Thursday, October 19, 2006
(3:00 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
On the Old Saw, "Republicans use the religious right for their votes but never give them what they actually want"
The Democrats do the same thing with progressives, or liberals, or whatever you call them. Arguably they learned this technique from the Republicans, but no matter how it arose, the end result is the same -- we have two national parties whose political strategy is based on consistently failing to deliver for what is ostensibly their primary constituency. Instead of pursuing policies those constituencies actually want, they mainly focus on convincing them that the other guys definitely won't give them what they want.From the perspective of representative government, what purpose is actually being served by either party is unclear. But be that as it may, there's no denying that this shit actually works. The Democrats have a total corner on my vote, despite the fact that I know that they're all equivocating cowards who will not impeach Bush, demand withdrawal from Iraq, or give us a real single-payer health care system -- even if they had supermajorities in both houses of Congress, they would do precisely none of that stuff.
Any opposition party worthy of the name would impeach Bush as soon as they returned to power. That's just the bare minimum, in my opinion. Plus impeach Roberts and Alito and replace them with actual living human beings -- no need to hold back from cleaning up his vandalism of the Supreme Court. For example. That such things are dismissed out of hand as completely unrealistic -- even in this extremely extreme political situation we find ourselves in -- shows that the Democrats don't really mean it.
I mean: they used to carry firearms into Congress! It used to be possible to get shot in Congress. And now using strong and "unbalanced" language to describe a criminal, disastrous war is considered to be too "divisive." But I'm still going to vote for them -- a straight Democratic ticket, all the way down to Todd Stroger. They're nothing, but they're all I've got.
