The Democratic Party...Dammit!

I am a Democrat because I have no choice. I prefer to work from within a flawed organization and try to infect it with a real Progressive ideology, even though as is often said, "The Democratic Party eats its own young." This contrasts with the Green party which gnaws its own legs off and doesn't have young, or the Republican party which eats every body else's young while the nanny drives Republican offspring to the private school. So, since I don't see driving off a cliff in a hay wagon to have much of a future, I am a Democrat by default.

My most favorite Congressman, Alan Grayson, is no longer a Congressman. I sent him money in his re-election bid and so did a lot of other Progressives but It was not enough to balance the train loads of cash spent by outside special interests. Enough money can make a straight talking man of the people look like a clown and a clown look like something other than the bizarre right wing ideologue that he is. Grayson was beaten by a bizarre right wing ideologue.

I understand how this happened because my own Congressman, Lincoln Davis, was beaten by a candidate that nobody knew, nobody knows, and nobody has seen since his victory speech. How many conservative candidates can get elected who have a French name? My new Congressman, Scott DesJarlais, has no history of political involvement and ain't from around here but he got elected. When one of Lincoln's aides went to look at media buys during the campaign he found that the media had already been bought but not by DesJarlais. It had been bought by a host of outside 527 political groups. Want to know who the main target of these 527 groups was in this election cycle? ...The very people that were closest to Republicans in the Democratic Party...The Blue Dog Democrats. Lincoln Davis was a prominent Blue Dog Democrat. He is now an ex-congressman. He ran away from his own party's president as hard as he could. Had he gotten the Obama votes from his own District he would probably still be in Congress.

The Democratic Party is fractured a the moment. The old DLC guard has steadily moved toward the right and big corporate money since the Clinton years. In doing this, they left their base...Us!

The message has been, "We're just like Republicans, only nicer." Well as it turns out, you can be pretty danged rotten and still be nicer than Republicans. This is a huge opportunity for the Democratic Party, only so far, it has failed to energize its base, which by my count should be 294 million of the 300 some odd million people in the United States of America. What the heck is going on? Even if you factor out the wedge issue crazies, the gun fetishists, the homophobes, and the ultra right crazies, that should still leave two thirds of Americans.

When will the national Democratic party learn what most of us out here in the boonies already know? Our nation is in a headlong rush toward fascism and plutocracy and the national Democratic Party seems to be trying to compromise with the Devil to only take half its soul.

Read what Alan Grayson told the NY Times.

...he considers the political right to be intolerable. He called the Republicans “a hopeless sellout party that will never do anything constructive for ordinary people in this country.”

“I don’t have to speculate about it anymore,” he said. “I worked with them for two years.”

But hanging over the interview was a lingering frustration with the Democratic Party.

We cannot take tea and cookies to a gang fight. We will lose our neighborhood, we will lose our town, we will lose our state, and we will lose our country.

This is a call to war.

Steve