Having fallen into an easy hatefulness
The country mourns its loss
Of memory
Of service
Of civility
A November noon in Dallas
An April rain in Memphis
An April bomb in Oklahoma City
A slaughtered school in Colorado
A September morn in Manhattan
A shattered morn in Tucson
Shudders the nation
We are shaken
Lessons learned and forgotten
The scars from each grow callous
We are hardened...
Inured against the touch
Of the better angels of our nature
Searching for an accusation
Longing for explanation
Yearning for a way
We are America
When we find
What is best in each other.
I don't know if you noticed, but it seems that the Republicans had a fair bit of success in the midterm elections. So much so, that even losing Republican/Tea Party candidates seem to be under the impression they won. No, really. I am not making this up.
But have no fear, the US Chamber of Commerce is not gathering any moss, and has already given instruction to all of the candidates they bought regarding the proper post-election narrative:
"The American people have spoken and the clear message is that they all hate Barack Obama as much as we do."
For some reason I can't really explain, this immediately caused me to recall an early Emily Litella rant performed by the late Gilda Radner. It went:
"What is all this fuss I hear about the Supreme Court decision on a "deaf" penalty? It's terrible! Deaf people have enough problems as it is!"
Like dear Emily, the Republicans seem to be hearing things a little differently than the way normal people do. In fact, it seems to me that they are deaf, dumb, and blind.
Deaf.
If I understand them correctly, they were suggesting the messages they "heard" from the election results were:
1. The single most immediate concern on voters' minds was that Obama not be re-elected president in 2012.
2. The second was that the majority of voters are obsessively concerned that the richest 2% of people in the country receive an extension of the Bush tax cuts on their taxable income over $250,000.
3. The American people would prefer the Republicans tie up the legislative process with persistent bad faith attempts to "repeal" the health care reform legislation so that the Congress cannot pass any other legislation which might help improve the economy. (Which could make Obama look "good".)
4. The electorate would like us to pretend that we're mad as hell about this insane deficit our economic policies have produced, but, since they let us get away with it, we're going to keep pushing the same policies because it makes our rich friends happy and they spend obscene amounts of (anonymous) money to get us re-elected.
(BTW, have you heard Obama is a Kenyan, anti-colonial, Muslim, communist, Antichrist, racist who hates America and is spending $200 Million dollars a day of our tax money so he can take a vacation in India and draw away crucial military assets protecting our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan just so he can show off?)
Because that's pretty much their platform. I'm a good listener, and that's what they're saying.
Dumb.
I did not mean dumb in the sense of "mute". I meant in the sense of "fucking retarded".
As anyone can plainly see, completely unregulated free market capitalism WORKS! With a vengeance. To me, it's pretty much indisputable, both theoretically and empirically. But strictly as an economic system.
It's pretty much a Katrina in terms of a socioeconomic system. It inevitably produces unsustainably high unemployment, a disastrous transfer of wealth to the egregiously wealthy from everyone else, and trade imbalances and a national debt that are both clearly insupportable.
It smothers all meaningful commercial innovation - other than the invention of new exotic financial instruments with which to financially defraud the American public and loot the US Treasury.
Well, to be fair, I've heard we do now have a pill that can alledgedly give some middle-aged guys a four hour hard-on. (Personally, I believe that "warning" is nothing but a clever marketing ploy.) Plus, we've got about 10,000 different handheld devices with which we can simulate social interaction and otherwise distract ourselves from the messy business of living.
But I think we could do better with policies that actually promoted productive business rather than the continual accumulation and concentration of capital by a relatively small cabal of plutocrats.
Blind.
In many ways, those promoting these failed economic policies actually seem blind to the effects they produce. I believe they are fundamentally blinded by ideology. They seem to have a nearly religious reverence for the neoliberal economic policies inflicted on the world by Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, et al., and their acolytes.
These policies have failed. It's as plain as the state of the economy.
Yet, many of these ideologues seem to believe the US Constitution enshrines the completely unrestrained "free market" principles espoused by the Chicago School.
It does not. I checked.
Many of the politicians, of course, are blinded by their own personal greed and lust for power. They are riding a rising spiral of excess, supporting policy that favors their wealthy supporters, who in turn extravagantly fund their campaigns, maintain the revolving corporate-government job placement service, and fund PACs to spread strident messages about "culture issues" the politicians have NO intention of addressing.
Because this blinds the base they depend on for the electoral mass necessary to keep the game going. They play these people by cravenly and cynically exploiting their deeply-ingrained values, biases, and fears. They incent the "values voters" to vote against their own economic self-interest by offering them the false hope that each of their individual core "values" issues will be addressed. They will not.
While it may strike you as extreme, I think this approach to politics has earned itself a lethal injection. The deaf penalty.
