The Lost Children By David Glenn Cox

[CrazyExpat]

It is human nature that impels the majority of us to be followers. Normal people, after five or six years of wandering in the desert, will begin to ask questions of their leadership. But a faith-based leadership leans heavily on the desire not to be wrong. No one likes being wrong, and many, if not most of us, will jump through hoops to prove that we are not wrong.

This defines our political landscape today. The Republican party is aimless and wandering; they have lost the centrist and the independent voter so all that is left of them is the far right wing. As the party collapses in on itself and becomes more and more fanatical, the political work of a lifetime is slipping away. The eight years of the Bush Presidency have destroyed the economy and damaged the political process itself. The center and independent voters have moved towards the lesser of two evils, the Democrats in name only. Anyone want to hold a rally to support Max Baucus?

The political spectrum has bent so far to the right you have Republican House and Senate members surviving only in their safe districts. Then you have the Blue Dogs who, when compared with Democrats of forty years ago, are in fact moderate Republicans. They live in political limbo. Neither fish nor fowl, they accept their committee chairmanships and mute what ought to be a Democratic majority.

There is a joke that I heard many years ago about a drunk on an airplane. He was having a good time talking and cutting up. Next to him was a large Texan with a ten-gallon hat. Trying to avoid the drunk, the Texan leaned back in his seat and pulled his Stetson down over his eyes. As the plane became airborne the drunk began to feel queasy and suddenly, without warning, yacked into the lap of the big Texan. The Texan slowly pushed the brim of his hat back up with his thumb and looked at the drunk as if he were going to kill him. The drunk looks at him and says, “You feeling better now, fella?”

Those teabaggers and 9-12ers in the million moron march have been following a political party that has yacked into America’s lap. All that is left for them is to divert the blame, and fortunately there is a 24-hour, full spectrum propaganda network running at all times. It doesn’t have to be true and it doesn’t even have to make sense. In fact, the more outrageous the better.

Since the beginning of the “Birther” movement I have just scratched my head in wonder. My first wife was born in Baden-Baden Germany. She was two years old when she first set foot on American soil, and she did so with an American passport. How? Because her mother was an American citizen. Barack Obama could have been born at an intergalactic trading post on Rigel Three, and by virtue of his mother's citizenship he would be an American citizen.

It is too easy for the left to call racism. It's true but you won’t win arguments or defeat your opposition just by calling them bigots. It is a component of their rage but it’s not the main component. Millions of Americans pay little to no attention to what is going on in Washington politics. They watch TV sound bites or Internet or cable channels, but that viewing now more than ever is dictated by what they believe in the first place. Twenty percent believe Fox News, no matter what sort of hogwash they spew out.

The latest campaign is the ACORN employees filmed proposing tax evasion by setting up a brothel. Those Fox minions, the Beckinites and the Rushinites, believe that this scandal will lead directly to the White House. They believe that an American attorney working for green jobs is really a Communist. Have you ever heard of an attorney that wanted to give things away to the state?

You cannot underestimate these people; their lack of education or sophistication means very little. It wasn’t intellectuals that made Mussolini Il Duce. It was the intellectuals who laughed at those nutty brown shirts in Germany in the 1920’s. We are witnessing the demise not of one political party but of two. The Republicans are splintered but so are the Democrats. Obama says one thing, Baucus another, and Pelosi something else.

The Democrats, unable to pass any real legislation, sink into the abyss of followers with their nose to the wind of public opinion but dependent on corporate support for survival. So you have a Republican Party that is splintered and fanaticized and a Democratic Party that is really a moderate Republican Party stuck to the teat of Corporate America and unwilling to let go.

Barack Obama has been called Hitler, Stalin, the devil, a Socialist, a Communist, everything but what he really is. He is a centrist Democrat, politically to the right of Bill Clinton, to the right of Jimmy Carter, to the right of John Kennedy. He is far to the right of Harry Truman and even farther to the right of Franklin Roosevelt. He is the modern day equivalent of Herbert Hoover. Like Hoover he believes that it is more important to bail out the banks than the people. He wants corporate entities left in place as he tinkers in the margins of financial regulations.

He has done nothing to help union workers; he allowed the gutting of the employee’s Free Choice Act. The take over of GM, which the right has complained about virulently, was in fact the right wing solution. The Democrats were against bankruptcy and the Republicans were in favor of bankruptcy. What did the President’s car czars decide? That the Republicans were right, bankruptcy was the only way to go. This freed General Motors specifically to dump toxic properties onto the taxpayers and allowed GM to abandon properties on which taxes were owed forcing local and state government to seize worthless properties in lieu of large tax bills.

