"Why is a Democrat like a windmill?" the man asked his little son. The boy thought a moment and replied: "because no matter which way the wind is blowing, they just keep going around in circles." Out of the mouths of babes, they say.
With the House GOP leadership indicted or under investigation for unethical or fraudulent conduct, the Senate Majority Leader under investigation for securities fraud and the approval rating of the White house trying to climb to a subterranean level of 35%, why are the Democrats unable to articulate a clear message and vision to capitalize on the current situation and seize the initiative that could regain leadership? One begins to wonder whether the very spirit of elected Democratic representatives has been broken by the GOP regime, and that they too buy into the notion that the function of government is corruption, distribution of spoils and aggregation of power at the expense of civil rights and liberties.
Hillary Clinton, the putative front runner for Presidential candidate in 2008 backs off from a challenge to demand that the Bush administration establish a clear and definitive plan for bringing an end to US troop involvement in Iraq. John Kerry sponsors a motion to declare the sense of the Senate that troops should be withdrawn by the end of the year under a strategy publicly advances by Jack Murtha as an "over the horizon" deployment. However, only 5 other democratic senators have signed onto the measure.
Where is the Democratic outcry for a formal investigation into the domestic wiretapping program of the Bush administration? The thoroughly debated, amply documented and carefully written legislation, the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, sets up specific procedures and minimal safeguards for the protection of civil rights of US citizens who may be targeted or ensnared in domestic surveillance and wiretapping. The White House has admitted that it has ignored these statutory safeguards and has no intention of abiding by the law passed by Congress. Where is the risk in exposing any legislator of any political strip who fails to call for holding violators of the law accountable? Yet Democrats seem absent with out leave.
The American people are slowly waking up to the substantial loss of their rights and liberties. Despite the gross failures of the media to act as watchdogs and uncompromising spotlights on the shadowy activities of government, the American people are beginning to realize that something, many things in fact, are seriously wrong with the way this country is being run and the direction in which it is headed.
But as Thomas Jefferson once noted, "the People, sir, is a beast." The public must be led in order to achieve anything substantial. That leadership may be venal and corrupt, or it could be principled and devoted to the public good. The job of a democratic government is to give the people an opportunity to choose which type of leadership they prefer. If the voting and electoral process has not already been too corrupted to reflect the actual choice of the people, a question not entirely free from doubt if one reads the detailed accounts of election fraud in Ohio and Florida, then two things are necessary.
First, candidates must be identified and supported who are truly more interested in public service for the benefit of the people rather than to reward friends and cash in personally at the expense of the government and the people. Those candidates must then be armed with an articulate and consisted principled message that demonstrates the direction and vision of this nation toward which they would lead the People as a beast. Simply waiting to see which way the wind blows and spinning wheels is not leadership and will not assist the People in any meaningful way.
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