As we are still revolving as a planet, at least it seems that way - under heavy cloud cover so I can't be too sure that the sun has been moving horizon to horizon, I have a rather distinctive feeling that Bush's Tour of World Destruction carries on.

For example, is Congress up to anything important?

With that in mind, let me peer down a bit closer on the planet and see whether the rest of the world  may have stopped everything awaiting the returns from Arizcaliwanevtana.

So, McCain promises there will be more wars.  I don’t know whether he has anything in mind or whether he is speaking generally.  If the latter, it’s a stupid thing to say if you are running to lead a nation exhausted by war since we all know, as in the most basic "Duh!" sense, there will be more wars.  It’s part of the human condition.  If he has something specific in mind, e.g., where we will go next, he needs to be run out of town now lest we elect someone who comes into office wanting to be the chess master where our kids and siblings and parents are the seemingly-regenerating pawns.

Then, this morning, I wake to see Murtha writing over at Huffington Post.  He discusses the cost of this war and the need to spend so many billions in order to get our military back to the level of readiness at which it should be, while paying for the continued costs of this war after it is finished, and the need to expand the size of our military.  Meanwhile he takes a little dig at our allies and mentions all the other fiscal problems we have as something in passing.

Wake the fuck up!

I think Hillary's strong enough, smart enough, and tough enough to be a decent president.  She may be a good one if elected.  I am endlessly frustrated by her centrist take on things because the middle ground between this version of the GOP and the rest of America is still a god-damned pit of despair.  Most of America is where the Democrats are on almost every issue.  I also find despair in Obama's apparent niceness in the face of what will be a nasty, brutal, ugly fight with the GOP if and when he becomes the nominee.

As far as experience goes for anyone, I am not that concerned.  Bill was not too terribly experienced but he made up for it in intelligence and curiosity.  I remember, after not voting for him in 1992, reading an article about how he would spend evenings in the rafters watching Congress do its work so he could learn more about the processes... constantly taking notes and researching to learn more about how it all comes together in Washington.  Experience is overrated especially where it meets intelligence and leadership abilities that allow one to surround oneself with competence.

The Dick Cheneys, the Bushes, the American Dominionists deserve one another.  None of them believes in America and none of them would find success in the ideology that made America.  All of them believe in abusing fear, running truth out of the room, and semantically twisting law, legislation, or language that pose potential barriers in achieving their desired ends.**

_

Before I get more serious, I’ll give you this:

The Ps in GOP: Power over Pelf.  Pelf over Politics.  Politics over Party.  Party over Policy. Policy to PerPetuate Power via ProPaganda Provided by Pelf for Paid Pundits*

The Ps in People or Public are severed from this perpetual loop.

Onwards...

And perhaps a few points for discussion, debate, correction, and, upon refinement, use in getting a grip on who we are in light of RW propaganda.

I don't pretend to speak for everyone here but I will say there is a hint of truth in what EnderRS said since it does apply to a few people... very, very few.  It does NOT however apply to the WHOLE COMMUNITY... au contraire, it is probably not the truth for the vast, vast majority of people here.  It may be that coming in with a conservative mindset, one tainted in the 90s by a group who ran BS conspiracy stories and trotted out a new country-endangering controversy every week on behalf of the Clinton administration, that conservatives are overly inclined to paint with such a broad brush everyone here.  The lefty model for this is something like assuming that all right wingers are apocalyptic, bible thumpers hell bent on christianizing 'me.'

This diary is done at the suggestion of teacherken from a comment I offered in his diary this morning.  He wrote in response to an article by a person high on his list of respectable, dependable thinkers who seems to have lost hope in the ability of Democrats to change things, essentially arguing his resignation that there is little to differentiate between the two major parties in US politics, as has been argued by others.

Certainly many of us, who I trust do give a great deal of thought to politics, have felt similarly in the seeming inability of Democrats to really stand up to the GOP juggernaut of recent times.  In any event, teacherken asks for ideas that may allay his concerns over this article, i.e., when someone this trusted by you begins to argue along these lines, it may be time to rethink some of the stands that you have developed and that have formed the background reasoning for much of what you say and do.

