Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose imperial war? Want to see what happens to you if you honestly oppose a horrendous corporate boondoggle that will effectively kill genuine health care reform for years, if not generations? This is what happens to you: The Liberal Case Against Dennis Kucinich.

Yes, if you stand up against endless, pointless, profiteering slaughter in foreign lands, if you stand up against an astonishingly brazen, deeply dirty deal cut in the White House itself to enrich some of the most brutal, rapacious corporate sharks ever to feast, quite literally, on the bodies of nation's working people and the poor, then those Fightin' Progressives at Salon.com will come around and slap you with the cold, wet fish of their withering scorn.

They will join with the very model of a modern major general of the "Progressive Forces," Commander Kos his own self, to belittle you and denounce you -- no, not just denounce you, but accuse you, on national television, of being directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.

That's right; according to the Commander, if Dennis Kucinich dares to vote against whatever corporate blank check the bought-and-sold bagmen in Congress and the White House come up with to deliver millions of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans into the clutches of the health care and insurance conglomerates (which, as our Progressives themselves rightly remind us, are the ones with the real "death panels"), then Kucinich will be a mass murderer of Americans on a scale far outstripping the petty efforts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban during the long twilight struggle of our noble global Terror War.

And isn't it odd that these discrediting blasts from "the left" undermining Kucinich come just as his resolution for a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is about to come up for debate on the House floor? Well, no, it's actually not odd at all; it is entirely predictable. The empire simply could not exist in its current form without the diligent self-policing of the "serious," "respectable" "left." They take great pains -- and inflict great pains -- in their efforts to mock and marginalize anyone who steps outside the narrow, suffocating boundaries of "savvy" Beltway gamesmanship. You cannot seriously oppose our empire of military dominion; you can only debate on the best, most "efficient" way to perpetuate it. You cannot seriously oppose the overwhelming sway of Big Money; you can only propose the mildest of mitigations of its depredations -- but only if Big Money agrees, of course.

The main thing you must be is savvy. You cannot be a real live Fightin' Progressive unless you know how to play the game. Look how the Commander's amen chorister at Salon, Alex Koppleman, drips sniffling scorn on Kucinich's legislative record: "of the 97 bills Kucinich has sponsored since taking office in 1997, only three have become law. Ninety-three didn't even make it out of committee." And even those three, Koppleman notes, were just silly little proclamations, of interest only to the hicks back in Kucinich's district somewhere out there in flyover land.

But just think what a howling pig circus the United States Congress has been during Kucinich's 13-year tenure in the House. Look around at the vast wreckage these poltroons have helped perpetrate, from the deregulation of the Bankster gangs to the imposition of draconian bankruptcy laws (championed by our super-progressive vice president) to the panicky, pants-wetting trashing of the constitution in the Patriot Acts and Military Commission Acts and Retroactive Immunity for Telecom Lawbreakers Act (supported by our super-progressive president) to support for the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq (supported by our super-progressive secretary of state) to the redistribution of the nation's wealth (for generations) from working people and the poor to those same Banksters whose Congressionally-deregulated scams have plunged millions around the world into ruin.

This is only a fraction of an overall record of towering cupidity, stupidity and evil that almost beggars description. Why would anyone with even the slightest speck of honor or decency want to be considered a major, "savvy" contributor to such a legacy? And considering the conglomeration of political whores, bribe-takers, liars, warmongers, lackeys and outright lunatics that constitutes the bipartisan bulk of Congress, isn't it actually a badge of honor -- rather than a mark of shame -- for your legislation to be rejected by them?

Not for our "progressives." Koppelman's scorn for Kucinich's lack of "savvy" is palatable. His agreement with Kos's libel -- "holding people like Dennis Kucinich responsible for the 40,000 Americans that die each year from a lack of health care" -- is evident. The president who literally sold out genuine health care reform is not responsible. The Congress that concocted a series of hideous, confusing, corporate-crafted boondoggles that utterly reject the highly popular notion of a public option is not responsible. And evidently the dark, satanic mills of the health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industries are not responsible either.

