The time has come for the Democratic Party to stand up and do what any responsible, self-respecting opposition party would do at such an extraordinary moment in our country's history as this. The time has come for the Democratic Party to stand up and talk about the elephant in the room: that America's current rulers are the most morally bankrupt in the nation's history.
For too long this opposition party has cowered in fear fear that the American people will punish them for speaking so important a truth. Bested so often by the spinmeisters and manipulators on the other side, most of the Democrats in Congress have sought to save themselves from further defeat by careful positioning rather than to advance themselves toward victory by speaking with real conviction.
Meanwhile, American democracy is suffering damage like nothing seen in our lifetimes. And millions of Americans are awaiting genuine leadership to save this nation from this degradation.
It's time to set fear aside. With polls now showing that fully 47 percent of the American people strongly disapprove of the Bush presidency, how much risk can there be in speaking the terrible truth about what's been happening in our country under this Bushite regime?
There is Only One Scandal
It has been said by some that there are now so many scandals -a new one breaking virtually every few days that the American people are so overwhelmed by the complexity that they just tune out. The result, it is suggested, is that the regime gets a kind of protection from the sheer multiplicity of these scandals.
The strategy of the opposition should accordingly be to simplify the picture, and there is a straightforward way to do it. For the reality is that there are not many scandals, but really only one: the moral bankruptcy of the Bushites. The various individual stories -the lies, the crimes, the arrogance, the lack of accountability are all parts of that one larger story.
This is the story the Democrats should now tell. The nation needs the story told, and the Democrats will be well-served by telling it.
The best hope for the Democrats, it is widely understood, lies in nationalizing the 2006 mid-term elections. How else to overcome the gerrymandering of districts to minimize real competition? How else to prevent the Republicans -who have opportunistically served as part of this regime to gain the spoils of power from running away from this floundering but still dangerous presidency?
And so telling this story -connecting the dots to bring into sharp relief the morally debased nature of this leadership, and showing how the Republicans in Congress, in their cozying up to corrupt power, have violated the trust of the American people is the best strategy for the Democrats asking the voters of this country to shift the power in Congress to them.
Telling the Story in Stages
Most Americans are already getting the picture. Even the only somewhat attentive American citizen -even the person who gets his/her news from the mainstream broadcast media now knows, or at least can recognize, a great many facts about the Bushite scandals.
The first stage in calling attention to the elephant in the room is to reduce these many well-known facts to a handful of important realities for which those facts are the supportive evidence. For example"
It's not just that the president put sixteen words into the State of the Union message -about Iraq's alleged efforts to acquire uranium in Africa-- that he and his people knew were not true. It's not just that the Downing Street memos indicate that the Bush administration was determined to "fix" the intelligence to sell a course of action they'd already decided upon. It's not just that the president said that no one anticipated the New Orleans levees being overwhelmed when we have videotape of his being told just that less than a week before his false excuse. It's not just that the president assured the country several times that "nothing has changed" regarding the need for a court order before surveillance could be conducted. It's not just that the administration deliberately kept from Congress the true anticipated cost of its prescription drug bill. It's not just that the Bush administration lied when it said that it would turn to war in Iraq "only as a last resort."
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