Cap Times-from Fighting Bob Fest: Former independent presidential candidate Buddy Roemer and current Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, made the case that Democrats and Republicans were much too alike to tolerate any longer. Stein … made the case that Democrats are, in many ways, worse than Republicans.
While the audience was polite, such denunciations of Democrats were met with only a smattering of applause, with many of the listeners clearly uncomfortable with language equating the two major parties.
It's so easy to step up to the podium and bash what is still, despite a gutsy DNC, a flaccid Democratic Party. What takes real spine is to change the party from within.
The democratic party is corrupt and so are you for defending them.
ReplyDeleteWell that comment was a little harsh.
ReplyDeleteThe main problem with the Democratic Party is at the national level which is controlled by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group that was formed with funds from the moneyed interests, including the Koch brothers, to insure that corporate Democrats controlled the party. It has been very successful.
My main issue with Obama is that he promised to restore the rule of law that had eroded under the Bush regime but has instead augmented the police state powers of the Presidency, claiming the legal right to disappear American citizens and imprison them indefinitely without access to attorneys or the courts. He even claims the right to kill American citizens under the same powers.
As a person who was spied upon by the FBI for my legal political activity, was blacklisted from employment and the University of Wisconsin, and was the victim of an illegal COINTELPRO operation which resulted in my imprisonment and destroyed my life, all of this strikes a little too close to home.
I also have a problem with a President who claims the right to attack Afghan wedding parties with drones because a member of the Taliban might be there, attack those who come to the aid of the wounded and follows all this up with an attack on the subsequent funerals. Oddly enough this is the same technique used by car bombers in Iraq to inflict the maximum civilian casualties and yet we are supposed to be the ones waging a war on terrorism. I find it Orwellian that the innocents murdered in these raids are classified as "terrorist associates".
I feel it's time for me to make my own small and probably insignificant protest against bait and switch politics and war criminals, no matter how erudite and charming they are. For this reason I'm voting for Jill Stein for President and for Democrats in all the down ballot races.
Your point on working within the Democratic Party to change it is well taken. At the local level I think this is reasonably possible but at the national level where big money shouts, not so much. This is a terrific idea that I first heard in 1968. God speed.