Let's Give the Working Man What He Wants!

 

 

Thanksgiving for me is usually a summary missionary experience with the Church of Libertarians - i am preached to by bright eyed, feverish sorts whose sermons - like any religious ideas - are positive and one sided and absolutely ungrounded in fact.

This is where I usually quibble with Libertarians - at least with Conservative Republicans you have a concrete grounding of history and data to give and take with. But Libertarians live in the air! You can't criticize them . . . well, you can - but for every criticism they have a ready and prepared answer. It doesn't matter what your criticism is, their answers are general and broad enough to cover all conflicting thoughts - and that's because there is not one single place on earth where Libertarianism exists. If you want to discuss Capitalism or Socialism or Marxism you have thousands of Real World examples and facts and data at your disposal. You can see how the glossy ideals lose some of their gloss when they are actually put into practice. Which is okay, of course. That's reality.

But there is not one country, city, county or small town that exists as a working example of Libertarianism. It's all theory, and theory can always be dressed up or excused with more theory. You don't have the boring, pedestrian examination of Real Facts to get in the way with your discussions. Libertarian theory is just that: theory. It's about as constructive as arguing about Revelations.

 You'd think that after all this time of unbridled Common Man anger that the Libertarians would have managed to convince at least one small town in the Heartland, where their support is strongest, to at least try to create a small, working version of Utopia.

Is there anywhere? If you're reading this Blog please make comment so that we can look at it.

People don't seem to be buying it, however. They don't want to play. Perhaps deep down inside the Working Man has some vestigial memory of the fact that it was they themselves who rolled up their sleeves and marched on the capitals and demanded the very regulation that the Libertarians want to strangle off. It wasn't the Liberal Elite of the Eastern Seaboard - it was the farmers and the factory workers of Small Town America who joined the Populist Party and demanded that something be done with the predation and rape of Big Railroad and the Slaughterhouses and Big Oil. Which, I think, is just fine with the Libertarians. It gives them a zealot's fire to preach, preach, preach without ever fearing their ideas will ever be judged on their own concrete merits.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the way Republicans have been able to galvanize that same Heartland Population to vote into place economic theories that undermine their security by attaching it to Fire and Brimstone Moral Outrage about all kinds of things - and then they - the Republicans - take control of the Congress and the Presidency, as they have repeatedly since the 1970s - and they do absolutely nothing to further those ideals: e.g. Abortion is still legal. There has been no real assault on fire-arm ownership. Nothing has been proposed by those leaders that will actually help out the family. They talk about it and talk about it, but when the time comes, the Republican Party is a one trick pony: lower taxes for everyone and deregulation. 

Which is fine, I suppose - but how come the voting public doesn't hold them accountable for these empty promises that seem to be at the center of the platform. They don't even try to work this Moral Legislation.

Because they know it will never happen. But they can sound True Blue by railing against a Straw Giant like everyone's David facing Goliath . . .

Again, if anyone reading this blog can quote me an example on the contrary side, please submit it in the comments.

 

 

 

The Tea Party Doesn't Know Shit About the Constitution.

Keep in mind, you Fundamentalists, the Constitution was designed to tell us what is legal and illegal not what is right and wrong. The Constitution does not delineate morality.

Also, the only mention it makes vis-a-vis God/Religion is prohibitory - it tells us what those things can't do in terms of our society. Thus Glenn Beck's belief that Liberals want to "separate us from our Constitution and God" is in fact combining two things as if they are always in tandem, like peanut butter and jelly and salt and pepper. They are not. They are not mutually exclusive but to suggest that they naturally go together is to be guilty of what is referred to in Logical Fallacies as an illegal use of the "And Operator" - commonly known as the "Complex Question".

Beck believes that certain shithead progressives forsook the "faithful Christian Founders" and forced the country to adopt a slew of unconstitutional measures that triggered our long decline into Obama-era totalitarianism. If the Founding Fathers and framers of the Constitution were, in fact, Christians, I might be less inclined to choke on Beck's stupidity.

In fact there's a lot of strange mingling of biblical phrases and preachy sermon language when these Tea Partiers get together. Sarah Palin says that our country has entered into a season of "constitutional repentance". It seems to me that their frame of reference is essential Christian Fundamentalism. Like those folks, they seek a Sacred Text that is faultless and changeless and which represents a Golden Age. Like any Fundamentalist, they see in their good book, only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don't sweat the details and they ignore all the ambiguities. And of course, in the long tradition of Christian Fundamentalists, they demonize and scathe those who disagree with their doctrine.

If these people were at all conversant in the way the Constitution works, there might be some room to negotiate with them. But, like all Fundamentalists - Christian, Muslim, Jewish - they see things only their way and ignore whatever exists that contradicts their purity of thought.

Thus we can have someone like Tea Partier Sharon Angle can assert that "Separation of church and state is an unconstitutional doctrine." Of course it's clearly stated in the Constitution that the opposite is true, but that doesn't matter.

Ms. Angle also tells us that "Government isn't what our Founding Fathers put into the Constitution." Which seems a bit odd when the Sacred Document itself establishes the power "to lay and collect taxes" in a Federal Government, and to "provide for the common defense and the general welfare" of the people. I don't know what Constitution Ms. Angle is reading. Perhaps she has a special one.

Nevertheless, the Tea Party movement has been extremely clear about one thing: the Constitution should be followed exactly, and it should always regulate our nation. Except when it doesn't work out the way they want it to. Then they begin to customize.

Ron Paul: America should stop automatically granting citizenship to "native born children of illegal immigrants". Which would violate the 14th Amendment.

Also by Paul: he would like to prevent federal contractors from lobbying Congress - a likely violation of their First Amendment right to redress.

Sarah Palin, when asked about Roe vs. Wade, was quoted as saying that the Constitution  does, in fact, guarantee "an inherent right to privacy" but then she suggested that such a thing would be better handled at the state level  - which clearly violates Amendment 14.

The Tea Party are Constitutional purists, all right. Like the Christian and Muslim Fundamentalists they oppose any change or modernized viewing of their Sacred Texts as being sacreligious. They decry modern additions to the Constitution as "progressive" and thus evil - as if the Constitution itself did not enshrine the very concept of the Amendment process because the Founding Fathers knew that time goes on and things change. But then they go about and begin lobbying for their own self serving amendments that do, in fact, violate the Constitution. Michell Bachhmann has suggested more than forty additions to the Constitution, including:
1. an amendment to ban flag burning, which violates the First Amendment.
2. a balanced budget amendment
3. a parents' rights amendment
4. a supermajority to raise the taxes amendment
5. an antiabortion amendment
6. an anti gay marriage amendment

etc. etc. etc. Most of these attempt to legitimize her own personal morality instead of understanding that the Constitution is a legal document that was meant only to create a Governmental Philosophy and Legal Document to frame what shall be "legal" vs. what shall be "illegal".

They need to go back to school or drop the idea that they're in any way riding on the coat tails of our Founding Fathers. They are not.

An Open Letter to the Tea Party

Whatever other failings you have, can you all please stop referring to the Founding Fathers, the framers of the Constitution, as God Fearing Christians? Because nothing could be further from the truth. Those who were not abject atheists were at best Deists: people who believe that there's probably a divine power and creator, but that it's no way concerned with humanity.

James Madison: 

 

"Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects." 

John Adams:  

"As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation.  But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?"

 

"I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of mankind has preserved-- the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!"
                            -letter to Thomas Jefferson

.

"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity.  Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."

 

"This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there  were no religion in it."

Thomas Jefferson: 

 "Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced an inch towards uniformity.  What has been the effect of coercion?  To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.  To support roguery and error all over the earth."
                             - "Notes on Virginia"

     "On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarreling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind."
                              - to Carey, 1816

                "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature."

