For my money, the New York Times' Frank Rick stands unrivaled among the commentariat in eloquence, perspicacity and formidability, and he confirms his singularity virtually every week. He manages to articulate rage with a calm, surgical style that paradoxically intensifies the reader's preexisting rage -- something most of the vast and sympathetic blogosphere has yet to comprehend, and something most of Rich's print colleagues are simply incapable of matching.
In short, he's talking only, and loosely but pointedly, about the much-disparaged, right-wing whipping boy of the intellectual elite -- and by that I mean those who are intellectually engaged; those who reside on Main Street, not merely in ivory towers. Everyone else is too busy -- to the right's unending gratification and its own causation -- with the distractions of consumerism to be bothered, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.
I think 'distractions' - "Look! A shiny nickel!" - is the operative word. All kinds of distractions. Most folks took Bush at his word - "We'll handle this. You're safe in our hands. Keep shopping." - while he lied about everything in sight, committed war crimes, shredded the Constitution, stacked the Supremes, amplified his executive power, wrecked the military, ruined the economy for all but the rich, diminished the United States in the eyes of the world, instituted christofascism in the land, and, lest I forget, revived racism and rule of the robber barons. All of that and more whilst dangling from the strings of the neocons and big business interests, with the help of his Repug Congress.
Other distractions, from WMD to Mission Accomplished to We Don't Torture to You're A Traitor If You Don't Buy This Scam were carefully orchestrated for the few who were actually watching. Enough of them with a voice bought into the deal, it matters not whether from fear or ignorance or willful blindness, even encouraged it, to let it happen.
I don't have any idea what Mr. Rich said back then because I never heard of him until a little over three years ago. Since then, he's been very vocal about Bush and his criminal war. We've known it for a long time, but the vast herd of the public has lagged behind and has only recently lifted its woolly head from the bullshit-fed green grass and realized they've been screwed, blewed, and tattooed in every imaginable way by Bush, Cheney, the neocons, and Repugs in general as a matter of the policies of power and greed.
As far as I am concerned, Mr. Rich had a hand in the awakening, along with a very few others, and I commend him for it.
The awful Repug Rule is coming to a long overdue end, albeit too slowly, but we will be paying for it, figuratively and literally, for generations to come.
Just as an afterthought, I wonder if our 'Good Germans' will be subject to something akin to what the US Army did to the GGs of the Third Reich after the discovery of the death camps located just outside their towns and which they, of course, knew nothing about. The Army made them go into the camps, smell the death stench, bury thousands of the victims themselves, and, worse, made them confront the lies they had been content, happy even, to believe.
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