Gutless pukes

The House and Senate Democratic leadership are quietly colluding with Rep. Steny Hoyer and Sen. Jay Rockefeller to legalize Bush's warrantless spying on Americans, and to give retroactive immunity to the telcom corporations who broke the law by cooperating with it. A vote on this cave-in may come as early as tonight tomorrow.

Update: 11:05 am, 20 June - Or, as I put it in a comment section yesterday: We're going back to Nixonland, where the law is what the president says it is, and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are taking us there on an express train. Today. End update.

Immunity will end the court proceedings against the telcoms, which at this point appear to be the only route through which the public has any hope of discovering the extent and nature of the criminal invasion of privacy conducted by the ruling regime. Last-ditch, bipartisan efforts to stop this are underway, but the complicity of Pelosi, Emanuel, Reid, and Durbin in rushing the calendar means they come too late for anything but retribution.

George W. Bush has clearly violated the law and contravened the Fourth Amendment in spying on U.S. citizens without a warrant. But impeachment is "off the table."

Bush has also clearly violated the law in authorizing the torture of detainees. He's admitted to doing so. This is not only an eminently impeachable offense, but a war crime. Still, impeachment is "off the table."

So is democracy.

Democratic strategists (so-called) are apparently willing to risk the certain demobilizing and demoralizing effect of this sellout on the party's activist liberal base and on potential supporters among libertarian-minded independents and Ron Paul Republicans. They claim to believe that caving will take the spying issue "off the table" and prevent Republican Congressional candidates from running ads charging Democrats with tying our hands against terrorists. They're idiots if they really believe that. And they're cowardly and idiotic not to see that this line of attack isn't even working the way it used to.

The party's presumptive presidential nominee is blessing this telcom-written sellout with his silence and his active support of a Bush-voting Blue Dog Democrat against a progressive African-American primary challenger. Brave Sir Lancelot, Knight of Change You Can Believe In.

I give up. I'm not giving a dime, I'm not lifting a finger, I'm not making a phone call for Democrats. I'll vote to prevent the greater evil, but that's all.

Update: 22 June, 11:45 am - The leaders of the party appear determined to stifle any inclination I might have had to pull myself together and focus on other issues on which there is some daylight between the Ds and Rs by insulting the intelligence of friends of the constitution in their "explanations" of support for this cave-in. Obama's statement adopts Bush's must-give-up-liberty-to-stop-terror framework and flatly lies about the effects of the bill, as does Hoyer's, Rockefeller's, and Pelosi's. They're aiming at the rubes and plainly don't think they have to deal with us at all. Message received and understood.