Gather round, gentle souls, and lend me your ears, as I relay the story of a great divide.......
There was a time.......not so very long ago.......when people could come together.......when they could work together towards a common goal.......when they could share ideas and often disagree and even engage in spirited but productive debate, the end result of which would be to pass laws and instigate actions that would ultimately make the country, and even the wider world, a better, freer and more just place for all who inhabit them.
Yea, there were indeed two opposing sides, and these sides each had their own set of principles and goals and ideals. But in the end the two sides could come together to do things like battle tyranny, overcome economic turmoil, spur innovation, create a dialogue with other nations, even reserve parcels of land as beacons of nature and respite for all creatures and forces of nature and the perpetual benefit of all citizens.
But then all at once came a great cataclysm! We stood in hushed awe as a retired second-rate movie actor stood up and said, “Government is the problem.” And he spoke of government’s real obligation being to enforce morality and decency. And he spoke out on behalf of those who proclaimed that AIDS was God’s punishment for the abomination of homosexuality. And he created the lasting, impenetrable illusion of economic prosperity.
And he was hailed as a hero throughout the free world.
And as a result, I contend, today the natural distinctions between the two opposing sides could not be any clearer. They are simply these:
The Democrats, in their present incarnation, have good ideas. They want to make sure all the people are well-fed, well-educated, and healthy. They want to maintain the freedoms we’ve had for 230+ years (okay, admittedly, some of us haven’t had them quite that long) while ensuring that all citizens pay their fair share, both financially and through active participation in the process of governing, so that this grand experiment in democracy can thrive and continue to lead the world in pursuing liberty and justice for all.
And these same Democrats prove with every opportunity that comes their way that they are completely, totally, hopelessly incompetent at bringing their ideas to fruition. No matter how large a majority they secure, no matter how much political power and influence they obtain, they manage, without fail, to honor some ironclad guarantee that their good ideas will never, ever evolve into the laws that govern our land. Never. Ever.
If their wonderful ideas to promote and pursue liberty and justice were an inflated balloon, and that balloon were located at the North Pole, and the only threat to that balloon was a pin, and that were located at the South Pole, then even if there were no means of transport and no natural forces that could ever possibly connect the pin and the balloon, the Democratic Party would move heaven and earth to ensure that our glorious balloon and our demonic pin would meet, somehow, somewhere, so that the balloon would have absolutely no chance, no possibility whatsoever, of remaining intact.
The Republicans, in their present incarnation, have horrible, destructive ideas. They want to manipulate all social, political and economic engines that drive the entire human race and all man-made, and even some natural, forces that make up the planet Earth and its myriad of ecosystems. They want to ensure a wholesale tyrannical conquest of our land and our rights, and complete eradication of all those lovely freedoms that have represented our national spirit lo these past 2 1/3 centuries, by a conspiracy of conscience-free aristocrats and demagogues whose only understanding of America is that the very rich should just keep getting that much richer and the rest should be forever beholden to them, and that freedom is whatever rich, white men say it is and can change at any time, without warning and without any dissent, according to the vicissitudes of their needs and desires, or merely according to their whims.
The Republicans want to cut taxes to the bare minimum, but only for those who already have so much money that they can buy and sell ordinary, hard-working people for their own amusement. They want to cut government to the point where its entire array of functions consists of: 1) making laws dictate by, and for the benefit of, those same obscenely wealthy individuals; 2) having the world’s most powerful military operation, in which young and hearty progeny of the ordinary hard-working people go all over the world enforcing the will of those same obscenely wealthy individuals; 3) collecting taxes from the ordinary, hard-working people to fund the aforementioned military operation; and 4) building roads and median strips.
And these same Republicans prove with every opportunity that comes their way that they are absolutely brilliant at bringing their ideas to fruition. By mercilessly bullying anyone who disagrees with them. By passing laws of communication and commerce that ensure that the nation’s airwaves are reserved almost entirely for those who agree with them and carry out their efforts to bully those who disagree with them. By launching obscenely expensive wars that make the world safe for no one and nothing but bring great financial and ideological benefit to themselves and their disciples. By deliberately interpreting the most sacred texts of the world’s dominant religions solely for their own benefit, when it’s clear by their actions that they only believe the words that appear in those texts to the extent that they can interpret them to their own benefit. By letting the spawn of Satan rule the entire nation and all of its allies with an iron fist for eight years while disingenuously giving him the title of “Vice President.”
They apply their ingenious methods every time, and in spite of the fact that so many people claim to see through their machinations and manipulations, these ingenious methods seem to work for them every time, no matter what.
And so there you have it. Polar opposites. A clear difference. Isn’t it good to know the two opposing sides aren’t identical after all?
5 comments:
quite interesting post. I would love to follow you on twitter.
