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Sunday, January 29, 2006

Who said the blogosphere is homogeneous?
Posted by Jill | 7:41 PM

John Aravosis makes a pretty good case against the way the filibuster against Strip Search Sammy the Stem Cell Alito is going.

I haven't beaten the filibuster drum here all that much because the words of Oscar Wilde keep coming to mind: "There are two tragedies in life: One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it."

I agree with John that a well-organized filibuster which communicates to the American people the danger of this nominee, and gets them on board, is an effective technique. This particular effort, about which even those Democrats who have agreed to aren't enthusiastic (I'm talking to you, Sen. Obama), is going to fail, and it is going to reinforce the idea of the Democrats as an ineffective party.

I also agree that John Kerry's sudden enthusiasm for the netroots is less a function of a true belief in the danger of a Supreme Court nominee who believes that a president is a king, and more a function of trying to get a database of names for his next presidential run. Kerry can talk about a filibuster all he wants, he's a day late and a dollar short, and as I've said before, if he'd done his fucking job as a candidate, and NOT allowed the Swiftboat liars to smear him without a response, and NOT tried to look like the blue collar tough guy he isn't, and if he hadn't tried to finesse every goddamn issue until even I didn't know where the hell he stood on anything, we wouldn't even have to talk about a filibuster. So if Kerry thinks he can undo that damage now and I'll slap a Kerry sticker on my car in 2008, he'd better guess again.

Sam Alito, or someone like him, was a foregone conclusion when John Kerry took his $14 million of leftover campaign money and left Ohio, while his running mate was still telling supporters that the ticket would not give up until every vote was counted.

George W. Bush is never going to name a consensus nominee, and Capitol Hill Republicans aren't going to make him. He may have a 36% approval rating, but he he thinks he's the King of America, and he's going to continue to behave like one until he either leaves the White House in 2008 or cancels the election. If the Alito filibuster should by some miracle be successful, then we'll get Janice Rogers Brown, and then there's NO chance of a filibuster, because the Mighty Wurlitzer is already warmed up and ready to brand the Democrats as the party of racists and misogynists.

The time for hue and cry was November 2004.

John's bottom line, and I concur:

But, you need to recognize that those are not the only two options available to us. There's a third. Destroy the Senate Democrats who did nothing to launch a REAL campaign to convince the American people that Alito must be defeated. Destroy the traditional non-profit advocacy groups who took our millions of dollars and did NOTHING to launch a real campaign to win the public to our side. And go after the rich donors who continue to enable these failed Democratic politicians and these failed advocacy groups like some addict who only needs one more fix, then promises he'll get better. If we do not go after them, if we do not force them to change or get out of the way, the same problem, the same failure, the same ineffectiveness will continue to plague our party and our movement, with no change in sight.

We have a choice. We have the ability to make change in our party. We have the power to make the Democrats stand up and fight like real Americans for real principles in a way that shows how fierce and tough and committed we can be.


I'm not convinced that we have the time or the ability to do this before the Bush unholy combination of fascism and royalism comes to pass and we no longer have choices because we are At War In Perpetuity. But if you aren't as much of a pessimist as I am, and if you believe that we will continue to have elections that aren't completely rigged, the fact of the matter is that the Old Guard of the Democratic Party must go. This means John Kerry and Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein and every pussy-ass Democrat who is content to nibble table scraps from the corporate table as long as it means re-election must be dumped from office as quickly as possible, replaced by candidates who fight for Americans, not corporations. We want elected representatives who can clearly articulate why progressive values are the values Americans want, and who can remind them that the things they take for granted as emblematic of the good life in this country were all progressive initiatives -- public education, clean water, clean air, public transportation, Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, voting rights -- all progressive triumphs.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a Texas Democrat who signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 even though he knew it meant losing the South BECAUSE IT WAS THE RIGHT THING TO DO FOR AMERICA. When was the last time you saw a Democratic presidential candidate with that kind of courage? I'll tell you when: It was early 2004, and the candidate was named Howard Dean, and the campaigns of John Kerry and Dick Gephardt got together and ran negative ads in Iowa that worked. Then John Kerry left his testicles in Des Moines and now he thinks he can go through the motions of filibustering Alito and it makes everything OK.

It doesn't.

I don't oppose the filibuster with the vehemence that John does. I think that doing SOMETHING, even if ineffective, may be necessary at this point, not to keep the netroots supporting this old guard of political hacks, but to make SOME kind of stand against this spoiled brat of a president who's used to getting his own way. And if by some miracle the filibuster is effective, then this party has to get its ass in gear immediately and educate the American public about what the Unitary Executive theory is and why it's so dangerous to everything this country stands for.

I just don't have a whole lot of faith that this bunch can do it.
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