The Ugly Un-American 11.20.07: Democrats
Posted by Ray Church on 11.20.2007
With everything going wrong with Republicans and the Bush Administration, why would Ray Church talk about the Democrats? Find out why in this week's Ugly Un-American.
Before I start, a quick disclaimer: I will be breaking my language code for this column. If you're offended by swearing, please don't read any further.
Well, here I am back amongst the living. Despite the rumours, I was not absent because of the writers strike, but Jason, if you're reading, can I reserve the right to use that excuse at a later date?
To tell the truth, I have been tied up by an unholy cocktail of complications; first a marking spree at work, then my grandfather passed away, followed by some music production work I was doing on the side and finally followed by a chaser more marking. To make this worse, I have been offered a paid writing gig for the next week or so, so until the great and powerful Ashish can pay me in something more than review DVDs, I may have to skip next week as well.
Still, I'm here for now. My last few weeks have been dominated by me occasionally looking up from my work, steering at screen and yelling "what the fuck?!" at the top of my voice. What surprised me, though, was that I was yelling at people I'm not used to yelling at. This repetitive action inspired a column I'm calling…
Fuck the Democrats
No, this is not a Lex Luger style swerve. I'm not crossing the aisle from face to heel and hanging up my lily-livered left-wing effeminate liberal leanings. Those of you hoping for some defense of the dark arts of capitalism, a column justifying the oppression and exploitation of the weak for the profit and gain of the wealthy should look elsewhere. I'm not becoming a Republican.
But I've never been a Democrat either, nor the New Zealand equivalent (the Labour Party). I'm first and foremost interested in how you run a country, and quite frankly the party system is the biggest impedance to any sense of true Democracy.
This is what I saw over the last month; a party continuing to make bad decisions based not on political idealism, but political expediency.
Exhibit A: Hillary Clinton
Our very own Josh Rivett wrote a column a few weeks ago explaining why he thinks Hillary Clinton is the only good choice the Democrats have to offer, but here's the difference between Joe and I: Joe chooses his politicians like you would choose a basketball player, I choose politicians like would choose someone who you think is best for running a country.
For all of the exaltation that gets poured over Hillary Clinton for how good she is at politics and how well she plays the game, we forget to ask if that makes her a person to run the country. I'm looking for a good analogy here, so let's compare her to Kobe Bryant. There's no doubt that Kobe can play basketball. He can defend, he can shoot and he can jam as good as nearly anyone in the game right now, but he's a bad man to put in charge of a team. He pulled the Lakers apart with his demands to get rid of Shaq and Jackson (although Jackson, like a schmuck, came home with his tail between his legs). Bryant may be a good player, but he's bad for the sport.
The analogy is not a perfect one, but Hillary is a good player who's bad for the sport. She spouts all the right rhetoric to let you know she's a Democrat, but she waters it down enough so that even arch fiends like Rupert Murdock, the money behind the Fox News Empire, is prepared to host fundraisers for her.
Now why would Rupert Mudock, who not only owns the rabid right Fox News, but also serves on the board of directors of the Cato Institute be so supportive of the "Liberal Senator from New York"?
Because the liberal Senator from New York is frankly not that liberal, she just looks like she's going to win and Murdock likes to keep his foot in the halls of power.
So why would Murdock think that Hillary's for sale?
Take a quick look at the groups who have financed Clinton's campaign for the presidency. She has her own little team she calls the "Hillraisers", who get their name by raising $100,000 for her campaign. It's a move stolen from the Bush playbook (he called them Pioneers). On the list are some familiar names; Steven Spielberg, Vernon Jordan Jr. (an advisor to her husband), Geraldine Ferraro (former nominee for Vice President), James Dolan (the rightfully maligned owner of the New York Knicks) and his father Charles Dolan (former owner of HBO). Then there are the dodgy ones, such as the now famous Norman Hsu (former operator of the Ponzi pyramid scheme and a fugitive on charges related to it) and Robert "the Torch" Torricelli (former senator, who stood down after one term surrounded by allegations of bribery and a campaign finance scandal).
And then there are the PAC's.
A Political Action Committee is a sneaky way around campaign financing laws. There are limits on how much you can raise from an individual donor. Officially, a PAC can only spend $5000 on each candidate, but you get enough of these PAC's and you can make a lot of money. They are also a channel for soft money, which are organizations that spend on a candidate but raise money independently. This means they can effectively spend whatever they want for a candidate, so long as they don't mention certain magic words, like "vote Smith".
