Anyone who pays attention (who knows what minority of the voting public, that represents) will recall the 2004 presidential election and the way the GOP scratched the raw wound of 9/11 with ceaseless energy.
Ever since, the video images of passenger jets filled with ordinary people slamming into the World Trade Towers play on a generational loop tape. Why? What is so powerful?
It is the quick glimpse and then the permanence of result. The sense of tragic ending with no escape. Not for the passengers. Not for the poor souls whose normal work environments were turned into hell.
Beyond good and evil, 9/11 showed us doom. We recoil from it.
As a psychological, political matter, the GOP message professionals understood the power of that revulsion to mobilize voters. It is a defining difference from Democrats. Democrats are inclined to explain. Karl Rove, a chief building inspector of the modern GOP, said it well to the New York Times in 2004, "... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
In an important way, Rove was dissembling. What Rove did best was to mobilize the power of revulsion -- against government. That is the reality that became the core of the Republican Party. It explains how moderates were driven out, leaving only GOP engineers to tinker at the edges (where profits could be squeezed from privatization of government services like prisons, education, and waging wars) while throwing matches on the dry kindling of popular insecurities, racial hatreds, and economic scarcity.
While Democrats struggled with principles and the panicky need to siphon corporate campaign contributions away from the opposition, the GOP professionals lit on gerrymandering, the manipulation of ultra-conservative "values" voters in red state districts, and finally hit on the libertarian wedge that made the amorphous Tea Party the cudgel to bring the entire GOP to unblinking obedience.
That's where we are today: an unassailable fraction of the Republican caucus in Congress extorting the nation in order to return the functions of federal government to daily operation. It is madness, but a madness that is as logical and as final as the trajectory of a passenger jet turned into the high story of a glass skyscraper in Manhattan.
There really seems no way out from the conviction of members of the radical right. They believe they are doing God's work and they are convinced the sacrifice is worth it.
That's right: it is worth the sacrifice of hundreds of patients a day, including children, treated for terminal illnesses at the National Institute of Health. It is worth stripping hope from millions of Americans who have waited decades for health care reform.
This is what we are left with: a GOP who believes that any and all weapons must be deployed to destroy government in order to save it. The absence of insight combines with conviction that compassion means doing harm in order to do good.
These are Republicans, and it is time for Americans to march on their district offices, in their states, in peaceful protest.
Ever since, the video images of passenger jets filled with ordinary people slamming into the World Trade Towers play on a generational loop tape. Why? What is so powerful?
It is the quick glimpse and then the permanence of result. The sense of tragic ending with no escape. Not for the passengers. Not for the poor souls whose normal work environments were turned into hell.
Beyond good and evil, 9/11 showed us doom. We recoil from it.
As a psychological, political matter, the GOP message professionals understood the power of that revulsion to mobilize voters. It is a defining difference from Democrats. Democrats are inclined to explain. Karl Rove, a chief building inspector of the modern GOP, said it well to the New York Times in 2004, "... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
In an important way, Rove was dissembling. What Rove did best was to mobilize the power of revulsion -- against government. That is the reality that became the core of the Republican Party. It explains how moderates were driven out, leaving only GOP engineers to tinker at the edges (where profits could be squeezed from privatization of government services like prisons, education, and waging wars) while throwing matches on the dry kindling of popular insecurities, racial hatreds, and economic scarcity.
While Democrats struggled with principles and the panicky need to siphon corporate campaign contributions away from the opposition, the GOP professionals lit on gerrymandering, the manipulation of ultra-conservative "values" voters in red state districts, and finally hit on the libertarian wedge that made the amorphous Tea Party the cudgel to bring the entire GOP to unblinking obedience.
That's where we are today: an unassailable fraction of the Republican caucus in Congress extorting the nation in order to return the functions of federal government to daily operation. It is madness, but a madness that is as logical and as final as the trajectory of a passenger jet turned into the high story of a glass skyscraper in Manhattan.
There really seems no way out from the conviction of members of the radical right. They believe they are doing God's work and they are convinced the sacrifice is worth it.
That's right: it is worth the sacrifice of hundreds of patients a day, including children, treated for terminal illnesses at the National Institute of Health. It is worth stripping hope from millions of Americans who have waited decades for health care reform.
This is what we are left with: a GOP who believes that any and all weapons must be deployed to destroy government in order to save it. The absence of insight combines with conviction that compassion means doing harm in order to do good.
These are Republicans, and it is time for Americans to march on their district offices, in their states, in peaceful protest.
3 comments:
There is no question we are in crisis, and individual citizens must resort to direct action. With this action the tea party can be viewed as a small group of terrorist intent on destroying our government to get their way. Under no circumstances should any small group of legislators be able to stop government and hold the country hostage until their demands are meet. Our democracy and our way of life will cease to exist as it will happen over and over again if we give in to them. There is a need for constitutional lawyers to begin to examine options available to move us from this point. Perhaps as a country we have to move on, and let them take their fight to the courts.
This nation wont get anywhere unless we start to use the same public relation tactics as the rabbit right. Namely addressing the miscreants as criminal intended AMERICAN Taliban in strongest language. Offering friendly negotiation wont cut it with a fringe group determined to stage a palace coup.
Americans had no problem slandering Communist party members and conducting a witch hunt over decades. When all the communist party was addressing the deplorable circumstances as is becoming apparent today again with the 1% trying to owning all.
To paraphrase, here is looking Fascism at you kid.
Government run by business, HELLOWWW
it seems disingenuous to give right wing members of Congress credit for all the things you mention at the end, when your precious Democrats under Clinton and Obama wasted billions of our money bombing people in other countries.
How many terminally ill patients would we be able to treat if we stopped giving the Dem/Repub dichotomy so much credence?
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