You Can't Get There From Here

Reading liberal blogs, it's pretty clear that Social Security is as sacrosanct there as defense spending is to the right wingers. These are the two issues that will define the debate over fiscal responsibility, party faith, and willingness to do what democracy demands; namely, compromise. These are, in other words, the reefs on which we will finally and fatally run aground.

Of the many reasons I'm still glad Barack Obama is president, his pragmatism and lack (RWS™ lies and teabagger credulity notwithstanding) of doctrinaire partisanship are at the top of the list. Because if we're ever to get our financial affairs in order, we'll need leaders willing to take the hard stands and to advocate for what will work. It's what Obama does. Unfortunately, it's anathema to the extremes of both parties. To the left, he does it too much; to the right, all evidence to the contrary, he doesn't do it at all. (I think it's what's called projection.)

Robert Gates, to his credit (and credit to Obama for keeping him), is willing to buck his party mantras and the brass and advocate for defense cuts (albeit, so far, not huge ones). Obama, I'm sure, would be willing to piss off his base (he's done it many times) and accept some kind of cuts to Social Security. The question is whether there are enough people in Congress to take the hard stands to get it done. The answer, I'm all but certain, is "Yer outta yer friggin' mind."

Do we really still need bases in Germany? In Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Netherlands, UK, Italy? How about virtually all fifty states? If we do need them, is the necessary number twenty or more in Japan, Germany, and California? How many Navy ships, how many missiles, how much spent on unproven Reagan-era Star Wars? These are not fatuous questions.

Likewise, do Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Frank Drackman need Social Security and Medicare? Given the increase in life expectancy since Social Security was enacted, is it completely off the table that retirement age be increased? Or, at least, that benefits be indexed to means? That the lid on withholding be lifted? Similar questions, of course, must be asked about Medicare.

At the fringes I see no more willingness to compromise in liberals (who, I generally believe, are more reality-based than conservatives, the representatives of whom, during the unlamented Bush years, famously claimed "we make our own reality"), and it's simply not tenable. On either side. It's why I'm also glad Alan Simpson, crazy ideologue that he is, is on the deficit reduction commission. If they come up with recommendations that both he and Erskine Bowles and the rest of them can sign off on, it will mean compromise has been accomplished and that both sides came toward the middle. The perfect contract, I've heard it said, is one in which both parties think they got screwed.

As impossible as that might be, the concept of Congress accepting the commission's recommendations is nearly unthinkable. The screamers of both sides will demagogue it to its death. (Which is not to ignore which party has been willing to do the compromising so far, and from what side are coming the vilest screams.) The deficit hawkishness of the current campaigns will disappear like teabags in a dumpster. Or cats.

On some level, it'll be interesting, especially to the adequately medicated. We are witnessing -- unless the tenor of the times reverses faster than physics allow -- the collapse of the myth of democracy, of the sort of politics that rose above the shallow mongering of stupid memes (vacation time, mosques, birth certificates, death panels, communist liberal America-haters) to do what was necessary. It's easier to believe lies and to fall back on the comfortable cushion of hate than to face problems squarely on the merits, pitch in, dispense with scapegoatism and pettiness. Fox "news" and the RWS™ figured that out a long time ago, and are getting very, very rich on it.

The voodoo deceptions of no tax, no regulations were easy to swallow when the inevitable was far enough off that the consequences could be ignored. But the attendant selfish ignorance has become enshrined and hawked effectively enough by the RWS™ and Fox "news" to have uprooted the ideas of shared sacrifice and common ground on which democracy depends.

Zero sum has become zero chance.

[Update, 9/2: yup.]

Down Is Up

If it didn't begin with Newt Gingrich, he certainly got the stone rolling down hill with his memo. Truth is irrelevant; in fact, it's best avoided. Make stuff up. Such is the central theme, the governing (as it weren't) principle of Republican leaders, and of those tasked with spreading their messages. And, oh, how well it works.

More than anything else, this is what bothers me so deeply about our political present, and future: that the opposition has resorted to overt lying in order to regain power. Redoubled, reiterated, reinforced by a dominant media network, their message takes hold disturbingly easily and thoroughly. And so it is that speeches like this get cheers -- not to mention other pretty ugly responses.