A Call

I call on Congress to represent the people.  I do not demand impeachment but I do demand that you assume your rightful place as representatives of our power and subject this executive and this judiciary to our collective discontent.  Act as you must to ensure that they do not have the power to do any further damage.  Then, act as you must to correct the damage done to date by this administration.  The will of the people was clear in two executive elections where the current executive did not garner a majority of the vote from We the People yet they act as though they have the full force of history, the full backing of the people, and the full support within the Constitution.  Clearly, We the People have reached different conclusions and on these you, as our true representatives, must act.  Within this action, you will be supported by the power behind you whether on the street, or in the media, or in our hearts, or even by those who claim ownership of the truths inherent in the US Constitution whether or not they carry the citizenship.  Let us be your guide, as is necessary in a democracy if you wish to prove that we still are a democracy.  If you cannot, we will enforce ourselves the will of the people.

The most likely D candidates of today will not end the war because if s/he hasn't done anything to end it before then and it is still raging, s/he will not win the nomination.  I don't care how much coin s/he has for a campaign.  S/he may even do exceedingly well in the primaries but s/he will not be the D nominee for President.

In truth, there is a chance that by that time rolls around things may have been improved dramatically in Iraq.  There will still be no WMD found.  AQ will still be hanging around plucking us off as they are able.  I/P will still not be solved.  But, the vast majority of those doing the fighting today, i.e., the Iraqis, may come up against a local movement that forces them out, or they may simply exhaust themselves and reach some peaceable consensus.  We may be able to renew their oil industry, rebuild schools, ensure their public infrastructure, get hospitals modernized and running, have a government that knows what it is doing and have a local police force that is doing it's job.  In short, by the end of 2008, everything may be just beautiful and the GOP will tout their victory to the high heavens and may use it to launch themselves into the WH with another hawk.

I've been on a big Tears for Fears kick of late and, today, sitting down on the bus, I remembered the words of Tears of Fears' massive hit of 1989, "Sowing the Seeds of Love."  At the end of the bridge, Roland Orzabal throws in the line "Kick out the Style, Bring back the Jam!"  This is a reference to Paul Weller and his second band, The Style Council, and the migration to that from his former band, The Jam.

The Jam was exceedingly popular in punk circles as radically political and revolutionary with a very open socialist message.  Weller moved on to forming The Style Council which was something of a jazzy, pop, lounge act that danced between songs about relationships and politics in the early days to much more lounge pop romance although the lyrics still hit on solid political topics from time to time.

Riding back on the bus today I popped on the headphones and turned on The Style Council on the iPod.  I pulled up "Walls Come Tumbling Down."

An open, angry, heartfelt, unedited letter to whomever is willing to listen (for a long ramble)...

Democratic Leadership:

There is no compromising with this WH.  There is no third way out of this.  There is no compromising with the GOP in its current incarnation.  If you are too damned thick to have learned that from roughly 5 of the past 6 years, if not the past 12, then I no longer have much use for you (a point I am reaching faster than I thought possible).

There have been a number of diaries on this issue but nothing in the past week or so.  This issue must get the attention it deserves.  If the bees die, and they are dying, we will die.  That is not hyperbolic.

I strolled over to Huffington Post and found a link to this article in the Independent.  Fuck Cheney's 1% doctrine when it comes to his pinheaded, hiding-under-the-skirt, chicken-shit militarism.  This is something deserving of a 1% doctrine.

In short, our voices are needed and fast.  Is it mobile phones?  Is it GMO?  As a subset of GMO, is it crops specifically designed by oversized ag. companies marketing seeds to produce plants with non-productive seeds so that growers are forced to return to those ag. companies to buy seeds in the next season?  Is is a new parasite, a new fungus?  I don't know, I don't care, I don't want to demonize anyone, any company, any industry.  I JUST WOULD LIKE TO SEE SOMETHING DONE.  Is there a line of bees that seems to be resistant to whatever is killing everything around it and how quickly can this line be 'recruited' to save us from ourselves (if indeed it is us)?

My apologies for the paucity of links in anything I write as I reference other ideas but I read too much and am too poor a researcher being so many years removed from academia to catalog everything.  In any event...

