Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Well, meet the Wal-Mart 22: the House Democrats that voted against an amendment to bar any spending of money by the Department of Labor to implement the infamous deal the department made with Wal-Mart last February, giving the bastards advance notice of any child-labor inspections of Wal-Mart operations.

Need I say more?

See if any of your favorites are among the batch. I bet they are:

Marion Berry (AR)
Sanford Bishop (GA)
Dan Boren (OK)
G. K. Butterfield(NC)
James Clyburn (SC)
Bud Cramer (AL)
Henry Cuellar(TX)
Artur Davis (AL)
Diana DeGette (CO)
Harold Ford(TN)
Charles Gonzalez (TX)
Ron Kind (WI)
Jim Matheson(UT)
Dennis Moore (KS)
Mike Ross (AR)
John Salazar (CO)
Vic Snyder (AR)
John Tanner (TN)
Mike Thompson (CA)
Bennie Thompson (MS)
Ed Towns (NY)
Al Wynn (MD).

After Tuesday's offyear elections the voice of the electorate will be heard to say, "Time for all levels of gummint to put on their sensible shoes" -- or at least that's how they'll hear it up at DNC/DLC headquarters.

Just imagine the triumphant braying -- "Fellow citizens! The nightmare is ending... the 5 year elephant stampede is rounding its last bend and unstoppably headed for the cliff edge. The bums have just smashed a little too much of the nation's sacred crockery. The people through the ballot box will .... errr... in fact already are... calling 'Halt! Halt you brutes! We've had enough of your big brass banding. Bring back the lute and flute group!' "

Amazing, eh ???

Time for the pawl in the ratchet to fall into place. For every time there is a reason, to every cause a season -- or something like that. After all this nonstop big big flappy-eared fun and frolics, it's time to cool our jets from the Beltway to the green zone. Yup, here and abroad too, "it's cleanup time" -- a role that suits the self-confining subaltern jackass party to the last syllable of its recorded wonkery.

And just you poor folks watch -- all the big neoliberal Bullwinkles of the party will want in on the mission. From now till Christmas time they'll bob and bounce across your screens -- no screen wide enough to contain their gassed-up, ballooning self-importance. The bigger the rack, the bigger the stride, each one trying to look more sensible and stately then the last.

Let's pass over the obvious Senate hams (other than my pal Grack's pinup girl, our relentless holiday queen of tarts, lady Clintaxe). They're all burnt-out cases. What will prove really au courant, really so this year and holiday fashion, are not all these stale stentorian gas horns, but instead all those milktoast, sunbelt dembo governors we've got, stretching from Virginia to the Rio Grande.

Their cry will be some colorless variant on the legendary Camelot punch, one part 90 proof long-aged donkey nonsense to three parts citizen sacrifice -- and oh yeah, a sprinkle of GooGoo nutmeg.

So brace yourselves for endless choruses of their hook line: "steady ways and prudent hands can fix what ails this great great country of ours."

Looming in the wings as next chief of fiscal surgery? -- who but Wall Street's own blended and bonded Bob Rubin, of course! And can old Doc Bob ever carve a mean budget.

Of course as usual, he'll leave the suturing to nobody special -- "I do the hacking, not the hackery."

It's an interesting pattern, worthy of analysis, how right-wing Democrats consistently provide the "edge" for measures like this. How do they get away with it, time after time? And why do people who hate measures like this -- people who consider this sort of thing deeply evil -- stay in the same party with repeat-offender war criminals like Lieberman and Landrieu? This mystery lies at the heart of how the American political system works. It's like an ingenious little bit of engineering -- an escapement, maybe, or a planetary gear -- that solves the most fundamental design problem of some complex machine.

The problem, as I see it, is how to make sure that people who aren't fully on board with imperial hubris and plutocrat rule keep playing the political game, but never win anything substantive. You want 'em in the system, pushing that rock uphill, trying to get liberals into Congress and ex-liberals into the White House; but you want to ensure that they never reach the summit and change anything important.

