Reid - 'Harmony' preferred to stopping Bush extremism

We recently watched Sen. Chris Dodd go toe-to-toe with the Majority Leader, Harry Reid, about stopping the passage of the FISA bill that contains full immunity for the telecoms that illegally supported Bush's attack on the privacy of American citizens. This illegal action was in February 2001, well before Bush even admitted that non-sate terrorists were a real threat to Americans.

Reid gave in to Chris Dodd's threat to filibuster the bill and pulled it, with the statement that he would bring it back in January. Reid's spokesman says that Reid will pass the bill in January - along with the immunity for the crooked telecoms. As Glenn Greenwald says, Reid thinks that Sen. Dodd was just grandstanding and that as soon as his Presidential bid dies in January, Dodd will stop disrupting the harmony of the Senate.

Here's Glenn's take on what Reid is doing:

In the Beltway world, anyone who aggressively objects to the Bush administration's extremism, and especially its lawbreaking, is always guilty of (at least) one of two sins: they are either fringe, unSerious, overly earnest losers, or -- as in the case with the accusations against Dodd here -- simply pretending to be bothered by such things in order to rouse the rabble and exploit them for cynical political gain. Anyone who disrupts Beltway harmony in order to hold the Bush administration accountable -- anyone who seems actually bothered by the rampant lawbreaking -- is thus easily dismissed as an annoying radical or a self-promoting fraud.

After all, it can't possibly be the case that Dodd actually believes in what he's doing and saying. He can't really care if telecoms are protected from the consequences of their years of deliberate, highly profitable lawbreaking. Clearly, Dodd's just doing all of this to prop up his flagging presidential campaign, just a cynical ploy for attention, not because he has any actual convictions that there is something wrong with granting such an extraordinary and corrupt gift to lawbreaking telecoms. No Serious person would ever actually get riled up about anything like that.

As much as the Bush administration's push for an authoritarian corporatized, globalized America made up of the wealthy and the poor with no effective middle class disgusts me (and violates the Constitution) the problem with the minority Republican Party is only one portion of the difficulty America faces.

The other part is that the Democratic leadership inside the beltway has gone native. "Harmony" is more important than the Constitution and the Rule of Law, and a lot more important than the needs of the average American for affordable and reliable health care.

When the Republicans get their ass whupped in November, the next problem to be resolved is for the Americans to retake the Democratic Party back from the out-of-touch beltway leadership. The idiots in Washington either need to go or get retrained, one or the other.