http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/40744/Establishment Dems treat their political party like a house in the fucking Hamptons. Who died and made these people gatekeepers to anything? Firing Squad Looms for the Dem Party OligarchyBy Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on August 23, 2006, Printed on August 26, 2006
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What exactly does self-appointed congressional mega-celebrity and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Rahm Emmanuel mean (says a friend of mine in congress of him: "He's an amoral, showboating cock") when he says, "Do I think
and Al Sharpton are the future of the Democratic Party?"
That's actually not hard to figure out; it's political hack-ese for the human sentence bloggers = Al Sharpton. As for what he means by that: just think about the thought process that had to go into Emmanuel's adding of the phrase "and Al Sharpton," when Al Sharpton wasn't even part of the question. Ask yourself if you really believe Emmanuel isn't aware that he's addressing the mostly white, Upper West Side readers of New York magazine when he "offhandedly" ties bloggers to the legendary gold medallion-wearing icon from forty blocks north in Harlem.
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Finally, the "firing squad in a circle" line has been a DLC favorite for years. DLC chief Al From has been pimping it at least since the last presidential race. It's time we officially retired this line, which is really just a sorry take on the lame old high-school guidance-counselor saw: "Now, Jimmy. When you shoot spitballs at Vice Principal Anderson, you're really shooting spitballs at yourself." And little Jimmy thinks: No, actually, I was shooting spitballs at Vice Principal Anderson...
What's amazing about the "firing squad in a circle" line is that it is inevitably used less than five seconds after the DLC speaker has just finished dumping on Michael Moore, peace activists, or whoever the party's talking-points-vermin of the day is (In this case, Sharpton and bloggers). He denounces Michael Moore as a disgrace to the party, then turns around and says that when we attack the party leadership, we're only hurting ourselves. These tactics are so transparent and condescending that one longs for some kind of cosmic referee to just drop down from the heavens and unilaterally disqualify their users on the grounds of their overwhelming general wrongness -- but the maddening thing about these DLC creatures is that that referee never arrives, and Al From is back on page one again the next day, shaking his head and grumbling piously about "unity" and "consensus" and "the lost art of bipartisanship."
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This schism within the Democratic Party is the most interesting thing to happen in American politics in decades, because due to a system error, people have temporarily been allowed back into what had been a totally closed process. They're working round the clock to fix the loophole, though, because the Emmanuels of the world know what's coming if they don't. The firing squad. And this time it won't be in a circle.
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
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