Hillary Clinton has raised almost $750 000 through PAC's. This may not sound like a lot, but it outspends every other Democrat by at least $200 000, and if you discount Dodd and Richardson, by at least $650 000. (It should be noted that Richardson and Dodd are making far more from PAC's than the other candidates, which may be explained by the fact that they are not so much gunning for President as angling for Vice President).
It also beats out the Republicans, who tend to raise much more through PAC's. The only Republican even close if Senator John McCain, who is hovering around the $500 000 mark.
Now why does this worry me? Because if the $5000 limit is being enforced, it means that there are about 150 organisations out in the ether with unlimited amounts to spend on Campaigning for Hillary, so long as the don't use the words "Vote Hill".
There are also several dodgy corporations getting involved with Clinton. Clinton, who once championed free health care for all while she was the First Lady, is receiving windfalls from the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare lobby. Now compare Hillary's new policy to the one she made in 1993. While every other Democrat is producing a plan almost identical to her old one, Clinton's plan gives… "choices".
Lower-income individuals would be eligible for tax credits to prevent them from paying more than a set percentage of their income on health insurance. They could keep their policies, choose from an array of private plans similar to what federal employees are offered or enroll in a new government-run plan similar to Medicare
The rest of the free world gets free healthcare. Free. People don't buy health insurance, find that there was a condition not covered by the fine print and have to declare bankruptcy because it costs an arm and a leg to pay for a kidney transplant. It's free.
Hillary Clinton failed to make changes as the First Lady because she was faced the powerful lobbying team, funded by the likes of Phillip Morris, who mobilized against her. Instead of seeing them as the problem, corrupting the entire political system in the US, she saw them as the solution. In rock n roll, that's called selling out.
A look at her donor list also sees a strangely familiar link to Enron. Of Clinton's top 10 donors, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan and Chase were all financers of Enron. I'm not trying to draw a conspiracy theory here, just to point out that these organizations were also intimately involved with lobbying to change energy regulations while they were funding a broken corporation.
Newscorp, by the way, is Hillary Clinton's 20th biggest donor.
So fuck the Democrats.
Exhibit B: Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein
In March of this year, Chuck Schumer led the charge against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In August 2007, Gonzales stepped down. Soon after, a former Justice Department official leaked the news that Michael Mukasey would be the next nominee for Attorney General.
It came down to confirmability
Irony, they name is the unnamed former Justice Department figure.
Mukasey turned out to be the most controversial Attorney General nominee since Alberto Gonzales…
Oh, wait… um. Well, trust me, you go back before Gonzales and it becomes harder. You get John Ashcroft, and he wasn't controversial at all…
OK, I'm going to give up on that "not-controversial" line. It's a much harder line than I thought it would be. Instead, let me point out that Mukasey was not meant to be a hard call. He was meant to be a cake walk.
Mukasey was supposedly a straight arrow. After all, he's the guy who ruled that Jose Padilla could be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant, but he had to be allowed access to his lawyers. He's the guy that dismissed allegations of brutality by a Jordanian immigrant, claiming that "you look fine to me. His bruises were conveniently hidden under the orange jumpsuit prisoners are forced to wear. He's the guy who attacked the PATRIOT Act, not because it was an Orwellian policy, but because it had an Orwellian name.
I guess hindsight being 20/20, it's pretty easy to see that Mukasey was a bad choice, but Schummer was taken with this guy early, even submitting Mukasey's name for the Supreme Court back in 2003. He only got an inkling that Mukasey was a bad idea when he stumbled on the whole "is waterboarding torture?" question.
Forget the fact that Waterboarding had been prosecuted as torture after World War II, resulting in a Japanese Officer being sentenced to 15 years hard labour for this war crime. Forget the fact that an American soldier was court martialed for water boarding during the Vietnam War. Forget the fact that former Acting Assistant Attorney General, Daniel Levin, once subjected himself to waterboarding to write his opinion that stated, unequivocally, that waterboarding is torture, getting himself fired in the process. Mukasey could not give a straight answer.
So, open and shut case. Mukasey should be rejected, right?
Not so fast, Sparky. For some reason, Feinstein and Schummer, despite their misgivings, voted against their party to confirm Mukasey despite all this bullshit. Why? Feinstein claimed it was to prevent Bush putting someone worse in place as a recess appointment. If you don't know what that means, basically when congress and the senate go home for the holidays, the Administration can appoint anyone they want as an "acting" member of that post. This is how Josh Bolton, a man vehemently opposed to the United Nations, was appointed as the US representative to the United Nations.
