How Lucky Are Those Damn Democrats?

They're in bed with the same greed-obsessed corporate predators as the Republicans and half of them are, at best, just paying lip-service to wanting to serve the interests of average American working families. Like the Republicans, Democratic elected officials seem so preoccupied with their own career trajectories that their constituents' come way down the priority list-- way down... and only just before an election. That's what makes the House of Representatives marginally better than the House of Lords-- in the lower House an election is almost always right around the corner; the Lords don't have to face the voters for 6 years after being elected or re-elected and even then, the costs of a statewide run by a challenger are so prohibitive that, so long as the incumbent hasn't pissed off all the corporate CEOs, he or she is sure to outraise any opponent fool-hearty enough to give it a try.

On almost any bread and butter issue, if a Democratic member of Congress isn't on the same side as Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, you can feel safe to bet that he's earning his keep from his corporate financiers-- or in the cases of contemptible sleaze like Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan-- earning her keep from her corporate financiers.

Democrats now have 60 votes in the House of Lords-- just what they need to stop any of the knee jerk Republican filibusters which come automatically every single time a Democrat proposes something that actually does try to better the lot of working families. But it isn't the Republicans they need to worry about-- it's the corporate tools, the ultimate bipartisan Insider coalition determined to uphold the status quo. And along with every single Republican, that coalition can claim the loyalty of putative Democrats like Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman, Tom Carper, Michael Bennet, Arlen Specter, Blanche Lincoln, Max Baucus, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, Kay Hagan, Mark Pryor... enough, with the help of one or two wafflers like Mark Begich, Claire McCaskill, Mark Udall, Kent Conrad and Tim Johnson, to water down-- if not utterly obliterate-- every single change initiative Obama (or the House) could possible throw their way.

Yes, the Democratic Party is very lucky. They can get away with venality, incompetence, dishonesty, cowardice and all their other trademark qualities because, no matter how you slice it and no matter how you dice it, the Republicans are even more venal, less competent, far more dishonest, just as cowardly and weighted down with a whole grab bag of other heinous qualities (see graphic above) that only serve to make the Democrats look like a quasi-attractive alternative. Before he met his Argentine honey, the right-wing fanatic governor of South Carolina would go away with male buddies and "blow off steam" by picking up random women-- but he never went beyond a quickie blow job until he met the Argentine in Uruguay. The only thing that's keeping him in office now is that the South Carolina GOP doesn't want a gay governor-- not even a closeted one who charms little old ladies who think he's "a devil-may-care bachelor." It isn't even just the legendary GOP backstabbing as much as it is their well earned spate of bad luck. It's pretty much all covered in these paragraphs from today's Politico though-- an example of why the Democrats manage to thrive, primarily a function of any reasonable alternative-- and it starts with GOP extreme right propagandist William Kristol in the pages of a Republican Party throw away he edits:

“In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.

Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an email: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”

“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”

Asked directly in a telephone interview if he brought up the prospect of Palin suffering from post-partum depression, Schmidt said: “His allegation that I was defaming Palin by alleging post-partum depression at the campaign headquarters is categorically untrue. In fact, I think it rises to the level of a slander because it’s about the worst thing you can say about somebody who does what I do for a living.”

But Kristol’s charge was seconded by Randy Scheunemann, a longtime foreign policy adviser to McCain who is also close to the Standard editor and was thought to be a Palin ally within the campaign.

“Steve Schmidt has a congenital aversion to the truth,” Scheunemann said. “On two separate and distinct occasions, he speculated about about Governor Palin having post-partum depression, and on the second he threatened that if more negative publicity about the handling of Governor Palin emerged that he would leak his speculation [about post-partum depression] to the press. It was like meeting Tony Soprano.”

Schmidt said Scheunemann’s charges were “categorically untrue.”

“It is inappropriate for me to discuss personnel issues from the campaign,” Schmidt continued. “But suffice it to say Randy is saying these things not because they’re true but because he wants to damage my reputation because of consequences he faced for actions he took.”

Schmidt is alluding, without saying so directly, to the stories that emerged after the campaign that Scheunemann had been fired... Schmidt unloaded in a lengthy telephone interview, suggesting that Kristol was carrying out a personal vendetta based out of anger over the attempt to fire Scheunemann in the final days of the campaign.

In doing so, Schmidt revealed what has been whispered about for months following the campaign: that he and another top aide had ordered a leak hunt in the campaign’s internal email system.

“What this is about is a personal issue that happened late in the campaign relating to a close, personal friend of Bill Kristol and people at the Weekly Standard,” Schmidt said, refusing to use Scheunemann’s name.

