The Rude Pundit, Alan Colmes, and Lizz Winstead are some of the many faces in Political Carnival's video "Do I Look Illegal?" Some serious, some sarcastic, but all sincere and angry. (The dirty secret is that all of us in the video are actually illegal. Especially Colmes. That Canadian bastard's been passing for American for years now.)
To underscore feelings of grievance and nostalgia, the slogan ends with a word deliberately implying both theft and resurrection. In tea party mythology, "back" means taking back a political system that was supposedly pilfered (even though it was taken via legitimate elections) and then going back to a time that seems ideal. As one tea party leader told The New York Times: "Things we had in the '50s were better."
To the tea party demographic, this certainly rings true. Yes, in apartheid America circa 1950, rich white males were more socially and economically privileged relative to other groups than they are even now. Of course, for those least likely to support the tea party -- read: minorities -- the '50s were, ahem, not so great, considering the decade's brutal intensification of Jim Crow.
But then, that's the marketing virtuosity of the "I Want My Country Back" slogan. A motto that would be called treasonous if uttered by throngs of blacks, Latinos or Native Americans has been deftly sculpted by conservatives into an accepted clarion call for white power. Cloaked in the proud patois of patriotism and protest, the refrain has become a dog whistle to a Caucasian population that feels threatened by impending demographic and public policy changes.
As a marketing masterpiece, the slogan would certainly impress the old Madison Avenue mavens. The trouble is that as a larger political ideology, its hateful and divisive message is encouraging ever more misguided madness.
Time to View the Political Spectrum Not from Left to Right, But from Science to Superstition, & from Reason to Madness
At one end of the spectrum, there is Sarah Palin speaking to Bill O'Reilly on Rupert Murdoch's dime:
“I think we should keep this clean, keep it simple, go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant,” adding, “They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the 10 commandments, it’s pretty simple.” (Faux News, 5-7-10)
It is, of course, historical fact that Jefferson, Paine, Washington, Franklin and others among the Founding Fathers were Deists; they were not Christians, and their view was that Nature was divine and that science and reason were vital elements of its revelation. It is also historical fact that the separation of church and state was fundamental to the U.S. Constitution, in both its essence and its form.
Palin and others who espouse such nonsense, whether in more sophisticated framing or not, show as much ignorance about the historical context and motivation behind the Boston Tea Party (which was an anti-corporatist act of civil disobedience) as they do about the Book of Revelations (which was a poetical text of a particular style, used by its author to address the issues and circumstances of his own time).
At the other end of spectrum, there are those who courageously champion reason and science, those who have diligently done the math, and those who patiently uphold common sense.
Even though the mind-melding, word-spinning Frank Luntz has been quoted by GOP insiders as saying that a House Republican majority in 2011 is "a done deal," Karl Rove and former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, who remembers what an effective RNC looked like, are taking no chances.
They've teamed in the development of a sprawling campaign apparatus independent of the GOP's national committees, organizing a string of "American"-this and "American"-that assassins of whatever American political decency is left -- from "American Crossroads," which will act as an institutional bag man; to the "American Action Network," which will act as a propaganda arm; to the "American Action Forum," which will try to act like it's a think tank; to the oddly "American"-deprived "Resurgent Republic," which, as Politico described it, will act as "a message-testing laboratory." You got it. A lie factory.
None of this is particularly surprising, of course, especially since every Republican's best friend, the Supreme Court, okayed corporate cash to flow like Gulf oil into GOP campaign coffers. What is striking, however, is the almost laughable siege mentality of underdog status that exists among the organizers.
All of these woe-are-us sentiments were presumably uttered in the absence of snickering, and doubtless each contained a certain strategic overture to the vulnerably monied and hopelessly gullible: the poor GOP, kicked around lo these many years by the outrageously affluent, viciously organized and malign left. Won't you help it out?
The right has been spewing this nonsense for so long -- the left is gonna get ya, the liberals are everywhere, the Liberal Elite and the Liberal Establishment are on an inexorable Euro-socialistic march of domination -- at least since the McCarthy Era, that even its leading luminaries of lunacy are by now inclined to believe their own propaganda.
