[Authors note:]
The following essay first appeared one year ago at this blog as a comment posted in an open thread. Our host and colleague, Imbecile, subsequently published it with the kind attribution “Something Worth Reading from Luskus Delph” and represents essentially my first contribution of content to this illustrious blog site. In the interest of doing some minor spring cleaning — apologetically and with the presumed forbearance of a few regular readers here — I am refiling it today so that it may hereafter reside in the OTM archives under my familiar nom-de-plume; Luskus Delph
[Here is a bonus pic from DonkeyHotey for your enjoyment… or to invite your disgust. —LD.]
Preface
Perhaps this is an opportune moment to purge something that has bugged me for months; i.e., the utter predictability of everything that has been unfolding since the coup d’etat by plebiscite some months ago.
I can’t claim greater prescient imagination than so many other rational followers of progressive politics that I have observed in various internet forums; but I did venture to write about this back in the contentious weeks leading up to the 2012 (POTUS v. Romney) election and shared with my brother, with whom I frequently exchange political email rants.
With profound sadness I am pulling it from my email archives and dropping it here for anyone else who may have seen all of this coming. It is what you too were thinking perhaps?
The subsequent interloping extinction level event called “trump” was an epic failure of imagination for any sentient carbon-based life form, who was more likely to crack the mysterious mathematics of infinity than to have foreseen that cruel catalyst lurking within any cosmic quandary in the spacetime of politics.
…from September, 2012 A.D.
November is “game over” for Democrats and progressives if Republicans win.
It is time to get started on those passport applications–right now. Or we may as well learn to sit down and shut-the-fuck-up. The conservative revolution is only a few moves from checkmate. Progressives have been playing checkers.
The unsettling feelings are intensifying daily, as I have struggled for some degree of comprehension of the Republican vision for America. Not the mythic Shangri-la evoked in patriotic prose and stump-speech poetry — soft-focus images of a shining city upon a hill shrouded in the halcyon mists of libertarian nirvana. No, I am talking about the metaphorical wood, brick, and mortar of policies comprising an architecture that they intend to provide for us all to live within; if only we fickle voters would please surrender our obstinance, and just sign another damn blank construction contract and let them get on with it.
I am sorry , but I am having a hard time reconciling Republicans’ murky vision of socio-economic engineering with the harsh reality of their resume’.
To earn our mid-term votes in 2010 the GOP repeatedly promised that they would “focus like a laser” on jobs, jobs, jobs. Well they have kept that promise by wielding a surgical laser to cut away at public and private sector jobs and cauterizing the vital revenue streams that sustained them. All palliative measures include spurious bromides of newfound “fiscal responsibility” and gospels from the catechism of “austerity”
An objective look at the recent congressional record shows that the Republicans have yet to introduce or support any jobs initiatives beyond tax cuts and repeating stale platitudes of prosperity that has failed to trickle-down to the middle class after thirty years. Their admitted obstructionism of all legislation, designed to hurt the President, has hurt the economy, and in turn has prolonged the suffering of all those victims of the 2008 economic meltdown.
Congressional Republicans’ simple plan has been to prolong the Great Recession and inflict as much hardship upon the electorate as possible while waging a relentless media campaign to scapegoat this administration as the true perpetrator. And for all this they continue to pay no political price. They are enabled – even coddled – by a beltway media frat club constantly jockeying for favor and access while formulating clever political narratives that will impress their peers in journalism. They are further sheltered from reprisal by a right wing media bubble that repels all reality, truth, and accountability.
How many of us have marveled at the amazing resilience of the Republican echo chamber of bizarro intellectual anti-matter, while our befuddled efforts to understand its anatomy and efficacy fall flat?
Insight comes by recalling a recent session with my local right wing talk radio station. Some D-list Tea party celebrity guest was providing for the host, a running commentary on news items of the day when he dropped this unattributed axiom into his “analysis”:
“As we all know, history is just a set of lies agreed upon”
Upon reflection I realized that despite my fascination with examining the countless “bricks in the wall” of the right wing edifice, what this guy had just revealed was no incidental nugget from the mind of Napoleon, but an article of their faith that serves as the critical mortar that holds the whole damn thing together.
It may be the liberals’ curse having an ability to analyze disinformation and immediately detect the resulting strategic patterns and unlocking cynical underlying motives behind countless ideological inconsistencies .
Sadly, the bane of the many critical-thinking liberal minds – one bordering on mental disorder – is the compulsive need to find logic and order in the inverse workings within the bizarro Republican universe. However we must eventually stop ourselves and accept that all mind-bending Republican ideology and tactics are conveniently possible because there is no logic or order in their universe to constrain them.
Yes, and what a perfect universe it is that they all live in; where everyone in the collective is bobbing their head in affirmation before a sentence is concluded. Where every complex issue can be explained or answered with no more words than will fit into a common fortune cookie. Where a selection of ordinary words have been individually encoded to convey large chunks of mythology. Where mythology is rendered immutable by simple inoculations against “lamestream media” rebuttals or confounding factual data from certified public sources.
Please consider that people in the “home-bound” GOP base have no experience with other countries or cultures. They also have little, if any, experience with an entire range of concepts. They rely on second hand opinions that they “interpret” as factual information. They never studied or read about communism, socialism, fascism, history, science, cultures, religions, etc. So they have assimilated insufficient raw data to have developed a rich and complex map of reality necessary to comprise an informed electorate. To make things worse, they assume that everyone else comes by theirs by the same process; thus we get the dismissive projection that liberal minds only contain or process what is “told” to them.
