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Twenty hours after the Obama/Kerry State Department let loose the Environmental Impact Statement on the Keystone XL pipeline, declaring in the dead of Friday afternoon that it has no significant environmental impacts, I turned to the big liberal web sites to read their articles on it. Huffington Post, nothing. DailyKos, nothing. Democratic Underground, nothing.
This is pretty interesting, politically. The Dem web sites seem to be treating this as if nothing happened, because, after all, what can they say? They are caught on the horns of a dilemma of Obama’s making. On the one hand, they need to be seen praising Obama’s SOTU rhetoric on climate change, but now that he’s shown he’s as firmly in the hip pockets of the fossil fuel industry as any other politician, they can’t bring themselves to stand up to him, either. The result is silence – maybe this dilemma will somehow go away on its own…
In my humble opinion, those of us who want the US to make as abrupt a turn away from fossil fuels as possible, can use this as leverage to help destroy the Democratic Party as we know it. It’s clear that the Democratic Party has drunk the fracking fluid – some, literally, like our once-beloved Governor Hickenlooper, now bound for greater glory (fawning articles in the Harvard Business Review and a little trip to Davos for the World Economic Forum means he’ll be moving up soon) and others, only symbolically, like Dear President. Fracking fluid probably wasn’t on the beverage list when Dear President golfed with his gas industry buddies while 50,000 mostly-Democrats rallied outside his house. But I’m sure he performed the equivalent action to get where is he now. Gotta prove you’re a member of the club, after all, before they’ll let you in. I wonder, too, if there were high-fives all around at the golf game when BO announced that the EIS will be released in two weeks and that you fellers will be very happy with what it says.
So, Democratic environmentally-minded voters have a choice to make: planet or party. I hope that those of us who have made the only rational and moral choice, planet, can find an effective way to make those voters make a choice, as well. If we can do this, perhaps we can reveal the Democratic Party for the corrupt institution it is, and reshape the politics of this country.
Caricature from DonkeyHotey licensed under Creative Commons
64 Comments
We had something to say
State Department Clears Keystone Pipeline For Approval
Go, us! I had missed that diary – it was so early, it must have scooped even the networks. But then again, we’re not part of the veal pen.
Let’s change that destroying the Democratic Party as we know it to destroying this country as we know it and I’m with you 1000%.
Yeah, I was conflicted about ‘as we know it.’ Consider it gone – even though I’ll leave it in so others can make sense of your comment. But I do want to destroy the Democratic Party. (Old lovers keep the longest grudges. In 1985, I was campaign manager for a Democrat for the Colorado House. He was a good guy, but we got beat by a Republican whisper campaign – ‘he’s a cocaine user’ (being from a ski town and all.) There have been few like him since.)
BooMan Tribune: State Dept. Releases Keystone XL Report
Meteor Blades, Daily Kos: State Department assessment of Keystone XL tar sands pipeline downplays environmental risks
Talking Points Memo (from AP): State Dept: No Major Objections To Keystone XL Pipeline
Hullabaloo (digby, David Atkins) – nothing
Eschaton (atrios) – nothing
The Dems loyalists don’t seem to understand that the key to Obama’s stance on climate change and reducing dangerous greenhouse gases will be the substitution of nuclear power plants for coal. And of course, Obama loves natural gas, America’s “clean energy fuel!”
The utility industry is substituting natural gas power plants for coal. And wind farms. Wind farms in the midwest are allowing AES to shut down three coal-fired power plants.
As much as “all forms of energy” Obama might want nuclear power plants, they turn out to be white elephants economically–even with current federal subsidies.
What Obama has done is to roll out greenhouse gas regulations, starting with the heaviest greenhouse gas point sources. And so far, EPA has made them stick. A lot of that has to do with momentum within the civil service employees at EPA rather than top-down policy.
Sure, we have the usual Obamalingus from Booman, but what do truthseekers Rebecca Solnit and Melissa Harris-Perry have to say about it?
Hey..dem librals still needs to put gas int their Mercedes, Lexus, BMW and Infinity SUVs,
In addition to FDL’s front-page coverage goNPA posted a diary yesterday as well.
If this announcement had been made by Mitt Romney’s Secretary of State, I suppose Democratic websites would have blamed in on the people who voted for Jill Stein.
Pardon me, but who are those two?
The plot thickens:
They’re the Bobbsey Twins of “O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing!” — in other words, professional Obot grifters — so they will have the last (paid) word on the Keystone XL pipeline and how it fits in with the Fiercely Historical Greatness of their visionary leader President Obama.
Rahmettes, eh?
BTW, here’s another interesting development that I had missed:
Canada threatens trade war with EU over tar sands
The EU is going to require labeling of Tar Sands oil as in “This gasoline might contain up to 50% of gasoline refined from Canadian tar sands.” Harper is feeling some pressure, it seems, to threaten a trade war.
Here’s Solnit at My.fdl; plenty of folks weren’t amused by this one.
I tried to fins a few critiques O Harris-Lacewell at BAR; got tired of flipping pages. This one on the wave of US school closings was easy. They’re (ahem) not fans of hers there, although she may have posted there back when Obomba was first inaugurated. Reminds me of a black Rachel Maddow: very educated, but pretty apt to avoid criticizing Obomba. Gatekeepers.
Thank you.
(not so sure about HuffPo being liberal anymore, LOL)
Salon got it:
Salon.comVerified account
@Salon
State Dept. report on #KeystoneXL sends “dark message to environmentalists, suggesting the tar sands battle is lost” http://slnm.us/fIuG6dU
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Wonder how much Exxon-Mobil paid Salon for that depressing spin. It’s depressing if you think the permitting of the pipeline is the only way to fight the exploitation of tar sands. Seems to me to be trying to discourage folks from actually skimming and commenting on the report.
If the first draft of State’s environmental impact assessment was poor enough that they had to rewrite it after public comment, it is possible that the second one is little better. There is only so much lipstick one can put on a pig. So make them work for it. Lots of cogent comments cause employment for civil servants to read, respond, and rewrite. And lengthens the period between this statement and the final one. Does no one know how to fight an asymmetric bureaucratic fight anymore?
Wonder what info can be FOIA’d from the State Department to see which lobbyists have participated in the drafting of this environmental impact statement.
Here’s info about pipleline lobbying in 2012 from thinkprogress. I can’t see that they specify the source, still looking.
You can blame Hilary for this. The timing indicates she was in the loop, but wanted to be gone to not affect her political ambitions.
The Huffington Post had this front page, which is where I read it first.
This post is mistaken. Huffington Post had this piece up on the top of the front page yesterday afternoon and it’s still on the front page today. It’s not surprising that Kos has nothing up as his unapologetic mission is to elect Democrats. No matter how any of us feel about that, it isn’t unexpected. But Think Progress, Crooks and Liars, TPM, Raw Story, etc all have posts up. I’m sorry but you’re wrong on this. It hasn’t been covered to my satisfaction, nor apparently to yours but to suggest that we’re hearing nothing but crickets from left leaning websites is empirically untrue.
Meteor Blades’s piece on Kos was frontpaged yesterday afternoon.
Expected, but still:
Then I missed it. That’s not surprising, considering I don’t spend a great deal of time over there and I spend most of that in the diaries. But that just means the author of this post is even more mistaken.
It certainly wasn’t on Huff Post late this morning/early afternoon. Not even in the areas where they demote previously run lead stories. Sorry that I missed the earlier appearance of the article. What was its take? And why did such a major story disappear so soon, I wonder?
Democratic Underground did have nothing, a notable omission I thought, because in the past, I’ve found them able to criticize Obama, the DLC and the other assorted Dems.
But I feel that the Administration’s support of KXL still does pose a dilemma for Dem-supporting environmental folks: who do you support, party or planet?
I linked to it @5.
Some “game changer” The draft EIS says 42K jobs during the project, 50 after it’s operational, 35 permanent and 15 contractors.
You are right about commenting (just wrote ‘vommenting’) on the EIS. Sometimes the relative futility of submitting comment after comment just gets to me. For example, on the recent oil shale EIS, BLM responded substantively to maybe 10% of my comments. The rest were deemed ‘out of scope’, ‘premature’, and so on. Some better information was added, but the next-to-worst alternative was still selected – making 1,300 square miles of oil shale land available for commercial leasing. Once the philosophy of an EIS is established, it seems like the agencies may tweak it, but will not fundamentally change it.
In this case, if we can get many many comments, that may change the algebra. I’d really like to see field hearings, not just in the affected states, but in a number of large US cities. If this is such a matter of national importance, the nation should get to speak.
