Liberal Agenda is (Still) Dead

By John Ballard

Deborah White at About.com put up a dismal analysis of what can be expected from the mid-term election. In Liberal Agenda, Influence Will Be Dead in 112th Senate  she says in part...

Most assuredly... Republicans will gain enough Senate seats in the 112th Congress to kill advancement of any semblance of a liberal agenda.

[The probable loss of] four senior legislators [Boxer, Reid, Murray & Feingold], who collectively have served 13 Senate terms (78 years), would be a severe blow to Democratic influence over federal legislation.

Combine that with the recent deaths of liberal lions Sen. Ted Kennedy (47 years of Senate service) and Sen. Robert Byrd (51 years), and the retirement of Sen. Chris Dodd (29 years)... and well, liberal debate and policy-making as our country has known it since FDR will be moribund. Lifeless. Dead. Which, of course, is exactly as the Tea Party movement wants.

I just hate it when stuff like that and Ron's previous post look right. All that's left is ranting.
So this is the rant I left at Deborah's place.

The very word �Liberal� is now pejorative, thanks to endless diatribes by a wide array of talking heads, politicians and talk show hosts all looking for a cheap shot. A few years ago when �Progressive� crept into the popular vocabulary Liberals everywhere breathed a sigh of relief and mumbled something along the lines of �Uh, yeah� that�s better� I�m no more Librul than I�m a Commie� think of me as your buddy who just looks at stuff different, kinda like brainstorming��

Brainstorming, indeed. Brain-numbing is all it is. It�s about time for Liberals to get in your face and say �Yes. I�m a Liberal. Get over it.� 

I�m old enough to have watched the Liberal agenda get savaged again and again.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to suck the blood out of the federal budget and our so-called leadership only continues to suckle the military-industrial complex Ike warned about when we were children.

Social Security and Medicare are the only tax money recirculating in the economy (payroll, not income taxes) and a chorus of voices calls for both to be destroyed, better to sate the appetites of brokers, sales people and investors who salivate when they think of how much they might skim from �privatized� systems.� Medicare Advantage and the famous Part D, both of which need to be eliminated, took two big bites out of the apple and the drug and insurance industries can�t wait to get more�

As we enter this Fall�s elections I�m listening to ads attacking one of Georgia�s most decent former governors now running again. He failed to get reelected before because he pissed off teachers� unions by calling for higher standards that are now finally coming into existence, and pissing off the Good Old Boys who were angry about his support of the Confederate battle flag�s getting removed from the state flag. The attack ads criticize him for apologizing for past mistakes, conflating his apologies with the usual distortions of Obama�s speeches to the Arab world being characterized as �apologizing to our enemies.� And there is a tag line �I don�t care about the Liberals in Washington�� Every time I hear it I get mad.

So I guess you�re correct. The summer of recovery has been a dud and anything resembling a Liberal agenda is dead on arrival after the fall elections. Without any central control and command three disparate Conservative hurricanes are separately swirling stronger this season than ever: the Tea Party and it�s spinoffs, the Koch empire and their compatriots with deep pockets in the world of business and banking, and an army of rhetoricians on radio and TV whose vile vocabulary of anti-Liberal buzzwords and catch-phrases is finally so much a part of everyday speech they no longer need to say �damned� or �socialist� when they employ the word �Liberal.� The listening public already knows how dirty those Liberals are.

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None of that helps much in a practical way but it helps me feel better to get it out. If you took time to read it, thanks. If not, that's okay. Thanks anyway. It's a holiday weekend. We'll hear worse from drunken people on vacation.