John Conyers
scolded Obama a few days ago:
Earlier this week, Michigan Representative John Conyers told reporters that he'd like President Obama to start fashioning himself after a different model of politician if he wants to get health care reform passed:
"The president could take a few pages from Lyndon Johnson's book... and start knocking heads together," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.
As these two articles remain seared into my mind:
David Swanson: Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment, January 14, 2009
And from
Arthur Silber on November 8, 2009
.....
As a practical matter, much can still happen between now and the summer and fall of 2010. A lot of variables will determine how successful the Democrats are in maintaining a majority, beginning but hardly ending with the final form of this bill.
Much more significantly, I think Welsh's formulation (at least in this post) fails to mention a deeper underlying problem. I discussed this issue in the final section of
"Those Who Enable the Triumph of Evil," where I excerpted David Swanson's
painful and detailed examination of how and why John Conyers, once an admirable politician in many ways, slowly and inevitably surrendered certain key principles that Conyers himself had repeatedly declared to be of supreme importance to him.
A few passages from what I wrote there will convey the sense of the issue I'm referring to, both with regard to the Democrats in general, and in connection with this latest abomination in particular:
Swanson documents Conyers' history on the issue of impeachment in devastating detail. It is a genuine Show of Horrors, and it provides plentiful examples of the rationalizations, equivocations, misrepresentations and outright lies that are required when an individual declines to fight against what he himself regards as monstrous and immensely destructive. Swanson goes through all the major arguments that have been used in the last few years to discourage impeachment -- all the arguments that many of you have undoubtedly seen offered by most of the leading liberal and progressive writers -- and he demolishes every single one of them.
...
This is one of the bitter, deadly fruits of cowardice in the face of evil. It helps to illuminate a critical principle, one that would be very simple to appreciate if it were not for the unstinting efforts made by Democrats like Conyers and the most vocal of Democratic apologists to evade the truth and refuse to acknowledge the obvious: each retreat from battle makes the next battle that much harder. The Democrats are always talking about "saving their gunpowder" for the next fight, which will be the genuinely important one. But each act of cowardice of this kind -- and it is cowardice, we should call such acts by their rightful name -- weakens them, rather than making them stronger. Each concession to evil makes evil stronger, while the coward reinforces his own cowardice. Thus, evil consolidates and expands its reach -- and those who would fight against evil are pushed farther offstage.
...
Appreciate just how pathetically shabby this is. Conyers might have lost his prerogatives within the existing system. That possibility carried more weight than defending liberty, justice and fundamental human decency.
Thus, the lesson: when you choose to be a critical part of a system that has become this corrupt -- and the endless corruptions of our corporatist-authoritarian-militarist system have been documented at great length here and in other places -- you will not ameliorate or "save" it. The system will necessarily and inevitably corrupt you.
With very few exceptions, and the exceptions are so few in number that they cannot alter the general direction of events, these are corrupt individuals operating in a profoundly corrupt and infinitely
corrupting system.
That is the basic underlying truth, or at least a statement closer to where the truth will be found. Against that terrible fact, all the rest recedes into the comparative meaninglessness and even triviality of empty public pageantry.
In the
NY Times story about the House passage of this detestable bill, we read this utterance from the awful Steny Hoyer:
“We did what we promised the American people we would do,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader...
On this occasion, Hoyer is entirely correct.
If you listened carefully to what almost every politician said during the last election campaign -- and I emphatically include what
Obama and all leading Democrats said -- and if you understood what they were saying, you realized that they told you over and over again that they would fuck you in an endless variety of ways, until almost every last drop of your blood and almost every dollar you possess were gone. In their infinite kindness, they won't kill you, for they hope to extract still more from you, as your life and hope slowly ebb away.
They've kept their promise. They've fucked you yet again, just as they said they would.
And they are very far from done.
The abominable truth of this matter is, where we find ourselves now, there is no reliable representation for progressives in this country.
And my definition of 'progressives'? Those who fight for economic, political and social justice and equality for all people.
What we are facing now is massive, systemic corruption.
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