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Someone Better Blow Reveille for the Democratic Leadership

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by David Leaf

Because this country is based on a two party system, the Democratic Party is this country's sole immediate source of help. The Bush administration is attacking this country on every issue of importance, while too many of our Democratic Senators and Congressional delegates seem to be either standing there or, worse yet, they are helping the Republicans totally destroy this planet and the country with it.

The Bush administration is systematically destroying the environment, our civil rights, the checks and balances written into our constitution, the judiciary, and the economy. They are putting our soldiers in harm's way while earning us the hatred and the resentment of most of the rest of the world. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was only one super-power left in the world. George W Bush's policies have created another one. Now it is the United States vs. the rest of the world. Under the Bush administration the United States is ignoring the reality of Global Warming while producing one quarter of the air pollutants on the entire planet. The Democratic leaders are standing by or, even worse, they are helping the Republican Congress and the Senate to pass laws and the White House to pass executive orders that reduce the restrictions on corporate pollution and allow it to increase. There regulations preventing the contamination of our land and water are being removed wholesale, spewing toxic chemicals and pollutants everywhere. Our National parks are being violated for profit and our National Forests are being decimated.

Instead of taking a stand against the NRA and the gun manufacturers, Tom Daschle is co-sponsoring a bill to exempt them by law from every responsibility they might have in the carnage we see in this country every day resulting from gun violence. In spite of the corruption and graft being handed out in plain sight to Halliburton, Bechtel, and other cronies of the Bush administration, the bulk of the Democratic Party allowed 21 billion dollars to be handed over to these companies without a fight. Where was the filibuster to insist that the money for the troops be set aside from the money being allotted for reconstruction, and voted on separately? Where was the demand that the money for reconstruction be cleansed of the war profiteering and be made accountable to the American taxpayers who are footing the bill? Where is the demand that our soldiers in Iraq get the flack jackets and other equipment they require? Where is the outrage to demand that our reserve soldiers get the medical care they require and not allow the wounded and injured troops to be housed at Fort Stewart in squalor while waiting for medical care? When is there going to be a demand to end the mendacity of the current administration?

The non-leaders of the Democratic Party are allowing Senators like Robert Byrd, Russell Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Ted Kennedy, Carl Levin and Congressional Democrats like Barbara Lee and Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi stand out there as the lone voices of dissent while they think they are saving their own elected skins. Senator Dianne Feinstein should stop cogitating so hard about whether or not to vote down right-wing ideologues like Janice Rogers Brown for our appellate court. She should instead start insisting that our judges have the qualifications to safeguard the constitutional rights of us all.

Most of the Democrats in the Senate let this country down from the very beginning of this administration when they didn't stop the appointment of John Ashcroft as the Attorney General. It was an additional dereliction of duty when they abrogated their responsibility to try to stop George W. Bush from taking us into this current immoral, self-defeating, and insidious war in Iraq. There can be no excuse for saying that they didn't know the administration was lying about the war. Literally millions of people world-wide knew the truth and we protested in the streets of cities across the world. The reply from the White House to this world protest was that the president doesn't listen to focus groups. The Democratic response in the Senate was to give the President Carte Blanche to start a war with a country that did not present any imminent danger to the US. If the Democrats in the House and Senate who voted to support the President couldn't see the ruse, perhaps they don't deserve to be there in the first place. They went even further downhill by not creating an obstacle to his tax cut for the very wealthy. They have contributed to weakening our home security by helping to weaken the economic stability of this country through the increase in the national debt. They have contributed to the increase of poverty and the wanton looting of the National Treasury.

But what is done is done. It's time for the Democratic Party leadership to wake up and start to be the true opposition party that this country so desperately needs. This country is going in a direction opposed to the one set so ably by the founders of this nation. Somebody or some group has to stop it and turn it around. Courage is judged not by what one does in the absence of fear. Courage is measured by how one performs in the face of great fear. If the Democratic leadership is so afraid of losing the next election, it should ask itself what purpose their election will serve if they simply permit the country to become a bankrupt third world nation that tries to bully the rest of the word with a hegemonic policy that will be the seeds of our own destruction.

The impeachment of Dubya would not solve anything if we end up with Dick Cheney for President. Based on the law of succession even getting rid of them both would only bring more of these neo-conservatives to replace them. We need to get rid of the entire group that is deceitfully destroying this nation. That means Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Delay, and the rest. We can only succeed in accomplishing this at the ballot box in 2004. In the meantime, we need the Democrats to develop that sense of courage in the face of their re-election fears and stand up for all of the rest of us.

For those without a military background, it should be pointed out that reveille is not sounded to wake up the troops. It is sounded after the troops are awake. It is then a call to stand in for roll-call. It is time for the Democratic Party to stand up for roll-call. It is time to be counted in the service of our country and to help the rest of us save this great nation from the coming disaster toward which we are now headed.

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY