[Peace-discuss] About Last Night

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...viewing last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness, I [nevertheless see] 
many complex factors that account for last night's crushing of Congressional 
Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America's obvious 
decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive 
status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc. etc. ... the ... rational 
conclusion -- given the eradication of 50% of the Blue Dog caucus -- is that the 
worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating 
corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to 
perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls "centrists" and "conservative 
Democrats" ... The number of Obama followers writing to me on Twitter and 
elsewhere telling me that left-wing critics of the President are the primary 
cause of last night's outcome - rather than massive economic suffering and the 
actions of their Leader - is even more than I expected.  Bizarrely, they 
actually seem to have convinced themselves of this; I suppose one who is 
desperate to cling to their leader-love will find any theory that shields him 
from responsibility. .."

     Pundit sloth: Blaming the left
     BY GLENN GREENWALD

Ten minutes was the absolute maximum I could endure of any one television news 
outlet last night without having to switch channels in the futile search for 
something more bearable, but almost every time I had MNSBC on, there was 
Lawrence O'Donnell trying to blame "the Left" and "liberalism" for the 
Democrats' political woes.  Alan Grayson's loss was proof that outspoken 
liberalism fails.  Blanche Lincoln's loss was the fault of the Left for mounting 
a serious primary challenge against her. Russ Feingold's defeat proved that 
voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc.  It sounded as 
though he was reading from some crusty script jointly prepared in 1995 by/The 
New Republic/, Lanny Davis and the DLC.

There are so many obvious reasons why this "analysis" is false: Grayson 
represents a highly conservative district that hadn't been Democratic for 
decades before he won in 2008 and he made serious mistakes during the campaign; 
Lincoln was behind the GOP challenger by more than 20 points back in January, 
before Bill Halter even announced his candidacy; Feingold was far from a 
conventional liberal, having repeatedly opposed his own party on multiple 
issues, and he ran in a state saddled with a Democratic governor who was 
unpopular in the extreme.  Beyond that, numerous liberals who were alleged to be 
in serious electoral trouble kept their seats: Barney Frank, John Dingell, Rush 
Holt, Raul Grijalva, and many others.  But there's one glaring, steadfastly 
ignored fact destroying O'Donnell's attempt -- which is merely the standard 
pundit storyline that has been baking for months and will now be served en masse 
-- to blame The Left and declare liberalism dead.  It's this little inconvenient 
fact:

"*Blue Dog Coalition Crushed By GOP Wave Election*

"Tuesday was a tough night for Democrats, as they watched Republicans win enough 
seats to take back the House in the next Congress and began to ponder life under 
a likely House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). But one group hit especially hard 
was the Blue Dog Coalition, *with half of its members losing their seats.*

"According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for 
re-election went down on Tuesday. Notable losses included Rep. Stephanie 
Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), the coalition's co-chair for administration, and Rep. 
Baron Hill (D-Ind.), the co-chair for policy. Two members were running for 
higher office (both lost), three were retiring and three races were still too 
close to call.

"The Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House, 
have consistently frustrated their more progressive colleagues and activists 
within the party..."/

Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for 
close to half of the Democratic losses./ Some of us have been arguing for quite 
some time that the Rahm-engineered dependence on Blue Dog power is one of the 
many factors that has made the Democratic Party so weak, blurry, 
indistinguishable from the GOP, and therefore so politically inept, and would 
thus be stronger and better without them -- here's a 2008 Salon article I wrote 
making that case.  Despite viewing last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness, 
I wouldn't point to this outcome as vindication for my argument, as there are 
many complex factors that account for last night's crushing of Congressional 
Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America's obvious 
decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive 
status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc. etc.

But for slothful pundits who want to derive sweeping meaning from individual 
races in order to blame the Left and claim that last night was a repudiation of 
liberalism, the far more rational conclusion -- given the eradication of 50% of 
the Blue Dog caucus -- is that the worst possible choice Democrats can make is 
to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving 
corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington 
calls "centrists" and "conservative Democrats."  That is who bore the bulk of 
the brunt of last night's Democratic bloodbath -- not liberals.

