Did You Read Your Own Post?

 

Yesterday Glenn Greenwald put up a short but comprehensive post which takes a little tour of the crimes of the Democrats. Corporate aggrandizement, war crimes, Big Lies, petty fascism, arrogance and disdain for the base, and most of all the Democrats’ willful, contemptuous refusal to regard mass permanent unemployment as a problem at all, let alone the greatest crisis facing America – it’s all there in just a few sentences. 

 

Greenwald’s sarcastic title, The Profound Mystery of the “Enthusiasm Gap”, certainly implies the right question. By now the proof is overwhelming that the Democratic party is just an organized crime syndicate, every bit as bad as the Republicans in ideology and policy and almost as bad in sheer viciousness, meanness, sadism. (The fact that they refuse to do anything about permanent mass unemployment proves they desire permanent mass unemployment. It’s an intentional policy goal.) All this is empirically proven. A post like this is just another stone on the Everest of evidence. So to still have questions about the Democrats is indeed a profound mystery, assuming the questioner isn’t actually a criminal partisan operative.

 

Yet having just written a post proving by itself that the bad and predatory policies of Democrats are not abuses or renegade examples but rather constitute a structural pattern, Greenwald turns around and performs an attitudinal flip and beriddles us with his own profound mystery in an update. It turns out in spite of his post and its title, he too remains “amazed”:

 

What’s most amazing about this is that Democrats generally and the White House specifically seem completely uninterested in doing anything about this — other than exacerbating it. The need to do something is what leads me to believe (without knowing) that Obama will nominate (without necessarily causing to be confirmed) liberal favorite Elizabeth Warren to head the new Consumer Protection Agency created by the Financial Regulation bill. If they do that and are serious about it, that would definitely be a good thing, but at this point, Democratic malaise and apathy are so entrenched that it’s hard to imagine a single nomination doing much to change it.

 

You think that what you yourself know ahead of time would be a sham appointment would still be “a good thing”? You think something you just implicitly said would serve no purpose but to try to obscure the truth about the Democrats, the truth you yourself just wrote a post dedicated to exposing, would be a good thing? Do you read your own posts?

 

This is why in the end most liberals, even the best of them, will never be worth anything in a fight. They’re congenitally elitist and conformist and simply can’t break out of those self-imposed constraints. This is an existential matter, a matter of temperament. They’re walking refutations of their own Enlightenment Myth. That’s why they get caught up in profound mysteries. No matter how much education they receive, no matter how much they learn in principle, no matter how much they even become teachers of the truth, they’re unable to really learn the lesson in practice. They’re always close to caving in, selling out, double-crossing the cause. Thus we see the guy who just wrote a good post laying out how the Democrats are our permanent, irreconcilable enemies spin right around to say he can be appeased by a Warren appointment, even though he intellectually knows it’s a sham.

 

I don’t normally think in terms of the “the worse it gets, the better for us” philosophy, but moments like this do make me feel like this country really does have to hit rock bottom before any change can come, just like any other incorrigible dope fiend. If that’s true, we’d be better off having Bernie Madoff become head of the CFPB than Warren. Such an appointment would be infinitely more honest, would have such greater clarity, would be so much more educational, and not have the bank-enabling soporific effect on liberals the way Warren seems to have. It would be stark and undeniable, while a Warren appointment will only be occasion for another profound mystery. 

 

This is nothing new for Greenwald. His characteristic two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern is to write a post which does a good job of laying out the big picture structural issue, and then regress to process liberal mode on that same issue. For example he wrote one of the best posts I’ve seen on the health racket bailout as exemplary of the great defining corporatist issue. Then just days later, evidently having been criticized by Obama hacks, he whined “I wasn’t saying I didn’t support the bill”, and whipped out a microscope to try to ascertain whether or not it might be infinitesimally better than the status quo.

 

One should acknowledge: the mere fact that the health insurance industry and the market generally sees this “reform” bill as a huge boost to the industry’s profitability does not prove, by itself, that this is a bad bill. Contrary to what I’ve seen said in various places, I haven’t advocated for the defeat of this bill. I’ve said from the start that there are reasonable arguments on both sides and that one must weigh (a) the corrupt, mandate-based strengthening of the private insurance industry, the major advancement of the corporatism model of government, the harm this is likely to do to some who are now covered and some who cannot afford the forced premiums, and the chances for a better bill if this one is defeated, versus (b) the various substantial benefits to many people who do not now have and cannot obtain health insurance and the risk that defeat of this bill will ensure preservation of the status quo. Weighing those factors is difficult and, at least for me, produces ambivalence.

 

No, we shouldn’t acknowledge any such thing, when the truth has been proven to be the exact opposite. That kind of picayune parsing and the wretched process fetish are typical of liberals. As is this profoundly mysterious refusal to personally register the truth about the Democrats, no matter how much they know about them, no matter how much they write to expose them.

