Thursday, September 21, 2006

Jeffrey Copeland, Bellevue, WA, USA

Challenger 23 is an amazing issue. The “dispatches from the front”‘ in the aftermath of Katrina are all just amazing. Linda Krawecke’s sadness as she watched the city she loves in danger – and unable to do anything about it – mirrors exactly the reaction I had on September 11th, as I watched the World Trade Center (whose construction dominated my teen years) fall. And similarly, Don Markstein’s criticisms of our “leaders” in Washington is well-put, and to the point. Peggy Ransom’s dispatch from the ground in the aftermath is just amazing. In calm terms, in paragraphs of “here’s what happened,” she gives a very clear picture of what life was like through the autumn in NewOrleans.

And then, there’s Dennis Dolbear’s wonderful piece. It’s the scariest thing I’ve read in a year or more – and I’ve been reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and some blogs by soldiers on the ground in Iraq. Dennis just reports, but the fear and frustration and danger come through. His simple observation, “Of all our angels, I hold these dearest, with a gratitude that is profound and a debt we never really repayable,” is moving beyond words. His is the real story of triumph, of people helping each other because that’s just what we do, it’s what makes us human. It didn’t do any good, but I added Dennis to my Hugo shortlist for best fanwriter because his was the best piece of fanwriting I saw in 2005.
I completely agree. Awesome work, DD!
Your editorial in ``Two Four-Letter Words’’ provides a wonderful twelve-step plan for a liberal political revival – “Respect suffering... Care for the uncared for... Adhere to the Bill of Rights... Torture is unacceptable... Mind our own business... Forget political correctness... Rebuild the infrastructure... Develop fiscal sense... Practical environmentalism... Support science... Rekindle conversation on race relations... Honest and Intelligent War... A decent respect for the opinions of mankind...” That is a good and necessary policy statement, but is insufficient as long as the Republicans:
  • control who gets on the voter rolls, as they did in Florida in 2000 and 2004, and also in Ohio in 2004 when they disappeared a quarter of a million voters from the rolls of the three largest (and most Democratic-leaning) cities in the state, and now with the new poll tax in Georgia;
  • are free to commit absentee ballot fraud as they did in numerous counties in Florida in 2000 and 2004, and with military ballots in Florida in 2000;
  • are allowed to suppress the votes of blacks and the urban poor by means such as threatening voter registration drives, challenging black (but not Hispanic) voters, and setting up police roadblocks outside of minority polling places, shorting those precincts of voting machines;
  • control what voting district everyone is in, as they did with the illegal redistricting in Texas and Colorado;
  • control what votes get counted, and launch ad hominem attacks when they lose by small margins, as they did on (Republican) secretary of state Rob McKenna after losing the Washington governor’s race;
  • control the voting machines themselves, and they companies who build them;
  • and control the courts who rule on these issues by appointing judges for their political purity and fundraising prowess, not for their legal scholarship.
It will continue as long as we liberals are insufficiently dogged in our pursuit of what is right, as long as we believe that the only way to beat them is to join them, as long as we screw up on strategy, as long as we allow lies to be told without shouting the truth from every rooftop.

I want a candidate who will adopt the rhetorical flourishes of the Right and say things like: “Restricting the liberties of our citizens for hyped enemies under the bed is not something the voters should tolerate from their government. We must repeal the onerous domestic spying provisions of the Patriot Act immediately. And lest anyone suggest that I sympathize with the terrorists, I do not, but rather I stand with every right-thinking American and believe that the way to defeat the enemies of liberty is to push for more of it.”

So yes: your platform is good. But to win, I’m afraid we may need someone as amoral and vile as Karl Rove to work behind the scenes, and I’m not sure I want to win enough to be that much like them. If we have to nominate Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman, who are Republicans in all but name, in order to win we’ve won nothing. While I don’t believe in Howard Dean, per se, I do stand with him in saying that I am from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The way to win back Congress is not for Democrats to pretend they’re mini-Republicans, it’s for them to be Democrats. I believe in the values that came out of the liberal wing of the party – even if not all the excesses of the McGovern apparatchiks – and your list encompasses those values.

The problem we’re going to face, however, is exactly the struggle between Dean and the imbedded functionaries in the Democratic party. When Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran, ran in the 2005 special election for the second congressional district in Ohio, he wanted to take ending the war as a campaign issue. The Democratic congressional campaign committee tried to stop him, and wouldn’t fund his campaign. Their attitude was that opposing the war wasn’t an issue to win seats in Congress. Nonetheless, after raising his own money, Hackett came within 3% of beating the Republican candidate Jean Schmidt. As long as the national committee hacks keep trying to run the party like Karl Rove runs the Republicans, we’re going to miss by narrow margins like this.

Meanwhile, I’ll support any candidate – on either side of the aisle – who is willing to stand up to President Frat Boy and say ``You and your boys screwed up both the war and the peace in Iraq. The Iranians wanted diplomacy. The North Koreans wanted diplomacy. I won’t be party to a blanket authorization for you to invade Iran, for you and your cronies to steal more oil, until you’ve really tried diplomacy. And sending John Bolton to rattle sabers doesn’t count.’’

However, that all said, there is the redistricting problem. Congressional districts are drawn to be safe for incumbents. Even with the level of voter disgust with the crony capitalism, the lying, and the outright bribery of the Republicans, is there enough play in the population on maps they’ve drawn to make a difference? I don’t know, but I sure hope so.

Maybe – just maybe – Americans are tired of having their country ruled out of ignorance, impulse and brutality. We shall see.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home