It’s there right now! Where do you think I got the link? It was displayed across the very top of their flagship page all yesterday afternoon and evening.
What kind of a question is that? If it’s any of your business, (which it’s not), I don’t support the Democratic Party on much of anything these days and I have criticized them quite a bit about it. I was here complaining about a lack of attention being paid attention to the environment going back for years, yes, even by the Democrats. Did I pass your purity test? Is that all you have? I point out that you’re mistaken so you immediately begin implying that I must be a party troll? THIS is why I have been staying away from FDL! This bullshit about being accused of nefarious motives simply because I point out a mistake.
Yeah, I saw that, thanks.
BTW. Read the HuffPo piece yourself. I linked to it above. It’s those li’l blue letters. Have a wonderful afternoon.
The environmental impact statement does not mean that the Administration supports the KXL pipeline. That decision is still up in the air. The EPA, not the State Department, two years ago criticized the original environmental impact statement and pipeline design, which caused Enbridge/TransCanada to have to redesign and resubmit the design, and State to have to conduct another environmental impact analysis of the changed design. The results of the analysis was what was released Friday. Public comment for 45 days. Then a rewrite into a final environmental impact statement. That piece should take until July. Then there in an inter-agency review that will take a little more time. So the decision is likely to come, up or down, around August. Until then, this issue doesn’t pose dilemmas for Dem-supporting environmental folk. Other environmental positions do, however.
The worrying part is that the argument for approval is pretty weak. That argument is that if the pipeline is not built, the environmental impacts of shipping by rail or by other pipelines will be about the same. That has led some folks to conclude that the decision about permitting has already been made and the the 45-day comment period will be pretty pro forma. I don’t know whether that is the case or not, but it does not take much effort to round up a bunch of on-target comments and see what happens.
To my mind, shutting down Harper’s tar sand project is far more important than the survival or disappearance of the Democratic Party at this point. And prior to that is shutting down K Street; if you do that the shutting down of the uniparty takes care of itself. Don’t go for the sockpuppet, go for the hand.
…The utility industry is substituting natural gas power plants for coal. And wind farms…
That’s exactly the same crap they’re trying to foist upon us here in the Isles, but, instead of coal plants, it’s our Oil fired plants…! And they want to soak us for a $5 Billion undersea cable to feed Oahu’s insatiable appetite…! We’re actively fighting to break up the State Monopoly and decentralize our power, and even push for public ownership of our grid(s)…!
Some diaries on how to do effective EIS comments would be helpful. The reviewers are going to be looking for specific technical stuff. In general, the worker bees don’t have axes to grind but know enough about the area that sometimes they are put off by (in their opinion) the ignorance of the public about the technical things that they can use.
But think about commenting on EIS as like signing petitions–only you don’t get campaign solicitations forever as a result.
Good for you. You folks should be able to do a bunch with rooftop solar and small wind units and not be at the mercy of transmission lines.
That’s exactly what we’re shooting for, along with some Tidal power buoys…!
I don’t think the question was directed at you, Margaret. I read it as more a rhetorical question directed at Obama/Dem supporters who fancy themselves environmentalists – they have an (apparent) dilemma. Heh, nothing a little compartmentalization cant cure! :>)
Thank you. I didn’t mean to insult Margaret at all. Sorry if it came across that way. I have no desire to offend here.
*heh* FWIW, I’ve never deemed ya an Obamabot, Peg…! You’re certainly keen of mind…! *g*
TD, I’m wondering what you are smoking today to be able to state that this Administration doesn’t support the pipeline or that a few public comments, however technical, will affect the final decision.
The Tarsands Question has become an international issue both here and in Europe but it appears it will be rammed through no matter what.
The real important question is how will people take this defeat? Will they go home and play politics to numb their minds or join the activists in the Plains and put their bodies in the path of this voracious Beast.
“Which side are you on,
boysguys, which side are you on?”FDL definitely covered it:
http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/03/01/state-depatment-clears-keystone-pipeline-for-approval/
Exactly. Seems that the decades-long secession of much of the American left from politics means that we have several generations of left/prog would-be activists who don’t know the first thing about how government (or politics) works.
Shut down K street? Is that all? Don’t you also need for the heavens to open, and Jesus to descend down from there, to here?
