Diane Kamp

Twas the Nightmare Before XMAS – Bipartisanship Sucks

Robert Parry wrote an essay in June of 2006 called “Hey Democrats, the Truth Matters”.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0511-29.htm

This is how it starts:

My book, Secrecy & Privilege, opens with a scene in spring 1994 when a guest at a White House social event asks Bill Clinton why his administration didn’t pursue unresolved scandals from the Reagan-Bush era, such as the Iraggate secret support for Saddam Hussein’s government and clandestine arms shipments to Iran.

Clinton responds to the questions from the guest, documentary filmmaker Stuart Sender, by saying, in effect, that those historical questions had to take a back seat to Clinton’s domestic agenda and his desire for greater bipartisanship with the Republicans.

Clinton “didn’t feel that it was a good idea to pursue these investigations because he was going to have to work with these people,” Sender told me in an interview. “He was going to try to work with these guys, compromise, build working relationships.”

So we ended up feeling all warm and fuzzy about the criminal Bush 41 and electing his nincompoop destructive child. We forgot about Reagan and his part in Iran/Contra. We forgot about him doubling our payroll taxes. We forgot about Bush Sr’s involvement in the defeat of Jimmy Carter. We forgot about the oil.

So like the “Living Dead” who should have been permanently disposed of with stakes in their hearts, they have come back to haunt us for 6 Christmases. They have talk shows and ministries. Like Elliot Abrams, they got their jobs back. Like Robert Gates, they return over and over again. Our Secretary of State even dresses like Nosferatu with those long black jack boots. Donald Rumsfeld looks eerily like Marley’s Ghost ready for his chains.

Compromise? Work with these guys? Why? I keep asking that question?
Why do we have to work with indicted and un-indicted criminals? Do they have something on us? Will they put polonium in our food or anthrax in our mail? Even if it’s not that diabolical, why compromise? Why not consensus? Why not coming up with a new idea out of opposing views not just some mushy middle? Compromise may be good for small things, but to compromise your passion and your core beliefs seems unnecessary and often just staves off the inevitable. For 26 years the conservatives have not compromised their vision of unraveling FDR’s “New Deal”. And for 26 years the Democratic Party leaders drifted into Rubinomics embracing the multi-national corporation’s mantra of “free” trade and left their labor constituency behind.

I was taught that Henry Clay was “The Great Compromiser”. And I was reminded of him when my latest copy of “The Atlantic” arrived and he was listed as one of the 100 most important Americans. He staved off the Civil War for many years, they said. But was that a good thing, I pondered? The Founders knew that we had to deal with slavery at some point and when we did it wouldn’t be pretty.

World War II defeated the Nazis and the Japanese, but kept Fascism aka the merger of the state and corporations. Chalmers Johnson has a great piece in this month’s Harper’s called “Republic or Empire” in which he discusses how Military Keynesianism rather than Economic Keynesianism has prevailed. Roosevelt used government to build things like dams, bridges, roads, electrical systems and put the unemployed to work. But after World War II, Eisenhower saw us fall in love with building bombs, ships, and planes and we have never weaned ourselves off this teat. For a while it worked. But now some of us are definitely “sucking hind teat” as my Daddy would say.

In another remarkable essay in the same Harper’s Lewis Lapham pretty much says that compromise is not what the next two years should be about. We need to have that war that we have been putting off. We need to have that war with the corporations. We need to wean each state off the military spigot.
We need the war on the middle and lower class to be ended. If it can be a really “civil” war, great. But methinks it’s time for the gloves to come off.
The people spoke loud and clear in November to those in Washington who are listening. It’s time to stop this love affair and heed Eisenhower. It is time to fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. It’s time to bring back the New Deal and FDR’s unfinished “Economic Bill of Rights” with healthcare for everyone as a right. It is not time to compromise


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