Dear Voice of the People,
That 22 Democratic US Senators voted shamefully to censure MoveOn.org for their patriotic ad supporting US troops who were betrayed by General Petraeus has caused me to lose all allegiance to the Democratic Party. Although I am a life-long Democrat, this is the last straw. One bill after another is killed by Republican filibuster threats, so that a Democratic majority cannot even manage to pass a law to restore the centuries-old Right of habeus corpus. Instead they condemn concerned Americans for exercising their sacred right of free speech. Did the Democrats ever filibuster to stop Republicans from abolishing our Constitutional rights”? Did they filibuster to stop the GOP from abolishing all environmental laws, to allow corporate polluters to wreak havoc on the environment? No, they were too polite to stand up for Americans.
A huge majority of Americans expressed their outrage over the continuing Iraq War by kicking out the Republicans en masse in 2006. Bush has the support of 29% of Americans. But the Democrats are still too cowardly to stand up to the threat that Republican liars will accuse them of “not supporting our troops” if they stop funding the war. The cowardly Senators (Lieberman and McCain) who pranced around Baghdad while surrounded by hundreds of US troops with heavy air support and claimed it was like a picnic, never talked to any real soldiers. The soldiers I know in Baghdad would leave Iraq in a second, given the chance, but they are held there like slaves without any hope of ever leaving. Lieberman and McCain choose instead to listen to General Betrayus, who was coached extensively by the White House before his “independent” testimony to Congress. He was coached by the likes of Bush and Cheney, cowards who refused to serve their country when they had the chance, even though they supported the concept of others going to fight and risk their lives on their behalf. Telling the troops they have to spend the rest of eternity in Iraq is NOT supporting them. It is condemning them to death.
The Republicans are bent on destroying the US government. One needs only to hear the manifesto by Grover Norquist, one of GW Bush’s favorite neo-con advisors. He advocated bankrupting the US Government by outrageous deficit spending combined with cutting taxes on the rich, both of which Bush has done in record time. Norquist said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Bush has managed to abolish most of the Constitutional Rights that all Americans enjoyed for 240 years. He has nearly destroyed the “safety net” for poor or disabled Americans. He has refused to accept international law including the Geneva Convention. Bush has declared himself to be an absolute dictator, and Congress has fallen all over themselves bowing to their new King.
Clearly the Republicans are anarchists, so we cannot vote for them. But the Democrats are such cowards, they will not do what they promised, even when they have the support of 2/3 of the American people, and even when their goals are to end a war for oil, to stop pollution and global warming, and to restore democracy to America. If the Democrats will not defend American rights, who will? The only choice is to vote for third party candidates. I see no other option.
Sincerely,
Captain Proton
That is the question, isn’t it – to choose between the Republicans (I’m not sure ‘anarchists’ is the right term or heinous enough to describe them) and the Cowardocrats.
Nice start to a blog you have here. Keep it up!
While I agree that this is a shameful mess, a disappointing betrayal by the Democratic Party, I would not reach the conclusion that third party candidates will be our salvation, either. They might, but they might not.
What I perceive is that the other options are to stop expecting electoral politics to be the locus of social change. As my best friend in DC confirms for me, electoral politics is at best but a reflection of the political will (or ill will) of the nation. It is reaction, not action. Or else, action contrary to the yearnings of the people. Should it be this way? No, but it is, and we have other means at our disposal than simply throwing up our hands and sighing. We shift the national consciousness, and that will eventually be reflected in government.
As the 1960s taught us, even Democratic presidents can lead the country in poor foreign policy decisions. It is thus up to us to look for social change not only in elections but in interpersonal relationships, in local political influence, in direct action, in spiritual transformation of individuals and institutions….. We have many spheres of influence beyond the voting booth, and we need to be bold in using all of them. We have many options, and when we are duped into believing that voting – for any particular person or party – is our ONLY option, then the elites of this patriarchal, white supremacist, ecocidal, imperialist social system will have won indeed.