Peace and Justice over Fascism

Happy Thanksgiving:

Voters Are Pot of Incoherent, Resentful Ignoramuses

A series of pieces out offer some facts of the American political culture.

The Marquette University Law School, Democratic Strategist, ProPublica and The New York Times’ Sunday Review, 538.com and Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior all confirm what is clear: America is a depoliticized state where policy and socio-political knowledge and sentiment are mostly confined to racism, social resentments, fear and a vague idea that a few special interests are looking out for themselves.

Low turn-out, midterm elections show the results.

Republican Party efforts to obstruct voting and gerrymander state and Congressional districts show why shifting demographics minimizing the electoral power of white, rural, Evangelical voters are imperative to Republican Party success, even post-Citizens United.

The large swath of voters who have given up on electoral politics need reasons (spelled out and repeated) and a dynamic candidate to drag them out to vote next November 2106.

First things first, get past the Republican gauntlet obstructing voting.

"Anybody who suppresses the vote, who intentionally tries to keep people from voting, is a political coward. They are undermining democracy," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont).

Republicans are political cowards, but indecency and undermining democracy are no deterrent to what Republicans do. They are after power and their base is fascistic.

These are facts you won't read in the above analyses and corporate political reporting: Republicans do not believe in Democracy.

Twenty Months into the Republican Recession

Update: President Obama: Halted free fall of economy, time to clean up and rebuild. The critical question is: Will we allow the GOP to stop Obama from reclaiming our country from the Republican catastrophe?

The thesis that the GOP rained ruin on the world is so overwhelmingly supported by the evidence that it is perverse to withhold our assent, to borrow from the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. Next thing you know Obama will start telling us biological evolution actually occurred.

So we are now 20 months into the worst recession since the Great Depression.

But after eight years of the Bush administration that inherited the prospect of zero national debt and huge surpluses (can you imagine debating the prospect of zero national debt now), rising unemployment, a virtual hollowing out of our economy, a betrayal of our veterans, we are now six months into the Obama administration and everything is their fault, according to the GOP know-nothings

In December 2000, the Clinton administration announced projections that “the United States is on course to eliminate its public debt within the next decade.” But the national and state deficits across the nation and the unemployment in the states, that's the Democratic governors' fault, and the national debt Obama as mentioned did that too.

Here in Wisconsin, the GOP is back to its old playbook of stirring up white resentment on the economy and placing the blame for the last eight years of national economic catastrophe on one Wisconsin governor and Obama and minority constituencies, and anyone who is not making six figures and is not white.

Fortunately, as Dan Balz reportes in his recent For Republicans, the Forces Aren't With Them, and the future looks bright for a political message based on unity, civil rights and inclusion, geared especially to younger voters who are diverse demographically, less religious, culturally liberal, and less susceptible to GOP racist appeals. The screw-you economics of the GOP just won't play.

As the Democratic Strategist reminds us: "[I]f you're into polls, it pays to keep an eye on everyone's approval ratings, and on actual electoral matchups ... ." The GOP brand is shot and its heroes, Rush, Sarah Palin [and I do love that] and Newt are no where.

The American people know what the GOP did and its bloviating and constant repetition of lies just won't work.

Its star, Sarah Palin, epitomizes the Republican Party and smarter GOP writers know this ain't no good. From Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on Palin and the know-nothing Party:

In television interviews she was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. ...

The era we face, that is soon upon us, will require a great deal from our leaders. They had better be sturdy. They will have to be gifted. There will be many who cannot, and should not, make the cut. Now is the time to look for those who can. And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do.

It's not a time to be frivolous, or to feel the temptation of resentment, or the temptation of thinking next year will be more or less like last year, and the assumptions of our childhoods will more or less reign in our future. It won't be that way.

Sites for Political Reality and Refuge

I occasionally get phone calls bemoaning the political culture as exhibited by, for example, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough.

The fact is Joe Scarborough is a blow-hard; and his ilk are blow-hards and they do not define political reality, so one need not be too depressed.

Back when the Clintons were the victims of rightwing media (instead of the perpetrators like now), Ken Starr and his media cohorts went on and on right up to impeachment, when the public, sickened by Starr and the media's performance, gave Clinton his near-highest approval ratings at 69 percent.

It's worth noting that political reality is best defined by the American people and not Hillary Clinton and the media blowhards who want to take down Barack Obama.

Here are five sites to visit and read when even an occasional visit to cable TV becomes too disgusting to bear.

- Daily Kos
- AmericaBlog
- BuzzFlash
- Huffington Post
- Common Dreams
- And give Jon Stewart a look; Stewart always seems to capture well the absurdity of the media idiocy.

Democracy Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

The National Journal is a political junkie's fix. And the Journal has broken much new ground the last few years in exposing the Bush administration's corruption.

But its cover story this week, State Of Disorder, by James Kitfield, reveals again the imperialistic mindset of the establishment American political culture on foreign policy as it relates to the desired social arrangement citizens of other countries have about their own societies.

Kitfield is imbued with a staggering inability to conceive that democratic results that create administrations in South America dedicated to directing their natural resources to their own people is not our problem. It is not our problem when the Sandinistas did it in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and it not our problem that President Hugo Chavez in now doing it in Venezuela.

But Kitfield frets that "new crises erupt with frightening regularity" around the world, and notes "a wave of leftist populism sweeping Latin America."

To Kitfield, it is axiomatic that this state of affairs, this state of disorder, must be dealt with, though he bemoans the fact that Bush is leaving the problem to the next American president to solve.

"Anti-Americanism everywhere you look," notes Kitfield, equating the mild redistribution of South American wealth to South American human beings with "devastating attacks by Islamic terrorists," "violence and threatened implosion in Pakistan," among other American challenges.

Kitfield (and Bush and Condi Rice) and the American foreign policy establishment apparently do not contemplate that the establishment of social arrangement through democratic processes that increase the material wealth of a given country's citizens is not destabilizing.

This dynamic is the achievement of "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ..."

And that's a good thing.

See also PARAG KHANNA's Waving Goodbye to Hegemony.

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