The proof that American democracy is grossly dysfunctional is that even widely popular proposals – like a national health care plan – don’t get enacted, decade after decade. K street represents a distasteful, anti-democratic, but very legal infrastructure to make corruption of democracy more of a science, than an art.
Even if shutting down the pipeline was a “widely popular proposal” (which I’m doubtful of; otherwise, why wouldn’t 350.org say so?), saying you have to shut down K Street, first, is putting the cart before the horse.
Evidently, you disagree. Well, then, what’s your plan, Stan?
IMO, progressives could achieve power, commensurate with their numbers, but also commensurate with the popularity of some specific progressive proposals, if they weren’t such wimps, and were shrewder.
You’re willing to dispense with the Democratic Party, but where is your realistic plan to dispense with even a single Democrat? If progressives can’t come up with a reasonable plan to aggressively dispense with even a single Democrat, what is the point of speaking of the “dissapearance” of the entire Democratic Party?
There’s a recent diary by Norman Solomon
http://my.firedoglake.com/nsolomon/2013/02/27/three-quarters-of-progressive-caucus-taking-a-dive-on-social-security-medicare-and-medicaid/
telling us
Say now, there’s a plan! Can you imagine a meeting of the French Resistence, during WW2, concluding by saying
Nor can I imagine the French Resistence concluding a meeting by saying
Wishing the Bundesbank away is about as realistic as wishing K-Street away.
Another unreal, fantasy-like statement I’ve seen at FDL is the indignant, almost triumphalist statement of some “only 3rd Party” types. The idea that they might forge coalitions with voters who are afraid to dump the Democrats, en masse, by voting out faux progressives in Democratic primaries, and then voting for their favorite Green Party candidate in a general election, is a topic not worthy of discussion, never mind becoming a central tactic to be organized around. Working the French Resistence analogy, once again, this is like the Frenchy freedom fighters saying,
The lack of political power by progressives, when they are opposed by plutocratic agendas, is no surprise, to me. Politics is the “art of the possible”. Embracing fantasies aborts the very sort of realistic thinking needed by any group wanting to influence an impure, but possible future.
To be clear: I’m all for shutting down K Street. Attempting to do so first, rather than nearer last, is what constitutes a fantasy.
Of course, I mean one that reduces costs, and is as palatable as any of the plans discussed in Sick Around the World. Obamacare is not what the American people wanted, for decades.
Even Time Mag. had a good piece on the negatives of
all this.
“Democratic Underground did have nothing, a notable omission I thought, because in the past, I’ve found them able to criticize Obama, the DLC and the other assorted Dems.”
ROFLAO! Democratic Underground routinely bans people for criticizing Obama and the Democratic Party. Hence this little bear cartoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLpm8UKNY6g&feature=player_embedded
More incrementalism, eh? More realism from one who has never seen a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, and from one who has a refrain that there is nothing We The People can do because the PTB are all-powerful due to successful secret cabals that have been pulling the levers of power behind the scenes for generations.
I’m not going to waste time mining through your past comments for links: you are well aware of them and so are many on this very thread.
But when TarheelDem points out a conspiracy that is right out in the open, to wit, K-Street, and says getting rid of its influence is a good starting point, you ridicule him. To top it off, you use Obama’s famous “art of the possible” quote to do so.
My impression of your posts is one of a swirling mass of contradictions and fantasies, and I’m being polite. You have stated the American government planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, and has all sorts of nasty surprises in store for any popular movement that dares take it on, implying that resistance is futile.
Then when people call out for support of third parties as an alternative to voting for Democrats, or call for the government to get money out of politics(ie abolish K-Street), or for doing something to stop the Tar Sands pipeline, you call THEM unreasonable and mock them?
If you follow your usual modus operandi, you’ll probably start a whole new diary entry to carry on with these arguments, too, and call out posters by name to boot.
I do not understand you, Metamars. I don’t think I WANT to understand you, either.
Baloney. I don’t run, like a coward, from the phrase “conspiracy theory”. That doesn’t mean that all conspiracy theories are respectable. Clearly, many are laughable.
This is a lie. I suggest you retract it. Anybody can peruse my diaries, and see that, if anything, I have too many ideas about what us “little people” could do.
