In one of the best pieces to appear since November 5, Thomas Scott Tucker talks, on his own site, about where the Democratic Party came from, where it went and where it now has to go, to survive.
In the wake of November 5, who will the leaders of the Democratic Party blame? The weather in Minnesota, the Greens in all fifty states, or the man in the moon?
The junta in Washington frightened, seduced or merely distracted, us with a war of its own invention. Is this nation cowardly, insane or just plain stupid?
Never mind. The consequences will be the same, regardless of the answer.
The people who illegitimately seized power in the last election now control every* institution of our national government and have free rein to accomplish their mean and dangerous program of greed and violence.
This was less an election than a second mugging.
The nation and the world are almost certainly doomed. What a pity it has all been accomplished without a real contest, and by such small minds.
Ah, but you and I both now see that it’s 5:30 in the morning! Won’t it look better in the daylight?
No.
* Think of all the federal judgeships in the land, and the nasty appointees on the way.
__________
For a somewhat less end-of-the-world reading, see Bloggy.
In the context of a letter to the editor responding to a really problematic NYTimes OP-Ed piece by Thomas L. Friedman, the writer includes a compelling european view of the U.S. today.
The United States is the friendly but overweight neighbor who owns a big house and a big car, has a pile of junk in his backyard, thinks he owns the block and walks around waving his gun. This neighbor doesn’t bring on envy, but he sure does raise some eyebrows.
[Barry and I are sharing this greeting today.]
An Election Day post courtesy of Thomas Scott Tucker’s “Open Letter.”
We knew there had been at least one reason why we had some negative feelings about Paul Wellstone:Whatever can be said in favor of Wellstone’s record has been said by the editors of The Nation, the leaders of NARAL, and indeed by the editor of Open Letter. But the crude contempt the Democratic Party leadership shows for the historical record will also now be inscribed on the same historical record. Paul Wellstone’s votes for the Defense of Marriage Act, the Afghanistan war, and the Patriot Act reflected the rightward drift of his own party. That party is dominated by the Democratic Leadership Council, which even Wellstone never troubled to deny.
Maybe the big story in the arrival of hundreds of Haitians on the Florida coast is not just the interruption of traffic or even the clear preference of our laws for Cuban refugees over their Haitian counterparts. A letter in the Daily News states the obvious.
Open shores
Forest Hills: Where is homeland security when hundreds of Haitians run aground feet from our land, swim ashore, crowd a U.S. highway and hitch rides in broad daylight?
Tom Mortensen
One right-wing pundit, who shall not be otherwise dignified with an identity here, has pointed out that most potential terrorists can read newpapers and have access to television. It should also not be necessary to point out that boats are almost as easy to access as guns in this country.
But the Bushies are keeping us safe, right?
Oh sure, they’re gonna “open their files.” Actually, it’s simply a continuing coverup of Vatican complicity in the Holocaust, and a transparent propaganda move, to show historians “the great works of charity and assistance” undertaken by Pius XII for prisoners and other victims during World War II.
VATICAN CITY – Some 3.5 million files on World War II prisoners of war will be made public by the Vatican in January as part of a promised release of documents intended to counter criticism of the papacy during the Holocaust.
The Daily News story continues with a cautionary note.
The files are believed to deal exclusively with the treatment of POWs during the conflict and not directly with issues surrounding the Holocaust.
Critics of Pope Pius XII, the wartime Pope, argue that he failed to raise his voice and use his position to head off the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis. Defenders insist he made every effort possible to help Jews and others.
Jewish groups and others have been seeking a complete opening of the Vatican archives.
Boondocks’ Huey really says it best, and it makes a great sound bite, should any of us find ourselves under a microphone in the near future:
Just a reminder that the economy is in the toilet, we’re on the brink of global war, our government has been hijacked bycorporate crooks, teachers still don’t make money, and because you haven’t done anything to stop this, you’re a pathetic excuse for an American.
Oh what joy! To be able just once to say to the Bushies, “Take a Hike!” and know that they heard, and that so did everybody else.
WASHINGTON – The sons of the late Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone said Vice President Cheney wouldn’t be welcome at their father’s memorial service last night, sources confirmed.
