Half-Full? Half-Empty? Who Fucking Cares? I Just Don't Want To Cut My Lip When I Take A Sip...

I'm neither a pessimist nor an optimist with respect to the national political outlook. I am an historical materialist. I ask: Has there ever been a fascistic coup--the revolt by elites against the masses--which was not, at least in the short run, 'successful'? I cannot recall one.

The last time there was anything even remotely resembling a 'liberal/progressive' agenda in DC (which is where it matters that there be one or not) was 1965.

The LBJ civil rights and anti-poverty initiatives--which was of what those died-aborning progressive agendas consisted--have been arrested and are being slowly but surely, but inevitably and irresistably reversed.

Roe-v-Wade is steadily being rolled back, one state at a time, not on ballots, but in legislatures and state houses; the new SCROTUS membership has signalled its hostility towards stare decisis, e.g., schools have been invisibly but irreversibly re-segregated by the both judicial fiat and the ever-growing divide between economic classes.

The Church committee in '75 was the last serious effort to rein in US excesses in intelligence gathering and domestic surveillance; and it was recently blamed for the laxities and failures which are blamed for the success of the IX/XI attacks.

The Raygunauts saw to it that media concentration would proceed pretty much unfettered by oversight or unchecked by law or custom; and that there would be no undue (uncomfortable, costly) restrictions on what banks and other financial institutions could do to collect more ever more of the national treasure.

The invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iraq, and the increasing and altogether predictable heightening of global military tensions in the run-up to the USer 'election' in '08, provide both incentive and opportunity for the corporate operatives in the entails of the State to abscond with ever larger bags of swag.

The Dems elected this year have evidently not a chinchilla of an inclination to pursue any agenda that is not in lock-step with what CorpoRat Murka insists upon. Their otherwise inexplicable failure to use the Rules of the Congress to even IMPEDE the Bush-cabal agenda suggests they at least sympathize with (or hope to inherit) the powers the Busheviks have so illegitimately arrogated to their own political advantage.

Hence there will be no more tax credits for alternative fuels/energy sources, or small-scale energy-efficient technologies--but there will be a major, sustained push to build more nukes, and to develop off-shore oil puddles (Pete Domenici just called for the end of the off-shore drilling moratorium, and (also NM senator) Bingaman will likely follow suit--after a bout of public and lugubrious hand-wringing...

The Dems have not the numbers to make an issue of national, universal, single-payer health care; at least not over the objections of the Insurance and Health Provider industries which are hugely, enormously, unimagineably profitable, and growing more so with every passing day, as more and more of the populace descends in to the morass of preventable diseases, cleanseable pollutants, and the accompanying toxicities necessitated, and exacerbated, by our 'life-style.'

To look for political solutions, in a nation divided 51/49 along so many crucial and definitively determinant fault lines is risible...

I'd have been happy if the New Dems would have just tied to cripple the Busheviks, but they've pledged to bi-partisanship, and have caved in on far too many crucial votes to be trusted as a true opposition...

None of the Democratic candidates has spoken explicitly and forcefully about restoration of the civil rights and liberties so critically eroded and diminished under the anti-Terror rhetoric propogated by the incumbent Regime.

Oh yeah, the economy is collapsing, too. Which will overshadow the clusterfuck in Iraq as the dominant issue of the coming campaign. Watch out fot tax-cut rhetoric rising. Surprise, surprise!

These are some of the conditions which it seems to me are basically irreversible, no matter which of the allegedly contending Parties takes nominal charge of the Government next year.

Shit! My lip is fucking lacerated pretty nearly clean off.