These aren't good people

From this story we find that a few House Republicans supported by that sack of insecticide Tom DeLay killed a bill to institute intelligence reforms that would conform to the 9/11 commision's recommendations.

And of course we have the passage by House Republicans of what Josh Marshall calls the Delay Rule, which would make it so that DeLay can stay in power even if he is indicted for his numerous crimes.

Now, from this MSNBC article via Josh we discover that Senate Republicans had inserted a provision in an omnibus bill that would give some Senate commitee chairmen total access to any American taxpayer's tax return.

What does all of this mean? Well, this isn't news exactly, but it means that congressional Republicans are corrupt, secretive, and unprinicpled. They care more about power than they do about governing, and something has to be done about them.

I'll insert a little side-note. I have a co-worker who clearly doesn't approve of me as a human being, for reasons that are unclear to me. When I was trying to tell my other co-workers that Tom Delay, one of the most corrupt and malignant politicians of the past half century, was being protected from losing power by what I see as a deeply hypocritical act on the part of House Republicans, overturning a rule instituted to punish corrupt Democratic politician Dan Rostenkowski to protect the Bug Man, he told me to shut my face.

We're always talking about how evil the Republicans are, he said. (this is only partly true) Everybody knows about this, blah blah blah.

Actually, most people don't know who DeLay is, let alone that he's one of the most powerful people in DC and that he's being prosecuted for unethical behavior and abuse of power, that many of his Texas cronies have already been indicted. This is real stuff. This man is a true reactionary, a powermonger, and a crook. A decent modern nation like ours can tolerate neither his backwardness nor his corruption.

We are taught, culturally, from an early age, that people who speak ill of folks like Reagan and George W. and Republicans in general are countercultural, a bunch of scraggly hippies and anarchists and drug users with bad hair. In the America where I grew up I knew, and this is in the very blue state of Maryland, mind you, that it was okay to hate the government and to regard politicians with the utmost suspicion right up to the point when these forces of the government expressed hyperbolic Nationalism and chauvinism for all things American and masculine and tough. Conservatism in this country is inexplicably associated with hard-working midwestern family values instead of the moral vacuosness of that lunatic Scaife, that compulsive gambler Bennett, sexual deviants like Bob Packwood and Dick Morris, traitors like Bob Novak, adulterers like Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston, and Newt Gingrich, or gluttonous drug addicts like Rush.

The Republicans and conservatives worked a four decade campaign to be associated with mom and apple pie. It barely slowed them down that many were trapped in that vortex of corruption, Watergate. Or Iran Contra.

A lot of the professional moderates of the chattering class may not like it, and perhaps my co-worker may not either, but these people have to be destroyed, and to destroy them will require a campaign of vilification that will make the Arkansas Project look like an 8th grade campaign for class president.

I applaud what Oliver Willis and others are doing to build Brand Democrat, but something must be done with Brand Republican as well. These people are not reasonable or decent, and America needs to know that.

Freedom

Digby puts something into words that's been swirling around my head for some time:

I don't think that reasonable taxation comes anywhere close to being as coercive to the individual as unregulated business, theocratic political factions or an unfettered police state.

Although he doesn't go into much depth concerning the why of this, it isn't hard to see what he means.

For decades the mouthpieces of the right have worked hard to make freedom a rightist virtue. Part of this has been done, with more intensity since 9/11, with the tools of nationalist propaganda. Freedom as a word, as an idea, has been devalued. Freedom of religion has been twisted in the "freedom" of Puritan Christians to tell the rest of us how to live. Freedom of choice has been twisted in the choice to buy my household products at a WalMart or a Target. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure- well, say I walk into the WalMart, how many cameras trail me from the time I enter to the time I live? Not to mention the state itself, expanding every year the ways in which it can grind the Bill of Rights to dust.

I see a country becoming increasingly less free, not because our taxes are high or because "political correctness" forces people to tell fewer racist jokes (what a crock that is), but because powerful forces, both within the state and beyond, in the church and in private industry, have so few checks on what they can do.

The freedom I see inherent in our great nation is not the freedom of the police or FBI or CIA to do anything they can to get a conviction, it's not the freedom of pharmaceutical companies to poison us until they lawsuits force them to stop, and it's not the freedom of snake handlers to coerce whatever behavior they think God wants.

It's the freedom of people like me to think what they want to, to say what they want, to write what they want. To live how they'd like, live where they'd like, practice their faith or not in the manner they'd please. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, all that shit.

