Democrats don't want people to see pictures of Bush-Cheney torture from the prison at Guantanamo, probably because it occurred with funding that they helped provide. They don't want to close that facility if it means housing prisoners in the United States. This forced their president into the extraordinary and troubling position of maintaining current prisoners in Cuba. As the Democratic Senators participated in the 90 to 6 vote to refuse President Obama funds to close Guantanamo, they were resolute in failing to mention that only10 of over 400 prisoners there are charged with a violent crime. To borrow an appropriate response, You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, at long last? Apparently not.
Democrats won't even talk about the deaths of over a million Iraqi civilians due to civil strife caused by the war that they funded. Failing to talk about it means it never happened, they hope.
Despite all of the alleged but obvious crimes of Bush-Cheney against people here and around the world, the Democrats want to "look forward" and bypass prosecutions of any sort against the Bush administration.
The Binary Fallacy
The binary fallacy is the crude dialectic that assumes that the two political parties are the only choices for voters and that what's bad for one party will always be good for the other. As evidence for this, we have Nixon's Watergate scandal followed by huge Democratic victories in congressional elections. President Carter's economically distressed four years begat the Reagan revolution and so forth.
Democrat Party operatives see the collapse of the nation and attendant pain as working against the Republicans since they were in control when the decline was assured by Republican sponsored programs. The situation is so bad, they argue, no one will take the Republicans seriously over the near and midterm. Add the highly favorable demographics among youth, women, and the emerging Latino population and you've got the dominant political party of the next few decades.
Republican loyalists speak of the risks that the Obama administration has inherited. When he falters, as he may given the circumstances that Republicans know all too well, his failure will assure a Republican comeback they argue.
Both parties fail to realize two flaws in their embedded fallacy.
First, the fallacy became a manufactured truth over decades due to the rigged game of U.S. politics. Funding and access to major media presume membership in one of the two major parties. Third party candidates need to poll equal or ahead in the public opinion polls, as Ross Perot did in 1992, in order to get any media attention or money. When the system is heavily rigged to exclude third parties, then, of course, there are only two choices.
The second flaw in the binary fallacy is embodied by our current troubles. The fallacy does not take into account successful performance during extreme crises. We're either in a depression or we're in the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. Times are desperate for tens of millions. The vast majority lives in fear of entering the world of the unemployed, homeless, and bereft. Iraq is the biggest foreign policy disaster in modern times. Our new plans for an Afghanistan adventure have the potential to equal Iraq in terms of national loss and increased threats of blowback.
One party created the current disaster. The other has embraced the broadest parameters of the policies that created the disasters that voters want fixed -- wealth transfers to the ultra rich while the vast majority gets just about nothing plus mindless, counter productive fantasies of empire through war.
The two parties and the elitists who look down their noses on the overwhelming majority of citizens assume that the people will simply tolerate the creation of a catastrophe by one party and the perpetuation of that grave injustice to citizens by the other.
When you're broke, you know it.
When you're out of work, you know it.
When there are no jobs, you know it.
And when the country continues to fight overseas but does nothing to protect economic security at home, you know it.
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