Want more stupid? Despite talk of "resistance," and impassioned calls from progressive organizations for Senate Democrats as a bloc to reject Trump's "deconstruction" cabinet of nominees whose goal is to wreck their government departments and agencies they head, many of the party's senators have been supporting outrageous Trump nominees for his cabinet. Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party Republican who likes torture and is an outspoken Islamaphobe, got 14 votes from the Senate Democratic Caucus for the post of CIA director. John Kelly, a retired Marine general who has said he's okay with targeting Muslims for special surveillance, got the support of 36 Democratic Senators for the post of Secretary of Homeland Security. Elaine Chao, George W. Bush's labor secretary, wife of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and no friend or working people, got 41 Democratic Senators' votes for Commerce Secretary. And then there's Nikki Haley, the Russophobic governor of South Carolina, whose nomination received 44 Democratic votes, and the Cold Warrior "Mad Dog" Mattis, the Marine general who picked up a whopping 46 votes for Secretary of Defense. Even the new "Secretary of Exxon" Rex Tillerson, the human incarnation of Big Oil, managed to snag four Democratic votes supporting his nomination.
This is supposed to be an opposition party? A party of "resistance" to Trumpism? It's sure hard to see it. Especially as it's clear that Judge Neil Gorsuch, Trump's nominee to replace the mercifully expired Constitutional Luddite Justice Antonin Scalia, and a jurist of at least equally right-wing views, will receive plenty of votes from Democratic Senators, handing back to Republicans a five-vote majority on the High Court after they stonewalled for a year on Obama's nominee for the vacant seat, not even granting him a hearing by the Senate Judicial Committee.
But surely the stupidest of all the Democratic leadership policies in this year of crisis, as President Trump and the Republicans in Congress seek to undo not just what few significant progressive actions were taken during eight years of the Obama administration, but even what's left of the New Deal legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has been the craven, pathetic and self-defeating effort to avoid accepting the blame for Trump's November victory.
Instead of looking for the real reasons for the Democratic Party's voter-base collapse, especially in traditionally blue working-class states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the loss of half the white women's vote, and the tepid support of trade unionists and blacks, instead of acknowledging the smug, shitty campaign run by Hillary Clinton, instead of admitting the damage done by the corrupt sabotage of the Sanders campaign, instead of admitting the role of the party's failure, through the entire Obama presidency and the Clinton presidency before it, and even during the Bush presidency when Congress was in the hands of the Democrats, to fight for policies that would have combated growing income inequality and fought for working people's needs, the party leadership has decided to blame it all on Russia.
Russia! A country that is no longer communist, that poses no territorial or military threat to Europe but wants to become an integral part of the European economy, a country that has no foreign bases, except in Syria, and that has no deep water navy patrolling all the seven seas, with drones and special forces bombing and raiding countries around the globe, as does the US.
So we have all kinds of charges being made based upon leaks by Democratic appointees and holdovers in the various intelligence agencies, claiming, without any evidence being shown, that the Russians "hacked" the US election, that Donald Trump and his campaign secretly worked with Russian intelligence, or negotiated secret back-door deals with Russia behind the Obama administration's back, and that Donald Trump is somehow being blackmailed by Russia. The claims are epic, but they are also unsupported by facts.
Did the Russians try to hack into DNC and RNC computers? No doubt, just as the US surely tries to hack into the computers of the Russian political parties, not to mention the Kremlin itself. But Wikileaks insists that Russia was not the source of the DNC emails it released that proved so damaging to the Clinton campaign, saying those documents were leaked by an insider -- apparently Seth Rich, the young DNC staffer who was murdered in July under very suspicious circumstances .
Did the Russians try to influence the US election? Who knows, but let's be honest at least: Congressionally-funded organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy helped to fund huge protests in Russia against Putin 2011, and also helped earlier throw a close re-election campaign to Boris Yeltsin. In fact, interfering in the elections of other contries has been a long-time practice by the US government.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
15
15
11
