to change for the better no matter who gets elected, I'm no longer afraid of the outcome." RichM wrote, "Someone posted a great Chomsky quote here yesterday: "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." My reaction to all this is simply this: If you have an option to vote for a Green candidate in the primary, do so. If you don't have such an option this year, vote Democratic and then reregister as an Independent or Green and get busy buildling a Green Party political infrastructure where you live. Commit to voting out the imcumbents, democrats and republicans. Our fellow Progressives, who still don't get it, will come around when the dems start dropping like flies. That's when we welcome them with open arms and enlist them in an energetic attempt to build alternatives to the two-party system. An alternative option (for those of little faith) get a foreign language under your belt, have your passport handy, have an exit bag packed with your most precious mementoes and enough foreign currency in place overseas for six months bare essentials, steel yourself to go abroad and renounce your U.S. citizenship and become a "stateless refugee" and get on with your life and don't look back. If you have foreign relatives abroad, convince them to sponsor your immigration. Believe it or not, there are better places to thrive than in the good ole USA. If you're convinced you can make no difference, you owe it to yourself and your loved ones to get out and move on. If you think I'm nuts, read Bertram Gross' FRIENDLY FASCISM: THE NEW FACE OF POWER IN AMERICA, 1981.

PS ... the above is step one.

Step two is when the Dems decided they do want to win and are serious enough about it to come and negotiate a real coalition with us. We might not get everything we want then, but we'd at least have a strong bargaining position to use to get something.

Come to Denver in August to let the Dems hear what you really think of them! Come in the millions, to create a voice so loud it can't be ignored and that will be heard no matter what security perimeter they set up.

Denver in August would be at least one place where the American people could say ENOUGH!

Glenn's articles are generally pretty good. I think I'd have gone just one step further and suggested that politics is like a great big dysfunctional family, in which certain kingpins think/speak/act out of alignment with themselves. That is, if you were to genuinely give an analysis of their term in office it would be based not on what they think (you can never quite look inside the skull), or what they say -- but ultimately what they do, the artifacts of their behavior.

So it's essentially irrelevant what the reasons may be for Democratic capitulation, cooperation, co-option, corruption, etc. The bottom-line effect is the deliverables of their actions -- or inactions as the case may be.

RichM March 3rd, 2008 6:57 pm
----
"Does anyone have any suggestions about how a stake can possibly be driven through the heart of this simple device? The one that lets these dummies so easily say, decade after decade, "Well, given our options, and the absolute necessity of defeating McCain/Goldwater/Bush, I am voting for Obama/LBJ/Clinton/Kerry."
----

Seems to me that if there were a motivated progressive party then the right would be split between the two corporate partys. It is true that they are currently sharing over 90 percent of the vote, but if after a few elections a progressive party were to be seen to be steadily picking up votes then that progressive party would be picking up creditability to the point that the "no alternative to the republicans but the democrats" argument can be put to rest. (Possibly if the Greens had not self-sabatoged three years ago they would be the third alternative - I think it can be argued that the progressive movement paid a stiff price to support the democrats).

FDR was not operating in a vacuum. He was pulled to the left.

Also begin to discuss -> how do we design and build a party that is highly resistant to corruption by corporate power, and how do we design and run elections to be highly resistant to corruption by corporate power.

"House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes "MUST GO", as do many other Democrats and Republicans who believe that the Constitution is just a "goddamned piece of paper"!

At what point does the shredding of the United States Constitution become an act of tyranny?

It will do no good to vote for any of the candidates for president. None of them will be our savior; they will all disappoint and appall us. Remember all the brave words spoken in the 2006 elections? Yada yada.

What chaps my ass is that politicians take us voters for granted. I think it was Howard Zinn that described "Jacksonian Democracy," wherein the voter is given two parties so that each can rescue us from the other in turn. We feel we have made a choice.

Nader won't get elected, but if he did, he would be defeated in his efforts to bring reform, at least for as long as he remained alive. The world is closing down. Cultivate local survival communities.