Wrapped in a Flag of Deceptions: So These are the Democrats?

At a recent meeting of House Republicans, members ruminating on the disastrous state of their party reportedly murmured with gloomy jocularity about the administration of "President Hastert". A CounterPuncher familiar with the proceedings reports "they were only half joking".

Yet, as they contemplate political ruin in next year's election, these Republicans can take solace in the fact that, if defeated, their replacements may not differ in any meaningful way on important issues of the day. That at least is the hope and dream of Democratic apparatchik Rahm Emmanuel and the corporate toadies he represents. Ominously, Emmanuel, a relict of the Clinton White House, heads the Democratic National Campaign Committee.

As such, he decides which candidates for the House should get money and other support from the national party. At a time when any fool can see that the public hates the war more this month than last, and will hate it even more next month and the month after that, Emmanuel is doing his best to recruit candidates, preferably rich ones, guaranteed to eschew vocal opposition to the war.

Clear evidence for this proclivity is evident in the race to succeed Henry Hyde, in Chicago's 6th District.

In the last election progressive candidate Christine Cegalis actually got 44.2 per cent of the vote against the sixteen-term Hyde, despite being outspent $700,000 to $160,000 in a conservative district with no elected Democrats at all.

Following this commendable showing, Cegalis figured that with Hyde retiring and the Republicans melting down, she stood a better than even chance of garnering the seat in 2006.

However it seems that in Emmanuel's opinion, Cegalis stinks. Never mind that excellent record against the giant Hyde, forget her well-crafted support network in the Chicago district, Cegalis has not yet raised a million dollars and, even more damningly, she is calling for troop withdrawal from Iraq. So Emmanuel set out to recruit a more suitable candidate. Initially, he approached two millionaires and urged them, serially, to run against Cegalis in the primary.

They refused. Now he is pinning his hopes on a double amputee women Iraq veteran, Tammy Duckworth

Duckworth, who is not from the district, has ignited hopes at DCCC headquarters that she would campaign on a "pro-business/centrist platform". Queried by a Chicago Sun Times columnist for her opinion on the war, she replied, "There's good and bad in everything".

That sort of equivocation must certainly have commended her to Emmanuel, who greeted Congressman Murtha's fervent and well-informed denunciation of the war with the words "Jack Murtha went out and spoke for Jack Murtha" and has declared that "At the right time we will have a position" on the war.

Cegalis' position is clear: "I support Jack Murtha", she tells CounterPunch. "If Jack Murtha is calling for withdrawal, then I go with that."

If Emmanuel and his like succeed in displacing Cegalis and similar candidates, thereby undercutting any claim the Democrats might have to either principle or votes, he will only be concluding the work he began in the 1990s.

Cegalis reports that the economy has become the key issue in DuPage County, roughly coterminous with the district. "DuPage has lost jobs for the first time in fifty years." As manufacturing jobs disappear to Mexico or China, voters can mull the benefits of free trade and the Democrats who fostered it.

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The Whig Interpretation of Recent History

By WERTHER

It is said that the earth's magnetic field is about 10 percent weaker than it was when Carl Friedrich Gauss first measured it in 1845. At some point, the field will reverse poles and regenerate itself. Compasses will then point south.

This process, which will no doubt confuse migratory birds, may or may not be an example of intelligent design. But as a metaphor for the life of political parties, the magnetic field theory has some merit. As the issues and controversies which motivate the formation of a party inevitably fade, the party's platform becomes hollow rodomontade, full of sound and fury signifying only jobs for the boys.

Once the causes which formed the party pass out of human memory, the rituals weaken to the point where, at some unrecorded instant, the ideological platform may actually reverse, with no one understanding why. Unlike the earth's magnetic field, however, the party process is not necessarily a perpetuum mobile. Should the party no longer hold the allegiance of its followers, it collapses.

Examples of this tendency litter the detritus bin of history. The Whig Party of late 17th and early 18th century England consisted of a few score wealthy oligarchs and the commercial interests that supported them. Its central tenets were an unquenchable hatred of popery, Frenchmen, and Spaniards, and a seething inimicality towards its hapless Celtic wards in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. So averse was the Whig Ascendancy to anything that smacked of Romanism that it imported an entire royal line from Hanover rather than take a chance on the Pope-addicted Stuarts.

Yet in time the Whigs became a more-or-less legitimate vehicle for expansion of the franchise, abolition of slavery and religious tests, home rule in Ireland, and do-goodism generally. By the early 20th century, English Whiggery (or the Liberal Party, as it then styled itself) had a radical strain which would appear positively Bolshevik today. Its Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (a Welsh Methodist leading the successor party to the Whig Ascendancy was in itself a novel reversal) offered a budget whose confiscatory inheritance taxes would probably strike the Hon. Cynthia McKinney as too radical.

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