More and more people recognize that the Democrats are no opposition party.

It’s outrageous. One word, it’s outrageous. And I rarely use that word, because it’s such [hyperbole]. And the Democrats didn’t join, the Democrats led, because — let’s be very clear. The House leader and the Senate leader, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid, could have stopped that legislation from happening. They were the ones who handled the calendar of Congress. As the party in power, they could have stopped it from being enacted. And let’s be very clear that it’s not just joining or being complicit. It’s leading, of sorts, I guess. And further, this FISA fix and this change further even more greatly guts the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero on today’s Democracy Now! regarding the Democratic support for legalizing spying by American telecommunication corporations (audio, video, transcript)

More on this issue from:

• Marjorie Cohn—the new law requires telephone companies to collect data and turn it over to the federal government. It also grants immunity against lawsuits to these companies, many of which are currently defendants in civil cases. and her recent DN! interview
• Dave Lindorff—Make no mistake: the Democrats did not have to pass this latest piece of legislation, loosing the NSA spies on us all. They had the power to kill that bill in its tracks. Instead, they succumbed to the President’s empty threat to label them all “soft on terror” if they didn’t give him what he wanted: a blank check. They caved, just as they did when they had the power to end the war in Iraq last April by cutting off funding for it, and instead, voted to fund it in full.

However I should note that, unlike Lindorff, I do not believe that “The Democrats in this Congress are a bunch of spineless cowards”. I believe this kind of agreement comes doing precisely what their parties are designed to do—benefit their paymasters. Perhaps Lindorff and I don’t really disagree on this point. Lindorff’s “The Case for Impeachment”, raises another point of shame for the party in power and the progressive Left: who is holding the Democratic candidates feet to the fire on impeachment?

Sen. Mike Gravel and Rep. Dennis Kucinich rightly identify Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards conspiring to narrow the Democratic Party contenders at the NAACP Democrat forum in Detroit on 2007 July 12. When the senators thought they were off-mic they had a brief but frank discussion about eliminating their competition:

Edwards: We should try to have a more serious, and a smaller, group.

Clinton: There was an attempt by our campaigns to do that, it got, somehow, detoured. We’ve gotta get back to it. Our guys should talk.

Sen. Clinton is practiced in whittling down competition by not debating them. Not long ago she used anti-democratic techniques to retain her Senate seat against anti-war candidates in New York.

But they couldn’t get away with this without the complicit mainstream media. Showing more of their shameful attitude, the New York Times is there to join the conspirators. Which side the Times is on is all too clear when one skims

their sidebar on “The 2008 Race”. Not that I expected better from the paper that runs sourceless headline articles about WMD in Iraq and then lets those reporters leave of their own accord.

I guess we just can’t afford to have people’s candidacies weighed on the value of their ideas. What is it the Progressive Left argues every other election cycle? This election cycle must be “too important” for that…again.

While I too happen to agree with Moore’s points, I have to disagree with weighing someone’s “personality” (and I’m not sure what, exactly, that means) rather than the substance of what they say. It suggests a lack of priorities I find dangerous on important issues of the day—we’re dealing with life and death issues when we talk about war and health care. We really don’t have time, nor is it in our best interest, to give people any excuse to dismiss an argument for being vaguely unpalatable. I thought Moore’s stridency was perfectly appropriate and I look forward to more of the same. The war machine and HMOs are quite strident when pushing their points, it’s time the rest of us framed issues plainly, directly, and without reservation.

To the extent anyone in the US supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq is due to the misinformation the corporate media fed them. Now the US public knows better and they aren’t fans of that war at all. The media were busy kissing administration ass instead of holding the government’s feet to the fire. The media have a duty to ask the tough questions and they reliably still don’t (note the lack of examination of proponents of war with Iran such as Senators Clinton and Obama; when Sen. Gravel points out the code talking in a debate, he is dismissed as a kook). We need more people to get the courage to call the corporate media on their lies and lack of apology. We know they can do it, look at how the New York Times (a leading proponent of war with Iraq during the run-up to the war) ran an exposé on Jayson Blair for some relatively unimportant lies. If the Times had any real pressure on them, they’d have to expose how Judith Miller lied about far more important issues on the Times’ front page.

Another problem: time in interviews. As Chomsky points out in “Manufacturing Consent”, restricting people’s time to short interviews and soundbites is another way to get people to reiterate the same old (invariably business-friendly) points you hear on corporate “news” all day every day—you don’t have time to say anything new or different. If a ten-minute segment is ever thought to be a gift, something is very wrong.

One such different point on health care, for instance, is one Moore explains in proper interviews with real journalists who aren’t embedded with corporations or government (such as his recent interview on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman). Moore explains that “universal” health care isn’t good enough. We can have “universal” health care the way some US states have universal car insurance: simply legally require everyone to buy a plan with an insurance agency. What the US needs is single-payer universal health care, and HR676 (the Conyers/Kucinich health care plan) is a great step in that direction. The HMOs had their turn and they kill people. They need to go. American readers should require their Congresspeople to co-sponsor HR676 now.