Blue Tsunami does NOT mean relax and shake hands all around...

[seawasp]

 
Posted this on Facebook, but figured I'd put it here too:

I see a lot of people basically saying "Hey, now that we won, let's not argue internally or fight the Party leadership."

That is the dead-wrong lesson to take from this. The Blue Tsunami had nothing to do with "we love all the Democrats", and everything to do with "Jesus, we're sick and tired of watching these guys screw our country over". 
 

A lot of voters were still holding their noses as they pulled the lever for various Democrats. They pulled the lever, but that didn't mean they were voting for *that particular person*. They were voting *against* the most corrupt and evil administration this country has ever seen, at least in living memory.
 

This is EXACTLY the time to clean house -- to take out of power the Democrats who still keep thinking that you can "work with" the Republicans, that we need to "go slow" or "not be focused on revenge". 
 

It's not revenge: it's just retribution that Trump and his cronies have been ducking all along, retribution for theft on an absolutely incredible scale, for treasonous work against Congress and the entire American people, for incompetence and grifting that boggles the mind. 
 

Holding those people accountable isn't a *bargaining chip*. There's no bargains to be made here. And Democrats who lead the party cannot start thinking there are. 
 

It's time to FIX the country, which means universal healthcare, which means restoring union and environmental and worker protections, which means rebuilding our destroyed goodwill... 
 

AND which means directly trying and properly penalizing every single person involved in Trump's grifts, in Epstein's island of horrors, in all the criminal, immoral, and self-aggrandizing acts perpetrated by this administration and the Republican party at large, as aided and abetted by the Heritage Foundation and its associates. 
 

It means restoring and enlarging the social safety net, removing the cap on earnings for Social Security conributions, finding a way for the productivity of the country to be returned in reasonable part to the general population instead of an increasingly small handful of wealthy corporations, and generally fighting the effective oligarchy that's been messing up the world for short-term paper profits. It means working WITH other countries to see what we can do to keep our planet livable and comfortable for humanity and for all the other species that we share this unique world with. 
 

And it means bringing the hammer down on the people that were dismantling all of this in favor of themselves and their friends. 

The time for polite disagreement is long past; we tried the "let's heal now" approach after the Civil War, and we're STILL paying for that; indeed, there's a lot of reason to trace much of our current trouble back to that. These guys STARTED another civil war and hoped that the fact it didn't involve armies shooting at each other (yet) that no one would notice.  They need to face the consequences of all their actions. 

Comments

[dewline]

Not only just retribution. It's active self-defence and defence of third parties as well.

[seawasp]

It's basically demonstrating that there's a cost for being evil. We didn't do that for the Civil War.

[dewline]

Amen, amen, amen.

[graycardinal]

To be fair, this is an inherent problem one faces after winning any war in what we now consider a civilized fashion - that is, in a position where the ostensible losers are left in positions of power and authority. While the Civil War South lost the military conflict, the North didn't have a practical means of neutralizing the entrenched Southern business economy. Our problems in the Ukraine and Iran are likewise complicated by this; Russia is flatly unwilling to accept an outcome in which they don't win, and Iran is equally unwilling to accept an outcome in which they lose. (These are not quite the same thing, but from a practical standpoint the current state of the "rules of war" is not well-suited to actually resolving situations in which armed conflict has come into play.)

[seawasp]

Yes, but.

Most of those HAVE a solution. For Russia, it's to ignore them and help Ukraine. Russia's GDP is pathetic and their economy is crumbling. Let Putin fall. For Iran, the opposite; stop doing what we're doing and concede that it was our fault.

[claidheamhmor]

Spot on.

[graycardinal]

The current mess with Iran is one of those things where we'll probably never know exactly who or what knocked over the key domino (at least not until enough of the original players are completely off the board). But I have the unsettling feeling that something was going on in/around Iran that posed a sufficient national security threat Over Here that our intelligence apparatus couldn't counter it without getting White House level authority involved.

Whereupon that authority being as flaky and alarmist as it currently is, we bobbled the counter sufficiently that despite heading off whatever-it-was in specific, the consequence was for Iran to take its war with us public. Result: the mess we've got now, in which current leadership can't explain what really happened without showing just how badly hamstrung our current command structure is by the ineptitude of the folks at the top.

This is, of course, sheer speculation on my part. But the real underlying problem in the Middle East is not just our fault. It's that that whole region is several centuries behind the rest of the world in terms of political and diplomatic stability - and retains almost no buy-in to the whole idea of peaceful transition of power from authoritarian governments to representative/democratic models. (From a historical perspective, the Western world has not done the region any real favors in establishing and defending the modern Israeli state, using much the same tactics as the rest of the Middle Eastern governments have in their own territorial squabbles.)

[seawasp]

I don't really agree. The main problem is that we (meaning the Western powers) have been messing around in that region for over a hundred years to try and make things work the way WE want to, a lot of it focused on a particular vision of "The Holy Land" and evangelical belief that was created in the 1800s and that we've been promoting in one way or another ever since.

I'm inclined to blame the whole current thing on Bibi and his friend Trump. Is Iran a beacon of love and trust? No. But Trump decided to take them on in their area of the world, for his own purposes, thinking he could do the same there that he did in Venezuela, and discovered he'd made a mistake. But Trump has NEVER learned the skill of "admit I made a mistake", the only skill he has learned is "double down", so he just kept making it worse.

[sturgeonslawyer]

To quote Henry Beard:
We are the chorus and we agree. We agree, we agree, we agree.

Now let's kick the asses of some corporate Democrats. To start with, Hakeem Jefries does not deserve to be the Speaker of the House. He's done some good stuff, but he's sucked up to the big money too damn much.

[claidheamhmor]

They absolutely need to be investigated and prosecuted.