This is the Democratic Party's raison d'etre. And shuttlecock aisle-crossers like Lieberman are the crucial little bit of engineering that keeps it working according to spec. Any time the less enthusiastic imperialists get numerous enough, or nervous enough, to give the emperor a thumbs-down, the shuttlecocks do their thing. It's like two fairly evenly matched basketball teams -- the Reds and the Blues, let's call 'em -- but a couple of guys on the Blue team will always shoot a basket or two for the Reds whenever the Red coach wants 'em to.

Of course, the great question is, why do the other Blues stay on the same team with these guys?

Well, it wouldn't happen in basketball.

You would think Hillary could no longer surprise me, but she does -- day after day after day. I'm always amazed when she runs true to form. Time to go back into analysis, I guess.

Yep, you guessed it -- the It Takes A Village girl had nothing but praise for Sharon's cattle-pen strategy. (Israel's wall is about four times as long as the Berlin Wall, by the way.)

"The primary responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens," she said. "That is the No. 1 priority. And after trying many things, it became necessary to pursue the security fence, and I understand that, and support it."

Were the ex-Arkansans thinking at all about the semiotics of the sequence -- sniveling over the bombing victims, and then, a few hours later, exulting in Israel's determination to rub Arab noses in the dirt? Was it just dumb, ugly-American ineptitude?

Well, maybe. But you know, I don't really think they're dumb. I think they must have known that the sequence would make a statement -- both abroad and at home.

How the statement would be heard abroad probably didn't concern them. These are not statesmen, or stateswomen, or a statescouple, or however you say it. In other words, they don't really worry much about America, or what may happen to Americans, or to the world -- in which Americans, like other nations, must live -- as a result of their little lap-dance for the Israel lobby.

No, they were thinking about sources of funding at home for the '08 election. And the little visual sermonette about the "victims of terror", combined with the usual Democrat blank check for Israel and whatever enormities it cooks up, sent a very clear message to the folks who really count.

Now I have a word for all you daily-Kosniks, and Deanites, and other starry-eyed dreamers who think the Democratic Party can be made a force for good: In 2008, this soulless monster will be your candidate -- she, or somebody even worse. Do you really, seriously, in your heart of hearts, doubt it? You know you don't. Well. You have three years between now and then. Do you want to spend them working vainly to reconstruct a party that will, in the end, present you with a Hillary vel sim. and ask to to go to your neighbors and explain, feebly, for the Nth time, that she isn't quite as bad as the other soulless monster?

You have, as far as we know, only one life. Three years, even if you're a young person, is not a small chunk of it. Can't you find some better way to spend your time?

Some good stuff in this piece, right from the lead: "Everything that needs to be known is now known." Love that alliteration, guys -- might have come right out of Beowulf. But "now"? Surely everything that needs to be known was known a long time ago?

attention
  straying   donkeys of the house

LISTEN UP CAREFULLY


cause im
only gonna  warn u once

     WANG THE MERCILESS AND HIS POSSE
                     ARE
                              IN TRACK DOWN MODE

    the hunt is on

any one of u pissants
  caught  aiding and abetting
  this himmlerian nonsense
                             called..... the patriot act

by whatever means  at all

by  votes or non votes

by log rolls or sweet rolls

be on guard
don't even touch that cops bible

or

i will  sniff u out

i will throw the klieg lights upon u

i will tack ur vile  squirrel's  hide

to the tallest cell tower in your district

is this clear enough???


if u  lift even the tinier of ur two  pinkies
to further the life of this   criminal  flash back

i will see to it u are destroyed

if u so much
as nod
in the direction
of these foul cookeries
these spurious
spectral menaces

i will find u out

and believe me
                u spongelike freaks
   before im done with u
         i will
make horns grow out of ur skull

  heed me

or
                          BE DAMNED

It's not the world's most entertaining read, this piece -- the Nation's editorial board generates prose so solemnly self-important that a Security Council resolution, by comparison, reads llike something from Wonkette. Abstract nouns grow thick as mangroves, woven together with an impenetrable tangle of cliche, as the board excogitates the hard choices facing America today. (Sheeit, this idiom is catching.)

It all reminds me of a tiny Left faction that I used to be part of, back in the early 80s when the anti-nuclear power movement was at flood tide. Our cell had some real iron-butt long meetings, trying to decide whether or not anti-nukery was OK under our exegesis of Marxism-Leninism. One particularly tough-minded comrade cautioned us that we shouldn't endorse anything that might come back to haunt us "when we take state power" -- hey, we may need these nuke plants.

