Democrats Don’t Care about You
by Reza Fiyouzat / July 12th, 2008
Public Service Announcement: You don’t need political analysts; just read the news. Singular lines of news suffice at times. You are now in the post-analytic age.
Here is a one-liner from a Yahoo! News piece on the recent passage of the Snoops-R-Us bill in the Senate: “Obama ended up voting for the final bill, as did Specter.”
That one sentence tells you all you need to know about where Obama and most Democrats stand on the issue of civil liberties and what political leaders are not willing to do to protect those liberties. Now, that should be enough to make you withdraw your support from Obama’s presidency — if, that is, you still have illusions about the Democrats in general, and Barak Obama in this round of Anybody-But-Bush/McCain.
“What?” says you, “And let McCain win the election?”
To that it must be said: What on earth is the difference when the Democratic presidential nominee, during the election campaign, votes in the same way as a right-wing Republican not just on any bill, but on a bill curtailing people’s civil liberties?
Of course, Obama, being a smooth political operator, made a mountain out of his molehill of an ‘opposition’ to the bill, by supporting an amendment to the bill that would have removed the telecom’s immunity, but when the amendment failed, he simply dropped the ball on the whole thing and plainly didn’t care enough to vote No (only symbolically mind you, since its passage was assured tremendously by the rest of the Democratic corporate lackeys masquerading as people’s representatives).
This, in an election year, is highly telling, if not plain astonishing. It is customary for Democratic politicians to pull symbolically left-leaning gestures during the presidential campaign seasons, to prove this or that credential with this or that constituency that has real and therefore left-leaning needs. So, one would have expected Obama to move slightly to the left of the right end of the political spectrum, if only for just a quick photo op.
As the presumptive nominee, he could have rallied all the Democrats into a cohesive voting block to stop this further erosion of people’s civil liberties; he would have raised his political capital by millions. One would have expected fiery speeches in support of a change from the totalitarian path set by the Bush administration to a situation where people’s rights were restored, secured and hopefully expanded. Instead, this Democratic candidate has been proving his right-wing credentials one after another.
-- more at link
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2008/07/democrats-dont-care-about-you/
