House of Eratosthenes

I don’t want to be a liberal mover-and-shaker right now. Someone in charge of deciding where we go from here. What would that be like? Before the very first burps and farts from the champagne-and-scrambled-egg breakfast morning after election day, the headaches start — what did we just get voted in to do? Who voted for us?

They’d probably agree with me that this poor deranged fellow is a better amalgamation of their constituents than most folks, although perhaps they’d argue about the problem this creates. Just look at the poor sap. He has the big brass ones to lecture Cindy Sheehan and tell her to “put a sock in it” so that the “Democrats [can] demonstrate they can govern and be a real counterweight to Bush” — and yet, who is he to say? Cindy Sheehan knows what she wants done. She’s said what she wants done. The guy telling her to cork it up, has no idea what he wants done…or if he does have an idea, he won’t say what it is. Probably because he can’t.

Democrats are just now assuming control in Congress, with a full plate of agenda items facing them, ranging from ethics and lobbying reform, reinstalling pay-as-you-go budget rules, changing our energy policy towards self-sufficient alternative sources, and fixing health care and taxes, holding hearings on Iraq, and making Congress more consumer friendly. And already Cindy Sheehan threatens to derail the Democrats before any of this can get started.

I know many of you support Sheehan and may want the Democrats to focus immediately on shutting down this war or impeaching Bush. Please, let the Democrats demonstrate they can govern and be a real counterweight to Bush, and let them fulfill the agenda they ran on, which has large public support before demanding they rush headlong into actions that will cripple the leadership before it can establish itself. Having Sheehan disrupt and shut down a House Democrats’ press conference doesn’t advance one damn thing, and does nothing to bring the war to a close any sooner. Let the hearings take place, let Bush walk the tightrope of justifying an escalation and let Henry Waxman, Joe Biden, Carl Levin, and Charles Rangel among others drag administration officials out in the open over the next 90 days to explain the last six years.

The agenda they ran on, has large public support, huh? Ethics and lobbying reform: How is it to be reformed? Before Al Gore’s first cherry-picked recount, Democrats have told me and told me and told me what they want. All I’ve heard in six years is that the public treasury should be paying for more advertising so no one is “beholden to the big corporations.” That’s not ethics or lobbying reform. Reinstalling pay-as-you-go rules? That’s just a cynical piece of political machinery designed to make it harder to keep tax cuts in place. I’ve heard a lot of that from left-wing leaders, most of them actually serving under the dome; not one word of it from the voters. Or bloggers. Or letter-to-editor writers. Or even television pundits for that matter.

Self-sufficient energy sources? Fixing healthcare? Making Congress more consumer-friendly? Now these, I’ve heard.

Was the election of 2006 was about these things? Really? Does anyone anywhere think so?

If I’m a Democratic senator and I do all three of these things singlehandedly…and then say one nice thing about George W. Bush, what happens to me? Let’s say, if I simply compliment him on his necktie? Do I get re-elected because of my wonderful accomplishments with energy independence and healthcare reform and putting a big happy-face on Congress?

I don’t think so. And that’s why I don’t want to be one of those guys right now. In fact, if I was one of them, I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in the public’s disaffection with Iraq. Changing the course, sure…the public is unhappy with the way things are going. But this giant change-the-course plateau is already splintering up, with a Grand-Canyon-sized fissure snaking its way between the “Let’s Get The Hell Out” folks and the Surge Brigade. It’s making for some pretty bad feeling out there.

Anti-Surge Protests Against McCain, Lieberman
By Sarah Wheaton

Don’t expect Senator Joseph I. Lieberman and anti-war activists to be kissing and making up anytime soon. Demonstrators were out in full force, despite the light sprinkle of rain, to protest his appearance at the American Enterprise Institute here in the nation’s capital. The self-styled Democrat-Independent joined Senator John McCain to speak about Iraq at the conservative think tank, and their call for more troops in Iraq was a foregone conclusion.

“Hey John, hey Joe, escalation has got to go!” and “John McCain, John McCain, escalation is insane!” were chanted pretty much constantly for about an hour by sign-waving activists with MoveOn.org, a grassroots group that leans left and generally aligns with Democrats, and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group. On top of that, a choir of the Lyndon LaRouche Youth Movement was singing satires about their arch villain, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other hymns.

Yeah, we hate Dick Cheney. Somehow, I doubt that sentiment does much to heal the divide.

