Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Independent Voters

I read with great interest an article by a writer associated with the Philadelphia Inquirer. The author is/was a registered republican who has now become a registered Independent. He asserts, fairly I believe, that he did not leave the party, as much as the party left him, a claim many people could make on both sides of the political aisle.
My wife and I have discussed leaving the democratic party for at least similar reasons. In our case, it is not so much that the Democratic Party has sold itself out to an extreme fringe group (regardless of the claims of the lunatic right wing). No, unlike the republicans who cater mainly to the farthest reaches of their right wing, democrats seem to cater to nobody. Well, that’s probably not fair. I’m sure that various lobby groups remain pleased. I mean, they had a 60 vote majority in the Senate and still couldn’t muster enough votes to pass real health care reform.
What’s that all about? Like they need an 80-vote majority to pass anything significant? So, now with the catastrophic loss of what had been a safe seat—the “Kennedy Seat” (he didn’t really own it, he just rented it for a really long time) they only have a 59-vote majority . . . tsk, tsk. But do they really need 60 votes to pass anything? Well, no, they only need 51 votes, but they are so terrified of a filibuster that they sit in a corner sucking their thumbs every time one is promised by the “loyal opposition.”. And what’s wrong with simply letting the republicans filibuster? Let’m read the phone book til they wet their pants. They’re going to look stupid, and then there will be no question about what they are doing. Now, with no penalty at all, they can stall whatever they don’t like . . . and that would include anything Obama wants to pass into law.
So, they dither. It’s like watching the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
And then there’s the yakety yak about, of all things, the deficit. Heaven knows it’s big and getting bigger. But has anyone noticed that the deficit was created, as out of whole cloth, by the republicans? And they’re the ones screaming about “generational theft” to use Sarah-Barbie’s term of art. Remember, St. Ronald, and the Bush family created more debt than all other presidents combined. Now, to be fair, they create debt for a purpose—to drown the government in some mythical bathtub. See, they don’t like government, so to prove it, they always run the most dysfunctional governments possible—crazy almost. But have the democrats nailed them to the wall on that one? Nope, they instead allow the right wingnuts to yell and scream about democratic deficits.
So, their habit of wandering around the landscape, or sitting in some corner sucking their thumbs, while the right wing rages on, has become really annoying, and we are considering dumping them.
The main problem is that Independents include assholes like Joe Lieberman. Do I really want join his party??

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