On Sunday I wrote about the tragic flaw of the Democratic Party: lack of unity.

Just two days later and another Democrat displays a shocking level of political ignorance and disloyalty to his party. Disturbingly, this guy used to be a fairly high-level Democrat:

But Mr. Clinton also lauded Mr. Obama’s rival, Senator John McCain, and said that either candidate would be progressive on the issue of climate change.

“Obviously, I favor Senator Obama’s energy positions, and Democrats have been by and large the more forward-leaning actors,” Mr. Clinton said. “But John McCain has the best record of any Republican running for president on the energy issue and on climate change.” He added, “I’m very encouraged about where the presidential rhetoric is in this campaign.”

I wrote in my post yesterday that I can only stand so much cognitive dissonance at a time, and I really could have done without another blatant example the very next day.

At one moment Clinton’s praising McCain’s energy record, the next moment:

He [Clinton] also questioned the recent rush to support offshore drilling.

Excuse me, dumbshit, but are you forgetting that McCain has become a rabid supporter of offshore drilling and has had the audacity to blame Obama for high gas prices?

I’m reminded of Bob Dylan’s Idiot Wind:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You’re an idiot, babe.
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.

Dems = dangerously pathetic

Josh Marshall reports today that there’s significant buzz around the possibility that Joe Biden sits atop the short list for the VP slot.

Listen, I don’t have THAT much against Biden. I don’t place much stock in the gaffe risk, because I have not seen gaffes make more than a fleeting impact on campaigns. On the contrary, what some would call a gaffe others would call real straight talking (as opposed to McCain’s pseudo-straight-talk), and the Obama campaign could use a shot in the arm in this department.

No, my resistance has to with the fact that SO much of the Obama campaign is built on the concept of change and the “same old Washington politics” put-down of McCain, and yet Biden is a 35-year veteran of the senate. Not much change built into that choice, and it seems to me it’s a pretty important choice.

I can only handle so much cognitive dissonance at one time, and it seems like it would get pounced on by the McCain campaign.

I don’t mean this in a right (conservative) vs. left (liberal) kind of way, although that is also a problem for the Democrats. No, this post is all about how, tragically, there is such a lack of unification in the party at a critical time in history.

Greg Sargent reports at TPM:

Dem Party leaders call on Obama to run sharper race on economy
Some leading Dems, worried that the race against McCain looks tougher than they imagined, want Obama to sharpen his economic message and convert his popularity into a stronger sense among voters that he will improve their lives in concrete ways. “It’s fine to tell people about hope and change,” says Governor Ted Strickland of Ohio, “but you have to have plenty of concrete, pragmatic ideas that bring hope and change to life.”

Strickland, like Feingold last week, needs a slap in the face, and if he doesn’t STFU his wrists bound and a gag in the mouth. This race is WAY too close for comfort, Strickland, and you need to watch every frickin’ word that comes out of your mouth for the sake of your party and your country. You sit there and think you know what’s best and run off at the mouth about it…well…you haven’t run an historic campaign for POTUS, you aren’t the first black man to do so, you don’t have an Arabic-sounding name, you didn’t beat the Clinton dynasty, you aren’t going head-to-head with a war hero who is getting a HUGE pass from the MSM on just how much bullshit the whole “Maverick” meme is.

Oh, and you obviously haven’t watched Obama’s last two multi-million dollar ads run during the Olympics, both of which were focused on the economy, including concrete, pragmatic ideas.

This shit really scares me. Without unification in the Dem party this race will be lost and millions and millions of people will suffer because of it. This is NOT hyperbole. The stakes really are that high.

They say that history repeats itself. In fact someone’s been saying this, in one way or another, since the 16th century.

Karl Marx said:

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

…in the case of the Bush II era, it seems to me, it’s been the exact opposite. It was a farce that we could still laugh about, a little, when the Democrats failed to prevent a buffoon like GW from ascending to power and maintaining it, but now the many tragedies seem all too clear and are no laughing matter at all.

Come on, admit it, we were all entertained by The Complete Bushisms for quite a while, and we didn’t initially start screaming when we watched The Daily Show. But as the Iraq/Afghanistan/Katrina body counts started to rise along with the Earth’s temperature, the price of gasoline, and inflation, the scale of things have clearly reached tragic proportions.

