Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Junta
Ahh, a treasure trove of information over at Thinkprogress. DeLay’s 13 worst ethical lapses here. John McCain, that “maverick,” heals the breach with Jerry Falwell here.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, there are no moderates in the GOP. John McCain may work with Ted Kennedy on occasion, but like any other republican he will still go back to the Deep Well of maggoty fundamentalism to shore up his base.
It is the fundamental problem of a criminal junta founded on a base of fundamentalist ministers, unreconstructed secessionists, and willfully ignorant jingoists, funded by a corporate network that knows no allegiance to anything except greater profit. When Ken Mehlman is policing the moderates like the SAVAK secret police it is just a further reflection of the rottenness of the organization. Being founded on that is bad enough, but when your party enforces discipline to the party line in a draconian fashion it simply makes it that much worse.
So we have Regnery Press, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, FOX News, and every other outlet of corporatist propaganda feeding the jingoists with disinformation and warping your political base. James Dobson and Jerry Falwell are twitching the lash to inspire Terri Schiavo-like legislation and judicial appointments like Pryor. Corporations are writing tax laws, environmental legislation, campaign finance laws, and immigration laws. You will never find a good politician emerging from this network.
And to add insult to injury, you have Ken Mehlman enforcing party discipline and telling the republicans that they can’t distance themselves from a blatantly criminal president whose JAR is in the 30’s.
Go ahead. Rally behind the president even as he sinks beneath the waves. It’s political suicide, but more than that, it’s blatant gangsterism. You can’t criticize the president in the Republican Party, even if he’s wrong, even if he’s breaking the law.
This is why I call the Republican Party a criminal junta. They are nothing more than a syndicate. They cover up each other’s crimes and support each other, right or wrong.
You might say the same thing about democrats, but democrats never sank this low. Democrats never went to bat for Tom DeLay, keeping him as their majority leader in the House until he was actually indicted, and then rewriting the House rules so that indicted leaders didn’t have to step down. Democrats never had a guy like Pat Roberts who delayed a vote on investigating the president’s activities that he admitted were illegal, and then strong-armed republicans until he had enough votes to block an investigation entirely.
Democrats have never been able to break the will of every “moderate” in their party. Ken Mehlman and Karl Rove have forced more party-line votes out of these republicans than anyone else in living memory. They made “moderates” like Arlen Specter, Mike DeWine, Olympia Snowe, and others eat their own words and vote to block an investigation of the president’s wiretapping a month after they said it was warranted.
This is a gang. This is a syndicate. This is an organization that has never been good, and is now enforcing top-down party discipline like a third-world dictatorship.
I have yet to see Joe Leiberman get a Come to Jesus phone call from Howard Dean. I have yet to see Hillary Clinton get forced to eat her own words by her party leadership when she teams up with republicans to advocate a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning.
This is how democracy gets subverted. When elected officials are forced to sign on to a national agenda despite what their constituents may want, when they are forced to cover up the wrong doings of their leadership because they’re in the same political party, they are abdicating their fundamental responsibilities to their constituents to be representatives of their wishes.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:13 AM 