Likewise, the Cardinal Archliberals of The Nation, like a shadow cabinet preparing for its turn in office, observe that the Iraq war distracts us from "real threats" like "more terrorist attacks, jeopardized oil supplies, rising tension with China, the spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction...."

Seldom has the liberal's intellectual imprisonment been more plainly laid out. These poor guys have no conceptual apparatus other than the worn and never-very-sharp tools of conventional wisdom. They actually use the phrase "national security" twice in the same paragraph with this list of editorial-page bugbears.

• "Terrorist" attacks -- why not just "attacks"? What does it add to call them "terrorist," except to reassure the reader that The Nation, like other right-thinking folk, doesn't approve of 'em?
• "Jeopardized oil supplies?" Geez, guys, don't you occasionally publish an item on climate change? What could possibly be better than jeopardized oil supplies -- except perhaps oil supplies that are completely gone?
• "Rising tension" with China -- what is this supposed to mean? Whose fault is it? What should be done about it? Or is it just a causeless, qualityless badness buzzing in a vacuum? One thing is for sure: we should be very, very scared of it.
• And of course, top of the pops as always, WMDs -- or rather, the "spread" of them: as if we, or the world, should be more worried about a nuclear Iran than a nuclear United States or Israel.

But that's a topic for another day.

"The show's over, guys. "

That's John Murtha this week. Listen to these phrases out of an old bemedaled vet-hawk's mouth:

" I just spoke to the Democratic Caucus and told them my feelings about the Iraq war... not going as advertised... a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.... The American public is way ahead of the members of Congress ... our troops have done all they can ..."

But here's where he really strikes the heavy telling blows, opening with this line:

"Our military is suffering," He proceeds to peel out this knuckly Whitmanesque series of suffering, mutilation, butchery -- hard in-the-face stuff.

One can only glare at chicken hawks like Cheney with a mortal fury. after receiving such a salvo.

"I've been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed almost every week since the beginning of the war...." boom boom boom.

And then this for the Rummy-type neo-clam civilian pin pushers:

" Many say the Army's broken... Some of our troops are on their third deployment... Recruitment is down ... the military's lowered its standards.... They expect to take 20 percent Category 4, which they said they'd never take ... forced to do that, to try to meet a reduced quota."

His plan :

"Turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. .... before the Iraqi elections, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice. ... The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. No schedule which can be changed, nothing that's controlled by the Iraqis... an immediate redeployment of our American forces."

And this final pearl:

"All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free -- free from a United States occupation... It's time to bring the troops home."

Quite a moment he created, this aged puffy dough-boy Tip O'Neill figure standing up at the podium, looking bleary-eyed, looking like bathos and old bilge, weary at last with the hackery of it all after what, thirty years in Congress? -- this now nearly flightless bemedaled old VFW stager.

And yet, behold what emerged -- and with a dogged sidewalk majesty. Clio needed him, fellahs. Maybe for only this one moment, but there he was ... very, very powerful indeed.

What is most delightful is that this unlikely paladin has outflanked all the Great White Hopes in the "progressive" camp of the Democratic Party: the Barak Obamas, the Russel Feingolds.

Murtha's courage and common sense are still in short supply among his colleagues: only two other Democrats joined him, and his resolution was defeated 403-3.

A quick galnce at the Census results shows that it is, to say the least, decidedly blue-collar: The 2000 median household income was $30,612. Only 6% of families had incomes over $100,000. 20% of families with children under 5 were below the official poverty level. 14% of the population over 25 were college graduates.

As the guy says in the opera, Traulich und treu ist's nur in der Tiefe; falsch und feig, was dort oben sich freut. Loyal and true are the depths -- false and frightened, they who enjoy life on high.

So we can probably expect to see some Bobby Kennedy moments over the next few months, as cynical, mendacious, murdering creeps like Hillary and Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman -- well, maybe not Lieberman -- will all of a sudden have a Road To Damascus experience and discover that, like Bogart in Casablanca, they were "misinformed".

