Once again, the Republicans have attacked DKos and I'm sure readers are flocking to our pages. So here's something to look at: If you're new here, Welcome to Daily Kos. We're the Coalition With No Ideas.
If you're coming here from the Rightosphere, it may be a shock to you to see how much space our No-Ideas take up on a page. That's why I've had to put most of this diary in the extended body. But first of all:
Since we're a truly democratic organization, this is in no way the "Official" Kossack manifesto. I'm sure others will find a way to disagree, but such is the beauty of Democracy. Everybody gets to contribute.
First of all, DailyKos is not a person, much like the Internets are not a series of tubes. I realize that it's all the rage to have CamelCase names these days, but Kos is the net handle of a guy most of us have never met named Markos Moulitsas Zúniga. He created this foul nest of terrifying blogginess. The rest of us are his programmed robot drones.
Click the "there's more" link, and you will never see a more wretched hive of scum and villany.
Some of the things we are interested in as the Hive Mind of Liberalism are:
Open, transparent goverment. This is an insidious plan wherein our government's activities are transparently visible to the citizens of the nation. Closed-door meetings like the one Dick Cheney had with his oil-company buddies to discuss our nation's energy policy will be frowned upon, and maybe even made illegal. Backroom deals to divvy up the spoils of wars will also be brought to a halt. Imagine the terror!
Open, transparent elections. This is also quite a pernicious ideal. The goal is that when people vote they know who they voted for and they know that each voter got one vote and it counted for the person it intended to. The problem is we have to get rid of a lot of PlaySkool /Diebold hardware that is hackable by my eight-year-old son and replace it with complicated technology like pen and paper ballots. This will interfere with fat contracts that have been negotiated with little or no voter input.
The U.S. out of Iraq.This is the big one. Four out of ten of you won't agree and will tell the rest of us that we have to stay the course, adapt to win, or we'll be cutting and running. The problem is, the war in Iraq has no goal, no plan, and no defined condition for an exit. It's exactly like the Vietnam war in that it's dividing our nation and sapping our resources and its end is now completely out of our control. The other six out of ten of you are nodding in agreement; please convince the Doubting Forty percent if you can that history has already shown us what happens when we occupy a country with no exit plan. Also, we can't currently defend our homeland while our demoralized soldiers are so busy over in Iraq. If real trouble erupts, we're going to be screwed.
No More Bogus Terror Alerts: This is one that still gets people's panties in a bind, but it's clear after five years of Wolf alerts that we don't have time for this. Terror was adequately contained under previous administrations through good police work and never once did we have to wet our pants in panic and give up our right to due process under the law, nor did we have to go flying off the handle and invade a country that didn't attack us and wasn't a threat to us. 9/11 happened largely due to gross incompetence of the Bush Administration, and all you have to do is look at the ridiculous shenanigans that went on while Hurricane Katrina drowned the city of New Orleans to understand that we are no safer today than we were on September 10th, 2001. Our President goes on vacation for five weeks in August and acts like a churlish little brat if anyone distracts him from it, and his cabinet runs around shopping for shoes and goofing off. We need adults to be in charge, and we need to stop using phantom threats to scare people into line. You and I are more likely to die of the flu than a terrorist attack. Let's get back to the threats that are real.
Sound Energy Policy: This one gets Oil Company panties in a bind. There are many compelling reasons to think that the path to oil independence (and therefore to tearing down a lot of the crazy regimes that support terrorism in the first place) is standing wide open in front of us, and that our nation's leadership doesn't take us down that path because they are being bought off by oil companies. In line with governmental transparency we as liberals are demanding that our national energy policy is reversed from its current disastrous course which benefits only a few oil company executives and put on a path that benefits the average guy. We may not be able to ever get gas prices down again, but we can make Detroit start manufacturing cars that burn less gas than they currently do, and we can start providing fuel sources that are more efficient and made closer to home than Middle Eastern (or for that matter, Venezuelan) oil. We think you're smart enough to realize that the reason you're paying $3.00 a gallon, on average, is not because of some crisis, but because you're being taken advantage of. We as liberals would like our government to at the very least stop colluding with oil companies as they rook us.
