Democrats are quick to criticize the Bush administration for bailing out Wall Street. Lest we find it too politically convenient to ignore, this grand billions heist of our treasure would not have been possible without the support of both houses of the Democrat-majority Congress most of us voted for, and it also received the personal endorsement of Barack Obama. Can we afford our conscience to register that?
Progressives must open their minds and try to comprehend we may be headed to get the lesser-devil, not the champion their partisan enthusiasm would suggest.
Integrity among ourselves is a difficult challenge, but if we learned anything from the treachery of the past eight years and the betrayal by our congressional choices of 2006 who denied impeachment and continued to fund the slaughter--it is that the electorate must be honest with itself if decent governance is to be possible.
It appears now that we all will be in other hands after the election. Are we certain that our national treasure will not continue to be beggared by weapons manufacture, that greed mongers will be excluded from the interface to medical care, that the REAL story of 9-11 will be researched and revealed, that affordable education will finally be available to all, that peace will come swiftly as humanity requires? And finally, are those hands we would entrust with our future and the world's actually clean, including the absence of political contagion, favors to be re-paid, relationships to be rewarded, and are those hands truly the instruments of political integrity and moral courage? Or are they simply a bit less possibly soiled than the only other realistic alternative's?
It's important, however limited the choices, that we are honest with ourselves and straight with America's future, our kids' future, and humanity's. Does our choice pass the "hands test"? Should we in future seek another path now effectively disallowed by the two-party constraint we impose upon ourselves, its often minor divergences, and its all too often amoral similarities?
Tough questions, certainly. And I don't have the easy answers for us. But this progressive is convinced that they don't lie in partisan fervor. The institutional structure of partisan politics has changed in the past--it can indeed change in the future. Above all else we need to think beyond the two overlapping partisan circles we now accept as the "realistic" choices. We need to think beyond tweedle-dum and tweedle-dem. We need to think beyond the borders imposed by the devil and the lesser-devil, and to seek the clean hands.
We will remember the treachery of 11 September 2001, and we should never forget the betrayal of Election Day November 2006.
