Where we went wrong - A commentary.

[Selteri]

The nature of the problem here in the US is twofold, much like it was in Nazi Germany during the buildup of power for Hitler. We have become a people divided by our own leadership and have put a group in power that cares not for the welfare of the people, but of the few. You merely noticed what we already know.

We now live in a global community where those who are our close neighbors like Canada to those who are not our direct neighbors but live on the same global block are equally able to be affected by out own petty problems. These problems have been developing over the past 30 years; yet, at the same time developing since the 1920s when Prohibition started as a failed experiment and even further back since this country's founding.

The Conservative - Republican party has already admitted that this was their plan that was developed by Barry Goldwater, they have been slowly and methodically doing this for years. In many ways Nixon started some of the ball rolling with his own heavy handed and undemocratic approach with the belief that the President was above the law. This continued under Regan who used the problems of the time to crucify Jimmy Carter politically with the new 'Moral Majority' that developed during Carter's administration by the form of the press finding out about the bleeding heart 'worried mother' story to scare parents.

To me the biggest _mistake_ for America happened near the end of Regan's term when the law was repealed that the news media no longer was required to be free of bias, either by equal time _or_ without bias toward one political side or the other in their reports. I said specifically it was a bad thing because the law had formed after Teddy Roosevelt because of yellow Journalism. I was informed I was just a naive kid and that nothing bad would ever happen from it. That law being repealed allowed for the Rush Limbaugh’s of radio to change their tone and no longer worry about which side they promoted. It allowed the media to follow it's natural bias in writing with less need for the overseeing editor to do their job, at first.

Just as cancer is a slower killer, so too has this been a slow death for America. It began when, 'El Rush Bo' gained his television show and lost it. He laid the blame solely on the liberal media. The Republican Political Machine realized that they had a winner of a scapegoat for any bad news, the Media. Bob Dole was the first Politician who blamed anything and everything on the Media. Truly though, had it not been for Ross Perot, who was the other scapegoat for why a Liberal was in office, Dole would have likely won the election as Perot pulled votes away from the moderate Republican and conservative Democrat voting pools.

The seeds of dissent against the media had been sewn. When George Bush's 'crack' team, including Carl Rove, began their attack on the 'liberal media' the American Voter believed them in spite of the case truly being the opposite. Dole opened the gates and since then Republicans have been using the news as an excuse for every bit of news they perceive as negative about them.

Still this is not the only thing that happened to allow this level of a power grab. Terrorists are a part of the mix as well. When the World Trade Center was bombed with the Van-Bomb the first time, Clinton, who had only been in office a very short time, acted quickly and decisively. He caught the direct perpetrators and their next rung up on the support ladder. Ironically this meant that after the trials concluded that the majority of the terrorists were Muslim, but there was a Jew in the mix too.

The next Major Terrorist attack happened in Oklahoma City, OK, this time it was also jumped on quickly and two direct pawns were snatched up while other members of this neo-nazi hate group managed to walk free. The irony is that the FBI acknowledged there were more in their own notes, they just didn't think it was politically a good idea to arrest them after the debacle in Waco, TX. Still, Clinton did a good job mainly because he had the support of an excellent counter-terrorism chief who had experience under Regan and Bush I.

Janet Reno went after other 'radical' groups like Waco and Ruby Ridge, even the Elian Gonzales incident, largely without direct Whitehouse consent; mainly due to her own choice to be an Attorney General and not a Presidential Show dog. This is mainly visible by the way she acted and her decisions that were sometimes directly opposite to the Whitehouse. We, the people, never even knew about the other terrorist attacks and plans that Clinton did foil, just the two he missed.

