Holy Corollaries

Really, I don't care if these idiots want to construct Reagan altars everywhere they go. I just wish they'd distort the facts to do so, instead of distorting the distortions.

--James "Doghouse" Riley

I AM not a Democrat. Never was. I was told that pretty explicitly in 1973, after a candidate they, not I, had nominated lost in a landslide to the most skillful politician of the second half of that benighted century. Or, rather, a caricature of their candidate lost in a landslide, after a caricature of a campaign. And yet, somehow, the grey men of the Democratic party did not seem to think they'd had a campaign stolen from them, or from "the people", whomever it is they think that is; they did not seem to feel the election had been wrongly decided on the basis of skillful distortion of the facts and easy, uncontested manipulation of the baser instincts of the electorate, nor that the election of a President in a time of dire national straits should have precluded, somehow, a media circus over trivialities; nor that Nixon was noxious enough to have been fought tooth and nail and regarded, after his re-election and before Woodstein made it unavoidable, as himself being the cancer growing on the Presidency, no. They decided the problem was me.

I've had a few decades to ponder this by now, between the time the grey old power brokers swore never again to nominate a raging Bolshevik like George Stanley McGovern and the time, earlier this very year, when their ironic Ché teeshirt-wearin' grandchildren explained the wisdom of the thing to me all over again. And, of course, in that time I've viewed the arc of the other party with revulsion and derision in pretty much equal measures. I don't have any better answer now than I did in 1973: Democrats tolerate Republican excesses in the hopes that they'll get their shot and will be tolerated in turn. The fact that the opposite is always the case never seems to occur to them. Bert Lance's financial dealings--for which he was later charged and acquitted--are an uproar; trading drugs for arms in order to circumvent the law is a matter for careful stepping lest one wake a sleeping (and popular) president. The investigation of Bill Casey and the Reagan administration's involvement in the curious timing of the release of Iranian hostages and Iranian funds conveniently runs aground until Casey is dead and Reagan has terminal brain bubbles; compare Reagan suggesting prosecuting Jesse Jackson (under the Logan Act!) for going to Cuba, and George W. leading the wingnut chorus in a round of "Nancy Pelosi is a Traitor" when the Speaker went to Syria. You know how this goes. Bush I runs slimiest Presidential campaign in fifty years, including not just racial overtones, but racism baldly denied; Dems say, "Gee, that Dukakis was a lousy candidate." Bush I pardons Iran/Contra henchmen; uproar over Clinton's pardon of Marc Rich includes two Congressional investigations. $40,000 land deal swindle--which four investigations find victimized the Clintons--is investigated a fifth time, on the grounds that you gotta roll a Seven at some point; Neil Bush personally accounts for $1.3 billion of $130 billion S & L dunning of taxpayers, pays a civil fine of 50 Gs. Clinton is impeached--despite overwhelming popularity and apodictic certainty of acquittal; Pelosi's first fucking act as Speaker, following long-overdue electoral denunciation of GOP, is to assure war criminal and serial Constitution shredder George W. Bush that his job is secure. And Harry Reid's first fucking official act upon Democrats kicking these criminals out of the White House, and capturing--thanks to Democratic voters, not their own political perspicacity, if it needs to be said--is to reward the slimy megalomaniac Lieberman who'd gone out of his way to dick them because he lost a primary.

I'm not a Democrat.  I am somebody who thinks that if we're going to be saddled with a two-party system it'd be nice if the distinction between them was something more than "one was dropped on its head in 1964 and has the Rage button stuck permanently On, while the other is its secret admirer". 

I'm not a Democrat. Were I a Republican, let's say of the religious bigot sort, I believe I'd have figured out by 1982 that I was being gulled. This, however, does not actually seem to have occurred to the average Republican religious bigot voter, nor his blue-collar Reagan Democrat or middle-management libertoonian cousins. Democratic voters, on the other hand, see it and convince themselves it's the natural order of things, or else that messing with the controls even slightly will cause a serious malfunction.  Supposing I were a Democrat, or at the very least a Democrat like Joe Lieberman, I would not favor stripping him of his chairmanship because he supported John McCain. Hell, I wish we'd see more of that sort of thing.  No, I'd favor stripping him of every privilege I could find, and any I could make up, for a decade of duplicitous behavior, and as the opening salvo of an investigation into both the current administration and Clinton Scandals, Inc.

But I'm not a Democrat. I don't view the re-elevation of Holy Joe as an aberration, or faulty political calculation--I'm sorry, but how old do you have to be to view a "filibuster-proof" Democratic Senate as the sickest political joke of all time?--I view it as the Democratic leadership being exactly what it is. I don't ask, "What th' fuck is wrong with them?" My question is, what all are they hiding, or hoping to hide?