It’s a dubious starting point, maybe even laughable. Even a 10-year-old should be able to figure that out. That’s because the corporations and banks that own the US government have no motivation to allow their activities to not remain legal. The most accessible gatekeepers of power, for the hoi polloi, are the elected officials. That’s why K-Street exists – to make sure those gatekeepers remain in their loyal service, as opposed to in the service of us little people.
Now, if you mean something like Move To Amend, I think that is worth pursuing, from the get-go. However, you still have to look at that as harder goal to hit. Is it easier to throw a single Democrat under the bus, or to amend the US Consitution? And if you can’t even organize sufficiently to throw a single Democrat under the bus, why would anybody be optimistic that organizing sufficient to amend the US Constitution will get the necessary support?
Oh, boy. Do you really think that originated with Obama? That’s such a famous quote, from Otto von Bismark (1867), that it was ‘falsely’ inserted into the lips of Benjamin Franklin in the biopic John Adams.
No reasonable person can possibly infer, from my numerous diaries, that “resistance if futile”. What I have said – which you can easily confirm, with google – is that I am conditionally pessimistic, and conditionally optimistic. If activists and the public continue to pursue directions along the lines of what we’ve seen, these last few years, then they can count on continuing to get flushed down the toilet.
That’s my general take. On the specific subject of anti-carbon activism that ignores the trajectory that the 3rd world is on – such that coal use is projected to exceed oil use – yes, that is futile. As is usual, for me, I have looked for a win-win solution, and have thus written about adequately funding big hot fusion projects, small hot fusion (a-neutronic), and so-called cold fusion. And it’s not just funding that’s at issue, it’s also awareness and investigation into who has been suppressing alternatives, including lying about them, and tricking the public into believing that something is nothing but junk science, when, in fact, progress is being made.
As for some aspects of the government allowing 911, I have no doubt. I also tend to believe it was engineered by some faction of the US government, Mohammed Atta, e.g., fitting the profile of a protected, drug running intelligence asset.
But I am FOR 3rd parties, as anybody can easily confirm by reading my diaries and comments. What I’m not for is being stupidly “pure”.
Why don’t you give a rational reason why progressives who prefer to abandon the Democrats, completely, and progressives who still hold out hope for reform of the Democratic Party, cannot combine their efforts to intervene in Democractic primaries, voting against faux Democratic progressives? Is it that they are so stupid that they can’t do the math? I frankly don’t know the reason why. Why don’t you enlighten me?
I did start another diary, and called out nobody, by name. I did mention Norman Solomon as an author. I didn’t “call him out”, in the sense of expecting him to answer. For one thing, he already ignored a comment of mine in his diary, that I quoted.
Now, here I have some sympathy with you, as I don’t understand myself too well, either!
Common Dreams has the best ongoing coverage of any liberal website, IMO, and if some “liberal” writer tries to sneak in a bit of pro-Democratic propaganda, they go after him/her with both barrels.
Margaret,
I noticed about 8 months ago during the election cycle that your assertions on just about anything were pro-Obombem and pro-Democrat all the way, every day. You probably think of yourself as an independent thinker. But … somehow the results are you always wind up defending the Democrat and the Democratic position, especially when Obungler is involved.
You (and maybe I, as well as many others) are not the only person by a long shot to think all your positions are impartially thought out whereas in fact you have an internal bias to belief a particular group of people.
To me, party or planet is exactly becoming the issue. Or it would be except my disappointment with Obomb-those-kids-and-call-them-insurgents is so extreme that I have been forced to the left, partywise, even tho I can’t agree with one of the major current agitations of the Green / Progressive / Labor parties, namely universal citizenship for illegal citizens, now.
The author’s comment @ 25 was a repetition of the same rhetorical question addressed to Democratic voters that the author posed to Democratic voters at the end of the diary.
The author appears to be reaffirming that this is still a valid question to Democratic voters, while acknowledging having missed something in reporting on the pipeline coverage.
It’s an interesting question. However, the author doesn’t seem to have asked it specifically of Margaret, and Margaret doesn’t seem to have chosen to discuss that specific point in her original response to the diary.
While I think a regular participant’s known views can be valid subjects when that person is participating in a thread where those views are relevant, in this case it would seem the author’s question should just be discussed on its own merits.
For me personally, party has never been the issue. I voted Democratic for years because I thought, despite their many failures, that they stood for something. When it finally got through to me that they don’t, at least at the national level, I started voting Green where I thought it made better sense.
