cindy sheehan: if mccain had won

Apparently the circus is in town again, and more cats of one colour or another will assume office in the US. I scratch my head and wonder why people think it matters which colour cat controls Congress.

Cindy Sheehan asks what the US would have looked like if McCain had won. The answer should not surprise you. Yet all those liberal and progressive USians are still voting Democrat, instead of building support for a progressive movement. Why?

What’s wrong with us? We are lazy, we are fearful, the establishment beats us down, we are ignorant, and we are defeated. Voting at least gives us the latent feeling that we are doing something, when we are really doing very little.

We righteously march down to our polling place, like good soldiers for the status quo. We vote. We get our little stickers with an American flag that proudly proclaims: I VOTED. But when we vote for a member of the political duopoly, we are only voting for "Dee or Dum".

The Democrats had their chance during the last four years, and instead of passing progressive legislation and ending the wars, they have pandered to the right, which has been emboldened by the power the Democrats gave it.

Now the Republicans are poised to take over at least the House of Representatives. And Democrats will begin to spew progressivism out of their lying mouths and abuse the energy of their newly-angry base to try to regain power - like the Republicans have done effectively for the past two years.

Will progressives ever learn that political pandering and fear-based voting never brings anything but defeat, or are we trapped in a vicious cycle of our own making?

Read it here.

If you're worried about a bunch of radical populists taking over Congress, Frank Rich has a good perspective on why they can't, and won't.

What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries.

If this crowd of pitchforks and torches bankrolled by billionaires really wants change, they won't get it through the Republicans, any more than progressives will get it through the Democrats.

In other words, don't worry. The Empire will not change from this election, nor the one after that, nor from any election in the present system.