The Young Turks' Cenk Uygur was invited on Dylan Ratigan's show to debate right wing blogger Matt Lewis on the financial reform bill. Cenk expressed a lot of the feelings I have about how the Democrats aren't much better than Republicans too often when it comes to who's been co-opted by special interests, but I think the one point he made here needs to be repeated.
Uygur: I don't disagree with what you're saying about the Democrats at all and I have tremendous problems with them. I think Geithner is terrible and I think listening to Bob Rubin was a disaster, so the Democrats are very guilty of this as well. But the problem is we don't have an opposing party that will actually keep their feet to the fire and instead of trying to make the reform stronger we have a party who's trying to make it weaker, so that's why I say the GOP is useless. I wish we had a real opposition party that could help us go down a better path, but we don't.
He's absolutely right. As bad as anyone might want to paint what the Democrats have done, there is no one in the Republican Party that's going to make any of the bills they're trying to get passed any better. They're only going to make them worse.
All of us who are trying to get rid of Democrats who don't represent the working class in America and give them primary challengers to either keep them honest or get them voted out of office are more than familiar with how hard it is to clean up our political process. I don't think Ratigan's generalizations about the two parties are correct though. I agree with Bill Maher.
Maher: This is because we don't have a left and a right party in this country any more. We have a center right party, and a crazy party.
Despite the problems with the Democrats right now, they at least look like they actually want to govern, don't hate unions, want to pass laws that help the working class and the poor and not just the rich, by and large look like they're at least willing to roll back some of the worst abuses from Wall Street even if it's not enough, and still care that there is a safety net in this country for the most vulnerable among us.
The "crazy party" is talking privatizing Social Security even after the Wall Street debacle, wants to take women back to the 1950's, is still fighting the Civil War, thinks we were justified in invading countries that weren't a threat to us and maybe we should do more of it with Iran, wants more tax cuts for the rich and still doesn't want to regulate Wall Street at all even after we watched the entire world's economy almost go down in flames. And their leaders don't mind throwing around birther conspiracy theories and calling capitalism Socialism and Marxism.
Dylan Ratigan needs to take a better look at both parties and where they're headed before he plays too much more of this "all sides are equal" game. They're not.
