Friday, November 9, 2007

Further Disgust

Well, this just settles it. The Dems are freaking USELESS as an opposition party. They just confirmed another torturing AG, they are about to pass amnesty for the blatently illegal actions of the phone companies that gave ALL of their electronic routing to the NSA. I want to puke.

To Ballgame and others who think I'm nut to even consider voting GOP for this, tell me, how can I get the Dems to actually listen to me? If they think I'll vote for them no matter what as the "lesser of two evils" they then have ZERO incentive to listen to me. They would know they had me and they could do whatever the hell they wanted, ignoring me completely, confident that they'd never lose my vote. If I vote third party, they lose a vote, but they know that they still never need to worry about me voting for the GOP, and it is the same as if I didn't vote at all. But if I vote GOP, now they have something to worry about, particularly if others do what I do, and tell them either listen to us or lose your jobs.

That's the thing that I think people who are partisan fail to appreciate. Haven't you ever talked to anyone who reflexively votes GOP every single election, even as they bitch and gripe about how they hate what the GOP has become? They are the enablers that have allowed the GOP to get as bad as it has - the GOP knows it can always count on their vote, so it ignores them. Thus, the moderate GOP people feel out in the cold. But they keep on pulling that GOP lever.

I tried to explain to a moderate Republican I know that they can't vote for moderate Republicans and feel like they are represented because even if you are in a district that has a moderate Republican (or a State with a Moderate Senator), the GOP will just use that moderate seat to get a majority, then will ignore the moderate on every single issue, as the GOP march in lockstep with what the neocon leadership does. In essence, voting moderate GOP guarantees the extreme GOP. So if you really want the GOP to be more moderate, the answer isn't voting for moderate GOP, it is voting out ALL GOP candidates by voting Dem until the party gets the message and changes. Because they aren't likely to listen to anything less.

So it is with the Dems. If they aren't going to oppose the GOP EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE THE POWER TO DO SO, then they are useless as an opposition party, and I refuse to reward that with my vote. I've given up entirely on the GOP. The only hope for the GOP is to be utterly and completely annhilated as a viable party so it can rebuild from scratch, and that simply won't happen because the GOP is too damn good at exploiting power, doing PR, and getting elected. (And because the Dems don't know how to use power at all, are timid at doing so, are HORRIBLE at PR, and the media favors the GOP). So we'll be locked in a nasty pendulum of going between weak Dem majorities that cave in on everything the GOP wants, back to ruthless GOP majorities that get everything they want, and so on, until we break the cycle.

I sure as hell don't want Hillary to be elected president, because that will enable GOP power for a decade. Though I'd take her over any Republican. Obama is my choice. Too bad he doesn't seem to have a chance in hell of the nomination. But it is probably too early to say that for sure.

I'm just so pissed right now. The Dems had the votes to stop the AG nomination. They had as many as 44 opposed. That is enough for a filibuster. The GOP seems to have no problem filibustering everything in sight. The Dems can't even manage one when they have the freaking majority in the Senate. How pathetic is that?

Maybe if more people told the Dems that, despite seeing the GOP as the worst, most corrupt party in history, they'll still vote for them over the Dems if they don't stop the GOP, the Dems would actually DO something about it.

2 comments:

ballgame said...

dbb, I look at it this way. There are three parties in Congress: extreme right wing corporatists, centrist corporatists, and progressives. Progressives are still a minority. Most of the CCs are now Democrats. You're trying to 'threaten' the CCs by saying you'll vote for the ERWCs, but in fact on certain fundamentals the CCs are aligned with the ERWCs.

Your 'threat' is based on (at least) two false premises. The first is that the CCs are primarily motivated by the fear of losing their jobs. While not entirely false, I suspect it's more accurate to say they are primarily motivated by money/power/prestige. If they lose their jobs, they'll just go into lobbying or some other cushy corporate job. That option becomes more remote if they align themselves with the 'rabble' (i.e. progressives).

The second false premise is that increasing the perceived popularity of voting Republican will cause these CC's to shift in a progressive direction. Whether in a poll or by ousting a CC and replacing them with an ERWC Republican, the only conceivable impact that your 'threat' will have (assuming your logic was embraced by thousands of others) would be to convince the CC that he or she is too progressive and pressure him or her to become even more aligned with the ERWC party.

AFAICT, the only way to get Congress to become more progressive is to elect more progressives, which is unfortunate because it's damned deadly difficult to to.

DBB said...

I suppose there is another option - voting a Dem out in the Dem primary, but that is realistically not going to happen unless circumstances are very strange. And even then, the Dems still seem to lose (like with Lieberman).

You are right that there is a danger that people will see more votes GOP as more support of the GOP agenda, but thats why it needs to be accompanied by loud and clear explanations of the reason for the vote - as in directly writing your rep and telling them in advance of the election what he or she needs to do to keep his or her seat.

And in the end, since I doubt I'm going to start a wave, my vote one way or the other won't matter. I live in Michigan. Odds are, this state will go Dem for the Senate and Presidency. Though my district is pretty well gerrymandered to be GOP no matter what (as is most of Michigan, which is why we have one or two House seats that go Dem basically 100-0 every election and the rest are like 60-40 GOP).

I'm just really pissed off at the Dems for all of the reasons I've listed.