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Edited on Tue Sep-06-05 01:11 AM by Lexingtonian
It does have a hollowing out effect- this sort of thing gets a lot of uncritical and ignorant people off of imaginary and subjective 'reasons' to support Bush and onto sort of objective ones. It focusses their attention on real things and important issues they could previously afford to ignore or deny.
You have to get used to this phenomenon on DU- there's always some wishful but electorally clueless person proposing to the group that This Is The Final Straw, Bush Is Going To Get Impeached Over XYZ. In other areas of life this is known as Magical Thinking or the Silver Bullet Theory.
If you look at it carefully, even the most seriously idiotic groups of voters of this country have pretty concrete and rather remarkably perceptive rationales, even if their judgment or conclusion is very wrong, for why they support (or don't support) Dubya and Republicans. And even when they are grotesquely wrong in their judgment of who to back, generally their politics does reflect some genuine problem one can find great sympathy with and need to resolve it.
And if you look at it all in a pretty big frame, every faction elected to power is actually tasked with something by The People that is serious. The larger the margin of power, the more extensive the range of tasks. And the American People has changed the faction it gave control to every midterm election since the end of the Cold War- it has been using up the wings of the Parties and Third Parties every election cycle. 1990/92 destroyed the power of moderate Republicans and the centrist Third Party effort (Reform/Perot). 1994/96 destroyed the power of conservative Democrats and the right wing Third Party effort (Buchanan). 1998/2000 destroyed the power of conservative Republicans- Gingrich and Lott- and the left wing Third Party effort (Greens/Nader). 2002/04 destroyed the power of moderate Democrats- Daschle and Gephardt- and the anarchist Third Party effort (i.e. Libertarians).
We're down to the last two undefeated factions, one in each Party. Hardline (i.e. Nixon) Republicans are in power but, inadequate to reality and at the end of their historical cycle, are crashing out and will thoroughly destroy their Party's coalition when they hit bottom, much as the FDR Democratic Party did under LBJ in 1965-68. They're at the edge of the cliff of obsolescence.
But they still have a job left to finish before they get tossed; this is sort of the pre-firing phase of the employment cycle, where the boss (The People) is mad at the underperformance and the employee (Bush) thinks he can still scrape by by some amount of energetic propaganda and badmouthing, distractions, and ploys for time while frantically concocting and stealing together some feeble semi-presentable work product.
The People is arguably using the present Administration and Congress to do certain necessary stuff. In 2000:
- Iraq was an ugly problem that Clinton couldn't resolve without neglecting the Balkan problems. He (rightly) picked the Balkans as more important.
- American standing in the world was too great relative to its real ability to project power and tangible merits; it stood on and profitted perhaps too extensively from its Cold War record and neocolonial actions.
- The U.S. was propping up too many Arab regimes it didn't actually like in the name of cheap oil and governments of Israel in the name of brutish colonialism and triumphalism incompatible with sincere forms of Judaism.
- The federal taxation and tariff structure was colonial and Agrarian Age and Industrial Age, i.e. designed to keep corporation officials in economic power.
- Absent political will to restrain it by Republicans, Texas-'pioneered' corporatist political corruption was spreading as an epidemic.
- The 'Christian' Right was working hard and effectively to subvert state and local government to its neoPuritanism and psychological colonialism.
Republicans promised to intensify, rather than defuse, all this stuff- it all served The True Gods, straight white male Christian American selfinterest and vanity, after all. In so doing they have efficiently resolved all these sticky problems by taking all of them too far, to the point where they collapse in major and minor disasters. It's been like fixing a fleet of clunky, damaged, cars by filling their tanks with jet fuel and driving them so that the engines burn out...some mixture of joyride and attempt at fiery murder-suicide.
Liberal Democrats are apparently destined to be the last surviving credible political faction of this post-Cold War transition to Modernity. Our politicians are the people left to be tasked with the hugh revamp/cleanup operation in 2006 and 2008. Of course, they're destined to be hobbled and hamstring by the revival of idiots termed Moderacy after a few years and pushing through some basic fixes.
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