The Democratic Party files for moral bankruptcy

On the day after the election, I wrote a lengthy post noting that while many factors went into the Democratic Party's shellacking in the mid-term elections, by far the greatest was the Democratic Party itself, and the whimpering cowardice of the people it foolishly ran for office in most places. Disconnected from the day-to-day concerns of the working people they purport to represent, not even brave enough to support programs that are actually working (let alone, heaven forbid, their president), the only surprise on Election Day was how close a few of the Democrats' inevitable defeats ended up. I noted the party wouldn't bounce back overnight, and that any comeback would require a great deal of soul searching.

How's that coming so far?

Not good....not good.

Just hours after Pelosi defended her leadership, it came out that House Democrats had blocked their own Rep. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, a double-amputee Iraqi war vet who is eight months pregnant and homebound by doctor's order, from casting a proxy vote for party leadership in the next Congress. Pelosi insisted that her hands were tied because of existing rules; critics say it was nothing more than a power grab, since Duckworth was intending to oppose one of Pelosi's picks for a committee chairmanship (who then did lose, perhaps because of this flap). You call that feminism? It looks like clumsy ward politics of the worst kind to me.

And I'm sure most of you have forgotten by now about that Obamacare consultant, Jonathan Gruber (rhymes with Uber). Anyway, Pelosi was asked about Gruber and his controversial health care comments the other day, and said "I don't know who that is." It didn't take long for Jon Stewart -- who's a better journalist than anyone in America right now, except maybe for John Oliver -- to dig up a clip of Pelosi heaping lavish praise on Gruber. I'm not going to succumb to agism and accuse Pelosi of being forgetful. Quite to the contrary...I think she was lying.

None of this is real policy. No, for that variety of outrage, head down the hall to the U.S. Senate, where still-for-now Majority Leader Harry Reid called an urgent lame duck vote on the Keystone XL pipeline. He didn't do this because the Keystone XL is a great idea. In fact, the Keystone XL is a terrible idea, sending millions and millions of barrels of dirty, climate-change-causing Canadian tar sands oil across environmentally sensitive prairies and aquifers of the American Heartland, all so that oil can then be shipped from Gulf Coast ports to foreign markets. But the vote was actually held in a delusional bid to save the job of Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, about to get crushed in a December run-off election.

In other words, Landrieu, Reid, et al are, or were, completely bat-guano crazy. Landrieu is losing her runoff because people who live in battered neighborhoods in New Orleans or faded bayou communities see no reason to turn out at the polls, not when the Democrats aren't addressing stagnant wages, long-term unemployment, and the real issues they come home to every night. They really think these folks are going to be excited by a pipeline, corporate America's wet dream, creating a grand total of 35 permanent jobs? Meanwhile, Reid won't schedule a vote for President Obama's highly qualified pick to be Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who'll probably never get confirmed once the GOP takes control in January. Brilliant.

These lamestream Democrats need to wake up from their hangover of lobbyist fundraiser cocktail parties and smell the coffee. On Keystone XL, thank God the small nucleus of progressives hung together and killed the bill...for now. In 2015, this band of sisters and brothers, and hopefully President Obama, need to stay strong against the GOP push to gut environmental protections and affordable health care, Call it the liberal Tea Party if you want -- that's fine. I'd call them last-ditch defenders of the planet.

In fact, call all of this political stem-cell research. The next two years will be a heck of an experiment -- to see if Democrats can finally grow a spine.