 

For another, new example on that same health racket bailout, we have two posts from Jon Walker at FireDogLake*.

 

The first discusses how polls reveal support for the bill and in particular for the individual mandate deteriorating from their already low levels. Over 80% oppose the mandate, most of them strongly so. Once again we see how the people in general are far more intelligent than the non-rich who support either kleptocratic party. The post condemns the Democrats’ crimes in engineering and imposing this reactionary, kleptocratic bill. You’d think the author comprehends the Democrats. Well, evidently not.

 

Why Democrats fought so hard to include this provision which could have been replaced by far less objectionable alternatives is beyond comprehension.

 

Again, if by that he means he doesn’t understand the substantive reason why they wanted to do it, then it’s only “beyond comprehension” how anybody can be dense enough to still think the Democrats are anything other than an organized crime racket, or that they’re less evil than the Republicans in this sense.

 

What anyone who’s been paying attention comprehends is that the Dems included this provision because their intent and goal was to bail out the insurance rackets and help them better loot the people.

 

On the other hand, if he had meant he doesn’t understand how they could have been politically incompetent enough to do this unilaterally and fail to either make the Republicans share responsibility or else drop it, I’d concur. The Dems are evil but also strategically and tactically very stupid. But on the evidence of his second post a day later, it sounds like he still doesn’t comprehend the Dems themselves.

 

He describes how Senator Ron Wyden, a longtime vocal supporter of a racketeering mandate, is now back-pedalling from his support for the version in this bill and exploring ways for Oregon to avoid it. Wyden’s doing this for purely political reasons, of course. Like many, many other Democrats, he’s already sweating over re-election. (What’s really amazing and incomprehensible is how these crooks thought they could not only aggressively and systematically flout the will of their own voters, but do so in such an intentionally brazen and offensive way, and then coast to re-election. But like I said, they’re malicious in their intent, stupid in the execution.)

 

Again, another interesting post which helps to compile the criminal indictment. We can add hypocrisy and cowardice to the list for Wyden. But what does Walker comprehend from this? What’s his takeaway?

 

We can only hope that Wyden’s recent shift away from the individual mandate is a sign that the Democratic Party is beginning to acknowledge what a massive political and policy mistake they made.

 

We need for the Democrats to do better! And that’s our “only hope”!

 

Again, however useful some of their writings are, we see how partisan liberals (which is practically a redundancy) can’t be a reliable part of anyone’s hope for radical change. By definition a liberal is an obstacle to such change. (And if, on the other hand, one does want radical change and is willing to fight for it, whatever he is he’s not a liberal.) 

 

[*According to this,

 

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wayoutwest August 4th, 2010 at 9:37 pm
5
I think it’s going to take a while for Americans to move from anger and scapegoating to understanding who is the real enemy. When and if they do wake up we might get a***edited in moderation***.

Too many progressives and liberals still think that we can change the system by electing a few more good guys to fight for us.

Until someone stands up and demands that the TBTF banks, oil companies and other predatory capitalists are nationalized we are not going to change anything.

***MODNOTE: comments advocating violence or revolution are not permitted***

Reply
wayoutwest August 4th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
6
So peacefull Democratic Revolution is a taboo subject on FDL?

 

FireDogLake itself is implicitly and censoriously committed to the Democratic Party. Even civil disobedience advocacy, even advocacy of non-violent resistance, are forbidden, at least according to that moderator. (There was no response to that last question, and looking around for an official proclamation I couldn’t find one.) I saw a moderator in another thread, which I couldn’t locate again in order to link it, explicitly say that the only advocacy allowed is legal change through the electoral process. That can only imply in particular that Democrat partisanship is the only acceptable viewpoint. In general, it’s the liberal process fetish taken to the level of debate-quashing dogma.

 

We see how, in spite of how FDL allegedly learned a lesson from past follies, deep down it really hasn’t changed. Just like with Greenwald’s posting pattern, the old Democratic “party of the fathers” brainwashing is never far submerged, today in the form of “liberal” ideology.]  

 

The Democratic party is beyond redemption. It cannot be rehabilitated. It does not do bad things out of stupidity or cowardice. It does them out of criminal will. (The Dems are often stupid and cowardly, but that’s only in the policy execution and the politics; their premise and their intent are always fully, consciously malevolent.) At best we may be able to find decent individual persons at the lower levels of politics. Some of these may sometimes be worth supporting, for purely tactical reasons, but never with the thought, “maybe this can be the beginning of a takeover of the Democratic party!” That way lies nothing but frustration and the pure waste of time and effort. Power corrupts; power within an organized crime network makes one a criminal. The longer one is a cadre within, and especially the higher one rises, the more one is corrupted. That has to always be the measure of any establishment politician. “Establishment” includes being a member or supporter of either establishment party.