Two posts down, we discussed the proposal that Democrats should support a return of the draft. Now we have Robert Reich arguing that Dems should take a forthright stand in favor of raising taxes sharply.Can this project wait? Nope. Gotta have it now.
Yes, in past posts I've argued for a more steeply progressive tax rate. For that matter, I think the national service idea has merit. But for chrissakes -- we are going into an election. Must we talk about such matters right now?
And you just know that progressives are going to insist that this country have a national "dialogue" on gay marriage in 2008 -- because the issue can't possibly wait until 2009.
I swear, these people want to lose. What's next? Maybe tomorrow some prominent Democrat will argue in favor of legalized rape.
16 comments:
Our country has a horrid deficit, and the bills need to get paid. Americans are smart enough to see past the political game to understand what needs to get done. (At least I hope so.)
The world doesn't stop for an election.
If people will take a few extra seconds to rise above our sound-byte culture where people don't have enough time to explore all the propaganda they're bombarded with, they'll see sound decisions for what they are.
In any case, I welcome a dialog on gay marriage next year.
"Our country has a horrid deficit, and the bills need to get paid."
Of course.
"Americans are smart enough to see past the political game to understand what needs to get done. (At least I hope so.) "
Don't even hope. Ever since Reagan, Americans have been convinced of the popular-but-idiotic equation that "lower taxes = greater government revenue." Not even a surgical operation can remove that thought from the American mind.
For god's sake, GET OUT OF THE PROGRESSIVE GHETTO. Most Americans do NOT agree with you and me. They just don't! They would vote for Jack the Ripper if Jack promised to, er, slash taxes.
I'm not saying that I like that situation. In fact, I HATE that situation. But unlike you, I understand that this is the way it IS.
"If people will take a few extra seconds to rise above our sound-byte culture..."
Yes, and if we clap our hands, Tinkerbelle will revive.
The SubGeniuses have it right: You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, by definition, half the guys out there are dumber than THAT.
"In any case, I welcome a dialog on gay marriage next year"
You sound like those people who insisted that we have a dialog on that subject in 2004 because it COULD NOT POSSIBLY wait until 2005.
How'd that decision work out for ya, bub? Ya happy? Ya glad that all the JesusMonkeys rushed out to vote for Bush because the gay marriage thing got them all riled up? Y'like the way that strategy worked out?
Oh, let me guess: "It's not important that we win. Better the Republicans win. As long as we stay PURE!"
Hey, here's a story that puts it into perspective: Rudy Guiliani is relying on Norman Podheretz to cobble together some bomb-Iran plans:
http://tpmelectioncentral.com/2007/10/rudys_man_podhoretz_details_his_plans_for_attacking_iran.php
Whoever the Democratic candidate is, that person will be the only thing standing between Guiliani and the White House. In other words, if we don't do whatever it takes to get that Dem elected, Poddy-thought will rule the day. And a whole lot of Iranians are gonna fry. Americans too, when the Iranians start firing those Sunburst missiles at our ships.
But hey -- none of that matters.
Gay marriage. THAT matters.
Gotta talk about it 2008. It can't possibly wait until 2009. And it doesn't matter if this all-important "dialogue" electrifies the evangelical vote and motivates them to support a candidate they might otherwise disdain.
And if Rudy wins -- if Iran goes up in a mushroom clous -- well, hell, that's a small price to pay for the maintenance of your damn purity.
Jesus.
I wish every progressive purist had but one neck so I could wring it.
You assholes inflicted Bush on us by endlessly braying that Gore was indistiguishable from the Republicans, and by supporting Ralph Nader.
All those people who have died in Iraq died because YOU had to be pure in 2000. But you are so fucking arrogant, you will always refuse to admit your responsibility.
And now you are going to do the same damn thing to Hillary, assuming she gets the nod (as I hope she does not).
How many people have to DIE to support your purity? Progressive purists are MURDERERS.
You know Joe, it saddens me to see it so clearly played out. America needs to have a multi-party system. Not a third part, but multi-party.
You know up here (Canada) we have a multi-party system. Its so split up that we have a Left part (liberals) a left-er than that part (the New Democratic Party) Then the Greens, Rainbow coalitions, we even have both a Communist Party and a Marxist Leninist Party (talk about Purists, don't dare mention the CP to the MLP-- those traitors!)
And it worked out fine when the Right was split down the middle too (There was The Conservative Party but there was also The Reform Party which made the CONS look like gay baby murdering sodomoites, you know cause they're so Jeesusey)
Then the right united. And so now the left vote gets split eight ways to sunday and the right gets into power (and then we commit to staying in Afghanistan, we opt out of Kyoto. And now, after a decade of growing and selling medicinal marijuana, we are going to turn around with a get tough on crime get tough on pot bill....). So either there has to be something like semi-finals before an election, or else there have to be as many parties on the right as on the left to really make this work.