 

"We discover in the gospels a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstition, fanaticism and fabrication ."

George Washington: while President Washington was a deeply private man, still those who knew him best said he was No Christian -

"Gouverneur Morris had often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than did he himself."
                                -Thomas Jefferson, in his private journal, Feb. 1800

Benjamin Franklin:

"I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works ... I mean real good works ... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing ... or making long prayers, filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less capable of  pleasing the Deity."
                                  - Works, Vol. VII, p. 75

"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." 

"In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it."

Thomas Paine: 

"Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half of the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God.  It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind. "

"Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies." 

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."
                                 .

Jesus: There's Plenty of Him to Go Around

In my brief forty-six years of existence I have found my way into many a Christian church, most of which contain a multiplicity of pictures of Jesus H. Christ. We have him in many action poses and with a variety of facial expressions, most of them of the Why the Fuck did You Do That variety. Some are a bit alarming in His interaction with children - this is not a good time for Church Leaders to be seen frolicking with the young.

One of the best things about Jesus is how amorphous he is. Since no one has actually seen him in the flesh - or no one I know - we can make Jesus be whatever we want him to be - although most historians are pretty much in agreement that he was a Jew, and thus of a certain pallor and hair color.

Nevertheless, Jesus becomes what you want him to be, in a way that you feel comfortable . . .

. . . Thus, the Jesus one finds in Baptist churches makes him look like a Country singer from the seventies - the kind of guy who likes his fried chicken and is not out of place at a NASCAR event, or wearing a large belt buckle with a bull on it.

Now clearly, the blond hair and blue eyes look is distinctly Anglo-Irish. There's no way that Mr. Christ looked this way - but then look at the people who go to these churches. This is how they want him to look.

Catholic churches have differing Jesii based on what ethnic group makes up their congregations: the catholic church I grew up in was made up mostly of Italians and Portuguese and Basques. Thus, the Jesii in that church looked like someone you might find bussing tables at a local spaghetti house. He loves ya, of course, but don't fuck with him.

The Irish in my town went to a different Catholic church. Whenever i went there, as a youth, I was disconcerted to see that their Jesus was whiter and more Irish looking than our Dago Jesus. It caused a great spiritual angst in me. It was one of my first moments of doubt.

Several years later I found myself in the unenviable position of waiting in a bus station in Indiana, waiting for a connecting bus to Atlanta. A young black male sat next to me and preached his own angry version of the gospel, one that included a brutal Black Jesus that was gon' kick yer white ass, boi.This was the kinda Jesus you can imagine goin' ape-shit in the temple.




















Over time I've seen Native-American Jesii and Latino Jesii - he's everywhere, and he's always one of us!

File Under: Stupid White People

The tea party: more for them, less for the rest of us 

Tears of rage

by Hal Crowther

When I published an unflattering assessment of the tea party movement, I anticipated a spirited response. In every form I've encountered, the rhetoric of the far right prizes belligerence and sneers at diplomacy. I never expected an invitation to share a pot of Earl Grey's best and talk things over. But considering the advanced age of the average tea-bagger—half of them must be even older than I am—I suppose I expected a certain gruff courtesy. We graying generations weren't raised to snarl and threaten and hurl epithets like tomahawks. What would our mothers say? It was a later generation of shock jocks and bellicose bloggers that reduced political discourse to tantrums and toxic drivel.

I admit they surprised me, these old guys who've enlisted in the geezer rebellion. Their prostates may be compromised but their bile is potent. The first e-mail message I opened accused me of committing sex acts with Bill Moyers and with several domestic animals. One gentleman interrupted his tirade every third sentence or so, interjecting "Answer me, damn you!" as if he were shaking me by the shirt collar to force a confession. Alarming stuff. Another rabid individual accused me of ignoring left-wing atrocities (pregnant women attacked in their cars for displaying George Bush bumper stickers?) and concluded that I was "a hypocritical little bitch." Betraying a certain lack of media sophistication, some assumed that I lived in the city where they happened to read my essay, and threatened to pay a visit to my house. Most of them signed their names, too.
My memory doesn't extend back to anything quite like this, nothing so animated by rage yet devoid of content. As a friend of mine wrote several years ago, everything's like pro wrestling now: taunts and scowls, fantastic narratives and pantomimes of violence, empty conflict aimed at inflaming an audience of oafs. And of course we're aware that the wife of the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, herself a participant in some of those preposterous ringside narratives, is spending a fortune to win a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. One key difference is that most tea party combatants come armed with deadly weapons, engineered to shed real blood. Dialogue, as I learned dramatically, is not their style. But what sort of dialogue can we imagine with a fierce minority virtually lobotomized by its gullibility, a minority of bubble-dwelling reactionaries whose every "fact" has been distorted or manufactured? The assaults on the pregnant women—is that something available in the right-wing blogosphere, something Michael Savage or Hal Turner was selling on the radio? Nearly every city has its own instigator, its mini-Limbaugh peddling bizarre conspiracy theories and assuring eager racists that Barack Obama is a Muslim/ communist/ antichrist born in Kenya and educated by terrorist mullahs in an Indonesian madrasah.

Most tea party mythology is so ridiculous that reasonable people will grin and ignore it. Sometimes they do so at their peril. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who passes for a moderate conservative in her home state of Alaska, lost the Republican primary to a Wild Right challenger because—observers theorize—she failed to respond to a fusillade of savage attack ads from the Tea Party Express (the same kamikaze group supposedly expelled from the party for posting a grotesquely racist "satire" of the NAACP on its blog). "They literally accused her of almost everything imaginable," one pollster reported. No doubt Murkowski thought that answering them was like trying to answer monkeys who scream and throw nuts and excrement from the treetops. In the shadow of Sarah Palin, she should have known better than to overestimate the intelligence of Alaska's Republicans. In this age of reality-proof information bubbles, lies and labels become deadly weapons.
The tea party's "Restoring Honor" rally on Aug. 28 in Washington was sponsored by the media demagogue Glenn Beck, self-anointed messiah of America's meanest morons. It was staged inappropriately—some say obscenely—at the site and on the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous plea for civil rights, the speech remembered as "I Have a Dream." A throng of grizzled white insurgents cheered and whistled as Beck and Palin, an odd couple of vulgarians waxing very rich on their admirers' simplicity, appealed America's fate to a Higher Power. They exhorted us to pray on our knees for deliverance from socialism and recycled the apocalyptic language of the tent revival. "For too long, this country has wandered in darkness," preached Beck, prophet of a lurking new darkness that would make our old one look like a tropical sunrise. A T-shirt favored by his audience read "Babies, Guns, Jesus."

Compromise with such countrymen seems remote. For want of a leader they've embraced Beck, an evil clown whose classic megalomania is metastasizing before our eyes and cameras. Yet for all their dreadful manners and gross taste in role models, I can't help feeling a twinge of compassion for my contemporaries who fall into traps like the tea party. At an age when answering e-mail or mowing the lawn can be a critical drain on our energies, these seniors are out marching and waving banners. For some it may be a last stand, a final surge of adrenaline before the finish line looms. Those of us who disparage Americans for apathy feel obliged to applaud the physical and emotional energy tea-baggers bring to their cause. And it's such a terrible waste. Because, of course, they're clueless pawns who've been co-opted from the start and sent marching in the wrong direction.