Our Economy began it's downturn before the 2000 election year began, in a large part due to Alan Greenspan who raised interest rates without allowing for the economy to truly have time to adjust. Those who were active in the Stock Market will remember the way many investors started calling it, "When Greenspan opens his mouth, the stock market tumbles." This along with the actions of a group known as the Carlisle Group (Headed in part by George H W Bush - AKA Bush I AKA 41) allowed for an economic downturn during the 2000 election, which follows a stock pattern of stocks becoming shaky during an election year where there is no incumbent or where there is a democratically seated President. (A pattern that has emerged since the 1950s) When the election happened and the Supreme Court chose to step in when there was already turmoil happening with a count that kept swinging back and forth, we, the people, should have demanded a second election in Florida, still, it was decided for us by a court that is majority Republican.

After George Bush was elected he did a 180 on his own statements, reassuring America that the economy was fine in spite of his election claim that the economy was in the toilet and ready to be flushed for another great downturn. The Economy did start a downturn in March, two months after he became President, he laid the blame on Clinton’s feet when the reality was that it landed on the feet of one Bill Gates for his company being declared a monopoly that needed to be broken up.

When September 11th came to be George Bush was not the man in charge, rather we listened to Dick Cheney. As was later revealed, the President sat in a room with school children listening to them read a book as he listened to them. He came out of his bunker a few short days later to tell the country that we needed to be strong and shop. Left the terrorists win. It would not be for a very long time that we would know about the Memo - Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the US or that Clark had been unable to meet with the proper people to help quietly stop this terrorist attack from happening.

Still, the confusion didn’t stop there, shortly after being told to shop we were told that terrorists wanted to bomb our shopping malls, but to keep on shopping. It was a very strange Halloween that year. This contradictory problem was only made worse by the magical terror alert levels that followed with news telling us to be afraid and follow duck and cover safety measures that were almost as equally ludicrous.

Our downfall wasn’t complete though, we had to lay the blame for all terrorism on Muslims, forgetting that there were more than just Muslim Terrorists. While the administration has included the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front in their group of domestic terrorists they have chosen to ignore many of the right leaning terrorist organizations, not even the KKK has gained mention as a terrorist group. (I consider a group that runs around in sheets that sets fires and uses terror tactics a terrorist group even without bombing.) Nor have the few religious terrorist organizations gained any recognition on this watch list of terrorists.

Still, things got worse here in America, our President chose to not only go after Afghanistan, the place where Osama Bin ‘Laden has hidden, but we then went after Iraq with evidence that a majority of the world’s nations did not believe. Through the time we have found that there were no WMDs found, that the terrorist ties that were proclaimed so loudly were not quite as strong as we were led to believe and that we didn’t send enough troops in and moved too quickly to truly stabalize the country, having somehow made the assumption that we would be greeted with open arms and that there would be no C-4 under the jackets.

That was not the end of the American downfall though, pictures of torture, a memo confirming it and shifted blame continued and contributed to even more American humiliation. We came under fire internationally for arresting and detaining people without trial, torturing them and for killing them in some cases. The response was even worse. In Gitmo we chose to erect tall walls and enact rules that the press could not get pictures from the inside of the camp X-Ray. Then to claim these were isolated incidents even though more and more evidence piled that these were more broadly done than we wanted to admit to.

All during this same 4 year period our President set records for cutting taxes to the top 1% of the nation, being the first President to cut taxes during a war, vacation time and vacation time during a time of war. This doesn’t even touch how soft he has been on allowing some corporations to get no bid contracts or that he has not demanded to know where the missing money has gone.

Some people grew even more suspicious when they discovered that the Democrat chosen by his party to stand against Bush was his distant cousin. That they were both brothers in a Fraternity so secret that they refused to talk about it at all. Then the ultimate slap in the face happened, nobody noticed that people who were on Bush’s reelection team were also supporting one of the advertisement groups known as Swift Boat Veterans… These people assailed John Kerry’s Record while ignoring George W. Bush’s less heroic record. They claimed he had lied to earn his purple hearts and his Bronze and Silver Star. They attacked him for saying the Vietnam War was bad and having the guts to speak about it in front of Congress.

