The Fence Sitter's Olympics

Tom Gallagher, president of The San Francisco Democratic Club writes in this article about his dissatisfaction with the disturbingly two faced position of Nancy Pelosi regarding the Iraq war.
She denounces it but votes to support it. She says she wants to give the troops everything they need. Her constituents tell her that all the troops need are planes to fly them home. He cites Kerry's mealy mouthed position in Iraq and concludes by saying that maybe the Democrats will wake up if voters abandon them this fall.

I don't know about you, but I dont' want to wait till fall. I don't want to go through another rigged election capped by a depressing capitulation.

Pelosi's position is not so surprising. It is the policy of the DLC and other remnants of the fossilized leadership. These folks have succeeded in muscling Howard Dean out of the way and are continuing to dominate the party with their losing strategies.
Most of the Congressional Democrats behave similarly and isolate anyone who steps over the line and actually tries to represent their constituency.

He goes on to say that perhaps the Democrats think the GOP started the war and it's up to them to stop it. They just want to get busy on domestic issues.

We should remember that almost every Democrat voted to start the war. Democrats actually had some power. They had a Senate majority.
Yes, congress was misled but so was everybody else. It didn't stop millions of Americans from seeing through the sham and joining millions of others around the world in an unprecedented show of non-support.
Joe Biden, a Democrat, led the charge with his faux Senate hearings before the invasion, carefully crafted to shut out any expert opinion and well informed nay sayers.

People of good will need to stop puzzling over the Democrats protracted inaction and start looking at some cold hard facts.

There is almost no part of the Bush agenda that could have been enacted without the support and complicity of the Democrats. Almost every deplorable bill or appointment, even those that provoked a GOP revolt, was assisted over the finish line by the Democrats.
From the war, to the Medicare D madness, to industry written bills on energy, bankruptcy, CAFTA, tax cuts for the rich, to confirming Rumsfeld, Condi Rice, Gonzales, and Michael Chertoff, for God's sake, the Democrats were either in the front lines or pushing from behind.

The Bush regime, with its record of outrage, corruption and criminality could not survive a determined effort by the Democrats to dislodge it. There has been no such effort.

Democrats complain they have no power when they simply fail to wield the power they have.
It is the citizens that sent them Washington "to fight for the interests of ordinary Americans" who have no power.

The official position of the Democratic Party seems to be to act outraged and enact the GOP agenda. The "no" votes are carefully crafted to be symbolic and to never affect the outcome.
It is a game of high stakes, championship level fence sitting.

I have no special window into the inner workings of the National Democratic Party. However you can tell by who is benefitting where their loyalties lay.
Corporate bad actors, polluters, war profiteers, big energy price gougers, drug manufacturers, big media, the top 1%, and the banking industry. In short, the GOP base.

You can tell who they don't care about by who they are ignoring.
The 70% of Americans who favor a liberal social agenda and economic justice, the 63% who want us out of Iraq, the 70% of Americans who favor environmental responsibility, the 54% who are women, minorities, labor unions, the poor and destitute, the underemployed and the ill and the elderly.
In short, the Democratic base.

Democratic voters are supporting a party that does not support them. They are voting for representatives that for the most part, turn their backs on them as soon as they walk into congress.

They haven't changed is five years and its unlikely they will change in five more. They are happy to sit on the back bench and throw their hands up, for the present. If the tide turns, they will go back to the sort of "business as usua"l that made them vulnerable in the first place.

If we want change, we are the ones that have to change.
We have to give up hoping and start doing. No more money for the Democratic party and no more money for the Democratic sell outs.

We need to form a coalition party and we need to do it now. Progressive Democrats, miserable GOP, Greens, Libertarians, voting rights groups, issue groups, Move On, Common Cause, peace and justice, unions, people of color, immigrants and non voters. We need to take that 70% of Americans who are unhappy and channel their energies away from begging the corrupted and uncaring and into shaping a new future.
We need to stop volunteering to help the clueless and complicit Democrats and help ourselves.

Let us begin!

Carol DW