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What a predictable society we have become. Not only are we guilty of expecting instant gratification of our every wish and quick solutions for problems years in the making, we are delusional about the reasons for our failure. Conservatives deluge call-in programs with partisan talking points as if they were voicing opinions derived in some rational process instead of being fomented in the torrid right-wing spin machine with disciples mobilized to spread the word about everything from health care to Supreme Court nominees.
Persistent rants claiming President Obama is driving the country toward a socialistic, one-world amalgam are made by people who obviously have no idea what socialism is and simply repeat the vituperations of talk-radio hosts. They are misled as well by a cadre of fast-talking self-promoting cable ‘analysts’ who discuss the most profound subjects in a shallow, dismissive manner and who always manage to have the last word.
On Morning Joe recently a guest discussed his documentary about how content-light Supreme Court confirmation proceedings often are. He mentioned, for example, that Judge Roberts had been something less than forthcoming during confirmation giving the impression that he was a moderate of sorts. Once on the bench, however, he went out of his way to deliver a conservative message. Host Joe Scarborough said he disagreed with everything the guest had said about Roberts but then he (Joe) was a conservative and the guest was a filmmaker. The truth is most observers agree that the Roberts who appeared before the Senate was a different creature from the Roberts presiding as Chief Justice.
We knew of course there’d be a fight over the president’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, no matter who it was. The veto machine in the Senate otherwise known as the Republican minority is always hard at work immobilizing that body with secret holds and manipulating issues to force filibuster-proof votes. They have plenty of company in efforts to malign nominee Elena Kagan. Absolutely ludicrous criticisms are leveled at her by a variety of people, many of whom should be relegated to the dustbin of inconsequential talking heads - - people like Bay Buchanan.
Buchanan says the president “dummied down” the Supreme Court by nominating Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, an astonishing pronouncement considering her support of Sarah Palin whom she described as accomplished and “extraordinarily qualified” to be president, and coming on the heels of the eight-year administration of a seriously under-qualified George Bush. Speaking of “dummied down” appointments other than the Supreme Court appointment of Bush in 2000, we have Clarence Thomas who received a minimally-qualified grade from the American Bar Association. But agree or disagree with the Kagan and Sotomayor nominations, saying they aren’t smart is, well, just stupid.
It is hard to imagine that voters stand ready to ‘throw the bums out’ of office and return bums of even greater magnitude in frustration at the nation’s slow rate of progress out of financial distress. Disregarding the previous administration’s failed agenda and believing that tax cuts and unregulated markets will resuscitate a weak economy and ward off creeping socialism represents an impulse to clutch at a huge empty straw. Oddly, political enemies don’t seem to grasp the irony of referring to what they describe as Obama’s failings in terms, as Jon Stewart puts it, of Bush “f**k-ups.” Thus Kagan becomes his Harriet Myers, the BP spill his Katrina and Afghanistan his war. In a desperate attempt to excoriate Obama, opponents run the risk of highlighting the failed policies and offhand governing style of the former president.
The ship of state was foundering long before Obama took office but the quicksand of previous inaction and intransigence was waiting to suck the life out of his agenda. Now, little more than a year later, the public seems to have forgotten the reason for our national distress and, in a wave of misplaced anger inflamed by strident demagogues, have taken aim at the president and all incumbents whether or not they deserve blame. If voters choose to embrace the politics of the past and heed the demon call of the right-wing we will be delivered into the mindless world of Rush Limbaugh.and the party he leads.
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FINDING A VOICE by Ann Davidow
Let The Sun Shine In......
Four of the merely six words in the title of Pew Research Center's latest poll results (pdf) are "distrust, discontent, anger" and "rancor."
That sort of says it all, doesn't it? A concentrated, supermajority of fuming, "a perfect storm of conditions," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut -- "a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials."
All of which, I suppose, was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the more common observations was that the unluckiest candidate would be the winner. For nearly a decade the Bush administration had labored mightily to pile-drive the nation's distrust and discontent, while throughout, its chief political strategist -- Karl Rove -- cultivated partisan anger and rancor as electoral insurance, whose costly premium has now come due.
Theirs was a conscious, unconscionable effort to split the country -- plus one -- to achieve what they confidently envisioned as a permanent majority. Hyperpatriotic global adventurism and partisan scapegoating would hold it all together, while any domestic discontent would be decisively confronted with the Reaganite shibboleth that government is the problem, not the solution.
Their objective was a kind of impotent überstate -- a sort of controlled anarchy in which the militaristic protection of Big Brother would subsume the internal vulnerabilities of plutocratic whim and socioeconomic decline.
And in this, the Bush administration accomplished its one splendidly executed job: it hugely reinforced the erstwhile moderate American belief that government, where not in uniform, is spelled s-n-a-f-u.
Best of all? If that permanent-majority thing failed to work out, some other poor schmuck would have to cope with the enduringly miserable consequences. The Bushies and their politico-economic class could take their misbegotten gains and head for the hills of material comfort; the opposition would be left the herculean task of reassembling a disintegrated nation.
