Posted by olvlzl
This election is the reason I started blogging in the first place. It is a pivotal election, it could be the end of real democracy in the United States or it could be the beginning, the start of its rebirth.
If Democrats do not win back either house then the struggle will be harder, a lot harder but we will have to continue. There is no chance that the Republicans will not try to prevent democracy happening, it’s what they do. And they’ve never been closer to turning this into an oligarchic despotism than they are now. Fully prepare for a total disaster, the Republicans are going to deliver if they get the chance. I’m not convinced that it won’t be partly in the form of an entirely idiotic attack on Iran. The only bright spot is that they will almost certainly have a narrower majority than before.
If Democrats take both the house and Senate then we have to put pressure on the Senate to refuse to confirm any more judges who are not acceptable. The practice of pretending that no one knows exactly what the Federalist Society stooges will do if they are confirmed has to stop. Stop the game of let’s pretend, get the stupid hearings off of TV where the Republicans can stage their costume dramas to manipulate what should be a serious deliberation. We will have to push the Senate out of its usual nap time stupor and get them to see that we are in danger of exactly what those old time conservatives warned us of, judicial tyranny. Only they never told us that it was they who would be the tyrants. They will steal the country for their patrons, they have proven that in Bush v. Gore. The Senate is our Achilles heel, we will have to give it special attention under any circumstances.
Without both houses it will be impossible to move the progressive agenda very much so we shouldn’t get our hopes up unrealistically high. But just stopping the head-long rush into despotism will be a great improvement.
If Democrats take the house but not the Senate it will be harder but the House under Nancy Pelosi will probably be eager to start exposing the corruption that has built up under Republicans. We will have to give those efforts our strongest support in the face of a full gale of media lies and distortions. They will do everything in their power to prevent even a tenth the investigation of the Bush II crimes that they fully supported on the trumped up charges against Clinton. Again, it’s what Republicans and their media shills do.
One thing that is absolutely essential to start working on right now. The broadcast and cable media are the tools that the Republicans have used to convince the American People that lies are the truth and that the truth is a lie. No democracy can stand in face of that. Pretending that radio and TV are the same as print and that they should be treated the same way is sheer, willful blindness. They sold us the Bush putsch and the most disastrous foreign war in our history, something that generations of Americans not born yet will be paying for. We have to force these lie machines to stop undermining democracy, to stop being Republican brothels and force them to fulfill the function of the press in a democratic society. Community service and fairness are requirements that they have to have forced on them BECAUSE IT IS NECESSARY TO RETAIN A DEMOCRACY. We have to do it because without it we won’t have a democracy any more.
The right of the people to govern themselves and to be free are more important than any corporate right. All rights held by media corporations are granted by a free people to news media that serves them, not a right that is inherent in the corporate press.
One small thing would be for any public broadcasting to be placed under community service and fairness requirements as a condition of receiving government funds. That is something that a Democratic Congress could force if they wanted to. Just refusing to appropriate the funds unless NPR, PBS, PRI and any other public broadcaster signed binding pledges would likely be enough. I don’t know if it would be possible to force other broadcast and cable to sign onto binding pledges but that should be investigated.
Bush is going to try every dirty trick in the book, or maybe I should say Cheney will. Cheney is the real executive, why pretend that Bush is anything but the figurehead he is anymore? We don’t have time to take a very long rest, no matter what happens we’ve got a lot of work to do.