Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Fighting back

Wow...Democrats in Wisconsin delivered over 1,000,000 signatures for a recall petition against that Koch brothers whore, Scott Walker. A couple other GOP state senators are being recalled, too. It's moment like this that make me hopeful for American Democracy. Any sort of pushback against the Rethugnicans is unusual, let alone one of this magnitude.

And it seems to be spreading. Look at Ohio; they had the same basic things happening but now Democrats have refused to the the GOP controlled Legislature have a quorum to pass their regressive, union-busting bills. And in Montana (!) the state Supreme Court said, effective, that corporations are NOT allowed to spend endless cash on elections, deliberately flying in the face of the radical right-wing-nuts on the Supreme Court.

I got into it, a little, with a blogger I link to, concerning this -- Ian Welch. He thinks we're collapsing and by fighting it are only prolonging the inevitable. I think it's better to fight back. Most of the other commenters on his blog agree with him, of course, and have berated me a little. I've shot back, even though deep down I wondered if maybe they were right.

I still sort of wonder...but now I'm not so sure it's really all that inevitable. It looked like the end of Democracy in the early 30s, during the worst of the depression, but we fought back. McCarthy damn near destroyed Democracy in this country with his commie-like demands for loyalty oaths and purging of undesirables from government offices, but we fought back. Viet Nam and Nixon wounded us, but we still got back on top. Bush used hysteria to initiate two wars and tax cuts and we're finally beginning to fight back. For a while it looked like the GOP was going to set the full agenda for the rest of the decade, but then came OWS and shifted the dialog from deficits to jobs. Now we're at the point where, when an asshole like Newt Gingrich says liberals ought to be fired from government jobs, we shout back instead of cower in silence.

The pendulum is swinging and the Tea Party's insanity is being seen for what it is and the GOP is realizing they've shot themselves in the foot and even Obama is beginning to understand jobs are more important than kissing Boehner's ass...though that may change with his State of the Union address; he's twisted himself around so many times he's like a fucking pretzel.

There's always hope, even in the face of apathy and fatalism...both of which I'd felt. And we still the next Congress, which may be just as contentious as the previous one, and the election coming up so I may slip back to it. But right now I'm feeling a lot better about our prospects.

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