who Saje is targeting with this diatribe.
I have stood up these past three elections with my wallet and shoe leather. I have spoken out almost ceaselessly from Day One, at personal cost. But even now, in this nightmarish time, I have never forgotten that I have it better than 99% of all the people who ever lived, and I am grateful.
I will never forget that the main ideal of the Old American Republic, was that everyone should have a decent quality of life if they work hard and follow simple human decency.
I love the ideal of the Old American Republic and I will NEVER stop fighting for it. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights may well be the greatest set of political documents ever produced by human beings. No, scratch that, ARE the greatest set of political documents ever produced by human beings.
But fighting the good fight does not mean being blind to the odds. It doesn't mean closing one's eyes to the reality of the situation. That our Democratic Leadership has betrayed us, that for the vast majority of them they simply don't give a shit about the Idiot Peasants they rule. They care about their privilege and power, and not about the fact that we have become a country of deep class divisions, where superior and inferior people are now accepted as a matter of course and aristocratic privilege has gone from being deeply unAmerican to a core value.
I think most of them, with maybe two or three dozen Democratic exceptions and Ron Paul (whatever you think about his nutty philosophies, it stems from a love of those three documents), pretty much agree with that philosophy. They ARE better than us, and we should just shut the hell up with our Idiot Peasants' love of those stupid pieces of paper and be happy when they let a benefit or two dribble down to us.
Our media is broken beyond repair. To fix it would require a massive upheaval, and even then you would have to find enough people who believed in speaking truth to power and our corer Founding Principles to refill the ranks, and that is going to be awful tough in a nation in which the Shock Doctrine has been applied to eradicate those beliefs in the vast majority of Americans, even if they don't know it.
Bushies have now fully Bushified/Nazified the Executive Agencies, and I guarantee you that "normal housecleaning" of Old America will not be sufficient to end this scourge.
And even now, with so many of the Bushie Felonies exposed, with Gonzales having multiple perjured himself on videotape, we cannot even get a single trial of these arch-criminals, and the likelihood that we will get even one is growing dim.
Bushie Protection is amazing. 9/11ani has been busted for multiple Class E felonies in Nathangate, felonies which not a year ago resulted in the conviction, resignation, and fining of Hevesi in NYC. But for Bushie Rudy, it just slides down the Memory Hole as if it never happened.
You think if Edwards or Clinton had been caught dead to rights like that misusing public funds in a felonious manner that it would be let go? You know as well as I do that their candidacies would be destroyed in an instant, and the carnival circus of their rapidly scheduled trials and convictions would be the main topic of Cable TV and Print Infoganda for MONTHS, perhaps years.
That in and of itself says it all. All of it adds up to deep structural sea changes as well as the conventional wisdom and mores of our Evil Empire, and all of it adds up to a 95% chance we are fucked, now that it is clear it will be allowed to grow and metastasize even further for at least a year. That's they way I see it.
And if Saje thinks I or anyone else points this all out for some sense of self-aggrandizement, he is sadly mistaken.
Because denial serves us nothing here, except to blind us at a time when we should be focusing our vision sharper than ever. Denial allows us to slip into the mistakes of the Democratic Leadership, who believe they are simply dealing with another political faction like themselves, instead of deeply evil totalitarians who have hated America since Grandpa Prescott tried to overthrow it and come in on the side of his good friend and ally, Adolf Hitler.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtmlNow I have gone and done the very thing Saje was railing about in the OP, but I don't care. Because in the end, we will all be fighting together, whether it be in phone-banking, canvassing, GOTV efforts, general strikes, or God Forbid, something worse.
My greatest concern is that, if a man like Edwards, Dodd or Kucinich got into power, and dared threaten the Bushies' "kick", as the Mafia calls it, or even worse threatened to expose Bushies' many treasons, they would get would get Kennedied, Kinged, or Wellstone in short order, but not so short it would be obvious to the vast majority, and that is all that would be necessary. Just a little Plausible Deniability, the grease which keeps the Bushie Mafia going.
But WE would know. Just one more "unfortunate coincidence" and we will KNOW.
Avoiding the trap of denial doesn't mean buckling to those long odds, either, though. Like the Jews in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, who were doomed before they started.
They didn't have a 95% chance of being doomed, they had 100% chance of being doomed. And yet they fought, they stood and were true.
As we must, too.
So go ahead, Saje. Flame away. Call me a negative asshole or doomsayer orwhatever the hell you want to. Be as brutal and insulting as you like. Here is my response:
To you and Saje and everyone else here at DU, I clasp your hands in friendship, for at the end of the day we are all on the same side. The side of the Founding Fathers against the Bushies, Hitlers, Pinochets, Stalin, and Pol Pots of the world.
There can be no more honorable place to stand and be true.
Peace.