On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 14:49:38 -0400 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
writes:
> SergioL652 at aol.com wrote:
>
> >But the only purpose of the mobilization is to elect Kerry. After
> >November 2nd its purpose will be to defend Kerry agaisnt Right Wing
>
> >attacks.
>
> It's not so much to elect Kerry as to fire Bush. No doubt some
> people
> will morph into Kerry apologists if he wins, but not all. I know I
> won't, nor will most of the people I know.
Unfortunately, I don't think that the people you know necessarily constitute a representative sample of the people who are currently stumping for Kerry. We need only look back to the Clinton Administration to see what is likely to happen if Kerry is elected. Clinton, as you may remember, helped to accomplish such feats as the passage of NAFTA, GATT, the abolition of AFDC, and the passage of the Antiterrorism Act in 1996 which constituted a serious threat to civil liberties and helped to set the stage for the Patriot Act under Bush. For the most part, barely a peep was heard from liberals and progressives when Clinton was doing these things, even though if they had been done instead under a Republican president, they would have screamed bloody murder. But Clinton was a Democrat, and "everybody knows" how bad and scary are the Republicans. This kind of "good cop/bad cop" routine which is built into the American political system has been going on for a very long time. It was Truman after all who initiated the purges of Communists and alleged Communists following WW II, not the Republicans (although the Republicans were able to get good milage out of redbaiting the Democrats afterwards). In 1964, people voted for the "peace candidate," Lyndon Johnson, because they were scared that Barry Goldwater might do something foolish like escalating the Vietnam War or something. And it was President Carter who helped to initiate the mania for "balancing the budget" which justified cutting back on social spending and (by appointing Paul Volker to head the Fed, the use of tight monetary policy, that is recessions, in order to fight inflation). And in foreign policy, Carter revived the cold war against the Soviet Union, following the invasion of Afghanistan (which Brezinski has boasted was a trap that the Carter Administration deliberately set to bog the Soviets into their own "Vietnam").
I suspect that things will not be much different under a Kerry Administration. Kerry, like his Democratic predecessors, will do all sorts of things that liberals and progressives would never accept from a Republican president. And if they are called upon this, they will make the same old excuse for Kerry, that he is better than the "wicked" Republicans. Anyway, I remember that the last real liberal president we had was, you guessed it, Richard Milhous Nixon.
>
> Doug
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