Democratic Navel-Gazing, or The Circular Firing Squad – Part II

A lot of this centred around DOMA and DADT, and the only thing the Left’s complaints served to prove was how woefully inadequate their knowledge of politics and the basic government procedure was. Obama hasn’t repealed DOMA or DADT, they whined.

(Well, actually, he can’t. Those are acts of Congress, and only an act of Congress can repeal either of them.)

This information was met with deaf ears. When the President addressed the Human Rights Commission and promised to oversee the repeal of both these acts, the Progressive base railed, ‘But he didn’t say WHEN!’

The ensuing brouhaha about healthcare occupied much of the remainder of the year, with rumours, innuendo and all sorts, the town mauls’ scenario inundated with astroturfing operatives from Glenn Beck’s 9/12 group and selected, cherry-picked grumpings from the Progressive Base about all sorts of rumours concerning what Obama wanted and didn’t want in healthcare reform:-

He wanted a public option.

No, he didn’t. That was being thrown out.

He’d sold out to the insurance companies.

No, he wants the public option again.

He wasn’t doing enough for the public option.

Christ-on-a-bike! On various websites and blogs, people who knew better tried to reason with these deficenti: Obama was following the strictures of the Constitution. Obama, as President, doesn’t legislate … by the way, that means ‘to make laws’ … Congress does that. Obama had returned their proper function to a body whose heart had effectively been ripped away by eight years of rampant rule bordering on dictatorship from the neocon Right.That Congress subsequently proved to be dysfunctional wasn’t Obama’s fault, and that the 24/7 cable news media offered people the chance of seeing actual government in process, up close and personal, warts and all, wasn’t Obama’s fault, either.

But he copped the blame … or Rahm Emmanuel did.

Suddenly, the blogosphere was rife with Obama-bashings. In fact, if this were a catwalk, it could easily be said, with no pun intended, that Obama-bashing became the season’s new black.

Huffington, Ed Schulz, David Sirota, everyone fancied themselves qualified to denounce Obama, and their willing disciples in the blogosphere followed suit, blindly, to the point that now, the extreme Left is beginning to sound like the extreme Right.

When Joe Scarborough calls for the Progressive base to ally itself with the Tea Party movement, when Jane Hamsher forms a political alliance with Grover Norquist, the neocons’ neocon, in order to kill the incipient healthcare bill, then something’s rotten in the Democratic Party. Something’s rotten to the core.

Scarborough has his reasons for this: the Tea Party movement has already thrown down the gauntlet to the Republican party, telling them that they’ll abandon any moderate candidates the GOP fields in favour of their own hand-picked extremists. That’s already happened in the special New York 23rd District Congressional election, with no less than Sarah Palin endorsing the Tea Party candidate and abandoning the GOP’s chosen one. This resulted in a Congressional district returning a Democratic congressman for the first time since the Civil War.

The lesson in this is that the GOP will galvanise, and they’ll remold themselves in the Tea Party image, which is extremely, extremely Right Wing. Of course, they’ll welcome any malcontents from the Progressive Left; but they’ll take the protest votes they give and kick the Progressives to the curb, whilst laughing at their stupidity. This is why Jane Hamsher’s playing a dangerous game too, although she’s exhibiting something very ugly and very subtly hidden that’s also an inherent part of the Progressive base.

The R word. Compound that with the fact that these people – people like Hamsher and Huffington, who crave political recognition and an elevation to the hallowed apotheosis of serious political pundit, and then bristled at their perception of not being thrown adequate crumbs from Obama’s Presidential table, find it all too easy to throw him under the political bus and urge the sheeple who people their aggregates to do the same – either to boycott voting altogether or work to mount a primary challenge to Obama in 2012 …

Plus

Equals …

Who are the sheeple of the Left?

Shortly before Christmas, Chris Matthews offered this opinon:

‘They’re netroots people. I’m not even sure that they’re Democrats, but one thing for certain is that they don’t have a clue how government works. They’re like kids. They’re the kid sat in the backseat of a car on a long trip, intent on stirring trouble.’

Well, he’s partially right.

That they’re ignorant of government and how it works is obvious; that’s why so many of them agree with and give credence to such stultifyingly stupid suggestions by the likes of Huffington that Joe Biden should resign as Vice President and lead a grassroots revolution against the President on the basis of objection to his Afghanistan policy. (That Huffington, who spent ages prior to coming to the States, trying desperately to be taken seriously by the British political media, could even suggest such an action, shows both that her understanding of how this government works is next to zilch on the intelligence radar, and that urging such an action, not only is a dangerous precept to the government as a whole, but is openly seditious.)

Sometimes I think it would be mete for the President to dust off the old copy of the Alien and Sedition Act, legalised by John Adams but never put into use.

Trying Huffington on sedition charges would be a great test case for this law that has never been implemented. At worst, she’d be imprisoned; at best, deported from our shores.

Another scary scenario embraced by these sheeple is a denial of First Amendment rights to anyone who doesn’t agree with their way of thinking. In late November on one of his nightly shows, Keith Olbermann, who styles himself as the thinking man’s Progressive, and Huffington took pleasure in announcing on air that the Tea Partiers should be censured.

I daresay their followers agreed wholeheartedly. In fact, recently, on a Progressive website, a naturalised US citizen, originally Spanish, was wondering aloud why extreme Rightwing groups in the United States were even allowed to speak.

Well, darling … basically, it’s BECAUSE we are the United States of America that we have the freedom of the First Amendment.

It allows Rush Limbaugh to say that he wants Obama to fail. It allows Arianna Huffington to misunderstand an Afghan policy expert and shout her down as a liar. It allows us to criticise our leaders when they warrant it and, lately, when they don’t. It is a privilege that’s easily abused and often infuriating, and we simply have to live with it. If you’d happened to take a Civics 101 course in your study for naturalisation, you’d understand this …

Or maybe you wouldn’t, in that fashionable quest for bashing the President.