McClellan Democrats and the Death of the Republic

[arendt]

McClellan Democrats and the Death of the Republic

We don't need references like Vichy to describe the cowardly Democrats. We have our own All-American, gold standard for cowardice - Civil War General George McLellan. No matter how many troops he had, it was never enough. At the slightest repulse, McLellan bolted into full retreat. He was constantly defeated by inferior armies. He probably single-handledly prolonged the war by six months.

I don't yet think the cowardly Dems have gone completely over to Bushism, as the Vichy epithet would imply. And, the Neville Chamberlain analogy has become toxic. So, let's stay on this side of the pond and just call them McLellan Democrats.

Its a good analogy, because McLellan was just an appointed general who could be replaced. Lincoln eventually found Grant. And the working base of the Democratic Party can...

OH, SCREW IT. Enough with the erudite historical analogies. Let's just tell the truth.

The First Republic of the United States, based upon the Constitution of 1789 is dead, dead, DEAD. The Dem cave-in was just the final flat-lining of a comatose system that has been on life-support for years. We need to give it a decent burial and move on. We need to tell the truth. Let someone else parade the corpse around like some holy relic.

The post-flatline truth, no matter how much CPR is given to the corpse, is that we now live in a friendly fascist, corporatist state. Politicians represent only the interests of corporations, theocrats, and other group organizations. They do not protect the individual rights of citizens - neither their medical rights, their labor rights, their environmental rights, their voting rights, their rights to free speech, and on and on.

In the last six years citizens have REALLY lost the following rights (statutes given):

Habeus Corpus (enemy combatant, Gitmo)
Cruel and Unusual Punishment (torture is just fine)
Free speech (1st amendment zones, expulsion from GOP meetings)
Unreasonable Search (wiretap, national security letters)
Honest Elections (HAVA, "voter fraud" prosecutions, partisan election officials)
Asset Seizure (began w drugs and RICO, now "terrorist" will do)
Paying one's "debt to society" (sex offender persecution)

Our legislators have GIVEN away the following Constitutional principles:

Declaring War (IWR)
Separation of Church and State (Faith-based Initiatives)
Oversight of Executive Agencies (most importantly, DOJ)
Non-political Civil Service (GSA scandal, USA purge)
Right to Impeach (if not now, when?)
Right to filibuster ("nuclear option")

And they barely missed giving away these other bedrock principles:

Bills of Attainder (see Terry Schiavo)
Separation of Powers (see "activist judges")

America has a massive Prison Industrial Complex for its rapidly growing, unemployable underclass, which has been created by the corporate policy of outsourcing. The PIC is a profit center for private prison corporations (an obscenity), sweatshoppers feeding on slave labor, and the ripoff phone companies. So far they don't usually put middle class folks in jail; they just make them unemployable, uninsurable, untouchable, non-persons. Eventually, such people fall into the underclass. Friendly fascism is so....nice, deniable. Its all the victim's fault.

----

But, back to our dead Republic. Every deceased person requires a death certificate. How did the First Republic die?

It died from complications of the National Security Act of 1947. Namely, a cancerous (almost unmeasurable) military budget, including a black budget that has swollen to $50 Billion per year! This budget pays for mercenary armies like Blackwater and DynCorp. It pays for massive domestic surveillance. And, somewhere in it, it pays for the blackmail and control of anyone who stands in the way of the Military Industrial Complex.

Indirectly, the NSA47 paid for the destruction of a free press. As soon as it was up and running, the NSA47-chartered CIA started planting stooges in the press. The press became known as the CIA's "Mighty Wurlitzer". Over time, it went from being a few friendly journalists to outright ownership of the news by a handful of MIC (defense contractor)-linked mega-corporations.

Since the end of WW2, America has spent its money on the MIC and the unending expansion of suburbia (all the better to isolate you, my dear). We stopped spending money on infrastructure, on non-military human capital, on non-military R&D.

So, the Republic is dead, but the military-run ghost of a great country lives on. The MIC and the PIC are America today. They represent the first American police state - a Committee of Public Safety on steroids and angel dust, just waiting for its first Robespierre to appear. (Pardon my French.)

----

Given there is a corpse, my opinion, as a person of Irish extraction, is that we need to have a wake for the First Republic, a big public drunken bash where we tell good stories about the good old guy. Then we need a public funeral in an appropriate cathedral of democracy, and a cortege to the cemetary, where we put the Constitution in a box in the ground and respectfully throw some dirt over it.

Then, we need to go get the bums who put it in its grave.

[some guy]

1. k and r

[katsy]

2. k/r

[blm]

3. I cannot understand ANY Democrat refusing to fight for OPEN GOVERNMENT

There are too many Dems, even here on DU, who think that corruption and secret government is something that should be tolerated just for the opportunity to SHARE some appearance of power with BushInc and his fascist allies.