I’m surprised that your comment didn’t draw more comment, Phoenix Woman, and I have no idea why. But to me, this seems entirely wrong. My considered guess is that it may have been that so many of us Disaffected were very intimately involved with politics, social movements underpinning them, BLM and Forest Circus politics that were advertised as reason/evidence-based, etc. over the course of our lives. And we found the process very disinclusive of the people’s wishes, the planet’s health, support for unions leading to lower wages, the export of jobs, and realized how the Democratic Party considered what we now know as the 99% were held in disregard, we became radicalized.
Radicalized enough in my case, after decades’ worth of Dem activism, sitting on the county Central Committee, being point person on campaigns in just about every federal primary, attending state conventions a few times, even being a paid staffer for a Senate candidate once, I now have left the party as not only useless, but as a hopeless gatekeeper for leftist ideals. Those ideals didn’t used to be radical, of course, they were simply…humane and correct.
Thank you wd for this comment …
I had considered commenting on this thread at a earlier point but declined doing so … at this juncture in early March 2013 this Obama WH regime “decision” should not be coming as a surprise to anyone. Anyone who has followed US energy/money and planet/environment/social R/D Party “politics” as conducted in WashingtonDC in the WH and in U.S.Capitol post 1975.
USA national elections calendar is now gamed by both the D Party and R Party “politics professionals” in large part along lines now cemented in by decades of working the elections calendar,long established political posturing and timing formulas that determine what is said,not said — what is done and when it is best done to slide around US national election calendar dates. War start dates,healthcare reform,Wall St bailouts etc. — scheduled to game US national election cycles just since year 2000 — is not a short list.
At some point any USian who has some political wits, who is maybe even reasonably informed,is not too gullible and not too engaged in suspended disbelief has to know the Ds and Rs are fully taken up with doing USian UniParty politics that serve the top ten percent of USians as defined by income,wealth held/holds and social/political/global class.
This USA/Canada Keystone outcome Obama WH is now moving into the open was knowable well before November 2012 WH election. Clearly Barack Obama was advised by his handlers and likely Barack Obama is/was aware of this anyway — that revealing Obama WH pro USA/Canada cooperation Keystone policy choice(s) was best done after November 2012. Why? So that USians practicing the “democracy” USians in theory are entitled to do could be gamed by Barack Obama who was desirous of getting re-elected as POTUS. The environment? The planet? They lost this one in Obama WH some time back. I doubt Barack Obama even seriously would have considered letting the environment and planet win this one being all the big money to be had from Ten Percent/One Percent gaming and playing was all about okaying Keystone. The big problems were how to time the cloaking and reveal choices.
Barack Obama is a very good hybrid UniParty POTUS as Obama has demonstrated repeatedly since Jan.20,2009. Barack Obama does the politics of the USian Ten Percent/One Percent/Point One Percent very ably. This Keystone decision was made well before November 2012 by Obama WH. It is now revealed because USians can’t do much about it now. Hillary Clinton has now been positioned to establish a plausible ( albeit very dubious) disconnect to this Keystone outcome for Hillary Clinton and to protect her likely forthcoming 2016 D Party WH bid. Why? Hillary will need to game 2016 WH election cycle from now until November 2016 to do what Barack Obama did to game 2012 WH election. For example — ACA aka as ObamaCare or more accurately called AHIPProfitsCare — plainly was done by Obama WH to serve AHIP interests post 2008 while sabotaging MedicareForAll. ACA was positioned to start in 2014 to maximise political money shakedown cycle(s) and to insulate Obama WH from ACA political hazards showing up prior to 2012 WH election cycle. ACA is knowably a very flawed and ultimately doomed USG attempt at postponing for a decade or so the needed implemention of USian MedicareForAll. Obama will be long gone from the WH when that final ACA Fail destination comes about.
Barack Obama should have not been re-elected in 2012 for several legitimate reasons — being a war criminal/war monger Reason # 1. Being a Wall St. tool #2. AHIPProfitCare #3. Need I continue?
PW’s comment @ 43 seems to be saying politics is a “insiders” game best left to the professional politicians and the political wizards who advise these politicians. Evidently PW would suggest we on the Left “rubes” don’t know how “real” politics work in “real” government. Obamapologists do tho? Hmmm…
PW is entitled to an opinion and anyone who frequents FDL very likely knows where PW is on the R vs. D stuff.
