When the Center Sells Out
Hillary shouldn’t Molly-Coddle the Right
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
1/21/06
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
Friday night, and I was just settling in to start work on my column for My Town,
and decided to check my email. Jim had sent me a copy of Molly Ivins’ latest, “I
will not support Hillary Clinton for president.” I read carefully and with
considerable enjoyment, as I always do with Molly, and then wrote Jim back,
saying, “Well, I can tear up Saturday's essay. Molly beat me to it.”
I wondered if Molly read Bartcop. He’s been vociferously championing Clinton as
the Democratic candidate in ‘08, even defending her pro-war record. And he is
offering the same argument that the centrists – and the GOP spin machine – have
been feeding us: a liberal can’t get elected, you have to go to the right.
The only trouble is that the Democratic Party has been trying that since 1972,
and all it’s done is give the GOP victory after victory. Carter won in 76 only
because of lingering public outrage over the Watergate scandal, and Bill Clinton
won in 1992 because he had a campaign team that was willing to go toe to toe
with the right wing smear machine (which isn’t nearly as viciously refined as it
is today) and in 1996 because he was an incumbent facing a hopelessly weak GOP
candidate. And yes, I know the Democratic candidates won in 2000 and 2004, but
neither were willing to fight when the chips were on the table, and they let
Putsch steal it.
Whether she reads Bartcop or not, she’s right, and Bartcop isn’t. Tossing up
another weak centrist isn’t going to address any problems, and this time around,
the left won’t give its support. Even without the war, Hillary lost that
constituency when she went soft on the flag-burning amendment, the tax cuts, and
abortion rights.
We’ve seen a generation of kowtowing to the extreme right, and what do we have
to show for it? A country with no health care, a government that openly sneers
at the law and civil rights, the most unfair wage structure in the developed
world, nearly no workers’ rights, a regime that is contemptuous of the
environment and lies us into wasteful and futile wars with impunity, openly rigs
our elections, and keeps the timid and the servile frightened with an endless
war against a sinister but not particularly dangerous enemy. Americans writhe in
the humiliation of being in a culture so controlled by the religiously insane
that there is an open effort to force creation myths to be taught as a weird
sort of alternative science, and where they are redesigning the new buffalo
nickel because THIS generation of the “put pants on dogs” wowsers have enough
power that they aren’t simply laughingly dismissed for complaining that the
bison clearly has a penis! The right wing has disgraced America, and has turned
the richest and most respected nation in the world into an impoverished disgrace
that is rapidly becoming a joke.
What have the centrists inflicted upon us? They let the right steal power, and
Americans, who just a generation ago were considered the richest people on
earth, are now considered the richest COUNTRY on earth–a critical difference, as
middle class Americans lose more and more ground and the poor vanish under the
surface of poverty altogether.
We have a phony “president” who boasts of disregarding the law regarding
warrantless searches domestically. Forced to sign a bill forbidding torture (and
five years ago, were there any Americans who thought such a bill might even be
NECESSARY?), he growls that he MIGHT obey it. If conditions warrant. If he feels
like it. Democrat centrists don’t demand his impeachment because they are afraid
the mainstream media, largely controlled by the right wing, will make fun of
them. But they want to inspire us to follow them.
Follow them where? To a new stance a measured five degrees left of the
Republicans, so the Republicans can move another ten degrees right and sneer
that Democrats are panty-waisted libruls?
Anyone can only look at the disgusting spectacle of America 2006 to see what
becomes of trying to appease the unappeasable.
In a free country, the elected officials appeal to the hopes and dreams of the
people, trying to translate them into a functioning society that lifts all
people. In America after 1933, that’s what happened, and America became the most
incredible success story in human history.
But now it has been taken over by greedy, vicious, wizened little men who rule,
not through hopes, but through fear, and who believe that elected and responsive
government should be replaced by what they believe is the cold efficiency of the
private sector. This is also known as “making the trains run on time.”
Certainly, under such regimes, you stop hearing complaints about the trains
being late. But that doesn’t mean they are any closer to being on time.
The people running the government want the government to fail. That’s why the
catastrophes of Iraq, Katrina, Medicare and the Educational System. They want
government to fail, so they can fill the power vacuum and “make the trains run
on time.”
These are the people Hillary wants to position herself next to, in the hopes
that the right wing press won’t savage her. It’s a forlorn hope, of course. Her
husband was the most conservative President since 1920, and look how the right
wing press treated him. He was centrist, but not a full on fascist, so they
savaged him mercilessly. Hillary would get the same treatment, as would anyone
who isn’t a fascist.
The funny thing is, as Molly points out, that the American people are solidly
well to the left of this regime. They hate the war in Iraq. The strongly support
protecting the environment, no matter what the cost. They think a flag-burning
amendment is nonsense. They support abortion rights. They don’t want God in the
government.
But the corporate press won’t admit that, and the Washington insiders are too
afraid of the right wing spin machine to stand with the people and against the
fascists.
It’s boiling down to people vs. fascists, and it looks like Hillary is making
her choice.
She is wrong, and the people are going to let her know it.