Exactly 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech from the feet of the Lincoln Memorial, America’s Favorite Free-Range Conspiracy Theorist, Glenn Beck took to the same stage to dog-whistle to the simple-minded the repellent message: let’s get that nigger out of our White House. The rally was ostensibly about restoring America’s honor, but conveniently no one mentioned how we lost it.
Perhaps now would be a convenient time to do that.
It’s too easy to say that Former President Chimpy McStagger is the root of all evil. He had help from Richard Nixon’s hand maiden, Dick Cheney and a legion of toadies and minions from both parties. It is not an exaggeration to say that our loss of honor, the nadir was reached under Chimpy’s administration with secret renditions, wire tapping citizens, torturing suspects, and the suspension of habeas corpus. Just to name a few.
I don’t recall seeing a single GOPer flocking to the mall to protest that loss of honor.
When Chimpy started the illegal and illogical Iraq war, there were world-wide protests. One day the modest estimate was fourteen million people protested. Chimpy said it was a focus group and was not interested.
I don’t recall seeing a single GOPer protesting that loss of honor, either.
So now we see two b-grade Fox News employees and flimflam artists, Beck and Mooselini, get up on a stage and tell us about the dark forces working to put our great country in the dustbin of history is beyond the pale, so to speak. To see a vast sea of uncritically thinking, white-entitled boomers slack-jawed and drooling from the comfort of their lawn chairs, wondering what happened to their country is sad, yet somewhat understandable.
The country is going through convulsions right now, we have an economic crisis of unimaginable proportions (brought to us by Blessed Saint Ronnie of Trickledown-on-Bel-Air and all who suckled at his crotch); I can understand that some of us are looking for divine intervention to save us from what is actually an engineered disaster brought about by thirty years of callous and selfish policy.
What I cannot understand the the lack of willpower on the part of allegedly sane politicians to let charlatans like Beck and Palin frame the issues and set the stage. The mystery is why are Obama, Pelosi, Reid — and other elected official claiming to be a Democrat– why are they letting these buffoons set the agenda? Why is it that the left are not telling us about what we are going through and why. Why can’t they just say it: we are broke.
We are broke because for thirty years we allowed the rich and the powerful to raid the treasury as a matter of policy. And to this day The Powers That Be are doing nothing about it; heck, they are not even trying to prosecute admitted criminals like Chimpy and Blam-Blam. They’ve told the criminal class that the rule of law does not apply to them.
And so instead of frog-marching the supply siders with their ill-gotten gains to the poky, we are being told that we little people must sacrifice, delay retirement till 70, scrap Medicare, oh, and give more tax breaks to the Rich and Corporations. We are broke, unemployed, and about to be screwed again as a matter of policy.
The thing is, the Dims could have fixed it if they wanted to: they had solid majorities. They did not have the willpower, or worse, they did not see this as a problem. The point is that off-shoring your job (or industry for that matter) continues to happen because they (both sides of the aisle) want it to happen; their corporate paymasters want it, and it will continue.
I can understand how a grifter like Mooselini and a snake oil salesman like Beck can suddenly shine in these times. They can say with a straight face that what is wrong is that their pasty white followers are not praying enough; White Jeebus (and it is the white Jeebus) will keep you out of bankruptcy. And the great unwashed masses can believe this message because they can see that no one inside the Beltway is doing anything for them. They’ve been trained for thirty years to hate liberals/progressives/Dims by rote memorization (the promise of a tasty fish as the reward, who knows), and lately the Teabagger phenomenon shows that they have learned not to trust the people who have been giving them the tasty fish.
And so while these simpletons are praying for Jeebus to save them and blaming the Kenyan Usurper for their problems, and showing their independence by attending rallies that are paid for by the GOP establishment that they are opposed to, their allies on the right are picking their pockets and laughing at the rubes.
The housing market is nothing more than a collection of swindles that may never be unwound and resolved, retail is crashing as we are entering what will probably go on record as the Worst Holiday Shopping Season ever, Afghanistan AND Iraq continue to suck billions of dollars out of our wallets, peak oil has been reached and all that that implies is yet to really hit home, and the Teabaggers are going non-linear and being agitated into some sort of Xristian Nationalism. Expect things to get much, much worse.
Unless you are a member of the ruling class. Then expect excellent business as usual.