Sound Healthcare Policy: If you pay for health insurance, you're lucky enough to be able to actually get healthcare, right? Maybe not. If you're playing by the rules you're very likely still getting screwed. Your healthcare premiums have risen somewhere between 10 and 20 percent every year for the last five years, and your quality of care has likely declined. You are also paying more for prescription drugs than you were five years ago, and every time your current crop of medicines goes generic, your doctor turns around and prescribes you the newest, most expensive version of the same old thing. Doesn't he? If this isn't happening to you now, rest assured it's because you're lucky enough to have avoided being hooked into the system. And if you're unlucky enough that you don't even pay for health insurance, we don't understand why you're still allowing the GOP to dictate your thinking on the matter. Every other industrialized nation in the world has some kind of national healthcare system, and they aren't all turning into Soviet Russia. Having an overpriced, unresponsive healthcare system is destroying lives and hurting our economy. It's high time we changed that and conservatives can't change, so they can't do it.
Sound Educational Policy: If you're one of the few Americans who has the same job you had before 2001, congratulations. If you're not, welcome, and let's do talk about where our country's employment situation is going, shall we? Right now education is getting more expensive and futher out of reach for all but the wealthiest of Americans. Aside from bogging down our elementary schools with unfunded mandates to test our students even more, Bush has failed to provide any clear means of getting America's workers into the next century with the skills we need to keep ahead. It used to be that you could go to any large American city and see the gold standard in technologial progress for the whole planet, but that's not true any more. We are falling behind in many fields and we just can't afford to let that continue. George Bush has allowed American corporations to shift millions of our jobs overseas and has NO PLAN to create new ones. For him, "status quo" is good enough. If you are fooled by the official unemployment figure, and think that somehow our economy is just raging along, ask yourself some very simple questions: are you more secure in your job than you were five years ago? If you lost your job today, could you get another one in the same pay scale? Very easily? I am willing to bet one voter registration card that your answers are mostly a Nope. Finally, ask yourself if George Bush or the Republican Party has done a single thing you're aware of to address this problem.
Sound Fiscal Policy: How are those tax cuts working for you? I know everybody got those big checks in 2001 and 2002, but did your taxes actually go down? If you make less than $200,000 a year, I'm willing to bet another voter registration card that your answer is again a Nope. Most of us saw little net reduction in our taxes. Those of us who work for a living, that is. In fact, many of us are now paying more in local taxes than we were before for the a reduced level of service from our government. If you aren't, there's probably a reason: services that used to be provided by the government have been sold off and are now being provided by a corporation. For a little while you won't notice much has changed, but gradually the corporation, under pressure to perform financially, will start charging more for less service, centralizing control or production, and reducing quality. What corporation in the world have you ever seen do otherwise? The thing is, as you can readily discover by Googling, this kind of stuff is happening to crucial services such as ROADS in America. That's right. Our roads are being sold off to the highest bidder, and not only that, but they're being sold to foreign companies who have no accountability back here at all. If you think I'm making this up, type "texas toll road german company" into Google and hunt up articles for yourself. Liberals don't ordinarily have a problem with people in foreign countries, but we have this crazy idea that our public infrastructure should be, like, OWNED by the public that uses it.
And while we're on taxes, did you notice that our country now owes eight trillion dollars and counting in debt? Do you have kids? Do you want them to spend the rest of their lives working to pay off debt? Most of the tax cuts have gone to the wealthy. You and I know damn well that we're not getting squat back out of the tax cuts. And the wealthy who pretty much own the GOP lock, stock, and barrel are not trickling that money down into our economy: they're stuffing it away in the Caymans somewhere.
So that's it. A brief tour of the horrors that modern Liberalism will bring to America. Think you can handle it? Or do you want to go back to another four or even eight or twelve years of Bush Cronies farting around and playing games while our country crumbles around their ears? I mean, I guess even three or four years ago the Bush regime was defensible but honestly right now the only thing the right wing media can do is occasionally trot out pathetic lines like "Carter was worse than Bush. Nyah nyah." I mean seriously. Can you believe that shit?
Finally, if you're a visitor from the DLC and wondering if it's OK to talk about these things in the open, I have a gift for you: these ideas are free for you to use, and I think they're resonating pretty loudly among most Americans these days. They embody the principles of transparentness, fairness, and freedom that define the American Way. Stick to these ideas with some level of principle, and face down your nattering conservative critics fearlessly, and you will win elections. This American is tired of being lied to and treated like a serf. And he knows that millions more are with him on that. So give us what we want, and we'll help you retake Congress in November. And maybe we'll get a real President in 2008, too? Could we please?