It seems to be an article of faith among a number of people here on Mudcat and elsewhere that all Democrats are the same, all Republicans are the same, and to make a dismal picture completely hopeless, there is no difference at all between the Democrats and the Republicans.
I know Republicans who kneel down and worship at the Shrine of Bush. I also know Republicans who think that Bush is one of the worst disasters that ever happened to this country.
I don't know any Democrats who don't, at the very least, think that Bush is one of the worst disasters that ever happened to this country. Most of the Democrats I know deplore the influence of corporations in the political system, and most fall into the category of "liberal" or "progressive," with all that that entails—livable minimum wage, universal health care, effective social programs for the poor and homeless, preservation of the environment, and the idea that we should clean up our own act before we try to tell the rest of the world how to live.
Now the Democratic National Committee may be a party looking for a position, and I'm quite sure that a lot of Democrats are owned by big corporations, but they share that characteristic with a substantial number of Republicans. There are a fair number of Democratic politicians who have not been bought and whose integrity and principles are intact. That also holds true for a fair number of Republicans. But of the two, I side with the Democrats because the progressive positions that many of them believe in wholeheartedly, and others at least give lip-service to, are much closer to my position than are the positions taken by the Republican Party.
The solution offered by the folks who complain bitterly of the deficiencies of our "duopoly" system is either to refuse to support the system by not voting at all (give up, roll over, and die! That's a great plan!), or to vote for a third party. I won't even talk about the asininity of the first position. The problem with the second position is that it fails to acknowledge the truly unfortunate political reality that third parties rarely if ever draw more than 5% of the total vote, and in a close election, that can cost the imperfect but preferable major party the victory. Self defeating. I would vote for the Green Party if I had any hope they could win. But since I know that the chances are slim to none, I vote for Democratic candidates, who, at the very least, give lip-service to my preferences, and whom I can influence to a degree because some of them know me as a constituent.
"But," you tell me loudly, "if everybody voted for the Green Party, they would win!" True indeed! "And," as Eleanor of Aquitaine said in The Lion in Winter, "if pigs could fly, there would be pork in the tree-tops!"
Now. A few simple questions for those who maintain that there is no difference between the two major parties:
Consider the attempt to blow up the north tower of the World Trade Center with a car-bomb in the parking garage on February 26, 1993, the bombing of the U.S. Embassies in East Africa on August 7, 1998, and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden on October 12, 2000, all traced to the activities of Osama bin Laden and al Qaida (with an attempted but only partially successful retaliatory surgical strike—as contrasted with declaring war on and invading another country—by Clinton on August 20, 1998 on a known terrorist target in Afghanistan and a suspected target in Sudan). As the Clinton administration turned the White House over to the Bush administration, in January of 2001, various members of the Clinton administration warned Bush, et al about the danger of bin Laden and al Qaida. The members of the Bush administration didn't want to hear it and blew off the warnings. And they continued to ignore repeated warnings of the same danger made by the various intelligence agencies.
Now with that as background, if Al Gore had won the presidency in the 2000 election (there are those who say he did, but that's another argument):
1. Do you honestly think Gore would have ignored warnings from both the CIA and the FBI of an impending al Qaida sponsored terrorist attack on the World Trade Center?
2. And had the attack succeeded (as it did under Bush), do you honestly think that Al Gore would have tried to blame it on Saddam Hussein and then invaded Iraq?
3. Considering Al Gore's book, Earth in the Balance, published in 1993 and his subsequent book and movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that Gore would not have been on the very forefront of promoting laws and regulations to counteract the continuing ecological degradation and global warming—to which the Republicans in general and the Bush administration in particular are so blatantly indifferent (read "criminally negligent")?
Or John Kerry. Now I was not enchanted by Kerry. Not at all. But considering his long record as a powerful anti-war activist as a result of his service in Vietnam,
4. Do you honestly believe that, had Kerry been elected in 2004, he would not have done everything in his power to extricate American troops from Iraq in as smooth a manner as the situation allowed, considering the hornet's nest that Bush stirred up there?
Okay, those are just a very few of the many similar questions that I could pose.
I'd like to hear some thoughtful answers from those who claim there is no difference between the two parties.