How did we get to this day?
No one apparently knows.
I’ve seen a lot of logical fallacies bandied around these parts over the last few days that paint democrats that were critical of their party for rightly calling out their parties failings as the reason we have Trump for president.
Let’s be honest.
There are a million ways that we got here today but the majority of that blame lies at the feet of democrats, and specifically the democrats that chose “Looking forward, not backwards, as a means of dealing with the rank, disgusting, illegal, unamerican behavior of the Bush administration.
When we failed to punish the people who illegally started two wars, enabled torture, used CIA blacksites, deported people to be tortured calling it: extralegal rendition, witnessed the destruction of a U.S city (NOLA), allowed unrestricted domestic spying, droning, outting of CIA agents as political retribution, ignoring the Downing Street Memos, allowing Karl Rove to defy congressional subpoenas, allowing 22 million emails that documented the conversation between neocons to just be “deleted opps”, and however many other abuses went on during the Bush regime:
We set the stage for Trump.
Many of you were here. You lived it. Hell, we lived it together. My first vote for President was for John Kerry specifically because I was being pragmatic after supporting Dean and wanted a check on Bush. When Kerry lost, the war was amplified, and Democrats ran on Bush’s “Culture of Corruption.”
Anyone remember that? I know I don’t have selective memory when it comes to that. Every — single — democrat — from Pelosi on down was running against Jack Abromoff, shady K street deals, and how Republicans had become more corrupt in a few short years than it took for democrats to in the near 40 years they held the House.
Yet, we win in 2006 and what happened:
www.nytimes.com/...
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi promised Wednesday that when her party takes over, the new majority will not attempt to remove President Bush from office, despite earlier pledges to the contrary from others in the caucus.
“I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table,” Pelosi, D-Calif., said during a news conference.
Pelosi also said Democrats, despite complaining about years of unfair treatment by the majority GOP, “are not about getting even” with Republicans.
She said the GOP, which frequently excluded Democrats from conference committee hearings and often blocked attempts to introduce amendments, would not suffer similar treatment.
“Democrats pledge civility and bipartisanship in the conduct of the work here and we pledge partnerships with Congress and the Republicans in Congress, and the president — not partisanship.”
She also extended an olive branch to Bush on the war in Iraq, saying she plans to work with him on a new plan but will not support the current strategy and supports beginning redeployment of troops by the end of the year.
Pelosi also said she supports the idea of a bipartisan summit on the war.
So we win the House after running against prosecuting war crimes, corruption, and then decide to keep our powder dry. When has that ever worked? Keeping your powder or “picking your battles” is simply synonymous with “I’m not gonna go against my donors.” If the last twenty years has many leftists acutely aware of anything, it’s bullshit detection.
So Pelosi goes against her base: The same woman who in the 1980s went to the DNC candidate forums and declared that democrats need to get in bed with big business or they will continue to lose to republicans.
She was not alone in this. All of the democratic leadership at the time supported “Looking forward, not backward.”
John Conyers was having meetings in the basement because congressional republicans refused to have any hearings, shutting the lights on Conyers, and turning off the cspan cameras. This was a big deal. I remember EmptyWheel’s coverage on it and how she was doing Pulitzer level work for this blog.
www.democracynow.org/...
Tomorrow in Washington, Congressmember John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will convene a public hearing on the so-called Downing Street Memo and other newly released documents that Conyers says show the administration’s "efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence." Conyers also says that he plans to raise new documents that back up the accuracy of the Downing Streets memo, which is actually the classified minutes of a July 2002 meeting of Tony Blair and his senior advisers.
So Bush team goes unpunished, democrats are demoralized, and in 2007 we get a historic opportunity to vote for the first woman or first african american to be president. I voted for Clinton in the democratic primary specifically because of Obama’s FISA vote:
thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/...
It should come as no surprise to Senator Barack Obama that his vote today in favor of expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is drawing cries of outrage from many corners of the liberal blogosphere. After all, the senator’s own campaign Web site had become a focal point for his supporters to express their displeasure with Mr. Obama’s stance on the bill.
That was the case again today. Carl from Ft. Worth, Texas, posted a message on Mr. Obama’s Web site this afternoon. The subject line read: “Obama just lost my vote.” He continued:
“I am disgusted. Obama will NOT receive my vote in November, regardless of whether it means McCain wins (at least HE’S being honest with us). Once again, Dems picked the wrong guy in the primaries. Time to leave the party I guess.”
Other comments struck much the same theme. Patrick in Chicago wrote “Can I get my money back this candidate appears to be defective” and Christopher from San Francisco put it simply “Senator Obama, you fail.”
Ouch.
I didn’t trust President Obama to go after the Bush regime for many reasons and never bought into “Hope and Change” since it appeared that President Obama wanted to expand the surveillance state and retroactively make all of Bush’s crimes legal. Which democrats and republicans then did.
So we win in 2008. Big historic moment. Jesse Jackson crying tears of joy on TV, country seems to be turning a new page after the last 8 years of 9/11,9/11,9/11, war, war, war.
Then, in his wisdom President Obama defers to the old boys club and says we gotta “look forward, not backwards.”
www.nytimes.com/...
WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama signaled in an interview broadcast Sunday that he was unlikely to authorize a broad inquiry into Bush administration programs like domestic eavesdropping or the treatment of terrorism suspects.
But Mr. Obama also said prosecutions would proceed if the Justice Department found evidence that laws had been broken.
As a candidate, Mr. Obama broadly condemned some counterterrorism tactics of the Bush administration and its claim that the measures were justified under executive powers. But his administration will face competing demands: pressure from liberals who want wide-ranging criminal investigations, and the need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies. At the Central Intelligence Agency, in particular, many officers flatly oppose any further review and may protest the prospect of a broad inquiry into their past conduct.
In the clearest indication so far of his thinking on the issue, Mr. Obama said on the ABC News program “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” that there should be prosecutions if “somebody has blatantly broken the law” but that his legal team was still evaluating interrogation and detention issues and would examine “past practices.”
Mr. Obama added that he also had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
Republicans, conservatives, neocons, palecon, whatever cons — were never punished and held to the rule of law when they broke it in the past. This has given them the false sense that they can do whatever they want. If Dick Cheney (who btw is saying Trump is over line), GWB, Rice, Card, Rove, Powell, and their entire imperial presidency could go without being punished:
Why do you have any expectation that Trump’s people believe they are going to be held accountable? They realized that they just have to lie, bombard people with more lies, and the media will not only dutifully stenography their lies, but the democratic party will not prosecute them if they lose that power.
I hope that in the future when it comes time for investigations, trials, and adhering to the laws we write for everyone except Republicans, our party, our leaders, our people: will hold them accountable.
If we choose to “Look forward, not backward.” — the next time we are faced with abject Fascism instead of the soft version practiced by Bush — we will loose at the ballot box and pave the way for another version of Trump.