McClellan Democrats and the Death of the Republic
McClellan as Hamlet, the reluctant general in a great cause, while working for
Pres. Lincoln; the exuberant presidential candidate against that cause while opposing
Lincoln for president in 1964. McClellan
By Internet Poster arendt Link
We don't need references like Vichy to describe the cowardly Democrats. We have our own All-American, gold standard for cowardice - Civil War General George McClellan. No matter how many troops he had, it was never enough. At the slightest repulse, McClellan bolted into full retreat. He was constantly defeated by inferior armies. He probably single-handedly prolonged the war by six months.
I don't yet think the cowardly Democrats have gone completely over to Bushism, as the Vichy epithet would imply. And, the Neville Chamberlain analogy has become toxic. So, let's stay on this side of the pond and just call them McClellan Democrats.
It's a good analogy, because McClellan was just an appointed general who could be replaced. Lincoln eventually found Grant. And the working base of the Democratic Party can...
OH, SCREW IT. Enough with the erudite historical analogies. Let's just tell the truth.
The First Republic of the United States, based upon the Constitution of 1789 is dead, dead, DEAD. The Dem cave-in was just the final flat-lining of a comatose system that has been on life-support for years. We need to give it a decent burial and move on. We need to tell the truth. Let someone else parade the corpse around like some holy relic.
The post-flat line truth, no matter how much CPR is given to the corpse, is that we now live in a friendly fascist, corporatist state. Politicians represent only the interests of corporations, theocrats, and other group organizations. They do not protect the individual rights of citizens - not their medical rights, their labor rights, their environmental rights, their voting rights, their rights to free speech, and on and on.
In the last six years citizens have REALLY lost the following rights (statutes given):
Habeas Corpus (enemy combatant, Gitmo)
Cruel and Unusual Punishment (torture is just fine)
Free speech (1st amendment zones, expulsion from GOP meetings)
Unreasonable Search (wiretap, national security letters)
Honest Elections (HAVA, "voter fraud" prosecutions, partisan election officials)
Asset Seizure (began w drugs and RICO, now "terrorist" will do)
Paying one's "debt to society" (sex offender persecution)
Our legislators have GIVEN away the following Constitutional principles:
Declaring War (Iraq War Resolution)
Separation of Church and State (Faith-based Initiatives)
Oversight of Executive Agencies (most importantly, DOJ)
Non-political Civil Service (GSA scandal, USA purge)
Right to Impeach (if not now, when?)
Right to filibuster ("nuclear option")
And they barely missed giving away these other bedrock principles:
Bills of Attainder (see Terry Schiavo)
Separation of Powers (see "activist judges")
America has a massive Prison Industrial Complex for its rapidly growing, unemployable underclass, which has been created by the corporate policy of outsourcing. The PIC is a profit center for private prison corporations (an obscenity); sweat shoppers feeding on slave labor, and the rip-off phone companies. So far they don't usually put middle class folks in jail; they just make them unemployable, uninsurable, untouchable, non-persons. Eventually, such people fall into the underclass. Friendly fascism is so....nice, deniable. It's all the victim's fault.
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But, back to our dead Republic. Every deceased person requires a death certificate. How did the First Republic die?
It died from complications of the National Security Act of 1947. Namely, a cancerous (almost immeasurable) military budget, including a black budget that has swollen to $50 Billion per year! This budget pays for mercenary armies like Blackwater and DynCorp. It pays for massive domestic surveillance. And, somewhere in it, it pays for the blackmail and control of anyone who stands in the way of the Military Industrial Complex. 
Do they teach this one in school or cover it in the press. Wikipedia
Indirectly, the NSA47 paid for the destruction of a free press. As soon as it was up and running, the NSA47-chartered CIA started planting stooges in the press. The press became known as the CIA's "Mighty Wurlitzer". Over time, it went from being a few friendly journalists to outright ownership of the news by a handful of MIC (defense contractor)-linked mega-corporations.
Since the end of WW2, America has spent its money on the MIC and the unending expansion of suburbia (all the better to isolate you, my dear). We stopped spending money on infrastructure, on non-military human capital, on non-military R&D.
So, the Republic is dead, but the military-run ghost of a great country lives on. The MIC and the PIC are America today. They represent the first American police state - a Committee of Public Safety on steroids and angel dust, just waiting for its first Robespierre to appear. (Pardon my French.)
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Given there is a corpse, my opinion, as a person of Irish extraction, is that we need to have a wake for the First Republic, a big public drunken bash where we tell good stories about the good old guy. Then we need a public funeral in an appropriate cathedral of democracy, and a cortege to the cemetery, where we put the Constitution in a box in the ground and respectfully throw some dirt over it.
Then, we need to go get the bums who put it in its grave.
ENDS