Donkeys and Elephants: Endangered Species

The two major parties, despite their stranglehold on political processes in this country, are dangerously close to sliding into the oblivion of total irrelevance. Consider:

Obama, after promising to end the Iraq war, has shown himself more than willing to continue the war (because it's all one war, after all). By downsizing and rebranding Iraq, and pumping up the Afghan segment of the so-called Global War on Terror, he'll placate the currently-overstretched Pentagon while leaving them a sandbox to play in, at the same time throwing a sop to fascists, warheads, and Republican ethnic cleansers.

I admire his deftness at the old bait-and-switch routine, but keeping the war machine fat and happy rather than confronting it gives a country desperately longing for peace none of what it actually needs. We'll only achieve peace by adopting a pacific attitude, and Obama's Middle East schemes prove that the donkeys, when push comes to shove, are as belligerent as the elephants, if a little more realistic about the scale of our imperial adventures.

And while Obama has avoided outright lying about his war policy, his choice of a homophobic fake Christian to deliver the invocation at his inauguration shows that he's willing to lie down with dogs and eat Alpo. Seen by some as a conciliatory gesture, a more honest appraisal of this boneheaded move reveals a willingness to tolerate liars, thus fostering a spirit of dishonesty in the political process. Warren, a Californian, declared during the recent election that if Proposition 8 were to fail, he would no longer be free to speak out against gay marriage from the pulpit. I pity anyone gullible enough to swallow such obvious and crude deceit. Is this really anybody's idea of legitimate "dialogue?"

The capstone of this hypocritical and duplicitous Democrat-dominated political season is Caroline Kennedy's candidacy for one of New York's Senate seats. With virtually no discussion of her qualifications or lack of them, the party higher-ups have decided that the family's name and deep pockets guarantee her the right to that seat, even though she's never been elected to anything in her life. Is a supposedly intelligent electorate really expected to approve of this sort personalities-as-politics, which might have been designed by and for Oprah's TV show? But I have to be careful here lest I cast a slur against Oprah that's untrue and unfair.

After eight years of Republican misrule (or 20 of the last 28 years, actually), the donkeys have galloped to our rescue, only to reveal themselves to be as completely corrupted as those they're replacing, if a little softer spoken. They all swill at the same trough, they all subscribe to what Atrios calls "The American Hegemony Project," and to my eyes, the donkey and the elephant appear to be wrapped in an obscene embrace of the type sometimes crudely referred to as "69."

To hell with these donkeys and elephants, who pantomime combat while lustfully grappling with each other under the blanket. Neither party is addressing our real problems, because neither is willing to challenge the status quo, whence our problems originate. We desperately need another political animal. How about a giraffe, or an anteater?