Someone said recently that his mother, would turn over in her grave. The intelligent and earthy mother of three boys and sister of five outstanding athletes was also tough. She would, he said, never, ever understand turning away from the first African-American President after the hope and dream of electing one–and a man of such exceptional quality and extraordinary determination to boot.
But we have no choice. This is an extension of the Civil War. Long smoldering racist and elitist attitudes have been given financial power, starting with the racists in the oil industry, as exemplified by the executives at Texaco, and running through the billionaires who fund Rush Limbaugh’s and Glenn Beck’s racist and corporatist propaganda.
They forced the President to choose between giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to billionaires or cutting off help and literally starving some Americans, millions of them. It is not a political fight any longer. It is a Civil War between the Rich and the Middle and Lower Classes.
The latest piece of propaganda is that if you have a college degree you can be employed. They float the number: 5% for college-educated unemployed. Of course the statistic, true or not, is merely another device to divide and conquer the lower classes by the spin masters such as Karl Rove, the Himmler-looking swami of the Neoconservative propaganda machine. It is also the phony promise and the hope that you can be employed if you have merely executed this one additional test that will save you. Baloney. Here is the truth.
These people have no intention of saving anyone but loyal Neocon partisans. A lot of college educations from public schools are little more than an extended high school education anyway. No. This is not about college degrees. This is about a totalitarian political movement that is going to go into high gear as soon as the Neocon Republicans get control of the House in January. They will start to burn the country down, pillar by pillar—civil rights, education, labor unions, product and industrial safety, foreign trade. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—all these will be targets of the Neocons.
The few idiot Tea Party members who were not seen as wingnuts and elected have promised to cut government spending. You will notice that they never talked about raising taxes on the rich, their real patrons, who caused the $13 trillion deficit. That is why the entire Tea Party movement fostered from its earliest beginnings by two billionaires is a complete sham. These guys wanted to promote anything disruptive, just like Communist and Fascist gangs did to political meetings in Germany in the 1920s.
And just as the Nazis did in the 1930s, the propaganda attacks, the “Big Lies” from Beck and Limbaugh and Hannity and Savage and the dozens of other talk show hosts, like the felon and Right Wing, Hitler-addicted G. Gordon Liddy will fall on Blacks, Homosexuals, and the “lazy” poor and unemployed. Watch the Republican spokesmen on television. They have their talking points down pat. Little lies tossed in between facts to distort reality. And then they talk non-stop, faster than a machine gun, and let no one else get in a question or a response that would immediately point out where their little lie changed the facts. It is called propaganda and it is a science, not an art. You can program it. And they do.
The left wing needs a warrior. We need someone tougher, more intellectually courageous and outright meaner than Barack Hussein Obama. He has spent his life dedicated to intellectual pursuits. He is the black version of George McGovern, smart and dedicated and honorable. We need Attila the Hun. We need Brian Urlacher and Ray Lewis. (for football fans.)
We need, God Help Us, a Marine. That’s what they are there for. They know it. The rest of us know it. They learn why they are Marines in boot camp and they never forget it. I don’t’ know if a literal Marine, like Tony Zinni, is the answer but we need a political Marine to get in there and stand his ground and fire back and get nose-to-nose with evil, fight it, and win.
Otherwise, the logical extension of the current trends in this country is that we will have a two-tier society. And in that two tier society, one group will always be upwardly mobile and another group, which will include almost all ethnic groups…black, Hispanic, and many Asians…will no longer have an opportunity, nor will they be welcomed into the top tier.
And then there is the question of the Jews. This country has been the model of the world, dealing quickly and openly with anti-Semitism. We have the most stable and prosperous and secure Jewish Community in the world. No one can deny that. But for how long?
If the Neocons get their wish…complete control of the political, military, judicial and financial processes, there will always be the nervousness about another regression. We know that racist attacks on the President have continued unabated. It is one small step for the racists to regress even further, and begin to reanimate that ancient, sick process of hatred against the Jews once again. They are fully capable of it.
What’s wrong with this President? He’s not FDR or Truman. That is what is wrong. He appointed an archconservative Senator from the state of Wyoming, (population 35, when the cattle are in town) to preside over solutions to the problem of $13 trillion in debt that this particular Senator was in the forefront of creating!
One can only call that stupid. Sorry, but what do you call it when you give the keys to the front door of the bank and say “give us a security plan” to Willie Sutton or John Dillinger? There was only one good “Fox in the Henhouse” and that was Joe Kennedy and even he wasn’t all that trustworthy.
What comes of the commission? The very people whose money was stolen by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their Neocon stooges, all of whom made small fortunes over 8 years have a pretty simple solution. Let’s fix it on the backs of the poor, but not touch any of the money that millionaires got from tax cuts. (For millionaires that ranges from a minimum of $1.2 million over ten years to as much as $5 billion.)
There were such things as nominal oil lease costs, foregone oil royalty payments, off shore tax havens, incentives to move jobs overseas, and ownership of sweatshop-type corporations in places like the Marianas Islands that made hundreds of millions and billions for Bush and Cheney (and McConnell and Tom DeLay) friends. The corruption was so vast, and came so fast, that it was hard to put a number to it…and harder yet, with a weak Democratic President to indict and convict.
If not Obama, then whom? Several names come immediately to mind. The top name would be Russ Feingold. Finally we could get our Jewish president without having to settle for someone like Lieberman. Feingold is tough, smart and as Liberal as it gets. He would raise taxes on the rich and change trade policy so that we can have a fiscally sound government and Americans working again.
Another name is Howard Dean. He helped to organize the Democratic victory in 2006 in the House and Senate and the big win in 2008. He will not stop until all the propaganda and trashing of a good, solid national health care system is refuted and a workable system is enacted. He will not compromise. Once we fix health care costs by taking the excess profit out of it, our governmental costs will go down.
We have a lot of great Liberals in this country who will work for the People. But the people need to stand up and say, as the billionaires tried to tell us the phony Tea Party program was doing, that we are “Mad as Hell and We’re not going to take it any more.”
We have people on our side like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and all their appointed team members. We have Bernie Sanders and Sheldon Whitehouse and Alan Grayson and former jet-jockey Tom Harkin and Dick Durbin and Ted Strickland and Dennis Kucinich and Sherrod Brown and Nancy Pelosi and Stenny Hoyer and on and on and on.
Liberals make up about 70% of the People, when you survey them on issues. So don’t give up. Let’s get a new leader and put the ball back in play.
