Picking your battles

With recent “suggestions” by numerous political pundits that the democrats need to pick their shots in terms of what horrendous bill or policy or nomination of President Bush’s to fight. When the answer to this is simply, every single one that is bad, in poor judgment or unqualified.

When these so called experts call for confirming John Roberts so that we can fight the next nominee or maybe keep Karl Rove and Scooter Libby’s traitorous acts in the headlines. In the meantime, such disasterous policies as CAFTA, the bankruptcy bill, drilling in Anwar and the energy bill giveaway have been allowed to pass fairly unchallenged. Before you tell me that the democrats fought the passage of CAFTA and it was a close vote, it still passed. With the pressure that Geedubya put on the congressional republicans, Our weak-kneed leader Nancy Pelosi was nowhere to be found.

The problem that the democrats have is framing the issues. They let the noise machine of the right wing media set the stories of the day and then try and follow. If you notice the right wing noise machine every day has the exact same message and they never stray from it. You can travel throughout the dial from Faux News to Druggy Limbaugh even to the small potatoes wanna-bes of Mark Belling(milw) or Vicky Mckenna(Madison), and they never stray from their script. The Facts be dammed. This isn’t rocket science we as progressives just need to bring out the truth and not follow their lead.

There are some indisputable truths that we need to make sure every American Citizen knows everyday:
· Someone, two people actually, leaked the name of an undercover CIA agent in order to punish Joe Wilson for telling the public that George Bush knowingly lied during his state of the union speech.
· President Bush promised he would fire anyone involved and he has yet to do that.
· There is no doubt that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were involved.
· NAFTA has proven disasterous for not just the American worker but also the workers around the world. It has helped cause the loss of 70,000+ manufacturing jobs in Wisconsin alone and the passing of CAFTA will only increase this number.
· The bankruptcy bill which hurts all middle class American trying to get by was passed as a giveaway to the credit card companies. The democrats tried to add provisions which would protect those hurt by medical emergencies and also National Guardsmen and women who have to leave high paying jobs at home to fight the war in Iraq and get paid considerably less from having to declare bankruptcy and yet the Republicans voted both of those provisions down.
· The democrats tried to increase funding to the blatantly unfunded Veterans hospitals and the republicans also voted that down.

This is just a sampling of the simple truths that we need to point out to the general public to start seats in Congress. This is not even addressing how poor the recent Supreme Court pick of John Roberts is. That will be forthecoming in my next blog.