The Circular Logic Is Making Me Dizzy
I’m conflicted about whether or not to support Democrats seeking re-election in 2006. My gut tells me to support any challenge to their middle of the road stance on just about every issue, but some compelling arguments have been made that if they had more support in Congress, they would be more willing to move to the left. Compelling but not convincing.
I simply cannot justify supporting incumbent Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the vast and credible evidence that our election systems have been hijacked by corporations that blindly support the Republican and neo-con agenda of perpetual war and corporate domination. Beyond being short sighted, by ignoring the elephant in the rotunda, Democrats are complicit in shooting themselves in the foot and engaging in faith based democracy by not addressing the issue of voter fraud head on. Any primary challenger who makes voting reform a cornerstone of their agenda should be supported over the incumbents who continue to stick their heads in the sand.
All of the arguments for supporting Democrats who have the best shot at winning in order to grow their numbers, while logical, are based on the fallacy that there is integrity to the voting process in this country. When the Democrats are slaughtered at the polls in November yet again, will Democratic voters finally be ready and willing to accept the reality of where we are? For people who profess to be part of the “reality based community”, we seem to be equally adept at ignoring facts as the “faith based community” we so abhor. It defies logic that in order to eradicate election fraud, we must get the right people elected using voting machines running on proprietary software and where in many states, it is against the law to even review the results.
I hope that the Democrats are able to make sweeping gains in the mid-term elections, I just wish that somebody could explain to me how that is a reasonable thing to expect. There is an expectation that if we can pull off convincing wins, it will be impossible for the Republican machines to steal it away. Let’s ask our fellow Democrats in Ohio how well that worked out for them this past November when polling varied by upwards of 30% from official tallies.
Unless and until we can accept the ugly truth of how far down the road toward a dictatorship we already are, we will never be able to slow the cart down, let alone turn it around and head back towards the democracy we are so close to losing.
posted by The (liberal)Girl Next Door @ 12:31 PM
3 Comments:
Guess it depends on what is mean by "Democrat." We need people with spines stiff enough to lift their snouts out the corporate trough. Not too many "Democrats" meet that definition. Bill Clinton was not much of a speed bump on the road to Constitutional deconstruction, empowerment of the oligarchs, enriching the very rich while further impoverishing the very poor, and further consolidating executive power. He brought us welfare reform, the precursor of the abomination known as the Patriot Act (the effective death penalty act, which I heard a Federal Appeals Court Judge say was in many instances a repeal of the Habeas Corpus laws meant as a safeguard against arbitrary imprisonment, and NAFTA, among other things. While he wasn't perhaps owned by oil, he was beholden to the big chicken farmers of Arkansas. True, he didn't completely deny the existence of global warming and was gonna sign up for Kyoto, he probably wouldn't openly advocate torture in war (although he was happy to deny clemency to a convict so brain damaged he wanted to save the dessert from his last meal until after the execution) ... but we're gonna need something a lot tougher than a democrat a lot sooner than we would have to slow down the crazy descent into dark, greedy bushcheneyism
There are two very big issues in this country that are assisting the far right in hijacking our country. And if we don’t fix them we are going to end up in a dictatorship. Call it fascism, corporatism, theocracy or whatever name the political scientists conjure up to describe it. One is voter disenfranchisement. Vote stealing/changing computer voting machines is just one of the far right’s tools. The voter ID card is another. Having more voting machines in republican districts than in democratic districts is yet another.
But when you think about it. The lack of a truly independent media may be the biggest concern. If our media was not beholden to their corporate masters they would be exposing the electronic voting debacle and other forms of disenfranchisement for what they are – a subversion of the very democratic principles which have made our nation what it is was.
Is it too late to turn the country around? I don’t know. But one or both of these issues will have to be resolved in order to make things right in this nation again. If we solve the media independence issue the electronic voting issue may well end up being righted by popular demand.
". . When will Americans recognize that theirs is a polarized, politically segregated society, not unlike those they helped create in Iraq and Palestine?
When will they come to the realization that their political process is nothing more than a collusive duopoly and, as such, borderline totalitarian? There is no opposition political party of substance, of courage and, of course, there’s no real choice between two political parties. When will Americans refuse to participate in sham federal elections? When will they recognize that all the accumulated data from study after study clearly shows that America is in real crisis across the entire socioeconomic, political and foreign policy spectrum? . . continued . . .
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?
context=viewArticle&code=STA20060126&
articleId=1816
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