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Stop the Theatrics

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Michael Bonanno
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Progressives want to force regulations on corporations and people.  They want to force employers to hire people of all races, genders, sexual orientation and ethnicity while Conservatives say that this will happen without regulations.  I happen to know for a fact that this would not happen without regulations.

Progressives want to force manufacturing facilities to implement safety and environmental improvements because they believe, quite rightly, that manufacturing facilities won’t do it on their own.  Believing that protection for workers and the environment must be mandated is not a strong argument that people are innately good.  Yet, only the threat of stiff fines or even a bit of jail time will force greedy corporate CEOs and their upper management cohorts to do the right and ethical thing.

There are some people which members of the Democratic Party are less “of” than others.

For example, I heard no outrage from Barrack Obama or Hillary Clinton when Kucinich was excluded from certain Democratic debates.  These two “candidates of the people” didn’t insist that all candidates, no matter their wealth or the size of their campaign chest, had the right to remain in the race until the final moment.

This brings me to my final point.

Do you know how much we spent on investigating Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes?  The fact that he cheated on his wife had nothing to do with his ability to be president.  The Republicans needed something to bring Clinton down.

Elliot Spitzer was being watched.  Republicans were spying on him.  This is wrong.  Elliot Spitzer’s life is his own and no one has the right to tail him.

If Clinton took his job seriously, he could at least have carried on his affair(s) while he was not carrying on the business of the American people.  This is not something upon which Progressives want to dwell.

The fact is that, no matter how much he was being watched, rightly or wrongly, Spitzer would never have been caught with a prostitute if he, indeed, was never with a prostitute.

Let’s face it.  Progressives beat the hell out of Larry Craig and David Vitter, though.  The difference, of course, is that both Craig and Vitter pretended to support “family values” while, of course, not practicing them.

I’m not sure if Clinton ever claimed to support family values, but Spitzer was going to wipe out corruption – when others manifested that behavior.

What we are witnessing now are theatrics.  No one raises the kind of money it takes to remain in a presidential campaign this long without quid pro quo agreements having taken place.  The agreements made today between the remaining candidates and their “donors” will determine what those candidates will do if elected.

There’s been a lot of wasted space on this and other news outlets talking about Obama’s minister, Clinton’s elitist attitude or McCain’s age and past human driven indiscretions and transgressions, the kind that not many of us can deny we’ve experienced.  None of them make a bit of difference because these three people have openings on their backs into which the hand of The Corporacracy fits perfectly.

Stop debating about the candidates’ qualifications until you learn them.  Stop defending pseudo-Progressives when they digress and stop attacking “hypocritical” Conservatives when they digress.  The propaganda of such ultra-partisanship is painfully transparent.

Progressives, like Ralph Nader and candidates from The Green Party, are not problems.  They want to solve the problems.

On the other hand, pseudo-Progressives talk about solving problems, but they’re each a part of the problem.  They lie to suck you in and, judging by the frivolity of the current articles and mainstream news, they, as always, have succeeded.

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Michael Bonanno is an associate editor for OpEdNews.

He is also a published poet, essayist and musician who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Bonanno is a political progressive, not a Democratic Party apologist. He believes it's (more...)
 

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