Democratic Gonad Depository: Build It On Hallowed Ground?
Back in the fall of 2008 we had some reason to hope. Barack Obama was going to be elected president. The constant diet of fear-suffused bullshit we'd been fed by Dubya for eight agonizing years was going to be replaced by a tasty mix of hope and tolerance and progress.
Americans were going to get the kind of universal healthcare enjoyed by the citizens of pretty much every other civilized Western democracy up to and including a couple of countries ending in "stan", and insurance CEO's were going to have to find some other way to fuel their eighty foot yachts in the Chesapeake Bay.
We'd bring the troops home from the war we never should have started in the first place. We'd stop torturing prisoners and salving our own consciences by calling it "enhanced interrogation", and we'd close Gitmo and use the kennels we built there for something other than human beings. We'd replace Bible science with real science, catch up with the signers of the Kyoto protocol and try to do something before the freaking north pole melted and Santa was forced to make his rounds in Bermuda shorts. We'd have more teachers and better education, more tolerance and less racial divisiveness, more jobs and fewer executive bonuses.
What the hell were we thinking? That just because Obama was elected on a tidal wave of disgust for the president and policies that had gone before him, a tidal wave that swept 59 Democrats into control of the Senate and enough representatives in the House that the Republican caucus looked like the children's table at a family Thanksgiving, that the Democrats were finally going stand for something? Yeah, right. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you".
Our first hint should have come around the time that the Obama White House started treating "public option" like one of the seven forbidden words. Since then, it's been one bitter disappointment after another. Obama and the progressive movement in this country had a chance to do some real good, some Lyndon Baines Johnson-type good, some game changing good…but Obama apparently checked his seemingly substantial balls in with the hatcheck at the RNC cloakroom, followed in short order by the withering testicles of the "Blue Dog" Democrats. They're kept there, safely refrigerated, along with the closely guarded cojones of the few Republicans who ever even briefly considered independent thought within the party of "no".
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati