Greenwald -- The impotence of the loyal partisan voter

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/democratic_party/index.html?story=/opinion/greenwald/2011/04/05/democrats

Rachel Maddow last night issued a very harsh and eloquent denunciation of Obama's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military commission at Guantanamo rather than a real court. At the end of her monologue, Maddow focused on the contrast between how the Republicans treat their base and how Democrats treat theirs, specifically emphasizing that the White House announced this decision on the same day it kicked off Obama's re-election bid. About that point, Rachel said this:

A Democratic President kicks his base in the teeth on something as fundamental as civil liberties -- he puts the nail in the coffin of a civil liberties promise he made on his first full day in office -- and he does it on the first day of his re-election effort. And Beltway reaction to that is. . . huh, good move. That's the difference between Republican politics and Democratic politics. The Republicans may not love their base, but they fear them and play to them. The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base -- they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible.

Only the base itself will ever change that.

How will that happen? How can the base itself possibly change this dynamic, whereby politicians of the Democratic Party are not only willing, but eager, to "kick them whenever possible," on the ground (among others) that doing so is good politics? I'd submit that this is not only one of the most important domestic political questions (if not the most important), but also the one that people are most eager to avoid engaging. And the reason is that there are no comforting answers.

More at the link --

[ReggieVeggie]

1. wait! I've got to make popcorn!

:woohoo:

[Donnachaidh]

3. some really noisy crickets here, eh?

:popcorn:

[ReggieVeggie]

6. the answer is so obvious it's painful

but suggest that to some of these people and it's like you shot their dog with a kitten and ate the remains

[Donnachaidh]

8. roflmao!!!

And to add insult to injury, flossed your teeth with their entrails....

[Skittles]

2. is she just now realizing he tramples on his base?

I mean, seriously

[FLAprogressive]

4. Better late than never.

[Bandit]

9. Have you never watched her show?

She certainly is not just now realizing the betrayal from Obama...

[Skittles]

11. nope; I watch very little TV

[jefferson_dem]

12. Betrayal...

Oh, the drama! Please.

Click here - http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS356US356&q=maddow+obama+accomplishments

[Donnachaidh]

15. the only drama is the wild-eyed postings of those trying to shut down discussion

Yeah, Dissent -- it's *soooo* outdated..... :sarcasm:

[ChimpersMcSmirkers]

25. You wild-eyed, shutter-downer! It gets better and better around here.

[_ed_]

34. Do you work for Obama or the Democratic Party?

If not, you should ask for a paycheck. You'll defend anything they say or do.

[sabrina 1]

5. Rec'd to zero!

Greenwald is so right. Repeating the same thing over and over gets the same results over and over.

[sabrina 1]

7. And Rachel too ~ she is right that it is a really important question

'what to do about it'.

[jefferson_dem]

10. I've never seen so much wild-eyed rooting for failure of Obama, the Democratic Party, and our agenda

as in the reader comments to Glenn's latest polemic. Who hates whom again?

Nonetheless, this destructive perspective will undoubtedly receive vocal support here on DU as well. C'est la Vie...

[Skittles]

13. LOL

yeah jeff, that's what it is :rofl:

[ReggieVeggie]

maybe you could represent a better choice

instead of kvetching about those dissatisfied with the crappy choices they're presented

[ReggieVeggie]

14. Kate Lee Dupe

[jefferson_dem]

16. Projection overload...

That's pretty much all Greenwald's piece is - whiny kvetching. Echoed by the amen chorus of kvetchers in the comments...

Fact is ... the choice is clear. What you do with that choice is the only question.

[ReggieVeggie]

17. clear to a partisan, sure

the rest of us like to use our minds to think

[slipslidingaway]

28. "our agenda" subsidies to private companies for insurance and not care ...

that is not my agenda.

[Cali_Democrat]

41. "our agenda"

What agenda?

Bush tax cuts?
Indefinite detention?
3 wars?
$700 billion/year for the military industrial complex?
Patriot act?

What agenda are you referring to?

[leftstreet]

18. K&R

[ThomCat]

19. Obama loves to Kick the Democratic Base because

he's not a Democrat. He's a Republican who lied his way to a leadership role at the top of the Democratic party.

And unfortunately, there are a lot of people in this party who are so in love with him, as Moderate democrats, Corporate democrats, Blue dog democrats, "practical" democrats, or whatever else they want to call themselves, that kicking the traditional democrats on the left becomes a party sport.

It is as if there are Two groups of democrats.

1. The democrats who believe in supporting position and power for the sake of having it. Win at all costs. The goal is to have the office. What you do while you are there doesn't matter as much as just having and retaining the office and power.

These are the democrats that are okay with Obama acting like a republican, and in fact deny that he even does, even when it is obvious and blatant.

2. The democrats who focus on issues and goals first, and party second. The environment, and civil rights, and ending the wars, and fighting poverty, reining in corporate abuses, and many other issues are for more important than cheering any one politician or putting the party up on a pedestal. The party is only as good as the results it gets, and the results have been dismal.

These are the democrats who get kicked and called un-loyal. They are told that the failures of policy are their fault because they aren't loyal enough. As if the politicians would have magically, retroactively decided to fight harder, submit more progressive legislation and defend it tooth and nail if only these people gave more money and wrote fawning posts on message boards. It's an absurd proposition, but that's not the point. The point of the attacks is misdirection of blame, and putting the victims on the left always on the defensive.

Blaming the victims is a grand old tradition that everyone uses whenever any power of any kind is at stake. Unfortunately, it works.

