August 2009 archive

A less florid version of yesterdays column!

Let’s start with 2010. There is about 14 months before the next election in 2010, historically the Party in the WH loses seats in the midterm. But unless Town Hall Hooliganism, Tea Parties and Birthers somehow sway the election, that doesn’t look like it will happen this time.

We can’t predict the future of course, but the Dems actually have a chance to gain a couple of seats in that troublesome Senate. if that happens, people like Lieberman, Landreiu and Ben Nelson will become, we hope, slightly more irrelevant. Right now, they and Repubs like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine hold an immense amount of power as the swing votes in the Senate.

Gaining even two more seats will change the landscape immensely, most likely taking ANY Repubs out of the realpolitik equation and bringing the situation we face now into even starker relief. The power stucture then will be, starkly: ConservaDems vs Dems.

That is bad, but it will accomplish, or at least help accomplish, the real victory. Breaking the ability of The Republicans to frame the debate(s). Or to put it more bluntly, decreasing the power of Republican delusion. And delusion, as is becoming apparent even to the dullards in the Village and the Merde Stream Media, is all they have.

Delusions on HCR, delusions on Foreign Policy, delusions on how an economy works, delusions of the proper place of those of differing race, creed, and orientation. Delusions of who America “belongs” to.

And if…IF, we can accomplish that AND expose the Culture of Corruption that IS the Republican Party to further justifiably discredit them, and by discreditting them, we can remove or severely diminish their influence not just on politics, but on how America THINKS.

Exposing the torture, the politicization of the Justice Department, the selling of political influence most blatantly illustrated by Jack Abramoff, and finally, their willingness to send Americans to die in Iraq based only on their lies….

SHOULD reduce the Republican Party to an irrelevant shell.

Then we will have only the ConservaDems as real political opposition, as a roadblock to meaningful change. And as much as we all despise them, one thing must be said: They are just not AS crazy and delusional as the Republicans.

They simply cannot get away with totally distorting reality, as the Republicans have been able to

Add in a big enough (but still not 100, dammit!) majority in the Senate….pressure can be brought to bear on the ConservaDems. Whetehr Fightin Harry Reid (gag, cough) WILL do so or not remains to be seen.

Then we can not only end the political standoff we are currently “enjoying” due to the shoddy and cowardly Dem leadership, but start to systematically dismantle the delusional Repub worldview that has infected our country and made it into a battleground of expertly crafted and presented outright lies vs INCREDIBLY poorly presented truths.

It is of course possible that some miracle will revive the Republicans.

It is of course possible that the Dems will blow it badly enough (again) to do that job for them.

But it really would take something akin to a miracle.

Once Health Care is done in a month or two…or three… it will once again be time to take up the call for aggressive investigations. By then much of the current energy of the Delusional Death Panel Republicans will have blown their wad. They will either be tired, or, lol, even MORE delusional. The 2010 campaigns will have swung into gear and the candidates will be slinging more ‘Hope’ful and ‘Change’-y rhetoric about. Rhetoric we can use to pin them down on Progressive positions and on cleaning up the Culture of Corruption.

We are right now, to put it bluntly, in limbo. An unnecesary limbo caused by Democratic caution. But if the voters don’t reject that unnecessary caution, and if the Dems can do even a halfway decent job of messaging….which would be a VAST improvement…we could actually begin to break the Republican delusions that have held the Great Middle in its thrall for generations.

That moves the Overton Window to the Left. It makes it not only possible, but almost certain, that Progressive solutions, ideas, policies , and FRAMING will gain credence, popularity and eventually be enacted by the Establishment dems.

Who will of course, after rejecting them and reviling them for decades, lol…then take credit for their effectiveness.

This essay was originally published on Wed Jan 02, 2008 on La Naranja Grande. I have tweaked it somewhat to better represent my current views on the matter.

As a person who has spent a certain amount of time in the belly of the military/industrial complex beast, I figure my observations on the matter are at least as good as anyone else’s.

While there are unquestioned parallels between what’s happening now and the takeover of Nazi Germany, some of the people who object to those comparisons will retort that it’s impossible that their behavior emulates the Nazis, as they are Jewish, black, or whatever. Likewise, some mainstream media corporations will state that comparisons to the Nazis are laughable because they have “an extremely diverse readership/employee base/non-discriminatory policy”, blah blah yadda blah.

The need to hide their agenda, combined with the need to build a powerful support base in an extremely racially diverse nation has required the neofascist movement to approach the construction of their “New American Century” with more strategy and stealth than their predecessors.

The blatant lie that the current version of capitalism is a meritocracy is how the neofascists have managed to (thus far) successfully hide their agenda from the bulk of the American public.