Enemy Combatant
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Yo Ho Ho -- Time To Pirate Up!
The current crop of Democratic Senators remind me of the meek, elderly, veddy British chartered accountants of the Crimson Permanent Assurance Company, in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. Wetted fingers forever to the wind, they wait endlessly in the Doldrums for a strong gust of public opinion to break their spell of inertia and send them sailing toward victory over their vicious corporate overseers (read: the GOP).
Well, fantasies are great -- but if that pirate raid is ever going to happen, they've got to learn to pull up anchor and set their own course. And to do so, they would do well to learn a little about the swashbuckling origins of the term "filibuster."
The first order of business, of course, would be to force Sam Alito to walk the plank. Despite what the so-called liberal media are telling us, his ascension to Sandra O'Connor's seat on the bench is not a done deal, because their calculus has discounted entirely the possibility of a filibuster. The public, we are endlessly assured, supports the Alito nomination, because they believe he won't vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the public, like Mr. Bumble's law, is often an ass, an emptyheaded cypher offering opinions based on nothing more than misinformation and lies.
While time is running out, it nevertheless is yet on the Democrats' side on this issue. They have done a piss-poor job of "framing the issues" with Alito: pointing out how the Court doesn't need another regional, political, partisan, constitutional, ethnic, religious, educational and familial clone of Antonin Scalia; how the Federalist fetish for a "unitary executive" is the looniest of tunes this side of Scientology, and Alito is its Tom Cruise; how giving Busholini unchecked power will make reversal of Roe v. Wade a minor blip on this country's low road down to fascism; how problems might arise when a supposedly secular country that claims to be 52% Protestant and less than one-quarter Catholic decides to put its first Papist majority on its highest Court.
If you haven't yet contacted your two Senators in Washington, to urge them to filibuster the Alito nomination, I ask you: What's your excuse? Do you care about your country, and its Bill of Rights? As for me, if I don't see a filibuster out of these invertebrates in the Upper Chamber, they'll never see another dime out of me -- it's that simple.
The second order of business for the Democrats is to show the public that all is NOT well in Washington, and that we face a danger far greater than jihadists brandishing boxcutters -- but this will have to be done by "catapulting the propoganda," if I may borrow a brain-addled phrase. The best way to show that sort of outrage, it seems to me, and right in the teeth of the complacent, wingnut-enabling media, is for our elected Democratic Representatives and Senators to rise up, as one, during next week's State of the Union speech, and collectively walk out on Bush and all his corrupt GOP colleagues. Let his empty rhetoric echo off the walls of a half-empty chamber, for a change. Refuse to act as props in Caesar's annual bread and circuses act anymore. It's mutiny time, Mr. Christian!
Believe me, if the Democrats did these two things, the public would take notice. The GOP would go into their Screaming Banshee routine, and so would their sycophants in the Beltway media, but so what? I'm sick and tired of the Democrats' sniveling battered spouse routine, ever hopeful that more beatings will improve our morale. This is a public that the GOP has numbed down and dumbed down to the level of enjoying professional wrestling -- let's give them a smackdown they won't soon forget.
