Sham AIG Outrage Left and Right

Whether or not it gets published, I submitted the following letter to the Editor of the Columbus Dispatch a few minutes ago:

In a letter in the March 24 edition, Mitch Seltzer expressed concern about the proposed 90 percent tax rate bill currently working its way through Congress. While there is ample reason to fear this piece of populist legislation, Mr. Seltzer's conclusion that "It could pave the way to making America a truly socialist state." is completely off the mark.

Like the representatives promoting this bill, Mr. Seltzer is playing politics at the expense of truth.

Those in Congress see an opportunity to gain points with an outraged public by posturing in fraudulent support of an ex post facto law, which they know full well could never survive a constitutional challenge and for which president Obama has expressed opposition.

Mr. Seltzer's warning about the specter of creeping socialism is likewise fraudulent on two accounts.

First, with communism no longer viable as the nebulous, enemy "-ism" needed to keep America in a state of fear and their party in power, the right-wing has made socialism the de rigueur bogeyman.

Second, and more importantly, this bill represents a move not toward socialism, but rather toward direct democracy, a governing philosophy rejected by the Founding Fathers when they established our nation as a republic in the Constitution. That is the true danger inherent in this bill.

Suggesting that a law which would overturn the tenets of representative government and replace them with mob rule is socialistic reveals either ignorance of the meanings of basic political terms or a deliberate attempt to obscure those meanings so that unrelated terms can be used interchangeably to justify any action.

This is not surprising, given that those who now cry "socialism" at every turn are by and large the same folks who believe that the unprovoked invasion of Iraq, the policy of extraordinary rendition, and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp are splendid examples of American democratic principles in action.

Putting the "Con" in The Economy and the "Mark" in The Market

This may come as a shock, but the financial system which drives the American economy, commonly called "the Market," is a swindle, a con game in which the average investor is the "mark" or victim. Specifically, it's a version of the old Shell Game, and it's rigged so that those running the game cannot lose.

Jon Stewart, host of the Comedy Channel's The Daily Show exposed this fact in his March 12 interview of Jim Cramer, host of the CNBC's Mad Money.

This is a must-see video.

In the interview, Stewart points out, and one-time hedge fund manager Cramer admits, that behind the public façade of "the open market" there exists a private club comprised of well-heeled players who game the system, lining their pockets with profits derived from playing fast and loose with the retirement accounts of others.

You may recall that it was Stewart who single-handedly brought down Crossfire and its hosts, Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, by going on their show and calling bullshit on its shallow format, which consisted primarily of the two hosts shouting at each other and claiming they were presenting informed political discourse.

Stewart is a comedian, and his "schtick" consists of lampooning actual news stories. Yet in an America where "news" consists of talking heads talking about what other talking heads are talking about, and the line between news and entertainment grows as fuzzy as a sandwich left in the refrigerator for six months, The Daily Show joins The News Hour with Jim Lehrer (PBS) and 60 Minutes (CBS) as just about the only broadcasts presenting in-depth reporting of the news.

Selling the Lie

Total disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law both at home and abroad? Acts that fly in the face of all that America stands for perpetrated by folks from the political party which routinely claims sole ownership of religion, moral clarity, and patriotism?

You say such a thing could never happen in America? Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says it has already occurred.

As reported by Eric Black at MinnPost.com, Hersh appeared on March 9 at a Great Conversations event at the University of Minnesota and talked about "new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an 'executive assassination ring.'" He said this operation was established during the Bush administration.

When I heard Hersh's claims, my first thought was that if they were accurate, those of the reactionary-right - folks who appear to live in perpetual fear of and who use fear to foment hatred for "the other" - would be found hunkered down in an undisclosed location wallowing in the pride in their "accomplishments."

I was mistaken.

Neither guilt nor shame nor introspective thought exists for those who are convinced, despite all evidence to the contrary, that they are right. If they believe value exists in committing heinous acts like those outlined by Hersh, both the acts and those who are a party to them must be defended. That defense must also be public, vociferous, and repetitious. Any other course of action would leave open the unacceptable possibility that they might be wrong.

Thus, immediately after Hersh's comments saw daylight, the minions of those same fear-mongers began popping up on cable news-talk shows like road apples at a parade featuring horses.