* * * * *

One other point about the standard pundit line: for all the giddy talk about the 
power of the "Tea Party" -- which is, more than anything else, just a marketing 
tactic for re-branding the Republican Party -- the reality is that the Tea Party 
almost certainly cost the GOP control of the Senate. Had standard-issue GOP 
candidates rather than Tea Party fanatics been nominated in Delaware, Colorado, 
Alaska and Nevada, the Republicans would have almost certainly won those seats 
(in Alaska, rejecting the GOP incumbent in favor of a Tea Party candidates 
appears to have ensured that Lisa Murkowski will return to DC as a GOP-hating 
reject rather than a loyal Republican, the way Joe Lieberman returned after 
2006). That's not a criticism of the Tea Party -- I think it's admirable to 
support candidates who represent one's views and be willing to take a few extra 
losses to do so -- but the Tea Party storyline from last night is one that is 
far from unadulterated success; in the case of Senate control, it's quite the 
opposite.



UPDATE:  On a related note, in The New York Times today, one finds the spectacle 
of Evan Bayh -- who gave up his Senate seat to a Republican while he frolicks 
around in the millions of dollars his wife receives from the health care 
industry -- demanding massive entitlement cuts for the poor and freezes on the 
pay for government workers, while also blaming the Democratic loss on the 
alleged fact that*"we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters." * Is 
he referring there to the escalation in the war in Afghanistan, the massive 
increase in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks, the virtually wholesale embrace 
of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties architecture, the defense of 
Don't-Ask/Don't-Tell and DOMA, the multi-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, 
the failure to stem the tide of the foreclosure crisis, or the elimination of 
the public option?  Apparently, the lesson Evan Bayh -- and most pundits -- took 
from last night's results, and which they want the Party to learn, is that if 
only Democrats had suppressed the enthusiasm of their base just a little more, 
they would have won.



UPDATE II:  The number of Obama followers writing to me on Twitter and elsewhere 
telling me that left-wing critics of the President are the primary cause of last 
night's outcome -- rather than massive economic suffering and the actions of 
their Leader -- is even more than I expected.  Bizarrely, they actually seem to 
have convinced themselves of this; I suppose one who is desperate to cling to 
their leader-love will find any theory that shields him from responsibility.  
Behold the supreme power of the Professional Left!!

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/03/pundit/index.html

On 11/3/10 6:10 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

"...the American electorate never quite grasps the obvious, glaring, brutal fact 
that neither of these factions is ever going to change the system one iota if 
they can help it; they are the system, they are its servants, its enablers, its 
enactors. Then again, we are dealing with, to borrow Gore Vidal’s deathless 
phrase, the United States of Amnesia, where history doesn’t exist (except in the 
form of feverishly distorted self-righteous myths about America’s eternal 
super-duper specialness), and every election is a tabula rasa ... The people’s 
concerns are not only not addressed; they are not even articulated by anyone in 
the lucrative, sinister game of King of the Hill played by the two factions, 
both of which are pledged, body and soul, to elite rule, corporate rapine and 
militarist empire. And certainly, neither the corporate media nor the 
educational system will do anything to help inculcate a deeper sense of history 
... Instead, these institutions keep replicating and refreshing those same myths 
of specialness (in either “conservative” or “progressive” form), adding layer 
after layer of thought-obliterating noise to the Great American Echo Chamber 
that encloses, and imprisons, the entire society ... both factions are – 
literally, legally, formally, undeniably – packs of war criminals, pledged to 
the continuation of a rapacious empire of military domination that is killing 
innocent people, fomenting hatred and extremism, and destabilizing the world. 
The myth of specialness prevents most people from seeing the truth of what their 
bipartisan political establishment is  doing  to the world – or even to 
themselves, how it has stripped them of their liberties, corroded their society, 
destroyed their communities and degraded their quality of life, while 
diminishing the lives and futures of their own children and grandchildren. Most 
Americans apparently cannot break out of the narrow cognitive structure that has 
been imposed on their understanding of reality: i.e., that America is 
inherently, ineradicably good..."