Glenn Greenwald laid out the case, in Salon (don’t worry about a day pass, just buy the subscription), that we have all been striving to make for nearly six years now without actually using the words Nazi or fascist.  Eloquence can bring about such results.  Using what David Brooks, I am certain, thought were innocuous ramblings of someone who can’t quite put their finger on the doubt tickling their few active brain cells, Greenwald launches into the rhetorical equivalent of a long-awaited sharpshooter’s bullet.

Now that I have your attention...

I am bloody fed up with the purity police picking at the phrasing of words, or even the words themselves, of those who are putative allies.  I know you've been disenfranchised and had the shit kicked out of you historically.    But, I for one am not going to worry about the words I use or how I use them if people can't get past that point to look at intent.

There are 6 billion special cases on this planet!  Most of them used to look up to the US as a model of how to govern, work, live, and behave towards others.  That's been shot to hell after 10 years of Bushes, 8 of Reagan, and 6-7 of Nixon in the White House, and 10-15 of the GOP in charge of Congress with their mix of social and political authoritarianism which uses the religious dupes to empower the oligarchs and send the kids of the rest of us off to useless wars while limiting the rights of any 'other' they can find.

1. If you want to know what the Founding Fathers thought of the balance of power in our government, and you don't want to read about it, think about this: Whose offices are on CAPITOL Hill?  Why c-o-m-p-r-o-m-i-s-e?

2. From the first days of this Administration, e.g., the Energy Task Force, after running a campaign on bringing respect back to Washington after the Clenis Horrors, they have shown time and again that they deserve not one iota of a benefit of anyone's doubts.  Why c-o-m-p-r-o-m-i-s-e?

3. They ignored the professionals in the run up to the Iraq war about what was needed - hell, they didn't always ignore them, at times they listened and then fired them - and insisted it would be cheap, easy, and quick only to prove those same professionals right at every turn.  Why c-o-m-p-r-o-m-i-s-e?

I read comments here frequently espousing socialism and condemning the free market.  Quite frankly, these make me recoil, steeped as I am in the literary, economic, social and political history of the former Soviet Union.

I grew up with sweet visions of the brotherhood of Soviets and how they banded together to develop an industrialized economy, throw off the shackles of monarchy, and beat the living hell out of the Nazis.  As I learned more, those romantic notions became nothing more than sweet, i.e., quaint, since I learned that the Soviets just recycled the oppression of the czars under a different banner and about the atrocities committed against its own citizens Although, from Brezhnev's time onwards things loosened up considerably, albeit slowly (until the US had a belligerent president who called them evil and joked about beginning bombing in a few minutes - which forced a massive cultural/political clampdown for a brief period).

I began my graduate studies in Moscow almost 20 years ago and took all of this knowledge with me.  I studied with a few Americans in an American program but spent my time out of the classroom and with Soviets themselves because, as I always have in my travels, I figured, "What's the point of leaving the US only to surround oneself with Americans?".

(This has yet to be fleshed out and I am counting on readers to help do that - I don't have time to write too much and am hammering this out, based on my notes from the commute in today, paragraph by paragraph as able in between meetings and phone calls)

I was watching this video over at Crooks & Liars yesterday and I was disgusted by Barr's comment that the problem with conservatism today is that it is too tightly aligned with the GOP.  I was disgusted to see Norquist as well and his comments since I see him almost every day as he walks down L Street, NW (his office is around 19th/20th & L), and I bite my tongue lest my company, family and self come under suspicion and are 'rendered.'

In any event, Barr's complaint means he is at best one of the two: oblivious  or disingenuous.  At worst, he is both and more.  This has been the plan of conservatives ever since Nixon's downfall.  They were all a bunch of snot-nosed punks in favor of the imperial presidency and, for those in the Nixon WH or affiliated with it, in love with the aura of power that surrounded them as part of that administration.  They also carried the label of Goldwater conservative.

Okay, so I pop over to HuffPo and see one of the headlines there that the Georgies are prompting Jeb to run in 08.  I had a discussion on this a few weeks back with a buddy of mine and the first thought that popped into my head was Bush's executive order from 2001 essentially sealing Presidential papers in perpetuity which followed the sealing of a number of Reagan's papers (for an extra bit of paranoia, read the last sentence in that last letter).