Boy Billmon, you want to hear howling! Just let the dems open up all kind of investigations on all these ratfucks. That’s all we’ll hear out of great amerikan media for god knows how long. But boy do I wish that would be the case.
However, first of all, god’s only party must actually lose an election (and I’m still not convinced the ratpubs are going to lose anything) and second I don’t see the demorats stooping as low as the ratpubs even if they had the chance.
Nice dream!

Posted by: terrorist lieberal craigb | Nov 7 2006 21:27 utc | 3

It’s a curious kind of democracy Bush intends to export to the Mid-East. But they’re fast learner there. In the NYT Chalabi article, there was mention of ballot stuffing during the 2005 elections — and the leader of one of the parties could tell the election was dishonest. They had stuffed the ballot with 5000 votes, and didn’t get as many when the total was tallied.
Good teachers, the Repub’s.
I’m in a foreign country, I am not a U.S. citizen, and I’m just wondering at the complete apathy of Americans. You don’t deserve any better if you let them get away with this.
For quite a while I used to sign of posts at Dkos with “You should be out in the streets protesting, throwing bricks through windows at eleciton headquarters, until you get verifiable paper trails and proper voting procedures.”
Enjoy the day – it’s turning out to be a doozy. And I totally agree with Billmon here. The GOP is a criminal organization, no different from the GRU or KGB.

Posted by: SteinL | Nov 7 2006 21:42 utc | 5

And God said, “let there be democrats” and there were democrats.
Sure its a choice between evil and evil-lite…
but let there be light all the same

Posted by: Fiat Lux | Nov 7 2006 21:56 utc | 7

A consistent plaint of mine over the past several years has frankly bored most of my friends, even those in the Shrinking Game: These people are a criminal gang. Many of them are textbook sociopaths. They are not rational persons. Do not expect them to respond to actual events or circumstances. They are not motivated by a desire for equitable solutions. They do not care about people.
Out here at the left edge of America, where little cable cars climb halfway up hills with values derided by Newt and the Falangists, there are a lot of people who don’t completely believe this. These people are motivated by greed, they say, But they’re not insane. They’re politicians; they’re pragmatic. When they’re up against the wall, they’ll compromise — because they might lose more without doing so. They might be highly-functioning neurotics, but just aggressively promoting their self-interest doesn’t make them sociopathic from a diagnostic perspective.
I don’t agree, I reply. Neurotics repeat their mistakes (in part) because to do so is a sad comfort. Sociopaths repeat behavior because they want to and can — without empathy towards their victims.
They don’t even consider their goals in terms of human beings, I tell my friends. All they care about is More … more power, more money; just — More. They have an intellectual rationale for it, courtesy of the PNAC. They’ve started a war to get it, and killed hundreds of thousands of unseen foreign human beings, and nearly 3,000 of our own people, in our names to that end. They have effectively destabilized the economy of this country, exacerbated divisions between Americans, and encouraged racial and religous extremisim, in order to get it.
But, I add, they have absolutely no empathy whatsoever towards anyone harmed in the process of getting More. You think they believe in anything other than Bonanno Family values? Do you beieve Frank Genovese or John Gotti gave two fucks about what they “had to do” in order to “do business”?
My friends chuckle, a little dismissively, at that point — but then I add: The day they or some part of their little alliance decides that disenfranchising, imprisoning, deporting or killing any American will ensure that they can continue getting More for just a while longer, they’ll do it. Because that is what professional criminals do, if they’ve manufactured the justification — and, if there are no limits placed on what they do, or get away with.
My grandparents came to the United States from Germany in the 1920’s, and those in the family who stayed and survived WWII all became Good Germans. I’ve listened to their descriptions of those years, and noted with a bit of professional detachment the rationalizations and coping strategies they had developed to maintain a continuity of self while living in a fascist dictatorship.
With that perspective, now, I wonder: Are Americans the new Good Germans? In order to maintain a sense of wholeness, and forget that collective guilt is not just a term in a Modern Civilization textbook — what rationalizations will we have to invent, if we don’t curb these damaged and toxic people?
I believe these people are capiable of self-justifications they haven’t even used yet — and, demonstrably, they are capiable of acts which are proofs that Others do not matter. They have walled off the capability to walk in another’s shoes.
In habitual criminals, addicts, that combination is a no-brainer. The same combination in national political and religous leaders — together with acquiescence of a complacent population — is fatal.

Posted by: Austin Cooper | Nov 7 2006 22:20 utc | 9

I agree Cloned Poster (#10) — there is absolutely no evidence that the Democrats are going to magically become vertebrate after a campaign season without such evidence. We can look forward to being dragged, ice axes fully deployed, into the crevace of bad times with failed government. The problem is, even after that happens, a large proportion of our population STILL WILL NOT GET WHAT HAS HAPPENED. Of those who DO get it, only a small proportion will want to DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT. I would love to be surprised, but I just don’t see it yet.

Posted by: Elie | Nov 7 2006 22:32 utc | 11

“if the Dems don’t turn the full weight of the FBI, the DoJ and the IRS loose on the Rovians the very first chance they get, they’ll just be asking for it.”
It’s nice to see someone who’s come to the same conclusion I got a few years ago.
The “left/liberal/progressive” wing simply can’t take power and keep it long enough for its policies to be implemented and have some effect if it plays nice. The right-wing fascists will just take back power and roll back the whole thing and even more just 3-4 years in the future. You don’t make lasting changes, progress, social, political, environmental, cultural, by having to go back to work every decade just to see it all disappear into thin air. And the “every decade” bit is the optimistic vision of things.
The right never hesitates to use dirty and illegal tricks to make sure the left is more weakened with every passing election.
Any left government that seriously intends to govern must first of all seek to utterly annihilate the right-wing, to the point it will cease to be any meaningful political force for at least a generation.
This indeed means to sic all the judges against the bastard right-wing pols, and against their corporate buddies. It may mean seriously shaken the whole national economy, but if it’s the price to pay, it’s welcome – not to mention that a shaken and weakened corporate world means it’ll be easier to get social progressive legislation into action.
The right must be shown as the den of traitorous scumbags it is, and it must be made plain to everyone, so that most of the country will turn their backs on them and just plain loathe them. Basically, if less than half the right-wing pols are jailed for years, if the main right-wing parties don’t end up bankrupted or just plain declared illegal and enemy of the nation, I’d say the job has been botched and will miserably fail.
The revolutionaries of old didn’t have our decades-long experience, yet it seems they instinctively knew that you have to actually get rid of the corrupt ruling elite to make any lasting change. Giving them any hope, any possibility of taking back power is just asking for it and mere suicidal behaviour.
And don’t get me wrong, Billmon spoke of the US, but what I said should apply in pretty much every single Western nation in the world right now. I mean, it’s not as if the German, French, Italian or British left showed any wisdom when they took power; they just let the bastards of the right-wing opposition get away with their crimes and corruption. And the Spanish “left” doesn’t seem any more intend on going after the Popular Party.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Nov 7 2006 22:44 utc | 13

When I think of the Republican crime family, the image that comes to mind isn’t an octopus. Rather, it’s the creepy thing that attached itself to John Hurt’s face in the original Alien movie.
Been there, done that:

Posted by: billmon@billmon.org | Nov 8 2006 0:31 utc | 15

frank norris. octupus. great novel. they just dron’t write em like that anymore.

Posted by: slothrop | Nov 8 2006 1:12 utc | 17

Billmon…….you can write real good.
Thanks

Posted by: Grouch | Nov 8 2006 5:04 utc | 19