Yesterday I watched a discussion on "This Week with Just another Corporate Whore", (Oops that should have been 'with George Stephanopoulos'), between Bernie Sanders and Lindsey Graham concerning the escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

I found myself laughing out loud at the TV when I watched this discussion. Bernie Sanders on several occasions talked about the out of control spending and passing the cost of this war on to the next generation. He also talked about the need for a public insurance option to control rising health insurance costs. Graham never mentioned any concerns around paying for the war or concern over reigning in health care costs.

I bet if you brought in a bunch of people from other countries that knew nothing about our politicians, had them watch this interview, then ask them to identify who was the "conservative" they would guess wrong and pick the self proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders.

What made the whole thing even more hypocritical was that I had just finished watching a bunch of Republican talking heads on CBS state that Republicans were physically conservative compared to out of control spending liberals.

Go figure. Only in Amerika...

Tom

I appreciate Greewald's efforts to keep the criticism at the institutional level without descending to partisan sniping.

q

More of the same old, same old. Pigs at the trough. And theyb don't mind these accusations because the money, power and peer prestige just keeps rolling home for them.

I lived in Indiana when the elder Bayh was senator. If there is a more backwards place in the usa I have yet to find it, and I have traveled alot.
This is what passes for reasoned debate there.
What I have to say about indiana is that I liked viet nam better.

Sad and destructive history of the last decade?? Try the last thirty five years! The only people who remember what it was like when this country actually supported the middle class are over 50 years old. Now, a disappearing middle class fighting over crumbs passes for normal. Decades of crushing debt in order to get a college education passes for normal. As do prohibitive camping fees, free music, art, and sports in schools, free access to museums, parks and beaches, free clinics. Our criminal "justice" system brutalizes poor kids and protects rich kids. This country is looking more and more like a hybrid of Soylent Green and 1984. The only people who can get elected are of the ruling class or willing to sell out to it. The public gets it's news from the lying M$M that is owned by the corporations running the country. The only hope I see for us is that enough people will get fed up with being ripped off to force change. I believe things will have to get worse for that to happen. And they will. The bankers showed us that greed is a positive feedback phenomenon. Like a law of nature; the more you get, the more you want.

People need to realize we actually do have strength in numbers, and to find ways of informing themselves other than the propaganda they're being fed by the ruling class.

When the people fear their government there is tyranny,
when the government fears the people there is liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

If the stereotype of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" occurs with this current Democratic Congress, then prime Blue Dog douche bag Evan Bayh will be fully complicit in it...and he will be richly rewarded by his corporate buddies.

Greenwald Nails Bayh!

Bayh is one of my senators. In early 2003 in the run-up to Dubya's invasion of Iraq, I wrote to him (an actual hard-copy letter, not an e-mail)saying that war would be a huge mistake and another quagmire (this was when people were saying we'd be greeted with flowers). His reply was at least a full page long and right out of Dubya's propaganda playbook: Saddam was evil, he had WMD, mushroom cloud, urgent necessity for our national security---the whole nine yards. In my naivte I was simply astonished that a Democrat could either fall for the lies or be promoting them as though he were a loyal follower of that lying sack of shit from Texas (Yale).
I also wrote to my other (GOP) senator, Richard Lugar, whose reply contained many of the same points but actually sounded more reasonable.

Too bad Greenwald didn't find a way to use the terms "despicable," "sleaze ball," and "war monger" because that is what Evan Bayh is.

-30-

That Bayh was even considered an appropriate Veep by Obama ought to tell us much more about Obama's real character than the one manufactured for him.

Bayh is a prime example of the Roman Senate's Proconsul who governs a state and facilitates the landed and powerful while the rest of us facilitate the corporate ceasar.

Only workers and consumers are allowed. Citizens need not apply.

Jeevee

Only God (or Mother Nature) can stop this unutterably insane Second Dark Ages.

EB's top bribers - finance, insurance, real estate.

At #2 - who else: Sachs of Gold, Man. Er, I meant Goldman Sachs.

I miss the old days when the bribing of politicians was mostly secret. Now, it's wide out in the f**king open, and all We The People do is shrug...

