As baseball legend Yogi Berra might put it, "It's time to take the bullsh*t by the horns."
See, off the field, Yankees' Hall of Fame catcher and manager was notorious for gems of colorful, if slightly misstated, folk wisdom. To such extent that Yogi's genius for timeless malaprops was celebrated in an Aflac insurance commercial--yes, Yogi co-starring with that omnipresent duck. There's perhaps no better political slogan than this article's opening one, framed in Yogi's endearing folk style, to capture the most pressing political imperative of our day. Yes, indeed: It's time to take the bullsh*t by the horns.
More specifically, it's time to take the Deep State bullsh*t by the horns.
For those unacquainted with the "Deep State bullsh*t" concept, you can easily get up to speed by browsing the previous OpEdNews article in this series, "Democrats' Deadly Electoral Disease: Deep State Bullsh*t," at minimum the section titled "Democrats' Elephant in the Room: Deep State Bullshit." A lightning executive summary is that a combination of entrenched corporate and government bureaucratic interests--the Deep State--holds both major parties hostage. And that our resulting public discourse and policy, insanely devoid of truth, secretly molded by Deep State agendas and scarcely at all by reality, is overwhelmingly "bullsh*t."
That bullsh*t, incarnate in every Republican, and equally but more sneakily in DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, must no longer be tolerated. If we wish to save human civilization--nothing less is at stake here--sane, moral people, aka real progressives, must be willing to say "I'm mad as and hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." And above all, mean it. This article proposes, in its author's view, the fastest, most effective political strategy for those who mean it.
Whether readers agree or not that the strategy here proposed is the fastest and most effective, please start, for the sake of all you hold dear, insisting on blitzkrieg effectiveness in any political strategy. With the gun of climate change--and even worse, the methane clathrate gun--inches from humanity's collective head, never has our political timetable been so severe. And, what's worse, as Naomi Klein insists in This Changes Everything, never have actual policies been so radically out of tune with humanity's needs. In the U.S. alone, Republicans simply deny the climate gun exists, whereas Democrats, admitting the gun's reality, act as if some genocidal freak has vaguely hinted he'll brandish it at humanity's skull--in forty or fifty years! Neither party--with both enslaved to fossil fuel and allied Deep State interests--is the least engaged with climate science or the planetary emergency it's stressing. That, above all, is why arresting runaway climate change is not simply a matter of electing Democrats rather than Republicans. "Red donkey" Hillary Clinton, as ready to frack and embedded with Big Oil poses a nearly identical menace to our climate.
What counts here is that so-called "progressive" Congressional Democrats routinely kowtow with lapdog passivity to an anti-progressive-- in several ways, outright fascist--agenda dictated top-down by the sitting Democratic president and the party leadership. And ultimately, one imagines, by the Deep State puppet masters Mike Lofgren so insightfully identifies. This supine cowardice by Congressional progressives--their church mouse silence as the Democratic president destroys the climate, makes needless, endless war, and shreds Constitutional freedoms--has happened without fail under Obama, and there's zero reason to think it won't continue under Clinton.
Indeed, the case already seems made. Obama, arguably, was a little-known, deceitful surprise, a Trojan horse for neocon, Wall Street, and fossil fuel agendas. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is well known, and her policies offer scarcely an inch of breathing room for progressives. So how can we expect the same "progressive" Congressional Democrats, perhaps caught off guard by Obama, to oppose Hillary's climate-destroying, warmongering agenda, when they've already pledged support for her candidacy full knowing who she is?
Given their spinelessness, one readily suspects Democrats' readiness to tout Elizabeth Warren's economic populism is a diversionary tactic to draw attention from their party leadership's locked-in allegiance to Deep State military aggression, global surveillance, and anti-transparency, anti-journalism, anti-dissent, and pro-fossil fuel agendas.
One also suspects their endless, wearisome e-mail campaigns to paint "evil Republicans" in apocalyptic hues--bad as Republicans are--is really an attempt to bludgeon progressives, to whom Democrats offer diddly squat, into electing them from sheer guilt. When Congressional Democrats tolerate burgeoning executive lawlessness--to the point of letting mere spy agencies sabotage Congress's Constitutional oversight prerogative with impunity--what other motive could we have?
Something is indeed very rotten in the state of "Demmark." Therefore, no progressive--at least none who finds in the word "progressive" infinitely nobler meaning than mere synonym for "Democrat"--should support Democrats until they pledge to address this rottenness. To address it, above all, by pledging support for Bernie Sanders--and not Hillary Clinton--for president. The idea of such a pledge, first by a coalition of progressive voters, and then by "progressive" Congressional Democrats, is the lynchpin of the strategy proposed here. For Congressional Democrats, a pledge to support Sanders instead of Clinton; for progressives, a pledge to cease voting for any Democrats unless they take and honor their pro-Sanders pledge.
Now, Democrat apologists will yammer that the president alone does not rule the country, that Congress and Congressional elections are important too. Yes--and that is clearly evident in Congressional Republicans' ability to blockade much of what Obama wants to do. But also NO, for much of the Deep State agenda, which Congresspersons of either party dare not oppose, is smuggled in by an unaccountable, lawless chief executive whom Congress, abdicating its Constitutional responsibility, increasingly fails to keep in check. Neither by legislative authority, nor by the public-opinion-forming power of their bully pulpits, have Congressional Democrats--acting as passive DINOs--dared rein in the excesses of their DINO president.
With so much bad, Deep State policy now instantiated on a top-down basis, with Congress passively condoning it, we must put someone who's decidedly not a DINO at the head of government. And given the sorry state of today's Democrats, probably no current Democrat can be trusted not to govern as a DINO. Enter independent, progressive outsider Bernie Sanders, the outspoken voice best suited "to take the bullsh*it by the horns." Or, framing our strategy differently, "Kill the DINO's head, and the DINO's body will die." When the most disastrous Deep State decisions--like the Iraq War--have transpired under a veil of executive branch secrecy and lies--this top-down approach seems crucial.
But Bernie will never become a legitimate, viable candidate for Democrat voters unless he receives ample support from Congressional Democrats, at least progressive ones. And given the ample evidence they all dangle from Deep State puppet strings, THAT will never happen without the electoral blackmail involved in the proposed pledge. Much more on that topic in the next piece in this series (about forming a league of Revolution-style Progressive Correspondence Committees based on that pledge), "Pledge Bernie or Green in 2016."
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