It was the late fuhrer himself, a poor general but a supremely successful demagogue, who wrote, "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." "Big government" is the big lie that our tea party has swallowed whole, with a hogwash chaser. An overripe canard from the conservative Chamber of Horrors, "big government" still works wonders with the logically impaired. (Hitler also wrote "All propaganda has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.") Did they notice that during the let-the-fat cats-feast administrations of George W. Bush, there was never a word about big government from the Glenn Beck section? Not even when deficits soared, hopeless wars drained the treasury and the White House expanded its powers in flat defiance of the Constitution.
If there's one firm truth, one persuasive image that might change the lives of hypnotized tea-baggers—I know, I'm dreaming—it would be this one, to wit: The relationship between corporate, special-interest America and our government is exactly the same as the relationship between a rider and a well-broken saddle horse; the horse is only cursed and kicked on the rare occasions when it bucks or bridles. Barack Obama saw health care reform and emergency regulation of the financial industry as self-evident necessities, but to the big riders who hold the reins in this country they registered as the kind of high-spirited fractiousness that's punished with whips and spurs. We never hear the words "socialist" and "communist" unless someone tries to dilute the absolute economic power of white men. Take a course in American history. Movements to abolish slavery (free labor), liberate women (free labor) and unionize workers (cheap labor) were all attacked tooth and claw by white men whose power and profits were threatened, who suddenly saw Bolsheviks behind every bush.
The current "big government" wave of right-wing rhetoric is about as populist, at heart, as a string of polo ponies. It's the latest attempt by the plutocrats to restore discipline to their stable of safe politicians—an uglier correction in this case because the new president is not white. Where does the tea party fit in? Old white men they may be, but everyone knows that white men of the ruling class don't wear T-shirts that say "Babies, Guns, Jesus." Past their prime, lower-middle class but not entirely uneducated, tea party soldiers may in some cases even understand that the gap between America's richest 1 percent and the rest of us has widened scandalously since 1980, and even more radically since the Bush tax cuts and the market crash of 2008.
The United States of America has become a cruel, winner-take-all society. What sets it apart from every other developed country (aside from its psychotic fetish for firearms) is the huge number of Americans who support that arrangement because they believe—against all evidence—that they are, or could be, among the winners. Ignorant and frustrating these losers may be, but almost touching in their hopeless hopefulness. They're the engine that drives the Republican Party, a fantastical coalition of wealthy cynics and gullible proletarians.

Tea party patriots belong to this sad class of manipulated stooges, marching in chains even as they proclaim their freedom. Unwittingly for the most part (their racism, too, has been excused as unwitting), they provide a populist smokescreen for corporate revenge. Even the lamest, tamest captive media might balk at parades of angry investment bankers in pinstriped Armani suits. Enter Joe the Plumber and Sarah the Hockey Mom. And it isn't rhetoric only that Big Business supplies for this "grassroots" movement of disgruntled Americans. Jane Mayer revealed in The New Yorker that the tea party's principal angels are the mega-billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles. The Koch family, one of America's half-dozen wealthiest, has been bankrolling the far right at least since the brothers' late father committed his oil money to the John Birch Society back in the 1950s. The Kochs' reactionary royalty control foundations and energy-industry political action committees that have lavished several hundred million dollars on the tea party and other right-wing causes in the past decade alone. Theirs are not the only corporate treasure chests available to the armies of the right. The New York Times recently exposed the personal largesse and fund-raising genius of Paul Singer, the hedge-fund ($17 billion) tycoon whose pet projects have included the appalling "Swift boat" attacks on John Kerry in 2004.

All intelligent Americans, the ones who deplore it and the ones who profit from it, are well aware of this populist scam. Everyone except the aging warriors out marching in the uniforms of the Continental Army. Their blindness is a greater shame, as I see it, because the tea party gets one very important thing right: The system is broken. Awash in money and mendacity, America's democracy is like a big animal that can't swim, floundering and drowning in 2 feet of water. Cash and slander rule—huge wallets, huge lies. If you won't lie and can't pay, you have no future in American politics. If you aspire to public service, try to find a country with a Supreme Court majority that doesn't spell "free $peech" with a dollar sign. The court's Citizens United decision last January, one that the Koch brothers must have toasted with Champagne, simply legitimized and institutionalized everything that's most disgusting about our system. To grasp the absurdity and obscenity of equating free corporate spending with free speech, visualize an actual political gathering, and put it to the bullhorn test. The crowd is huge, row after row, as far as the eye can see. One candidate has a huge bullhorn that reaches the back rows easily; his opponent has such a tiny bullhorn that his voice is inaudible beyond the 20th row. When he asks why he can't use a big bullhorn, too, they tell him, "Because you can't afford it." Think that's unfair, un-American? Tell it to the Supreme Court.

"We either get the money out of politics or we lose the democracy," Molly Ivins warned shortly before her death in 2007. In the brief span since, Michael Bloomberg spent more than $100 million to be re-elected mayor of New York, sinister players like the Koch brothers poured uncounted millions into the tea party's puppet theater, and the price of high office in important states rose into the tens of millions, with more and more billionaires and corporate titans prepared to pay it. No midterm election cycle has seen as many reckless big spenders as this one. Candidates had spent $400 million before the end of August, including unprecedented price tags on the campaigns of Meg Whitman ($104 million to date) and Carly Fiorina in California. Linda McMahon, the wrestling mogul, pledged to spend up to $50 million, if necessary, for Connecticut's Senate seat. This is a woman who once kicked her husband in the testicles on TV, as part of a phony McMahon family feud that had their Cro-Magnon wrestling fans in stitches. Remember when money was associated with class?

The right loves to talk about the Founders and original intent. Do they think the Founders meant to auction off the highest offices to the highest bidder? The Constitution never had a fighting chance against billionaires' egos or the Koch brothers' brand of checkbook democracy, which has frozen favored incumbents in office and swallowed up both Democrats and Republicans. They flip-flop in and out of power, regardless of their failures, because voters have no memory and no real options; third parties can never raise enough money to stop the revolving door. What's left of the two-party system is contemptible. The Democrats are reliably gutless, corrupt, selfish and indecisive—and perpetually the lesser of two evils since the Republican Party sold its meager soul to a thousand howling devils.

Epitomized by its recent standard-bearer, John McCain, the 21st-century GOP has renounced every constraint of integrity or responsibility and now fits snugly into H.L. Mencken's definition of a politician, regarded as humorous exaggeration when he wrote it in 1926: "A man who has lied and dissembled, and a man who has crawled. He knows the taste of the boot-polish ... He is willing to embrace any issue, however idiotic, that will get him votes, and he is willing to sacrifice any principal, however sound, that will lose them for him ..."

Republicans exist only to keep cash-and-power channels open for the richest and mightiest of America's invincible special interests. To achieve that they bond with any bigot, fanatic or neo-fascist extremist who can promise them votes. Most Republican congressmen now refuse even to work at their jobs. They live off our tax money, serve only to obstruct legislation and turn savagely on any colleagues who try to take part in the patient compromise that creates laws.

Expelling incumbents is nearly always a good idea, but with what do you replace them? Replacing the unappetizing Harry Reid with the unspeakable Sharron Angle is like treating your arthritis by cutting off your hand; replacing Barack Obama with Sarah Palin is like curing your gout by stepping on a land mine. Are the voters that stupid? A great many, I'm sure, and most of them drink Tea. "Larry, the people stink," the comic/ commentator Bill Maher said on Larry King Live, impressing me by ignoring the prime media taboo against bad-mouthing the sacred "American people."

The conventional wisdom is that America's sick economy and emotional discontent will benefit Republicans this fall, which is outrageously unfair; it was their ill-conceived wars and tax cuts and regulatory negligence that caused all the pain President Obama is struggling desperately to alleviate. Worse than unfair, it's plain crazy. But when were politics fair or rational? We all knew Bush's sins would be the ruin of Obama.
Throw the bums out, by all means. How many bums would we miss? But beware of what might come after. The right is not monolithic. All its serious money comes from the same sources, but the reactionary bestiary houses a variety of strange creatures with strange dreams. Tea party grandfathers dream of a 50-foot fence around Mexico, penal colonies for gays and abortionists, a warm gun in every holster and Fox News in every nursing-home dayroom. Rank-and-file Republicans dream only of regaining power, of Dick Cheney's Halliburton foreign policy once more set loose in the world. The Koches dream of a tiny, toothless government about the size of a cherry pit. As for Glenn Beck, don't let those bursts of tears and piety fool you. He's a refugee from a nightmare, he's fresh blood on the staircase. On a recent radio show, Beck recommended a book (The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots) written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling (1894–1966), the notorious anti-Semite, racist and Nazi sympathizer who called President Eisenhower "Ike the Kike" and JFK's New Frontier "the Jew Frontier." In her day, most people thought Dilling's deadly venom damaged right-wing causes. Will the same be true of her pop-eyed disciple?