The bankruptcy allows GM to go anywhere on planet Earth they wish to go to build cars, and they are already expanding plants in Mexico and China. The cash for clunkers bill that has received so much praise was in fact nothing more than a public subsidy for corporate America. It worked so well that of three billion dollars invested two billion dollars of it went straight to Asia. It temporarily buoyed the economy while expanding our trade deficit; yet three billion for a bounce is not much bang for the buck! It is Hooverism, if you help the corporations long enough, sooner or later the economy as a whole will pick up.

The left has their own fanatics and you ruffle their feathers when you imply that Obama is not all that he should be. It is the same fanaticism, that speak no evil, because our guy is in office and we should blindly support him or her. They will take offense at my comparing of Obama to Herbert Hoover.

In 1929 Hoover set up a two billion-dollar fund to offer low interest loans to business. He was against any direct aid to struggling Americans. Obama supported the bailout of Wall Street and the refunding of the banks. In 1932 Roosevelt redirected Hoover's fund toward direct mortgage purchase by the federal government. At one time the federal government owned 12 percent of all mortgages and created the thirty-year mortgage. The Obama solution is exactly the same as the Bush solution, to allow the banks to settle mortgage problems as they see fit. And how’s that plan doing? At best, at best, 14 percent of all homeowners in mortgage trouble are being assisted by their lender. That means with an expected three million more foreclosures this year, 2,580,000 will receive no assistance whatsoever.

Bush’s plan aided one percent of homeowners and on average Obama’s plan aids ten percent. Now, if you are a bank and getting your money for free (.25 percent) and lending it out on credit cards at eighteen percent, would you rather continue to do that or save a mortgage? The Obama plan awards banks $1,000 for every mortgage they renegotiate; yet for $2,500 they can borrow a million dollars in new money and write off the bad debts at the end of the year for a lower tax bill. The banks might want to help the homeowners but there is no money in it!

Obama is Hoover, not FDR, so it is only fair to believe that many of those on the left are as badly educated as those on the right. But the issues facing this country are reaching critical mass and the time for dithering will soon be over. I’ve seen it called the collapse of the left, but in fact there is no left. The true left was euthanized long ago; we have a center right party and a hard right party. They decide whether to help banks and business a little bit or a lot. If it were otherwise we would have single payer healthcare done and done.

The lost children are on all sides of us, left, right, conservative, moderate, liberal. They are lost because we are a nation of meaningless labels, which subvert a craven political class to use propaganda and smoke and mirrors to score points and to call it educating the public. They call rolling backwards moving forwards. They call freeing corporations to move overseas a bailout to save jobs, and call it healthcare reform where you might pay less to your health insurer while your government subsidizes the health insurance industry by creating twenty million new customers.

It’s not Socialist or Communist. It is not conservative and definitely not liberal or progressive. It is center right American fascism.

[smoker]

The thing is that the GOP is so insane right now that dealing with them in any meaningful way is impossible, but we have a president who wants to deal with them anyway - even if they are batshit insane.

[lvdkeyes]

As President he really has no choice but to deal with the idiots.

[WannaGo]

David Greenberg had an outstanding piece in Slate yesterday examining the roots of the radical right and how this group went from being on the margins 40 years ago to being in the mainstream today with high-profile mouthpieces like Beck, Hannity and rest of the Faux News nation. But even more interesting was his examination of an idea first distilled by social historian Richard Hofstadter that most right-wing politics seem to grow out of fear and paranoia.

Hofstadter's 1954 essay introduced the concept of "status politics." It suggested that the far right's obsessions—which he judged inexplicable solely by reference to conventional material interests—were tied to a distinctly modern anxiety: "[t]he rootlessness and heterogeneity of American life," felt as the old order of the rural village collapsed. Once-dominant WASPs of native stock feared displacement by rising ethnic groups, while Irish and German Catholics embraced "hyper-patriotism," "hyper-conformism," and kindred values to strut their American bona fides. Patriotic societies, veterans' groups, and McCarthyite causes helped these groups equate their own values with American ones.

Having been raised by right-wing religious fundamentalists, this resonated with me because that always seemed to be my impression of their politics...that in their minds, they, as God-fearing white Americans, were socially and morally superior, and that any attempt to either limit their advantage or elevate any other group to equal footing was actually an assault on their personal freedoms.

You can read Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" here.