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FORD
05-20-2005, 10:22 AM
May 19, 2005
An Open Letter to Democrats
Listen to Galloway and Learn Something

By STAN GOFF

Dear Democratic Elected Officials of the United States (with damn few exceptions),

I am writing this open letter to call your attention to the remarks made day before yesterday, May 17, 2005, to the United States Senate, by British MP George Galloway of the independent Respect Party. I do this because he serves as an example of why your party should be abandoned by the U.S. working class, by U.S. women, by oppressed nationalities in the United States, and by anyone who professes to be a progressive or a leftist.

George Galloway did that for which you have proven incapable; he spoke as an opposition. Since there seems to be a great dark space in the middle of your heads where the notion of opposition should be _ a void filled by parliamentary molasses and the pusillanimous inabilty to tell simple truths _ I suggest you all review the recordings of Galloway's confrontation with Republican Senator Norm "Twit" Coleman to see exactly how effortless it is to stand up to these cheap political bullies. While you are at it, you can watch your colleague Carl Levin demonstrate exactly what I mean about most of you and your party, as he alternately hurls petulant cream-puff insults at Galloway and kisses Coleman's stunned, clueless ass to give that toothy dipshit some comfort in the wake of Galloway's verbal drubbing.

Galloway didn't have to walk up to the docket and slap the cowboy shit out of Coleman _ though I admit I still struggle with my own secret urges to do just that with most of the air-brushed, combed-over, Stepford meat-puppets who now people the United States Congress. No, all Galloway had to do was tell the unvarnished truth, and it had exactly the same effect. If Democrats had half the spine that Galloway does if you would stop chasing your creepy little careers through the caviar and chicken-salad circuits of duck-and-cover American political double-speak, then not only would people like me not be calling for all to abandon the Democratic Party and take their fight to the streets like good Bolivians not only that, but you'd have won the last election.

The reason Galloway was able to break from your mirror party in UK _ Blair's sell-out Labor Party _ and still get elected, is that Galloway fights for his convictions and the real needs of his constituents, and doesn't run for cover every time the bully-boys of the capitalist extablishment attempt to take him down.

Here's a hint.

People follow those who speak plainly and fight. Aside from Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee, and Cynthia McKinney (not surprisingly Black women who know where it goes if you let rich white men get away with giving you a bunch of shit) and a precious few others, the Democratic Party is not only just another party controlled by big capitalists; it is not even a good *capitalist* opposition party (much less a real opposition).

You don't deserve anyone's support, not even as a tactical matter any longer, because you end up doing ritual verbal combat then give the "cornpone Nazis" of the Republcan Party any goddamn thing they want. That's why Galloway rhetorically spanking that soap-opera-looking shitbird was the most satisfying thing many of us have seen in months.

That's exactly why some of us are saying go Bolivian on their asses. Tell the Democratic Leadership Council to eat shit and die. Stop working, stop obeying, block the streets and highways, shut down the capital, and watch them choke on their own sewage. If Americans weren't so bewildered by television, so addled and soft from junk food and cars and electronic appliances, and so addicted to their own cultural superficiality, they might begin organizing general strikes: women's strikes, workers strikes (without union bureaucrats to calm them down), Black people strikes, Brown people strikes, info-tech strikes, eco-strikes, all working our way up to One Big Strike.

It's a ways off, but it's coming. Of course, there won't be any Democrats there. They'll be wringing their hands about their defunct careers, and conducting focus groups to see how they can shift further to the right in the next election.

And the reason this doesn't happen is that people still hang their thin hopes on you, on electing Democrats who stab them in the back the first chance they get. But Galloway's appearance before the U.S. Senate moved us an inch closer to the Big Strike, and an inch further away from your worthless asses.

Because Galloway didn't, as some are saying, expose the Republicans.

Someone with a full frontal lobotomy could expose a Republican politician.

He exposed the spinelessness of the Democrats.

Yours very truly,

Stan Goff

(My thanks to James Howard Kunstler for the term "cornpone Nazi." I've known quite a few... even been related to some of them.)

Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com.

Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org



link (http://counterpunch.org/goff05192005.html)

Guitar Shark
05-20-2005, 11:19 AM
Good letter. I fail to see how it justifies a new thread though.

Nickdfresh
05-20-2005, 12:54 PM
Apparently he's a hit at home, even with the more of the conservative elements of the British media.

Briton praised by media for defying panel in U.S.

By JILL LAWLESS
Associated Press
5/20/2005
Associated Press

George Galloway, British member of Parliament, approaches the witness chair before combative testimony to U.S. Senate panel.

LONDON - There is usually no love lost between George Galloway and the British press.

But after the maverick lawmaker's blistering performance before a U.S. Senate committee this week in which he excoriated the Bush administration over Iraq, not even his biggest critics could contain their grudging admiration.

"Galloway: the man who took on America" ran a headline in the Independent newspaper Thursday.

Galloway's combative appearance Tuesday before senators who accused him of taking kickbacks from then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein enhanced his status as a folk hero among his supporters.

The lawmaker is known, even in the highly articulate world of British politics, for his memorable turns of phrase. Tuesday, he called the panel of senators a "lickspittle Republican committee" and accused them of "the mother of all smoke screens."

Upon his return Wednesday, he was given a standing ovation by hundreds of people at a rally in London. "He blasted the whole of the U.S. Senate," said Abdul Khaliq Mian, a member of Respect, the antiwar party founded by Galloway.

Galloway's no-holds-barred testimony won widespread praise in a country where many accuse Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of taking a supine approach to U.S. relations.

"In one hour, George Galloway has shown how to do what a succession of British ministers . . . have conspicuously failed to do: to stand up to American bullying and mendacity," reader Andy Bailey wrote in a letter to the editor of the Guardian.

Last week, the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs investigation subcommittee released documents that it said showed that Galloway and other international figures received valuable oil allocations - in Galloway's case, allegedly 20 million barrels' worth between 2000 and 2003 - from Saddam as a reward for opposition to U.N. sanctions on Iraq.

In his testimony in Washington, Galloway vehemently denied the accusations and accused the committee of maligning him before giving him a chance to defend himself.

"Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice," Galloway told the panel's chairman, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn..

Even observers skeptical of Galloway's belligerent manner and talent for self-promotion acknowledged the skill of his hard-hitting attack.

The Times marveled at Galloway's "gift of the Glasgow gab, a love of the stage and an inexhaustible fund of self-belief."

Galloway's testimony was also picked up by the Arab press, with Egypt's pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper giving front-page treatment to his declaration that he had met Saddam "exactly the same number of times as (Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld."

Link (http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050520/1066534.asp)