Prince Norodom Sihanouk said of the Khmer Rouge, "When they gain power they will spit me out like a cherry stone." As the PBS series "Vietnam" goes on to state, they were using Sihanouk's prestige to mobilize peasant support.
So it is with any Democrat willing to be "bipartisan." The Republicans are using Democratic prestige - perhaps even Obama's - to mobilize peasant support.
Yeah, we're the peasants you know.
To those who think the title of this diary is a tad bit offensive, make no mistake: the radical Republican Party is eliminationist in its aims - it seeks nothing less than the elimination of a government that serves the people. And this is a grave threat to the United States. The gravest threat.
The Republican Party, and to a large extent, the Democratic Party have been co-opted by capital. The recent "shock doctrine" shenanigan made this plain as day. Luckily the Democratic party is still salvageable.
But the Republican Party has declared war on the Federal government, in effect. If you haven't read Andrew Leonard's take on the "permanent government shutdown fight," you owe it to yourself to do so. Whether Obama is a willing participant in this is moot, as far as I'm concerned. The fact is that there are people - Republicans and their backers- who wish to cripple the effectiveness of the Federal government on a permanent basis - in effect a revolution against the very reason that the framers of the Constitution put together a strong central government in the first place.
And the reason was to have a strong, effective central government, one that was powerful enough to promote the general welfare of the American people. Republicans want the opposite, and only to please their paymasters.
So the Republican Party wishes to seize control of the mechanism of government with one goal in mind: to dismantle the effectiveness of government. Infectious viruses seize control of the machinery of the cell in order to propagate the virus and destroy the cell. One could say that tea-party conservative Republican ideas are infectious memes. And let's get this straight: I'm talking about the elimination of this ideology as a "serious" contender for the driver of policy of the United States. I specifically abhor violent solutions to this end. But the ideology must be removed from the United States.
It doesn't have to be the way it is now. We shouldn't in any way seek a "compromise" with people who wish to redistribute our wealth to those who need it least by waging a class war on us.
One last somewhat tangential aside. I was in China recently China is still booming; its economic boom is spreading now throughout the country. My trip coincided with the 90th anniversary of the birth of the Communist Party, and the English language broadcasts of the Chinese TV were filled with propaganda praising "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics." Their country has a great deal of problems to be sure, and there's lots of structural problems in their system.
But...
Did you know that since China started its mix of capitalism and socialism that, in over 30 years they've never had a recession?
You may argue that "Oh, they cook their books!" or some such thing, but even the US media's reported for the past 15 years - as we went through two of the worst post-war recessions - that China continued to grow. They have been managing their economy with their government. We have had privateers dismantling our government so the government couldn't manage the economy.
The Chinese had their experience with a weak central government, after the fall of the Qing Dynasty and their civil war - it was rule by war lords. It is no accident that the surviving governments of that civil war - the Communists in the PRC and the Kuomintang on Taiwan - both established strong central governments in their domains.
Since it has been Republicans, with their policies, who wish to turn the United States into the Guatemala or El Salvador of the 1980s - whose murderous right-wing regimes they enthusiastically backed, I would say that it is time for a call for all good people to say it loud and often: the Republican Party of today is a threat to the Republic.
Much worse a threat than the Communists in the US ever were.