- Iraq War going to hell, with U.S casualties approaching
2000 dead and 25,000 wounded, at a cost of $200 billion and rising.
-
- Poverty in America on the rise in a period of supposed
economic growth.
-
- Republican Party a cesspool of corruption.
-
- White House being investigated for outing undercover
CIA agent.
-
- Abortion rights under serious threat, with the Supreme
Court being packed with right-wing judges.
-
- New Orleans, just drying out from disastrous flood, being
raped by White House-linked corporate pirates and scam artists.
-
- Budget deficit topping half trillion dollars.
-
- Gas and heating oil crisis looming, while oil companies
reap record profits.
-
- Bush poll numbers hit historic low as even some Republicans
abandon him as an incompetent.
-
- Oh yeah-all this and global warming and the end of human
life as we know it.
-
- Man, if you were an opposition politician looking to
make a run for Congress next years, or for president in 2008, this would
be a magical time.
-
- But where's the opposition?
-
- The media tell us that the leading candidates for the
Democratic nomination for president in 2008 are Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden,
Bill Richardson and maybe John Kerry. What all these people have in common
is their deafening silence on all the issues of importance facing Americans
and America.
-
- Not one dared show her or his face at the record demonstration
against the Iraq War held in front of the White House last weekend.
-
- None has spoken out on the Republican corruption scandals.
-
- None has called for a public program to hire all the
displaced of New Orleans to put them to work rebuilding the destroyed city.
Instead, they are allowing Bush and the Republican Congress, with the acquiescence
of Louisiana's corrupt local Democratic Party, to bring in speculators
and the same profiteers who have been sucking up the reconstruction money
in Iraq.
-
- None has offered a plan to attack the U.S. deficit and
the hollowing out of the American economy.
-
- None of these "leading opposition candidates"
has even taken any kind of strong stand on global warming-for example calling
for a tax surcharge on low-mileage cars and trucks and strict limits on
carbon emissions by power plants plus a crash program to develop alternative
energy sources.
-
- The truth is that when it comes to the Democratic Party,
the purported opposition party, there is no there there. It no longer exists.
-
- You'd think the sorry experience of the last two presidential
campaigns, where two Democratic candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, ran
spineless, uninspired campaigns that managed to avoid taking a progressive
stand on any critical issue of the day, and predictably went down to defeat,
dragging Democrats in Congress down with them, would have been a lesson:
political cowardice and wedge issue pandering has no future.
-
- Yet here we are five years into the Bush presidency,
with Republicans imploding on their own greed and ineptness, and the Democrats
are still afraid of their shadows.
-
- Unless someone comes forward soon with an inspired progressive
agenda, it's probably time to let the Democratic Party go the way of the
Whigs.
-
- Simply letting the Republicans flounder will not win
a single election, much less the race for the White House.
-
- It used to be said that pulling the lever for a third
party candidate was wasting your vote. These days, voting for a Democrat
is wasting a vote.
-
- Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation
into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch
columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff
can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
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