What the Republican party offers is the freedom to live in a future where a few companies run by greedy old men control our private industry. They offer the freedom to breathe poisoned air and drink poisoned water because said greedy old men dare not see beyond short term profits. They offer the freedom to dream of upward mobility while living paycheck to paycheck. They offer the freedom to live in fear of some great enemy, internal or external, gay couple or Islamic terrorist.

The Democratic Party is the the party of Freedom, even if it doesn't know it yet.

Many in the blogosphere, like Matt Yglesias and Josh Marshall, have been pointing out that one of the major weaknesses of the Democratic Party is organizational. And we've heard time and time again that the Democratic Party doesn have any "new ideas." Much of this is true. And this needs to be resolved.

But what needs to be fixed most desperately is, and frankly this is going to sound like a bunch of New-Age hooey, but here it is- Democrats and liberals and everyone left of Zell Miller have lost both passion and vision. We've stopped believing that real change is possible. The bad guy always wins. Karl Rove is even now hatching a trap. And you know what that demoralization turns into. It turns into a reactionary, timid Democratic establishment. It turns into a Democratic establishment that thinks its candidates should quote a little more Corinthians and maybe it'll be better. Sell out the homos, that's the ticket.

I don't have any illusions that the American people aren't fearful, ignorant, and easily persuaded by absurd lies. But everyone wants to believe...

Part of the reason the Republicans won this last one is because the Democrats underestimated the American people's foolishness, but something else is at work. The solution to the Democrats' problem isn't to pander to people who thinks liberalism=socialism=satanism. As Ferris Bueller said, "You can't respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn't work."

Those two at Pandagon have asked the right question- What do we believe in? It needs to be asked and it needs to be answered. We need to know what we want, and we need to express it with more passion than the Right does.

PS. One of the favorite sagacious pseudo-moderate tropes is that the Democrats need to reach out to the Red Staters (who said millionaires always perceive as Pious Primitives, Noble Savages) with religion and moral thingies. So they need to quote a ton of scripture and talk about praying and go to NASCAR events, kill some animals. Only if they do that, the sages of the McLaughlin group etc. know to say that Democrats who do this aren't really being authentic, that it's pandering. It's a trap, folks.
We really need to change the media landscape and quick. We need new blood among the liberal punditocracy. If they can push half-wits like Ben Shapiro, surely we can field actual wits. And the people we bring into the show need to be actual partisans. You can be thoughtful and actually believ in something, don't ya know.

Fix the Media

I'm watching the Chris Matthews show and the most reasonable person on there is Andrew Sullivan. Which is not to say I've suddenly become conservative.

The fact is that our punditocracy is dominated by softheaded middle-aged white millionaires whose blue-state self-hatred is only matched by their Heatherism. This needs to stop. I'm tired of hearing morons like Gloria Borger light up with glee talking about how Hillary Clinton is going to move to a Red State so she can run for president. I'm tired of hearing out-of-touch chuckleheads like Sam Donaldson describe an utterly unrevealing video snippet of Hillary talking about gay marriage as indicative of her Triangulation. Do these nitwits have a script?

And I'm sure as hell tired of hearing Borger tell us that the party of working people (the Democrats) is now elitist. Excuse me, you overpaid shithead. You are the elites. Really. You don't speak for anyone but self-loathing, BMW-driving, DC dinner party circuit media millionaires. The Republican party is run by businessmen and religious demogogues. That they appeal to the worst populism does nothing to change that this is the party of the Bush dynasty, of Southern aristocrats like Bill Frist, the party of tort reform and the repeal of the estate tax. It is not an accident that the Bushes have so many connections to the culturally medieval, deeply dysfunctional, and definitively elitist Saudi royal family. Democrats fail to win Mississippi, and sudenly Democrats are the elitists. Feh.


I don't like Andrew Sullivan. He's a butt-scratching prig, and not without his hypocrisies. So it shouldn't take an Andrew Sullivan to bring up the fact that Bill Clinton's perception as culturally divisive is largely if not principally the doing of the rising Religious Right.

That said, Andy don't get it. The people who voted for Bush based on "moral values" ARE bigots. They hate everything that Andy stands for and is. Andy is a Blue-state foreigner homosexual- HIV positive no less. He'd have to be French rather than British to be a better target for the cultural neanderthals of this country.