A frightening array of opportunists, egomaniacs and amateur entertainers have stepped forward to exploit the national discontent, this supposed Thunder on the Right. Freed from the straitjackets of dignity or proportion, the scramble for office resembles a "reality" TV show—America's Got Candidates?—aimed at an audience that loves Jersey Shore. (Sarah Palin, her daughter Bristol and Bristol's loose-cannon ex, Levi Johnston, are all currently shooting reality shows.) But out of the swirling, often incoherent dreams of the American right, a sterner, more dignified figure emerges and commands attention. This is the libertarian, and, before you dismiss him as a fossil crackpot, note that it was the libertarian high priest, Ron Paul, who rebuked the whole chorus of conservative demagogues for their rabble-rousing protests against the Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero.

Unlike most of his fellow travelers on the right, a real libertarian does not pander. He has principles he actually understands and follows conscientiously. Libertarians blend the highest ideals with a holy sort of innocence and an unfortunate adolescent narcissism. Unlike most of us, they actually identify with Ayn Rand's supermen, those will-powered would-be masters of the universe whose destiny is impeded by lesser mortals and their silly laws. (Ayn Rand was by all accounts a repugnant personality, so self-important as to be the next thing to an idiot.) You may or may not be surprised to learn that I was a deep-dyed baby libertarian, allergic to all authority and infatuated with Barry Goldwater. Libertarianism appeals not only to free-market fundamentalists like the Koches, who dream of commercial rape and pillage, but also to the nonconformist and self-reliant. Most intelligent people have flirted with it. This stark dichotomy between small-government conservatives and regulation-loving socialists is a Fox News creation. Who honestly loves bureaucrats and laws that curb personal freedom? No one I've ever met.

The problem, of course, is that libertarians are supernaturally naive. They operate in neurotic denial of human nature. Like most ideologies—communism, laissez-faire capitalism, anarchism—libertarianism is based on the belief or disingenuous claim that human beings will naturally behave well. All evidence cries out to the contrary. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow, perhaps, but certainly the business editors of The New York Times. If you read the business pages every day, as I do, you understand that no government on earth could afford enough regulators to police the avaricious who take unfair and criminal advantage. From Bernie Madoff and the Ponzi industry to recalls of shoddy pacemakers to insurance companies (Prudential) who steal from the survivors of dead soldiers, the parade of greed and deceit would make a sneering cynic of Winnie the Pooh. And still deregulation is a passionate religion. The free-market right raged against regulators and environmentalists for decades, while the government babied the oil industry with incestuous concessions. Then came the disastrous BP oil spill, right on schedule. Naturally the bastards apologized and took it all back, right? Right.

The limits of libertarianism were dramatized when Ron Paul's son Rand (named after you-know-who?), Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, suggested that we were being much too hard on British Petroleum. Further limits were displayed when Rand Paul declared that civil rights laws should not apply to private businesses, causing one journalist I know to declare Paul "crazy as a tick" and another, an African-American, to suggest that in Rand Paul's America, he could drive from West Texas to Pennsylvania without finding a welcoming restroom.

The late Molly Ivins made a critical distinction between the right libertarian, who, like a spoiled child, pursues only his id, his Randian "I want," and a left libertarian, a category in which Ivins included herself and where I also feel comfortable. A left libertarian wants to be left alone, too, but he doesn't think that what he wants is more important than what other people need.

This spreading national narcissism, this petulant demand to have one's way, is infecting liberals as well. Many of them refused to vote for Obama, or have already given up on him, because they wanted a liberal messiah and got a pragmatic centrist who shies from confrontation. (At least liberals don't threaten to overturn election results by force of arms, the "Second Amendment Solution" favored by some treasonous tea party maniacs.) For a successful democracy of sane adults, it's never what we want but what we can reasonably expect, and achieve, in a communal context. And a sovereign nation is nothing if not a communal context.

Please Read This

Republicans and the Middle Class

Published: September 13, 2010

But it was refreshing to hear a Republican leader say that he could conceivably vote for any bill supported by President Obama. Perhaps the man the Republicans hope will be speaker of the House felt some pressure from Mr. Obama’s recent efforts to remind Americans that the Republicans were proposing to sacrifice the middle-class Americans, yet again, in the name of failed trickle-down economics.

For months, Republican leaders have been uniform in their insistence that they would allow everyone’s taxes to rise if the rich did not get to keep their Bush-era tax breaks. Mr. Obama has proposed continuing the tax cut for the 98 percent of taxpaying families earning less than $250,000 while allowing the tax rates for the top 2 percent to return to their levels prior to the Bush administration. Republicans have demanded tax cuts for all, and, so far, not a single Republican leader has lined up behind Mr. Boehner’s concession.

Even his deputy, Eric Cantor, the House Republican whip, issued a no-compromise statement on Monday demanding a “clean bill,” which means one that would make no distinction between tax cuts for the rich and for everyone else. Anything short of that, he said, is a “nonstarter.” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, introduced a bill on Monday that would extend the tax cuts indefinitely for everyone, including the wealthiest Americans. He may well be joined by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut independent, and a few conservative Democrats.

But we hope Mr. Boehner would not be the only Republican to refuse to allow middle-class tax rates to rise, as they are scheduled to do at the end of this year. Even if it gave Democrats something to crow about, cutting those rates makes economic sense during a recession (though we disagree with Mr. Obama’s plan to cut the rates permanently). Holding the middle-class cuts hostage to those for the wealthy would pose both a political danger to Republicans and an economic danger to the nation.

Ultimately, the case for the top-level tax cuts is increasingly shaky. If Republicans are the least bit serious about reducing the deficit, they have to acknowledge that doing so requires additional revenues, $700 billion of which would be lost to the top 2 percent of earners in the next decade if their taxes do not rise. Handing out those revenues to the rich would have little stimulative effect on the economy because those taxpayers tend to save rather than spend their marginal income.

Mr. Cantor and other hard-line tax-cutters like to claim that the high-end cuts would go to small businesses and other “job creators.” But they should listen carefully to another of Mr. Boehner’s surprising acknowledgments on Sunday. Under sharp questioning from Bob Schieffer on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” Mr. Boehner admitted that only 3 percent of small businesses would pay higher taxes under Mr. Obama’s proposal. As the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation recently reported, 97 percent of the taxpayers with business income would get a cut under Mr. Obama’s plan.

That is something that Republicans simply do not say out loud; it would add inconvenient facts to a battle that they prefer to wage at a purely emotional level. But Mr. Obama’s efforts to enact a reasonable tax policy are not just good politics. They make good sense.

The "Mosque" at "Ground Zero"

Because It Needs to be RePrinted (subtitled - How Fucking Stupid are the Average Americans?)

