From beyond the pale, the Masters of Projection deploy hunter-killer drones to the far most reaches of the zeitgeist…
Excerpt from Newsmax TV’s Wayne Allyn Root‘s latest book, Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America—and What We Can All Do to Save the Middle Class.
“Let’s look at some of the ways we’re being targeted, intimidated, and persecuted. The evidence is out in the open. Look at the IRS scandal. Just look at the groups who President Barack Obama and his socialist cabal chose to target and persecute: conservative groups, Tea Party groups, Christian groups, Jewish groups, pro-Israel groups, pro-Constitution groups, pro-life groups, donors to conservative causes or candidates, and any Obama critic (like me) brave enough to appear in the media to report the raw truth.”
…while in dankest gloom and quietest quiet, a desperate-to-survive Democratic Party, hunkered in positions of forced entrenchment is dispatching emissaries beyond the veil to find a strategic silver bullet:
Ripley: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it. How? How do we do it?
Ash: You can’t.
Parker: That’s bullshit.
Ash: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it.
Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality….I can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies.
—
[Do we need reminding that this Stygian admonition from the movie “Alien,” was provided by a dying synthetic human?]
If you are wondering what has gotten into me all of a sudden, then see this email from the DCCC that arrived on Thursday: (bold highlighting is mine)
We’ve NEVER been angrier.
Not only did the Republicans just pass a budget that slashes Medicare, AND Medicaid, AND Obamacare…
It paves the way for a brutal middle-class tax INCREASE.
That’s right.
The Republicans just took money from key programs so they could hand a tax break to their wealthy donors — and RAISE middle-class taxes.
We know we can’t change what they’ve done — but we can make them regret it.
We just launched our emergency rapid response plan. We’re running ads to inform every undecided voter that Republicans are destroying key programs to pay off their donors.
Dear Nancy and Tom,
Let me get this straight….you are just now launching our rapid response plan? Now that the horses are grazing in another zip code, you are not even closing the gate, but by gosh, some scoundrels are gonna be sorry later? And what?…I’m supposed to pony up another 8 bucks for new ad buys for terminally indecisive yahoos with mute buttons, swoon-watching “Dancing with the Stars”? It’s not about the money; it’s about your timing.
If you snooze you lose. But now we are bitch-slapped upright and sitting on the edge of our beds, let’s survey a mere sampling of the enemy battle groups constructed and deployed since the Right began sifting the ashes of the Goldwater candidacy and grinding Reagan’s magical bones into weapons-grade fairy dust.
The GOP’s Ministry of Information Propaganda has their own cable TV networks (Fox, One America), and broadcast network (Sinclair), and their own intractable religion with its own vast network of megachurches and media platforms actively — and with singular dedication — spreading the gospel of authoritarian conservatism and functioning as a literal campaign arm of the GOP; whipping votes from church pulpits and proselytizing from a canon of misapplied scripture and wingnut mythology.
Then there is the new muscle at MSNBC; retooling itself as a platform for conservative refugees from Trump’s Rolling-Thunder Doomsday Machine that they spent their careers assembling and road-testing. Next is that discombobulated hybrid of entertainment journalism, CNN; refining its mission as standard bearer for the epic, primal lie of “Both-sides-do-it” and the go-to channel for petulant partisan shouting matches that never-ever reach the vicinity of the threshold of a conclusion merely hinted at.
Republican mouthpieces have calligraphed place-cards at half of the seats on every panel on every broadcast network Sunday show (which are then padded out with Conservative enablers and a both-siderist moderator.) Conservative demi-doctrine is a feature on half the op-ed pages in major American newspapers, where the new lingua franca of cruelty and its politics of disposability are on full display. The Right curate their own book publishing houses, their own magazines, their own Universities, Schools of Economics, and Law Schools. They maintain god-knows how many think-tanks, foundations, white-paper generators, advocacy groups and myriad wingnut welfare funded websites and at least one specious science institute to provide bogus peer reviews of spurious scientific studies and publications…
…and you can’t spin the dials on terrestrial radio anywhere in America without encountering Rush or Sean or Laura or Mark or Hugh’s round-the-clock toxic Conservative hate speech.
