Others To Choose From by David Michael Green

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Others_To_Choose_From.html

"If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from."

----Hillary Clinton


....What precipitated the Hillary-Barack row was a set of comments by Hollywood mogul and big-time Democratic Party fundraiser, David Geffen. In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Geffen walked away from his longtime prior support for the Clintons, and threw it – and his money, and his friends’ money – behind Obama.
Geffen had grown disgusted with the Clintons’ ability to tell lies with the greatest of ease, and he had the courage to say so in print. He was also disenchanted with Hillary’s inability to admit the ‘error’ of her Iraq vote (more on the error of calling it an error, below). And he was still smarting from Wild Bill’s failure to pardon wrongly-accused and long-imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier, at the same time Bubba was doing just that for Marc Rich, described by Geffen as “an oil‑profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice”.
Geffen had finally had enough. And that, I’d say is the first sign of hope from the incident. Democrats will never amount to anything better than Republiclones until they begin demanding more of their presidents and members of Congress, both as candidates and as incumbents. The Clintons – both of them – represent the death of progressivism in the Democratic Party. Their brand of donkey politics is essentially Wall Street with a dash of gay rights thrown in (and only kinda, sorta, maybe, half-hearted, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, at that). As opposed to the Republicans, who offer voters the alternative of Wall Street with a side order of gay-bashing. And who says the two-party system doesn’t offer American voters real choice?

What first energized me about Geffen’s move is that, at last, the Clinton’s are being held to account for their politics. I have long been amazed and mystified at how Democratic voters have adored Bill and Hill. I suppose he has some sort of charismatic magnetism for many people, though he never did anything for me. And, anyway, that’s about the worst reason to vote for someone, isn’t it? Do you really want to assist in the process of being made to feel good while your own wallet is being fleeced? Trust me, you don’t. Trust me, when the jingle-jangle has been fully drained from your tattered pockets, there will be no more charisma wasted on you....My first and last cheer for Bill Clinton (but not really) came on the night of his election in 1992. I literally walked out of the house I was living in, onto the street, and tattooed a big old howl on eardrums across the local neighborhood and the less local cosmos. Sorta like the Lennon shredder that opens the song “Revolution”, but less demure. Actually, though, it wasn’t Clinton I was cheering, but rather the end of twelve unrelenting years of suffocatingly depressing Reaganism (not imagining then that it would get lots worse later). In any case, that moment was the warmest I ever felt toward Slick Willy. Almost everything he did from that point forward was just another disappointment succeeding the last one... the ideology of Bill Clinton was always Bill Clinton. That means if you need to fry some mentally retarded Arkansas kid – a guy so out of it that he actually asked to set aside the pecan pie from his last meal so he could eat it later – in order to demonstrate your tough-on-crime bona fides, well then, it’s goodbye Ricky Ray Rector. That means if you have to diss Sister Souljah to signal to white closet-racists that you’re a different kind of Democrat, then diss is what you do, and dat’s just too bad. That means if you have to kill an entire welfare system and cast millions of families onto the streets to get reelected, or sign trade bills that include nothing for workers or the environment, then... well, you know the drill. Same with Hillary. In a career full of sellouts to choose from, the only personal-best contender to her Iraq war vote was the monstrosity of a healthcare plan she came up with as First Lady, rather than simply doing the right thing – universal national coverage.....I’m glad, this week, to see Democrats (especially those with leverage) sending this message loud and clear: “Do not take our votes, and our volunteer time, and our money, for granted. The era of bad government is over. We want something in return for our support, and warm and fuzzy feel-good sessions in which Bill feels our pain (let alone cold and clammy ones in which Hillary doesn’t) are not what we had in mind.”

Of course, those others to choose from are – at least now – principally Barack Obama. I’m not thrilled about his candidacy, but I can say I like him more than I did a week ago, and that I liked him more a week ago than the week before that. Of the Big Three at the moment (Edwards being the other candidate in the most viable tier), Obama has staked out probably the most consistently sensible position on the key question of our time, Iraq. And what is more, he has held that position from the beginning, something neither of the other two can say.

