The Democrats have proven once again that they are minor league players over their heads when it comes to playing the game in the Bigs. Like most decent Americans they are way too trusting, and at this point to trust anything that anybody in the Bush administration says is to be foolish beyond belief.
Apparently they trusted that director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, was negotiating in good faith, and when they stretched out their hand to shake on the deal they had agreed on, McConnell withdrew his and said with a sneer, "Psyyyych."
The players in this administration are gaming the system the way Enron gamed the energy markets or the way Boesky gamed the financial markets. If you approve of what they do, you call them brilliant political tacticians. But who beyond the 28 percenters really approves this administration anymore? Nobody really does, but we go along with them out of a habit of believing they really do care about what’s good for America.
It’s precisely this "habit" that keeps us tied up in knots right now. Even if we don’t technically approve what the administration is doing, we keep letting them do it, because we don’t have any easy habitual way of stopping them. The Bush people understand this, and they have telegraphed a message to future right wingers. Future authoritarians will look back to this administration as one that might have failed in the short run, but which laid the foundation for their success.
The administration taught them that what nobody thought possible before is in fact very possible. That you can get away with almost anything so long as (1) play the fear card; (2) insist you are doing nothing unusual; (3) brand opponents as partisan, fringe, or just crazy. The players in this administration have proven that any opposition is easy to neutralize even when they have a majority public opinion against them. They realize that the empty suits in the legislature and the media are driven primarily by their own career interests and can be easily coopted, and that the few who cannot be coopted can be marginalized. They realize that most people in the country are confused, uninformed, and don’t really care about what’s happening in Washington, and that the broad electorate’s views are shaped by the media that they have coopted.
If we’ve learned anything in the last six years, why are people like Giuliani and Romney taken with even the least bit of seriousness? We do it only out of habit. We have a two-party system, and these utterly vacuous people are the other party’s leading candidates. We take them seriously out of habit, not because they deserve to be. And do we really expect the Democrats to return to the status quo ante before the Republican executive power grab? It doesn’t work that way.
These Republicans or Democrats, with a few exceptions, are not patriots; they are conventional through and through with little or no capacity for independence of thought or for courageous stands. Whatever they are in their own fantasies of themselves, they don’t care about what is good for the country except when it coincides with what is good for themselves. They are so easy to manipulate because their motives are so transparent and their actions so predictable according to the three steps outlined above. The power and wealth interests want an executive who is accountable to no one, and whether or not the Democrats exploit executive power the way the GOP has done (assuming Dems win in ’08), the executive powers those interests want when they get their guy back in the White House will still be there. Has the Military Commissions Act been overturned? Do you really
believe this most recent version of the FISA law will sunset in six
months?
It’s all about these power and wealth interests agenda to build a power infrastructure. That’s what Iraq is all about as well. The U.S. won’t withdraw most of the troops until it’s sure that these bases can be sustained with a smaller force. Building that power infrastructure in the heart of the oil fields has been the goal from the beginning–and that means it’s always been about the bases. Nothing else really matters to these interests. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want to abandon them. There will be little or no debate about that issue. They will give up on them only if they are militarily indefensible–as in Vietnam.
Update: From Kevin Drum:
THE GAME….Loretta Sanchez is my mother’s representative in Congress. Here’s what she told some protestors who wanted her to vote against further funding for the Iraq war:
Tuesday night Sanchez said she could not support the protesters because the $145 billion in Iraq war funding was in the same bill that would provide money to build the C-17 aircraft in California.
"I never voted for this war," she said. But "I’m not going to vote against $2.1 billion for C-17 production, which is in California. That is just not going to happen."
That’s a real profile in courage. With anti-war Dems like this, I guess we’re going to be in Iraq for a lo-o-o-o-ng time.
Gottal love a woman who at least is frank about her subservience to the power and wealth interests in the military industrial complex, rather than to the common good. She knows who her real boss is and that her career depends on good service to those interests. Good for those protesters to bring this kind of systemic insanity into the light for everyone to see.
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