By Dennis Loo
Relief that at last the evil warlocks will be gone can be felt everywhere.
The day after the election Nancy Pelosi declared, while basking in the glow of the GOP getting drubbed in the elections, exactly the same trend that swept the Democrats back into the majority in the 2006 mid-term elections, that a “new President must govern from the middle.”
The GOP’s defeat happened despite Congress’ approval ratings being even lower than the White House’s. It happened because of the deep and wide revulsion towards the Bush Regime’s policies. But the American people’s political sophistication isn’t yet high enough. The belief and hope that voting for a candidate who sounds like he’s going to bring a change – and that that is all it’s going to take – exists broadly among the people. Obama’s campaign skillfully appropriated phrases from the movement and Obama speaks repeatedly of this cause being something that requires people’s participation. But what he means by this is very different from what most people think.
Pelosi said what she said not because she’s an idiot, like Palin, but because she’s dishonest. Her comments are the equivalent of an army soundly defeating the other side and then having the victorious general say: “No hard feelings. You and I are still going to rule in tandem and with equal regard for each other’s views.” Apparently, “change” isn’t supposed to mean a change from the “bipartisan” debacle that got us to this point.
The election results were meant by the voters to be understood as precisely the opposite of Pelosi’s claim.
The electorate wants the policies of the Republicans and the free market fundamentalists to go the way of the DoDo Bird.
But this is not what Pelosi and the Democratic DLC want. Pelosi, who was briefed back in 2002 about the use of waterboarding on detainees and told that the NSA was spying on all of us, said nothing then and has said nothing since. She has actively shielded holding the war criminals in the White House accountable. By her silence and inaction, she has been complicit in war crimes.
Continued co-operation and complicity with the GOP and the Christian fascists is what we’re going to get from Pelosi and Obama, unless and until millions in this country realize that merely voting and going to campaign rallies is not going to do what must be done.
Unless and until a movement that is independent of electoral politics arises in sufficient magnitude in the society and demands the righting of the wrongs that this government has brought us – including from the likes of the Pelosi and Reid and Obama – then the very people and policies that we and the world have been suffering under the heel of will be allowed to continue, with a slightly different tinge.