Dissatisfied Mind: Flickers of Hope in a Deadly Political Cycle
>     By CHRIS FLOYD
>
> I found myself unexpectedly heartened by American election returns, at least 
> in one respect. For they have shown, once again, that the American people feel 
> an abiding, angry – if deeply inchoate – dissatisfaction with the nation’s 
> unjust, corrupt and dysfunctional political system. They know that something 
> is profoundly wrong with the system, and so they keep voting one faction out 
> and putting the other faction in, hoping to see some kind of change.
>
> History gives this proof: in almost every national election for the past two 
> decades, we have seen a change in control of either one or both houses of 
> Congress or the White House. This has happened in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2000, 
> 2002, 2006, 2008, and now again in 2010. The pattern is very clear. And it is 
> not because Americans “prefer divided government,” as the dim chewers of 
> Beltway cud like to tell us; it’s because they can’t get anyone in the system 
> to address their concerns.
>
> Yet with every turnover in factional control, we see a rush of earnest, 
> serious analysis telling us how the results represent a vast sea change in 
> America’s politics, culture, society, soul, etc. But somehow, two years later, 
> these momentously meaningful tidal waves ripple into nothing on the empty 
> shore. And again, that’s because they don’t actually signify anything beyond 
> the by-now perennial unease and dissatisfaction.
>
> What is less heartening, of course, is the fact that the American electorate 
> never quite grasps the obvious, glaring, brutal fact that neither of these 
> factions is ever going to change the system one iota if they can help it; they 
> are the system, they are its servants, its enablers, its enactors. Then again, 
> we are dealing with, to borrow Gore Vidal’s deathless phrase, the United 
> States of Amnesia, where history doesn’t exist (except in the form of 
> feverishly distorted self-righteous myths about America’s eternal super-duper 
> specialness), and every election is a tabula rasa . The only flickering 
> historical awareness that seems to exist in the American electorate is a vague 
> sense that the gang they voted in two years ago hasn’t changed anything; 
> better try the other gang again … forgetting this is the same gang they threw 
> out the time four years ago, for the same reason.
>
> So the cycle goes on and on, and the rot and dysfunction grows deeper, and 
> ever more intractable. The people’s concerns are not only not addressed; they 
> are not even articulated by anyone in the lucrative, sinister game of King of 
> the Hill played by the two factions, both of which are pledged, body and soul, 
> to elite rule, corporate rapine and militarist empire. And certainly, neither 
> the corporate media nor the educational system will do anything to help 
> inculcate a deeper sense of history (“History is bunk,” said that 
> quintessential American, Henry Ford; you can’t make no money from it, so 
> what’s the point?), or provide any wider, deeper context for articulating – 
> and confronting – the causes of the electorate’s dissatisfaction. Instead, 
> these institutions keep replicating and refreshing those same myths of 
> specialness (in either “conservative” or “progressive” form), adding layer 
> after layer of thought-obliterating noise to the Great American Echo Chamber 
> that encloses, and imprisons, the entire society.
>
> Mmm, maybe it’s not so heartening after all. Especially given the fact that 
> both factions are – literally, legally, formally, undeniably – packs of war 
> criminals, pledged to the continuation of a rapacious empire of military 
> domination that is killing innocent people, fomenting hatred and extremism, 
> and destabilizing the world. The myth of specialness prevents most people from 
> seeing the truth of what their bipartisan political establishment is  doing  
> to the world – or even to themselves, how it has stripped them of their 
> liberties, corroded their society, destroyed their communities and degraded 
> their quality of life, while diminishing the lives and futures of their own 
> children and grandchildren. Most Americans apparently cannot break out of the 
> narrow cognitive structure that has been imposed on their understanding of 
> reality: i.e., that America is inherently, ineradicably good, that whatever 
> mistakes it might make here or there (usually when one’s own preferred faction 
> is out of office, of course), this essential goodness remains inviolate, 
> forever untainted by any genuine evil.
>
> And so bipartisan perpetrators of enormous evils – mass murder, aggressive 
> war, torture, brutality, ruination, atrocity and injustice on a gargantuan 
