Sorry for anyone who cares. Due to a car breakdown this week, and the trip to Chicago this weekend, SwS has to take a week off. Plus last week, obviously.
Don’t worry, I hated Dreamcatcher enough for two weeks, and will get my venom out soon.
(Yes I know, it’s a very hopey-changey movie, and honestly the ‘get rid of handguns’ thing at the end feels really tacked on)
So the Huffpo piece “Power Struggle: Inside The Battle For The Soul Of The Democratic Party” is the gift that keeps on giving; it’s just full of useful information.
One of the most fascinating parts for me was the discussion of just how shellshocked the Democratic leadership was by losing power in 1994, and how desperate, absolutely desperate, they are to retain power — at seemingly any cost.
For the next 12 years, Democrats came to Congress to run out the clock. Chastened by the losses of the 1980s and early 1990s, they triangulated, pushing policy positions not because they were good in and of themselves but because they were better than the opposite. They wanted to be in the majority because it was awful to be in the minority.
…
After all, what could possibly hurt the progressive agenda more than losing the majority? A former Democratic staffer who came to the Hill in 2001 says padding the majority is a worthwhile endeavor.
“Anybody who actually says [we'd be better with a smaller, more progressive majority] may or may not have experienced the minority and doesn’t know how terrible it is living in that world,” he says. “It’s a shit world to live in. On the House side, to be in the minority, you get nothing. You get absolutely nothing. No legislation gets enacted. You have less staff. You have less resources. You have hundreds or thousands of well meaning young progressives out of work. It’s a terror — it’s an absolute terror.”
Yes, people being out of work, not having resources, that’d be a shame, wouldn’t it? Terrifying, even. It’s therefore good that we defer major political goals (like, say, reducing the catastrophic unemployment rate outside of the Capitol) to ensure that young progressive staffers don’t face unemployment of their own.
God-fucking-damn. Do these people listen to themselves talk, or is there some kind of mental filter that screens out narcissistic bullshit? I hope, if I ever acted like such a selfish douche in public, that the universe would have the mercy to shut my mouth for me. Maybe make a bird fly down my throat, or cause a sudden, highly localized earthquake to knock me off my feet so that the whole world can literally kick my ass.
This is the crux of the problem with our modern Democratic party, right here, and the reason I attached that video at the top and stole its phraseology; our so-called leaders are so paralyzed with fear that they stopped doing their jobs a long time ago, opting instead to take any expeditious route they can find toward KEEPING their jobs.
Because, in politics, performance doesn’t have to correlate with reward. You could work hard, craft logical legislation that advances the public good and then try to sell it to a public that admittedly cares more deeply about reality television and Twilight movies. That’s very hard, and there’s every chance you might lose your next election. Alternately, you could sell out, take huge sacks of cash from Wall Street, big polluters, health insurers and other scumbags, and blanket local tv with 30 second suckup ads extolling your great moderate virtues. That’s comparatively simple, and the odds are against your loss, thanks to the incumbency protection racket.
It’s a move right out of the Rahm playbook. We all know how that turned out last time, too.
What a sick, sad, vomitous world we live in.