Here at FDL during the 2011 Obama/Clinton/CIA Libyan Sabotage/Regime Change R2P American Empire sham/fraud/plunder operation some Lakers were very adamant about the need to impose Obama/Clinton R2P/NFZ on Libya. Opinions are opinions here at FDL and everyone is entitled to have and push one or several. Whether they are good or correct opinions? Time often tells all in politics. Some Lakers are heedless about knowable FDL comments histories or fellow Lakers memory and recall.
Do I get how politics “really ” work? I think so. Disagree if you wish but since 1975 how USA “politics” have been getting done in most ways has failed to address what I think are good,long term policies for the planet,the environment and for how wealth and war and society/money decisions are made,by who and why. Am I a political dummy? A politics idiot? I hope not.
I do know how politics get done does matter as to what follows.
I think Barack Obama should be in a jailhouse. O/D zealots in 2012 wanted Barack Obama back in the White House. Obama now is back in the WH. Until 2017. Choices have consequences.
Choices in politics have consequences. O/D zealots and the politics they were pushing to help get Obama elected again in 2012 now deserve whatever Obama delivers/does not deliver. I may not know much about politics “get done” but I do know what is being done in WashingtonDC since 1975 — since 2009 — is not working. WashingtonDC needs a regime change and I do not see either the Ds or Rs as still being around after this needed regime change.
Keystone “yes” decision has now been delivered by Barack Obama.
Obamaplogists now likely to be spinning this as being IOKIYAAD.
Am I surprised? No. Why should I be? Obama is being/doing Obama.
Obamapologists are being Obamapologists. Still. A learning curve? Not seeing one.
Good choice for a FDL diary plainsedge. Thank you plainsedge.
Recommended.
Thanks. I appreciate it. I probably would have written it a little differently now, but it was Saturday morning after another sleepless 3 AM wakeup – like I used to have after Bush invaded Iraq – and I just wanted to get something on paper to deal with the despair I was feeling, knowing that our continued obeisance to fossil energy is harming so many people, now and in the future.
“Obamapologists are being Obamapologists.” So true. I had put a diary up on DailyKos also Saturday morning to push something I called the Conscience Voter Pledge:
I will no longer support, now or in the future – through my votes, my donations, or my political registration – any politician or political party which will not turn away from fossil fuels, which is the source of endangerment of our progeny and the other inhabitants of Earth.
I thought it might stir up the hornet’s nest there, but I only got one response – a positive one – and no negatives. Maybe people were still not awake Saturday at 10AM, but this surprised me and made me think that maybe mainstream Dems didn’t know how to respond.
I posted something similar on my facebook account, though my number of ‘friends’ there is pretty limited. But most of them are Dems, so I thought I’d generate some kind of response. Crickets. To me it said that Obama supporters aren’t ready to deal with this conundrum yet, party or planet. I want to keep pushing them, though. They’re moral people and they need to start making moral choices politically.
Well, at least you have a sense of humor. There’s hope for you yet.
I retract nothing. I see you backtracked a little here, saying that elements of the US government allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen instead of outright planning them, which I find interesting.
You did ask a direct question:
“Why don’t you give a rational reason why progressives who prefer to abandon the Democrats, completely, and progressives who still hold out hope for reform of the Democratic Party, cannot combine their efforts to intervene in Democractic primaries, voting against faux Democratic progressives? Is it that they are so stupid that they can’t do the math? I frankly don’t know the reason why. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
OK. Because the Democratic Party is bought, hook, line and sinker, by corporate interests. Because the purpose of the Democratic Party is to co-opt all progressively populist movements into the two party system which exists to maintain those same corporate interests. It has done it numerous times–Black and Hispanic civil rights, the environmental movement, the various antiwar movements, the list goes on. The most recent attempt was to co-opt Occupy Wall Street. It failed, but Occupy didn’t rematerialize after last winter, either.
Any attempt to intervene in the Democratic primary process, even if initially successful, will only result in those Democratic officeholders being co-opted by the system to which they have been elected. I’ll give you a test case, albeit not as a result of a progressive primary challenge: Elizabeth Warren.
Watch. She’ll tow the party line, too.