If only good ideas were enough. What a world it would be. Unfortunately the people with the bad ideas have most of the money and have bought off the dems just like the bought off the republicans. At this point, I'm pretty sure it's intentional, not mere incompetence, that the dems won't use their majority. Obama's White House and the congressional leadership, especially Harry Reid, keep the progressive caucus on a short leash to keep them from enacting any legislation that might offend their corporate sponsors. And they cut loose the Blue Dog democrats to forestall any progressive legislation under the mantle odf "fiscal discipline" (even when the status quo, or their own counter proposals, are more expensive in the long run). We saw this during the health care reform three-ring circus last summer and fall. Demopublicans like Max Baucus and Ben Nelson were intent on stripping the reform out of health care reform. We could have passed health care reform with a strong public option and then under the guise of "bipartisanship" it managed to get whittled down to two weak bills, one of which, in the Senate, didn't even have a public option that would give the government power to negotiate for lower prices, yet would actually require people to become customers of the insurance companies that are ripping them off.
Dems get elected on their platform of good ideas - then do minimal follow-through. And they don't have to, because where are their voters going to go? I'm not saying the two parties are identical, but the Dems are merely enablers of the Republicans' active efforts to undo all the progress made for the middle and working classes since the early 20th century. They talk about meaningful changes like a consumer financial protection agency, then don't fight for it. They complain about bankers' bonuses, then keep on pouring money into bad banks who are still getting rich off of toxic assets.
Our political system is controlled by money and both parties cater to business interests in practice, even if one party is able to talk out of both sides of its mouth.
BTW: here's one link you might want to add to your side panel
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/print
Matt Taibbi's always spot on, but this article in particular lays out a complicated scenario of the Wall Street meltdown in graspable terms
Anonymous,
I wish I could offer you the option of following me on Twitter. Unfortunately, I am clearly way too verbose and too madly in love with my own prose to be restricted to 140 characters at a time.
Also, as a writer-writer (as opposed to a twitter, or a tweeter, or a twit, or whatever), I have some ideological issues with Twitter and the zeitgeist it represents.
I do appreciate your reading my blog entries, though, and I really hope you'll keep doing so.
Thanks again,
S.D. Aron
"Cemopublicans" is a good way to describe the political class that inhabits the federal level. Once elected to Washington, party distinction gives way to money and making sure the corporations that provide it are given every priority available.
And Dems are no slouches at making sure the military aspects of our culture stay strong:
http://songofhiram.blogspot.com/2010/03/bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-bomb-iran.html
Rachel,
First off, let me apologize for the long delay in replying to your comment. I wanted to give it the same level of attention you did, and my schedule has been a bit hectic for the past month.
I pretty much agree with everything you wrote, and it kind of makes me want to weep. I do concede there are clear differences between the parties, but in the end, you're absolutely right, it's the Corporate States of America, with the right-leaning corporate party usually shouting down and/or out-bloviating the left-leaning corporate party.
I was one of those many fools who genuinely believed Barack Obama would bring real change to this country. I didn’t “drink the Kool-Aid” per se, since I knew that realistically he’d meet with a lot of resistance and it would take some time. But then the first thing he does is appoint Wall Street lackeys like Geithner and Summers to the posts of Treasury Secretary and top economic advisor, all but ensuring that banks would be propped up once again (we all seem to have forgotten the S&L debacle from a mere 20 years ago), while the voters who put these hacks in office would receive an endless smorgasbord of lip service and bupkis when it came to real progress or assistance. And, of course, we’re still in Iraq, at a pricetag of $20 to $30 billion a month, 14 months after inauguration day. So obviously time wasn’t a factor – he had no intention of keeping his litany of promises to change the status quo.
It also brings me no joy that the GOP’s auxiliary brain trust – Palin, Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Malkin, et al – are using the massive quagmire that is the Obama administration as a springboard to argue that Republicans do a better job of running the country, and their blindly loyal followers continue to shout down anyone or any information that might divert them from their rage-fueled charge towards complete ignorance.
I suppose that sort of reaction is to be expected – let’s face it, the mouthpieces on the left take the same liberties when the opportunities present themselves – but the aforementioned bloviators and their ilk are just so completely disconnected from anything resembling objective fact that they even continue to argue the current deficit problems were caused by Obama and the Democrats rather than by the Bush wars, the Bush tax cuts and the unfunded Bush Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit.
Re: your recommendation, I’m a bit ambivalent about Tabibi. I read him from time to time if the particular subject he’s covering interests me, and I think he's an excellent writer, but I’ve often found him to be a bit too knee-jerk for my tastes. I think fundamentalism at either end of the spectrum is the archenemy of progress, so I’d rather hear, and participate in, reasoned debate than automatically side with an extreme, even if I agree with the ideology.
Anyway, you read enough of my bluster in the blog entries, so I won’t bore you into catatonia with an overdose of it here. Suffice to say, we’re pretty much on the same page, although I’m not sure what much I can do about it save for adding my two cents once a month or so. I think the federal, state and even local governments in this country have a reached a point of such ionic entrenchment that social revolution will never bring anything but more lip service. We’re going to need actual revolution, but even there the two sides are so unwilling to compromise about anything that it’s beginning to look like the warring factions of communists in the years during and after the Russian Revolution. And the result will likely be pretty depressingly similar. I just hope I’m not alive to see it, although that’s where the weeping comes in once again. I weep for my nephews, now 8 and 6, their entire generation, and the ones that follow.
S.D.
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