A Leak In The Safe

In light of the recent election I’m really glad that there’s a movie out now about the Valerie Plame scandal. You remember her, Plame and her husband are the people who, from their mid-level intelligence positions, dared to report that there was no sign of WMD’s in Iraq and no indication that Saddam Hussein was making any great effort to obtain any. But higher-ups in the Bush regime had no great respect for reality, which had a way of contradicting their policies, based, not unlike those of contemporary Republicans, on faith based conservative dogma, gaining popular traction through sanctimonious appeals to emotion and prejudice rather than any sense of logic or pragmatism. The strong fundamentalist beliefs of conservatives evidently allow them to conflate their interests with god’s, believing that the almighty will somehow alter reality to conform with their self-serving world view.

The Bush regime’s reaction to anyone who asserted contradictory facts in the face of their fantasies was to employ the usual Rove/Atwater arsenal of spin, smear and big lie. This crap is often effective in the court of public opinion, which is not especially amenable to reality either. The only problem for them was that war is a rather stern reality check. There simply were no WMD’s in Iraq and the people of Iraq failed to be properly receptive to conservative think tank truisms about free enterprise and the wonderful benefits of the lack of an effective central government. Whatever the end result, it will be far darker and more costly than the rosy hued mirage summoned by Bush and company.

Although public perception is more in play when it comes to the economy, reality is a cold arbiter there, too. Bush’s magic mantra for economic success was cutting taxes and easing regulations, and we know how that turned out. Now the American public (or a majority of the small fraction that voted, anyway) dissatisfied with the pace of economic recovery (which would have been greater without Republican obstructionism), have, like consumers wanting to clean things up better and faster, switched back to brand GOP. The problem is that these new and improved Republicans (Now containing Tea Party!) are using the same failed formula of lower taxes/less regulation that caused the mess in the first place. It’s a product that, like the Iraq war, simply won’t work, now matter how energetically Fox News advertises and peddles it, and now that the Republicans will have to step up rather than foot drag, the cold hand of reality will eventually unmask them as the incompetent blowhards they are. You only have to wonder how many times the American people will allow this act to painfully bomb before they boo them off stage for longer than an election cycle.

The Proud Face of the Republican Party

I mean to me it’s just so freakin’ obvious, but I’ll just write it out here because my fellow Americans seem so oblivious….

Where to begin? First of all, the winning slogan for this election seems to be something about shrinking government and taxes, and balancing the budget. But let’s look at the actual problems the nation has faced recently. Was the economic meltdown precipitated by too much Government control? No, clearly not, in fact quite the opposite, as the Bush policy of lax regulation and letting the greed is good financial industry police itself were the man factors that  led us to the brink. Obama’s much reviled bailout saved us from a more catastrophic failure, and its only flaw was that it didn’t go far enough, chiefly because of the Republicans, whose performance of pure negativity for political gain should have  brought them the scorn of voters rather than the power they’re being handed. I can’t believe anyone in Michigan would vote GOP, because we, if anyone, should understand what the effect of letting a company like GM go down the tubes would be.

Or how about the BP gulf oil disaster? Was that caused by an obtrusive government, or was it actually the result of the Bush hands off policy? Why put a party back in power that doesn’t have a single idea differing from that of the worst administration in recent memory. Their hypocritical cant about a balanced budget is exposed by their absolute refusal to allow the “temporary” tax cuts on the super-rich to expire. They are promising something for nothing, the same old line since Reagan, and the American public is still buying it.

I have to wonder why. Why do so many people consider simplistic celebrity clowns like Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck to be more credible political thinkers that the actual people who have an idea how to run the country? To me it goes back to a fundamental schism in American life — on one hand it’s a capitalistic system, and the corporations prefer a fickle populace that can be swayed by sixty second commercials, have a short attention span and live in a materialistic fantasy world of ersatz celebrity and counterfeit glamor, a world where, as Joe Strummer said, you change your vote along with your overcoat. True democracy, on the other hand, calls for an informed populace, one not swayed by the big lie and demagogic slogans, who are able to make intelligent decisions as voters and jurors. Guess which one we’ve got, and now that Fox News is out there furiously propagandizing and big business is able to anonymously spend as much as they want on misleading ads, they’ve been able to convince people that supporting the right of corporations to screw over workers, the environment and the country itself is somehow a populist position. A single look at the grotesque visages of Palin and her Tea Party cronies screaming in favor of hate and ignorance is enough to instantly call to mind Yeats’s much quoted line about the best lacking all conviction and the worst being filled with a passionate intensity.

Happy election day….