Fuck bipartisanship - screw the Republicans into the ground, stomp on them, crush them, butt-bonk their remains

1. Now They’re All For Bipartisanship -- by Molly Ivins/TruthDig

Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake screaming, “Bipartisanship!” and scare myself.

Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an extramarital while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatment.)

This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the Dems have to go. I tell you what. Let’s all hold hands together and sing, “Oh the Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends!” Just not, please, Newt Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies, godless, liars and other such bipartisan-promoting terms.

Please, anyone but Newt.

Now, from my hours spent battered and half brain dead listening to the fatuous, sell-important commentators of our nation, I learn that the people of this country did not elect liberals to Congress last week. Nope, they elected populists! Well, gosh all hemlock. I’ll be go to hell. Populist! I AM one. Honest—been a populist so long I’m on my third bottle of Tabasco.

Who knew? I thought all said I was chopped liver. Populist. Like Tom Frank of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” fame. Jim Hightower. We can even draw our lines of political genealogy—via Ralph Yarborough and Bob Elkhart.

A populist is pretty much for the PEOPLE and generally in this case exactly the same as a liberal—we just put the em-PHA-sis on a different syl-LA-ble. We also tend to be more fun. We do not vote to hurt average Americans, even if the corporate payoff is really big. Even if it’s just a little bit—like the bankruptcy bill.

We tend to focus less on social issues and more on who’s gettin’ screwed and who’s doin’ the screwin’. In my opinion, Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They are getting screwed by Large Corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.

The word populist was misused, abused and co-opted by right-wingers for years, ever since we were all forced to read Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Bad history can do a powerful amount of damage. Most of us stopped at the painful news that Tom Watson, leader of the late-19th century populism, went on to become a raging racist bigot. Populism itself took on the connotation of bile and nastiness, a la Father Coughlin.

If you read back to the beginning of the populist movement, however, you will find Andy Jackson and the West set against all those dreary snobs of the East. When Andy opened up the White House and let in the people, all the snobs had the fantods.

OK, it’s not the 19th century anymore, but it is always the right time to point out the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. Honest. There stands George W. Bush, buck nekkid. We want to help him out of this fix because he’s dragging the whole Army, the country and the world down with him. But don’t ask us to call those clothes.


2. New Head, Same Policy
The Perishing Republic
By RON JACOBS/Counterpunch

"While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens" -- from Shine, Perishing Republic by Robinson Jeffers

We live in dangerous (and interesting) times. Yet, not since the 1960s has there been an opportunity to change the direction that the powerful and greedy are leading us like that which exists today. Of course, the converse of this truth is that there hasn't been this degree of risk to the very existence of the world since the 1960s, either. Massive mobilizations of weaponry and bloody force have been used by the forces of US capital in an attempt to dominate the world and its people. Supplemented by trade agreements that are primarily beneficial to the financial capitals of New York and London, the capital of the world's richest cartels of finance and industry flows like water without regard to borders to wherever the lowest wages can be found. This race to the bottom precipitates corresponding wage decreases in the powerful nations of the north and massive migrations of people from the south towards the northern jobs that offer better pay than those in the migrants' home countries. The answer to this migration is racism and xenophobia from northern workers that feel threatened. Of course, these twin phenomenon are encouraged by most elements in the north's ruling elites since it takes the heat off of their policy of free trade.

That is but one element of the current imperial order. The other, more obvious and explosive aspect are the wars precipitated by Washington, London and Israel, with various supporting casts. In this scenario, Tel Aviv plays the rabid pit bull, Washington the trained-to-kill Doberman, and London the poodle that considers himself vicious, even though the closest the poodle ever gets anymore is maybe a good hump of the US shepherd's leg. These wars are part and parcel of the neocon-neoliberal plan to dominate the world in the name of US capital. Notice the countries that Washington threatens Iraq, Iran, Northern Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, to name the first that come to mind. All of these countries have (or had, in the case of Iraq and Serbia), one thing in common. They refused to go along with US capitol's designs for free trade, opting instead to defy the trade agreements that suck the lifeblood out of the majority of the people in the countries that sign them. So they get the sword, instead of the pen.

