Charlie Hits The Nail On The Head

As usual, Charles P Pierce cuts through the crap and gets right to it: 

...The money power does not need the political entity that is the United States of America except as an organizing infrastructure through which private profits can be insured and increased. The money power does not need its fellow citizens as anything but disposable commodities, and anonymous, interchangeable units, in the mechanism that produces those profits. That is the political and social reality against which The Wisconsin Idea was raised up to combat. It depended vitally on the intellectual ferment of the state's universities, and the products of that ferment as applied in pursuit of a better life for all the state's citizens. The forces for which Scott Walker is only the most recently popular front man are threatened by education, and by knowledge, so they use all the power they have to frighten people about new ways of looking at things, about fresh knowledge, about the process of education itself. They force a kind of mental surrender of the rights of the people to create and sustain a self-governing political commonwealth by convincing those people that anything done together, through the mechanisms of self-government, is a threat to personal, private liberties. You can see it in what Walker's trying to do to the University of Wisconsin, and you can see it to a smaller degree in the way that potential Republican presidential candidates have bamfoozled themselves on the subject of childhood vaccinations. We conquered polio, and smallpox, and measles because we all worked together, and when intelligent people offered us a cure, we made a national movement out of the effort to eradicate these diseases. The government and the universities and the people they produced showed the way, and the country made that cause its own, and we by god eradicated these diseases. We didn't do this as a mindless and fearful herd. We did this because we educated ourselves on what the experts told us was the best way to prevent these diseases. and then we acted on the knowledge that we had gained for ourselves. 

Now, though, a substantial portion of the population has been taught that the worst people in the world to trust are the people who know the most about anything. They have nothing to say to us. We have our good old common sense which, I have learned, grows less sensible as it grows more common. This has been a lesson devised by people whose power is threatened by the act of creating a political commonwealth in which their power needs must be scrutinized and, if necessary, limited. That is the game Scott Walker is playing. It is far from a new one, and it still can be lost.

In the simplest of terms: people calling the shots for today's Republican party have -- so easily it's beyond belief -- convinced about half the population to ignore what they're really about; have convinced about half the population to distrust expertise, to reject knowledge, to ignore our most significant problems. And they've done so for purely selfish reasons, understanding that there's a limitless pool of gullible, frightened, people from which to draw their votes. People so anxious for easy answers, so willing to find someone to blame other than themselves, so anxious to rationalize their own selfishness and prejudices, that they'll ignore their best interests, ignore the implications for their kids, and vote for those who tell them what they need to hear.

Okay, maybe that wasn't the simplest of terms. But it's simply true.

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