MacGowan Gets It

As it turns out, it’s not such an unlikely partnership after all, since one of the two ‘liberals’ – Robert Kennedy, Jr., that most prototypical of Washington ‘ultra-liberals’ – is actually “a longtime personal friend of Ailes,” who has played a major role in shaping the decidedly right-wing voices of both Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This would, of course, be a rather surprising revelation – if there were any actual substantive differences between the nominal ‘liberals’ and the nominal ‘conservatives’ in Washington, but there isn’t.

I am reminded here, for no particular reason, that I had a rather humbling experience the other day whilst visiting my local supermarket. As it turns out, grocery shopping in my neighborhood can often be a humbling experience. You wouldn’t think it would be, but it is – primarily because a local cadre of dedicated LaRouchians seems to have adopted the front entrance to the store as their primary base of operations. So doing the grocery shopping now means running the risk of being accosted by one or more enthusiastic, but hopelessly confused, young men and women who feel compelled to lecture me on my obvious lack of knowledge about national and world affairs.

My latest encounter involved my being chastised for not knowing that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid deserves my full support as he works diligently to impeach and remove the evil Dick Cheney. Reid is working, you see, from a blueprint provided by Mr. Lyndon LaRouche himself, so we know that his is a sincere effort. The fact that I did not recognize Reid as a knight-in-shining-armor was a dead giveaway that I am not up to speed on what’s happening in Washington.

Here I was thinking that Reid was just another fully complicit puppet who unapologetically supports illegal wars abroad and massive repression here at home, but it turns out I was wrong. Now I can hardly wait to find out what other knowledge the local supermarket has to offer. Will I learn that Patrick Fitzgerald poses an actual threat to the Bush administration? Or that John McCain is a legitimate critic of the regime? Or that, as many people seem to think, Ahhnuld is really a closet Democrat (he is, after all, married to Maria “I’m a Kennedy, so I’m obviously a liberal” Shriver)? Or that Hillary Clinton is a foe of the Bush crowd, even though her husband’s primary job these days seems to involve working hand-in-hand with George, Sr. to do damage control for George, Jr.?

But wait! That can’t be right, because Bill Clinton is a hero to the LaRouchians (at least he used to be; I haven’t really kept up on my readings from the master in recent years). Why, he’s practically the anti-Bush! I assume then that he must have perfectly good reasons for spinning the Bush response to Katrina, and the necessity of continuing the illegal slaughter in Iraq, and the importance of renewing and expanding legislation like the Patriot Act. I have no idea what those good reasons might be, but apparently Lyndon does, because his disciples appear to be convinced that the Democratic Party, and prominent individuals within that party, offers some sort of real alternative to the direction this country is currently heading.

And that, my friends, is simply not the case. If the Democrats were truly an opposition party, and if they had any desire to wrest power from the Republicans, the Democratic Party platform for the upcoming 2006 midterm elections would be aggressively and unapologetically anti-war, to capitalize on the fact that a sizable majority of the American people now oppose the occupation of Iraq. Indeed, if the American political system was at all legitimate, Democratic politicians, and the purportedly liberal press, would speak the truth about the conquest of Iraq – the real goals being pursued, the true human cost, the blatant illegality of the invasion and occupation, the use of illegal chemical and radioactive weaponry, the use of death squads and torture, the illegitimacy of the puppet government – and the American people, already inclined to oppose the war, would quickly run the war-mongers out of Washington.

That is how a democracy is supposed to work: a politician gets elected to office by voicing support for policies favored by the majority of the voting public, and he then takes action as an elected official to implement those policies. The question then that some of us need to ask ourselves is: if we live in a country in which a clear majority of the people oppose an illegal military occupation, and yet not a single elected official will take a principled stand against that illegal occupation, do we really live in a democracy? And does anyone really think that the Democratic Party’s 2006 platform will be anything but aggressively pro-war?