It's not even incrementalism.

No, those are Third Way talking points.

In order for that assessment to be true, current policies under the current president would have to be yielding incremental progress toward liberalism.

They are doing just the opposite.

We are not dealing with a slower or more pragmatic journey toward the same liberal goal. We are dealing with a corporate propaganda machine pretending that corporate Democrats *have* the same goals.

The absurd claim by Third Wayers that corporate Democrats have merely been obstructed by Republicans is so inconsistent with blatant reality and has been demolished with lists and lists and evidence of that reality so many times here that its repetition at this point can only reflect a repeating advertising/propaganda machine rather than attempts at good-faith discussion. We can post it all again and again and again: the relentless corporate appointments, the executive decisions, the slimy deals in which just enough corporate Democrats reliably appear to ensure that promised liberal legislation can't pass, the betrayals of liberal candidates and deliberate throwing of elections...

...but the Third Way "2+2=5" drones on.

That's what corporate usurpation of politics does, after all. Corporate money pouring into government and politics means the replacement of good-faith efforts to represent citizens with what corporations do instead: advertise, propagandize, and sell a product for profit, no matter how viciously and pathetically the shiny picture on the box misrepresents the product.

The talking points, the propaganda machine, and the rewriting of reality get so old.

Shun the Third Way Shills with extreme prejudice.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5767160

Nonsense. He deliberately buried the public option.

A public option was polling very well among Americans at the time.

The Third Way always wants to argue about single payer in order to try to obscure the fact that Obama sold us out on the real potential reform of a public option, which is what he campaigned on and promised to fight for.

Obama chose not to fight for a public option *after* he had promised to do so, *even when* polls showed that the country was strongly behind it, and *even though* public opinion could have been mobilized to demand it.

Not only did he make a backroom deal to kill the public option, he lied to the American people and claimed that he had never campaigned on a public option *after* the deal had been made, just as he lied to Americans that he would not support a mandate.

The truth is that, consistent with his aggressively pro-corporate appointments and proactive corporate policy agenda in virtually every other area of policy important to his corporate donors, he was working for the insurance companies' version all along.

+10000 You are exactly right.

+1 If people felt the Democratic Party were actually functioning to defend them

DU's corporate Third Way message brigade is already trying to swarm and spin responses to this OP,

which is how DU rolls these days. I think the answer is simple: People are weary of the failure of the party to represent us rather than Wall Street, and they are weary of the message control/propaganda machine that infests and poisons even places that purport to be discussion areas for citizens who care about liberal political principles and are deeply worried about the direction of their country.

I think people are finally waking up to the fact that we have a united oligarchy rather than a gridlocked democracy, and they are increasingly aware of being played by the owners of the Red versus Blue theater production.

I think corporatists vastly overplayed their hand this summer when they had corporate Democrats actively suppressing Democratic votes for the 2014 midterms. I think the deliberate lack of a clear, positive message and the DCCC "Accept Doom" email campaigns....combined with the relentless campaign on DU and elsewhere by Third Wayers to insult and demoralize the base... caused a lot of people to realize that rallying around party has become a scam.

DU at least claimed to stand for liberal principles when it began. Now, anyone who comes here and attempts to use the site to speak honestly about what corporatism has done to this nation....from looting the middle class out of existence to trashing the Constitution and implementing a police/surveillance/propaganda state....will meet immediate, relentless response by our resident message control brigade. There is a 24/7 propaganda machine here defending the party no matter what the party stands for....and right now the party is very, very corrupted.

We don't have a functioning democracy anymore. We have a purchased, united, bipartisan oligarchy that is pretending to be a democracy while relentlessly implementing fascistic policy no matter which party is elected. Keeping the illusion of Red and Blue "democratic" teams alive, while also propagandizing tolerance and submissiveness out in the nation for the predatory corporate agenda that continues no matter which side is elected, is a full-time job now for the corporate message machine. Meanwhile, the Americans whose lives are being destroyed by this corporate takeover are merely trying to find somewhere to discuss what to do about it, where they won't be relentlessly message controlled, diverted and disrupted.

Corporate voices here now start approximately half of the OP's on this site. It used to be that messaging like that was rare. It has been slowly increased here to become the norm.

Those who build surveillance machines also build propaganda machines. It's sad that propaganda has become part of daily life in this country. But it happens in all countries that turn authoritarian.

Cameras are not a real or sufficient solution.

Cameras only add another pseudo-protective layer to this fascist police state.