Put up or shut up

By

Roger Ebert

 on September 1, 2010 6:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (925)

We already know the numbers. Pew finds that 18% of Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim. A new Newsweek poll, taken after the controversy over the New York mosque, places that figure at 24%. Even if he's not a Muslim, Newsweek finds, 31 percent think it's "definitely or probably" true that Obama "sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world."
When the focus is narrowed to Republicans, a Harris poll finds 57 percent of party members believe he is a Muslim, 22% believe he "wants the terrorists to win," and 24% believe he is the Antichrist.
These figures sadden me with the depth of thoughtlessness and credulity they imply. A democracy depends on an informed electorate to survive. An alarming number of Americans and a majority of Republicans are misinformed. The man who was swept into office by a decisive majority is now considered by many citizens to be the enemy. Some fundamentalists believe he is the Antichrist named by Jesus in the Bible. [Yes, I know Jesus never mentioned the Antichrist, but there's a video online proving that he did. He was punning in Hebrew -- or was it Aramaic? -- on the name Barack Obama. ]

This many Americans did not arrive at such conclusions on their own. They were persuaded by a relentless process of insinuation, strategic silence and cynical misinformation. Most of the leaders in this process have been cautious to avoid actually saying Obama is a Muslim. They speak in coded words and allow the implications to sink in. I recently watched Glenn Beck speaking at great length about Obama's Muslim father, but you would not have learned from Beck that the father, who Obama met only once, was not a practicing Muslim in any sense.

Rush Limbaugh has told his listeners he can find "no evidence" that Obama is a Christian. In Paul Krugman's op-ed column in the New York Times on 8/29, Limbaugh is quoted: "Imam Hussein Obama, is probably the best anti-American president we've ever had." Limbaugh obviously doesn't believe Obama is an imam. How many of his listeners realize that? Is he concerned that his words will be taken seriously?




These opinions have an agenda. They seek to demonize the Obama Presidency and mainstream liberal politics in general. The conservatism they prefer is not the traditional conservatism of such figures as Taft, Nixon, Reagan, Buckley or Goldwater. It is a frightening new radical fringe movement, financed by such as the newly notorious billionaire Koch brothers, whose hatred of government extends even to opposition to tax funding for public schools.
The money behind the movement has been shaken in its boots by the recent exposure of criminal activities in the money markets. Our economy has collapsed and it seemed clear to many Americans that the unregulated greed of Wall Street trading, especially in derivatives, was responsible. These were not investments in industry, the economy or the future. They were investments in a bold Ponzi scheme which defrauded home owners into fronting for a pyramid of worthless loans. Citizens lost their homes, investment houses went bankrupt, but the criminals responsible continued to pay themselves multi-million-dollar bonuses.
From the same column by Krugman: "Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland."

Say what? Proposals to end loopholes? Read that again. Our recession and the collapse of the housing and jobs markets squeezed through those loopholes. And if you agree with the Democratic attempts to close them, you are compared to Hitler? Republicans in Washington vote nearly as a block against financial reform. Shouldn't the implications be clear to an informed electorate?
This process may soon be arriving at a moment of truth. The new issue of Vanity Fair mentions in its profile of Sarah Palin, as a casual aside, that Glenn Beck has booked the Dena'ina Center, the largest venue in Anchorage, for the date of September 11, 2010. What do you think that means? It could mean Beck simply wants to hold a rally in the home state of the woman who shared his podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous speech.
Beck says he chose that date without realizing its significance. But it cannot be a coincidence that he has chosen 9/11. Nor does it take special insight to connect that date with Palin's many statements about the "Ground Zero Mosque" and the even more pointed "9/11 Mosque." The association is obvious: "9/11" feeds into "mosque" feeds into "Muslims" feeds into the misperception that Obama is a Muslim. Beck and Palin speak about "taking back America." The buried message is that they will take it back from Muslims. This is a heartless misuse of the tragedy of 9/11 and its victims.

If Beck had planned to come to Anchorage on another date, it wouldn't have excited much notice. But any meeting in Alaska on 9/11 without Palin also present will be anticlimactic. It's too far to go not to feature her. The symbolic date of 9/11 invests this event with the inescapable possibility that he and Palin plan to announce their Presidential candidacy for 2012.




This is their privilege, and is not exactly unexpected. What is inescapable, given the timing, is that their candidacy would benefit from the paranoia already infecting so many Americans about Obama's fictitious Islamic religion. Palin and Beck have so far both been content to let this process work without specific comment on their part. Their silence is a symptom of a cancer infecting American democracy. Our political immune system has only one antibody, and that is the truth.
The time is here for responsible Americans to put up or shut up. I refer specifically to those who have credibility among the guileless and credulous citizens who have been infected with notions so carefully nurtured. We cannot afford to allow the next election to proceed under a cloud of falsehood and delusion.
We know, because they've said so publicly, that George W. Bush, his father and Sen. John McCain do not believe Obama is a Muslim. This is the time -- now, not later -- for them to repeat that belief in a joint statement. Other prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul also certainly do not believe it. They have a responsibility to make that clear by subscribing to the statement. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh must join, or let their silence indict them. Limbaugh in particular must cease his innuendos and say, flat out, whether he believes the President is a Muslim or not. Yes or no. Does he have evidence, or does he have none? Yes or no.
To do anything less at this troubled time in our history would be a crime against America.

Addendum to Requiem for the Liberal Press

Forgive me: the following is lifted completely from Cracked.com because it's relevant as hell and part and parcel of why people seem to dislike President of the United States, Barack Obama.

There was quite a stir recently when it turned out that a growing number of people believe the President of the USA is a Muslim. Regardless of whether or not you intend to vote for the man, this is just an issue of fact, and the fact is that at various times we have all seen video clips of Mr. Obama drinking alcohol, eating pork, getting sworn in on a Christian Bible and sitting in a Christian church.

But according to the Pew Research Center, for almost 20% of the people they polled, those memories have been trumped by the mere act of hearing commentators assert that Obama is a Muslim, over and over and over.

Obama, posing with a statue of the famed Imam Ali bin Superman.

You can laugh at them all you want, but that technique works on all of us, to various degrees. Nobody likes to think of themselves as susceptible to advertisements, or propaganda, or liars. Too bad. It's just part of the mechanical workings of our brain: when we hear a statement enough, we'll start to believe it.
They call it the "Illusion of Truth" effect. We judge things to be true based on how often we hear them. We like familiarity, and repeating a lie often enough makes it familiar to us, the repetition making it fall right in with all of the things our memory tells us are true about the world. Every advertiser or propagandist knows this. Humans are social animals, and there is a primal part of us that still says, "If other members of the tribe who I feel close to believe this, there must be something to it."

"We will never regret any of these decisions."

And no, simply showing us the correct information doesn't fix it. Quite the opposite: research shows that once we've seized on an incorrect piece of information, exposure to the facts either doesn't change what we think, or makes us even more likely to hold onto the false information. You can guess why this is: our self-image triumphs over all. It's more important that we continue to think of ourselves as infallible than admit we're wrong. This is how people continue to believe admitted hoaxes after they have been proven to be fake.

"Who would fake something like that?"

But wait, here's the best part:
Most of you will still think of this as something other people do, and that you of course are the unbiased observer who can clearly see their stupidity. There is a reason for this, too. They call it the Bias Blind Spot. The biases in your system cripple even your ability to examine your own biases. So just now, when you thought to yourself, "Ha, I've caught myself doing that! But at least I'm not as nutty as those 'Obama is a Muslim' nutjobs!", you just saw your own bias at work. You're trying to examine a broken mechanism with a broken mechanism. It's like trying to perform surgery on your own ass, with a scalpel that is itself clenched in your ass.

"So we're out of gloves..."

Less Government, more Fascism!

Do you remember the Good Olde Days? When government kept its fucking mouth shut and let the market do whatever the fuck it wanted to? They're kind of hard to remember now - the only people still alive from that Golden Age are currently hooked up to machines in Elderly Deathcare Centers, dripping their lives away while their great-grandchildren work hard at trying to remember a time when these decrepit carcasses were ambulatory.

