Posted inPolitics: National

Dangerous party animals

Dear God, I wish America had a real two-party system. As it is, the Republicans have been reduced to a regional gaggle of angry white guys. They're opposed to everything but tax cuts and — now that their profligate former president is gone — government spending. One of their most prominent governors hinted that Texas ought to secede. I wish we could let them go, confiscating North Dakota's nukes on the way out. And given the Great Disruption that is only beginning, national breakup is not out of the question. But the reality is that what's left of the Republican Party are welfare queen states such as Arizona and Mississippi that need the federal Treasury even as they curse it.

The damage from the Republican crackup goes beyond the latest laff riot on Fox "News" or even the bottleneck in the Senate. I think about Seattle, where Democrats have been in charge for years, often with bumbling results. It would be nice to have a real opposition party that would provide meaningful competition. One-party polities are never healthy. But the Republicans can't be trusted because in power, even those who claim independent thought almost invariably become janizaries of the extreme right and its bankrupt policies.

Think about Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Big Finance). Wouldn't it be nice to have a Prescott Bush-style Republican to take him on (Bush defeated Dodd's father for the senate seat Connecticut in the 1950s)? Such a Republican wouldn't be focused on defunding Amtrak, denying global warming and voting in lockstep with the extreme right. We would have an alternative — perhaps as much a creature of big money, perhaps not. But competition that would keep everyone more honest.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Don’t get depressed — Get mad

Here’s my advice to Obama supporters: Turn off the television. Put away the depression. Get mad and get active. The race is far from over unless there has already been a stealth coup in this country — a subject for a future column. The Republicans are the party that wrecked America — and McCain and Palin are Republican to the core. They’re counting on Americans to be stupid and easily manipulated. Obama is counting on us to be smarter than that, to be Americans, a people who once were never "easily led" by demagogues.

I don’t trust the corporate media, especially the electronic kind. I don’t trust the polls. They are trying to game the outcome. The "economic royalists," to use FDR’s term, were never going to give up power easily — nor was the military industrial complex. I never doubted that the conservative base would come "home" eventually, or that this would be a close election. And there’s the elephant in the room: will enough white Americans vote for a black man?

It’s interesting to recall that, unlike many other democratic countries, America once had two mass parties. Republicans and Democrats had liberal and conservative wings. In 1936, for example, Gov. Alf Landon was a liberal Republican challenging FDR, and might have made a race of it had not his campaign been co-opted by the reactionaries in the GOP.

Now only one mass party remains: the Democrats.

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