Republican Planned Obsolescence

     There is a common thread that runs through many of our nation’s problems today.  It may be latest seen by a cursory examination of the recent failure of congress to come to an agreement on an auto bailout.  Congress for many years in all its endeavors has unfailingly taken the path of least work, least resistance, and least responsibility toward their ultimate nexus of a policy with the least positive effect on the nation.
     Naturally some of this is human nature.  But they have institutionalized mediocrity, apathy and greed as the basic common denominators of all their activities.  They are tiresomely predictable in this pattern.  They invariably hazard the most harm to the nation by doing all the wrong things, whether of omission or commission, because they are easy and avoiding all the right ones because they are hard.
     From Clinton’s impeachment, the Iraq War, rampant deficit spending, the gutting of all regulation and oversight, their common goal is always the same – political expedience, careless irresponsibility and personal profit.  Wherever you look they are playing at governance rather than governing and it’s impossible to find an enduring, selfless, responsible or even competent act anywhere in their record.  It’s marvelous to watch how their basic theory of what’s best for the country has come to so closely resemble their own narrow self-interests that they’ve become indistinguishable.   
    Generally the republicans hide their cynicism behind a theme of superior morals and smaller government, though these are virtues they have never achieved.  Listening to their explanation for their inaction in not supporting any deal toward an aid package to the auto industry is illustrative of their method.  It was hard to escape the notion that the shifting conditions they put forward had more to do with evading responsibility for doing anything and blame for anything previously done than with any real attempt at finding a way to help solve the crisis at hand.  Meanwhile the crisis itself continues to grow in all directions, multi-dimensionally, around us.  
    Instead, they left one with the certain feeling that no compromise would have ever proven acceptable to them.  Rather, they worked backwards, like a ravenous pack of congressional dogs (which is to say like a cowardly watchdog that, the farther it backs away from the problem, the louder it barks) until they had finally fastened on a set of conditions which they knew would be unacceptable to reaching consensus with the other side.  Then they blamed everyone else for the failure to reach an agreement acceptable to them, by which they meant total capitulation to their increasingly unreasonable demands.
  
     Of course no ones like the necessity of bailouts of business, Wall Street or the automobile manufacturers.  Nobody likes the incredibly difficult work that has now been made necessary due to the sheer moral lassitude and corruption of our politicians and business leaders.  Nobody likes to have to solve problems which only arose because the people we are now tasking to fix the problems are responsible for creating them in the first place.  But that’s where we are.
    Having virtually wrecked the economy with their own vapid and puerile form of laissez-fairism, the republicans now profess themselves to be too laissez-fairist to bother trying to salvage it.  The one thing they could do – nothing – was the one thing they were determined to do.  As always, with the car rescue package it wasn’t hard to round up enough do-nothings to unite around an unprincipled position to do nothing at all.
     The republican response to the auto manufacturers’ plight is a tried and true one. They are past masters at the strange art of do-nothingism.  A favorite tactic of theirs is crippling oversimplification.  In the real world the shortest distance between two points is invariably a structural impossibility.  Easy solutions to complex problems seldom exist and when tried become a seductive trap.  Yet this is what the republicans normally demand as a starting point which evolves with increasing complexity into a general excuse for all their latter inactivity.  
    In this case, they said that the auto makers needed to essentially solve their problems and make themselves solvent and profitable prior to their receiving any financial help which could give them the breathing room to make their solvency possible.  It is the perfect republican scheme to do nothing and blame everyone else for the ensuing failure.  It’s exactly the same sort of scheme these do-nothings have perpetrated on the American people for decades.  When in doubt cavil, posture, pontificate and preen.  But do nothing.  Why do you think nothing ever gets done, or done right or once broken ever gets fixed?  
    We are living in the Age of Republican Planned Obsolescence.  Their mantra has been that government can’t work and can’t be made to work (though our entire history prior to their stewardship of it completely disproves this).  So elect us, they say, and we’ll do as little work as possible to prove that not working and doing next to nothing for our salaries results in government failure. True, it’s an odd collection of people who would seek jobs with the explicit intent of not doing them.  But they have succeeded in proving without a doubt that government with people like them in charge of it won’t work.  Their failure is their vindication.  It stands as their only noticeable success.  
    Unfortunately, this doesn’t prove the point they were making about government at all but a much older one: that which you don’t work at won’t work for you in return.  

