Process Liberals Have Learned Nothing In the Past Decade They Are A Dead Hand On Progress

I have read that some of the people who were there refute the charge that some of the Democratic House members who met with Bernie Sanders booed him when he said this, but I certainly would have objected to it.

Sanders also stunned some of the Democrats in attendance when he told them that winning elections isn’t the only thing they should focus on. While they wanted to hear about how to beat Donald Trump — and how Sanders might help them win the House back — he was talking about remaking the country.

“The goal isn’t to win elections, the goal is to transform America,” Sanders said at one point, according to multiple lawmakers and aides in the room.

If he said that in the context of an election year, an election year in which the Republican candidate is Donald Trump!, Bernie Sanders has lost his marbles.  It would explain why he has enabled the fantasies of so many of his die-hard, dead-headed, dead-enders, as can be read all over lefty comment threads, still, a week into July.  His elevation of process fights over symbolic junk like the party platform over winning elections, taking control of the government is, literally, delusional.   I wrote about that early in my blogging.  

Winning this election is the only means of doing anything,  in the end.   All of the process reform crap that such lefty puritans have and could dream up will be overturned by anyone appointed to the Supreme Court as other process liberals in the "free speech- free press" industry file briefs in favor of overturning it.  They've learned nothing at all and they don't because, obviously, they believe it's all supposed to just happen by magic*.  Nothing else could account for such thinking.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

PRETENDING POLITICIANS HAVE THE SAME JOB DESCRIPTION AS SAINTS

You have to admit some liberals are strange. Some get up on a soap box and that turns into their whole universe. One of the oddest of these ducks is the process liberal. You can tell one by it's call, "I'm not interested in the outcome, I only want the process to be honest,". And so it's time to rip out another weak plank from the platform of The Code of Liberal Ethics before someone else steps on it and gets hurt.

This might pinch some toes but Fred Wertheimer is the great example of process liberalism. Some of you know that I've got a bone to pick with him over his teaming up with Newt Gingrich to get Jim Wright ousted, ending the only real opposition that the Reagan-Bush administration ever faced. In the most supreme political irony of our age, Fred and Newt sank him over a BOOK DEAL that by Gingrichean standards was chump change. Even if Wertheimer's motives were pure, in theory, this act marks him as the archetype process liberal due to it's pettiness, the enormous benefit it brought to Republicans and the damage it did to Democrats. You remember, Wright was replaced by the tragically ungifted Tom Foley who obsessed over marble floors in the elevators and lost the house to Newt Gingrich. I don't believe that was what Wertheimer wanted but it wasn't any surprise when it happened.

Process liberals bask in their own purity knowing that they are welcome on any talk show in the country and will seldom be asked a tough question or get pinned down on anything they say. They go on and answer all of the reverently posed questions about the latest sins of Democrats. They predictably bleat out their dismay over these venial sins which, they decree, must carry the penalty of eternal damnation. In the process they sell out the real progressive agenda that doesn't end in process, it ends in results, in making peoples' lives better.

They say "the ends don't justify the means" on the rare occasion someone questions their judgment. But that phrase was invented to counter people who wanted to use means that involved killing people and doing serious injury. Dictators' ends don't justify their means. But the left in the United States won't start doing that, no matter what the temptation. The left will use the untidy and imperfect process of government to defeat Republicans' lies and theft. If there is some minor naughtiness involved it's a small price to pay for child nutrition, healthcare, jobs creation, Social Security and other such benefits to humanity as the notably impure Democratic majorities of the past have produced. Remember the "post office scandal"? Looks penny ante after Bush II, doesn't it.

The sentimental attachment we have for these process liberals is rather strange itself since they haven't produced much and they've prevented much good. That the Republican media values them isn't any surprise, it should be an indictment against them. They wouldn't be asked on if Republicans didn't like the results.

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I did actually get flack for that - at the height of the Bush II regime - from the kind of people who are financially secure and have an interest in the kind of nonsense that Bernie Sanders was quoted as spouting in that meeting. Considering the criticism of him from some of those who have been in the House and Senate who were skeptical of his achievements, you would think that Sanders would know better than to confirm that he has so little appreciation of the realities of making laws and policies that change real life.

Bernie Sanders' reputation as a serious person is one of the casualties of his presidential campaign. One of the biggest Bernie or Busters I know is a woman who is quite wealthy,  it will be no skin off of her if Trump is elected.  I suspect that it would turn out that Sanders' support comes heavily from the financially comfortable, the kind of people who make donations to those groups that supported Fred Wertheimer's career.  It will be quite different for most of us.  I suspect a lot of them were also Nader voters in 2000.

*  I have been becoming more interested in the superstition exhibited in such thinking among the enlightened, the sciency and the materialists.  More on that later.