SLOWLY COMING TO A BOIL

Meanwhile, the mess in Washington just gets uglier. Democrats shot themselves in the foot this week when Senator Ben Nelson, who is technically a Democrat, sided with the Republicans in a committee vote on whether to cut off funding for Dick Cheney’s office in retaliation for his continued stonewalling of any attempt at Congressional oversight. Nelson is widely considered to be the most conservative Democrat in the Senate. He helped get Sam (Muss)Alito on the Supreme Court, supported John Bolton’s nomination to the UN, and is against allowing women to have power over their own bodies in the matter of abortion. With Democrats like that, who needs Republicans?

The sad news is that this indicates that, since they can’t get it up for cutting off funds for Cheney or even slapping Alberto Gonzalez on the wrist for lying under oath, and the main reaction to Bush’s utterly self-serving commutation of Louis Libby’s sentence seems to have been mere dismay, we can expect more business-as-usual from the Demopublicans. Sure, there are a few subpoenas being issued here and there, but the Bush junta has got the Supremes and a big chunk of the federal judiciary in their back pocket, and somehow I don’t think they’re too worried about lawsuits.

The Democrats could have stopped all this a long time ago, but they didn’t argue with the stealing of the 2000 election, they didn’t argue with the invasion of Iraq as a response to 9-11, they didn’t argue with the appointment of highly partisan, activist judges to the Supreme and other courts, they played along with denying the relief of bankruptcy to people whose lives have been destroyed by medical debts, they didn’t argue with the stealing of the 2004 election, they temper their calls for a change in Iraq with an insistence that Iraq turn the majority of its oil reserves over to US corporations…the list goes on. Like crustaceans in a pot (and politicians and crustaceans have more in common than I even want to go into right now!), they have tried to play it cool while the water temperature around them slowly rises, and now it is just about too late to stop the Bush junta. And we’re all going to boil–not just a few overpaid, overweight Washington politicians.

The truth is, the Dems are complicit in Bush’s war crimes and domestic crimes because they want to be. They view competition for leadership of this country as competition for the spoils of power, not the privilege and duty of making sure the best outcome for the most people is the one that happens.

And the truth is, there is a rising perception in this country that, although the Democratic landslide of 2006 was intended as a mandate for change, those who were supposedly empowered by that landslide lack the political will to make those changes. It is my hope and prayer that this betrayal, predictable as it was, will not result in a deepening cynicism and a turning away from the political process, but that instead the energy of America’s anger with its elite leadership will be channelled into overturning that leadership and creating the democracy this country was intended to be in the first place. Already we have Cindy Sheehan promising to challenge Nancy Pelosi for her Congressional seat if Ms. Pelosi does not come out for impeachment of the lying scum who make up the Bush junta. We need hundreds, if not thousands, of Cindy Sheehans. It’s now or never.

Music: David Rovics, “Crashing Down,” “Waiting for the Fall”