"Hey - look at me. I took millions from the Banksters! Whoo hoo! Vote for me me me!!! (Paid for by The Owners of The Place, Inc. committee to re-elect another easily bought-off whore.)

"I'm Evan Bayh and I approved this message... because my owners told me to!"

senator nothing in an empty suit, a child of the media, someone who has nothing to offer except empty pleasantries and a well practiced smile. whatever happened to the concept of noblesse oblige? if anyone should possess it in spades, it's this guy. but in america, enough is never enough. if you have 10 million, position yourself to make 10 million more. why let scruples or devotion to a higher good get in your way? coddled, cultivated, and rehearsed, this empty suit is the personification of all that's wrong with the ruling elite in this declining country of ours!

The Democratic Party has been usurped by divide and conquer Republicans like Bayh and other cons. Libs need to take it back.

Apart from a dwindling handful of exceptions, ALL of our Elected Misrepresentatives are rotten. Even the spotless dove, the resplendent peacock, and the celestial nightingale will mutate into hideous, grotesque predators while roosting and nesting in the radioactive branches of the Tree of Power.

I don't think it constitutes Abusing the Comments Section to Walk My Idiosyncratic Pet Peeve(s) (I've got a million of 'em!) to restate my abiding conviction that our federal government institutions have devolved into a professionalized para-corporate service-delivery system operated by technocratic managers and executives.

It is effectively a collective, a hive-mind. The Collective is an amalgam of the very old, and the very new: it's medieval, insofar as each Elected Misrepresentative is also a party vassal loyal to its overlord-- for one party, this equates to the sitting monarch; it's very new, insofar as Amerika at least pretended to be a constitutional republic for a century and a half.

Even the above-cited "dwindling handful" are compromised. They differ from the norm-- no, not Norm Coleman!-- because they still retain a vestige or husk (or pretense) of conscience, and are unable or unwilling to wholly conceal their moral agony from the public.

But one can't be a true individual with only only one foot in the Collective, any more than one can be a little bit pregnant. One can't live off The Collective Power Grid without buying into The Collective.

I agree with Glenn's perspective on Bayh, and I'm not faulting Glenn for singling him out here. I simply see Bayh as a personification-- or should that be a "de-personification"?-- of the Elected Misrepresentative Collective.

This view is inimical to the "incremental change" model driving Glenn's "Accountability Now" project. I fear that the "more and better Democrats" solution is insufficient to overcome the Collective's formidable and burgeoning defenses. And BTW, I'm really finding it hard to resist using the Star Trek "Borg" collective to finish this point; it's ideal for the purpose, but some may not be sufficiently familiar with it.

However, I can safely cite the well-known lapidary dicta "Resistance Is Futile" and "You Will Be Assimilated".

It's akin to sending the least-compromised and most-superficially-principled candidates as "moles" into The Collective, in hopes that they will over time counter-corrupt the Hive Mind and cause it to reach self-destructive tipping points.

But, as the 2006 elections proved decisively, the "anti-Bayh"s are promptly absorbed into The Collective. They may make human noises for a while, but before you know it they're cheerfully practicing the Art of the Possible and Not Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good hand over fist. Rome wasn't razed in a day!

The Collective, Hive-Mind, Borg perspective, while metaphorical in nature, IMO is more than an abstract metaphor; it is a reality.

All of the familiar cautions and abjurations against stereotyping, generalizing, collective blame, etc. notwithstanding, Glenn's accurate and insightful diagnosis of one case of tree blight is enhanced by recognizing that the tree is part of a living class or community-- a sociopolitical forest ecosystem.

I think it's necessary to keep in mind that Amerika has actually established Titled Classes to run things, and that the Titled Class of Elected Misrepresentatives persists above and beyond individual attributes, e.g. party affiliation and idiosyncratic ideologies, values and agendas. Such classes are expressions or manifestations of the economic system underpinning and overarching mundane, everyday politics. Our Elected Misrepresentatives can be accurately described as Capital Fellows, to a (wo)man.

I struggle to bring this into focus, because it easily degenerates into mere ad hominem denunciation. To merely say wholeheartedly that a Portrait of Evan Bayh is a Portrait of a Typical Elected Misrepresentative Pod Person, while valid and true, isn't very compelling or persuasive in and of itself.