That's right - it was a long time ago, but history repeats itself frequently, and bringing back a semblance of the Good Old Days is what our friends in the Libertarian Party are hoping to do. It goes without saying that Government is a collection of lying fuckers whereas the Market is where American Do-Gooders strive to sculpt our Rugged Values into something that we can pass on to our children and our grand-children. Never has anything been more clear: if we could reduce the size of our government and free up the market to find its natural, Gawd-Given Equilibrium, the common man would walk taller, save more money and not need to masturbate so much. Frustration is not a pretty thing: guvmint stands in the way of my happiness. There's the marketplace right over there waiting to make all my freedoms come true if those lazy, elitist sodomites in the guvmint would get the fuck out of the way of progress.

I hear these people all the time - not on the regular Conservative Media: ABC, CNN, the Big Papers - but on the Lunatic Fringe Conservative Media: Fox and the various Talk Show Clever Bastards. Their mantra: if government were to fade into obscurity like chastity belts and ox-plows and quill pens, then the market would bring us into balance. If it's said on Talk Radio, it will soon blather out of the mouths of the Common Man - the same people who shop at Wal-Mart, eat at buffets on Sunday nights, and believe that there's a significant difference between Chevron gasoline (with "Techron") and BP gasoline (without so much Techron, but plenty of baby seabirds). These are the folk who are too busy watching "Jersey Shore" to pay attention to the news and investigate the issues - they listen to Talk Radio and say, "Think for me, Sean Hannity! I'm too busy - tell me what to think!" And it's a service Hannity is happy to provide - all his life he's wanted to control what people think, and how they think, and suddenly we have a society where the Common Man requires his services, his prejudices and his subjective opinions.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk have in common a belief that the Market can do no wrong - indeed, that the Market philosophy as all the answers, whether we're talking about family, education or government. New Gingrich proposed, in 1994, that the Government solve the Big Issues of the day by asking the CEO's of the biggest Multi-National Corporations what they would do. This was the logical conclusion of a reality that had been in the Secret Social Laboratories since the end of WWII: the Bidness Man was the Common Man who stood against the brutal repression and prejudices of the Liberal Elite. Gingrich and the New Wave of Conservative Thinkers posited a "Marketplace Democracy" where the masses were Democracy Consumers who could "invent their own futures" in a way that Old World Europe never could, because "inventions often remained the province of the wealthy and aristocratic".

According to the Libertarian Party - the True Party of the Marketplace - we can solve nearly all our woes by reducing the boogerman of Big Guvmint with all its smartass elites who loathe Freedom; the Marketplace of Democracy will then surge forward and God will smile upon this great nation as He once did.

When did He? Well, if we're following the logic of the Libertarians and the Reduce Satan's Government Philosophers, I guess we can go back to really the only model we have of a relatively unregulated marketplace and a government that kept its nose in its own business, which was making business happier - The Gilded Age, which was anything but Gilded for the vast majority of suffering masses.While there were some beautiful mansions built in Asheville and Newport, Rhode Island for the big shots, the workers and laborers often times were kept as virtual sharecroppers, if not indentured slaves, to the Corporations that employed them. This was the age of Child Labor and Sweat Shops and Strike Breakers. This was a time when Upton Sinclair and various "Muckrakers" exposed Standard Oil, and the obscenity that was the meat markets in The Jungle.

This was an age when: 

The industrialist George Pullman built a model community devoted to constructing his luxurious passenger rail cars south of the city. Pullman provided his workers with churches and cultural facilities, but denied them the opportunity to own their own homes or govern themselves. Pullman also made his town run at a distinct profit. All Pullman workers were obliged to live in the town and pay rents some 25% higher than those in Chicago. 

When the depression of 1893 undermined Pullman's business, he cut workers' pay by up to 25%, but did not reduce their rents. Despite other businessmen's advice, he refused to negotiate with his hard-pressed workers. The Pullman employees went out on strike. 

He also sold city water and gas to his population - at a 10% markup. There was no Big Government to step in and regulate the situation. The workers themselves had no money to move out of the villages because they were purposefully kept impoverished. They had no recourse to the Famous Market philosophy of  Mistreated Workers Will Vote with Their Feet, finding a new job. They couldn't - they were so in debt to Pullman - like the sharecroppers in the the rural South - that their salaries were gone before they were paid, put up against the massive debt they had accrued simply by working for this company.

Plutocrats are NOT democrats (little "d" - not the party but the political philsophy) - they never have been. Gilded Age plutocrats like William Vanderbilt damned the public and saw democracy as a threat to his wealth; John D. Rockefeller claimed "God gave me my money" which meant that guilt was tantamount to sin; mining big shot, George Baer, used these immortal words to address a 1902 coal strike: The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for - not by the labor agitators, but by the Cirstian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.

Inhuman working conditions, child slave labor, starvation and the threat of death and dismemberment within the maw of industrial machines. Those people who benefited - a tiny minority - built massive homes. We call them "Robber Barons" for good reason. Another good name for them is Plutocrats. Everyone else involved became so increasingly marginalized that eventually government had to step in. Laws were drafted after things got so bad, even the President had to step in. Teddy Roosevelt led the fight to reign in Corporate excesses and slave-labor and child-labor and monopolies and the entire panapoly of Grotesquery that resulted from unregulated Big Business. There was so much outcry that something had to be done. An entire network of regulation was created to prevent Big Business from perpetrating these sorts of abuses ever again. In 1929 when the markets crashed, it was because Big Business hadn't been regulated enough.

There are a lot of differences between government and business but perhaps the most obvious one is that business operates under a singular philosophy: make money. It is money driven. We know instinctively that "money is the root of all evil"; we know deep in our bones that the pursuit of money, for money's sake, brings pain and suffering and unhappiness virtually always. We know this - therefore it strikes me as being incredibly - well, insane - to believe that a system that is built on greed and selfishness and cut-throat competition can give us a model for how we're supposed to comport ourselves in everything: education, family, society. 

Thomas Frank puts it this way: "A system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism."

Look: the business model basically works this way - you want to maximize profits while at the same time cutting costs. Businesses may pay lip-service to providing benefits to their employees but that's all it ever is. The sensibility of the Marketplace is, if you don't like your job find another one. Some other smart guy will snap you up because he realizes that benefits will make employees happy and that revelation will push him to the front. People will want to work for him instead of the competitor. That's the dynamics of competition! But not really because there's no place to go and no one has any money in the bank and the competition to get those jobs means that people are forced to put up with a lot of shit, just to hold them. They sacrifice their dignity and their humanity and their hope.

If the market is unregulated.

When the market is unregulated the money flows in one direction - into the coffers of an increasingly exclusive plutocracy. It's happening that way right now. Currently the gap between the uber-wealthy and the poor is larger than it has ever been since the Gilded Age. That's why recent studies have found that there's much less class mobility present in the current US than in Europe. In a land where we're supposed to be able to make our own destiny - which put us as a radically new idea vis-a-vis old corrupt Europe, we're actually less able to do so.

The unregulated market allows a Wal-Mart reality to exist without boundaries - Wal-Mart is scary enough as it is. Massive companies move into small towns and, with their huge coffers, are able to temporarily underprice their competitors and drive them out of business. The bigger the company, the more they are able to crush the opposition. Soon you have four or five huge businesses that control everything - if you need an example, look at the Oil Industry. How many small guy operators are there, undercutting BP and Exxon and providing healthy competition? You only have to look back to about 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused the fear of an oil shortage. The oil industry reacted in a singular way: the four or five major oil companies colluded to raise their prices despite the abundance of real oil reserves, including oil from America's newest economic colony, Iraq. A monopoly can exist when you have a few companies who work in conjunction to artificially set prices and conditions. By the end of 2005 when oil prices were higher for the working man than ever in history, oil companies recorded record profits while simultaneously poor-mouthing through Talk Radio Assholes. 