“At the end of the campaign there were a series of leaks that were so damaging that it was consuming the 24-hour cable news cycle. Leaks to reporters where Sarah Palin was called all manner of names. [McCain senior adviser] Rick Davis and I jointly felt that was outrageous. So we made an attempt for the first time in the campaign to try to ID who was leaking information that was so damaging and demoralizing to a campaign that was in very difficult circumstances,” Schmidt said, noting that an IT professional executed a system-wide search by keyword.

“What was discovered was an email from a very senior staff member to Bill Kristol that then entered into the news current and continued the negative in-fighting stories for an additional news cycle. I recommended tough medicine for that individual that was carried out,” Schmidt said, again referring to Scheunemann. “Bill Kristol might not have liked that decision, and he might be mad about what happened to his friend, but going all the way back he has been a part of this story and I’ve preserved his confidentiality in that until now. But his use of his public forums to take a personal fight and make character attacks is just simply dishonest and wrong.”

Scheunemann, confirming that his email had been searched, accused Schmidt of “acting in a manner of Iranian secret police” in going to his account.

Yeah, Tony Soprano and the Iranian secret police: today's Republican Party. Just add in the dirty sex. All that remains to be answered is why-- oh why-- a real working-family political party hasn't emerged to balance the class war being waged by the aristocratically-entitled-- and programmed-- zombies of corporate management against the rest of us. You see this kind of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with grassroots Democrats, only with the Inside the Beltway variety.


UPDATE: On The Other Hand, How Lucky Is It Really To Be Burdened With Die-Hard, Unapologetic Enemies Of Working Families?

If you hate working families, why not just join the GOP, whose entire ideological basis is built on that? But, noooooo... Democrats have to get stuck with vampires like Joe Lieberman-- who, bolstered by Inside the Beltway shitheads (like you know who) just refuse to die-- and the 19 putative Democrats who announced they will oppose the public plan unless it becomes an anti-choice bill. We'll come back to that in a moment. First, Lieberputz. Charles Monaco compares him to "a mutant cicada funded by the insurance industry" and reminds us that "Lieberman emerges every 15 years or so to help kill health care. This year is no different than 1994, when CT progressives descended on Lieberman in DC to protest him on health care, even though three years ago he promised CT voters he would do a better job of getting them universal health care than Ned Lamont would. Now, surprise!, he's leading the fight against the public option.

[I]t was all a lie, and a particularly bad one. At the time, it was easy to see that Lieberman's election-year rhetoric on health care was just as mendacious on its face as his claim that "no one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do", or his promise to help Barack Obama "reach to the stars", or his vow that he would help "elect a Democratic president in 2008" and that it was his primary opponent who would "frustrate and defeat our hopes of doing that".

Now, in 2009, on the cusp of a 60-seat Senate majority and at a
now-or-never moment on heath care reform, Democrats have the old Joe to deal with once again:

"If we create a public option, the public is going to end up
paying for it," Lieberman said following an hour-long confab with public-health experts at the Ashmun Street community center of the Monterey Homes public housing complex. "That's a cost we can't take on."...

Lieberman hopes to help do that through the work of an informal,
but busy, bipartisan group he formed last year with Republican U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander [like Lieberman, an entirely owned subsidiary of the Medical-Industrial Complex]...

That common ground, in Lieberman's view, has no room for the public option.

Just six months removed from being saved by political irrelevancy by President Obama, Joe Lieberman has declared that he is now working to kill Obama's health care plan.... almost exactly 15 years after he helped kill Clinton's.

I'm in Asia right now and Jane Hamsher is in Sweden. When I woke up this morning she had sent me a piece in the National Journal talking about 19 of the worst reactionary Democrats in Congress telling Speaker Pelosi that they will oppose health care legislation "unless it explicitly excludes abortion funding from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan." Please remember these names and keep in mind that when you donate to the DCCC part of your money goes towards supporting some of them, namely far right anti-family fanatics Travis Childers, Bobby Bright, Steve Driehaus, and Kathleen Dahlkemper, all of whom would likely fail to win re-election without massive financial help from unsuspecting Democrats from around the country who donate to the DCCC thinking they are promoting a progressive agenda, never suspecting they are supporting corrupt, anti-family Democrats who vote with the GOP again and again.

Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Bart Stupak (D-MI)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN;
Tim Holden (Blue Dog-PA)
Travis Childers (Blue Dog-MS)
Lincoln Davis (Blue Dog-TN)
Rahm Emanuel's greatest hit, Heath Shuler (Blue Dog-NC)
Solomon Ortiz (D-TX)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
Jerry Costello (D-IL)
Gene Taylor (Blue Dog-MS)
James Oberstar (D-MN
Bobby Bright (Blue Dog-AL)
Steve Driehaus (D-OH)
Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) [consider giving her a pass on this because she's so good on everything else]
Charlie Melancon (Blue Dog-LA)
John Murtha (super corrupt D-PA);
Paul Kanjorski (super corrupt D-PA
Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-PA)