The latter may certainly be less painful, but the results are the same. After free trade is agreed to by the elites in Washington and your home country, there is certain death for many of those not considered part of the program. For the US workers in the equation, there is a certain change in your material standard of living. If you were already poor, you're even poorer now.

In countries to the south, the masses rebel at these agreements and take their anger to the streets. Lately, they've even changed a few governments so that they work a little more in their favor--Venezuela, Bolivia, even Chile. But here in the US there is no recourse within the political system. Yet, all we ever do is complain. Or get mad.

I just finished re-reading Arthur Miller's play The Crucible. For those of you unfamiliar with the work, it's nominally about the Salem witch trials in Salem, Mass. back in the late 17th(?) century. There's a line in the play that easily applies to any type of fundamentalism--religious or political. That line goes like this: "cleave to no faith when faith brings blood." Yet, that isn't what the play is really about. It's about fear and intolerance. Indeed, Miller wrote the work during the era of McCarthyism and hoped his audience would draw a parallel between the testimony of the girls in Salem that sent several women to their deaths because they were considered to be witches and the testimony of those being called in front of the McCarthy committee investigating communism in the US. Like the reaning that informs today's fear of terrorism, no woman accused of witchcraft was proven to be a witch--instead, they had to prove that they weren't witches. Those who lied and said they were witches had to then go along with the charges provided by the prosecutor against other women or they would be sent back to prison. Today, it's not enough to say you are not a terrorist--you must support the policies and wars of those who say they are fighting terrorism and thereby prove that you aren't. That is what is meant by the phrase you're either with them or against them.

I read a few different newspapers every day. Most of them are from the US. One thing I notice about their coverage of certain issues is how incredibly skewed it is. A relevant example (besides the obvious one of Israel and its sanctity) is the way in which most US papers present the immigrant rights question. Despite the incredible numbers of people that turned out demanding legalization of undocumented workers' status, the continuing coverage of the issue presents the activities of the much smaller (and I mean much smaller) anti-immigrant groups as equal to the popular upsurge for immigrant rights. Now, we all know that the mostly unsaid motivation behind groups like the Minutemen is a fear of a non-white planet. More specifically, it is a fear of a non-white United States. The fact that newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Pos t spotlight the vigilante activities of the Minutemen and its members is one thing. The fact that they present their fears and racist reactions as rational and worthy of front page coverage reveals something more insidious. By doing so, the liberals prove themselves to be the tails to the neocons head on the corporate capitalist coin. The sooner the movement truly understands this, the better off it will be. Everything that George Bush and his cronies have done and are doing was begun or maintained during the Clinton years. There is a cartoon from an old underground newspaper --1969 is when it appeared I think--where LBJ is laying in a hospital bed awaiting surgery. The captions are a paraphrase from the philosopher and writer Herbert Marcuse and read like this:

"(Panel 1) The art of holding on to power is our American system's know how. Given their constitutional rights, dissenters help maintain the status quo we call repressive tolerance. (Panel 2) It works this way: you let dissidents say whatever they please in a system loaded in favor of the powerful elites. The dissidents let off steam in a controlled way and the controllers keep power. (Panel 3) The trick is to make change look so tantalizingly close that it dulls the edge of militancy and makes revolutionary reform impossible. (Panel 4) Of course, every 4 to 8 years people will start blaming you personally for the lack of change, so you change your face."

Instead of LBJ's head being on the body in the hospital bed, the last panel shows Richard Nixon, who, of course, became president in 1969. One wonders whose head will be in the White House in 2008 carrying on the same policies as Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton before him? Does this mean that elections are irrelevant or that Bush and Cheney shouldn't be impeached? Of course not. What it means is that such efforts are meaningful only when they are carried out with the understanding that they are not cure all remedy, but just an opportunity to educate people to the true nature of the system. Like the elections held every couple of years, all adjustments to the current system of government--a system based on the right of those with the desire and cash to exploit the rest of us--are merely adjustments. They will not solve the fundamental problems. Those problems are more than political and more than economic. Indeed, they are on the broad swath of human endeavor where politics and economics collide and mingle. Political systems are designed to uphold economic systems. The republican system of democracy we live under is not a system where the people rule, but a system where those with money rule the people. So, as long as the system of monopoly capital rules our economy, than the political system will mirror those capitalists' needs and desires, not ours. That is the risk to the world. Our risk is to be found in attempting to subvert this mechanism.

(Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground , which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden . He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net)


3. The Aftermath
Democrats, Born to Compromise
By SHARON SMITH/Counterpunch

Commenting on the results of Election Day 2006, Republican Party pollster Bill McInturff told the Wall Street Journal that Republicans faced "the most difficult environment since Watergate," referring to the scandal that forced then-President Richard Nixon to resign from office in 1974.

This is encouraging news for everyone who has spent the last week celebrating the Republican Party's "thumping'" by the angry electorate-to quote the visibly disoriented president, fumbling for words, in a White House press conference the day after.

Within 24 hours after the polls closed, we were treated to the sight of Donald Rumsfeld-no longer sneering, but instead choking back tears-during his brief Oval Office "resignation" ceremony, before Bush's handlers permanently shuffled him out of sight.

The seemingly unstoppable Bush regime unraveled with stunning rapidity when faced with a massive voter rebellion last Tuesday. The widely accepted notion of the apathetic (and, presumably, politically contented) American majority also took a thumping last Tuesday.


The angry electorate

According to the New York Times' exit polls, six in ten voters said their vote was based on national, not local, issues. The same percentage disapproved of the war in Iraq and said the war had not increased the security of the United States. Six in ten voters also disapproved of the way Congress was handling its job. Six in ten voters who described themselves as "independents" voted Democrat, while two-thirds said they were dissatisfied or angry with Republican leaders.

There was also a class component to the Democrats' victories. About half of all voters said they had just enough money to continue at their present standard of living (otherwise known as living a paycheck or two away from poverty), while one-fifth said they were falling behind financially.

The Wall Street Journal reported that exit polls showed that of the 31 percent of voters who said they are "getting ahead financially," 63 percent voted Republican; among the 51 percent who reported they are "maintaining their living standard," 39 percent voted Republican; and among the 17 percent who said they are "falling behind financially," only 21 percent voted Republican.

Indeed, 66 percent of those who hadn't completed high school voted Democrat.

Race also played a key role in voting patterns, although a higher percentage of whites also voted Democrat. The percentage of white voters going for Democrats was 48 percent in 2006, compared with 41 percent in 2004. African-Americans continued their long-standing loyalty to the Democrats, by an 88 percent margin (identical to 2004). Asian voters voted by a margin of 67 percent for Democrats in 2006, compared to 56 percent in 2004.

But Latino voters showed the greatest increase in Democratic voting: 73 percent in 2006, compared with 53 percent in 2004. Only 27 percent of Latinos supported Republicans, in contrast to the more than 40 percent of Latinos who voted for Bush in 2004.

The 2006 election also drew the highest percentage of young voters (under age 30) in a mid-term election in 20 years-up by more than 4 percent since 2002. According to exit polls, 61 percent voted Democratic in House elections, playing a key role in close races that pushed Democrats over the top.


Enter stage left: the other corporate party

The Democrats must also appreciate that their victories in the November 7 elections were due in large part to a shift in corporate loyalties. The Republican Party has traditionally been the preferred party of America's corporate class, openly parading the virtues of laissez faire capitalism. But the Democratic Party remains the corporate party-in-waiting, ready to cloak the same class loyalties with compromises aimed at curbing mass discontent when it threatens the class status quo.

The Bush administration served the corporate class well, providing tax cuts for the wealthiest percentile in the midst of a major war. But the electorate apparently caught on to this increasingly transparent hoax.

Corporate dollars began a significant shift to the Democratic side in the weeks before the 2006 election, signaling a ruling-class consensus on the need to shift from "Plan A" to "Plan B". It cannot be a coincidence that Rep. Mark Foley's sexual indiscretions became media fodder just six weeks before the election-since they were well known, apparently, years ago. While it is a pleasure to watch the mainstream media attacking Bush ruthlessly now, their corporate sponsors have approved and encouraged the media's about-face.