    So not bothering to do the job they were hired to do or enforce the rules they are paid to uphold, or adjust to changing circumstances to reform problem areas and meet crises head on leads to institutional failure?  Who knew?  If the institutions they have been put in charge of aren’t carefully maintained and refurbished and upgraded over time, they will deteriorate and decline.  This is the inherent internal entropy at work in republican theory today.
    After years of republican misrule then all our institutions and departments of government are in a state of high odor and near collapse. After first bankrupting the government with trillions of dollars in debt they say there is no more money left for essential services like health care, education, infrastructure maintenance and repair.  Next they mortgaged the future of our economy to foreign nations’ banks and then bankrupted what was left of our economy with their malign deregulatory inactivity/activity.  And now they have the nerve to put themselves forward as born again fiscal conservators and claim that because of their dereliction we are now too poor and broke to be able to afford to save ourselves. 
     As the lead republican in the republican auto bailout fiasco, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama is the classis naysayer.  An auto bailout may not work so why try?  It’s much less work and far more laissez-faire to not even bother.  He goes so far as to say help for automakers won’t work even as he continues trying to scuttle it thereby making his prediction of failure come true in advance.  Neat.  
    When asked about the dire effects on our shaky economy this failure would make worse, including the catastrophic potential loss of three million jobs in an economy already teetering on the brink of disaster, he gives out a silly half grin and shrugs like a dolt in a suit.  And even as the incoming government talks of spending billions more to create jobs he is sanguine about losing millions more jobs prior to their arrival, making the economic hole that faces them that much deeper and more costly to dig out of.   
    So what if another vital part of the American economy is decimated under republican stewardship?  He’s got his and doesn’t really seem to care.  There are Japanese and German and Korean automakers ready to take up the slack as American ownership dies, as if foreign ownership of our industrial base was just as good for our economy, if not better, than American ownership.
    Some apologists claim that our current problems are the result of a few errors in judgment or a few bad apple administrators.  But the failure is too comprehensive to support such a limited and benign conclusion.  After all, this administration, one by one, has gutted or corrupted FEMA, the SEC, FDA, NSC, CIA, DoD, EPA, OSHA, Interior, State, Justice, etc.  This is not just a phenomenally unlucky string of anomalies.  The civil government is the state and George W. Bush, the man we put in charge of the institution of government, is a devout enemy of it.
     On top of this, Dick Cheney, our inestimable Vice-President, has spent his spare time invaluably trying to effect the same illicit goals Nixon so ignobly failed to advance.   Namely he tried to unconstitutionally elevate the executive above the law and relegate each of the other two previously coequal branches of government to a lower level of subservience.  Of course, he was only doing this in order to commit with impunity a series of illegal acts, from engaging in warrentless wiretapping, illegal detentions, bad intelligence triggered wars and torture that he knew were all repugnant to the world and foreign our own history.  With a consciousness of guilt before the act, he realized that if the constitution were not hamstrung prior to these actions, he either might not get to do them to begin with or be held liable for them later. 
     George Bush, the innocent in the oval office, accepts no culpability for any of these failures but was nonetheless noticeably acquiescent to all Cheney’s efforts to place him above our laws.