No; Dennis Kucinich -- and "people like him" -- are responsible. Why? Because they cannot find it in their conscience to support what they fervently believe to be a harmful bill. This is their crime; to act according to their conscience on a piece of bad legislation that has somehow been elevated into a sacred totem, a holy grail by our respectable Fightin' Progressives. It doesn't matter what the Grail actually contains (or doesn't contain); all that matters is its symbolic significance as a great "victory" for our "progressive" president, and indeed, for all the progressive forces of our higher progressivism.

But what this "symbolic" victory will really do, of course, is lock into place -- for decades probably -- a rancid, corrupt and ill-serving system that will leave millions of the most vulnerable Americans at the untender mercy of corporate predators. However, if the bill were defeated, one could simply start all over -- with genuine reform this time.

But who wants that? It's too much like hard work. Symbolism is a lot easier than substance -- especially if you're a rootin', tootin', savvy, serious Fightin' Progressive. Anyway, symbolism is all you're gonna get from our imperial overlords. So you better just be happy with that little crumb. After all, as Commander Kos says, it's "a foot in the door." Who knows? If we all stay real serious and respectable, they just might throw us another little crumb somewhere down the line!

This, then, is what now passes for "the left" in America: snippy derision -- and thundering condemnation -- for anyone who dares suggest, even mildly, that a goddamn crumb is not good enough.
 

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Sean O'Neil said:

	... Excellent. Here's something I posted 5 days ago on my wall on facebook, in a discussion with a friend: The post-Vietnam path has been walked slowly and subtly. The Republicans serve a crucial role now -- the excessive ridiculous clowns compared to whom the Democrats look "sane" -- and that's why the Democrats will bring us the new McCarthyism.
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March 11, 2010 | url
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juan mcbadger said:

... Yeah, nice one, Chris. Salon's attack was shallow and stupid - I keep thinking that W made the great move of holding 150,000 of our kids hostage in the Middle East against their parents' good behavior. Now it's 40,000 potentially dead people held hostage against somebody's perfectly sane opinion. As if these people would save those 40,000, ho, if they could. As usual, thanks for your cuttingly insightful writing.

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March 11, 2010
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Mike Smith said:

... Right on the money. Obama SOLD rational healthcare reform over a year ago. When the planets lined up in the wrong positions during the Senate drafting and Reid breathlessly announced not only a public option, but a Medicare outreach to those who were 55 years old it took mere hours before you had Lieberman et al kicking the chair out. Hours. When the White House remained silent and ultimately there were no repercussions for Lieberman, the entire fucking universe should have figured out what Obama had done. It will thrill me if Kucinich doesn't cave. Millions have died since 911, and there are ghosts all over Washington. They won't be looking for Kucinich.

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March 11, 2010
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Expat said:

A germane comment made elsewhere ... ... As long as people refuse to see what their lying eyes inform them of what is before themselves, those people will never be able to respond to reality, most times the condition is named madness, they comprise “… the Madding Crowd”, best be “Far From”. The idea is broke, the government is broke, (edit: the Congress is broke), the Constitution is broke, the law is broke, the nation is broke, the economy is broke, the military is broke, education is broke, reason is broke, politics is broke, the language itself is broke, the people are broke, and nothing is able to repair such widespread breakage. A war has been waged against the national mind, that war was lost, the national mindset irrevocably altered, nothing of the “old order” remains but the myth of it; not even the history remains reliable, it too has been broken. Many elite went down on the Titanic, the elite will go down with the country, the substance of their elite is not exceptional outside of hubris. There are others that will inherit the earth, whatever condition it is in.