The only real answer is an actual reversal of the militarization of the police, reversal of the looting of our nation, and reversal of the transformation of our cities into exploitation zones like Ferguson.

What we need is not cameras to oversee the police state. We need to demand that the police state *itself,* the militarization *itself* be dismantled, along with the corporate takeover of this nation.

What a shock that in all the corporate news coverage of Ferguson, the programs that actually militarize the police, the programs that have exploded even under this Democratic administration, are never mentioned at all.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025897324

Abby Normal.

When did the Third Way decide that respecting the fundamental civil liberties of protesters

should be dismissed as only a "progressive" issue?

When did selecting someone who does not have a history of brutally suppressing protest become something to be snidely dismissed as though it were some pony rather than a constitutionally protected right of all Americans?

Do you even pay attention to how twisted those Third Way talking points you are repeating have actually become?

Militarized police forces are not acceptable in the United States of America.

What we need is for the militarization programs to be ended.

We need a public, national database on police violence toward citizens.

And we need relentless attention from the DOJ to cases of police violence until this garbage stops.

But we are already receiving relentless messaging that we have no right to expect or demand actual reversal of the militarization. Cameras on the militarized police are all we are going to be offered, and we will be expected to cheer in delight at this concession by our corporate masters.

The militarization of our police is federally driven, bipartisan, and as much a part of the growing police state as the mass surveillance, prison industrial complex, and assaults on journalism, other political protesters, and whistleblowers.

What is being offered is not a first step to anything. Cameras are the sum total of what our corporate politicians will offer as a solution to Ferguson. Never mind that this administration has vastly expanded the obscene militarization of our police forces and can also reverse it. Never mind that that obscene militarization continues, to the point that we now regularly see photos in our newspapers that look like something out of Afghanistan. We are to cheer for cameras, because actually REVERSING a vicious, malignant policy would be asking too much...

The Obama administration's escalation of police militarization
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/06/aclu-police-militarization-swat_n_2813334.html

It's almost certain that if the police agencies cooperate, the ACLU will find that the militarization trend has accelerated since Kraska's studies more than a decade ago. All of the policies, incentives and funding mechanisms that were driving the trend then are still in effect now. And most of them have grown in size and scope.

The George W. Bush administration actually began scaling down the Byrne and COPS programs in the early 2000s, part of a general strategy of leaving law enforcement to states and localities. But the Obama administration has since resurrected both programs. The Byrne program got a $2 billion surge in funding as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, by far the largest budget in the program's 25-year history. Obama also gave the COPS program $1.55 billion that same year, a 250 percent increase over its 2008 budget, and again the largest budget in the program's history. Vice President Joe Biden had championed both programs during his time in the Senate.

The Pentagon's 1033 program has also exploded under Obama. In the program's monthly newsletter (Motto: "From Warfighter to Crimefighter&quot , its director announced in October 2011 that his office had given away a record $500 million in military gear in fiscal year 2011, which he noted, "passes the previous mark by several hundred million dollars." He added, "I believe we can exceed that in FY 12.”

Then there are the Department of Homeland Security's anti-terrorism grants. The Center for Investigative Reporting found in a 2011 investigation that since 2001, DHS has given out more than $34 billion in grants to police departments across the country, many of which have been used to purchase military-grade guns, tanks, armor, and armored personnel carriers. The grants have gone to such unlikely terrorism targets as Fargo, N.D.; Canyon County, Idaho; and Tuscaloosa, Ala.

What we need is for the militarization programs to be ended.

We need a public, national database on police violence toward citizens.

And we need relentless attention from the DOJ to cases of police violence until this garbage stops.

But we are expected to cheer, because now there may be cameras on the officers in our militarized police state. We are to accept that the militarization itself is an acceptable "new normal."

This is textbook MO of our new corporate-ruled government. Implement unconscionable new authoritarian policy...then make some small concession that preserves the bulk of the new abuses, and seek adulation for that. You will know the corporate Third Way by their absolute refusal to entertain the possibility that the abuses should actually be reversed. You will know them by the incessant, malignant propaganda messaging that teaches us always to accept the "new normal," no matter how unconscionable it may be.

Militarized police, prison industrial complexes, impoverished communities, mass surveillance....They are all part of the new normal being constructed around us.

We have to insist on reversal of the militarization itself. Our corporate government will never yield more than we demand.

We must not accept our militarized police forces as an acceptable "new normal" in the United States of America. Corporatists have no right to do this to us and to our country.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/what-weapons-are-police-using-in-ferguson/2014/08/14/4acf0920-23e0-11e4-8b10-7db129976abb_video.html