Swirling vertices of confusion and mendacity and fateful calculation are all converging into a perfect storm which the voters must navigate without benefit of clear skies or reliable compass. However, a birds-eye view from beyond low-hanging fruits of political deception reveals a clear perspective of conditions likely beyond the next election. Our future.
Each individual thing done by the GOP may be arguably benign when viewed in isolation, but when we start adding those things together (GHW Bush’s “New World Order”; the Patriot Act; the demonization of foreigners, Muslims, gays, women seeking reproductive rights; their incessant call for war; their stated goal to have a permanent majority control in all three branches of government; etc.) it adds up to a rather frightening long-term plan for our nation they seem to have in mind.
Citizens United dealt a mortal blow to democracy in America. The corporations already own the media and along with the billionaires of Wall Street and industry will soon own the levers of government exclusively. As Paul Begala pointed out in Newsweek, the principle lesson of the failed Wisconsin governor recall election is that money is superior to any level of ground game:
” It has become fashionable in progressive circles for activists and donors to delude themselves into thinking that a tidal wave of advertising can be answered by an army of grassroots organizers. It can’t.”
Thirty million dollars will outpace thirty thousand “boots on the ground” wielding clipboards and knocking on doors. State elections can be bought by one billionaire donor for – relative to him – the price of a hot dog. Elections are reduced to expensive public relations campaigns that produce the required Pavlovian responses that manifest in the privacy of a voting booth.
When the Republicans win the Oval Office and the Senate, they will finally have the permanent majorities they have been engineering for two decades while distracted Democrats have played “whack-a-mole” with their own peckers. People in Washington setting their hair on fire or waving shiny baubles at the cameras have kept attentions diverted to the fight for control at the Federal level, while the Conservatives have been cleaning our clocks in the State houses and courts.
So what of our Courts? Certainly immune to politics, and the ultimate bastion of justice for the wronged individual or repressed constituencies? No, actually.
Do you want to leverage control of a State Supreme Court? Buy the election for the judges of your choice. In states where they are appointed, buy the governor’s office and let him do the stacking. State house seats are a dime a dozen and the plutocracy has noticed the fire sale that commenced with Citizens United. Big business will close the circle on tort reform and deregulation; stifling all litigation and rules that have hampered their progress for decades. Citizens will find no quarter and certainly no venue that adjudicates accountability or where justice may serve to protect the weakest among us.
In the Senate, there has been a long-standing bipartisan fear of abolishing the filibuster. It is traditionally viewed through the lens of checks and balances as the coveted weapon of last resort for either party who might find themselves in the minority. However, with unlimited money behind them virtually guaranteeing a permanent majority in the U.S. Senate, the Republicans can confidently hold a 51 seat majority in perpetuity. That old 60-vote filibuster-proof rule will be an obsolete club in their bag, so emboldened Republicans may exercise the “nuclear option” of employing procedural maneuvers to kill it off.
After that the Democrats in the Senate might as well stay at home and work on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. They can sublet their Senate offices to the K-Street lobbyists who will appreciate being on premises to write all of the legislation FOR the Republicans. In 2005, MBNA suffered the inconvenience of commuting to and from Capitol Hill while authoring the biggest rewrite of U.S. bankruptcy law in a quarter century, to protect the banking industry and themselves from the phantom scourge of “consumer fraud” that was sapping their astronomical profits.
Republican control of Congress and the White House will result in an irreversible conservative majority in the U.S. Supreme Court. They will resume packing the Federal Courts system with conservatives, as well as all levels of federal prosecutors’ offices. The Republican governors and Statehouses will complete the task at local levels; finalizing total control of all three branches of government by Conservatives. The true “Nuclear Triad” if you will.
Next comes the tsunami of unfettered legislation on social and fiscal policies. Roe v. Wade — gone! Eminent Domain — ceded to any monied interest. Privatization of schools, police, fire, prisons — done! Social safety nets — eviscerated or privatized. Draconian voter suppression legislation — boom! Environmental safeguards and regulations – outta here! Food, water, medicine — as long as it all goes in as presented and comes out as visibly unalarming and flush-able content for a toilet bowl, then everything will be fine regardless of whatever else is in them.
The Christian Taliban will be unleashed upon our school curricula and our policy debates. Not the serious policy stuff, mind you; but just enough to keep them off the backs of plutocrats and kleptocrats in government and industry. Evolution and Climate Change will be quaint anachronisms of the eggheads and elites.
Contraception? Hmmmm. Come and get it, but you will swim a gauntlet of Christofascist sharks and theocratic flotsam to get your slut medicine. Oh yeah……bring cash, ladies. We can’t have the banks involved in your genocidal onslaught against fertilized eggs.
This is a future I see. It is based upon history spanning my lifetime, research, human nature, and political reality in evidence. It is a work in progress, and becomes turbocharged if Democrats lose in November. If Obama prevails over Romney, consider it a postponement while the Authoritarian Conservatives fortify their troops with the steroids of fear and loathing…..and Koch money. They have waited this long, in lavish comfort. A little more time is an opportunity for them to continue scheduled maintenance on the groundwork laid since the Nixon era.