On Hardball with Chris Matthews, Ari Fleischer kicked off the defense initiative. Using the same verbal chicanery for which he was famous as press secretary to George W. Bush, he suggested that president Obama should thank his former boss for leaving him a world in which Saddam Hussein is no longer alive. He then repeated the thoroughly discredited claim that Saddam had been involved in the 9-11 attacks.

Fleischer knew exactly what he was doing. His two statements, presented in that order, construct a specious argument which contains the logical fallacy known as "undistributed middle term." There is some truth to be found within the first statement. However linking it to the second statement is a deliberate attempt to trick his audience into accepting the unwarranted conclusion that everything done by the Bush administration was above board and justified.

The groundwork having been laid, others soon followed to defend Fleischer's comments, repeating his "argument" as if it were unassailable fact. Coming to Fleischer's defense is itself an insidious ploy intended to shift discussion away from the nature of the original lie and to add a layer of insulation between it and the truth.

Chris Matthews, in apparent bewilderment at this onslaught of obfuscation, expressed the belief that we were witnessing an attempt to polish of George W. Bush's legacy.

I believe Matthews missed the real story.

On March 9, the Washington Post published statements made by Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., in which he outlined the strategy of the GOP. McHenry's comments first appeared two days earlier as part of a long article in the National Journal magazine titled GOP's Dilemma: Substance Versus Spin from which the following excerpt is borrowed:

Roughly 80 House Republican members have appeared on about 200 national cable programs since the start of the year, a conference spokesman said. On the economic stimulus bill, Republicans cite media coverage, public opinion polling, and Democrats' defensiveness to contend that they won the political debate.

"We will lose on legislation. But we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010," saidn Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., an outspoken conservative who has participated on the GOP message teams. Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Waging the "message war" is the sum and substance of the appearances by Fleischer and the rest of the right-wing spin team. The goal of their strategy is to return America to the control of ideologues who see nothing wrong with committing atrocities which make a mockery of the principles which the Founding Fathers set forth in the Constitution, principles for which countless others gave their lives to protect and defend.

Conference Promoting Abusive Conflation (CPAC)

At last week's Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting, Rep. Ron Paul summed up the current political climate in America as follows: "We now have moved in the direction of socialism. We're close to a fascist system where the government controls our lives and economy."

This statement illustrates why I believe CPAC really stands for Conference Promoting Abusive Conflation.

Any educated person hearing Ron Paul speak would know that socialism and fascism occupy opposite positions on the political spectrum - socialism on the left; fascism on the right. But those who took to the podium at CPAC weren't talking to educated people. Their speeches relied on the knowledge that a large number of Americans weren't paying attention when their Social Studies teachers explained political terminology. Thus, they are ignorant of the true meanings of basic political terms and susceptible to being played like a fiddle by charlatans on both the right and the left.

It is those on the right, however, who more often, and as a matter of policy, rely on conflation to exploit the ignorant and to stymie attempts at meaningful political and social reform. They have done so throughout our nation's history and continue the practice today.

This policy of obstructionism stems from the very essence of their political ideology:

conservative |kənˈsərvətiv; -vəˌtiv|
noun
a person who is averse to change and holds to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics.

Prior to the Civil War, conservative landowners in the Old South conflated the doctrine of States Rights with the American ideal of individual liberty in order to protect and preserve the institution of slavery upon which both their wealth and their privileged existence depended. After the fall of the Confederacy, they used the same stratagem to create Jim Crow Laws, which replaced slavery with segregation to the same end.

Artfully crafted under the Reagan administration to funnel wealth to those at the top of the economic heap at the expense of the middle class, supply-side (AKA trickle-down) economic theory provides a more recent example of how those on the right used conflation to preserve privilege. Selling this patently regressive economic model to middle-class Americans involved a carefully coordinated effort in which conservatives conflated capitalism (an economic system) with democracy (a social system) at every opportunity until opposition to right-wing economic ideology became, in the minds of the duped, an attack on America itself.

That anyone would accept as credible the vacuous objections to president Obama's economic recovery efforts voiced by those who spoke at CPAC would seem to indicate that Americans did not reject Reaganomics because they recognized how they had been duped, but because its effects on their wallets had left them little choice. The persistence of ignorance is the legacy as well as the aim of abusive conflation.

