Haiku Politics

Here's a quote from Niranjan Ramakrishnan, as part of an article in today's Counterpunch, about the state of American politics:

The prosecutor's probe will not erase the fact of twenty nine Senate Democrats voting for the Iraq war resolution. It will not nullify presidential candidate John Kerry's sheepish reassertion of his vote two years later, long after it had become clear that the WMD claim was a lie. Nor will anyone with an IQ over 80 be persuaded, by the manner in which Democratic senators voted for Condoleezza Rice's promotion to Secretary of State, or their "I think you're the real deal" encomiums to Alberto "Torture Memo" Gonzales, that they have any sense of right and wrong. Nothing if not consistent, last Sunday found Charles Schumer saying he would still vote for the Iraq resolution, knowing everything he now knows, three years later. No prominent Democrat who voted for the War resolution has since said it was a mistake, or even that he was misled by the White House. The thunderclap of Democratic silence from Congress on Iraq (excepting perhaps Cynthia McKinney and a few others who have had the conscience to seek immediate withdrawal) speaks as loudly as anything Fitzgerald's indictments can proclaim about "Scooter" Libby or "Looter" Cheney.

The current strategy that the Democrats employing in the face of Republican self-destruction is to simply sit back and let the Republicans destroy themselves. This is perfectly consistent with the fact that the Democrats are themselves incapable of offering a principled opposition to the Republican Party. This scandal involving the CIA leaks and Valerie Plame ultimately involves the crime of Bush lying to the American people in order to justify his war in Iraq. And in this matter, the Democratic Party, which nominated for President last year a candidate who voted for that war, was utterly complicit.

Posted by The Haikuist at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments

I just finished reading Left Out!, a book by frequent Counterpunch contributor Joshua Frank. This book should be required reading for every liberal who naively still clings to any attachment to the Democratic Party as the hope of progressive virtues. (There is an interesting review of the book at this location).

The book's subtitle is "How Liberals Helped Reelect George Bush", and this is a key point. The sins of lesser evilism, unfortunately, have locked liberalism into a fatal embrace with the Democratic Party. Frank documents brilliantly just how unprogressive the Democratic Party is. In the first half of his book, he explodes the myth of Howard Dean supposed progressive credentials. Dean's record on a whole host of issues was terrible, as was John Kerry's. Kerry, of course, was a warmonger who voted for the Iraq war and who never ran an antiwar campaign. Instead, Kerry was calling for more troops in Iraq--sort of like Lyndon Johnson in 1967. This year, after the election, he changed his tune. Now he calls for turning over the war to Iraqi government forces once they've been sufficiently trained by the US--in other words, Vietnamization. Kerry has progressed to Nixon, circa 1970. How pathetic.

Dean himself was ostensively antiwar, and it was his opposition to the war in Iraq that garnered him so much support from liberals who conveniently overlooked his record on the environment, the death penalty, and his support for corporate interests. Dean was virtually identical to the DLC Democrats, and even on the issue of an Iraq war, he was willing to support such a war as long as the UN endorsed it. In other words, his ideas were virtually identical to the centrists in the DLC like Kerry, but, as Frank points out in his book, he was not part of their cadre, so he was dispensed with by a massive attack campaign by Kerry and his corporate patrons.

Ultimately, Kerry's inability to distinguish himself seriously from Bush on a host of issues cost him dearly. Not willing to present a principled alternative to Bush on the war (the singlemost important issue of the campaign), he offered little to distinguish himself on other issues as well. As Frank points out, this problem extends back to Clinton himself, the ultimate triangulator and DLC loyalist who tugged the party rightward, who gave us a disastrous attack on the poor with his welfare reform, a disastrous attack on the environment with his Salvage rider bill that exempted federal forests from environmental regulations, who initiated various acts of military action, and who expanded the death penalty. In every way, Clinton presaged Bush.

Liberals , however, loved Clinton, despite the disastrous policies that violated some of the most important progressive principles. Herein lies the disaster of liberalism. What is considered mainstream "liberalism" is so far to the right now, as it has tagged along with Democrats like Clinton and Kerry who have moved the nation's political agenda rightward, that the Republicans, without any serious opposition to their rightward ambitions, can get away with murder. In American politics, without any countervailing force to the Republicans, the Republicans can simply push the politics rightward with impunity. And this is why liberalism, with its continued attachment to the Democratic Party, is proving to be a monumental failure.

Only by severing ties with the Democratic Party, the graveyard of progressive social movements, can a genuine Left really emerge in the United States.

