Post Trump Letters to My Democratic Senators

As much as know-nothings and racists, corrupt Democrats who don't listen to or fight for their constituents cost their party the presidency.

Here's one of my letters to my three Democratic senators (one is being replaced at the end of this term by another). I live in a Republican House district, so I have no rep to contact there.

Feel free to copy and send it to your own senators, reps, and state and national party officials.


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Sen. Dianne Feinstein

United States Senate

331 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

November 13, 2016

Sen. Feinstein,

As a Democratic voter old enough to remember the George W. Bush years, I urge you to fight against Republicans and fight for progressive values rather than repeat the shameful enabling that Democrats in both chambers did for nearly all of the Bush presidency.

I am under no illusions that Democrats made some faulty tactical political decisions to pursue a greater good. 

The reality is too many elected Democrats take their marching orders from Wall Street banks and other corporations even when what they want conflicts with the best interests and wishes of the overwhelming majority of your constituents.  This has been especially true on issues like Wall Street deregulation and  bailouts, instead of regulation and vigorous prosecution, enabling the privatization of public education and prisons, and not publicly challenging the business and geopolitical goals of our foreign policy and means of implementing them.

A profound example of this was Obamacare that was written largely by insurance companies with seemingly no provision to control their arbitrary price increases instead of something like Medicare for All or at least a public option that would have served as a threat to private insurers that if they didn't act ethically, their customers could leave them for that.

Democrats in Congress have also supported rather than opposed our profoundly dishonest and criminal policies in Middle East.  Our allies in the Gulf, and indirectly (barely) our own government are supporting groups like ISIS to undermine secular regimes like the one in Syria, and the past one in Libya.

Likewise, the recently declassified Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 make it clear that Saudi Arabia funded and supported the 9/11 hijackers, which our government did nothing about.  This makes it clear that terrorism is not a problem our government is fighting but a tool and excuse it is using to pursue other goals.  No one in the leadership of Democrats in Congress has ever clearly articulated what those goals are and consistently fought this agenda that I know of.

Worse, once the Cold War ended and Russia became at least as capitalist as us, rather than find a way to cooperate with them, we have violated our word, expanded NATO to their borders, and fomented coups in places like the Ukraine to install regimes hostile to Russian security and economic interests like the transit of oil and gas from Russia to European markets.  A lot of people like myself balked at voting for Hillary Clinton since she had enthusiastically implemented this policy as Secretary of State and during her campaign, announced even more confrontational policies that could have lead to war with nuclear armed Russia.  While we might "win" such a war, millions would lose their lives and trillions dollars would be wasted to benefit very, very few.

While you have been progressive on many domestic issues, your family’s profiting from war contracts makes your support of any policy in that area suspect to say the least.  

Senator Feinstein, I urge you to help make the Democratic Party represent working people instead of just being the corporate party that doesn't pander to bigots.

Urge your colleagues to fight for leaders of the Democratic minority in Congress who will fight for progressive values.  Wall Street tools like Chuck Schumer should not even be considered an option.

Democratic voters will no longer tolerate politicians who give us lip service during election season, their back after, and their loyalty to Wall Street.

Sincerely,

 Professor Smartass

Joe Lieberman will be VP on BOTH Clinton and McCain 2008 tickets

Sen. Joe Lieberman with running mates Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton

It has long been suspected that Joe Lieberman would make history by being the first person to run for vice president for both major political parties, but now he will top himself and potentially appear as VP candidate for both parties at the same time.

Lieberman was Al Gore's running mate in 2000, and has been widely rumored to be John McCain's choice this year.

Today, Lieberman not only announced that he will be on the Republican ticket, but that he will also be on the Democratic ticket if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

"I think this shows what is really great about America," Lieberman said at his press conference. "There is something for everyone in this decision. Voters get to choose between two candidates who differ on issues like gay rights, abortion, and whether blacks should continue to be allowed to vote, all issues which people of good will can legitimately disagree on, while the business community can be reassured that when president Bush is out of office, nothing will change in terms of tax, regulatory, trade, or our Iraq and future war policies."