So, as disgusting as it is, you hold your nose and swallow the medicine so that you don't get anything worse, right?
Well, not if you were listening to Harry Reid this week.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has decided to keep the chamber in session over the Thanksgiving break to block President Bush from making any unsavory recess appointments while Senators are out of town. source
So, if Harry Reid was going to do this anyway, why did they appoint Mukasey?
Well, one rumour is that it was a deal to get funding for the military:
"According to sources inside and outside the Democratic leadership, Harry Reid allowed a vote on Mukasey because in exchange the Republican leadership agreed to allow a vote on the big Defense Appropriations Bill, which contains $459 billion in military spending but doesn't fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reid had wanted to get this bill passed before the end of this week, and in fact, the defense bill did come up for a vote late last night and was passed after the Mukasey vote. source
So, Bush gets Mukasey and funding for the military. He can't use it for Iraq or Afghanistan, but isn't he looking at Iran at the moment?
Fuck the Democrats.
Exhibit C: The Judiciary Committee
I'm not sure which moron to point to, but let me point to them all. In April, Dennis Kucinich tables House Resolution 333 to impeach Dick Cheney for misleading the USA into war. After no debate, Kucinich put forward the bill again on the 7th, this time called House Resolution 799.
Just as it looked like the debate was about to happen, The Republicans suddenly voted to support a debate on the bill. Faced, finally, with a chance to nail Cheney to the proverbial lamppost, what do the Democrats do?
They send the bill to judiciary.
I know the argument. If they really went through with the impeachment, they would risk the ire of the public; a backlash from the public against the impeachment. It will be called an attempt to continue politics through the legal system. The Democrats will be eviscerated by the media for this misuse of power.
First up, at risk of presenting a strawman, this is not a misuse of power. The Democrats have been elected to end the war. That was the clearest mandate to come out of the last election. They can't cut funding without looking like they're not supporting the troops, so what do they have left? Impeachment is their only other weapon.
Secondly, the case against Cheney is fairly cut and dry. Even allowing for the possibility that this was not an intentional misleading of the public, then it was certainly a gross example of criminal negligence.
Thirdly, impeachment does not lead to public rebellion. The Republicans impeached Clinton against the will of the American people and the Republicans won the White House. Event if you discount that, there is a big difference between sexual misconduct with an intern and launching a war of aggression.
So, fuck the Democrats.
In Summation
The Bush Administration has launched an unnecessary war, a war of aggression, against another sovereign nation.
Fuck the Democrats.
At every stage, the Bush Administration has twisted definitions of freedom, patriotism and human rights to serve their own paranoid goals.
Fuck the Democrats.
The Bush Administration has permitted the use of torture against enemy combatants. They have twisted the definition of prisoners of war to deny prisoners their rights to lawyers and fair trial. They have engaged in the process of extreme rendition to further corrupt the fundamental human rights of all people.
Fuck the Democrats.
The Bush Administration has undermined notions of International Law and due process. They have kneecapped the United Nations and weakened any sense of a common good shared between the nations.
Fuck the Democrats.
Fuck the Democrats because they are weak and ineffectual. Fuck the Democrats because they buy in to the same corrupt system that has allowed the last seven years to take place. Fuck the Democrats because they are prepared to make justice subservient to political expedience.
Fuck the Democrats because in the face of what is right, they stood for what is wrong, and in doing so have become complicit in the act.
Shut the Hell Up Award
OK, short and sweet this week, because you might have heard this one already. This was Bill O'Reilly on his radio program the other day.
Go to Revelations in the bible and look at the prediction for the end of the world.
So, Bill O is going to school us of theology. Let's start with an obvious one. It's Revelation, not Revelations; singular, because it's purported to be one dream of one man. Let's move on.
It's fascinating because it does involve the Middle East and it does involve the clash of cultures.
Of course it involves the Middle East. Christianity was founded in the Middle East. To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't specifically mention a clash of cultures. There are numerous interpretations, of course, but none of the major ones talk about a clash of cultures, more a clash between heaven and hell.
This was written… what… uhh… 5000 years ago
Ding! Thank you for playing. Your own guest told you it was about 2000 years old.
Shut the Hell Up.
So long, For now
I would normally take the time to send you to other great sites at 411, but like I said I'm pressed for time. Keep an eye out for Crow, Jase and Justin, as well as E. (Don't worry, I'm still firing emails at E to tell him when he's wrong).
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