What price [electoral] victory?

Cindy Sheehan speaks
US: myth of the two party system - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

excerpt:

Obama and his regime have done all of those things that people were afraid that McCain would do, but there’s an extremely small outcry. Here we are, once again, careening madly down the path to electoral ruin—where voting for the "lesser of two evils" has become a national pastime. When the elite class gives the appearance of only two choices on the ballot, we end up voting "against" a candidate far more times than we vote "for" someone. What’s wrong with us? We are lazy, we are fearful, the establishment beats us down, we are ignorant, and we are defeated. Voting at least gives us the latent feeling that we are doing something, when we are really doing very little. We righteously march down to our polling place, like good soldiers for the status quo. We vote. We get our little stickers with an American flag that proudly proclaims: I VOTED. But when we vote for a member of the political duopoly, we are only voting for "Dee or Dum". The Democrats had their chance during the last four years, and instead of passing progressive legislation and ending the wars, they have pandered to the right, which has been emboldened by the power the Democrats gave it. Now the Republicans are poised to take over at least the House of Representatives. And Democrats will begin to spew progressivism out of their lying mouths and abuse the energy of their newly-angry base to try to regain power - like the Republicans have done effectively for the past two years. Will progressives ever learn that political pandering and fear-based voting never brings anything but defeat, or are we trapped in a vicious cycle of our own making? Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Specialist Casey A. Sheehan, who was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. Since then, she has been an activist for peace and human rights. She has published five books, has her own Internet radio show, Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cindy lives in Oakland, CA, and loves to spend time with her three grand-babies. You can learn more about Cindy at Peace of the Action. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.