By Luke Thomas
June 21, 2009
Talk show host Bill Maher pulled no punches Friday labeling the Democratic Party “the new Republicans.”
Maher, known for his outspoken commentary and for being a fearless defender of Progressive values, said the Democratic Party in the last thirty years has moved to the center right, morphing into a party for “hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby.”
“And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat Earthers and civil war reenactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans,” Maher added.
Not stopping there, Maher said those who accuse President Obama of being a socialist should realize that Obama’s “not even a liberal.”
“Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting the military budget, a party that is straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal health care, legalizing pot and steep direct taxing of polluters?” Maher asked.
These aren’t “radical ideas,” Maher said, policies that most Americans already support or would support if they were properly argued and defended.
“What we need is an actual Progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats. Because, bottom line, Democrats are the new Republicans.”
Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is a former software developer and computer consultant who proudly hails from London, England. In 2001, Thomas took a yearlong sabbatical to travel and develop a photographic portfolio. Upon his return to the US, Thomas studied photojournalism to pursue a career in journalism. In 2004, Thomas worked for several neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco before accepting a partnership agreement with the SanFranciscoSentinel.com, a news website formerly covering local, state and national politics. In September 2006, Thomas launched FogCityJournal.com. The BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly, among other publications and news outlets, have published his work. Thomas is a member of the Freelance Unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG-CWA Local 39521 and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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June 23, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Lets say the mad Muslims were justified in stunt flying into the twin towers? Wouldn’t that also mean that right to lifers are justified in killing doctors?
Alas, Afghanistan was harboring the people who were behind stunt flying into the twin towers, that might explain that action free “who killed Vince Foster” of conspiracy theories.
Invading Iraq was a terrible idea, an idea more likely and more simply put (free of mangling Occam’s razor as we do here, ala “god did it”) Bush is an idiot and surrounded himself with neo-con idiots who cherry picked the data.
Before we wonder off into the crazy conspiracy area, one needs to look at the simple answers first: intellectual lazy-ness, outright stupidity, good intentions of true believers with the will to believe.
Rob is in general right, making your reality in a wilderness of mirrors only works on others predisposed. Hofstadters paranoid right is now at home in the left.
June 23, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Yes, not to mention the fact that you haven’t made much of an argument.
June 23, 2009 at 11:20 am
Luke,
Why are you arguing with Rob Anderson? Do you actually think you can convince him of anything? Don’t you see that tweaking progressives is the only way he can shoot his goo? Don’t give him the satisfaction.
June 23, 2009 at 10:50 am
of course the US won’t get ‘exclusive’ rights, it’s global economics, and the US, by large, happens to be the biggest playa, know what i’m sayin’??
June 23, 2009 at 10:12 am
I won’t comment on where your head is. From the wikipedia link:
“Since the United States military overthrew the Taliban government, the project has essentially stalled; construction of the Turkmen part was supposed to start in 2006, but the overall feasibility is questionable since the southern part of the Afghan section runs through territory which continues to be under de facto Taliban control.”
The US invaded Afghanistan for this dubious project? Baloney! The US has spent more than $2 trillion on these two wars, and they aren’t even going to get exclusive rights to the oil! Which makes me think that there were other reasons for these wars.
June 23, 2009 at 10:03 am
Anderson, you’re head is in the sand. Rather than accept the that you could be wrong in your worldview, you stubbornly defend your stated position using distortion. This is clearly a desperate attempt to avoid accepting that peak oil related motives have been in play in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
On Afghanistan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Afghanistan_Pipeline
June 23, 2009 at 9:19 am
None of these links show that the wars in Aghanistan and Iraq are “incursions against sovereign nations to secure the last remaining resources of oil and natural gas.” In fact the first link leads to articles about how the government of Iraq is getting ready to sign oil agreements with British oil companies. No American companies are mentioned.
Funny that you knock the “corporate press” and then use a link to both ABC and CBS stories. The ABC story on John McCain is just about him shooting off his mouth about what the war in Iraq was “really” about, not about what US decision makers were thinking when the invasion was being planned.
Another link is only about concerns of “peak oil,” not the motivation of US policymakers in invading Iraq.
The Independent story is an alarmist story about the price of oil from a year ago and not about why we invaded Iraq.
And the CBS story is about Alan Greenspan’s statement in his book about how the war in Iraq was about oil, which he backtracked on later. Greenspan was not involved in planning the invasion of Iraq.
But what about Afghanistan? Hard to maintain that the invasion of that country was about resources, since that country has none, except of course its poppy crop.
June 22, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Here’s just a few articles that shed light on the veiled motivations of the US occupation of Iraq. Also keep in mind, when the US Army invaded Iraq, the first thing it did was secure Iraq’s oil fields while the country descended into chaos.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/256227
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/05/mccain-backs-of.html
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0504-06.htm
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/oil-a-global-crisis-834023.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/17/the_skinny/main3267685.shtml
June 22, 2009 at 1:52 pm
You people are the ones who are deluded. What paranoid crap! The anti-American left in alliance with al Qaeda and the Taliban against the Great Satan, which happens to be their own country! You folks make great bookends with the radical right, which is stocking up on guns now that a Moslem is in the White House!
June 22, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Maher is lazy, irresponsible, and hugely deluded. He should be apologizing for encouraging Obamidolatry all last year instead of studying and pointing to Obama’s legislation, Obama’s votes, and Obama’s platform, which warned anyone who did study it of how really bad Obama was gonna be.