Just listen to ultraconservative panelists so frequently spotted on C-Span, holding forth from, say, the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute. To hear them tell it -- tell each other, and with stunning sincerity -- American conservatism is at best stumbling along, battered as always by the all-powerful Left, which has permeated and diseased, perhaps irreversibly, the American System.
More than that, however, is the value of knowing the enemy's mind -- the first and indispensible stage of any successful political warfare -- and by that I mean the right's clinical paranoia. In that, there are needling opportunities for the left, assuming it itself can avoid mistaking paranoids for supermen.
Joe the Plumber Elected to GOP Committee Seat in Ohio
First step on long road to eventually getting a plumber's license.
Supreme Court Closing Front Entrance
Sign to be changed to “Equal Justice in Rear.”
Feds May Probe Apple
But only slap on wrist expected from iCommission.
REMINDER
The right of terrorists to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
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Imagine a government in which Bob Bennett of Utah is considered a liberal and you have some idea of what will happen if the Republicans seize power.
Blue Cross Arena Rochester N.Y.
12-20-2003
Tim Reynolds-guitar
Tery Anastasio-guitar
Bradly Blade-Drums
Tony Hall-Bass
Ray Paczovski-Keyboards
Arthur,s Musical Journey
http://arthurfromholland.blogspot.com/
Hipster culture is having a senior moment
Suddenly, at least in parts of the blogosphere, it's hip to be old — a paradoxical twist for a youth-obsessed nation that injects, pulls and carves away any semblance of age. The "olds" (as sites like Gawker.com dub those old enough to remember rotary phones) are the subject of Facebook fan pages, YouTube shows, Twitter feeds and even fashion blogs.
Why is our youth-obsessed society suddenly so fascinated with the 65-plus set. For one thing, they are almost exotic creatures in our fractured modern lives, glimpsed only on major holidays.
This is the good news: many of the world's most powerful, hurtful, wretched old men will soon be dead.
Does that sound cruel? Unkind? I might be OK with that. In fact, I might very much be in the mood to not really mind at all if a whole slew of these nefarious creatures of sociospiritual corrosion were to, say, spontaneously combust, or be struck by lightning, or perhaps accidentally fall into a giant, roiling vat of Astroglide and turpentine and a million duplicitous prayers. Whoops! Sorry, Monsignor!
When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young children for decades, and he did nothing to stop it. How much does God believe the pope's argument that Vatican PR trumps pedophilia? Joe Ratzinger, 82, will soon find out.
Over here, we find far too many timeworn members of the U.S. Supreme Court, a majority of whom firmly believe that giant corporations are very much complete, entitled humans, but gay people most certainly are not.
But perhaps none of these fine and soulless charlatans appears as noticeably miserable, as lost, as openly insulting to the human spirit as the wretched leaders of the Mormon Church in Utah. There, I said it.
Translation: To the old, powerful men of the various churches and archaic institutions, to those that hold us back and demean the spirit in a thousands different ways, the message is clear enough: You will be gone very soon, right along with much of the enormous black cloud of fear and joylessness you carry.
There seems to be a strong sentiment in Congress that the only constitutional right suspected terrorists have is the right to bear arms.
Lord Ashdown made this comment
Perhaps off the top of his head:
"The country has spoken -- but we
Don't know what they've said."
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Everyone got excited that this might be the year the Liberal Democrats (who are mildly liberal and very dysfunctional -- like our Democrats) did something at the polls. But as usual, it was all a tease and they've managed to barely increase their vote and not increase their seats.
Gordon Brown, who combines the charisma of Dukakis and the glower of Nixon into one unpopular package led a Labour Party that had exhausted itself after 16 years of governing to an abysmal performance of just over a quarter of the vote.
And the Tories, led by longtime aspirant David Cameron, who conservative papers laughably tried to turn into a "Hope" poster, gained votes, mostly because Labour lost them, but have come up well-short of what is needed for a majority.
So nobody really wins -- a hung Parliament.
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