In addition to the two examples above, conservatives have mounted sustained efforts to conflate birth control with abortion, Christianity with anti-gay bigotry, religious freedom with a rejection of science, and a host of other disparate terms in their quest to dupe Americans into supporting their agenda. I will deal with those sacred cows and others in future posts.

Today, elected conservatives like Rep. John Boehner, Rep. Mike Pence, Sen. Mitch McConnell, and Sen. John Kyl rely on Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Counter, and other unelected mouthpieces of the rabid-right to continuously push their abusive, conflated lies because without them - and beyond them - they have nothing to offer that thinking Americans would want for themselves or their country.

Bleeding-Heart Liberal Socialism

Oh, how those on the right side of the political spectrum hate socialism. They bray the word as invective, almost as if it were a virus that they must expel from their lungs lest it take root and corrupt them.

By and large, these are the same folks who claim exclusive ownership of Christian values; yet they somehow manage to overlook an obvious fact, one which a letter-writer pointed out in the March 4 edition of the Columbus Dispatch.

Quote from Bible borders on socialism

In his Feb. 21 letter, Tom Dehn said Dispatch Senior Editor Joe Hallett's comment about "ensuring that those with means get less and those without get more" reminded him of the philosophy of Karl Marx.

I thought Jesus Christ said "to whom much has been given, much will be required (Luke 12:35-48)." Sounds like socialism to me.

ANN TWIGGS
Columbus

Thank you, Ann, for exposing the hypocrisy of the self-righteous right.

A Little Light Reading

I am currently enjoying "The Studs Terkel Reader - My American Century," a collection of interviews from eight of Terkel's previously published works. Terkel, who passed away last October at the age of 96, spent a lifetime looking for the soul of America. His search involved interviewing not princes and potentates, nor the powerful and profligate, but everyday men and women he met doing everyday things and whose stories he chronicled in a series of oral histories.

I'm not very far into the book, which runs to well over 500 pages, but I've already struck gold. Passages containing truths and observations with implications for today's America abound. Two in particular, both over fourteen years old, speak to and expose the insidious nature of what passes for informed opinion today.

The first is found on page 4. It involves statements made in 1995 by Mark Koernke, a militiaman from Michigan after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. in a nationwide shortwave broadcast reported on by James Ridgeway of The Village Voice, Koernke claimed that the bombing was a government plot. He then went on to say this:

"I did some basic math the other day, using the old-style math. You can get about four politicians for about 120 feet of rope. Remember when using this stuff always try to find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer."

In response to Koernke's words, Terkel borrows a line from Edwin Markham's The Man With the Hoe and asks, "Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?"

Now in 2009, comments similar in tone to those made by Koernke pepper the daily broadcasts of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity and re-echo in televised interviews of prominent members of Congress, who embrace the ideology of the radical right-wing of the republican party. All too often, their opinions, presented as unassailable fact, air without challenge or caveat.

Rather than ignoring this proliferation of ignorance, I firmly believe that America would be better-served if those with lights still burning within their brains responded immediately to anyone making such comments with this modified version of Terkel's borrowed quote: "Whose breath blew out the light within your brain?"

The second passage, from page 32, requires little additional commentary by me, save to suggest that Terkel correctly identified how and why one's "brain-light" can sputter, blow out, and be replaced by ideas like those cited in the first:

During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie, weaving his way through traffic, was offering six-o'clock commentary.

"We gotta do it. We have no choice."

"Why?

"We can't be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show 'em we're number one."

"Are you number one?"

A pause. "I'm number nuthin'." He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters. His wife left him; his daughter is a roundheel; his boy is hooked on heroin; he loathes his job. For that matter, he's not so crazy about himself. Wearied by this turn of conversation, he addresses the rear-view mirror: "Did you hear Bob Hope last night? He said..."

Forfeiting their own life experience, their native intelligence, their personal pride, they allow more celebrated surrogates, whose imaginations may be no larger than theirs, to think for them, to speak for them, to be for them in the name of the greater good. Conditioned to being "nobody," they look toward "somebody" for the answer. It is not what American town meeting was all about.