DEM PARTY GROWING PAINS, AND THE STAGNANT STENCH OF THE GOP! My first diary.
Appears in full here too, and on Daily Kos.
The Odious GOP Platform
Ok, obviously alarming is that the GOP is tied to the same repressive
and regressive policies election cycle after election cycle. Fear,
white and bright America, guns and plain-folk America, no people of
color, no immigration, no gays, small government, low taxes… an Ozzie
and Harriet America that was partially true at best for a part of our
society (read: when the middle class was probably largest) at one point
post-WWII. This also denies the major subcultures and realities which
were also very much “American” at that same time, but again for brevity I
can’t go there.
So today… we still have a low tax, immigration fearing, small
government and national GOP platform that insists on: denying abortion,
denying meaningful immigration reform (and immigrants in general!),
denying the science of climate change, wealth favoring, torture and
waterboard advocating, being impatient, being afraid and for the most
part being a small minded platform. You have to buy the whole thing.
I mentioned this to a friend of mine at a tailgate party last year: a
60-ish (South African immigrant have you) gentleman who professed to
being Republican. “You only want low taxes!” I told him. (He has some
money). He also has a gay daughter. “But because you want low-taxes, you
have to be a gay hating, environment hating, torture loving guy. It’s a
bad deal! You aren’t that guy.” It’s just that the basket lunch, or
buffet, is all-inclusive. Take your candidate for low taxes, and you
have to eat the rest of the buffet, even if you really don’t like it.*
He nodded. Even after some tequila, he nodded to his even more well-off
friend, “You know, he’s right.”
(*A major problem in our Democracy: particularly when platforms don’t
change, and candidates always must offer essentially the same buffet…
to get RNC money, and tired old Koch and other Mr. Burns from the
Simpsons type donor money.)
The Changing Democratic Platform
So while the GOP trip over each other scrambling to adopt the nearly
impossibly archaic national platform (awkwardly like Trump, and unlike
McCain before him who tried to hold out to resist torture and support
the environment for an astonishingly long time), the Democratic Platform
is changing.
Bernie’s popularity brought publicly-funded college tuition into the
platform. It brought support for a better minimum wage. It brought
single-payer health care onto the platform. It kicked support for the
workers’ and environmental rights’ and national sovereignty snuffing
Trans-Pacific Partnership out of the party platform. Among a number of
notable additions and subtractions.
So it’s a little rough, but the Democratic Platform
is changing. It is
modernizing. This cannot be said about the GOP. Their platform, to quote one of several great lines in Bill Murray’s
Kingpin, is
“about as fresh as a Foghat concert!” (Note
to rock and roll naifs: Foghat is a very old, tired, derivative,
obsolete sounding rock and roll music. Sorry Foghat fans.) The GOP
platform stinks. It is rotting. It actually has a stench, you can almost
whiff over your monitor or TV. The GOP desperately needs a new infusion
to remain relevant at all: someone who truly embraces pluralism,
multi-culturalism, women’s rights to control their bodies, the science
of global warming and what we must do to reverse it, etc., etc.,… and…
low taxes and smaller government I guess.
So getting away from that and back to the present and future, shame
on Debbie Wasserman Schultz for loading the deck for Hillary. It is
flat-out shameful, embarrassing and infuriating. Is that really her
role, to load the deck? Is that written in the job description? I bet
it’s not. Getting in the way of change. I believe she should have no
role in a Democratic institution for quite some time after her
snake-like malfeasance. She should repent and show up humbly in public
somewhere in a year or two (at the earliest) with her ears soundly boxed
in my opinion. The dang primaries should be led by the VOTERS. Get
those superdelegate votes off the books at the start of things. Don’t
rig things for ANYONE. We don’t need to see skewed superdelegate votes
early in an election, and we probably shouldn’t see them until after we
ordinary citizens vote. Period. And frankly, the superdelegates (if that
system is even kept) probably shouldn’t make up
their minds
that early either, until they become informed of the entirety of the
candidates’ positions and personalities. At any rate WE THE PEOPLE must
be allowed to choose new directions. And bring new energy into the
platform, with new candidates with new ideas that need to bring us up to
speed. The world in which and technology with which we are surrounded
are making change and progress capable at
incredible rates of speed.
Note to the DNC: you have to be wholly part of letting the people lead,
and to change and modernize in step with us. This is not a Democracy
otherwise. Props for adopting some of Bernie’s mojos (and Elizabeth
Warren’s) and vision. Bernie even said, “Our job now is to see that
platform implemented by a Democratic Senate, a Democratic House and a
Hillary Clinton presidency! And I am going to do everything I can to
make that happen.”
Hillary now gets to run with this baton. Please get rid of Citizen’s
United, and regulate Wall Street further and restore some of this
nation’s wealth and prosperity back to the middle class, from which it
has been swindled, and back to where it belongs.
Ok, maybe that’s enough. I could elaborate on a few tangents here. Hope this helps.
Here’s to a better, and groovy, future.
Colby
