The assessment that Thomas Magstadt offers in his article at Nation Of Change, Five Signs ‘Liberals’ in Congress are Faking It, isn’t a new perspective, but toward some good conversation, it includes what Magstadt calls
… a short list of urgent matters I predict Congress will dither over or simply ignore in the coming weeks and months.
He also encourages readers to “add to this list,” and I’ll second that call here. I’d guess we can come up with a quite lengthy list, given the Congressional history of “dithering” and “ignoring.” As Magastadt notes, the cost of such “faking it” inaction is paid by us. (emphasis added)
We can’t afford to go on letting fake liberals who ask for our money and our votes hide behind empty rhetoric while consorting with the same old paymasters and special interests. They have enabled Tea Party Republicans and it is now quite clear they intend to continuing to do so. … We must defeat them before we can defeat the extreme right.
Magastadt provides examples and analysis for each of his five “signs.” Below are excerpts.
Sign #1 The filibuster – … Senate Democrats have no desire to change the rules. As things stand, they can pretend to care and blame the filibustering Republicans for inaction. …
Sign #2: Gun control – President Obama struck the right chord on gun control in his inaugural speech, but there is one big difference between the president and every Democrat in the House and Senate: he doesn’t ever have to stand for re-election again. (Note that he, too, was careful not to offend the NRA before the November election.) …
Sign #3: Bank regulation – Here’s William Black, a leading authority on control fraud in the financial industry and corporate crime: ‘…President Obama intends to appoint Jacob Lew as Treasury Secretary Geithner’s replacement. … Geithner worked for a wholly-controlled subsidiary of Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Lew is the real deal, another brick in Obama’s creation of Wall Street on the Potomac.’ …
Sign #4: Campaign finance reform – Five Supreme Court justices say giving money to political candidates to steal elections and thwart majority rule is a form of free speech. …
Try to imagine a scenario wherein this Congress moves to counter a Supreme Court that has clearly gone off the constitutional rails. …
Sign #5: The battle of the budget – … Why does Washington continue to ignore the advice our best and brightest economists who urge stimulus not austerity – more, not less spending – in times of high unemployment and slow growth? …
A debt-ceiling band-aid allows Congress to back away from the ‘fiscal cliff’ for a few months but doesn’t fix anything. Nor does it commit the Republican to giving an inch taxes or spending. …
There will eventually be a showdown – or charade – over the federal budget. … (E)xpect a Washington sell-out.
A part of a complete analysis of “signs” of “faking it” has to include the actions of the people who the Electeds theoretically represent. This morning in a news story I heard “the 2014 midterms” referenced as a factor in what Congress and the White House will do. No surprise, but another indication of “faking it” as an accepted, that’s-just-the-way-things-are framing of our entrenched Duopoly. That framing fairly often has the Electorate “faking it,” too, both in terms of thinking / hoping that voting for Duopoly candidates will change the system, and more fundamentally yet, thinking / hoping that voting is sufficient action on our part.
(DonkeyElephant Combined Via If You’re Still Voting Dem/Rep)
Wait a second – you mean all those liberals who never do anything liberal are fakes? Next you’re going to tell me that professional wrestling isn’t real…
I think I could add:
Those fake liberals refuse to do anything about the continued erosion of constitutional rights brought on by the executive branch.
They also refuse to do anything about providing medical care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it – not making them buy insurance that won’t work for them, or making them hope their state governments will expand Medicaid, but actually making sure they have access, and that the cost of medical care isn’t going through the roof.
They refuse to try to do anything about climate change, including doing the things that would make our worldwide military presence less necessary by removing our dependence on foreign energy supplies.
They refuse to make education and the health of young people a priority. We can barely find enough young people who are qualified to join the military and willing to do so. Before too long, we’ll be just like Rome, depending on foreigners to join our legions.
But, I’m told, I have to keep supporting those guys, because otherwise The Other Guys will win, and then we won’t see any progress on human rights, energy, climate change, education, health care, etc. And, of course, we’re all lazy because we don’t want to join a corrupt organization to reform it from the bottom. After all, everyone knows that’s the way to do it.
I just wrote in one of Taylor’s threads today that progressives live in a different universe. They seem to think that politicians will do what we ask, because we asked nicely and we always vote for them. Then they’re shocked to find out that some politicians will change their minds about what they want to do that affects a group of people, because those people don’t vote for them anymore.
But then, I’ve also written before that the average progressive voter makes the average sack of hammers look like an extra large bag of artificial intelligence, and this is why. They’re at least twenty-five percent of the electorate, but they don’t understand how politics works well enough to even realize what they’re doing won’t work, so they never get what they want.
So called “Progressives” lost their way when they decided that the success of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama were more important than the success of Progressive reform, and then hid behind the false notion that the road to progressive reform lay exclusively with the Democrats.
When someone tells you to shut up about entitlements, defense spending, drones and poverty until After the Election, or tells you that they agree with everything you are saying but First We Must Win This Next Election, they are not your friend, and they are not a Progressive. They are a tool of the current Democratic Party. People who dress themselves in the armor of Better Than The Alternative are usually too dense to get that they are the reason we are where we are- in a Liberal Country being governed by Conservatives.