Can this party be saved?

I’ve been cruising the web, checking out the blind men groping different parts of the elephant and trying to make sense of it all. None of them are seeing the big picture though, with the exeception of Ian Welsh and he’s even more pessimistic than I am. So, I thought I’d throw my own uninformed opinion into the mix. Here it is.

The Tea Party should give the Democrats the willies but not for the reason they think. It’s not the Koch brothers who are the big problem here. Oh, sure, the crazy idiot libertarians of the Republican party are about to get their wet dream fulfilled. But if they didn’t exist to fund the Tea Party, the voters might have invented it themselves. See, a lot of the people voting for Tea Party candidates are voters the Democrats might easily have claimed as their own two years ago.

If the blogger boyz could actually bother to get to know them, they’d understand what kind of pressure the working class is under. They work long years for stagnant pay while their under water houses take up more and more of their income. They can’t send their kids to college without saddling them with crippling debt. Their employment prospects are dim. And someone’s always got their hands out. Sometimes it’s teachers. Sometimes it’s bankers. Sometimes it’s their unemployed neighbors. To top it all off, the businesses that became cozy with both parties are ripping them off in every transaction from the ATM to the airlines to the gas station. And no matter how desperate they are for relief, the government only subsidizes the most destitute. In other words, you have to lose absolutely everything you have ever worked for before you get a boot with which you can pull yourself up.

Now, two years ago, those people had a choice. Or they THOUGHT they had a choice. They could have hit the reset button and gone back eight years or they could take a risk with Barack Obama. The choice was made for them by blogger boyz who felt they couldn’t leave this monumental moment of transcendent, orgasmic change in the hands of stupid working class people. So, we got change.

But while the blogger boyz were basking in the afterglow, life went on for the working class. And life has gotten significantly worse. The Democrats have given them nothing. The health care reform act was less than nothing. TARP was a disaster. HAMP is a disgrace. And as Peter Daou pointed out today, more people were killed in (non combat) operations in (not) Iraq, or something like that.

Believe it or not, guys, the working class can read.

They are not amused. At this point, the lives of the working class of the Tea Party have become like a sinking liferaft. They are throwing everyone else over to save themselves. Well, who can blame them? The Democrats gave them nothing in the past 6 years. At least the Tea Party Republicans offer them tax cuts. If that’s all they can get, they’ll take it.

And don’t blame them for this choice. It’s not because they’re stupid. It isn’t that they don’t understand that they are only hurting themselves. It’s that the Democrats give them no alternatives. And they’re pissed off. They could have had another Clinton.

Now, the lefty bloggers can continue to make fun of them and pile on Sarah Palin but that only going to make the former Democrats in the Tea Party even madder and more committed to getting rid of Democrats. They are tired of being mocked and treated like suckers.

The Democrats appear to be headed for political impotence. If they lose Congress, it’s back to the hinterlands, with no committee chairmanships and less seniority and meager campaign contributions. Obama will have to carry the ball for the whole party. Let me repeat that. OBAMA will have to carry the ball for the entire party.

Can this party be saved? I dunno. Depends on how badly it wants to save itself. Is it ready to make peace with the people it stupidly threw away in 2008? I’d like to think so but the Catfood Commission is still in business. That’s a bad sign. Oh, and Elizabeth Warren’s appointment would signify that the days of a free ride for bankers and credit card companies are coming to an end but that doesn’t look very promising at the moment.

It would be helpful to bring in another quarterback for 2012 but the blogger boyz are sneering at that idea.

I guess the answer is, No, unfortunately. Too bad really. Because unless the voting machines are already rigged, a party still needs voters to remain viable. And the Democrats got rid of a good chunk of them in 2008.

Pass the crumpets.

Wednesday: Live by the sword… yada-yada-yada

Dayum, it sure is easy to become cynical this season. Everyone seems to be double crossing everyone else with a “nudge, nudge, say not more, a wink’s as good as a nod to a blind man, eh, governor?”.

The Blogger boyz who were supposed to keep the media in check were coopted by it. Joe Lieberman, the Wormtongue and bane of our existence, is suddenly worthy of pity as his camp tries to outfox Obama’s camp who is trying to nail down the coffin of the Clinton campaign that just wants to get their damn delegates counted like every other candidate we have ever known while Howard Dean tries to rewrite history, “No, we’ve NEVER had the loser’s delegates counted at a convention.”

Has the whole world gone out of it’s frickin’ minds?

We know the media lied its ass off.

We know the blogger boyz propagated those lies because they were having kids and the college funds needed filling and, “Jeez, it’s just a presidential campaign, all the candidates are the same, They’re the SAME, you stupid, old, uneducated, Sino-Peruvian lesbians, I swear, why do I even bother talking to you broads?”

We know the DNC rigged the delegate count. We saw it with out own lying eyes on channel 210, CSPAN 1, while Donna Brazile, who has provoked unwanted negative feelings towards the country in us, screamed about the RULZ that were selectively applied.

We know that Lieberman is a double crossing. mean spirited Iago and no saint and without question set up that abominable Kyl-Lieberman amendment as a political wedgie because no matter how the Democrat voted for it, he/she was screwed.

And we know that just like every frickin’ controversial and politically tricky vote that he has ever been confronted with, Sir Obama bravely ran away.

The only refreshing thing about this primary season is that Clinton was forbidden to behave cynically during this primary season. Oh, she certainly tried to slip a few cynical jabs in there but on nearly every occasion, she was caught, flogged, stripped of all dignity, had each example paraded before a national audience and ridiculed. Well, *that’ll* learn her. Yep, cynicism was definitely off the table for Hillary. She was forced to play a clean game and she nearly won. Some of us would cynically say that she actually *did* win. And this bodes well for future candidates. You can run a relatively clean campaign and win even if every breath you take is jumped on by the media and the blogger boyz as one you had no right to inhale.

But what of Obama?

Well, I’ve been saying all season that the best way to take down the poisonous media’s ability to choose our nominee every four years would be to elect Hillary. But instead of sapping their powers, we have cynically seen everything they were up to and given in to it while barely uttering a discouraging word. Now, the media beast has grown and it’s going to start focusing its laser like attention on the presumptuous nominee. And since the blogger boyz have lost all credibility, they will not be able to walk it back. The media monster roars with delight and toys with its food before biting off each limb.

I would laugh cynically about this except that it’s a sad, sad day when the place I hungrily turn to for news is my own blog.

(This not to denigrate any of the efforts of my worthy cobloggers. It’s just that, well, there’s not much else out there that we can trust anymore.)

In the meantime, PUMAs, put your cynicism away for the morning. Gird your loins for another battle.

Silly video; great song.

Note to Kbird and ronk: I cleaned out the moderation queue and have documented the atrocities in a Word file for future reference.