Sen. Clinton said, "Joe is the smart choice. He is trusted and beloved by pundits, Republicans, corporate lobbyists, really all the people who matter. This signals them that they will not be forgotten by a new Clinton administration."

When asked if he had been approached by Sen. Barack Obama's campaign to be his running mate as well, Lieberman appeared pain. "We have not closed the door on that possibility," he said, "but Sen. McCain and myself recently tried to persuade him of the merits of having me on his ticket, and we have yet to hear back from him."

"Frankly, he is turning out to be a bit of a divisive personality," Lieberman added. "Even before these revelations about his pastor, Sen. Obama said some very hurtful things about the Iraq War before we even got it started. We were trying to put something together that could help building contractors, defense contractors, security contractors, and of course the oil industry, and his comments were not helpful at all. Just recently, he refused to even show up to vote for the Kyle-Lieberman amendment to exterminate Iran, a bill that had broad bipartisan support.

If he does win the nomination and eventually the presidency, he needs someone like me close by to help him straighten out his priorities. "

Which doctor do you see, the new kid or the ones who killed a million patients?

When you are sick, you find that there are only three doctors to choose from.

One has been a doctor for a very long time. He has helped some patients but made many a lot worse by saying the best treatment was no treatment at all, and then moving the life-saving equipment to the room of a very wealthy patient getting a tummy tuck. When he would prescribe a treatment for regular folks, it was often because he got kickbacks from the drug company, and the patient did not necessarily get better--but he was still required to pay his bill. The one time the very seasoned doctor saw an irritated patch of skin on a patient, declared it a potential epidemic of flesh eating bacteria, and prescribed a cure that killed over four thousand of our troops, and a million Iraqis (but some drug companies did suspiciously well during the epidemic).

The second doctor has less experience but has a good record treating children and bandaging some knees. She did occasionally prescribe some drugs that seemed to help the drug-makers more than the patients too. Unfortunately, she strongly agreed with the first doctor about the big epidemic, and help administer the treatment that killed so many. Worse, she sees a nearby rash that she says will need the same treatment, and will likely lead to even more deaths.

Both say the third doctor is dangerously inexperienced. They admit that it was true he correctly diagnosed the irritated patch of skin as something that could have just been watched and treated with some ointment, but he does not have the long experience of killing patients that they do.

So who do you choose, the inexperienced but correct doctor, or the experienced ones who bury their patients?

Fuck experience: in this election, it equals betrayal

Actually, it has equaled betrayal for a couple of decades if not always.

If you look at the ''experienced'' candidates' record in power, it is largely one of betraying the middle class and kowtowing to corporations, particularly on trade and foreign policy.

While the war in Iraq is the most glaring example of this, their support of trade deals that eviscerated American jobs and neoliberal shock therapy for other countries that reduce most people to poverty and demand the end to any New Deal type social programs have been going on for decades with bipartisan support.

After 9/11, experts familiar with what Wall Street has directed our foreign policy to do to other countries said they were surprised the hijackers weren't from Latin America given our century of crushing their desire to raise their standard of living and control their own natural resources since it would have cut into mining, sweatshop, and banana plantation corporations' profits.

In the Middle East, our experienced leaders have supported vicious dictators like Musharraf, the Saudi royal family, the Shah of Iran whose rule led to our current bad relations with that country, and even Saddam Hussein until 1991. So long as these guys played ball with American corporations, our experienced leaders did not give a rat's ass about what they did to their own people and even trained them in how to keep the plebes in their place.

In Iraq, already a profit-making machine for defense and rebuilding contractors, Bush is twisting the arm of the Iraqi parliament to pass an oil law that will give 88% of their oil wealth to big oil companies, a deal other oil-rich countries would never accept without a gun to their head. Do you think that might some Iraqis mad enough to have killed some of our 4,200 troops who are dead? Was giving that oil to ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil, and BP worth killing over a million Iraqis and spending up to half a trillion tax dollars, more than the whole federal budget was in 1988.

And in case you haven't noticed, those corporations have a bad track record of sharing the profits from those foreign assets acquired with our military with the rest of us. The privatize the profits and socialize the cost.