> scale – are not only never held accountable, but are instead celebrated, 
> honored, and rewarded with great wealth and privilege. It is no wonder that 
> dissatisfaction reigns in the body politic. The people sense that something is 
> badly wrong; but no one in the system will tell them that it is the system 
> itself that is wrong. Instead, we get these circuses and shams, these 
> diversions and delusions that pass for election campaigns, throwing up a 
> blizzard of false issues and partisan posturing, sound and fury signifying 
> nothing … then when it’s all over, it’s back to business as usual for our 
> bipartisan courtiers, feasting on the bloody swill of empire.
>
> Still, the nagging spark of dissatisfaction can often be the beginning of 
> wisdom, eventually forcing us to look beyond the confines of our cognitive 
> overlays and unchallenged understandings. The merry-go-round of factional 
> turnovers, in election after election, shows that this fertile element of 
> dissatisfaction is rampant, and chronic, in the American people. They have not 
> yet, not quite, accepted the system of rapacious empire and elite domination 
> as the natural order, the settled status quo. They want something to change, 
> they want things to be different somehow – but, like people everywhere, they 
> don’t want to turn the mirror on themselves, and see the reality of the 
> noxious system they are perpetuating with their yo-yoing between two utterly 
> corrupt and depraved factions of money-grubbers and power-seekers.
>
> But as long as the dissatisfaction remains, there is still some hope that it 
> will drive more and more people to see beyond the cloud of myth, to hear 
> truths outside the echo chamber, and to begin the long, arduous, quite 
> possibly impossible but morally imperative work of breaking the stranglehold 
> of these murderous fools and forging a genuine alternative to the system.
>
> Chris Floyd's blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.
>
>
> On 11/3/10 5:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> [With no apologies to David Mamet, here's the best analysis I've seen of the 
>> thoroughly cooked election and What It Means. --CGE]
>>
>> America the Clueless:
>> Gridlock is Good
>>
>> The American people have spoken, but it’s impossible to decode their 
>> incoherent message. Drunk with their capture of the House of Representatives, 
>> the Republicans thunder that the verdict of ballot boxes from Maine to 
>> Hawai’i is clarion-clear: the ultimate evil in America is government, 
>> specifically government as led by President Barack Obama. But when exit 
>> pollsters questioned voters on their way to those same ballot boxes, as to 
>> who should take the blame for the country’s economic problems, 35 per cent 
>> said Wall Street, 30 per cent said Bush and 23 per cent Obama. The American 
>> people want a government that mustn't govern, a budget that must 
>> simultaneously balance and create jobs, cut spending across the board and 
>> leave the Defense budget intact. Collectively, the election makes clear, they 
>> haven't a clue which way to march.
>>
>> Has the Tea Party changed the political map? Scarcely so. In concrete terms, 
>> it ensured that a significant portion of the political map didn’t change at 
>> all. Unlike the House, the U.S. Senate will stay in Democratic hands, albeit 
>> with only a tiny edge. As I wrote last week, purely on the basis of cui bono 
>> – who stands to gain – one could make a sound case that the Democrats 
>> invented the Tea Party out of whole cloth. If it wasn’t for Tea Party lady, 
>> Christine O’Donnell, the Republicans would be counting victory in Delaware. 
>> But the sometime-Satanist ensured the surprise victory of a dreary Democratic 
>> unknown, Chris Coons.
>>
>> No single Democrat was targeted more fiercely by Republicans than Harry Reid 
>> of Nevada, the Democratic senate majority leader. His was the symbolic scalp 
>> they craved. Right-wing millions poured into the state, backing Tea Party 
>> Republican Sharron Angle. Tuesday evening one could sense Republicans holding 
>> their breaths, ready to blare their joy at the victory for Angle suggested by 
>> many polls.
>>
>> Around midnight east coast time it became clear that Angle had gone down, 
>> victim of the political suicide she actually committed several days ago, dint 
>> of one of the most racist, anti-Hispanic campaign ads in many years. It had 
>> escaped the attention of that supposedly consummate Republican political 
>> strategist Karl Rove – born in Sparks, Nevada, -- that the Hispanic vote in 
>> Nevada is not insignificant. Hispanics went for Reid by a factor of about 75 
>> per cent and he slid through to victory.
