David Sirota calls it "czarism on steroids," this rising up of various interests to "reform" Social Security in a very big hurry, citing an urgent need to sidestep the normal democratic process.
Well. Isn't that special!
How nice that they're all so concerned - especially the Blue Dogs who had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about Bush running up a trillion dollar deficit over his little Iraq misunderstanding, but now have such grave concerns about spending on social programs during a global economic crisis. (As Jane Hamsher recently noted, she loves how these self-styled patriots "crawl out from under their slimy rocks every time there’s a Democrat in office to preach 'fiscal responsibility,' which somehow always has to start with the social safety net but never quite works its way up to the F-22.")
WALKER: You mentioned in January about the need to achieve a Grand Bargain involving budget process, social security, taxes, health care reform. You're 110% right to do that. Question is, how do we do it? Candidly, I think it takes an extraordinary process that engages the American people, provides for fast track consideration and with your leadership that can happen. But that's what it's going to take.
This is what it's about for these "Shock Doctrine" partisans, because they just don't like democracy. That's why they'd rather buy off legislators: because they know if the American people ever get a clear fix on what they're really up to, they'll be drawn and quartered. That's what Sirota points out:
Why is democracy such a threat to those who want to slash Social Security or pass corporate-written trade deals? Because those right-wing ideologues know that if any mildly democratic institution even vaguely accountable to the public is allowed to weigh in on those proposals, those proposals will be seriously amended to reflect the will of the people who, for instance, don't like the idea of Social Security cuts or more NAFTAs. Put another way, they know that the public intensely hates their ideas, and that thus, the only way to get their ideas enacted into law in the United States is to crush democracy before it is allowed to interfere.
What's funny, of course, is that democracy and checks and balances were set up specifically to prevent the kind of thing that the Blue Dog Democrats are now trying to impose on the country. The Founding Fathers set up the legislative process - with its debates and amendments and deliberations - so as to prevent a tiny minority of elites from enacting policies that the broad majority of the public opposes. They didn't want a government like there was in Britain - a dictatorship where whatever the king wanted was the law, regardless of whether it had popular support.
Now, in order to destroy the most popular program in history, America is seeing the revival of the Royalists - the people who are effectively insisting that their will should be imposed on the rest of us, regardless of what the rest of us want, regardless of whether the rest of us even get a say.
If there's one thing we all know about dogs, it's that they need to be trained. House-broken, as it were.
Primary challenges, anyone?
