Eight faces that I’m thoroughly sick of.

Ten faces that make me vomit, projectile style.

Now, the man on the stand he wants my vote,
He’s a-runnin’ for office on the ballot note.
He’s out there preachin’ in front of the steeple,
Tellin’ me he loves all kinds-a people.
He’s eatin’ bagels
He’s eatin’ pizza
He’s eatin’ chitlins
He’s eatin’ bullshit!

Bob Dylan “I Shall Be Free”

I knew this would happen when they started campaigning for the 2008 election five minutes after the 2006 mid terms. I felt it coming, like the feeling I get when I eat a giant sausage sandwich with peppers and onions at midnight, I know that indigestion is in my immediate future.

I’m sick of politics, thoroughly, fed up, to the gills…. Urp!

I know, I know, being sick of politics is like being tired of living, OK so what what what do you do about it? Shut up? Quit bitching? Take up residence in the nearest hermitage? Find a cuckoo’s nest and commit to it?

I’ve been reflecting in the last few days about lofty goals, the dreams and visions of changing the world expressed by the alpha personalities parading before us in this increasingly irrelevant, interminable and irritating beauty contest of a presidential election campaign.

I met a person recently whose goal every day is to help people in one remote village get a second meal each day, just that, help someone who normally eats once in every twenty four hours to get an extra tuna sandwich.

There are thousands of such people who arise each day, not thinking about building a nuclear reactor, desalinating the Indian ocean, irrigating a billion acres of desert, creating productive farmland to feed an entire continent, but simply concern themselves with helping Julius Mukembe provide a second meal for himself and his wife and children as well as the families in the other 17 huts in some remote part of nowhere.

A remote part of nowhere, where a scientific breakthrough is a septic system and mass transit is a foot bridge that enables livestock to forage in new pasture land and cuts hours off the daily task of gathering fuel or food.
A remote part of nowhere where a health care program is clean water, where feeding the hungry means sharing your dinner.

I no longer believe that any of the high class whores depicted in the circus pictures above will do anything that will make life easier or better for the common people in this or any other country. They will not solve a single one of the enormous societal challenges that lie like an enormous weight on our public chest and that lie in wait to restrict our children’s future.

Whether we talk about war and peace, energy or health care, social security or child mortality I cannot find the face of a savior or even a halfway decent prophet in any ring of this circus.

I know that I can trust all of them to say one thing publicly and the opposite when the cameras amd microphones disappear. I know that everyone shown on the stages above has, and will in the future, sell out the interests of the working people of this country and others to the first corporate lizard with with a handful of campaign cash. I hear their phony pronouncements, so carefully crafted by their handlers and spin doctors and reject almost every word I hear.

I am sick of hearing from everyday people around me that “they’re all alike, Republicans, Democrats, it doesn’t matter, they’re all crooked.”

I’m sick of hearing that statement because it’s so damn true. The instant that the election returns were counted last fall my Democratic leadership began groveling at the feet of the same corporate interests that put the Bush/Cheney fiasco in office.

They will provide for the future, trust them, “their future,” but when the pie is sliced and served we will still be eating cake… Urp!

Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust

My final report on DemocracyFest is going to be brief, as I was away in the afternoon during most of the good stuff. I arranged to catch  up with former Alaska Senator (and Presidential candidate) Mike Gravel across town for what turned out to be an extended interview, so I wasn’t able to catch Dennis Kucinich calling into the conference (GreenVermonster was there…. perhaps he’ll grace us with his impression). Nor was I able to catch Matt Dunne’s presentation on “Service Politics.” Basically all I can recount further is a piece of the e Pluribus media presentation, and of course the big speech by DNC Chair Howard Dean.

The good news, though, is that I was able to secure interviews not only with Gravel, but with Dunne, and even Howard Dean. I’ll have the Dean interview up at some point Monday and will trickle out the others as I can transcribe them. Hopefully I’ll also have the Hodes/Shea-Porter clip by the end of the week.

