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
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
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