See, it's not as if there's nothing to criticize about President Obama, or about legislation that's come down the pike. But, long ago, Republicans realized that defending their central tenets of deregulation, tax cuts, and theocracy has gotten harder and harder as reality has shown the dangers and/or unworkability of each. Arguing their case on the merits has become all but impossible; it's a lot easier to distort ideas put forth by Democrats than it is to come up with their own new and useful ones. But if it became obvious that their core beliefs were anything but brilliant, their response to that realization most certainly was.

Brilliant.

Concluding they could no longer argue the rightness of their Ronaldian failures, they made that swift-slick and sly-sick calculation: we can still win elections without the work of producing ideas if we're willing to rewrite the past and lie about the present; the American voter is nothing if not malleable, gullible, and willingly ill-informed, they figured, and, boy, have they been right. Of what have they convinced their followers, whom they hold in such low esteem? Socialism! Soft on terror! Apology tours! Government takeover! Coming after your guns! Coming after your children! Giveaway to the banks! How else to explain the Republican filibuster of Wall Street reform, than that they figure they can lie about it with impunity; that they can keep bedding with bankers, and no one will care; that they can call their shit shinola and their RWS™ will fan it from the flatscreens, and the teabaggers will nod their heads, raise their fists, mad as hell without two facts to rub together in their low-taxed, gun-totin', misunderstood-Constitution-carrying hands.

As pathetic as Congressional Republican leaders are, as devoid of ethics as the RWS™ and their "news" channel may be, I'm not certain they're stupid enough to believe that stuff themselves. Which makes it worse. Following that Newtonian lead, they've overboarded all pretense and moved on without shame, leaving conscience behind, counting on the baseness of their base and the credulity of the rest. They have yet to be disappointed.

I know I repeat myself. I wish I could let it go. And, most assuredly, I continue to believe George Bush is the worst president of my lifetime and well beyond, with Ronald Reagan close at his neck. But at least I have facts on which to base my arguments. I don't make stuff up, I don't use words chosen for me by others. I point to actual events, positions, results. How few there are on the right that do the same, as relates to their commentary about Barack Hussein Obama.

Which is worse? The cynicism of the right wing leaders and their mouthpieceri, or the fact that they've found such fertile soil in which to dig? Either way, it bespeaks the coming of the end.

If I believed we could survive it, I'd say what the hell. Take that former half-term governor of a socialist state and stick her in the White House. Give John Boner the Speakership, McConnell the leadership, and let's do it all again: let's further widen the gap between rich and poor, let's Christianize our war plans once again, further theocratize our schools, let's cut taxes even more, privatize social security, unfetter all businesses from any regulation, let's drill everywhere, abandon CAFE standards, let's find another country to invade. Let's lift our middle fingers once again to the rest of the world, round up a few more American citizens and deny them counsel, let's repeal health care legislation, take away all equality for gays, and, while we're at it let's forget about stem cell research, let's outlaw Islam, jail brown people now and ask questions later.

But the thing is, as the passage of less than a sequiyear's time has shown, people have no political memory. Such destruction as would be wreaked, such proof, once again, of the fraud that is the tax-cut-deregulation-heterowhitesonly sum of all parts of the current Republican party, would no more bring the country to its senses than has, mere months later, the meltdown brought on by Bush, riding the coattails of Reagan, and the rhetoric born of Gingrich/Rove/Delay/Armey.

Newt may not have been the first to stumble upon the power of dishonesty. Sarah may not be the first to parlay it so recklessly. But their timing has been perfect. And not even Newt could have known that a mere few years after he opened his mouth, there'd be tea people only too happy to dip their bags right in.

Thumbs Up

This "tweet" (and, no, I'm not into twitter [although I do have an account]) may be all that needs to be said about US politics at this moment in time:

Roger Ebert twitter last week:

"Q. How come Bush got people to believe lies but Obama can't get them to believe truth?"

"A. Those are the same people."

Lessons Learned

I learned a lot in 2009, none of it good. Not being a naive innocent, maybe I should say I had some beliefs confirmed, but to an unexpected level. I've known for a few years that, as a country, we're screwed. Still, I didn't think the end would be coming this fast.

What's funny, in the sense of non-funny, is the extent to which so many people are so easily manipulated, and the extent to which they are simply unable to see it. How ironic it is that those people who claim the current administration is like Soviet Russia, or Nazis, have been convinced of that by the fusing of a political agenda and a network propaganda machine exactly like those created and maintained by those authoritarian and failed entities.