Thats why up here in Canada, I want to start:
1) the Canadian Fascist Party (almost libertarian, but with more selling off of public services, and some xenophobia, eh?)
2) The Secessionist Party (we have a party who's only goal is to split Quebec away from Canada-- so siphon those votes! Split all of Canada!
3) The Be Jesus Party. To scare the bejesus out of all the sinners, this party will take back the rights to abortions, take away gays rights to marry, and put the 10 commandments up in the courthouses.
See, the way I see it, this is what you need. You need some really high profile 3rd, 4th and 5th parties down there.
You need one that clearly shows how the Republicans are not the Jeesus party, and so Bozarkistan could vote with their bibles but not for the Sodomite-GOPs.
You need a party that is so extreme right that makes Ledeen look like a commie. A party that is all military might, that openly says that we need to invade countries to keep the housing bubble from bursting. A party that is all for cutting welfare and medicare to ZERO, and that talks about "Tough Love"
..and then you need a Libertarian Party to actually run. Bleed the right of all it's greedy cowards (OK, well that may not be possible, "all"?)
But you see what i mean? This is the only way that bleeding off the Purists won't matter, and where some semblance of real democracy could actually happen. So, all we need are some credible sounding people, with clean records, who are willing to do to the Right what the Right has covertly been doing to the Left for ages.... Maybe thats not realistic, but i think at this point the only hope is when there is split so fractionalized that the only way to get anything passed is with a "majority vote" that goes over party lines. Maybe i'm a dreamer, but hey, I get to choose Marxist Lenninst, Communist or Green when I go to the polls....
We were saddled with George Bush because the election was rigged. Ralph Nader was made a convenient scapegoat by a corporate media establishment which has a vested interest in discrediting the idea of legitimate third-party candidates. Al Gore is probably 179 degrees different than George Bush and will make a great president.
Anon 6:11, what the hell compels you fucking purists to come to THIS blog? Have I done anything to make you feel welcome? Why are you here?
Assholes like you are the reason why we did not get Gore in 2000.
Ralph Nader was not the establishment scapegoat. He knew damn well what he was doing and that is why he did it.
lee, you've been a good contributor to these pages, so I don't want to insult you. But can't you see the utter uselessness of what you suggest?
Ever since I was a kid, I've heard people say that sort of thing. "Oh, there will never be any real change in America until we have a parliamentary democracy as they do in Europe. So until systemic change occurs, let's not try to do anything."
When did I first hear that? Nearly 40 years ago. And the folks who have said that sort of thing over the past 40 years -- have they ever accomplished anything worthwhile? No, they have not.
You've got to work within the system you've got, because it ain't changing.
And even if we had a new Constitutional convention -- what kind of people would go into the room to hammer the thing out? Not folks of Jeffersonian caliber, lemme tell ya.
Gore Vidal used to call for a new Constitutional Convention in the early Reagan years. So -- suspiciously enough -- did a number of that era's neocons. I would picture the kind of people who would have walked into that room, circa 1983: Jeane Kirkpatrick, David Stockman, Ed Meese...
Imagine the crew we'd get NOW.
No. No no no.
I'm a Democrat. I'm sticking with the Democratic Party. I think all of our current presidential candidates are pretty good, and I am proud that if my party's vote had not been shot down by a veto, we'd be pulling out of Iraq right now.
When I began this blog, that stance pleased a lot of people. It seems to please no-one these days. I don't care. I yam what I yam...and if my readers like it not:
DIG OR SPLIT.
Another thing, lee. Let's just play along with your "bell the cat" game for a bit. Suppose we had a real multi-party system. What then?
A Euro-style multiparty system requires compromise. Oddly, the Americans who yearn for such a thing always view compromise as a dirty word.
But we do not have the temperaments of Euros or Canadians. In this country, these days, we can't even get Republicans and Democrats to sit together for five minutes without a fistfight.
Imagine how much worse things would get under the system you describe.
What would get accomplished?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The real winners would be the Libertarians -- who WANT government to do nothing. Maybe you like the idea. But I consider Libertarianism an even greater potential danger than is the Republican Party.
Joseph, I'm not suggesting it could happen. Or that that is where your efforts should be placed at the moment --as far as I can tell voting anything but Dem in 08 is handing your commander in chief job to Mitt (or Ghouliani).
And seeing how in the end, the multiparty system in Canada is now a multiparty-on-the-left and uniparty on the right, there are some obvious problems to the structure (which is what you would see if Meese was involved, right?)
For now what to do is obvious. Support the one party of the two of them that comes closest to what we want. If gay marriage is left off the plate for now, really, even two guys who want to get married REALLY BADLY should still look at which party, overall, represents what they want. And unless they are fans of closeted self-hating homos who unleash anti-gay legislation, marriage or no marriage, they ought to still know which party jibes with their lifestyle and which does not.
