A Very Dangerous Game in Kennedy Country

The assassination of a young archduke of a European power and his wife by terrorist fanatics of the Black Hand, set off a chain reaction of war that became the Great War, the first world war that killed a generation of young men and led to millions of deaths from disease.

It doesn't always take something as titanic as a presidential election--or the stealing of the presidency--to end up wreaking incredible destruction. This Tuesday it could be a special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate. According to polls and pols, the previously unthinkable could happen--the conservative Republican could win Senator Ted Kennedy's seat--a man who pledges to defeat the universal health care bill, what Kennedy described as the cause of his life. And thanks to the lack of any margin in the Senate, he would do just that.

A defeat of health care, after so much political capital has been spent on it, would be a devastating blow to Democrats and to the Presidency of Barack Obama. That of course is what has Republicans so excited. It's their Tea Party revolution, the functional overthrow of the elected government and the not really American, not white enough President! And it could very well begin a chain reaction that ends any hope for the future.

That may sound like alarmism, but all the dominoes are lined up. With the ability to filibuster and therefore defeat any major legislation, Republicans will kill not only health care but economic reform and stimulus, climate crisis legislation, nuclear weapons treaties, green energy, environmental protection and, in short, anything that Democrats or President Obama propose for the next three years or longer--not even because Republicans oppose it, but because their political enemies are for it. This is the definition of political party fanaticism. All for themselves, not a care for their country.

That's the state of this country right now--while the electorate that elected Obama sleeps, or indulges their frustrated fantasies of instant change, extremists have taken over the GOP with loud voices proclaiming outrageous lies, aided and comforted if not led by racists and cynical fanatics like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck--currently lambasting President Obama for trying to help Haiti's earthquake victims--and the smug ignorance and lies of stealth zealots like Sarah Palin, who don't care about facts or reality but only on imposing religious and political ideology, and making a personal fortune doing it.

You can describe them in various ways. Baby Bushcorps on steroids. Tools of corporations solely interested in feeding more millions to their billionaires. Possessed by ambition and their own unconscious wrath and destructiveness. Their blatant lies and obvious racism is chilling. Whatever you call them and however they are described, if unleashed they will lead the way to the new Dark Ages. And that isn't hyperbole. There is only so much time left to confront our growing problems before they overwhelm us.

The Democrats aren't blameless. The Dem candidate in MA, Martha Coakley, is by many accounts not a very good candidate, though she would be infinitely better as a Senator than her opponent. In general throughout the country, Democrats have not fielded very good candidates or made good appointments for the many vacancies resulting from Obama's election and cabinet appointments. Nor have they responded adequately to the economic pain and disquiet in the country, or to the shameless lies of the Rabid Right.

It's a perilous moment. Former Obama supporters, especially in the blogosphere, are engaged in various civil wars, including progressive contests that seem to be more about ego, marketing and glands than ideology, and more about ideological purity than a better if imperfect future. In Massachusetts as elsewhere, many Obama voters are withdrawn, nursing disappointment that the world hasn't changed in a year, and that Obama has chosen to try to make a real difference rather than go down gloriously in pure self-righteous flames.

But the sins of the Dems don't match the stakes. The stakes couldn't be higher. President Obama needs this election in Massachusetts, he needs the Haiti relief effort to succeed faster, and he needs to get health care done and out of the way. And then he needs to go on the offensive, and confront his opponents and their threats directly. What's going on in Washington now is often not very pretty and at times angers and disgusts us all, but the Republicans have no solutions.

The ugly genius of Republicans since Obama's elections, even more than in the Bush years, is to look into their souls and project their own tendencies onto their chosen enemies. They are fascists with all the respect for the truth that Orwell's Big Brother had, and so they call Obama and the Democrats fascists and Big Brother. They are racists who shout that they are the victims of racism, and they compare to the Holocaust a health care bill more modest than most civilized countries in the world, that gives some government control over a wasteful, unjust and inhumane private health care system that is wrecking small and large businesses as well as countless lives--as well as help for those who will otherwise suffer and die without minimum health care. That these people are even taken seriously demonstrates in chilling fashion our society's decadence and lack of maturity. That they are this close to effectively reversing the last election and taking power again, with a single election in a single state, is beyond frightening.

Few if any in America, and not many in Europe, knew anything about the Archduke Ferdinand. Europe was a well-armed tinderbox, but a world war wasn't inevitable. Most historians would probably now agree that World War II was mostly an extension of the Great War, and the Cold War was a result of World War II. It was a chain reaction that mauled the future of generations.

Now once again, what happens in a single state, in a special election nobody was paying much attention to until recently, on a single day, the day after a holiday, may lead to immense damage and suffering for generations, and possibly more than that.

The Democrats have woken up. President Clinton, very popular in the Commonwealth, is there. President Obama will go. Mrs. Edward Kennedy is more visible and audible there. I hope more of the Kennedy family joins her there as well. But the last word comes from the voters of Massachusetts. They can't afford to "send a message" or think it doesn't matter who wins.

That's the kind of non-thinking that got G.W. Bush so close to the White House that he could steal it. The divided progressives, the start-over/new face/ bright new product consumerist approach to elections, it's the same formula. And all we got then was at best a lost decade, the treasury raided by arms merchants and oil companies, a surplus to help prepare for the future turned into a deficit to cripple the future, one of the longest and most costly and unjustifiable wars in American history, official federal corruption including partisan political rule over the judiciary and the outing of our own intelligence agent working on terrorism, torture as a national policy, an attitude of let people die in New Orleans because they're black and Democrats, plans for more nuclear weapons and refusal to ratify nuclear proliferation and Climate Crisis treaties... and the list goes on.

Thanks to that little tremor in the national electorate in 2000, we'll be lucky to get out of this century alive. Another little tremor in Massachusetts on Tuesday will most probably set us on a course of foaming conflict that makes that getting-out-alive prospect considerably more remote.

But we can still come out of this, if Massachusetts steps up. Once the health care bill is a done deal, President Obama's State of the Union could be the time we turn the corner, and renew the focus and the hope that flowered last November, and--hard as it is to believe--only a year ago next week at the Inaugural in Washington.