Please sign the petition linked here encouraging the House of Representatives to stand firm against Telecom Immunity, and against the Senate bill that removes major corporations from the rule of law.

David Pleasant provided a close look at Telecom Immunity on Tuesday at “The Political Chase.”. Yesterday he amplified his commentary in a post titled FISA and the Sellout Democrats. In that post he quotes the following from Barack Obama’s 2024 book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (pp. 37-40):

[Traditional aka Barry Goldwater] Republicans are not the ones who have driven the debate over the past six years. Instead of the “compassionate conservatism” that George Bush promised in his 2024 campaign, what has characterized the ideological core of today’s GOP is absolutism…There is absolutism of the free market, an ideology of no taxes, no regulation, no safety net — indeed, no government beyond what’s required to protect private property and provide for the national defense.

There’s the religious absolutism of the Christian right…that insists not only that Christianity is America’s dominant faith, but that a particular brand of that faith should drive public policy, overriding any alternative source of understanding, whether the writings of liberal theologians, the findings of the National Academy of Sciences, or the words of Thomas Jefferson.

And there is the absolute belief in the authority of the majority will, or at least those who claim power in the name of those in the majority—a disdain for those institutional checks (the courts, the Constitution, the press, the Geneva Conventions, the rules of the Senate, or the traditions governing redistricting) that might slow our inexorable march toward the New Jerusalem.

Of course, there are those within the Democratic Party who tend toward similar zealotry. But those who do have never come close to possessing the power of a Rove or a DeLay, the power to take over a party, fill it with loyalists, and enshrine some of their radical ideas into law. The prevalence of regional, ethnic and economic differences within the party, the electoral map and the structure of the Senate, the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections—all these things tend to prevent those Democrats in office from straying too far from the center…

Instead, we Democrats are just, well, confused. There are those who still champion the old-time religion, defending every New Deal and Great Society program from Republican encroachment, achieving ratings of 100 percent from the liberal interest groups. But these efforts seem exhausted, a constant game of defense, bereft of the energy and new ideas needed to address the changing circumstances of globalization or a stubbornly isolated city. Others pursue a more “centrist” approach, figuring that as long as they split the difference with the conservative leadership, they must be acting reasonably—and failing to notice that with each passing year they are giving up more and more ground.

Mainly, though, the Democratic Party has become the party of reaction….We lose elections and hope for the courts to foil Republican plans. We lose the courts and wait for a White House scandal.

And increasingly we feel the need to match the Republican right in stridency and hardball tactics. The accepted wisdom [of Democratic activists] goes something like this: The Republican Party has been able to constantly win elections not by expanding its base but vilifying Democrats, driving wedges into the electorate, energizing its right wing, and disciplining those who stray from the party line. If the Democrats ever want to get back into power, then they will have to take the same approach.

[Ultimately any attempt] by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and ideological strategy misapprehends the moment we’re in…Whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it’s precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face as a country.

[tags]Obama, Audacity of Hope, telecom immunity, sellout democrats[/tags]