>>
>> It should be added that the powerful corporate and labor interests in the 
>> state of Nevada , most notably in the gambling and entertainment and 
>> construction sector, were all aghast at the possibility that economically 
>> stricken Nevada might cease to have its cause promoted in Washington DC by 
>> the most powerful man in the U.S. Senate, and instead have as their tribune a 
>> racist dingbat with zero political clout. If ever there was a need for the 
>> fix to be in, and seasoned fixers available to face the task, it was surely 
>> in Nevada. But that said, Angle and the Tea Party may have engineered defeat 
>> all on their own.
>>
>> Just over half of the 17,000 respondents to a national exit poll said that 
>> their votes in House races had nothing to do with the Tea Party, pro or con. 
>> The other half was split, pro and con. Over 60 per cent said the 
>> all-important issue is jobs; 87 per cent said they are worried about economic 
>> conditions. Between government laying out money to create jobs and government 
>> slashing expenditures to reduce the deficit there’s also pretty much an even 
>> split.
>>
>> Is there anything new in all this? Of course not. Republicans always campaign 
>> on homely pledges – economically illiterate – to balance the government’s 
>> books the same way as their household budgets. Pressed, as many triumphant 
>> Republicans were last night, as to exactly where they would start cutting the 
>> federal budget to achieve this end, they invariably slid into the 
>> programmatic shadows, with hoarse ranting about freezes and “across the 
>> board” budgetary carnage, except for military spending. As California 
>> governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, now even more unpopular than the man he 
>> ousted, demonstrated, it’s easier to terminate in a movie script than in a 
>> legislature. The incoming California governor, Jerry Brown, demonstrated, 
>> that even if you spend more of your money than any other candidate in US 
>> political history, around $150 million (as did his opponent, Meg Whitman) you 
>> still need to treat your maid right if you want to win.
>>
>> The second craziest victory speech of the evening came from a Tea Party man, 
>> Rand Paul, now the Republican senator from Kentucky. “We’re enslaved by 
>> debt,” he screamed at his cheering supporters and followed this by savage 
>> diatribes about any constructive role for government. Now it’s possible that 
>> Paul, inflamed with libertarian principle, could actually try to filibuster 
>> the next vote in the US Senate to authorize an increase in the US national 
>> debt. As awed commentators swiftly noted, he could plunge the United States 
>> into default, bring economic devastation to the world.
>>
>> On the other hand, the history of the Republican Party is supposed crazies, 
>> like Ronald Reagan who campaigned against the deficit in 1980, coming to heel 
>> and plunging the United States into a vast new ocean of red ink, courtesy of 
>> his tax cuts. It’s what drives the Tea Partiers crazy. They do know one basic 
>> truth - that to govern is to betray and they are in line for betrayal. The 
>> craziest speech? The visibly psychotic Republican gubernatorial candidate in 
>> New York, Carl Paladino, soundly thrashed by Andrew Cuomo, swinging a red 
>> baseball bat with the transparent desire to dashing it into Cuomo’s skull.
>>
>> The landscape has changed. The Republican swing in the House was as dramatic 
>> as in 1994, after two years of Bill Clinton. Democrats who entered Congress 
>> on Obama’s coattails have now been ousted. What lies ahead is a war of 
>> maneuver, between the White House and the Republican leadership. Obama has 
>> been weakened -- deservedly so, because a large part of Tuesday’s disaster 
>> for his party can be laid at his door. He laid down no convincing political 
>> theme, mounted no effective offense, relied on a team of advisors of dubious 
>> competence, which had run out of steam. He himself tried to run for and 
>> against an effective role for government, made the same childish equations of 
>> domestic and federal budgets, sent out mixed messages, lost the confidence of 
>> the young and of a vital slice of the independents.
>>
>> All the same, after two years, the polls show Obama is no more unpopular than 
>> was Clinton in 1994. By 1996 Clinton had outmaneuvered the Republican 
>> leadership and won reelection in 1996. Today the economic situation is far 
>> worse than it was in 1994. No effective political and economic strategy for 
>> recovery is on the cards in the current atmosphere. As always, these days in 
>> America, our last best friend will be gridlock.
>>
>> ###
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