Cutting the crap

It is always interesting to note foreign news outlets and their ability to express certain realities about American politics, realities that American news outlets simply will not acknowledge. Recall, for example, after the mid-term elections, when that dreadful band of tub-thumpers from the DLC were standing on a stage, smiling and swaying back and forth with DCCC chair Rahm Emmanuel front and center. The scene, brought to you by the good folks of the US corporate media, played on for sometime. Oh, a viewer would think, those guys "won" the election big time. This message continued on its merry way for days after the election. Well, as much as it could what with the resignation of Rumsfeld and the nomination of Robert Gates suddenly demanding most everyone's attention.

But there were brief moments when the talk did not focus on the "new Bush," a man who had essentially called Democrats terrorists during the campaign, but who, we would be told, had been humbled by the election and would seek "bipartisanship." And during those moments, what one was likely to hear was how the sweeping electoral victory was all the doing of the DLC; that Rahm Emmanuel was a fucking genius. James Carville, a man who should now be back down south, rocking on the porch and sucking his gums, bewailed Dean's 50 state strategy because it didn't produce a big enough win (though it probably would have had we not seen, once again, the disappearance of 3 million votes).

That's right. At the same time, the DLC had both resisted Dean's 50 state strategy, appeared to claim the electoral success it produced as its own and that it was still Dean's fault for not giving them 40 seats in the House. That's quite a contortion. But not in the American media. And especially not within the DC beltway, where Dean is and has been a reviled outsider. For as much time as the media have spent mocking Dean, it would do them no good to start portraying Dean as a competent chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

But like I said, foreign news outlets have neither the time nor the interest in such pissy in-fighting. They can see what happened and tend to succinctly express the situation that would seem to be more obvious when viewed from a safe distance.

He didn't reprise his famous scream, but the man who engineered the Democratic party's return to power in the U.S. Congress shared his winning strategy as the Liberal party opened its convention Wednesday night.

Now, that was simple, wasn't it?