Lazy Fairy Gummint

     Laissez-faire is an elided French term which means literally something like, “let (alone) to make or to do.”  Meaning if you let something alone it will probably do what it was going to do by itself anyway and probably do it better.  Of course, this theory has never, ever worked in its extreme form for an entire population in the entire history of the world for any extended length of time, but why should a few stray facts get in the way of an ideologue’s free lunch?  Especially when they are still standing in the chow line with their hands out and pockets waiting to be filled with what someone just filched from us.  
    Then our tactical geniuses in charge reduced this questionable economic theory to an absurdly banal and illogical level beyond what any theorists have ever dared do in the past. Laissez-faire economics becomes not limited regulation but no regulation.  It becomes greed for its own sake economics.  This new theory holds that even existing, proven, necessary, effective and long standing regulation is bad and therefore any additional regulation applied to new instruments of imminent fiscal destruction are unnecessary.  
    This is like someone who once enjoys a chocolate éclair gluttonously deciding to eat nothing but chocolate éclairs.  It’s the logic of someone who enjoys a suntan heaving themselves into the sun itself.  It is cripplingly infantile and irrationally excessive behavior.  And this tells you everything you need to now about the quality of politician we have been suffering under in Washington for years.
    And of course, in the Bush administration we have seen this bizarre version of laissez-fairism taken to its extreme and bleed out into other insane principles - such as, if less is occasionally more, it must follow that the least must always be the most. Therefore, the less we think, the smarter we are.  The less hard we work the more effortlessly things come to pass.  It is easy to start wars, plan no contingencies if things go wrong, and then sit back and watch as these wars virtually win themselves.  Since it is far easier to let our financial institutions wreck the country than it is to rein them in, obviously it behooves us to let them do it to us.  The less we debate, the greater our consensus; the more we agree among ourselves the more true our conclusions turn and when most intelligent expertise disagrees with us it just proves how much more right than them we must surely be, etcetera, etc., etc.
    By this point laissez-faire government has become Lazy-Fairy government.  They have discovered the pure, undisturbed essence of mediocrity.  It means that the lazier our leaders are the more the fairies of their indifference will arise to do their jobs for them better than they could have ever done them themselves.  It also means, how lucky for them, that though they accept their salaries, in a strange inverse ratio, they have to work less and less hard to earn them.  Magical.
     This concept that everything is easy and that anything suggesting hard work is a hindrance to a successful endeavor explains our policy in Iraq and foreign policy as well as the abysmal state of the economy.  Deficits, we’re told, don’t really matter to them because it is easier for our government to build them than it is to keep them from being built.  The latter is hard work, the former isn’t.  Lazy-fairy gummint means not only never having to make a difficult decision but (apparently) never having to say you are sorry or rectify your mistakes.
    Because, in the end, never having to balance necessity with resources and be always able to say you are in favor of cutting taxes (for a few) while never having to actually raise taxes to a level commensurate with needs, makes government service fun and profitable, hardly like hard work at all.  In the corporate world too, not working really works. Executives love their golden parachutes and automatic bonuses and exorbitant stock options because these absolve them from the necessity of actually having to do anything and work hard enough to succeed.
     Yet these are the same people who find time to preach responsibility, accountability and sacrifice for everyone but themselves.  They seek merit pay for underpaid teachers and revile the decay of moral fiber implicit (for the recipient!) for the tiniest hand out to the weakest, hungriest, poorest people in the land.  Meanwhile they’ll give away our money as bailouts to feckless billionaires on general principle with neither oversight nor demands while simultaneously begrudging a nickel or crust of stale bread or effective health care to a single mother with four sickly children.  They do these things, which might seem cruel, anti-Christian and perfectly perfidious, not because they want to nor because they are the greediest people on the planet but because they want to instill in the lower orders the same divine principles of hard work they are working so scrupulously hard to evade in their own lives.  
     One might conclude that the morals of these people are lacking, and that there is a small double standard implicit in their policies.  But that would be unkind.  Let’s just assume they are collectively dumb as a box of rocks and aren’t smart enough to discern that their entire lives are a self-serving contradiction to their own stated beliefs.