And thats just on Gay issues, if you don't have a pet cause-celebre, and do think that BPATS, but still acknowledge that one is obviously more bloodthirsty, one is handing contracts out with no bids to crony pals, one is systematically stripping your country of all that is good in it, and the other is the Dems, then you have an obligation to vote the fuckers out, and take your pet causes up, like you say, in 2009.
But TBH i would still love it if MY country had a Fascist Party, a Jeezus Party, a secessionist party and the like... i mean side from the bleeding of votes from the right, it would also put these people on the grand stage, and let everyone hear how utterly silly their positions are.
You know, way up north, in the northernmost parts of Canada, we have Inuit (eskimo is pejorative) and you know how they resolve conflicts? They take the plaintiff and the defendant, put them in a circle, make them both say their piece, and then the entire community laughs at them. They laugh about the pettiness and they laugh about the seriousness of the two in conflict. I think we need to take these pet issues and make them all laughing stocks.
Sure, I'm not a purist (Joe you have told me before that I am worse than them, but it's OK, I still love you)and i do believe that you gotta work with what you got. But the sad comedy of abortion, gay weddings, baby seals, wise use, and any other wedge issue is that the blood is still pouring in the Iraqi sand, and the bullseye targets are still set on Iran... at least my dream multiparty system would avoid wedge issues...
Candidates who want to get elected almost always align themselves with one of the two major parties, but their political ideologies aren't monolithic or even binary. Lately, too many of them were prosecutors, which gives those politicians a very similar mindset. Age, gender, geographical region, and time in office matter more in their thinking than over-rated 'loyalty' when it comes to actual business. But to get elected, they'll say whatever it takes. All political/legislative business is argued out in conference rooms well before any public hearings take place. If you're in one of those conference rooms and you don't know you're stuff, you get your hat handed to you, and the next time you show up you have to wear a beanie like a prep school freshman. After legislation is proposed, it's circulated among the lobbyists and think tanks, where the bill's language gets refined as a practical matter. We're the cynics, they're not.
Within each major party are fairly broad ideological differences, sufficient for there to be virtually different political parties, but they usually co-exist as functional coalitions. Today they look like they're dysfunctional, and I'll bet most of the politicians are more frustrated than any of us are. But it's a mistake to ever imagine that any of them are there to represent the little guy because that's not what they affirm when they take their oaths. They aren't tribal war lords or our parents, even if they often posture as such. The incompetent ones never get to make or influence policy, but dammit, they do get a real vote.
We've been bamboozled by media influence to call anything other than Democrat or Republican a "third party", and we're much much poorer for it. Nothing and no one like Lincoln ever again. In 1980, Congressman John Anderson with his Johnny-Carson svelt and goyishe good looks got enough attention to run without any party affiliation, as an 'independent' candidate. Yet the media dubbed him a 'third-party' candidate even though he was in fact a no-party candidate, even though the Socialist Party (or Socialist Workers' Party -- I don't know or care) was nominally in third place by the registration numbers, followed by other long-established parties. Really, you couldn't even register as 'an' "Independent" in 1980 -- state laws had to be passed for that to happen later.
I wouldn't mind if they taxed beer a lot, according to its color -- the darkest beers should be taxed the least. The deficit would disappear in less than a week.
Edwards and Kucinich have already spoken the truth about taxes and are going to raise them to help pay our bills, provide Health care and other needs this country faces.
The train wreck we have suffered from the last seven years is catastrophic as the wealth is being sucked into the pockets of a very few criminals and traitors so what's the big deal about raising taxes?
Well, we used to have something more like Lee's idea of a multiparty system. There were northern Democrats and southern Democrats. There were northeast establishment Rockerfeller Republicans and Midwest isolationist Republicans. And so on, in increasingly fine subdivisions.
The art of being a political leader, back in the days of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, involved forming coalitions, using whoever you could get from whichever party, in order to pass legislation that would more-or-less satisfy everybody.
That all changed in the 1960's as a result of what you might call the first case of political purism, Joe -- when the Democratic Party had to pick sides between black voters and southern whites and decided on the former.
Everything else has followed from that. On one hand, we had the the major realignment that gave Nixon his silent majority and the transformation of the Republican Party into a monolithic juggernaut, bound together by the rigid iron bands of culture-war issues (race, first and foremost, but also sex, religion, and guns). On the other, there's been the endless dithering of the Democrats, finding themselves pigeonholed somehow as the party of minorities, fringe groups, and the poor and wondering why no Republican will play ball with them anymore, even on issues (like SCHIP) that large numbers of Republican voters favor.
