Voices without Votes

Countries:: none
Candidates:: none
Issues:: Government & Politics

The Democratic Party ran for the past four years as a party of change - an antidote to what it portrayed as the corrupt cronyism and ethically bankrupt government for sale ways of the Republican Congress and Bush Administration. The election is over, but the new congress and new administration are not even sworn in, and the Democratic Party is showing itself to be at least as corrupt and ethically bankrupt as the Republicans. Maybe more ethically challenged, if that is possible.

Consider the Democratic Governor of Illinois being arrested for trying to sell the senate seat of the President Elect as just one article of many. Then we have Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid browbeating the accused governor Blagojevich to make an appointment quickly, so that the seat won’t be lost to a Republican in a special election. Nice work, Mr. Reid! Why don’t you just admit that the Democratic Party thinks democracy is a mis-nomer. Maybe Governor Blagojevich can make the appointment from jail, if the legislature doesn’t act first and either remove him form power or impeach him. Or Harry Reid again, rumored to have been encouraged to intervene to save Al Franken’s failed effort to be elected to a Senate seat in Minnesota. Nice work, Senator Reid - have you considered sending your resume to someone like Robert Mugabe? A place like Zimbabwe, where goon tactics and ballot box stuffing are considered good government is someplace where you would be very much at home.

Or the Kennedy Clan. Caroline Kennedy is now being promoted as the supposedly logical replacement for Seantor Clinton. Froma Harrop has a nice response, noting that not only is it a case of establishing a hereditary political seat, but it also shafts a hard-working Democratic female candidate who has years of actual government experience, but not the Kennedy name.

The hubris of the Democratic Party is impressive to watch. They haven’t even taken office, and they are making some of my liberal colleagues begin to think fondly of a time when we had clean government, and a reasonably effective President. George H. W. Bush was actually the president one of them said she was thinking kindly of.