Our representatives in Congress knowingly lied about the causes of the Iraq War as well. Every member of Congress is old enough to remember the Cold War knows that even if Saddam Hussein or any other third rate dictator gets a handful of nukes, he would not dare use them on us or give them to terrorist who would because we have 10,000 nuclear warheads and would burn their country off the map before the mushroom cloud cleared here. And we would still have enough left over to do the same to every other country on earth every day for a week. That was enough to stay the hand of the Soviet Union for four decades even though they had MORE nukes than us. Americans may have forgotten that, but the rest of the world has not.

To the degree that we have a legitimate need for defense, it is in part to protect us from those who have suffered at the hands of our experienced leaders.

I would trust someone more who isn't on a first name basis with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, George Shultz, Colin Powell or any of the other technicians of these policies.

With the exception of Dennis Kucinich, presidential candidates in both parties have the ''experience'' of largely supporting these policies that impoverished average Americans and the rest of the world. Kucinich is largely ignored and mocked by the media precisely to prevent him from getting power or even being able to force the debate to the realities of our policies and away from haircuts and fairy tales about spreading democracy and fighting the boogey man.

This makes two relatively inexperienced candidates, Edwards and Obama, look more attractive. Both have their drawbacks. Neither would cut insurance companies out of health care altogether. Obama takes corporate donations. Edwards voted for the Iraq War. But their relative inexperience means they are more likely to change their ways just as a relatively inexperienced JFK did once in office and as his brother did before he ran for president.

So in this election, fuck experience.

Hillary's Iraq War vote: she didn't bother to read intel report that showed how thin evidence was

This focuses on Hillary because she said she would still vote the same way with the same information though it brings up that Dodd, Biden, and Edwards are only in slightly better shape since they also had access to the NIE that cast doubts on whether Saddam had WMD. The most damning line though is that then intel committee chair Bob Graham went as far as to have CIA director George Tenet declassify part of his behind closed door testimony and give it to the press, and he urged other Democratic senators to read the NIE that had the grave reservations about whether Saddam had WMD, but few bothered to read it before they voted.

As some one old enough to remember the Cold War but still younger than all the candidates, even if the only info on WMD they had was what we all heard on TV, they would know exactly what Tenet was forced to say in what he released to the press: even if Saddam had nukes, he would only use them as a last resort while being attacked. He may have been an evil man, but he was not retarded. He knew full well like every other world leader that if a nuke went off here and we had a return address (or even if we didn't) the country that launched or smuggled it would be burned off the map and we would still have plenty of nukes left to do the same to every other country on earth four or five times.

Everyone who voted for the war resolution is old enough to remember that, and if they pretend they thought Saddam was a threat, they are lying. They may be telling nicer lies than the Bushies, and may not step on our civil rights as badly if they become president, but if they lie about something so important, they are likely still susceptible to doing the real decision making behind closed doors and making up fairy tales to tell us in public so that democracy is as effectively neutered on foreign policy as it is under Bush.

KEY EXCERPTS:


posted June 1, 2007 (web only)

Hillary's Political Horror Story

Nicholas von Hoffman


Slowly, very slowly, Hillary Clinton's vote to invade Iraq is turning into a political horror story. It is the moldering hand of a murder victim coming out of the grave to grab her by the ankle.

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She may be concerned that a retraction will make her look weak. So her line of defense has been, "My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at the time." She says it over and over again.

The facts she had and the facts she could have had before she cast her vote for the war are two different things. We learn that from an article in The New York Times Magazine by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.

These two, who have made a career out of investigating Hillary, have dug up a couple of facts the Senator is going to have a hard time ignoring. The big fact is that she had access at the time to a highly classified report, the National Intelligence Estimate, which contained authoritative doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Gerth and Van Natta have established that she did not read this report. Because it was classified, senators wishing to read it had to sign in, and Hillary did not. Although one of her Democratic colleagues, Bob Graham, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, urged Hillary and all the other Democratic senators to read it, few did. Graham, however, read the ninety-page document and was so shaken by the questionable evidence for the existence of WMDs that he voted against going to war.


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