[BzaDem]

23. Similarly, there were Republicans who claimed Reagan was a sellout liberal. This is nothing new.

There will always be people that will never be satisfied -- on both sides. You can almost mechanically find a few people in each party that claim their nominee is actually a member of the other party.

Their musings tend not to be taken too seriously by 90% of their respective parties, however.

[ThomCat]

29. Oh sure, the man who has been cannonized by his party.

:rofl:

[BzaDem]

42. Just because you don't believe the obvious truth doesn't mean it isn't obviously true. n/t

[dionysus]

37. drivel.

[nashville_brook]

39. well said.

[underpants]

20. KSM would go free if they tried him on a civil court

Bush's torture regiment assured that.

I don't like it but there is no way a civilian court could convict him of anything at this point.

Yes- Bush created a new unconceivable way to screw that up too.

[mike_c]

22. our "standards of justice" make that necessary...

...because they're standards-- or at least they were until they became malleable tools for use in political campaigns and such.

[L0oniX]

31. Standards? LMAO

Bernanke, Summers, Paulson, Gramm, Cassano, Sullivan, Greenspan, Geithner, Fuld, Sparks, Viniar, Blankfein, McDaniel, Mozilo, O'Neal, Thain, Tyson, Dudley, Hubbard, Sachs, Schapiro, Emanuel, ...Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powel and many more ....all are criminals of one sort or another. They all got away with their lies and crooked schemes. Some are working for Obama. They all have a part in the destruction of our country ...and they are getting away with it. The rule of law is dead!

[JackRiddler]

26. The idea that KSM could be acquited is 100 percent right-wing mythology.

Apologies, since you're not right wing I presume, but it is so. It's the mythology of the courts that let criminals go, when of course courts are far more likely to lock up innocents (depending on what group they belong to). It's a justification for the military tribunal.

No American jury would ever let the accused mastermind of 9/11 go. It's an absolute certainty. Jury selection would weed out any 9/11 skeptics. Prosecution then would show hours of death and mayhem in New York and DC and wave the flag over the Flight 93 uprising and bring forth a march of widows and parents who lost their children and tie KSM to all of that a million ways emotionally, and the judge would have to keep calling recess so that the jury could stop crying and compose themselves. KSM would have no more chance of an acquital than Osama Binladin. The outcome is foreordained, in any scenario, with any evidence. It's almost a function of human psychology.

Which is not to say that a civilian trial is not infinitely the better kangaroo court than a military death panel. Because the civilian trial is in public. The defense gets to speak. There is a transcript. History gets a record. And because the military death panel is a travesty, a crime, and should in no way be legitimated for further use.

What's feared is what may come out in discovery. While the verdict is certain, many varieties of evidence will be made public and go into the historical record that no one in the Bush or Obama administrations want out there. First of all, exactly what you're saying: evidence of US torture complex, in violation of all the laws of man and God, a barbarism. Then there is that a clever defense would go all the way on 9/11 skepticism, potentially gain mounds of documents (full of redactions that make the government look suspect), and win much of the public opinion on behalf of the patsy thesis, regardless that it will not change the inevitable verdict.

And who knows what he'll say on his own behalf?

And who wants the inevitable circus outside the court?

[ThomCat]

30. How do you figure that?

The defendant in the first World Trade Center bombing was tried in a civilian court, In NYC. He didn't go free.

That went just fine.

There is no reason this trail couldn't be handled just as well.

Predicting the incompetence of a court in order to justify military tribunals seems like a really weird way to support the rule of law.

:shrug:

[Hydra]

40. How do we even know he did anything?

The whole point of Gitmo was that we were holding people without charges. We only do that when we have nothing to work with.

If those people were as guilty as claimed, they would have been in court days after their capture and pushed through court to execution your head would spin. The fact that they were never able to scrape even a sort of case together says volumes.

[Old and In the Way]

21. well, I have a solution!

Lets support someone a lot more progressive than Obama! Then we can split the vote and the Republican will win. Just like what happened here in Maine, last November. We got a teabagger who got 38% of the vote because the non-teabagger votes were split.

Until we have instant run off reform so that a majority winner is assured, we risk another revisit of 2000. Was it that long ago? Are we still buying that there's not a dime's worth of difference between the Democrat and the Republican?

I guarantee you that there will be someone who runs to Obama's left. He'll be funded by the Republican Party. He'll tell you how awful Obama and the Democrats are (it will go without saying that the Republicans are just as bad).

If Obama had a Congress full of Ed Kennedys and Alan Graysons, I'm pretty sure we'd get the legislation we really want and need. But Ted is dead and Alan got beat and the voter just sent a bunch of bagger reinforcements to Washington last election. Until the electorate smartens up, we'll be lucky to maintain what little progressive agenda still remains.

[nashville_brook]

43. misses the point. completely.

[bvar22]

24. Rachel was On Fire.

I agree with every word.

K&R,
and kudos to Rachel.
:patriot:




Who will STAND and FIGHT for THIS American Majority?
Lofty Rhetoric, Broken Promises, and Whiny Excuses mean NOTHING now.
"By their WORKS you will know them,"
and by their WORKS they will be judged.

[slipslidingaway]

27. knr nt

[JackRiddler]

32. knr

[Name removed]

33. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[nashville_brook]

35. Sam Seder mentioned this today...will discuss at length tomorrow

[Keith Bee]

36. K&R

Greenwald & Maddow are the only two American journalists left.

[xchrom]

38. Recommend