The following is a short, transcribed, audio clip from last Sunday’s program, featuring Marcy Wheeler and Stuart Zechman. The entire program is available on the BlogTalkRadio player.
Marcy Wheeler: The thing about Wikileaks that strikes me, the lesson I come away with, aside from lot of little things like that or a lot of details confirming everything we knew is that these people hate democracy.
These people hate democracy.
They go around and they say, “Oh this person who has run on this issue is therefore foolish because they’ve run on this issue and their people actually think that they should run on this issue.” Or this dictatorial ruler wants to do X, Y and Z because that’s what his people want to do. We shouldn’t do that either.
I don’t know, maybe the United States was never the beacon of democracy, but boy it’s not now.
Stuart Zechman:
Well, it certainly isn’t. We have people who are ideologues who are sort of weirdly and openly, when they think they are talking amongst themselves, anti-democratic. If you listened to the gasbags today on Meet the Press you had the spectacle of one of them Mike Murphy, I think, speaking for the entire panel and saying that the catfood commission had to be forced on the American voter.
That these things had to be forced.
Those are the words that he used. So yes, they apparently hate Democracy. And who they are is really I think the subject of what should be a real discussion on the left as we go into the “what are gonna do about Obama” season and the 2012 [discussion of] how do we primary Obama.
Stuart is referring to this part of the Meet the Press roundtable discussion:
MR. MURPHY: It’s very important because it has to start on the inside, and then it has to be forced on the voters, because it’s easy to say in a poll you want all this sacrifice. And most of the time voters look at sacrifice, they grab the person suggesting it and they throw them in the political wood chipper.
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
MR. MURPHY: Voters do not reward sacrifice. Politicians are very tuned into voters. Look at the deficit commission vote. The, the retired politicians were 5-to-1 for it. The active politicians were split 50-50, on a bipartisan basis, to the credit to some Democrats.
MR. FRIEDMAN: I think, David…
MR. MURPHY: So this is where it begins inside, and it, it is a hopeful sign.
The path to effective governance is finding ways that prevent voters’ preferences from being expressed, developing chicanery to circumvent the will of the electorate and force policies onto them that they oppose. It is a hopeful sign that, inside, we are finding ways to undermine the will of the voters.
Jamelle Bouie also noticed this.
VIrtually Speaking 