I Quit

My daughter asked me recently if I had given up blogging... and it appears that I mostly have.

Not because I made a decision to do so, but because I have never been so dispirited in all my life about our political process and culture.

And it's not that I hung such high hopes on Obama. The only thing he has done that has surprised me so far has been his embrace of so much of Bush's unconstitutional approach to war and national security. And thanks to him, our national shame lingers...

No I do not blame Obama, but the Democrats in Congress. Never have I witnessed such a sniveling bunch of spineless corporate whores in all my life. To allow Joe Lieberman to become a one-man determinant of how many people die from a lack of health insurance to salve his ego is beyond an outrage; it is a desecration of everything this party is supposed to be about.

So this is the letter I just sent to MY Senator:

Dear Senator Durbin,

I have been a loyal Democrat all my life, and have worked on more campaigns than I can count.

So I thought it only fair to let you know: I quit.

I am embarrassed to call myself a Democrat after this sniveling display for Lieberman. The people will never vote for eunichs. Mark my words.

Sure, the independents may forget how this party sold its soul to get to an ephemeral "win" on healthcare, but they are not the ones who knock on doors, make phone calls, and host house parties.

Not one more phone call. Not one more step onto a strange street. Not one more penny.

I quit.

Couldn't resist

My thoughts exactly

Mark you calendars. This column is several days old, but I completely agree with conservative Ross Douthat!

Honoring Teddy

I’ve been holding this back because somehow it seemed crass to engage in today’s politics while the homage to Ten Kennedy is taking place.

And then I caught myself thinking “Are you kidding me? Who would be more outraged? As the narrow spitting match that the Republicans seem insistent on fostering right now stands in the way of this country recognizing its final unmet moral obligation, whose voice would rise strongest, if not his?”

So I am moving on to continue the good fight.

We need to be pissed. We need to step forward and reclaim this opportunity. We are the majority of the American people and we can reclaim our power if we choose to.

So in that spirit I offer you Hunter.

God I wish I could have written this rant.

With Thanks to Bush, Cheney and Jack Bauer

“The fact that we are not really bothered any more by taking helpless detainees in our custody and (a) threatening to blow their brains out, torture them with drills, rape their mothers, and murder their children; (b) choking them until they pass out; (c) pouring water down their throats to drown them; (d) hanging them by their arms until their shoulders are dislocated; (e) blowing smoke in their face until they vomit; (f) putting them in diapers, dousing them with cold water, and leaving them on a concrete floor to induce hypothermia; and (g) beating them with the butt of a rifle -- all things that we have always condemned as "torture" and which our laws explicitly criminalize as felonies ("torture means. . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering . . .") -- reveals better than all the words in the world could how degraded, barbaric and depraved a society becomes when it lifts the taboo on torturing captives.” Glenn Greenwald, Salon


“…The question of torture - and the United States' embrace of inhumanity as a core American value under the presidency of George W. Bush - remains, in my view, the pre-eminent moral question in American politics. The descent of the United States - and of Americans in general - to lower standards of morality and justice than those demanded by Iranians of their regime is a sign of the polity's moral degeneracy.

[snip]

This is what Bush and Cheney truly achieved in their tragic response to 9/11: two terribly failed, brutally expensive wars, the revival of sectarian warfare and genocide in the Middle East, the end of America's global moral authority, the empowerment of Iran's and North Korea's dictatorships, and the nightmares of Gitmo and Bagram still haunting the new administration.
But what they did to the culture - how they systematically dismantled core American values like the prohibition on torture and respect for the rule of law - is the worst and most enduring of the legacies.” Andrew Sullivan