I rarely comment on politics anymore as the situation has been dire and dismal for too long and I'm too old, grumpy and cynical to even bother with it any more.
As far as I can tell, the Dems are done. They did what they saw themselves elected to do, passing the COVID relief plan of 2020, and that's it. Done. Going home now. Bye-bye. The Congress starts its LOOOONNNNNNGGGGG vacation tomorrow, and they, our elected representatives in the two Democrat controlled bodies, are outa here, so long, too bad about all the things they didn't get done. Maybe next year, eh?
It truly is shameful, primarily for the Dems' failure to recognize that anything is urgent enough to keep them from going home for the summer and letting everything burn while they do whatever it is they do during the hot months.
Nothing at all is urgent enough for them. Certainly not the looming eviction tsunami. Climate catastrophe. COVID resurgence. Sputtering economic situation. Federal voting rights protections. The faltering lost in the weeds infrastructure half-plan. And on and on and on.
Enh. Too much trouble. Going home now. Y'all can fend for yourself. mkay?
I'm old enough to remember the catastrophic Democratic wipe out in the elections of 2010. At the time, I speculated that it was deliberate. The Dems did not try to hold state and local offices, and they failed to hold on to their congressional majorities, largely it seemed to me because of gross policy failures to adequately address the financial and economic meltdown of the failed previous administration, and perhaps worse, the imposition of what was at the time a very unpopular health insurance mandate (which was not yet in effect) on a long suffering and fearful population.
This was like a one-two "fuck you" punch to the public, and the public responded by voting them out.
Bye-bye, so long.
And as is so often the case, those superfluous Dems turned around and blamed the voters for failing to show up at the polls.
The 2010 R take over of state houses meant that they would be in charge of gerrymandering election districts for the next ten years, possibly longer -- it will be twenty years because Rs still hold the majority of state houses -- and now with voter suppression all the rage among Rs, the outcomes of elections will be determinable by R legislatures and/or election officials regardless of the actual votes.
It would be astonishing if we hadn't seen this sort of dereliction by Democrats before. In fact, it's so frequent, it's considered normal. Dems don't have a follow-through. They present X+++ as their Plan, they do Y-, and then they go home -- either voted out or as in this case simply because they want to. Nyah. Nyah.
It's always the voters fault when they do this, never their own.
A lot of internet opinionators hate on the Dems for everything because it's their brand to do so. They claim to be "progressive" or something but objectively they're R shills in "progressive" drag, and they've been around in one form or another since before the internet was born.
And these days we should understand that a lot of Democrats, some in powerful positions in or out of office (particularly but not exclusively in the media) are ex-Republicans who are still ideologically aligned with conservative political and economic ideology. I like to think of Markos over at Daily Kos in this way. He was a die-hard Republican who "switched" during the Bush2 years, especially in support of the Dean campaign in 2004. Dean himself, though nominally a Democrat, was for all intents and purposes a Rockefeller Republican like his parents. Ie: he came from money, was raised in a Republican household, was basically conservative in ideology though with many old-line progressive attributes (Progressivism was originally formulated and implemented within a Republican political context), and had he been elected, he would have governed as a progressive Republican, in contrast to Bush2, who was essentially a corporate shill and war-monger, in other words, a representative of the un-progressive wing of the Republican Party.
Markos likes to claim that his site is intended to help elect "more and better Democrats" -- which it has utterly failed to do. Instead, his and many other ostensibly Democrat-aligned sites on the internet have served to elect many more -- and often worse -- Republicans who have turned into bat-shit fascists.
I have often criticized Daily Kos for failing to even name a Democrat on its front page, even during election season, while featuring and amplifying Republicans endlessly. Interestingly, the tactic of constantly writing and talking about Republicans while ignoring Democrats doesn't seem to work very well in electing "more and better Democrats," does it?
But since the Republican Party has essentially taken over the Democrats, indeed become "Democrats", we're really dealing with two branches of a Uniparty that both serve corporate interests quite shamelessly, leaving the public to fend for itself. Relying on politicians of either party to serve the public is a fool's game. We haven't seen that happen for generations. And even then, political service to the public was limited.
The failure of Democrats in Congress and the White House to substantially move government from inappropriate corporate service to long-neglected and necessary public service -- again -- is likely to lead to yet another mid-term blow out election for Republicans which signs and signals suggest will be the last more or less "free and fair" election this nation/empire conducts.
Any future election will be an overt sham intended solely to preserve an illusion while protecting and perpetuating neo-fascist oligarchic rule regardless of which team nominally holds power. I think many would say this already happened, perhaps with the Bush v Gore decision of the Supreme Court in 2000.
There's no going back.
Every attempt at restoring some kind of public service -- as opposed to corporate service -- ethic to government since then has failed.
There is no sign any such effort will succeed in the future. Every sign suggests the opposite.
