I just heard Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) spout on about the continuing occupation of Iraq. I don’t recall him calling it that, but that’s what it is.

For Kennedy, and the majority of other Democrats, the war is not to be questioned on the basis of its beginning: was it ethical, was it legal, is it right to give the President war-making power that trumps Congress? The war is to be questioned as a management issue: it’s not being fought properly.

In other words, there’s no disagreement that the war was a good idea, how it is being fought is the key issue. If the Republicans were to somehow turn the occupation around and make progress building infrastructure, supplying potable water and electricity to a majority of Iraqis, much of Kennedy’s speech would be a moot point. If the Republicans took down Saddam Hussein’s anti-organized labor laws and let Iraqis work to rebuild their own country, another huge segment of Democratic Party objection would fall away. As more Democratic Party bitching disappears, it is made even more plain how much the Democrats are not an anti-war party.

The Democrats remain, deservedly, a minority party who are not an opposition party.

This is an important issue because of who benefits from this “debate”—the businesses who keep war going (Bechtel, Halliburton, GE, Northrup Grummon, etc.). Two major national parties compete for their dollars while not seeing that elections are lost over these issues and more people don’t care to vote because they’re fed up with the process.

‘nuf said.

When you hear or read about what goes on in other countries fighting for water or land rights, it is rarely made clear that this is what will happen to more Americans. More Americans will learn that water will be priced out of reach of most people, water fountains will be replaced with commercial soda dispensers (the soda made with water that was hoarded or taken away from the public as Coca-Cola does in India), the land made uninhabitable (through nuclear or biochemical “accidents”) or unaffordable to the vast majority of the population. We don’t see how privatization of natural resources and collectively owned public resources can harm us. We also don’t see who pushes for these moves to privatize — the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Along these lines, today’s Democracy Now! has an interesting message for Americans with regard to voting for people versus voting for policies from Marcela Olivera, Bolivian researcher and activist who works at the Democracy Center in Cochabamba. She was a member of the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life that organized a popular uprising against the privatization of the Cochabamba water system by Bechtel and the World Bank. Last year she worked with Public Citizen in Washington to develop an Interamerican water activist network. A rough transcript of part of her interview follows (starting at 31m19s, emphasis mine):

“Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada is a very symbolic person for us because he represents all the policies that were coming to my country from the World Bank and the IMF, you know, he’s the guy who sold, for us, all our companies, all the state companies, who sold all the natural resources, who killed people in the streets without any feeling about that. So this guy represents, for us, the model that [husband?] posed in Bolivia and other Latin American countries.

I think when people kicked him out from our country we were feeling that we were kicking out all these policies too. But at the same time, you know, even thinking that this guy is a symbolic guy for us, I don’t think that the angriness of the people are focused on just one person. I think it’s all the political parties in our country that were doing — doesn’t matter who is in power, who political power is running the country, you know, the political policies that come from them are exactly the same. The names change, but the policies are exactly the same. So it’s all these political parties that belong to these old [?] in Bolivia and all the angriness of the people are against them, it’s not just one person or one political party in singular, it’s all of them and I think that was perfectly reflected on the streets in Bolivia.”

Perhaps it is time we recognized that it is not the candidate’s personality that matters, or how they look on camera, but what policies they endorse, how they want to implement those policies, where their campaign funds come from, and what their political history is.

Cynthia Bogard claims that Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is “still our last best hope for saving the nation“.

Bogard doesn’t fully come to terms with the reality that Sen. Kerry worked along side the other Democrats to kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis during Pres. Clinton’s terms, or that Kerry and a majority of the Democrats supported Pres. Bush’s power to supersede Congressional oversight to make war anywhere (before the 2004 election, Kerry told the AP that he thought this power was proper for the President to have; I suspect he said this because he knows what a pain it can be to convince the public that war is a good idea). Instead Bogard calls Kerry’s support for the Iraq war “equivocation”—the use of ambiguous or uncertain language. No, he wasn’t hedging, he liked the invasion of Iraq and he should be identified as such.

Bogard says that “We are thrilled that you have decided to raise the Downing Street Memo with your colleagues in the Senate.”. Who is this “we”? I see the actions described in the memo as an unbroken line of aggression against Iraq. Apparently I’m not alone. Jeremy Scahill touches on this argument on today’s Democracy Now! (transcript). To have a Democrat now point out Bush’s foibles on this means that we have to be willing to put aside a huge bombing campaign and the Iraqi sanctions which killed 500,000 Iraqi children. Complaints coming from proponents of these acts are hard to interpret as a principaled condemnation of Bush. Bush does deserve impeachment and to be imprisoned, but so other US Presidents.