collapse

A year into the Obama administration we've now seen the total failure of his presidency and of the 111th Congress. There won't be a recovery.

Campaigning in 2008 Obama promised that he and a Democratic Congress would deliver comprehensive health care reform. Now, in the wake of Scott Brown's election to the Senate from Massachusetts as the 41st Republican (the Dems still have an 18-seat majority), Rahm Emmanuel has signaled that what's left of health care reform after the Senate got done eviscerating it this fall is on hold. Obama's vow is revealed as an empty promise issuing from an empty suit, and the failures of the Democratic Congress make the failures of the Republican Congresses of 2001-2006 under Bush look normal.

The various reasons and excuses for why this happened are detailed today at Talking Points Memo, but the failure of health care reform and the Democratic Party are only part of the story of the total collapse of the political system as a viable problem-solving entity. We now have a strong executive branch, filled for the last nine years with extraordinarily weak presidents, and a Congress incapable of any action other than continuing to appropriate money to the perpetual war and the so-called "intelligence" services, and funding boondoggles like the Department of Homeland Security.

In the three years that remain before the elections of 2012, we need to recall the purposes of government, as detailed by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that "Governments are instituted among Men," in order to secure to them certain fundamental rights, that they "(derive) their just powers from the consent of the governed, (and) That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

We need to recall and keep in mind as we move toward 2012 that this government exists for our benefit, and not the for benefit of a few corporations and fat cats. With that as our reference point, it's time for us to say good-bye to these Demolicans and Republicrats and their parliaments of whores, who have shamelessly sold themselves to the highest bidders.

Power to the people.