two out of what used to be four?

Like many other people, I have gone slightly nutty trying to sift through the available (inadequate) information in trying to make sense of just what is happening to the Democratic party.

This is not a discussion that was done democratically. People have voted to change the party - not only its rules but its ideology, its goals, its direction, and its membership. But those who are privileged to vote have not been sharing with us what they have decided. Instead, they mockingly call us "low information" voters.

The Democratic party thinks it does not need us anymore, and that is why it has treated us so shabbily. They wouldn't mind if we voted the way they want us to, of course - but they're not going to offer anything.

They are going to redraw the party. They are going to pull in Republicans and make the Democratic party into...well, something "new".

Officials from both campaigns confidently predict that they will steal states that have been in the other party's column in recent elections, and an early analysis suggests there will be new battlegrounds added to the map this year

So don't expect a lot of meeting our needs. There are rich people to court - people who trashed the Republican party, and so would like ours. Thanks to the fact that Democrats are letting the party go cheap, those of us who are - you know, real Democrats - will be out of a party.

And just in time for Labor Day - isn't that fitting, for the death of the party that stood (until now) for worker's rights?

You know who'll stand for worker's rights now? That's right - nobody.

This from the party that once gave us FDR's "Four Freedoms".

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

The new Obama Party does not uphold this vision. In fact, it rejects this vision.

If you look at Obama's reason for, say, universal health care that isn't universal, you see that his economic reasoning is premised on an essentially Libertarian view of freedom - a view that explicitly rejects freedoms such as freedom from want or freedom from fear.

These are not Libertarian values, because those freedoms for me might entail a reduction in freedom for them - namely, the freedom to use the power of men over women, the power of rich over poor, the power of the strong to exploit the weak. FDR's values are not Obama's values. But they are Democratic values.

I don't know what Obama is "for" (nobody really does) but I do think it's reasonably certain that at least part of why he has come is to fulfill the Republican mission of dismantling the last of the New Deal.