I don’t think the Democratic Party is worth saving, only worth destroying, either by a third party or by waiting until things get so bad that this whole political system falls apart.
I’d rather see the former, but I think the latter is far more likely. There will probably be blood. A lot of it. Possibly even yours and mine, Metamars.
I think you misunderstood. Allowing the attacks to happen is virtually a slam dunk. Helping plan them may not be a slam dunk, but there’s good reason to suspect it.
How about the voters who vote in primaries? Are they bought, “hook, line and sinker”? If they are, then it doesn’t matter what ballot line the vote on, they will vote for what their paymasters request of them.
Of course, while tribalism is rife amongst Democrats and Republicans, it’s not the whole story. Neither the D nor R base are, generally speaking, “bought”.
There’s certainly historical validity to this POV. In fact, during dinner, I was listening to Zinn’s People’s History, and the speaker was talking about how the Populists went Democratic, and were absorbed.
Well, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, and that would include DINO who are actually either progressives and/or populists. Obviously, there has to be continuing efforts at education regarding co-optation, as well as aggressively throwing out from office bad apples who were formerly good apples. Such education, vigilance and party governance must exist, I presume, amongst South America’s successful leftist parties.
Also, I find the idea that 3rd party candidates who attain office will not be subjected to tempatation to sell out, also, to be extremely implausible. I vaguely recall such notions being dashed, in Britain and Canada. Since 3rd party office holders will be tempted to stray, the problem of maintaining the public’s grip on officeholders will remain.
Rumor has it that the Republican Party used to be a 3rd party. Except, it’s not a rumour, is it?
I’m interested in the public using the Democratic Party, not saving it, per se. It’ll naturally be saved – from oblivion – if it serves the public. That’s a good problem to have, even for people who’ve developed a hatred for it, or stubborn belief that it is completly beyond significant reform.
Rahmettes? Absolutely not. Obamabots. If Rahm disagreed with Obama, they’d throw Rahm under the bus faster than you can say “pants on fire.”
Obama self-describes as a moderate Republican of the 1980s.
I am not sure if he is actually a moderate Republican from the 1980s or only a Republican, period. I do take him at his word about the Republican bit.
Despite his own words, anyone to the left of Obama is considered “far left.” That lie is told by Democratic and Republican politicians and the media. The beneficiaries of that lie are the rich.
I have not read all the comments, but I don’t think the websites that you named are necessarily liberal websites. Some of them are merely loyalist Democratic Party websites; and the Democratic Party is decidedly DLC/Third Way, or center right. That is almost the opposite of liberal.
The cake is baked long before the primaries.
If the public doesn’t like the flavor of cake that’s going to be baked, it’s necessary for the public to organize so that they will have the final say as to what flavor is going to be baked, on primary day. Or at least, while they are weak and building strength, prevent the party-ordained flavor from being baked.
The plutocratically aligned elements in the Venezuelan democracy were not asleep at the wheel when the Chavistas took over. Nor did they give up, when they lost. They will never give up.
Why do the American people give up, most without even trying? There are many reasons, but ultimately the buck stops with the people who gave up, or didn’t even try.
This idea about blaming the big, bad Republicans; or the big bad Democrats; or the big, bad plutocrats; moreso than the public should be blaming itself, is a big part of the problem.
This is not just a means to escape responsibility; it’s also a psychological chain which perpetuates the current system. Have we been whining about the Republicans/Democrats/plutocrats for the last 20 years, and nothing’s changed? Maybe, without public engagement forcing change, they are incapable of changing? Didn’t Frederick Douglass say something like this?
I don’t want to get into it, but the public’s escapist torpitude needs to be dealt with, head on. I believe the most effective way probably involves civic value propositions, with emphasis on the evil fate that will ‘deservedly’ befall you (“you” meaning the person being addressed with the civic value proposition) if you persist in in-action, or even stupid action.
Are you a student, hopelessly saddled with student debt? Your serfdom may degrade into a stint in debtor’s prison, if you don’t get off you rear end, intelligently.
Are you a retiree? You may have to learn to like cat food if you don’t get off your rear end, intelligently.
Are you a young parent? Imagine how your cute youngster will no longer find much to be cute about, as the realization dawns on them that even a college degree is little insurance against not having access to a job that’s been outsourced, complements of global ‘free trade’ agreements. Unless they get off their rear end, intelligently.