The Future Of Democracy

[poliphilo]

There was a film last night about the bloggers who brought down Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary. OK. I thought, no contest. People power. I know which side I'm cheering for.

But.

While Lieberman is a machine politician and a sell-out, the empty-eyed smoothiechops they had running against him had nothing going for him except that he was rich and not Joe Lieberman.

And then there were the bloggers themselves. You know what? My idea of a blogger is the sort of person I meet on LJ- independent, quirky, individual, committed to the art of writing, happy to be in a place where  there's no editorial control and one can say what the hell one wants- no matter how silly, far-out, erudite, obscene, strange or uncommercial.

But these people were sweaty and had stary eyes. They didn't care about words.

And there was this brutish, young man- who wore his hat the wrong way round and never took it off, not even in church- who was organisinhg them, feeding them stories, telling them what to say. 

A whipper-in of hounds.

So there were the bloggers, a whole posse of them,  with their camcorders, following Lieberman around, hoping to catch him saying or doing something daft, smirking and smugging and egging one another on and it slowly dawned on me that I hated them. As someone said in inteview- maybe it was Christopher Hitchens- they'd become a mob.

A gang of peasants with torches and pitchforks.

And what they were blogging was mainly abuse. Not, clever, witty, analytical or anything like that. Stupid stuff.

Then one of them- a blogger of national celebrity who can count on getting a million hits a day- published a photoshopped image of Lieberman in black face. Why? Because the mind of a mob is constantly pushing the envelope of stupid. 

And there was a surge of support for Lieberman.

In the end Lieberman lost the primary but went on to win the race as an independent. Something had changed and nothing had changed. We'd seen the future of democracy and it was just like the past-

Graceless and ugly.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the film and to be honest I suspect you're being both fair and accurate in your assessment of at least some of the bloggers that helped bring down Joe Lieberman in the Connecticut primary. That said, I think characterizing "Holy Joe" as "a machine politician and a sell-out" is to give the man far too much credit.

In what machine is he a happy little cog? To what interests, both foreign and domestic, has he sold his constitutional duty? The answers to these questions, I think, rob Lieberman of any deserved sympathy.

Here in the States, we don't have a democracy - thank Goddess. What we have are the decaying remains of a once promising republic and in recent years men like Lieberman have done much to pry up what little remains of its foundations. Had that stary-eyed mob come after Holy Joe with real "torches and pitchforks", I trust my humanity would have objected to their stringing him up from a lamppost on Pennsylvania Ave. But in what scales does one weigh the travesty that is the "Great War On Terror", which the man has promoted and cheered at every turn, against the loss of one unctuous shill like Lieberman?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I know little more of Lieberman than we saw in the film.

But I'm with you on the "War on Terror". I think it's a Big Lie- in the shadow of which great crimes have been committed. And I don't see how intelligent men and women with access to the unspun evidence could ever have believed that the case for invading Iraq was valid.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Lieberman has a long and well-documented history of war mongering. Here's part of a statement he delivered on the floor of the Senate, 13 September 2002:

On September 11th, 2001, a foreboding new chapter in American history began. On that day our government was reawakened in this new century to its oldest and most solemn responsibility: protecting the lives and liberty of the American people. As we survey the landscape of threats to our security in the years ahead, the greatest are terrorists like Al Qaeda and rogue regimes like Saddam Hussein's. Saddam hates America and Americans and is working furiously to accumulate deadly weapons of mass destruction, and the missiles, planes, and unmanned aerial vehicles to use in attacking distant targets.

Every day Saddam remains in power is a day of danger for the Iraqi people, for Iraq's neighbors, for the American people, and for the world. As long as Saddam remains in power, there will be no genuine security, and no lasting peace in the Middle East among the Arab nations, or between the Arabs, Israelis, and Christians who live there.

The threat Saddam poses has been articulated so often that some may have grown numbed to the reality of his brutality. But after September 11th, we must reacquaint ourselves with it, because if we do not understand and act, his next victims, like Osama bin Laden's, could be innocent Americans.

There's more tub thumping and preening over his past calls for military action in the rest of his speech, which you may read for yourself, here:

Senator Joe Lieberman Floor Statement on Iraq

When it comes right down to it, Lieberman worked as hard as anyone in Washington, Republican or Democrat, to bind the need for revenge for the terrorist attacks of 2001 to his long-standing desire to eliminate Saddam Hussein.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, at least he's been consistent.

Thanks for sending me this. It tells me all we really need to know about the guy.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

You're most welcome.

And thanks for tolerating my little tirade so graciously. For all the good it does, at least it feels good to vent a bit, sometimes.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Venting is one of the things LJ is for.