Post-Election Celebration
I don't have any warm, fuzzy feelings about the new "Democrat" majority (anti-choice Democrats? Can't we just start a new All Your Bodies Are Belong To Us party?), but Rummy's departure fills me with that special glee that only hard-won schadenfreude can provide.
posted by Turtle at 1:02 PM
6 Comments:
There's just one nagging question for me about the "pro-life Democrats." Is a anti-choice Democrat one who will make symbolic gestures towards religious crazies during campaigns but actually do nothing about it (like many moderate Republicans have been doing for ages) or will they actually aggressively pursue anti-choice policies once in office?
I honestly could not care any less. That they exist is an affront to the idea that any election can be anything other than a choice between two evils.
To me, it's always a matter of lesser evils, because every candidate has something that you agree or disagree with. They probably should, otherwise every person in the world should just be sliced into Red and Blue and not allowed to have any opinion beyond the conservative or liberal agenda.
There are gay Republicans and pro-choice Republicans, too, but that doesn't mean we scream that "they should be more evil than that."
Personal opinion.
But see, gay republicans have formed their own branch of the party, and even started endorsing different candidates, whereas Dems seem to think all people who are opposed to... well, to Republicans should be good enough. And, NO. It's indicative of a party platform that has been thrown out the window in favor of sheer power-seeking, and while the Religious Right scares the shit out of me, this almost scares me more. Because I've seen "revolutions" (yep, I've heard Dems calling it a revolutions) based on the "we'll take power and THEN sort out our philosophical differences" principle before, and it doesn't end well, and most of the people it doesn't end well for have little to no say in what happens.
The analogy to gay Republicans just doesn't wash, not because they aren't similar groups, but because they don't act and aren't reacted to by their parties in similar ways.
Random addition: I don't think it's entirely accurate to portray the Democrats as having won entirely on the back on conservative Democrats either - though that's the way the (conservative) media likes to portray it. Among the freshman Dem senators include a senator from Wyoming who's a pro-choice, liberal organic farmer, a senator from Vermont who's a self-described socialist, and a senator from Missouri who is pro-choice (and hails from a Red state that just voted to support stem cell research). Most newly elected Democrats didn't win this election by "going conservative." Polls show the most important issues were corruption, Iraq and the economy. On each of these issues, the Democrats won by running to the left of the Republicans - for the first time in many, many elections, and it paid off. Truth is there have always been pro-life Democrats, the fact that there are some now as well is proof of no big change in strategy for the party. The pundits and the media just love to dwell on the topic b/c of the success of Fox News and the Republican Party at seducing "values voters" to win power.
Two links on the myth of the conservative Democratics:
One.
Two.
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