Big Oil is a perfect example of unregulated industry. Money and power become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Small operators disappear so that eventually, because the market is unregulated, the marketplace and all its supposed values is replaced by a hegemony. Competition disappears.

The unregulated market does not work for you, humble American worker guy. In today's global economy, companies can maximize their profits more easily by exploiting weak labor laws in Third World Countries - China and Pakistan. Your workers are agitating for insurance? Fuck them - save some money and relocate to Pakistan. Or Mexico. Those niggers will be happy for a fucking job paying twelve cents an hour. Increasingly, jobs are going overseas - it makes good business sense. And somehow, we're supposed to benefit from that - the same way we were supposed to benefit from Reaganomics Trickle Down theory: if the rich get richer, they will bestow largesse upon us. Their monies will become our monies. Their wealth and ease and comfort will somehow bless us in some amorphous way. I'm not sure how that will happen but it will because Rush told us so.

A Requiem for the Liberal Media

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." 

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister to Adolph Hitler

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."

Adolph Hitler

Lately my inbox has been troubled by "Fwd"s from several well meaning but misguided older gentlemen who assume that their politics are my politics and that it's meet and good to spread The Word among like-minded folk. What kills me is that these emails come straight and un-homogenized, without even so much as a query regarding what I might actually believe or a disclaimer to disregard said email if it doesn't jibe with my own political beliefs; they are so bloated with their own cocky arrogance that they can't conceive that anyone they regard as mildly intelligent wouldn't love to receive such messages, weekly. Usually I earmark them for the the Junk folder so I don't even have to witness them but sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get fired up.

Early this morning I received one of these Fwds, reproduced in its entirety below: 

We were in slow-moving traffic the other day and the car in front of us had an Obama bumper sticker on it.  It read: "Pray for Obama.  Psalm 109:8".    My husband's Bible was lying on the dash board & he got it & opened it up to the scripture & read it.  He started laughing & laughing.  Then he read it to me.  I couldn't believe what it said.  I had a good laugh, too.    Psalm 109:8 "Let his days be few and brief; and let others step forward to replace him."   At last - I can voice a Biblical prayer for our president!   Look it up - it is word for word!  Let us all bow our heads and pray.



I am not an Obama apologist, though I make no excuses about voting for him. He's the President and a Big Boy and he's on his own now. He doesn't need me to hold his hand. The successes and errors of his Presidency will be diagrammed by Time and History. Like most Presidents, he's sure to have a balance of both. As an observer of all things political in this society - a typical smartass who doesn't mind seeing himself as outside the fray so that I can't be held accountable for anything at all - I am mostly struck by the mediocrity of his Presidency. There have been some good things done for sure - America's Healthcare Industry was a shambles and the scandal of the Western Industrialized World; Wall Street's shenanigans over the past thirty or so years required some stout parenting; the chokehold Credit Card companies had on the American consumer were closer to mafioso usury than anything resembling Fair Market Practice. He got us out of Iraq in a timely manner too, which I salute. There's more I'd like to see him do, but he hasn't done them yet - and he might not at all - and those are the things I quibble with. Be true to your message, etc.

But he's not been a barnstormer of a President in any sense of the word, not like Reagan or George W. He's been - well, mediocre. Nothing more or less. His health care reform - that under No Cirumstances can be called even mildly socialist - didn't go far enough for moderates and liberals. The whole idea that he would throw away his Government Option because of vitriolic outrage from Talk Radio Nazis whipping up populist furor was seen by us as so much a gesture of bipartisanship that it smacked of weakness. But there you go. He's not a Savior, not by any definition.

And just to show you that I'm not a partisan yes-man, I also take issue with the President for the following reasons: I want more than lip-service given to Immigration Reform. I love Latinos but really, this thing has gotten out of hand; I think he should take a stronger stand vis-a-vis the September 11th Islamic Center. I believe utterly in religious freedom and tolerance but I can't help but think that the sponsors of this center are sticking their fingers up to us - and it's not like NYC doesn't have many, many mosques already. Why there?

He's not a savior, no, - but he's not the devil either, and that's where I begin to get pissed off - because we just came through eight years of some of the most dysfunctional, illegal and elitist Presidency in American history and none of these people who are sending me these fucking emails said a word. Why now? Why are you sending me these snickering, carping emails now - with a President who can, at worst, be described as mediocre or ineffective - where were you doing the last Presidency? Did you have nothing to say? Were you happy and satisfied? Were there no prayers that George W. might safely go on his way, or condemnations of, well, anything at all?

I mean, let's recap: beyond running a shamelessly dirty campaign, there are serious questions as to what happened in Florida when they office of Presidency was handed to George W. by none other than the Governor of Florida, George's brother - despite plenty of allegations of voter fraud and trickery. Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral votes because George's brother was in charge of retabulating the Florida ballots.

That's pretty bad right there, folks. How many outraged emails did I receive from Concerned Citizens? Zero.

Four years later, another filthy campaign in which allegations of John Kerry being a coward who lied about his war record are covered as if they were facts, and another curious vote tally - this time in Ohio. For those of you not paying attention, Ohio was infamous for the fact that every single exit poll showed Kerry as clearly ahead of Bush in that state. Then, when the ballots were tallied, lo and behold! Bush wins! What are the odds of every single exit poll being wrong? One in 959,000. According to Republican Strategist Dick Morris:

“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

What happened in Ohio might have been cleared up if Michael Connell, Republican internet strategist in Ohio and - ironically -  the guy who developed the website that hosted the vote tallying for Ohio - didn't mysteriously die in a plane wreck on his way to testify before Congress on this very issue.


Again, number of emails fwded to me on this issue by concerned citizen? Zero. The irate American electorate was curiously silent. Why?


This brings me to my final issue: Where was the Liberal Media when all this was going on? Shouldn't the Liberal Media have been trumpeting these issues left and right, filling our heads with their slanted and biased reporting to create the stampede of fear-mongering they're so justly famous for? They seriously missed the boat on these issues - both of the election irregularities mentioned here were pooh-poohed by the Media, liberal or not, as if they were nothing more than Conspiracy Theories whispered in corridors by mutants who believe in UFO abductions, etc. Really, the Liberal Media was as culpable as the Conservative Talk Show propaganda machine in creating an aura of Let's Just Sweep These Issues Away and Get On With Business.

I mean really, Liberal Media - I'm starting to doubt your existence! Where are you when we need you? God knows that there's a strong Conservative Media - a creature created when Talk Radio exploded in the eighties, after the Reagan Administration deregulated news and stopped requiring news servers to broadcast "both sides of each issue." Now a news server could broadcast only one side of any issue and not stand accused of being criminally biased. Suddenly we had Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter and the grand-daddy of them all, Rush Limbaugh. Everybody knows these guys - they're household names. Where are the virulent, dangerous, one-sided Liberal Fear Mongerers? Surely the multi-billion dollar media machine could whip up some convincing liberal crybaby to counter this alarming trend on the other side?

Again, another failure by the Libs! Why did they allow the Conservative Backlash Movement to take the initiative? Are they not even trying? It boggles the mind! All those billions of dollars they could throw towards their Barely Hidden Scheme to turn America into a Socialist Worker's Paradise are just sitting there, going to waste.

I don't get it. Unless - no, that's too crazy to even consider. Could it be that, despite everything we've been told, there is no Liberal Media?That would be a frightening thought, wouldn't it? Like the Nazis who united their people by creating a Straw Enemy - the Jews - so that they could form a rigid opposition, this theory means that we've been lied to! Maniupulated!

Let's step back now and look at this Liberal Media thing. In theory, if there was a Liberal Media that threw the weight of its power and wealth towards creating a liberal bias in the American electorate, would we not see some of that bias during the first post-Reagan Democratic Presidency? Wouldn't Bill Clinton's Presidency be given a "free ride" with all the power and prestige of the American Media Industry championing his every move?