But on to epm and Dean…

I only caught a bit of the e Pluribus Media talk on their model of citizen e-journalism (presented by epm-ers GreyHawk and luaptifer). It was a hoot to hear of the rapid genesis of the citizen media clearinghouse that began with this post by SusanG at dKos which lit the fuse leading to the “horizontally organized” journalism site in only a matter of weeks. Amazing how quickly things can happen in this medium.

It was also downright inspiring to see how comprehensively they have implemented their editorial and fact-checking system with enough redundancies and firewalls to insure quality and verifiable content, but not so much as to choke off content. The presentation wandered a bit, but it was still good stuff.

I seem to have missed a powerful presentation on the impact of the war before Dean’s appearence, unfortunately. In any event, the place had begun to fill once again to capacity in anticipation. Among those present were the three candidates vying for the right to run for Republican Senator Sununu’s seat in New Hampshire’s Democratic primary; Steve Marchand, Jay Buckey and Katrina Swett.

Dean, of course, entered with rock star fanfare. After referring to the event as a “family reunion,” Dean began his balancing act of playing his role as chief Democratic Party cheerleader, while acknowledging, and even validating, the concerns and frustrations of liberal Democrats who play the role of his constituency. He acknowledged openly that the Democratic victories of last year constituted “probational employment,” and after praising Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid, commented that a “fair amount of you are disappointed ahe voting a couple weeks ago in Congress.”

Dean’s response was to validate, but to remind attendees that Harry Reid starts out every Iraq vote with only 49 votes, given Tim Johnson’s temporary incapacity and Joe Lieberman’s delusional intransigence. He also made a point of contrasting the debate rhetoric of the Republican Presidential candidates versus that of the Dems. He noted that the Republicans uniformly endorsed Bush’s comparison of Iraq to the military commitment in Korea, calling it the “50 year plan for Iraq.” He noted that every single Democratic candidate, in contrast, said we should get out as soon as possible, and that they would in fact bring out troops (to varying degrees and at various rates, obviously)

“If we want to get out of Iraq,” Dean said, “we have to have a Democratic President.”

Dean urged activists to fully engage this election cycle, again making the point that we should ask for everyone’s vote (and that doing so was a sign of respect to the voter). He admonished activists when approaching voters to “ask everybody what they think before we tell them what we think.” He spoke optimistically about the prospects of building bridges with the younger generation of evangelical Christians, proposing a forthright approach that states clearly to socially conservative Christians that, while we will not turn our backs on civil rights for gays and lesbians or a woman’s right to choose, there is still much we can agree on, such as strategies for alleviating poverty and protecting the environment.

For those looking for some of Dean’s famous (or infamous) take-no-prisoners rhetoric, they got  a taste during his discussion of the filibustered immigration bill. While acknowleding the bills shortcomings, he placed it’s failure squarely on the shoulders of the far right, stating “what we don’t need is a lot of racist hysteria about immigration” based on fears of immigrants because they “don’t look like you” or that they may “change the character of your town.”

Dean, in contrast, praised the majority of immigrants as hard workers, calling them “the best of the best” and asking “why wouldn’t we want people like that in the United States of America?”

Tying the frustrations around immigration legislation and the Iraq vote together, he stated that it was time to “get rid of the stranglehold the right wing has on the US Senate.”

It was a very positive speech and Dean did what Dean does so well; lay out his own anger and frustration but channel it positively and optimistically into a rallying cry. Whatever you think of the man or his politics, you’d be fooling yourself to deny this oratorical talent he’s honed on the national stage.

Dean closed by stating that he’d taken the DNC job “so we could fix the Democratic Party,” again acknowledging both progress as well as the continuing challenges. Despite his position, he insisted with a smile that it’s “not about whether Democrats win or Republicans win – it’s just that it so happens that the Democrats are right, and the Republicans are wrong.”

Heh.

So what do you all think? Inspiring? Phony? Exciting? Boring? Discuss away…