I have to seriously question whether the public wants out of Iraq. Unhappiness with our being in there — sure. How can you not be unhappy, when the situation is by nature unhappy? Hell, I’m unhappy about it, as much as anyone…but I’m for it. I would have voted to go in, and I’d do it again.

I guess it has to do with upbringing. I was raised to think whether something is pleasant or not, has little bearing on whether it has to be done. Maybe this is a piece of maturity that a lot of people never learned.

I think most people are on my side of this one. Most people were brought up to understand that while life is better when it’s entertaining, nobody ever promised anybody that it would be. But George Bush lost a big chunk of this crowd for a good reason: Since his re-election, the situation has been mostly unchanged. We’re still there. We still have control of the place. Terrorists don’t want us to have control of it, and they’re making public-relations moves the way terrorists do that…with things that go boom. The body-count is infinitesimal by the standards of previous engagements…but it’s still trickling upwards, past multiples of a thousand, past the official body-count from the September 11 attacks, which I was previously told were entirely unrelated to Iraq. And the media is taking advantage of this to do public-relations the way they do public-relations.

I hate to seem cynical, but none of this really means as much as a lot of people would like it to mean. That we’re occupying a place, means our country has taken control of it. I think if you could travel back in time to, say, somewhere around 1995 to 1998, most reasonable people from there would say this is a good thing. That our troops continue to be blown up by IED’s, simply means that this piece of turf is strategically important. There are arguments to the contrary; some of them are highly creative; but none of them hold much water. Placing bombs by the roadside and blowing up American troops, entertaining as this may be to an unsettled mind, is hardly something one would consider just for the sake of sport. Besides, it costs money. Someone in a position of power, someone with interests contrary to ours, is none to fond of the status quo. Once you acknowledge that, you have to acknowledge our country has accomplished something important.

And yet the Americans are unhappy. Is the status quo equally disaffecting to them? Is it really because of the situation itself, or is it with uncertainty about it?

Well, Americans don’t trust the media, according to the latest Gallup poll.

A new Gallup poll released today reveals that most Americans — some 56% — believe that the news media’s coverage of the war in Iraq is generally “inaccurate.”

But in what way? Of those who feel that coverage has been inaccurate, 61% feel it has painted too negative a picture there, while 36% say it has pictured it as too positive.

That means that overall, about one-third of Americans believe that the news media present too negative a picture of what is happening in Iraq; one out of five believe that the news media present too positive a picture, and the rest say that news media coverage is about right or have no opinion.

Looking at the partisan divide, Gallup explains: “Two-thirds of Republicans believe that the news media’s coverage of Iraq is both inaccurate and makes the situation there appear worse. Only one-quarter say that news media coverage is accurate. [emphasis mine]

I think this is pretty important. How could it not be? Twenty-five percent of us trust the media coverage of what’s going on over there. This is even more confounding when you realize there’s a certain bedrock, and it isn’t too far below twenty-five. Under the worst possible scenario, a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” type of moment…how many of us would still trust the media, after it had been proven according to empirical evidence that we should not? Five percent? Ten? Fifteen?

So it all comes down to this: We don’t know what’s going on, we aren’t in a good position to find out, and we understand this to be a problem. This isn’t the kind of thing that makes people happy. Now, no matter what your party affiliation, it makes good sense that you’re going to gather more useful information about what’s going on if a different party takes over Congress, than if things stay as they are — especially if the President’s party remains in control of Congress. With that in mind, it makes good sense that a different party should be put in charge.

So I have no beef with the folks who voted for the baby-killing soldier-slandering tax-the-rich party. I don’t even have a beef with the folks who run it…nothing that rises to any level of significance next to the pity I have for them. The only beef I really have, is with the propaganda artists who work at misconstruing this as some kind of mandate, consciously or otherwise.

But hey, they’ll always be around.

This is no mandate for “fixing” healthcare or taxes, solar power, lobbying reform or +++snort+++ pay-as-you-go budget rules. But really, nobody needs me to point that out. Certainly not loyal Democrats. They said exactly this thing after the elections of 1994, when Newt Gingrich’s party won twice as many seats in the House as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s party just won. Except this time, we have a war; wars have a saddening, fatiguing effect on people, and what a wretched lot of nasty people we would be if this were not the case. And sad, fatigued people simply don’t vote for the status quo.

Because of that — and some guy named Mark Foley, remember him? — Madame Speaker enjoys a majority of sixteen seats out of 435. Enjoy ’em while you can, Nan.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 01/08/2007 @ 11:12

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I Don’t Want To Be Them
Saturday, January 6th, 2007