Friday, August 26, 2005

oh that liberal political strategy

LI is still on vacation. We tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of our far flung correspondents, C., to write a post about her first pregnancy – a report from the frontlines. This might still happen, if we turn on the Svengali.

Small topic today: if our readers want to know why the Democratic party is brain dead, go to the Wesley Clark op ed in the Washington Post today. The tone and feel of it – the inanity surmounted by arrogance – the blindness – it is all there, like an indigestible stew served to a dying invalid in a poorhouse. We particularly liked this graf, both for its meaninglessness and as a true gauge of how D.C. thinks about their war, three years after:

“On the political side, the timeline for the agreements on the Constitution is less important than the substance of the document. It is up to American leadership to help engineer, implement and sustain a compromise that will avoid the "red lines" of the respective factions and leave in place a state that both we and Iraq's neighbors can support. So no Kurdish vote on independence, a restricted role for Islam and limited autonomy in the south. And no private militias.”

This is a man pissing in the wind and complaining about rain.

The LI theory is not, pace Harry, to disestablish the Dems – it is that the liberal of today must explore multiple tracks. This means supporting independent movements to strangle the U.S. military’s capacity for continuing in Iraq as well as re-engaging with the… G.O.P. The liberal influence on the G.O.P. is non-existent. That is because liberals, after Vietnam, gave up on the G.O.P. and allowed themselves to be bought by the Dems. Well, that was a silly strategy, and we’ve been paying for it for years. Liberals should start picking Republicans to support, and they should start doing it now. Let’s revive the Bull moose faction of the Repug party.

Let’s… well, we aren’t going to get carried away. Doubtless the power of LI to affect the liberal mindset is less than that of a goose fart in a whirlwind. But the blogger manner is to pretend that one is some crowned Humpty Dumpty reigning over the scene, and who am I to violate the blogger stylebook?

1 comment:

Juke said...

It's no longer possible to talk seriously about oil and Iraq and Venezuela and Korea without talking about the melting tundra in Siberia and the vanishing glaciers worldwide. It's no longer possible to talk about women's rights or minority rights or human rights without also talking about shifting seasonal boundaries and reproductive disruption in flagship ecologies.
It's no longer possible to talk about the fascist security state without talking about impending social collapse triggered by climate disruption.
Witchcraft and demonic inhumanity must be included at least tangentially, along with technological interference with sub-molecular life as an act of revenge.
It's all well and good to make as much sense as possible about any one of these subjects, but they're happening all at once in a feedback cycle that's getting narrower and narrower as it grows more intense.
Oil security global heat war.
It's so much easier to try to address one or another in isolation. So much more comforting. But that's why the Bush orcs and their symbionts have all that confidence in their world-view. They can see that we aren't doing the wholistic analysis.
But then the wholistic picture's pretty overwhelming, isn't it?

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