Given the limits of the two-party system, the Republicans' loss was the Democrats' gain. But the message was unmistakable. As the Chicago Tribune noted on November 8,

"Americans finally got to vote on the war. They want change. They got to vote on one-party rule. They rejected it. They got a chance to vote local. They voted national. Indeed, the Democrats essentially beat something with nothing. They offered no clear agenda, no Contract with America, not even a memorable bumper sticker. This was an election driven by feelings of rejection far more than embrace."

The Democrats are rejoicing in their successful "centrist" strategy in this election-deliberately running Democratic social conservatives opposed to abortion and gay marriage against Republican social conservatives also opposed to abortion and gay marriage in several key races. These included abortion opponent Bob Casey Jr., who beat Republican abortion opponent Rick Santorum for his Pennsylvania Senate seat; the also victorious Indiana sheriff Brad Ellsworth, who won a House seat while opposing abortion rights and same-sex marriage; and Christian Heath Shuler, an evangelical who won a House seat in North Carolina last Tuesday. And they will seek to continue this "centrist" strategy into the 2008 presidential election.

But the election results were definitive on only one issue: discontent with the Republican Party. The red-state vs. blue state formula adopted after Kerry's defeat in 2004 was extinguished by voting results, in which Republicans who just months ago were on top in opinion polls were voted out in many "red states."


Rising expectations: the Democrats' dilemma

But the Democratic victories have led to a rise in mass expectations for an end to the Iraq war, a raise in the minimum wage, and an end to political corruption.

The Democrats, of course, have no plans to shake things up. This election was widely touted as a referendum on the war. But so far, Democrats have provided only a vaguely worded "phased withdrawal" of U.S. troops from Iraq at an unspecified future date.

In a post-election interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer, likely 2008 presidential contender Barack Obama backpedaled on his earlier pledge to begin withdrawing troops by the end of this year:

"I think now it's too late to try to start something before the end of the year. What I would do is sit down with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military that's actually on the ground and figure out, how do we fit together a military strategy that can start that phased redeployment, but ensure not total collapse in Iraq, and also make sure that we engage the Iraqi government [We need] to make sure that they [the Iraqis] know we're serious about not being there permanently."

Michigan Democrat Carl Levin, in line to become chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was more explicit. "We have to tell the Iraqis that the open-ended commitment is over and that we're going to begin to have a phased withdrawal in four to six months," he threatened-as if Iraqis invited the U.S. to invade and occupy their country in 2003 and are now taking advantage of Americans' waning goodwill.

So far, Democrats have gone no further than deferring to the recommendations of the (Republican) James Baker-led Iraq Study Group-which is rumored to embrace a strategy for significantly lowering down U.S. troops at an unspecified date.

Overall, the watchword of the victorious Democrats remains "bipartisanship." Despite the venom of their own campaign ads, they seek compromise with the Republican Party.

This is not surprising, since a U.S. defeat in Iraq would be on par with the humiliation U.S. imperialism suffered after its defeat in Vietnam. And both Democrats and Republicans are, after all, pro-war, imperialist parties.

The electorate has spoken. But it is worth noting that the Watergate scandal, while ending Nixon's presidency, did not lead to a seismic shift leftward in the political climate. On the contrary, U.S. politics moved decisively rightward in the following years, as the mass social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s pinned their hopes on the Democratic Party to spearhead social change. As it turned out, the Democrats responded to corporate pressures to tack rightward, leading eventually to our present predicament.

We should not repeat the mistakes of that past generation of leftists. The Democrats, like the Republicans, must respond to mass voter discontent. But their shared goal is a return to politics-as-usual.

The Democrats will not deliver an end to the Iraq war without substantial pressure from below. And that requires large-scale, grass-roots struggle. This should be a wakeup call to everyone who wants an end to the Iraq war, a raise in the minimum wage, a step forward for immigrants' rights-and an end to politics-as-usual in Washington. The door for social change is opening, but we must take action to achieve it.