Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A Healthy Reaction to Attacks on Democracy

Crooks and Liars has a clip of Wisconsin Assembly Person Gordon Hintz reacting to the insulting treatment he is receiving at the hands of the Repug majority in the Wisconsin state assembly. As he makes clear, his anger stems from the fact that important stuff is being railroaded through without even a pretense of concern for democratic forms, rules, or ideals. $47 million is apparently being taken from his constituency and the city officials there are telling him it might mean the complete cancellation of bus services.

He hears about the Repug bill on the radio from an ad placed by a group in Washington D.C.. He's handed a 144 page financial bill on a Monday and told that the vote will be on Thursday or Friday. Requests for public hearings are ignored. At 4:57 he receives an email saying the debate on the bill is to begin at 5pm. At 5pm he goes to the assembly room and finds out that they're already voting.

It's an insult to him. It's an insult to the people who elected him. It's an insult to democracy.

Repugs are (thanks to the complicity of the Democratic Party's elites across the country) long-time masters of this sort of bullshit. Occasionally we see a Democrat who could even pass for a decent Canadian politician, explode in frustration. (Anthony Weiner's response to Repugs' cowardly attempts to reject a bill compensating 9-11 first responders by attaching all sorts of stupid amendments to it, and then mewling like the creepy babies they are when the Democrats tried to bring it to a straight up or down vote, is one such example.)

Now, I don't read right-wing bloggers. Mainly because when I did they seemed to be filled with asinine stupid garbage. But maybe there's all sorts of recent examples of Democratic perfidy on par with what the Repugs are doing. I don't know. But if so, it's wrong.

"AdScam" was wrong. Toppling Aristide in Haiti was wrong. Sending the RCMP to teargas heroic human rights champions at the APEC conference in Vancouver to protect mass-murdering kleptocrat Suharto was wrong.

But harper goes beyond, way beyond, what any Liberal or Conservative government ever did. This latest nonsense of allowing Bev Oda to lie to Parliament (probably to protect his own culpability in this case), refusing to obey court orders to release Tamil refugees, ... harper is pissing on our whole system of government. Forget compromised democracy, harper wants no democracy whatsoever (aside maybe from letting his own supporters vote, but so long as they have no power to ever disagree with him in the future).

Our political leaders should be outraged at these serial attacks on democracy because attacking democracy is supposed to be a bad thing.

4 comments:

Kev said...

Walker is playing from the neo-con handbook. We've all heard this story before. When he took office there was a budgetary surplus.

With massive corporate tax cuts and refusing federal grants, such as the 47 million transportation grant referenced in the congressman's impassioned speech, voila a deficit crisis, necessitating drastic measures. As per the handbook it is the working class and the poor who take the brunt of it.

This is all so transparent and predictable that I am at a loss to explain why so many are still oblivious to what is going on here.

thwap said...

Remember John Snobelen, the shit-head motivational speaker/high-school drop-out who Mike Harris made education minister, and who said he wanted to "create a crisis" in Ontario schools?

What surprises me is that we [more like mainstream gate-keepers] continue to treat these scum with any respect.

We should condemn them unreservedly.

Kev said...

One of the worst manufactured crises here in Canada was the "debt wall" bullshit used as a pretext for Martin's gutting of our social safety net in 94.

There was no debt crisis, it was pure fiction. Our bond rating remained strong and in fact as Linda McQuaig noted in her book Shooting The Hippo and later referenced in Naomi Klein's The Shock doctrine,the Moodys analyst responsible for Canada, stated that while he usually received complaints that his ratings were too negative, Canadian government and business leaders were calling to complain that his rating was too favourable.

thwap said...

Kev,

There are people who can connect the dots.

There are people paid to pretend that the dots can't be connected.

And then there are people like the "blogging tories" ... too stupid to even see the dots. They tend to see whatever pattern their masters tell them to. Today it's a gay Muslim terrorist on welfare, and three decades ago they saw Chairman Mao and Comrade Stalin in a 69 sucking on each others' ICBMs.