Now Maher’s saying “everytime Obama tries to take on a progressive political cause, there’s a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats.” Last week Obama and Pelosi threatened the House Democrats until they voted overwhelmingly for another $106 billion for war and $100 billion for the IMF whose mission is strangulation of the Global South.
Obama’s doing what he promised to do—“clean coal, nuclear power, more troops; strong defense; finish the job in Afghanistan, fight the War on Terror; homeowners are a moral hazard; let the foreclosures go forward.”
Two exceptions: he did promise to end the Iraq War, and to end abstinence-only-until-heterosexual-married-monogamy sex ed. (Here, not in Africa, but who pays any attention to Africa?)
The Iraq War is still on; the War on Terror is expanding, in the Middle East and in Africa, which has surpassed the Middle East as a source of U.S. oil imports.
Abstinence only, like the White House, has a new brand.
And Maher is still deluded, spewing more Obama religion by claiming that the Democrats are standing in his way.
June 22, 2009 at 11:19 am
Uh, the US did allow Iraq to invade Kuwait in late 1988; it came as a result of the end of the Iran-Iraq War (Operation Praying Mantis was the covert operation i was in that put an end to the Iranian navy, 300+ dead), and Sec. of State James Baker gave Saddam the green light to ‘liberate’ the oil fields of Kuwait. The Right-Wing is constantly inventing new ways to agitprop the Middle East out of that sticky commodity. As the joke once went (I think it was George Carlin, please correct the source if I’m wrong) “Moses and the Jews wandered the desert for 40 years and settled in the only part of the Middle East without oil!” Looks like there’s some ‘oil-envy’ going on here! Also, the Hamas and Fatah governments are both owned tens of millions in dollars from the Israeli government in pilfering the profits from the natural gas reserves off the coast of the Med from Lebenon to Egypt..
June 22, 2009 at 10:44 am
“911 was retaliation against the consequences of US policy in the region. The easy way to prevent future retaliatory attacks is to abandon the policies which created the conditions that led to those attacks.”
Right. If we had allowed the Arab states to destroy Israel and Iraq to invade Kuwait, we wouldn’t have been attacked on 9/11?
June 22, 2009 at 7:49 am
“Rob, unless you do a full independent research for yourself on the topic oil/Afghanistan, then you will know, all will be revealed! Why rely on another to supply you with this information, that may be true or not.”
Luke made those serious claims so confidently I figured he had the citations at his fingertips. Both the war in Afghanistan and Iraq are about oil? The burden of proof is on those making the claim. The implications of the claim: the US is in fact the Great Satan, and the US and President Obama are enemies of the people of the United States, since both are working for the oil companies.
June 22, 2009 at 7:03 am
911 was retaliation against the consequences of US policy in the region.
The easy way to prevent future retaliatory attacks is to abandon the policies which created the conditions that led to those attacks.
-marc
June 21, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Rob, unless you do a full independent research for yourself on the topic oil/Afghanistan, then you will know, all will be revealed! Why rely on another to supply you with this information, that may be true or not.
June 21, 2009 at 2:12 pm
“Anderson, these are not ‘wars.’ These are incursions against sovereign nations to secure the last remaining resources of oil and natural gas. But you won’t read about this ulterior motive in the corporate press.”
Silly me. I thought that the 9/11 attackers were trained in Aghanistan and that Osama Bin Psycho was based there. I’d like to see some evidence of the charge about the oil and gas grab. Maybe you can get one of your Marxist pals to do an expose for us.
June 21, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Don’t blame me — I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, 2004, 2008 and, if he runs in 2012, then too. I look forward to seeing you at the socialist convention, Luke.
http://socialistworker.org/2009/06/05/join-us-at-socialism
June 21, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Anderson, these are not “wars.” These are incursions against sovereign nations to secure the last remaining resources of oil and natural gas. But you won’t read about this ulterior motive in the corporate press.
Rather than face the reality that oil and gas has reached its peak, requiring a complete restructuring of society as we know it, you would rather put your head in the sand and support war for no other reason than to win.
What the “left” wants is investment in domestic policies – renewable energy saturation, mass transportation, education, universal health care, housing, population control incentives, sustainable communities and the protection of our natural habitat.
June 21, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Completely wrong, ultra-left crap. Cut the military budget while we fight two wars? Okay, I get it that the left actually wants us to lose those wars. Fortunately, Obama isn’t a lefty and will ignore this sort of thing.
June 21, 2009 at 11:47 am
Vi,
Thanks for posting the link to Alfred McGuire’s op-ed.
The bottom line here is that Americans appear apathetic and reluctant to protest after realizing they’ve been hoodwinked into believing Obama would be the new political messiah.
Perhaps he fears he would suffer the same fate as John F. Kennedy if he were to actually put the interests of Americans and this country before the interests of the corporate whores who own Congress.
Until Americans wake up, turn off their 50 inch plasma TVs and rise up against this corporate dictatorship, this once great nation will continue to devolve into the abyss.
We need a party for the many, not the few – a revolution that dismantles and rebuilds our political system from the ground up via public campaign financing, and we need a colonic of all corporate lobbyists from our political process.
June 21, 2009 at 10:48 am
Thank goodness for Bill Maher.
This is a great article along the same lines.
Progressives: Has Corporate Media Succeeded in Silencing You?
http://www.opednews.com/populum/print_friendly.php?p=13537