Forgiveness is a great thing, but these are cases where we need to hold a grudge.

Go get 'em, Dick! Don't let 'em off the hook! These creeps were right there with you going into this, and they should go down with you. Get 'em in a death grip and don't let 'em go until you're all in the Dumpster together.

Meanwhile, in wealthy, well educated Rye Brook, NY, Hillary Clinton was afraid to give the same message to her enlightened, ultra-Blue constituents.

"It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state the way Afghanistan was, where terrorists are free to basically set up camp and launch attacks against us," she said. Probably without blushing at all.

In a way you have to hand it to Hillary. She has her own kind of honesty. When she's bought, she stays bought. I don't know exactly who's put the injun sign on her, although the Israel lobby wouldn't be a bad guess. They wanted this war bad, and they'll find that their latter condition is worse than their first once the US runs down the flag and packs up.

So Hillary has her orders, and she's staying the course. For the time being. It'll be fun to watch her wriggle when she finally decides she's got to fight free, somehow, of this particular tar baby.

Most of 'em seem to be MIA. -- Well, Paul Hackett has boldly demanded an apology from the admittedly scary Jean Schmidt for calling Murtha a coward. It would have been bolder, of course, if he'd been in the same room with her at the time, as Murtha was.

What would be really bold would be if they joined Murtha in his call for prompt withdrawal. But it seems that's asking a little too much for these ballsy dudes. Hackett has apparently mumbled something about how ill-advised "arbitrary deadlines" are.

Maybe all the earnest democratic-party Eloi who are hoping so much from Hackett et al. should give their guys an arbitrary deadline or two. Like, line up with Murtha by this time tomorrow or we're outta here.

get this clear
my boyz and me
  don't plan on
   lettin'  any "treed"
                donkey war hawk pissants  escape
                            even with notes from their mothers
that old gator
bob graham
may be  trying  to rescue them
                 with stuff like

            "  well .....they trusted their president  ...if they'd  only 
all  known  what i knew"

           horse feathers  bob u know the truth

that execrable  gaggle
of  poll jagging gibbons
  helped vote us into iraq
knowing full well
bush-cheney were shootin  hog wash  at us

      so come what may
short of a  one by one
public mea culpa worthy of
              the late  anna miniani

                    we're  votein  u all  out in 06

and oh ya...
                speaking of cracking open a few  bad eggz   ...

u 43  demo  dirt  slugs that voted to  put diapers on the patriot act
and send it back out to devour our rights
   back  there on the infamous 21 july

remember
  u  got  just one last chance now
to   reverse yourselves

             when that  heads we win tails u lose "compromise"
            comes up for final
                                      house "affirmation"

    vote to kill  or else .....

as in
     otherwise
  we'll make  ur  personal re election run
such a hell    you'll  wish you were
                     out there
                                on patrol  in iraq yourselves

"Maybe ..... give... an arbitrary deadline or two. Like, line up with Murtha by this time tomorrow or we're outta here."

But why not apply it where the big mouths are, i.e. the House "out of Iraq" caucus, as in... demand these loud principle-bristling stalwarts get off the noble posturing and hot-air circuit, and prove to their constituents they mean business. Maybe start by publicly threatening the party honchos: "Either we get a full house Demo caucus 'out now' vote or we 're leaving the party -- flat -- and won't even consider rejoining till the last American trooper leaves Iraq."

They have some leverage here: if they made such a demand -- and were willing to back it up with action -- and the War Democrat honchos stonewall 'em or the vote goes against them, then the donkeycrats can kiss their '06 House majority dreams bye-bye. So the Out of Iraq caucus -- which ought to be the Out Now caucus -- has the whip hand, if they mean what they say enough to use it.

• Waters (CA)
• Lee (CA),
• Solis (CA),
• Woolsey (CA)
• Becerra (CA),
• Farr (CA),
• Watson (CA),
• Frank (MA),
• Delahunt (MA),
• McGovern (MA),
• Tubbs-Jones (OH),
• Kucinich (OH),
• Kaptur (OH),
• Owens (NY),
• Serrano (NY),
• Abercrombie (HI),
• Clay (MO),
• Jackson-Lee (TX),
• Kilpatrick (MI)
• McDermott (WA)

It's been "referred to committee" -- and not one, but two committees: International Relations and Armed Services -- "for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker."