The right wing’s strategic machinations to undermine every organic progression of democracy began decades ago and continue to advance like shipwrecking coral reefs.
The decades old American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC); a clearing house of legislation; bills and templates authored by sundry private industries, that are dispensed to legislators — like so many prefab student term papers — which are copied and pasted onto stationary appropriate to the particular state or federal legislative body in which they are to be introduced for litigation and passage. I am fairly sure that they arrive in a separate envelope from the campaign donation checks. (Although I have heard that brazen gun manufacturing lobbyists favor confetti cannons, launching loose currency from the gallery of the House chamber.)
…and yes… their own stable of crackpot plutocrat billionaires footing the bill for any little thing their fascist movement might need. The most notably tentacular among them are the “Castor and Pollux” of alt-universe zodiacal constellations…..Charles and David Koch.
“The [Koch] network is fully integrated, so it’s not just work at the universities with the students, but it’s also building state-based capabilities and election capabilities and integrating this talent pipeline….No one else has this infrastructure”
…from a convocation address to the crowd of elite supporters attending the annual Koch meeting
Koch brothers’ spending on higher education, which is almost singularly focused on economics, is now a critical part of their broader campaign to infuse politics and government with free-market principles. Political success begins with reaching young minds in college lecture halls, thereby preparing bright, libertarian-leaning students to one day occupy the halls of political power. Koch officials routinely cultivate relationships with professors and deans and fund specific courses of economic study pitched by them. Foundation funding sometimes comes with certain strings attached, with some donor agreements providing Foundation review of faculty hires. I think they bought out the University of Florida’s program for a paltry, pocket-lint donation of 1.5 million USD.
Liberty University founder, Jerry Falwell, once boasted: “Our university law school is training the next generation of Supreme Court Justices who will overturn Roe v Wade.” His dream survives him.
The coral reef continues to grow slowly but unabated:
Joe Strupp reported at Media Matters in 2012:
The Franklin Center is a multimillion-dollar organization whose websites and affiliates provide free statehouse reporting to local newspapers and other media across the country. Funded by major conservative donors, staffed by veterans of groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, and maintaining a regular presence hosting right-wing events, the organization boasts of its ability to fill the void created by state newsroom layoffs.
When Idaho state legislators proposed a seemingly uncontroversial bill to ban access to commercial tanning beds by minors earlier this year, IdahoReporter.com took up the issue with force.
The state news website, an affiliate of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and overseen by the free market Idaho Freedom Foundation, posted six stories on the proposal between Feb. 16 and March 22, when the bill was voted down in a state Senate Committee.
Finally there is weaponized control 0f the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court. Aside from this nuclear triad, they have overrun the lion’s share of state legislatures, and a majority of Secretaries of State billets and governors’ mansions. Since the 2010 wave election, the GOP has unified control of both chambers of state legislatures in 33 out of 50 states. And the Party used that power not only to draw districts that gave themselves a majority on Capitol Hill but to create “safe seats” for Republican incumbents, districts that are difficult if not impossible for Democrats to flip.
Trump and the GOP Senate, are currently clearing a backlog of 150 vacancies in the Federal Judiciary that went largely unfilled through Republicans’ systematic obstructionism during 8 years of the Obama administration. The Federalist Society has dredged up some humdinger nominees from the ranks of conservative political operatives bearing law degrees, with 51 currently under review and who should pass muster without so much as a harrumph from Senate Republicans.
As most of you know, there is so very much more to tell…and more to regret — chapter and verse and volume-upon-volume. But in closing, I have one burning question to ask of no one in particular among Democratic Party leadership:
Where the fuck have all the Best and the Brightest been camping, while sentries in your base issued warnings that disembodied ghosts of fascism were emerging from shallow graves of heaped up leaves and bitterness grown moldy down the years? You doted on pollsters with their thumbs held to the wind, while ignoring voices in your party who could see a feudal oligarchy transcoding the political software and fouling the intellectual food chain, until an army of reprogrammable authoritarian malcontents and quasi-patriots now piss rivers of toxic hysteria, streaming away to form fetid pools inside a dark forest, in whose waters we shall drown.