Dark Rights

Long time between posts - partly due to the election, partly due to some kids stuff, partly due to laziness.

Still hard to fathom the election - and the prospect of Speaker John Boehner - though easy to explain the results.  The midterms were a perfect storm as a wave of stupid - right-wingers who claim that Obama is both a socialist AND a slave to Wall Street (capitalism), morons who think he's a Muslim determined to hand over the country to Islamic radicals, 'constitutionalists' who don't understand how that document relates to the Bill of Rights or that the Constitution counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person and did not recognize women's suffrage, etc. - crashed into a legitimate wave of anxiety over the economy and unemployment.

It used to be that economic anxiety benefited Democrats, especially when Ds were seen as the party of labor and the Rs the party of capital.  But this year stupid overwhelmed the economic-oriented voters, and the country is much worse for it.

As frustrating as seeing motivated Republicans win at the ballot box, the message it sends and story it tells about the current state of America - not American politics, but the nation - is even more disheartening.

Obama was swept into office just 24 months ago for two reasons: he was not George Bush, and he ran on hope.  Hope almost always wins, and was the reason I blogged 3 weeks ago that I thought the Ds would stem their losses since Americans historically rarely vote mad.

[I guess that mainly applies to voting for President.  Vote Hope every fours, vote Mad every two.]

In addition to running on hope Obama promised to DO something, and unlike the Bush Administration attack our problems instead of countries.  He pledged to: stimulate the economy; reform health care; increase regulation of Wall Street; get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan; and re-industrialize the country behind a clean, green-energy economy that would fight climate change and create jobs.  Those are six big, ambitious items to deal with if you count Iraq/Afghanistan separately, and Obama did 4 out of 6!

And of the four that apply to the vilified Nancy Pelosi, she batted a thousand (a higher batting average than her hometown world champion Giants)!

That's why that fact that Obama did what he said he was going to do, and was punished at the polls for it, is even more depressing that finding out that Boehner will soon have Pelosi's old job. Or that young and serious members of Congress like Tom Perriello and John Boccieri and Zach Space did not get reelected.

It's that the nation we've become?  We're only good at tearing things down, or being against something?  We punish a President for doing what he said he was going to do?

As noted before, the left was full of piss and vinegar when Bush was in office, at least near the end of his second term.  We got completely rolled during the rush to war in Iraq, but after the nation came to it's senses we rode quite a hot streak of stopping stuff.  We stopped drilling in the Arctic Refuge in 2005, took back Congress in 2006, increased fuel economy standards in 2007, and elected an African-American president in 2008.   And that's just a partial list.

But with the exception of increasing fuel economy, those were mainly  "anti' campaigns.

Being positive is much more difficult, and now the right is crowing over having killed a climate bill in the Senate, dethroning Speaker Pelosi, and weakening the President.

I really thought the election of Obama would mark the beginning of an aspirational era, a time to think big and get things done.  And in 2009 we did pass an omnibus lands bill that protected more than 2 million acres of public land. 

But America now seems to be in the throws of a 'no cult.'  It kind of makes sense, actually. We are a nation full of pampered, spoiled, and entitled citizens who say they want change, but then vote AGAINST it. 

People who want a huge army, great schools, Social Security, a balanced budget - AND low taxes.

Folks who believe if we cut government waste and take down the signs that say "Paid for by the American Recovery Act"  we can balance the budget.

A nation full of people who think we are the wrong track, then vote against a President who has worked to get us on the right track. A nation that has completely forgotten that we are still in Afghanistan, and still spending billions in Iraq.

The right-wing in the US is made of this dangerous melange, of the stupid, the entitled, and the hypocritical, fed by corporate money unleashed by the Supreme Court and nurtured by echo chambers like Fox News. 

If it's any consolation, these kinds of turns are cyclical and usually temporary in American history.  The Know-Nothings and the slave-owners had their moment in the sun, and lost. So did the robber barons, capitalists, prohibitionists, and the machine politicians - and they all eventually lost.  

The other silver lining is that younger voters continue to get more and more liberal, and the older voters swayed this election (uber-hypocrites since the government gives each senior money - Social Security - and health care via Medicare) will shape fewer and fewer ones in the future. 

A vivid reminder of the cyclical and stupid nature of American politics could be found in Sunday's The Washington Post special section on the 150th anniversary of start of the Civil War.  Philip Kennicott concludes his essay:

... the Civil War legitimized something essential, and dark, that remains with us. Ultimately, the South was fighting for the right to be wrong, for the right to retain (and expand) something ugly and indefensible. It lost the war, and slavery was abolished. But the right to be wrong, the right to resist the progress of freedom, the right to say "no, thank you" to modernity, to leave the fences in disrepair and retreat into a world of private conviction, remains as much a part of the American character as the blood spilled to preserve the Union. Nothing great has been accomplished in America since the Civil War -- not footsteps on the moon, or women's suffrage, or the right (if not the reality) of equal, unsegregated education -- without people also passionately fighting for that dark right, too. 

Last week the forces who fight for those 'dark rights' won a temporary victory, as temporary as Bull Run or Fredericksburg. We need to remember that last Tuesday was a terrible battle for us, but liberals and other non-morons need to keep fighting.  That's the only way to win.

Greek elections

A  year after Obama was elected, Greeks went to the polls and elected a real socialist, George Papandreou, as prime minister.  Papandreou inherited an even bigger mess than Obama did, and passed drastic - and overdue - cuts to government programs, pensions, and subsidies. The Greek parliament also increased the retirement age from 54 to 65, and raised most taxes.  All these changes prompted massive and violent street protests that embarrassed Papandreou - and clear-thinking Greeks around the globe.  More tragically, 3 citizens were killed when anarchists fire bombed a bank.

 

On Sunday, Greece held their own version of mid-terms in the form of regional elections.  Despite the street protests and wining of the last year, Papadreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement won seven of the 13 districts and regions (roughly the same as a US state) nation wide.  

Like Obama, Papandreou has been doing things, and making tough decisions that are in the national interest.  But unlike Obama, Papandreou was not punished for taking action. 

That's how bad things have gotten: Greek voters are now more mature and sober than the tea party-sotted louts who made John Boehner Speaker of the House two weeks ago.

With their 3,000 years of history, perhaps Greeks have learned something that a younger and more dynamic nation has yet to learn: that 'dark rights' are not worth fighting for.