No, there can be little disputing the concept that history repeats, all too often in horrible, horrible ways, and I’m not just talking about the resurgence of bell-bottoms. It’s fitting to include Marx’s version of this saying here as I segue into plugging two movies that highlight a particularly disturbing repeat.

First, a former fan of Marx’s, Pete Seeger, is honored in a wonderful film available now on DVD.

Pete Seeger: Power of Song

This film brought tears to my eyes a number of times, moved by the man, his life, and his music. With incredible old footage and interviews with Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, etc., a story unfolds that perfectly captures the sentiment in Howard Zinn’s famous line, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”

It’s fitting that another musician interviewed in the Seeger film is Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks, who got her own taste of blow back for an act of Zinnian patriotism:

We need to be vigilant, folks. As Natalie Maines says, “You can’t just say you have rights. You have to use them.”

To tie this altogether, change a few words in this song of Pete’s from 1966 and the repetition of history will slap you in the face.

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.

It’ll make our generals sad, I know,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They want to tangle with the foe,
Bring them home, bring them home.

They want to test their weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But here is their big fallacy,
Bring them home, bring them home.

I may be right, I may be wrong,
Bring them home, bring them home.
But I got a right to sing this song,
Bring them home, bring them home.

Even if they brought their planes to bomb,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Even if they brought helicopters and napalm,
Bring them home, bring them home.

Show those generals their fallacy:
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don’t have the right weaponry,
Bring them home, bring them home.

For defense you need common sense,
Bring them home, bring them home.
They don’t have the right armaments,
Bring them home, bring them home.

The world needs teachers, books and schools,
Bring them home, bring them home.
And learning a few universal rules,
Bring them home, bring them home.

So if you love your Uncle Same,
Bring them home, bring them home.
Support our boys in Vietnam,
Bring them home, bring them home.

with her scimitar buried in joe lieberman’s chest, nancy pelosi continues to build her pirate cred.

“In 85 days or so, [the senate] will have five more Democrats. They won’t need him to make the majority. And it will be interesting to see what the leadership in the Senate, the Democratic leadership in the Senate, does at that point in terms of Joe Lieberman’s chairmanship of his committee.”

lieberman has to be desperately hoping two things:

1. he’ll be asked to join the mccain ticket as v.p.
2. that mccain then has a miracle bestowed upon him and wins the presidency

barring those unlikely events, the remainder of lieberman’s senate experience is going to take a turn for the unpleasant. democrats will be lining up to spit on his political grave. and won’t that be gratifying?

back to the pirate queen…pelosi is about to prove that anything is negotiable, and an accord can be struck with anyone at any time.

after years of opposing offshore oil drilling, suddenly she’s open to the possibility.

She said she would be open to a vote on new drilling in protected areas as part of a much broader energy package.

Pelosi [said] the package could pair some new offshore drilling with Democratic energy proposals that Republicans have opposed, including expanding subsidies for renewable energy, revoking tax breaks to oil companies and forcing the Bush administration to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

“We can have a piece of offshore drilling, but we have to renegotiate the terms,” she said.

in politics and piracy, principles are malleable. expedience is the coin of the realm. and some other piratey metaphors.

aaarrgh.

pirate.

Totally.Awesome.

From The New York Times:

Two California companies said Thursday that they would each build solar power plants that were 10 times bigger than the largest now in service, creating the first true utility-scale use of a technology now mostly confined to rooftop supplements to conventional power supplies…

At OptiSolar, the chief executive, Randy Goldstein, said, “There is really no point in doing this on small scale.”

“If you’re going to make a difference, you’ve got to do it big,” Mr. Goldstein said

As far as I’m concerned, and I am one crazy, tree-hugging sonofabitch, these solar plants should be installed all over the deserts of the Southwest. Of course there are areas, like heavily-visited national parks and other popular outdoor recreation locations, where some discretion would make sense, but there are incredibly vast amounts of desert wasteland in remote areas that could be covered with solar plants and wind farms and we, as a country, would eventually be so much better able to preserve the real natural treasures we enjoy so much elsewhere in the country.

What we need is a leader in Washington who understands the concept of economies of scale and recognizes that the bigger we think about this, the more solar and wind plants we build at once, the cheaper it will ultimately be.

He may be wobbling on off-shore drilling, but…