It was amazing to observe that even as they addressed the nation in their Convention, framed by the charred landscape of deregulation without end, lowering taxes without end, privatization without end -- a wasteland of looted and failing infrastructure, demolished standards, rules, liberties, hopes -- still the Republicans railed and railed robotically against "Big Government," all those gimcrack swells who swell the corporate-military machineries of State, still they squawked about an "alien" Washington that they themselves have rendered a swamp of corruption through their long occupation of it, still these white wizened diamond-encrusted power-players whomped up their enraged would-be resentment against "elites," still they dipped deep into that same old dried-up and poisoned rhetorical well of idiotic libertopian rugged individualist free-marketeer pieties.
When the Democrats win the day -- and it looks like they will -- will they go on to provide the alternative rhetoric that finally, once and for all, wins the war against stupid white-racist patriarchal imperialism, corporate-militarism, Economic Royalism?
Honestly, how hard can it be? How wrong how often how long does the old line have to be before we finally replace the damned thing?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Win it once and for all, you say? Certainly you jest, sir!
It may be because I'm a foreigner looking in on things from outside (Canada, though, so not really outside), but it's not looking to me so much like the Democrats will win today as it did yesterday. I still think they've got a good shot, but, unfortunately for you and I, McCain understands that he can still rake in the votes by nominating, as you put it, a likeable wingnut with... with legs! I hate having to think badly of people (I'm too much an optimist at core to imagine they're not all optimists too), but the only reason I can conceive for John McCain to call on Palin would be to get the vote of non-university educated women, and frankly to distract us all with her family issues and her faux populist hockey mommery. That religious shtick probably appeals in an unhealthy way to a lot of Americans too.
As for Obama... well... I could just kiss him. He's done a bit of backsliding, since he won the nomination, but he's still out leagues ahead of the Palin-McCain crew, and a successful Obama presidency would do wonders to open up the space behind us, so to speak. As a foreigner looking in, don’t screw this up for us all!
Corporate media has a vested interest in making this a horse-race.
Right now, right after their convention and with the energization of their long-ambivalent (to McCain) wingnut base through the nomination of Palin the Republicans should be getting their best polling the whole Election. The race is indeed tightening a tad -- but it's flabbergasting to realize their bounce is so underwhelming given that they've pulled out all the stops. They might manage to do little more than pull it even, given margin of error. I understand, believe me, the panic and pessimism. Progressives are on a hair trigger. We've seen the worst that can happen and we worry that it will happen again, and the stakes are such that this seems at once all too imaginable and unimaginable at one and the same time.
But people need to panic less and work more. Obama is cool as a cucumber and we should be as well, else we'll make the very mistakes we're endlessly attributing to the campaign for fear we'll lose this chance at change.
Look at the Electoral College match-ups. Obama has never been behind nor will he be. Are you following the voter registration numbers? They are historically unprecedented, and even states that don't keep tabs on party affiliation note that young people predominate among new registrations. When turnout is high, Democrats tend to benefit, when youth turnout is high Democrats tend to benefit.
Look at the State by State races, look at the money race, look at voter registrations, look at party identification numbers, look at the disapproval ratings of Bush.
They're losing and they're going to lose. This isn't boasting, the numbers say the same for those with eyes to see them.
The media narrative should be about the coming landslide against a discredited philosophy and a party of "personal responsibility" that refuses to take any responsibility for any of its catastrophic mistakes, lowering taxes while started a war of choice based on lies and dismantling the infrastructure on which their own society depends for its survival with devastating results. That isn't the narrative, but it is the truth.
Don't rejoice until we win the day, and don't rejoice long when we do, because the effort to wrest the winning party from the control of the corporate-militarists is no less urgent than ousting the Movement Conservatives from power in this Election is. But all the foolish panic and dread people are feeling about this contest is unproductive and irrational, it seems to me, however understandable it may be.
Post a Comment