Go back in time and look at how the Liberal Media handled Bill Clinton: from the very beginning they seemed willing to sacrifice their Liberal Bias by reporting every "scandal" perpetrated by the Clintons as fact without investigation, and without retractions when they were found to be patently false. Remember "Haircut Gate"? The scandal of Clinton tying up an entire international airport so that he could take his ease on Air Force One and get a personalized hair cut? Go back to Lexus Nexus and read how many headlines that one generated in the Liberal Press.


Remember Whitewater? Do you? Well, if you do - can you tell me what it was all about: I mean, before you Google it and try to put together something out of nothing? If you don't, Whitewater was a development scheme that the Clintons invested in and lost plenty of money. It was first printed in that bulwark of Liberalism, The New York Times in 1992 when allegations that ex-Gov of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, put pressure on David Hale to loan hundreds of thousands to the McDougals, business partners of the Clintons in this land-deal. The NYT did not mention the fact that Hale never said anything about Clinton's "pressure" during hours of FBI investigations of this deal previous to Clinton becoming President. Whitewater spun out of control, with the willing collusion of the Liberal Media so that eventually a Commission was set up under Ken Starr to investigate Clinton's involvement in fraud. This Commission lasted the length of Clinton's Presidency and, at untold millions of tax payer's dollar spent, proved conclusively that - nothing happened. Nothing. 


"Nothing Happened" was certainly not the verdict in the Monica Lewinsky scandal where Bill became coy when asked if he had sex with a fat girl in the White House - a scandal on all kinds of levels. I mean, did you ever see her? I know some guys like Chubbies, but really! And in the White House? Bad taste, man! For Godsakes, man! A Grand Jury was convened to find out if this thing happened, presumably because there was a law against it and the reality of it might alter America's place in the hierarchy of nations. At the cost of another fist full of millions, a kind of neutral vote was given and we all schlepped back to business, somewhat ashamed that we were interested in this at all. In fact, if the Liberal Media didn't devote hundreds of square footage of newsprint on this story, no one would have cared. Another Liberal Media failure, dammit!


Which wouldn't have been so bad if the Liberal Media was doing its job and applying the same scrutiny to George W. Bush and taking him to task for this and that. Certainly they started off by giving W. a bye in such matters as non-investigating rumors that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the internet." They gave that man absolute HELL over that issue, didn't they? Fucking Liberals! Can't even back up their own man! Even when he clearly didn't say any such thing. Gawd, they fucking suck! Fail!


What about the whole Swiftboat Veterans for Justice, a group of so-called concerned Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had invented his war record and received medals that were not warranted. The Libs missed their (swift)boat on that one too: following the story closely yet, curiously, without investigating any of it. When the facts came out that the allegations of this group were anything but quantifiable facts, the Libs were silent again! Probably drunk or stoned or some damn thing. Bastards.


Still, you'd think after September 11th that the Liberal Press might have sobered up long enough to look into the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, the cassus belli for the US to declare war on Hussein, with the blessings of the UN, and topple that regime. Clearly, lying about these so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction to Congress and the UN were not on the same level as lying about a blow job from a fat girl in the White House - but still, you'd think that the Liberal Media might get off its ass for this one.


Despite the fact that over four-thousand Americans have died and an estimated 31,000 have been maimed, blinded, crippled and mentally destroyed at a cost of over one trillion dollars - one trillion dollars! all over the felonious misinformation that Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - there has not been any effort to convene a Grand Jury or a Commission or some fucking thing to look into this. If there was ever a Impeachable Offense by any US President in the past fifty years - surely lying about facts to Congress in order to orchestrate an illegal war would be one. If there was a Liberal Media worth its name, this issue would have been looked into with the same Eagle Eye for Details that we saw them focus on Clinton's Blowjob and his Haircut and Whitewater, ad nauseum. Surely this was almost as important.

We'll never know. They let us down. They never touched the issue. Why not?

This is where some smartasses like myself begin to wonder if, in fact, there is a Liberal Media at all?

“Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives' frequent denunciations of ‘liberal bias’ in the media were part of ‘a strategy’ (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: ‘If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is “work the refs.” Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.’” (Seth Ackerman, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, August 2001).

Bill Kristoll, arch-Neo Conservative editor goes Bond one better: ‘I admit it,’ Kristol told The New Yorker in 1995. ‘The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’”

Bill's a liberal when compared to ex-Nixon speechwriter and one time All The Way to the Right Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, who is quoted as saying, “‘The truth is, I've gotten fairer, more comprehensive coverage of my ideas than I ever imagined I would receive,’ [Patrick] Buchanan acknowledged in March 1996. He added: ‘I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage -- all we could have asked.’”


What the fuck? The Liberal Media gave him Fair and Balanced press coverage?


In fact, the Myth of the Liberal Media is one of the grossest lies ever perpetrated on the American Electorate. According to Eric Alterman, in The Nation: 

"Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match--either in size, ferocity or commitment--for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda. 


"In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

In point of fact, there is no such thing as the Liberal Media and there never has been. In fact, in a study of 
ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.”(Who's On the News?: Study shows network news sources skew white, male & elite, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 2002).


Those media scamps aren't liberal at all! They're Republicans! And it shows, too:

Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim, David Croteau, Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, (archived at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), June 1998:
“The findings include:
“ ·  On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to health care and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.
“ ·  Journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation.
“ ·  The minority of journalists who do not identify with the ‘center’ are more likely to identify with the ‘right’ when it comes to economic issues and to identify with the ‘left’ when it comes to social issues.”

This is frightening stuff, because we're told over and over again that the Media is Liberal and that charge gives moral integrity to the very existence of a Conservative Backlash in the Press. If the Media wasn't liberal then Rush wouldn't be Right and Bill O'Reilley wouldn't need his No-Spin Zone to counteract it. If the Media wasn't Liberal, these guys would not need to exist.

Price of the 'Liberal Media' Myth, Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, January 1, 2003
“[T]he larger fallacy of the ‘liberal media’ argument is the idea that reporters and mid-level editors set the editorial agenda at their news organizations. In reality, most journalists have about as much say over what is presented by newspapers and TV news programs as factory workers and foremen have over what a factory manufactures...

“News organizations are hierarchical institutions often run by strong-willed men who insist that their editorial vision be dominant within their news companies. Some concessions are made to the broader professional standards of journalism, such as the principles of objectivity and fairness.

“But media owners historically have enforced their political views and other preferences by installing senior editors whose careers depend on delivering a news product that fits with the owner’s prejudices. Mid-level editors and reporters who stray too far from the prescribed path can expect to be demoted or fired. Editorial employees intuitively understand the career risks of going beyond the boundaries.

“These limitations were true a century ago when William Randolph Hearst famously studied every day’s paper from his publishing empire looking for signs of leftist attitudes among his staff. And it is still true in the days of Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.”

And more:

Big media pushes news to the far right, San Francisco Examiner, undated:
“The biggest lie fed the American people by conservative pundits is that the United States is dominated by the ‘liberal media.’ As if Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, General Electric, Time-Warner AOL and Viacom are owned and operated by liberals. 


“Not only are these folks ultra-conservatives, but the people they hire to voice their opinions are so far to the right, they give independent journalism a dirty name. No, my friends, the corporate media is in the hands of right-wing kooks parading as moderates and pushing the political envelope further and further to the right.”
 And that's the whole point, right there: they're pushing the political envelop further and further to the right. The entire reason for the existence of the Conservative Backlash Media, after all, was the perceived bias of the Liberal Media which desperately needed to be counter-balanced. But go back and look at those quotes that begin this overly long essay - create a lie, make it big but simple, and create your own reality.

The masses will follow . . .