Quote of the day: Are establishment Democrats trying to prove that they really aren't any better than Repugs? David Sirota seems to suggest so

"I understand that candidates have to raise money--I started as a fundraiser way back in 1998 when I first got into politics. But what's changed is that openly selling access is no longer considered taboo--it's become just as much part of Democratic Party culture as it has Republican Party culture."
--David Sirota, in his blog column today, "Hostile Takeover '08: Democrats Gone Wild"

One of the funniest comments DWT has drawn was one not long ago from some right-wing slug who sermonized about how we never say anything bad about Democrats, which just proves how little we see. What it proved, of course, was that the moron has never read DWT.

Considering the state of human degradation reached by today's Republican Party, and the stranglehold it had until recently on all three branches of the federal government (not to mention all those governorships and state legislatures), it's hard not to spend a lot of time screaming about the width and breadth of its greed and selfishness, vileness and incompetence. But there aren't a lot of writers who have been as dogged as Howie about the number of Democrats who give even the worst Republicans a run for their money when it comes to scuzziness.

If we support Democrats, as we often do, it's not because we're ideological soulmates, but because: (a) they're certainly closer to most of the things we believe than most Republicans, and (b) the reality is that it's next to impossible to hope for change outside the two-party framework--in our system, third-party efforts not only fail but usually serve the interests of the worse of the two parties. (See: Nader, R.)

If you review Howie's coverage of the 2006 election races, you'll find him constantly sifting through the maze of self-styled Democrats looking for candidates he could support with real enthusiasm--and more often finding those he couldn't support at all. There was always the recurring theme, one I sounded frequently too, that merely electing Democrats wasn't going to bring about a political golden age.

And once the giddiness of Election Night faded, there were the growing signs that there were elements within the Democratic Party who merely wished to substitute themselves for the GOP honchos who had been living high on the hog during the years their party controlled Congress. Always there was Rahm Emanuel, of course, but it wasn't just Master Rahm. As November morphed into December and then January, there were all too many indications that large numbers of Democrats wanted nothing more than to hitch a ride on the K Street gravy train.

Now there's no question that Democratic control of Congress has made a momentous difference. For the first time in six years we're seeing the start of actual oversight of the executive branch. For the first time we see at least the possibility that the Bush regime may be held to account for some of its malfeasance.

A huge change, no question, and yet at the same time something short of a revolution. Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it's pretty much all about the money.

Nobody has been farther out front on these issues, or explained them to us more sensibly, than DWT favorite David Sirota. It was David, for example, who pointed out that one crucial reason congressional Democrats were having such difficulty arriving at a unified position to end the occupation of Iraq was that so many of them--of the dyed-in-the-wool "Inside the Beltway" persuasion--actually support the war.

Today David has weighed in with an especially timely piece for anyone who has noticed that election coverage has now sunk to a new level of obtuseness. Remember when we complained about "horse race"-type coverage? When we bitched that reporters never talked/wrote about issues, but only about rising and falling poll numbers? Well, those are starting to look the good old days. Now all that those reporters seem able to report is news of the fund-raising race.

We are even being told that we have entered a "post-ideological" era. The idea seems to be that there is no more ideology, or maybe that all voters care about is personality, not ideology, or some such horseshit. As David himself pointed out in a terrific piece a couple of days ago, "The rise of Seinfeld politics & the end of principles," the switcheroo of personality for beliefs is earnestly supported by both the Democratic Party elites and the "chattering classes" of the media who cover, er, enable them.

(Let me just log a note of wistfulness at the persistent abuse of the idea that Seinfeld was, as it cheerfully proclaimed, "a show about nothing." It was in fact a show about everything, or at least everything in daily life which fell in the producers' and writers' sights while the show was being produced. It was claiming to be about nothing that gave the show license to range so widely. Naturally, the joke has been misunderstood and misused to provide cover for public discourse that's truly about nothing.)

If you don't mind my saying so, these two offerings of David's are both desperately important pieces, which should affect the way we look at and listen to everything that happens in our political life. By way of a tease, let me leave you with just the conclusion of today's, picking up from the chunk I've highlighted as our "Quote of the day":

Democrats, just like Republicans, don't even try to hide corruption (and when in the few times they do, we find they aren't even willing to stick to the spirit of their own pledges). On the contrary, as we see, Democratic candidates have clearly become just as publicly proud of their own corruption as Republicans have been of theirs. And that has happened, not surprisingly, at the very same time reporters have stopped even pretending that they care to cover anything other than the horse race when it comes to the money chase.

Don't look over here at what's being purchased, say millionaire Democratic campaign consultants, look over here at our latest YouTube video and our neat new website and our well-coiffed candidate posing for pictures with babies--and reporters obediently follow. Don't look over here at what's being sold off, say career Democratic operatives and other assorted professional gophers, look over here at how eloquent and smooth and "authentic" our candidate is--and power-worshipping pundits happily oblige. And then after another NAFTA is passed, after another deregulation scheme is championed, after another bill is pushed through jacking up the defense budget once again, the navel-gazers who populate Washington's endless symposiums somehow wonder why Americans are so cynical about politics.