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March 11, 2010
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don nash said:

	Power Rangers "a howling pig circus the United States Congress..." that's a good one. Moulitsas is a punk. Simple as that.
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March 11, 2010
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Alan Smithee said:

	... The moral cretins of the pwoggieverse have always needed a lefty devil to hiss at, a stand-in for all their own ethical failings. So Kucinich is the new Ralph Nader. It's interesting that craven boot-licking democrat sycophants like Kos couldn't find anyone outside "their" party to abuse.
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Jimmy Montague said:

You go, Chris! "But just think what a howling pig circus the United States Congress has been during Kucinich's 13-year tenure in the House. Look around at the vast wreckage these poltroons have helped perpetrate, from the deregulation of the Bankster gangs to the imposition of draconian bankruptcy laws (championed by our super-progressive vice president) to the panicky, pants-wetting trashing of the constitution in the Patriot Acts and Military Commission Acts and Retroactive Immunity for Telecom Lawbreakers Act (supported by our super-progressive president) to support for the Hitlerian war crime of military aggression in Iraq (supported by our super-progressive secretary of state) to the redistribution of the nation's wealth (for generations) from working people and the poor to those same Banksters whose Congressionally-deregulated scams have plunged millions around the world into ruin." A howling pig circus! I keep coming back here because NOBODY ELSE WRITES LIKE THAT! I haven't laughed so hard since Hunter S. Thompson quipped that whenever the presidency was mentioned in the presence of Hubert Humphrey, the Happy Warrior began to look like six iguanas in a feeding frenzy.

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March 11, 2010
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Michael B said:

What's a "progressive" anyway? "Progressive"- It's just another weasel word. "Progressive" is merely a term that was salvaged from the scrapheap of history, sorry but that's too great a metaphor not to steal, by the alleged "left" in this country because the Limbaughs, Kristols,et al had so demonized the word "liberal." That's basically it, plain and simple. The problem is, that in spite of the fact they were led by one of the biggest imperialists and warmongers, the original Progressives were a bunch of Bolsheviks, compared to the hegemonic capitalists who wrap themselves in the "progressive" mantle today. While some of us here know that modern-day liberalism was founded to be a capitalist-friendly "third way" between socialism,and conservatism, most people do not. If they did and truly understood this history they would not waste all of their time and effort into trying to make "liberals", and The Democratic Party in particular, into the socialists they might want them to be. A "progressive" is someone who cannot admit to the systemic failure of the society. Through this stubborn blindness, they reveal their own fundamental loyalty to the social system as a whole. The solution to the "anti-democratic" turn in American politics is not to question its foundations but to proscribe "more democracy" or "real democracy", without evaluating for a minute whether the ""turn" is really an aberration. In economics, a "progressive" is one who blames an excess of greed, a deficiency of regulation, or the corruption of the state rather than the normal operation of capitalism. In this way, "progressives" are identical to Libertarians who, in the face of insurmountable evidence, continue to insist that it is "too little" and not too much "free enterprise" which is the problem. We need a capitalism based on good intentions says the one, based on a strengthening of the "individual" claims the next, and one purged of racial corruption declares the last. Fixing capitalism is the highest and in fact the only slogan of all of the above, and this in the most trivial and unhistorical way possible. Those are the last and the only words of this brand of "radical" criticism which is actually a radical support for the society as it exists... if only that society could be "allowed" to achieve its "true" nature. All too often "progressive" has come to mean someone who will offer unconditional support to The Democratic Party no matter what. A progressive is someone who believes in the system. Progressives and liberals are as ready as conservatives to support government interventions in our lives and on the world stage. The country in question may be Sudan, Afghanistan or perhaps Iran. The clarion call is the same. "We must do something” because “we” are superior, all knowing, and chosen by a divine force to make the world in whatever image we choose. No one asks how “we” is defined, or if the presence of the United States is needed or wanted. No one asks about the history of past interventions and their usually negative outcomes. It is assumed that Americans are good and know what is best for the world, despite a long history of numerous brutalities carried out across the globe.

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Sean O'Neil said:

	... Michael B's assessment of "progressives" is on the money!
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March 11, 2010
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