“The family thought it wouldn’t be appropriate. They were concerned about the difference in principles between the two men and believe me it’s principles here, not politics,” a top Democratic operative told the Daily News.
At a certain point, we have to admit it and we have to say it, “those people are evil!”
How far has The Left gotten by being nice, playing it like it was all only a game or a cocktail party?
The Right doesn’t play.
[Yesterday a Middle East intellectual] suggested that there was a double standard in the extraordinary reaction against Mr. Hussein today compared with the world’s inaction when he turned chemical weapons against Iran and even against Iraqi civilians.
“If chemical weapons are bad, why when they were used against [Iranian] or Iraqi citizens wasn’t Iraq condemned and pressured?” he asked.
The man who posed the question, responding to reporters’ questions while on a visit to Spain, was President Mohammad Khatami of Iran, representative of the “Axis of Evil.”
Mr. Khatami, a midlevel cleric who studied philosophy, is the first Iranian leader to make an official visit to Spain since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1965. He is using the occasion to press his campaign for the “dialogue among civilizations” that he introduced at the United Nations four years ago.
At Complutense University in Madrid, he delivered a speech on Cervantes and his relevance in today’s world. In the course of the speech, he cited Proust, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Kafka and Mann, and criticized modern-day Don Quixotes who lack his “kindhearted, merciful and humanitarian” nature and “ruthlessly assassinate and annihilate people with their huge war machines.”
Although Khatami’s question about chemical weapons went unanswered in Madrid, we should know the answer. In the past, the weapons were only directed toward brown people, and now they are about to be turned on white ones, or so we are told.
The whole answer is too complex for Americans, and for that reason, as well as for what it tells about our greed and hypocrisy, it won’t be put forward by Washington.
More from this notorious evil-doer.
In a sharp criticism of the United States, President Mohammad Khatami of Iran said today that his country opposed a war against neighboring Iraq and charged that Washington’s misguided campaign against terrorism had strengthened support for Osama bin Laden in the Muslim world.
“Have the erroneous policies of the United States made bin Laden more popular or more hated than before in various sectors of the Islamic world?” Mr. Khatami asked in a joint news conference with the Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, during a three-day official visit to Spain. “Have the erroneous policies of the United States weakened Islamic trends that favor wisdom and democracy? The United States with its hegemony has strengthened bin Laden, so we ought to condemn it in some way for supporting terrorism.”
And finally.
Mr. Khatami even likened the logic of Mr. bin Laden to that of President Bush.
“I hear a discourse from two poles,” Mr. Khatami said in his native Persian. “One is the voice raised from Afghanistan by bin Laden that says, `Whoever is not with us must be destroyed.’ The other is the voice from the United States that says, `Whoever is not with us is against us.”‘ He added, “That is a logic which on one side leads to the most atrocious forms of terror and, on the other side, on the pretext of confronting terrorism, creates the worst type of atmosphere for waging war.”
Fanatics madly spin the world and reason is made whoozy.
Gore Vidal is not afraid to offend, bless him.
America’s most controversial writer Gore Vidal has launched the most scathing attack to date on George W Bush’s Presidency, calling for an investigation into the events of 9/11 to discover whether the Bush administration deliberately chose not to act on warnings of Al-Qaeda’s plans.
Vidal’s highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled ‘The Enemy Within’ – published in the print edition of The Observer today [JAW–I actually bought the Sunday Observer today, since the full text is not avalable online] – argues that what he calls a ‘Bush junta’ used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home.
Vidal writes: ‘We still don’t know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta.’
Vidal has always seemed to annoy even those who would be expected to agree with his arguments, but I have always thought it is basically because he comes off as an aristocrat (he is) and because he comes off as a faggot (he is), and not enough Americans are comfortable with either.
Actually, I think we should be very grateful for the product of both of his outsider identities.
He represents much of the best of both of these eccentric elements of American society (one waning quietly while the other waxes loudly), and that, after sufficiently crediting his intelligence (and who said real intelligence is valued in America?), his solid position within those unpopular orders explains much of the power of his social and political criticism.
The novels are still a guilty pleasure, but the essays really do it for me.