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Just quoting the song. The question has a strange irrelevnace, leaving vcountry ot leaving DU. Point the feet in the real directions we all have been talking about. That is any direction that will create a just, progressive future. Tiffs and miffs among oursleves is just a petty sign of our own escape from responsibility and seeing in the mirror of our representative leaders(no matter how ill chosen) ourselves or at least or our predicaments. And to remember there are many if not most Dem leaders in Congress who share our exact rage and sentiments and passions. I am amazed at the depths of disillusion over this extra straw on the camel's back before Congress hotfooted it off to vacation. In anger our memories are short, our righteous myths strong. The cricle turns oddly against itself into retreat anddisillusion- because of idealism?
The great challenge posed by the Gonzales crime against Congress was THE crisis and that is to wend it's its way slowly uncertainly, reluctantly, granting the Bush administration the initiative and the legitimacy every single step of the way. In fact tossing in FISA reform which any decent president logically would NOT need was a reminder of who is still boss and a reminder that only impeachment(we dare you) can stop them. This is to encourage the WH staff as much as to humiliate the Dems. DC is full of cowards and for real cynics this is not an uncommon perception since the First Continental Congress.
There ARE reasons to acquiesce to FISA. There are inescapable dilemmas so long as you acceded to the legitimacy or competence to exist of the present executive branch. There IS one underlying weakness that is the root from which all of this springs. That is the current representation of Dems, their number, quality and representation of duties ideals and even the common voter is insufficient to conduct impeachment. They are forged into a circle pointing inward and understandably have become reluctant by experience to start shooting. Afraid to fail, afraid therefore to try, which is the certainty is the moral circle that gets nowhere. So the closed circle shuffles together in another absurd motion forward to election day to try to untangle the self-standoff, somehow, which is absurdly unclear. Better than being despised into the bargain by starting the circular firing squad?
We were starkly shown this in 2000 which cast a dark light forward and backward with the grim concrete of a fate that the ordinary man cries out in just anger could, must be changed. Well, change is in picking and getting real representation, which we now know is a possible hope. The possible hope did not suddenly arrive in 2006, when under the handicap of continued vote cheating, the organizational Dems continued to stack the party with self-fulfilling problems and false expectations. But did the Congress promise to end the war just because it was a convenient synergy that pushed them into the majority? No, things, the basic things in our own party leadership, have not changed yet. Some political miracle could propel DK into the WH and he would have to face this self-handicapped party as a more potent barrier than the GOP.
Bush knows what straw is for. To lay on other people's backs. To make haystacks to hide the poisoned needles in after use. And yes, our so-called fighting is exactly where he wants us too. Raging, splintering in impotence because the first order of business since 2000 was to remove, punish and restore. Instead it has been applied to our own inadequate party representation. It may be ironically said we have not yet begun to fight. Slaves swallow a lot of humiliation in rage. Their options were to plot impotently, know uselessly, run away, wait for a Deliverer.
Our options are to grimly use the free tools of a free people and advance on several fronts, none of them THE frustratingly easy thing of applying the law to bring the crooks down or the easy thing of getting a fair vote, unopposed by national media, with fair choices of representation. It IS a long road, if only Bush were to be taken to jail. But if that were to happen I sure the lesson here is that we would relax, in a false sense believe we had arrived, start praising and accepting the rotted fruit in our own party- and be more than ready for it all to happen again and again.
Like it or not a party is represented by its leaders. If there is a Dem party better than than its current crop it must pick new ones or force the chameleons at least to change their color. Like it or not the Naders and Sheehans, the voting reform activists, the urgent progressives, are reminders of the the long haul which is why the short haul- hauling the Bush a$$es to jail, is not yet happening.
This was truly known before the first vote was cast in 2006. This is what was really and openly in the cards if you simply paid attention. Exposing the crooks is not the ultimate victory as has been wearily touted over and over again. They are still there and treating them LIKE a legitimate, competent executive branch still leaves victory deferred. Let the Congress learn that their way is not the be and end all. It IS a dismal failure if they think this is the best of all possible surrenders.
if they pushed back on FISA and left Gonzales intact I would not like Faust, give up my soul and say to that moment "Stay, you are so wonderful!" Nor at Bush's impeachment. Striving toward what is just brooks no surrender and expects no perfection- if we know ourselves and meet our times square on, together.
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