Democrats first have to come to grips with where the Ship of State founders in the political seas -- way the hell over in the lower right quadrant. We didn't get there with the unanimous approval of the deck hands, nor through outright hi-jacking of the pilot deck by the extreme right. We are a centrist ship, but we have been steadily plotted to the right through a series of incremental, zig-zagging tacking maneuvers, sometimes right into the wind (Bush is far to the right of the ship's hands on almost every issue). If these complicated tacking maneuvers can be interrupted, the prevailing winds will bring us all back to the middle reaches without there having to be a mutiny and a lurching turn of the wheel to the extreme left. These tacking maneuvers are often small things, almost silly, like gay marriage, the morbid obsession with abortion, Elmer Gantrying, race-tweaking, symbolic gun rights, etc., but the cumulative impact has been to move inexorably to the right, virtually since the day FDR died.
We need to be the party that replenishes and reinvents the New Deal Covenants. The party that rejects market-based governance, in all its amoral favoritism of those with access to the most marketable goods. We need to be the party that rejects the cynical idea that government only makes things worse, we need to be the party that tries, at great pain and cost, to rescue our health care system, instead of the party that exploits the crisis by adopting legislation that accelerates the cashing in on the sick and failing by the medical industrial complex. We are losing ground every hour in this fight. The mouthpieces continue to pretend we have word-class healthcare and dare to mock and to scorn more equitable, more healthy, and more health sustaining systems elsewhere. Anyone who understands actuarial principles knows that our current institutionalized larceny produces a steady growth in suffering, disease and death in our most needy citizens.
We need to be the party that anchors into the bedrock our social security and pension systems. Are we really ready to follow de-regulated markets to the point where our parents, even those who worked and saved and planned responsibly and honorably for their last years, become destitute and sick, at best a terrible drag on working families, at worst a third world disaster of Dickensian proportions?
We need to come to grips with the dark side of the corporatization of America. We have gone too far down the free-market trickle-down road. We need to reign in our corporations, to recognize that insulation from liability has loosed the bounds of common decency. Tort reform without liability reform is a license to kill and to maim -- your ass is simply a cost of doing business. We need to get over our infantile fixation on the ultra-wealthy and to recognize that often such unimaginable fortunes are amassed through an unconscionable rigging of the game. We have celebrated too long, those who are the best at fixing the game. We can not continue to have an economy that is incentivized by the desires of hundred-millionaires to become multi-billionaires, where the game is to concentrate wealth to black-hole density within the gilded class. If we crimp your style in your rise to Gatesville, to the point where you'll stamp your feet and just take your toys and go home, go right ahead. If you have bet your fortune on the continued market for $20,000 boob tubes and Bradley-Class SUVs, tough on you.
We need to be the Party that begins the long, maybe unattainable climb out of the pit where our foreign policy and credibility lies drowning in our own swill. We need to grow back up and recognize we can not be the exemplar for the world while we are sliding into ruin at home. We need to categorically reject torture and inhumane treatment of humans, and we need to re-center ourselves so that our foreign and domestic agendas are not driven by small numbers of religious fanatics in the middle east, aligned either directly or indirectly with oil-monied interests in our own mid and south west. How well did the Bush hands-off-the-middle-east-peace-process policy work out? Did Bush's disengagement from the peace process extricate us from that region's endless wallowing in violence and hatred? Or do those sorts of things tend to dominate as never before? The clinical proof is everywhere that neoconservatism is a necrotizing fasceitis on the body politic, and it is distressing to see still how many are willing to sign off on it so long as a narrow and very special interest of their's is given some diseased crumbs. Is your special interest so special, as to override our most cherished principles of justice, decency and fairness?
We need to be the party that recommits to the career diplomat, the career environmental engineer, the career teacher, the career government lawyer, the career government accountant, the career intelligence officer, the career emergency services worker, and the career scientist, even if it means there will less beak-wetting for party loyalists. We need to be the party that wants intelligence from the CIA and FBI, not political smokescreens. We need to rebuild our military, restore it to its honored traditions, to once again truly value what so many are still willing to give. We need to answer their sacrifice with a respect approaching sanctity, and to never spend that gift rashly or to waste it cynically. We need to answer their sacrifice with our support in real and monetary ways, not merely when our support redounds to our immediate political gain. Likewise, we need to fund and enact true safeguards of our national assets at home. Move away from the spinning of safety and toward the securing of it. It will cost our economy and it will cost our political capital, but it will be worth the price.
We need to reaffirm our commitment to our core American principles, to reject and rid ourselves of those who would encroach on our privacy, on the dignity of our homes, our friendships and our speech. We need to ratify by our official and covert conduct, the Bill of Rights.
We will need to be the party that does something about the coming housing crisis, or we will do for the family home, what the bankers did for the family farm in the dustbowl era. Only this time, within weeks of the first massive wave of foreclosures, dozens of self-financial-help gurus will hit the cable access airwaves selling the secret of growing rich from the newly dispossessed!
We need to know that greed is fucking awful and its appetite is bigger and more boundless than all the bounty that this nation still possesses. How many times does this have to be demonstrated to us before we'll see it and believe it?
We are floundering and we're arguing why, why, why, as more and more are gong under. Some blame the poor flounderers, but I'm not willing to cast them upon the waters and I feel only shame if we will go along for a lick and a promise that there's still one seat left on the boat for us. It seems like some people are counting along as the flounderer is going down for the 3rd and last time, and they seem to think that it is the most important thing in the world that the last words those poor blighters hear from us as they dip forever below the surface is that it is their fault. You should have learned to swim. . .glub, glub, gluuuuuu.
We need to be the party that emphatically denounces the evil cross-breeding of religion and politics. If Jesus keeps fucking everything up to a fare-thee-well, I will be for the active repression of organized religion in this country. Even though we sometimes push Ole Charlton Heston out in front, with his everybody-must-read-stone-tablets and his Winchester clutched in his cold, dying hands, we all know that it is Jesus who is the real trouble-maker. Why, in this age fanatical right-thinking, politically aware Christian warriors, armed with the awesome power of Presidential Prayer Teams, do we need privacy-intrusive, body-invasive legislation? Why don't we just pray away all the abortions? Why is it that when Good Old Pat Robertson was muttering his voodoo incantations against the Clinton Supreme Court, that Jesus sent cancer instead to Reinquist? Why not some excruciating disease for a cancer-is-too-good-for-them liberal justice? Maybe Jesus wants us to take matters into our own hands? How far a baby-step is it from praying for a Justice's death, to just going ahead and helping the prayer along? We need to be a party where the phrase "America is a Christian nation" is like ipecacc. If Jesus wanted a Christian Nation, he would have saved us the trouble and just ascended to the throne of the Truly Holy Roman Empire 2005 years ago (or else he would have made massive contributions to Abramoff's favorite shell corps). If I recall my bible correctly (and I can't recall the exact chapter and verse), Jesus said "pass" when the choice was before him. He didn't take the door that lead to earthly rule and instead said, "I'll take the Crown of Thorns and Crucifixion, Monty!" You know we are in the Bastard Age of King Scatus (everything, everyone he touches turns to shit) when in contrast, JFK, that moral cripple, sounds like Sir Thomas Moore when he talked about the separation of church and state. If we can excise the current crop of charlatans, each of us will be able to worship or commune as we see fit, subject to our inner conscious, secure and safe from State intrusion into this profoundly private interior realm.
If there is a man or woman out there who would run on this platform, give me Charlton Heston's gun and I'll shoot the yellow dog myself and vote without regard to party affiliation. Call me moderate.
