(10AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)
Booman “squats and leaves it:”
It’s the pwoggies, the friggin’ pwoggies! who are ruining the
Democrats’Pathocrats’ chances in November, by trying to subvert and de-motivate the base.
He’s terrified of the hardcore psychopaths come November. And he should be.
That list is hardly comprehensive, but it does spell trouble for the Democrats pseudo-psychopaths.
Ian Welsh explains the term “pseudo-psychopath:”
First, Democrats didn’t make an all out effort to torpedo either Roberts, or more reasonably, Alito. With both on the Supreme Court, decisions like Citizens United were inevitable.
Second, when given a historic opportunity to break the power of the rich and corporations by not bailing them out, Democrats bailed them out. They did not make shareholders get wiped out (as they deserved, they took the profits from housing bubble fraud, after all) and they did not let the bondholders take their losses. Be very clear, this was never about saving the economy, the trillions of dollars used to bail out these corporations could have been loaned directly to consumers and businesses which needed loans. In fact, at this point, it is entirely likely that bailouts made things worse, not better.
Third, Democrats did not push hard for the Employee Free Choice Act, an act which would have made union organizing much easier. Union members vote for Democrats at much higher rates than non Union members (in particular, white male union members are pro-Democrat while as a group white males who aren’t union members vote Republican). Unions not only provide financial resources for Democrats, they put feet on the ground for Democrats. Where unions are strong, Democrats tend to win. Where unions aren’t strong, Democrats tend to lose.
Fourth, Democrats abandoned their constituencies economically in order to bail out the financial sector. They seem to have thought the financial sector would be loyal. Of course, it isn’t, it will give money to whoever it thinks can win and from whom it’ll get the best deal. Meanwhile unmarried women, Hispanics, African Americans and Youth, all core Demoratic groups, have high unemployment rates. That means they are not motivated to vote or volunteer, they cannot give as much money as they could if they were doing well. The money spent on bailing out banks and the rich, could have been used for a proper stimulus and proper loans which would have helped these groups.
Fifth, Democrats let ACORN be destroyed. ACORN was framed, but Democrats threw it under the bus. ACORN was a community organization which did huge voter drives which registered voters who were overwhelmingly likely to vote Democratic. Again, a key liberal organization was simply abandoned.Democrats made a play for corporate money and in so doing, they sold out constituencies which were actually loyal to them, and could actually be counted on. Wall Street will never be reliably loyal to Democrats, neither will the very rich. At best they will play Democrats and Republicans off against each other, but realistically, they prefer Republicans whenever Republicans can win.
You reap what you sow. Sell out the interests of your core supporters, and they can’t help you as much as they could if you helped them. When will Democratic politicians learn this lesson?
Democrats should have much stronger allies in 2010. But they preferred to play footsie with Wall Street and abandon their own constituencies.
Democrats assured that psychopathic behavior emitted by single-minded corporations entered an uninhibited, socio-pathogenic, positive feedback loop utterly destructive to the social contract.
Lambert is amused that nobody could have predicted that psychopaths might victimize their collaborators:
I hate to read, let alone quote, Politico, but this is just a gem:
RAHM EMANUEL told POLITICO’s Ben White yesterday that rather than recoiling against Obama, business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a half dozen counts: his advocacy of greater international trade and education reform open markets despite union skepticism; his rejection of calls from some quarters to nationalize banks during the financial meltdown; the rescue of the automobile industry; the fact that the overhaul of health care preserved the private delivery system; the fact that billions in the stimulus package benefited business with lucrative new contracts, and that financial regulation reform will take away the uncertainty that existed with a broken, pre-crash regulatory apparatus. But, in the White House view, some business leaders listen only to Obama speeches…
Ha ha. Only a fool would take an Obama speech seriously! Hey, rubes!
… being tough on BP or on the excesses of Wall Street and assume Obama is hostile to business across the board. “Rather than respond to atmospherics, they should look at policies where we have been supportive,” Emanuel said.”
Yes, indeedy.
Thus, the Supreme Weasel will become a half-term president. Blame it on the pwoggies. The psychopath and pseudo-psychopath always blame their victims.
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He gives them everything they wanted, everything, everything!
Now people are mad at all kinds of things namely fantasies and invisible entities and they will blame Obama, the fall guy, for all the problems–it was the socialists who messed us up! So they will elect some joker on the right who will do exactly the same things as Obama only with an deliberately obnoxious swagger that will scare the “progressives” (not really progressives, just pretend) into “coming together” with another center-right candidate who will do exactly the same thing as the Republicans but be called a socialist by all and sundry and the cycle will go on each side blaming the other and politics will continue to be a professional wrestling match with finger pointing and chest thumping and silly, stupid dramas that appeal only to the lowest of the lowest and so on and so on and so on.
Had enough? Come on, let’s get real and come to terms with what actually works. It’s called force. Let’s study politics as it is not as some contest of sermons which is the entire sum total of what progressives think politics is. And despite everything I notice little change or interest in power on the part of progressives.
I think I will simply turn back to art and the contemplative life–politics in this country is absurd and pathetic beyond belief and the blame for that is on the left, not the right.
Author
This does not mean I won’t be interested in what folks, including banger, for whom I have great respect, have to say.
I very much doubt he is truly “hanging it up.”
No. That view is rejected (by me), on the basis of personal disbelief.
experiences and interpretations of events, which ultimately form a dominant cultural belief system, have always been molded by powerful entities which aim to control behaviour. It is an omnipresentneverendingreinforcing wave of cultural chatter.
People here, at least, can tune it out quite easily, but cannot, of course, do much to change it. It forms the consciousness or belief system that enables propaganda, a very elemental force which has made we earthlings fearful slaves to our own delusions. That is history. Politics are just wars of distortion, and probably will remain so as long as resource control remains in the hands of the few.