Friday, July 10, 2009

Talking Loud and Saying Nothing.


Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said: ‘My idea is to create a $1.8 trillion deficit for the next fiscal year.’”
-Jeb Bush in an interview with Tucker Carlson

A lie, within a lie, supporting a lie.
But he went on:

I'm not saying abandon our principles. To the contrary: Find creative ways of expressing the principles.”
-Jeb Bush

"The nation’s economy can’t endure anymore 'Republican creativity.'"
-Sandy Jimenez

I can only imagine the smile on Tucker Carlson’s face as this was said aloud far away from the ears of anyone with any common sense who would question or contest it. Only blind, supplicant, gullible Right Wing voters can swallow this kind of nonsense: those masses who still want to believe whatever they are told is in their best interests to believe. Clear thinking, principled Republicans can at best remain mute when they hear this tired variety of pabulum, lest they be called traitors to their party or worse. It seems there are few options for Conservatives with questions about how the candidates and policymakers they supported for twenty five years wrecked the country. Nobody can put in plain words why the loudest voices in the Right Wing establishment today only want another chance to do it all over again. Republicans are owed an explanation; instead they’re being given more orders and told to sit tight while the remaining elected Republican officials in power say “no” to just about everything happening in Washington DC and the world.

If one only directly addressed the sheer managerial ineptitude of the last Republican administration, scores of arrest warrants and retroactive impeachments would have to be issued.

For my part, I’m going to lay off the Republicans for a while, at least until the GOP starts some new nonsense, because their silly attempts at disowning the economic collapse; their pathetic denials of the runaway Wall Street crime wave they abetted and all but legalized are making me repeat myself as well. It’s better not to be mired in bullshit at all, but especially someone else’s.

Barack Hussein Obama is the President of the United States.

Those words stab like ice picks into the ears of some, but the only thing those Americans are indicating with their unspecified disgust and thoughtless adamantine opposition is that they are part of the past. Just as Ronald Reagan ushered in an era of deregulating, pro-corporate, Right-tilted rule that all but said that the moneyed-Rich elites in our country will tell the rest of us what to expect from government; Barack Obama’s White House signifies, at least by our collective act of electing him to the presidency, a new era in which the many are demanding new purpose and action from the government they empower, while letting the wealthy few remain just that, for now. At least that was the promise of last November.
That promise is in fact the not-so-secret plan Jeb Bush is lying to Tucker Carlson about. That is what Jeb Bush is trying to scare Americans away from. -Good luck Jeb: Say hello to your brother at the Crawford ranch for me; the unemployed; the uninsured; and all those veterans coming back to the ruins of the economy that he and your rich buddies wrecked. I can’t imagine how you two punks manage to look your father in the face without crying every time.

For the Obama administration and the rest of us, the job at hand, (GOP interference not withstanding,) is as historic as it is Herculean.

There are still two wars going on. We have an economy that won’t fix itself. We are in a new, historically lowered “normal” for heavy industry, media, finance and international trade that is exposing the groundless, credit and debt-based foundation of American “prosperity” of the post-Reagan era. We have 50 million uninsured people. We are in an energy crisis that is economic, social and environmental in its threat to the human race.

What does this Administration plan to do when its bipartisan fantasy of sharing vision (and responsibility) is inarguably, undeniably over? The Republicans have made it clear that their definition of Bipartisanship means concessions on policy and legislation made by all… save themselves.

This Democratic majority in government must differentiate this era by beating back the excesses begun in the Nixon era by transnational big business. They must do it with law, with subsidized programs and regulation.

But they can’t do it by negotiating with politicians, (be they Republicans or their own Democrats cravenly beholden to corporate paymasters) who oppose the core ideals of Progressive reform and brand such imperative policies and programs such as Universal Healthcare as exclusively “Socialist.”

The more time the Obama Administration and its informal coalitions in the House and Senate spend trying to get the support of “all” Senators and Congressmen while they have a majority, is the more time the nefarious lobbying interests have to organize and reframe the issues with well-funded lies. The more time the Obama administration wastes, the more diluted its public mandate becomes.

Why have they wasted so much time and effort negotiating with politicians who have already stated that their starting posture in any conversation is “no?”

What are Democrats, the closest current custodians of the Progressive agenda, going to do other than fall into disunity in the face of the same corporate interests that made Republicans betray America in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s to every major industrial lobby on K Street?

Al Franken is the United States Senator from Minnesota.

While that may feel like corkscrews winding into eardrums to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and other pro –establishment-anti-working class propagandists masquerading as TV pundits, it’s a further block in this potential foundation for “the Great Society” President Johnson struggled for but ultimately abandoned after he dug in his heels refusing to pull back from the Vietnam war. Operating in a filibuster-free Senate is a fragile and temporary condition. Democrats have to act quickly, if they are to act meaningfully. They have to forge ahead and dispense with the public shows of egalitarianism and contrived acts of inclusion. It didn’t work and it won’t. The Republicans don’t care how venal and greedy they look or how ridiculous they sound when they tell Americans they don’t think we should have Health Insurance -like the medical coverage we all pay for them to have.

Republicans don’t care how stupid they sound when they now start talking about fiscal responsibility, as if they didn’t tank the economy and send jobs overseas and let the worlds of finance and investment banking run out of control. The Democrats just have to pull their party together, straighten out the cowards and sell outs in their midst behind closed doors and get to work immediately.

The question remains: of all the things the Democrats said they were going to do, -What are they willing to do?

I “see” a lot of talk, but I’m not hearing anything.

-SJ

2 comments:

Jack Jodell said...

Congrats on another in a long line of superb analyses and passionate posts, SJ! I'm with you all the way on what you advocate here. The Democrats MUST shit or get off the proverbial pot here. The window of opportunity is small and the time is right. Both political parties have fallen down miserably over the past 30 years in delivering for average Americans. Our government has also walked away (cut and run, you might say) from our most important war of all: the war on poverty. If it abandons the war for fair and universal health care as well, this government will deserve to fall. Pandering to corporations and the wealthy elite has gone on for far too long and has only brought the country down. NOW is the time for truly progressive legislation to pass, or there will indeed someday soon be a very ugly and brutal revolution. The time for action is nigh: enough is enough!

SJ said...

@Jack,
Right you are. The more time they waste; -the more time the corporate lobbies have time to produce commercials that spread misinformation and lies and also the more time they have to get to our representaives with all manner of behind-closed-doors coercion.
The have to act quickly, so that it's the opposition that has to scramble to keep up.
-SJ