[starroute]

4. 60 years of the same damn triangulation

The National Security Act was a sop that Truman tossed to the GOP Congress as a way of saving the New Deal. And it worked, more or less. The basics of the New Deal are still with us, though looking more tattered all the time. But oh, the price he paid.

[Burried News]

5. A CIA slandered and perhaps damaged beyond repair.

A State Department ignored and marginalized.
A Department of Justice compromised.
An FDA hamstrung.
A VA System left to fend for itself at a time when a war is sending it severely disabled soldiers.
An Army broken.
A pentagon bullied into submission.
An inept SEC that fails to keep abreast of Hedge Funds that dominate markets, or sound the alarm about massive amounts of derivatives and junk bonds.
Gutting of the Sherman anti-trust laws.

It is a very long list.

[many a good man]

6. NSC-68 slowly killed the First Republic

Long live the Second Republic. When do we start?

“Rome creates a desert and calls it ‘peace.’”
- Tacitus

:kick:

[OneBlueSky]

7. k/r . . . nice job, arendt . . . n/t

.

[Mme. Defarge]

8. Brilliant!

Your McClellan analogy is perfect, and your historical perspective is extremely helpful. I'm dazzled by your transitions.

For me, after working to successfully elect two Democratic presidents, who were then betrayed by their party, and now being reminded (albeit indirectly) that although the '06 election gave the Democrats a majority in both houses we, the voters, still failed to give them a big enough majority, the pattern is simply undeniable. As much as I have come to admire Kucinich, the Democratic party will NEVER support him. So, at this juncture, I'm done with the Dems.

Since that infamous Saturday morning in November 2000 when I heard the news that the Supreme Court had stopped the Florida vote recount, I began reminding myself that even people who live in fascist dictatorships still have to try to live their lives and get through the day.

While I haven't given up all hope, I will no longer be a useful idiot for our current one party system.

[Mme. Defarge]

9. K & R!

[LBJDemocrat]

10. Excellent post

I tried to recommend it, but I don't have enough posts to do so.

[loudsue]

11. Arendt!!!! You're on to something!!! A WAKE!!! A national PARTY/ WAKE!

We can call it A WAKE (awake), and have a big huge national party. I truly think that, if nothing else, the U.S. is READY for a national party (4th of July fireworks, tailgaiting and all) , because it seems that people in BOTH parties, and especially the independents, think our country is dead. The 70% of Americans who think things are VERY wrong, would LOVE a party, if we tell them we're having a good ole Irish WAKE.

National prizes for the best picture (float?) of a coffin with the Declaration of Independence/Constitution in it. YOU KNOW Hollywood would get on board, and MAYBE get some funding for the grand prize? Could we raise, say $1 million to award the best coffin/exhibit?

One thing that might do, is WAKE some people up (even college and high school age kids) to the situation we're in, and do it with a PARTY! A WAKE.

It also may send a very important message to the legislators, in ALL branches of government, local and national.

The blogosphere should have NO PROBLEM calling the country to a PARTY, and let everyone know it is a WAKE. Bill Maher will sign on, Jon Stewart, David Letterman -- all partiers for certain.

We DO need a party to celebrate a life well-lived, and be able to move on to a new reality. The country needs a rite of passage right now.

:bounce: Let's have a national IRISH WAKE!!! :woohoo:


K & R

:kick::kick::kick::kick:

[Mme. Defarge]

12. Permettez-moi to suggest the date of

July 14th.

[loudsue]

13. Do we have a second to the motion??

:kick::kick::kick::kick:

[autorank]

14. K*R. This is brilliant! Period. Just brilliant. Damn!

I'm at a loss...good beyond words.

[Me.]

15. K & R

I'm in complete agreement, and just like McClellan blackmailed Lincoln in that the president thought he didn't have any other options but George, the dems have been blackmailing us. Where else you gonna go, they say. Well Lincoln got his Grant, I'm looking for ours.

[scarletwoman]

16. Needs another kick -- already recommended. Excellent read! (nt)

[tom_paine]

17. Wonderful article: I hope you are wrong, but think it more likely you're correct

November 2006 was a breath of optimism in a hopless desert of dead, decaying democracy. Maybe things weren't as bad as they had seemed.

Maybe the jury is still out. maybe we are overblowing the significance of a single incident.

That is my desperate hope talking. It is worried that doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being the way things move forward into the future. 5-10% at best.

It is worried that what you state here is dead-on accurate. Worried that you and I and many others here would then be retroactively made correct, when we said each in our own way that the Republic had likely perished on 12/12/2000, or perhaps 9/12/2001, or perhaps the day Leahy and Daschle received their "Made in the USA" anthrax.

I am still trying to be patient, which is pretty tough given the realities of the situation.

Your article articulates what I think, sadly, is most likely to be true.

Pity those who live to see 2050 and 2100. Unless this trend is reversed (and even if it is, it may be too late) those years will most likely not be good ones to live in our nation.

Not good, at all.

[rhett o rick]

18. What's the next step? Please don't tell me to get active in local politics. nm