Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Political Posturing in the Election Year
In a front page story in the Chicago Tribune, a paper that is dead to me and one I should not be commenting on, there is nevertheless an interesting story.
Sustained sectarian violence permeates Iraq. “But the event that is supposed to stabilize Iraq—the formation of a government that unite the squabbling factions—remains just out of reach.” The Vice President of Iraq told al-Jazeera that the new government might just have to wait on announcing the head of the Defense and Interior Ministries past the deadline because it is so hard to find a compromise candidate. A secular politician, Ayad Jamal Aldin, said that even the announcement of the ministries probably wouldn’t lead to a decrease in violence. “The democracy has become a democracy of sects.”
Iraq is in middle, not the end, of a long, hard slog to stability. The insurgents are not in their “last throes” by a country mile. Maybe that’s why a majority of Iraqis want the United States to leave soon so they can sort out their problems by themselves. Maybe they see that the violence will take years to control and the US forces aren’t really helping.
Despite the will of a majority of the Iraqi people, the US remains an occupying force. The latest blast described in the Tribune came in an area that US mercenaries, Global Security, recently abandoned.
But this is an election year, and as in every election year republicans throw red meat to their base. In off years they spend all day raiding the treasury for the benefit of investors and the upper class, but in election years they need votes from more than 1% of the electorate, so they focus on the social issues that determine the votes of Evangelicals and culturally conservative people in the country.
Bill Frist recently announced that debate will be held in the senate on a constitutional amendment (!) to prevent homosexuals from getting married.
It doesn’t matter if it passes or not, and it probably won’t. What matters is that the republicans will be seen as fighting for the conservative values that brings in votes rather than supply-side economics that doesn’t bring in votes.
I would expect something about abortion to be debated, too, as that is the other big hot-button topic that shores of their base.
I apologize if I sound cynical, but I long ago learned that the party of Tom DeLay and Newt Gingrich isn’t really interested in Christian values. She Does Respond isn’t very well-versed in the ten commandments, either, for that matter.
None of this will save the House for the republicans, who are in the middle of the first time in modern history when both their president and their congressional caucus are held in contempt by the vast majority of Americans.
But our memory is short, and 2008 and 2012 may turn out to be better years for conservatives. Americans will have to institute publicly-funded campaigns and vulgarity laws that cover blatant lying to undermine the republican base of corporate money and propaganda outlets, respectively.
Conservatives still control the #1 cable news channel in America, along with 90% of the political talk radio market. This outright control of disinformation outlets into the United States is simply a threat to the democracy of the United States. Voters in the United States can’t cast intelligent votes if they’re doing so based on bad information.
The chief disseminator of this misinformation is media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who recently courted Hillary Clinton by agreeing to host a fundraiser for her. Read Jeff Cohen’s excellent article on this here. RED FLAG, democrats.
He says it as well as I possibly could. Hillary Clinton may be a rockstar to republicans and fundraisers, but I have never seen a democrat so regularly reviled among democrats on blogs and in “Letters to the Editor” sections of newspapers. She has made a career out of triangulating positions that would make a moderate republican proud. From her nanny-state politics of restricted access to violent video games and a constituational amendment to ban flag-burning, all the way to, as Cohen puts it, “Iraq, military spending, Iran, Israel, media consolidation, pro-corporate trade deals,” and other issues, Hillary Clinton is simply indistinguisable from a republican.
She’s not even a charismatic politician. Witness her speech at Coretta King’s funeral compared to Bill Clinton’s, to name one example.
I think it is a sad commentary on the state of our democracy when a bloodless corporate shill is the presumptive democratic nominee for the presidency in 2008. I am not one to underestimate the power of campaign contributions, but I think Clinton’s run in the democratic primaries, if she does run, will hardly be a formality.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 11:27 PM 
