Kagro X Lets Loose Against the Defeatists (You Know Who You Are)
Thursday, March 30, 2006
If you don't know Kagro X, he is a contributor on Daily Kos. He has been a great worker bee in the movement to impeach George W. Bush.Here is his latest post (copied with permission). In it, Kagro goes after the so-called pragmatists in the Democratic Party.
------------
"We can't impeach," I'm told daily. "We just don't have the numbers. We need to focus on the elections and winning back the House and Senate. Then we can have real oversight, and do the things we want to do."
Well, I've had about enough of this so-called "pragmatism." Not because it isn't rooted in truth, but rather because the roots aren't as strong as people think.
It's not that I have a magic formula that suddenly will give us the numbers -- although I do believe there's an outside chance that good, old-fashioned hard work can give them to us, in the same way we found "the numbers" to dump DeLay as Majority Leader, without a single Democratic vote.
No, the reason I can't accept the old "we don't have the numbers" routine -- especially when it's paired with the equally obnoxious "wait until after the elections" canard -- is that, well... we "don't have the numbers" for anything.
That's right, folks. The big news of the day is that EVERYTHING the Democrats are planning to campaign on in November is something we "don't have the numbers" for.
BY DEFINITION.
Be it health care, campaign finance reform, ethics reform, serious oversight of the executive branch, Iraq, or what have you, if Democrats "had the numbers" we wouldn't have to campaign on it.
So what is it, exactly, that makes everything but impeachment so damned magical that it can be freely discussed -- without "distracting from the elections," mind you -- even though we "don't have the numbers" to get it done?
Is it the unproven (and possibly unprovable) "conventional wisdom" that only impeachment will "hurt us at the polls?" How exactly have health care, campaign finance reform, ethics reform, and the rest been performing for us at the polls? Why are we in the position of having to "win back the House and Senate," again?
Is it that "Karl Rove wants us to talk about impeachment, to bring out the GOP base?"
This, I assume, would be some new part of the base that he's not been able to bring out with the "War on Christmas," the liberal efforts to "ban the Bible," the threat of same-sex marriage to every household in America, and the "don't send a signal of weakness to al Qaeda" ploys.
"No, no," you say. "The Republican base is going to stay home and sit on its hands, because they're fed up with the 'Culture of Corruption' and the 'Rubber-Stamp Congress.'"
Again, you must be thinking of the base that doesn't think the "Culture of Corruption" line is really just cover for a "War on Christians," as Tom DeLay now tells them it is.
No, I'm afraid we're going to have to face it. The excuse that "we don't have the numbers" applies to everything we want to do. The very reason the things we want to do are campaign issues at all is because we "don't have the numbers."
So, "we don't have the numbers" can be either the reason voters have to give us their trust for all the things we want to do, or it's a reason not to even try them until we do have the numbers. But not both.
Which one will it be?
I don't see any Democrats withdrawing the bills they've authored but "don't have the numbers" for. Do you?
