Billmon has been doing very good work on his blog The Whiskey Bar in the recent weeks. I read him on the Israel-Hezbollah conflict first every morning, and I appreciate the righteous passion his writing shows. So today I feel like asking Billmon to go out on a three-legged pub-race with me. Because he's down in the dumps and that's not a good place to be, even in a world that has gone insane, end-times insane.
Not that he isn't telling the truth today when he writes:
I used to argue that progressives in this country had no choice but to support the Democrats -- even pathetic frauds like Howard Dean and inept Thurston Howell III clones like John Kerry. I used to quote Frederick Douglas's despairing comment about what the Republican Party of his day represented for African Americans: the rock; all else is the sea.
Maybe that was true, once. But I've finally come to realize that in modern-day America there is no rock -- just a vast, featureless expanse of reactionary ocean, like something from the set of Waterworld, except without a gilled Kevin Costner.
So here's my confession: At this point I really don't give a flying fuck whether the Democrats take the House or the Senate back. No, wait, that's not true. The truth is I hope they don't. It wouldn't save us from what's coming down the road, in the Middle East and elsewhere. It wouldn't force President Psychopath to change course or seek therapy. But it would make sure that the "left" (ha ha ha) gets more than its fair share of blame for the approaching debacle.
That may well be the natural role of the Democratic Party in our one-and-a-half party system, but I don't want any part of it any more. Which means that when I say it's a bad sign (consensus opinion always being wrong) that Charlie Cook now thinks the Republicans are likely to lose their House and/or Senate majorities in November, I just mean that it's a bad sign for the Democratic Party and its professional hangers on.
For the rest of us, and for whatever is left of this country's soul, it doesn't really matter. We've already lost.
mmm. True. But also not the whole truth. The Democrats are spineless wretches in business suits, mostly, and no way can they clean out the stables Bush people will leave behind. So from a purely partisan point of view sitting the next years out would be a good idea for what so quaintly and inaccurately is called "the American Left". Except that if this happens there might be no earth to worry about in, say, 2008. It's a sacrifice time. It's a time to choose a bad rash over terminal cancer. And then it's time to kick the rash's ass.
That was my cheering and encouraging talk to Billmon and others who feel like him. Me included. Despair. Is. Not. An. Option.
Besides, three-legged pub-races are fun. Last time I got the largest hangover in the whole world, though. But it was a hangover on a new morning, and that's what we need to keep in mind. The fight to have new mornings.