However, at the time Clinton and Edwards were voting for a certain war resolution, Obama was in the Illinois state legislature, not the United States Senate, and the idea that he might be running for president in 2008 was probably laughable even to him. That made the potential costs of his denunciation of the war considerably less than those facing the other two. For me, that takes more than a bit of the shine off of the image now being sold of Barack Obama, Great Antiwar Crusader, especially when coupled with his relative silence on the issue since he has come to the Senate. And even that wouldn’t be such a big deal but for the pattern of style over substance that forms the context for this man. The guy writes entire books on himself and still it’s impossible to locate his position on nearly any issue! Okay, we get it, Barack. You’re a black man living in America. You’ve had some challenges coming up. Standard issue boilerplate presidential candidate book fodder. Put your mug on the cover, flag in the background. Bind ‘em and ship ‘em. But what’s your position on global warming, dude?....I’m tired of having to choose between losing a whole loaf with Republicans or three-quarters of a loaf with pretend-Democrats. I like Barack Obama because he’s challenging a leading candidate who badly needs the challenging, and because he seems to be leaning left – maybe. Before I can get too excited about him, however, I want to see that he has some real principles, that they’re good ones, and that he can throw a punch.
He’ll need to. I think we know pretty well what the GOP would do with a Barack Hussein Obama nomination.....If Hillary apologizes now, it will only be because of her desperation to find the Obama antidote. And if she apologizes at all, you can bet she’ll tell us yet again about how she was duped by George Bush.

Bullshit.

That’s nonsense. Anyone who was paying attention at the time knew what was up. And let us remember that almost all of the rest of the world got it right – even though damn few on that list were United States senators. Nevertheless, we knew why Rove scheduled the vote right before an election. We knew that Iraq had zero to do with 9/11. We knew that invading Iraq was a diversion from fighting al Qaeda. We knew that Saddam was no threat. We knew that he had not attacked us. We knew that he had not threatened to attack us. We knew that he knew (like the Soviets had known, and like every country in the world knows today) that if you attack us we’ll atomize your country. We knew that there was no emergency, and no risk in allowing the weapons inspectors a few more weeks to finish their work. We knew that Bush lied when he said there would be an up-or-down vote at the Security Council on whether to authorize the war. We knew that days later he pulled that resolution because he could only get four out of fifteen votes, less than half the number needed to pass. And we knew that an invasion of Iraq under such circumstances was about as clear a violation of international law – including the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory – as is imaginable....

They (Congresspeople) all knew how bogus the war was. But they also knew the national mood at the time. And the president’s popularity. And the decades-long history of Republicans hammering their opponents as soft on national security should they dare to stray a micron from supporting any American jingoistic adventure abroad. (Rove is no different than McCarthy or Nixon ever was at that ‘wimp’-baiting game – he just had better material to work with.) And these senators also knew what happened to those who had had the courage to oppose the Gulf War of 1990-91....They not only voted for this shameful war resolution for their own career ambitions, but hours before they also all voted against an amendment that would have required Security Council approval prior to authorizing the use of force in Iraq. When you hear them say that they thought they were just strengthening the president’s hand at the UN, not actually authorizing war, they might as well be saying they thought they were cosmonauts orbiting Alpha Centauri. Indeed, the whole ‘authorization’ aspect of this vote has been nonsense from the beginning. Every commander-in-chief – and most especially this one – owns the right to deploy forces as they see fit, without any sort of congressional action or approval. Bush was going to do what he was going to do, and it was all perfectly constitutional. This resolution, therefore, was an act of political symbolism, pure and simple. We should make no mistake about this – those who voted ‘aye’ put themselves on the side of war, and they did precisely that knowingly.

[Demeter]

1. morning kick