Posted by The Haikuist at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments

Here is an interesting tabulation of how various Presidents have fared in the Gallup poll during a certain point in their second term. Comparing the approval ratings of seven Presidents during August of the second term (except for Truman, where a June poll was used in lieu of one having been done for August), we find that Bush has the second-lowest approval rating at this time in his second term. The only President with a lower approval rating was Nixon, who was in the midst of the Watergate scandal at that time. This table also does not reflect the fact that Bush's approval rating has sunk even lower since August, down to 40%.

President	Time	Approval rating
Harry Truman	June 1949 (No July or August 1949 measure)	58%
Dwight Eisenhower	August 1957	63
Lyndon B. Johnson	August 1965	65
Richard Nixon	August 1973	34
Ronald Reagan	August 1985	61
Bill Clinton	August 1997	61
George W. Bush	August 2005	43

Posted by The Haikuist at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments

I have no interest in Democratic Party websites like DemocraticUnderground.com, but I did manage to find out about a discussion thread in a forum there from last July that discussed some sort of presumed deal between some Greens and the PDA. You can read about it here. According to this alleged deal, Greens would agree to support "progressive" democrats when no Green is running, while PDA members will agree to support Greens who run against centrist Democrats.

This was interesting to me on several fronts. For one thing, it demonstrated the cozy relationship that the liberal faction (David Cobb, Medea Benjamin, and others) of the Greens have with the Democratic Party. But what I also found interesting was a point raised by some Democrats in that thread. It seems that it would violate the charter of at least one state Democratic Party, and probably others as well, for a member of the state committee to give "public support for or financial contribution to an opponent of a nominee of the Democratic Party", and they could be removed from the committee for doing so.

This underscores the absurdity, and the self-defeating nature, of third party activists supporting the Democratic Party. The relationship is totally one sided in such a scenario, one that exclusively benefits the Democratic Party but not the alternative party. The Democratic Party spends much of its energy trying to keep alternative parties of the left, such as the Greens, off the ballot, for God's sake. Their bylaws call for kicking their officials off of state committees for supporting opposing candidates. The fact is that Democrats will happily take the votes and support of Greens, but in no way will they tolerate the converse. The "inside/Outside" strategy of the David Cobb and others in the Green Party is a surefire recipe for disaster for their party.

The same thing holds true for supporters of other alternative parties, such as the Socialist Party USA. Instead of an "inside/outside" strategy, what is needed is an "outside only" strategy. Opponents of the duopoly need to know that to compromise with the Democrats is to lose. It is as simple as that. The Democrats are experts at absorbing and coopting radical and progressive social movements to the point where such movements are watered down and rendered useless. It is time to understand that the Democrats are an enemy party. The way to challenge the duopoly is to take it seriously, and that means treating it like the enemy that it is. Voting for or supporting Democrats will never help any alternative political party grow.

Posted by The Haikuist at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments

A report published in Counterpunch on the Green Party's Tulsa convention demonstrates the continuing problems that the Green Party is facing from those within that party who would sabotage its mission and purpose as a viable third party. The efforts by the Greens for Democracy and Independence (GDI), spearheaded by Peter Camejo, both to democratize the party and to take it away from the self-destructive direction that Cobb's faction took the party last year, seem to be failing. Those in the party's right, who support lesser-evilism, who support the Democratic Party, and who align themselves with the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) seem to have the upper hand. The tragic direction that the Greens are taking should serve as a valuable lesson for anyone who is involved in trying to build an alternative political party.

The Greens had a chance of succeeding. Unfortunately, when push came to shove, many in the party blinked. The only way to build a viable alternative party is by being committed fully towards that party, and not subscribing to the poison of lesser evilism. The Greens failed this test miserably last year when they nominated Cobb for President, whose "safe states" strategy was a clear example of lesser evilism at its worst. Potential converts to that party who now vote for Democrats can only ask themselves why they should change their allegiance when many activists within the Green Party themselves continue to support Democrats. Many of those in the Green Party who supported lesser evilism last year and supported Kerry may claim that they are still committed to building their party. But the odds against third parties are immense, the duopoly is too committed to crushing interlopers, and a party cannot succeed against the duopoly unless its membership is fully committed to that party and to challenging the duopoly 100%.

As things currently stand, the future of the Green Party seems questionable. Other political parties who seek to challenge the duopoly should take heed, and learn from what the Greens are doing to themselves.

Posted by The Haikuist at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments