Up against the wall

Writing in Salon on December 2, Sidney Blumenthal quotes from the Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication, a Pentagon panel that submitted its findings to the White House in September. This scathing indictment of US policy toward the Muslim world has been met, not surprisingly, with silence from the Shrub team.

One paragraph of Blumenthal's piece struck me:

"There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends. (Original emphasis.)" Rhetoric about freedom is received as "no more than self-serving hypocrisy," daily highlighted by the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies."

This is not a new idea - and the Bush team has not been the only one to diss it. In the wake of 9/11, Arundhati Roy said Americans "ought to know it is not them but their government's policies that are hated." In the midst of an article entitled "Blaming America First" in the January/February 2002 issue of Mother Jones, supposed leftist Todd Gitlin sneeringly described that as a "queenly declaration," adding that "the murderers did not trouble themselves with such distinctions," thus, as I said at the time, "sweeping up not only all anti-US terrorism, but a significant portion of the Islamic world, into one cruelty" by equating the 9/11 attackers with all Muslims who oppose the US. In a similar vein, Eric Alterman, the scourge of the SCLM, wrote in the October 29, 2001 issue of The Nation that the "'Hate America' left" should be "rejected for reasons of honor and pragmatism," although, unlike Gitlin, he couldn't be bothered to actually name anyone.

Unhappily, while time may have dimmed that sort of foolishness - certainly Gitlin and Alterman have fallen silent on demands that the left spend time and energy to "draw this line" between "principled dissent" (Alterman) and "reflexive anti-Americans" (Gitlin) - it has not eliminated it among those who we inanely persist in thinking might know better. Digby over at Hullabaloo provides the link to an article at AlterNet containing these two gem quotes:

We've got to repudiate, you know, the most strident and insulting anti-American voices out there sometimes on our party's left ... We can't have our party identified by Michael Moore and Hollywood as our cultural values. – Al From, CEO, Democratic Leadership Council

You know, let's let Hollywood and the Cannes Film Festival fawn all over Michael Moore. We ought to make it pretty clear that he sure doesn't speak for us when it comes to standing up for our country. – Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, the think tank of the DLC

Yep, you got it: The Dummycrats screwed up another election and we're facing a rerun (perhaps with exclamation points) of the last four years' attacks on civil liberties, equality, jobs, our standard of living, Social Security, science, the Constitution, and the environment; the blood and destruction continues in Iraq; the drums of war are starting to be thumped over Iran - and who does the Democratic leadership think should be the focus of the party's attacks? Who is to be denounced as the enemy of all that decent Americans hold dear? Michael Moore.

If this kind of self-defeating inanity, this "chase the GOPpers to the right" (which has worked so very well so far), this, as Digby notes, "repeat[ing] GOP talking points," is not promptly and definitively rejected by the party as a whole, it should be the last straw for anyone who still imagines that the Dummycrat Party is or will be an agent for change of any sort except for the worse.

As I've said before, there are still individual Democrats in Congress who merit support and, I will add, a larger number who deserve support on particular issues. But those are individuals and they are the exceptions, and our associations with that larger number should be viewed strictly as tactical alliances. The party as a whole is trash; the party leaders are self-interested, clueless hacks; the party's goal, it seems, it to be the good cop in a continuing scam on the public; the party's fate, based on present trends, is the be the smiling reactionaries to the GOP's growling reactionaries.

Face it, people: We're on our own.

Footnote: The link to the Defense Science Board report is here; it's in .pdf format. Warning: The file is almost 2 megs.