Imagine that -- Denny Hastert gets to play guardian to this resolution.

Nice play, Nancy.

• Becerra, Xavier [CA-31]
• Capuano, Michael E. [MA-8]
• Doyle, Michael F. [PA-14]
• Holt, Rush D. [NJ-12]
• Jackson-Lee, Sheila [TX-18]
• Lee, Barbara [CA-9]
• Lofgren, Zoe [CA-16]
• McGovern, James P. [MA-3]
• McNulty, Michael R. [NY-21]
• Moran, James P. [VA-8]
• Rangel, Charles B. [NY-15]
• Solis, Hilda L. [CA-32]
• Weiner, Anthony D. [NY-9]

Greenfield is a former member of the pathetic US Green party. The "former" part of that characterization initially sounds good; but unfortunately, he only left the party last month, so that he could enter the Democratic primary. In other words, he doesn't seem to have minded the Greens' feeble lie-down-and-die strategy of supporting Kerry back in '04.

Indeed, there is depressingly less to this gambit than meets the eye. The press have taken an interest in it, but running in a Democratic primary is a form of self-mutilation. Greenfield may see to it that she gets some embarrassing questions on the stump, but he won't take the nomination away from her, or deprive her of a minute's sleep.

What would be more fun, and more interesting, and more constructive, would be if he ran in the general election on a third-party anti-war ticket. Even if the war is over by then, people have a healthy respect for the idea of payback -- and there's a lot of payback Hillary is due for, dating back to the way she made us all vassals of the HMOs in her husband's first presidential term. A third party determined to punish a bloody-fanged war criminal like Hillary might just deprive her of her Senate seat, and even if it missed that laudable goal, it would give all the other sellout Democrats something to worry about next time. It's like Voltaire said about Admiral Byng: "il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral, pour encourager les autres" -- it's a good idea to shoot an admiral every now and then, in order to encourage the others. Voltaire, of course, was being ironical; but there's many a true word spoken in jest.

You know, there is such a thing as being too forgiving. It should be a Priority One job for the Bay State anti-war movement to get at least one of these guys out of office, no matter who replaces him. Yeah, it's sheer, bloody-minded, Judgement at Nuremburg vengeance, but it's vital to do it. Democrats need to learn that they can't fuck us over and then get an all-is-forgiven hug when they come to their senses. Particularly in Massachusetts, fer Chrissake, it's an act of amazing effrontery to defy anti-war sentiment like this and then expect to be received like the Prodigal Son when they drag their tails home from their debauchery.

I'm tempted to say we should just pick the weakest one -- the low-hanging fruit -- and make sure he faces a three-way race his next time up, with demonstrators in camo and corpse paint everywhere he appears. And I do not mean a primary challenge: I mean a red-hot lefty running on a third-party ticket in the general election.

But if we feel like being a little more sporting about it, we could make it a contest. Start sending all three letters, like f'rinstance:

Dear representative X:

Do you enjoy your office?

Well then, get us the hell  out  of  Iraq now, 
or buster, you are headed back to private practice. 
No excuses.  Get us out or  plan on a lobby job
starting in January '07. 

Your friend, 

The Electoral Avenger

Only thing these guys understand is punishment at the polls. This is how the gun nuts and the Israel lobby, to name but two, enforce their will. We've gotta learn how to operate this way too. Don't welcome these guys back to the fold. Make sure they and their colleagues understand there's a price to pay when they do the wrong thing.

Dear Howie -- 

This is to let you know that no Democrat who 
had a hand in starting the Iraq 
war will ever get my vote for any office,
including the Presidency. 

If Hillary or Biden or Edwards or -- nefas! -- 
Lieberman is the Democratic nominee in '08, even for 
Vice-President, I'll pull a third-party lever, or write in 
Noam Chomsky,  or maybe just stay home. 

Ditto when these creeps run for re-election. I 
don't care if Genghis Khan is the Republican nominee; 
I will not soil my hands by voting for a war criminal. 

You have been warned. 

Sincerely, 

Fed Up

Send a copy to your local paper, too.