It only got worse when John Forbes Kerry chose not to fire back, but instead chose to run a ‘kinder and gentler’ campaign against the President. It was little surprise to any of us that the race was so close. Yet some were shocked that after a remarkable insipid campaign that John Kerry hadn’t shown to be better than George Bush. When irregularities and vote problems surfaced in both Ohio and Florida the ‘Liberal’ Media called it tinfoil hat paranoia rather than doing their real job to investigate why Florida had irregularities two presidential elections in a row and why Ohio did after Bush’s Campaign coordinator was also the person in charge of the electoral process in that state.

Simply put - The problem is that WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA failed to maintain a more perfect union and failed in our vigilance to protect OUR liberties.

[Asgaya Dihi]

1. Another take on the source of the problem

I'm glad someone else is thinking about that, how and where things went wrong. I just posted in the "What are our winning issues in 2006 again?" thread to detail the current situation some since there's more propaganda than facts around the drug war, but I have a different take on where the party went wrong. I'll copy a message I sent to the party a few weeks ago, I think it's worth considering.

There's a couple of things about the failure of the Democratic party that bother me, but I've never in my life seen anyone else even mention the link, certainly nobody in power. I'm not sure the party can recover till they do. In effect they committed suicide, this'll take a little to explain so please be patient.

First we have to go back to the baby boom Generation that came of age in the 60's and the 70's, and rethink them a bit. In every generation that's ever existed they've rebelled, and if a person is going to make a mistake or commit a crime it'll likely first be as a youth. Many or most as they mature will simply stop.

Now look at the start of the drug war, and the reasons for it. We had a lot of young rebels that grew up with the lies and deceit of Nam, and they acted like young rebels. We had a spike in the crime rates for the very simple reason that we had a spike in the population that tends to commit them.

Some genius in the Republican party came up with a plan, and you guys went along with it. The plan involved attacking your own voter base, the hippies and free thinkers, the minorities, the rebels. And the Democratic party jumped in with both feet.

As the baby boomers matured and invested in stocks instead of in rebellion, the Republicans took credit for falling crime rates so you guys decided to prove you were just as tough. When Clinton came into office instead of showing some restraint or even doing a study to see if any of it is working we saw three consecutive years of record numbers of marijuana arrests, growth in the powers of the police to search, seize, and confiscate, and the loss of many rights to privacy. There's been another side effect as well, a big one.

The laws tend to actually target minorities, consider the safe school zones for instance. In a crowed urban area most people are near a school, daycare center, or something of the sort all the time just by force of how crowded it is, so they do a mandatory minimum. The same crime in a suburban area draws little notice, treatment perhaps. DA'a bargain charges down to get them to turn on others or to get them to give up property without protest, but for those with nothing to offer they get the maximum and no judge can say it's unfair. That leaves punishment mostly on the shoulders of the poor and the unconnected who just got into a bad situation, and leaves those we intended to target all too often untouched.

And the result of all of this? A growth in about 30 years from roughly 300,000 in our jails and prisons to over 2,100,000, mostly minorities, the poor, and the hippies. Voter disenfranchisement running over 4.7 million, in a nation where elections are decided by hundreds or thousands. And none of it has been needed, as far back as Nixon our own commissions told us it didn't work. Heck, back in the 1940's the LaGuardia report told us it didn't. It still doesn't.

The Democratic party committed suicide, and unless and until they reverse course they don't deserve to recover. If it wasn't for the damage they've helped do to this nation they'd by all rights be controlling it right now.

LEAP: Law Enforcement Against Prohibition - Homepage
http://www.leap.cc/

Drug War Facts
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/

Homepage of truth: the Anti-drugwar by Brian C. Bennett
http://www.briancbennett.com

[Selteri]

2. Good points.

Those are also quite well made points, I was giving a broad overview of the problem as I see it, and though it could include a lot more I was aiming more toward just how we got to the problem with how things built up. The origin of this post was in reply to a person I like who lives in Australia.

[newyawker99]

3. Hi Asgaya Dihi!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Asgaya Dihi]

4. Thanks :)

:)