The truth is that on average we are a stupid people, weak-willed and uncomfortable with complexity. The reason Fox has the influence it does is that it appeals to the sense of victimhood and lost entitlement that's increasingly the political mainstream. Roger Ailes' brilliance in unabashedly pushing a hyper-partisan agenda is his realization of how simple it would be. Constantly barraging listeners with repetitive falsehoods, conspiracy theories, reinforced endlessly in every time-slot by ethically empty so-called journalists, his network is the embodiment of theory of the "big lie." And the process is made even easier by targeting the very religious, with their need for certainty and their long-standing cultivation into the art of denying reality, the willful rejection of the obvious. Religiosity and political manipulation: they go together like hand and glove, peanut butter and blackberry jam, unprotected sex and STDs.

Who'd, for example, have thought that the destruction of Haiti could be so politicized? It's amazing enough that science has become partisan, with denialism as the central core of an entire political party. But charity, for Christ's sake? To what level of cynicism have our politics sunk that President Obama's actions to help a ravaged nation are mocked, decried, and demagogued shamelessly? That people are being asked NOT to help, and it's being hyped by the right wing, the party of Jesus? (I'll admit that in this, even Rush's rants seem not to have deterred giving to a noticeable extent. Possibly because, as usual, atheists are pitching in.)

How can it be that Massachusetts may well elect to the Senate a guy who, exactly like George Bush, advocates massive tax cuts, after denouncing the budget deficits, and without saying a single word about where he'd cut the spending needed to make up the difference? (And who, most Foxoteabaggingly, suggests our president's mother wasn't married.) Implicitly making the disproved argument that cutting taxes increases revenue, he also claims that the health care bills represent "government takeover," and promises to stop it. Government takeover? Relying entirely on the private insurers to an extent their stock has shot upward? Government takeover? Really? Yet there he is, the darling of an entire movement: completely divested of fact. Not to mention decency.

All of this is against the backdrop of the most misguided populism imaginable, cynically manipulated by corporate interests. Dick Armey, of "Freedomworks" must be in a state of constant tumescence over the ease with which he's pulled it off (as it were). As I've said many times, there's much to criticize about the Obama administration so far: most especially that stimulus monies seem to have been misdirected to a large extent. Not unneeded: inadequately dispersed. Nor do I agree with the buildup in Afghanistan; I'm concerned about Tim Geithner, about the lameness of some White House responses to the constant and dishonest attacks from Fox and the rest of the RWS™. But these worries have a basis in fact. Rather than lies and obstructionism, I wish the opposition would pitch in and provide sensible suggestions, work together even a little. Democracy depends on it. It might even do their party good!

Unlike the things I criticize, wild statements on the placards so proudly waved by the teabaggers are based on unquestioned belief in the steady stream of propaganda to which they're constantly and uncritically subjected. The supreme irony is that they are the very people who ought to be -- claim to be -- scared sh*tless by political agitprop and media control. And yet they eat it like cookie dough.

To them, disagreement is pure evil. I wonder what they think about the founding process of the country they claim to love, and understand not a bit. Compromise. Respect for opposing opinions. Doing the hard work of finding common ground. Contra the Nazi-baiter, it's they that have been dumbed down, not liberals.

Today, for the second time in a few months, someone forwarded me a breathless email. Strewn with full caps and varying colors like holiday fireworks, it claims Obama has demanded a stamp be produced to honor a Muslim holiday. "If you only forward one email.... patriotic Americans.... reject... stand up.... " The usual crap. (The wild-eyed commentary is based on the fact that every year for around ten years such a stamp has been issued, much like those commemorating Christmas, Hanukkah, and Walt Disney characters. Of absolutely NO significance, but seen by the crazed hordes as proof of Obama's treason.) Into the streets they march; into the Congress they send like-minded (in the loosest use of the word "mind") representatives, intent on destruction. It's working.

In a perverse way, I hope I live long enough to see it, because I'm absolutely certain I'm right. And I'd like to know if at any point along the decline those blind and dumb right wingers and teapartiers will realize what they've done, even though I already know the answer.

[PS: speaking of lessons, here's a good one.]

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