My hypothesis is that "we" have allowed our politicians to devolve and transmogrify into technocratic ruling-class aristocrats, despite the superficial retention of the mechanisms of a constitutional democratic republic.

Our government is using the same game board, pieces, and loaded dice. The rules printed on the inside of the box cover have been amended, though, creating a game-within-a-game in which ordinary citizen-players have become the played.

· Yr Obd't Servant

chicken hawk not fiscal hawk. this bitch would die if
someone put a gun in his hands in earnest and told him
he had to fight and would get a friends blood on his hands.
its a sad commentary on our third world country that
a punk like this is elected to such a high seat. there
ought to be a rule that these clowns actually have to
go up to the front lines instead of sitting in a highly protected
place in a war.or better yet send his kids to iraq!

Simply another DEM human stain.

The psych-ops prescription is conveyed in the ivy-league politics curricula: Calmly but firmly speak only the handful of confirmed talking points, including the deficit, spending, and national security. None of it is coherent, but that's ok, because the audience is mentally shut down. The monkey suit, the talking points, and the calm voice are targeted not at a tree stump, but at an audience that is spellbound by the relentless repetition of this formula for decades, unable to think, because thinking is prohibited. Only swallowing is allowed. Of course the USA is ripe for revolt, after the monkey suits failed to secure the nation, failed to stabilize the economy, failed to uphold the rule of law, failed to reign in imperial misadventures, failed to halt mass exploitation, and failed to set responsible policy on every account.

Beware! What "other" cost cutting does Bayh favor in order to dig deeper into the Afghan quagmire? Social Security? Medicare? Welfare for orphans?

Evan Bayh is a first class phony and closet case Republican as well as a neo con jack ass, not so much unlike Homer Capehart, whom his father put out to pasture in the 1962 midterm election. He has almost nothing worthwhile in common with his father.

Also similar to Capehart in his day who was a McCarthite all the way, Bayh is also a modern day McCarthyite seeking to panic people into a hysteria which might sooner or later destroy the USA.

AD

Christ what a barf-bag Bayh is. Greenwald is spot-on to point out that this piece of white-bread, blow-dried filth is the quintessential face of modern American politics: staggeringly self-serving and irresponsible while mouthing endless platitudes about "responsibility" of every kind. All the while, he and his ilk drown the increasingly destitute, desperate and alienated populace in rivers of red ink and trans-national, mega-corporate exploitation.

Let's get down to it, Common Dreamers. As sure as the sun will rise this ludicrous country will bounce back and forth between the Republi-plutocrats and Demo-plutocrats until the last American -- homeless, jobless, destitute, utterly terrified by non-existent threats, wearing an ankle bracelet and a Britney Spears t-shirt -- has lapsed into a diabetic coma after downing the terminal high-fructose corn syrup-laden Hostess snack cake his final food stamp purchased from a rusty vending machine on the outskirts of a flooded trailer park.

America is a hellhole. Get your family out while you still can.

To fake_french---

I thought about leaving but I'm staying in Indiana despite the "white-bread, blow-dried filth" that is Evan Bayh. My paternal family has been here since 1811 when we hobnobbed with Abe Lincoln when he was a youth working the barges on the Ohio River near Perry County. That was back when the "civilized" Miami Indians were mingling with the invaders after the Treaty of Greenville. Bayh is a traitor to his own history. I am not.
CF: Treaty of Grouseland (wiki). Indiana is incredibly corrupt and is, like Lieberman's "Connecticut," built on the leveraging of "insurance." And of course our governor is the inestimable Mitch Daniels, former Dubya budget chief and the Napoleon of the West! He auctioned off the Indiana northern toll roads to private corporations for the next 75 years. Now he wants an I-67 big highway to cut through from Indianapolis to Evansville as part of the NAFTA HIGHWAY. Nearly "shovel-ready," dontcha know... I'm staying to fight the bastards.

-30-

I remember his father Birch-- he must me rolling over in his grave. Maybe Evan will get a visit on Christmas eve.