Which, for President Obama (as well as his admittedly hapless but passably well-intentioned allies on the Hill), became a thankless chore. The year 2009 wasn't 1933, which now, bizarrely enough, seems a golden political age, a time before lunatic cable-news hosts and lunatic radio talk-show hosts and lunatic bloggers -- all absolutely ubiquitous, and the crazier the more successful.
Yet a good deal of today's thanklessness loops back, I think, to that splendid job performed by the Bushies: their jackhammer, propagandistic insistence that government is unfailingly inept, so what might you expect?
To the contrary what the body politic did expect -- unschooled as it is in the grinding parliamentary process of reversing determined decline -- was nothing short of a miracle: virtually instant betterment. Obama would simply stroll into the Oval Office, I can only presume, and snap his fingers and issue executive commands and presto -- within, let's say, a year, our city on the hill would gleam again.
Eight years -- indeed, several decades -- of unprecedented, deliberate neglect and suffocating decay would be erased. Theoretically. And when the theory failed to hold? Why of course, thought the electorate: Government is unfailingly inept. Why -- against the Bushies' admonishments -- did we ever expect otherwise?
Much easier, then, to revert to the former administration's finely cultivated zeitgeist of distrust, discontent, anger and rancor: reactionaryism's best friends.
During a presidential campaign such an apocalyptic foursome is not only acceptable, it borders on the acceptably advisable. For nothing concentrates the democratic mind like motivated revenge.
Yet what appeared to be relatively short-term distrust, discontent, anger and rancor had in reality become a new way of American political life. Except for one's closest ideological allies, everyone's a vague kind of enemy; plus government's a joke, hope's a pipe dream and real and upwardly robust change is not only unattainable, it's a liberal mirage, QED.
That is the Bushian DNA of our political ghosts -- Bush's truest legacy; a sour, fuming, disoriented, thoroughly disenchanted electorate which -- the result of relentless, top-down repetition -- can always land on at least one identifiable enemy: inept government.
And irony of ironies, who's paying the political price? Why of course. The unlucky winner of 2008, who is only trying his damnedest to ept the inept.
That sort of says it all, doesn't it? A concentrated, supermajority of fuming, "a perfect storm of conditions," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut -- "a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials."
All of which, I suppose, was inevitable. During the 2008 presidential campaign, one of the more common observations was that the unluckiest candidate would be the winner. For nearly a decade the Bush administration had labored mightily to pile-drive the nation's distrust and discontent, while throughout, its chief political strategist -- Karl Rove -- cultivated partisan anger and rancor as electoral insurance, whose costly premium has now come due.
Their objective was a kind of impotent überstate -- a sort of controlled anarchy in which the militaristic protection of Big Brother would subsume the internal vulnerabilities of plutocratic whim and socioeconomic decline.
And in this, the Bush administration accomplished its one splendidly executed job: it hugely reinforced the erstwhile moderate American belief that government, where not in uniform, is spelled s-n-a-f-u.
Best of all? If that permanent-majority thing failed to work out, some other poor schmuck would have to cope with the enduringly miserable consequences. The Bushies and their politico-economic class could take their misbegotten gains and head for the hills of material comfort; the opposition would be left the herculean task of reassembling a disintegrated nation.
Which, for President Obama (as well as his admittedly hapless but passably well-intentioned allies on the Hill), became a thankless chore. The year 2009 wasn't 1933, which now, bizarrely enough, seems a golden political age, a time before lunatic cable-news hosts and lunatic radio talk-show hosts and lunatic bloggers -- all absolutely ubiquitous, and the crazier the more successful.
Yet a good deal of today's thanklessness loops back, I think, to that splendid job performed by the Bushies: their jackhammer, propagandistic insistence that government is unfailingly inept, so what might you expect?
To the contrary what the body politic did expect -- unschooled as it is in the grinding parliamentary process of reversing determined decline -- was nothing short of a miracle: virtually instant betterment. Obama would simply stroll into the Oval Office, I can only presume, and snap his fingers and issue executive commands and presto -- within, let's say, a year, our city on the hill would gleam again.
Eight years -- indeed, several decades -- of unprecedented, deliberate neglect and suffocating decay would be erased. Theoretically. And when the theory failed to hold? Why of course, thought the electorate: Government is unfailingly inept. Why -- against the Bushies' admonishments -- did we ever expect otherwise?
Much easier, then, to revert to the former administration's finely cultivated zeitgeist of distrust, discontent, anger and rancor: reactionaryism's best friends.
During a presidential campaign such an apocalyptic foursome is not only acceptable, it borders on the acceptably advisable. For nothing concentrates the democratic mind like motivated revenge.
Yet what appeared to be relatively short-term distrust, discontent, anger and rancor had in reality become a new way of American political life. Except for one's closest ideological allies, everyone's a vague kind of enemy; plus government's a joke, hope's a pipe dream and real and upwardly robust change is not only unattainable, it's a liberal mirage, QED.
That is the Bushian DNA of our political ghosts -- Bush's truest legacy; a sour, fuming, disoriented, thoroughly disenchanted electorate which -- the result of relentless, top-down repetition -- can always land on at least one identifiable enemy: inept government.
And irony of ironies, who's paying the political price? Why of course. The unlucky winner of 2008, who is only trying his damnedest to ept the inept.
Wikimedia Commons / Joint Pipeline Office
