Yes, What Indeed DOES It Mean To Be A Democrat?

The DCCC video above, narrated by the great John Lewis, tries to associate all the great achievements accomplished by progressives with the broken down den of corruption and corporate prostitution that the Democratic Party has degenerated into. Steve Israel unveiled it at the caucus retreat last week. What an irony that the man touting the video-- Israel-- is most responsible for recruiting a new generation of reactionary and conservative corporate shills to populate the House Democratic caucus, in many cases, opportunistic Republicans switching parties or Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, like Jerry Cannon (MI) and Jennifer Garrison (OH)!

As Mike Lux's amazing book, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, proves, over the decades the progressive movement has sometimes made use of Democrats and sometimes made use of Republicans. Currently, the entire Republican Party is reactionary and probably less than half the Democrats in Congress are as corrupt as their GOP colleagues. But much of the House Democratic leadership is-- Israel, of course, as well as Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz… These people are not a force for change; they area force for reactionary politics. Lux describes the progressve argument this way:

We are all created equal and deserve both equal rights under the law and equal opportunities to make good lives for ourselves and families. That means that the laws should not be formulated to favor one race of people or to help the wealthy over the poor. And it means that we all should have a good education, enough food to eat, adequate health care if we get sick, and a decent place to live.

Our society works well only when it has a sense of community, an understanding that we are all interdependent on one another, that we are all diminished if any one of us is suffering, and that we look out for those who can’t take care of themselves.

America is a democracy that should be a government of, by, and for the people. We don’t trust elites to look out for the rest of us, and we want everyone to have a say in how the government and the economy are run.

That sounds like the progressive caucus and it sounds like independents like Bernie Sanders and Marianne Williamson but does that sound like the corporate whores who have grabbed control of the House Democrats? Not to me it doesn't. The Democrats are now, at best, the lesser of two evils. And the lesser of two evil is-- let's not kid ourselves-- evil.

You'll never hear a defense of Republicans from me, not the way they;re currently configured as the reactionary handmaidens of great wealth. The Democrats-- minus the progressive wing of the party-- are putrid, but not as bad. Today the Republicans were bragging how there will be no serious legislative agenda for 2014-- while wailing that Obama is conducting "an imperial presidency." So no comprehensive immigration reform, no tax reform, no ENDA, no increase in the minimum wage, no Climate Change initiative, no effort to stimulate the economy and increase jobs, and fixing the Affordable Care Act… that's not happening either. Recognizing that their own caucus is so dysfunctional and incapable of accomplishing anything at all-- short of just turning the country over to the Koch brothers to run-- Boehner and Cantor will just have Congress coast until after the November midterms. Boehner lackey Devin Nunes (R-CA): "We don’t have 218 votes in the House for the big issues, so what else are we going to do?" As Greg Sargent put it earlier today: "Can Republicans package themselves as “ready to govern” in the run-up to the 2014 Congressional elections without pursuing serious policy accomplishments?