There's a whole lot more that could be said on this, though I'm not about to say it, but the one point I'd like to stress, Joe, is that your approach seems to have something of a blame-the-victim mentality about it. It's like news people repeatedly asking Valerie Plame whether she shouldn't have known ahead of time that allowing her husband to write that editorial would inevitably lead to blowing her cover as a CIA agent.
Well, no, Plame shouldn't have known any such thing -- and to say she should have is to say she should have realized that the Bush administration would casually commit treason for the sake of minor political advantage. That sort of "knowledge" isn't real knowledge at all -- it's a kind of poison that destroys us from inside if we open our minds to it, and we need to avoid it at all costs.
Similarly, there's no reason that liberal Democrats should *know* that recasting themselves as a party based on principle (rather than on particular geographical or ethnic bases that no longer exist) is asking for irrelevance. We shouldn't *know* any such thing, and to ignore what we do stand for is to submit to continued domination by the party hacks and corporate whores who run the party now.
The real problem, I think, is that the Republican noise machine has convinced too many Americans that the Democrats stand only for giving "special" rights to other people and not to ensuring fundamental rights for everyone. And the best answer is to hammer very hard on just what those fundamental rights really are -- starting with economic security, education, health, and a worry-free old age and continuing from there to a loving family, a clean and safe environment, and the necessary time and privacy for personal development and self-expression.
If the Democratic Party were to really base itself in a definition of rights similar to that one, to make it crystal-clear that the minority rights it supports are only special cases of those universal rights, and to hold its own elected officials' feet to the fire on committing to those rights, then I think we could have an outcome that would satisfy you as well as the "purists."
And if it doesn't, if it continues to buckle under to Republican destructions of our basic rights in the guise of "security" or "morality," then it really doesn't matter how a few elections turn out in the short run, because we're doomed either way.
"The train wreck we have suffered from the last seven years is catastrophic as the wealth is being sucked into the pockets of a very few criminals and traitors so what's the big deal about raising taxes?"
The big deal is that any candidate who says "Let's raise taxes" will lose.
Of course, in the real world, taxes must be raised, and of course, I favor soaking the rich. Also, I'd like to do away with NAFTA and GATT and increase levies on imports.
But any candidate who SAYS "I'm going to raise taxes" is a loser.
Mondale. 1984.
"But...but...things have CHANGED...!' No they haven't.
GET OUT OF THE PROGRESSIVE GHETTO. MOST AMERICANS DON'T THINK THE WAY YOU THINK THEY THINK.
I'm not even going to bother looking up the most recent polls on the question of raising taxes. I know the answer already. It's a spectacularly unpopular idea. Maybe it SHOULD not be so unpopular, but I'm talking about the word IS, not the word SHOULD.
I don't know what to think. I don't see much "consensus building" on the part of politicians on either side these days. You know, identifying what you think needs to happen, then selling it to the voters, so they support it AND you.
Maybe that's because the voters don't matter. The fix is in. It does not matter what they say or do, because the "consequences" only come from the "king-makers".
Whatever. The only thing more annoying than the complete disintegration of America is reading the pontifications of foreigners who think the only thing wrong with America is that is isn't enough like their country.
I guess I can see how the little countries feel about us now, in that context.
Let's all watch "Reds" (1981) again and look at how other really good people said the very same things a century ago. We're like quoting the movie without citing it. John Reed: But if Wilson says he'll keep us out of the war, we have to support him. Emma Goldman: I think voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain. C'mon, now, group hug!
Any candidate who says he is going to raise taxes will lose.
Really? This is what Bill Clinton promised to do, after all. How did he get away with it?
And quick, better get the memo to the Hillary campaign. For that is what she has proposed as well.
So, one of the most intelligent and most politically astute presidents in history only recently did what you say is electoral poison, and yet was elected (and re-elected). And now, his wife, with him and his policy brain trust people backing her up, presumably, says the same thing? Wonders of wonders, say it ain't so!
The fact is, the failed Democratic presidential nominees, Carter, Mondale and Dukakis, went out of their way to hew to the middle ground, to show they were not hostage to the left of their party (progressive purists, some call them), to show they were in the mainstream of the national defense policy consensus, and not wild-eyed radical leftists, but solid centrists. They went down to miserable defeats on CULTURAL shibboleths, not economic ones, as I see it.
Did Michael Bloomberg doom his re-elect chances by his widely unpopular tax and fee hikes. No. Did George HW Bush get fired by the people for raising taxes (after pledging he'd never do that)? I don't think so, in either case.
People aren't completely stupid. But as I've heard John Stuart Mills quoted to say, 'While not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are conservatives.' The relatively good news is that self-described conservatives make up maybe 20% of the electorate at the most, and now, the moderates and independents are seeing things more along the lines of the Democratic Party's positions.
...sofla
Post a Comment