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Thursday, May 24, 2007

Democrat Cowards cave in and fail to hold Bush to a timetable in Iraq










http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Olbermann_rails_against_Bush_Dems_for_0524.html

Boy are we screwed. It's one thing to be victimized by a political party--at least you have your party of victims, hopefully united, morally indignant, so ready to step in, when possible, to right what wrongs they-and their country-have suffered. So, after all the marches, all the grassroots action, the donations, the calls for impeachment, the t-shirts, the bumper stickers, the phone calls, the talk shows...what do we find?
We -- all of us, democrats or not, are being victimized again, this time by the democratic party.
The democrats today are going to vote to continue funding Bush's grinding, absurd, isn't-this-over-already, post-modern simulacrum, disaster of a war--with no timetable attached. I.E., they're handing him a loan which no one expects him to repay. He gets all the benefits our weakened treasury can provide; and none of the responsibilities to all of us who fill that treasury. Which appears to be the way W has lived his whole life: cash and power goes in one end, failure and death come out the other.

Over the last few years we've seen our traditional balance between the 3 branches of government gradually get swallowed up by just one of those branches-the executive. All the checks and balances that are built in our system have failed, in a relatively short time, to prevent our government from spying on us; to prevent our president starting a war based on lies; to prevent voter fraud; to prevent habeas corpus from being demolished; to prevent our government from torturing people; to prevent New Orleans from unnecessary suffering;etc;etc;etc. Our anti-virus software, if you will, has crashed, and the viruses are running wild.

At least, I thought, at least we (barely) have a second party in the US. At least that's one last check against all the abuses we've seen. And now I feel we've lost even that feeble shield.

What's really galling is that the Democrats have everything to gain from pushing Bush and his cronies hard to end the war; they have popular support, they have an electoral mandate, they rode the anti-war sentiment into office, they are up against a president who is popularly regarded as being the "worst ever" and who will be moving into his lame(est) duck period in the next year. I don't see why they are being such weasels.

I wish I had known about this spinelessness back in the fall when I spent many nights and weekends calling people around the country encouraging them to vote democratic. Next time I'm going green.

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