I think it's dangerous to think of this as being Rumsfeld 'getting his comeuppance' - This is the bare minimum of pressing questions that demand an answer from the Secretary of Defense.
it's also worth noting that the line of criticism is entirely directed at the military's capacity to fight the war as ordered, not the decision to fight it in the first place, or even overall strategy, human rights abuses, etc.
the obvious response is that the Bush administration will be "forced" by this scandal to further increase military spending.
it's like "intelligence reform." when they cry "our intelligence agencies have become ineffective" it means they want three things: more money, less accountability, and relaxation of civil rights protections. because they've successfully framed the issue in terms of remedying current inadequacies instead of expanding already-bloated powers, they're going to get all three.
Forgive me for being overly optimistic, but history shows that societal change CAN be effected from the bottom up. All we need is for enough people to get pissed off enough to raise their voices and take action.
this is true, presuming that there is grassroots support which has yet to be untapped, but the people are not on our side right now and that's not going to change in the next four years. we'd be extremely lucky if it were to happen gradually over the course of the next forty. they have the grassroots advantage, frankly, and i hate to admit it but higher turnout anywhere other than the African-American community probably helps them.
frankly, we've kept ourselves content with the idea that we speak for the people, but i don't honestly think that's the case. i think that the American political system is floating on top of an effectively bottomless well of hate, zealotry, and ignorance, and any politician who panders to that we be rewarded, and anyone who bucks the tide will get lynched. if there's going to be any "grassroots uprising" in the near future, it's going to be against us and our perceived domination of the culture/treason/moral decay.
I'm thinking about public opinion of the Iraqi War as well as the GOP in general. For example, we have a mid-term election in two years. The President can't do anything on his own; he needs the support of Congress. If people in Congress get the impression that supporting Bush may cost them re-election, they may think twice before doing so.
that's not going to happen. pretty much every Congressional district in the country has been gerrymandered to within an inch of its life, specifically to cement control and prevent rapid turnover. any change in the House is going to be glacial. is it true that the House now has less turnover than the Soviet Politburo in its heyday?
the Senate is even more set in its ways. the best we can hope for in the Senate is a mass defection on the part of Chafee, Snowe, Collins, and maybe Specter, but that wouldn't even give us control of the Senate.
By a very slim margin.
not slim enough. anyway you slice the numbers, there's no way to build a solid Democratic electoral majority right now. Kerry did extremely well by keeping the gap that narrow, but they own the South, period. that gives them a built-in advantage which we have to fight to overcome in every other state. what this election proved is that margins are so narrow that we could win a lot of states, but the electoral college situation basically means we have to win all of those, and the odds are against that happening, barring a massive Depression-scale economic collapse which we can successfully pin on Reaganism.
and it's worth noting that Kerry's lead in California shrank significantly from Gore's, and Gore's was down a bit from Clinton's. the red counties in California are basically the Central Valley and the exurbs, and they're growing faster than the urban cores because our sprawl problem is out of control. some pollsters are predicting that California will be seriously in play in 2008. i don't think i need to tell you that if the Democratic party cannot count on California as a safe blue state, it cannot elect a President.
in any case, the Dems seem to be seriously considering responding to the election results by shifting even further to the right, which means that even if "we" won, we'd lose.
as far as progressives in this country go, we need to recognize that, in the words of the elder Dr. Jones, "we are pilgrims in an unholy land." we need to concentrate on protecting our enclaves and surviving long enough to start building up a credible opposition, from the ground up, starting in the areas we control. |