Class Chauvinism

     For whatever bizarre theory they put forward to excuse and provide cover for themselves, the pure crux of all their policies is greed and class bias.  Every bad policy put forward and good one opposed has as it core purpose the further enrichment of the very rich (among whom they hope to number themselves) at the expense of the rest of the economy, the middle class and the poor.  This is the squared root source of the dangerous economic imbalances we find ourselves struggling with today.
    How else can you explain all the time the government has spent in recent years trying to end the estate tax on the one hand while refusing to grant even a miniscule bump up in the minimum wage to the working poor?  Repealing the estate tax would represent a giant leap backwards to a permanent entrenched wealth, undemocratic privilege and create an unassailable upper class in this country.  The very thing our democratic representatives have been hired to prevent is the actual thing they have been most tireless in their attempts to achieve.  
    Somehow these ethically challenged people thought it was more important to alleviate into the far distant future the tax burden on the scions of great wealth, these lay-about heirs and heiresses, often before they are even born.  Better this than allow hard working millions to properly clothe, house, feed and educate themselves and their children today.  This is the false prejudice and high privilege that has operated in Washington recently.  Our leaders, largely quite well off in their own right, have come to see their interests inextricably aligned with the richest Americans at the inexorable expense of the remainder of the country.  
    Investing in the people of the country is the only course to national regeneration.  It is from them that future businesses, corporations, innovation and leadership will arise just as it always has before.  To the contrary, unjustly propping up existing corporations and money managers at the expense of the people at the tail end of society is ruinously short sighted.  A democratic government which doesn’t help and invest and put back and that isn’t of, by and for its own people is traitorous to the purpose of its own institution.  A nation which refuses to invest in the future of its own people paves the way to its inevitable decline.
     Unfortunately, in this emerging global economy there are many adjustments which have to be made.  Downward pressure on American wages from abroad will be a fact of life for many years to come.  This is an inescapable fact. In certain respects, pay and pensions and health care costs may have to be trimmed or at least restructured and these inherent burdens for our population collateralized throughout the economy more equitably.  
    These changing burdens and increased costs cannot be levied exclusively against the working class while creditors, executives, boards of directors and members of congress try to profit in the exchange.  The wrenching changes wrought by globalization are a national burden that must be shared nationally across the entire economic spectrum not a burden just borne by a few if we are to emerge onto a healthy economic future.  
     After all, the strength of an economy builds from below up.  You don’t rebuild the foundation of our economy by buying new furnishings for the penthouse and polishing the silver and gold fixtures.  The thieves of our future who have served as apologists for rapacious executive pay packages that serve no public economic benefit have essentially been helping to scavenge their own companies and our own economy for years.  
    Seen in this light, the dismantling of all government controls over our economy by our political class couldn’t have come at a worse time.  Just as globalization was kicking in we were stuck with a bankrupt, elitist and incompetent administration determined to dismantle all our natural democratic defenses against an increasingly uncertain and volatile macro economic tsunami.
    Yet these same people responsible for our vulnerability still resent any benefit to the poor or alleviation of stagnant middle class wages or expansion of rights and services to the population as a whole to help mitigate the economic injustices ravaging them.  In fact they jump for joy at the thought of workers’ wages and benefits being slashed and unions being crushed as if this would be beneficial for the economy even as the financial inequalities in this country are being exacerbated further by their actions.  When republicans chant, “drill baby drill” they apparently mean with them as the dentists and we the teeth.
     The ones in greatest jeopardy, the American workers, are the only ones who have been blameless here.  They have actually continued to do their jobs well while the executive class and boards of directors and financial institutions and the politicians who we were counting on to provide oversight, honesty, equal opportunity, fairness, stability and direction to our economy haven’t.  While they were playing by the rules of the game the ones in charge changed the rules without telling them and now are trying to make the workers pay for the executives’ mistakes. 
    The answer to these assorted problems, unlike Shelby and his ilk, is surely not to merely continue to cede our economic interests to foreign control.  They seem more than willing to do exactly this.  Rather than let our economy continue to erode as our debt ridden government sells the direction and management of our country into the hands of others cheap, we must breathe new life into the economy by actually working to save it and our way of life and our standard of living.
    The one thing that is not acceptable that they seem determined to continue is to place the future direction of the economy and the country into the hands of Wall Street.  Wall Street doesn’t care about this country.  Big money is no more patriotic than the weather.  When it practices what it preaches, Wall Street is the refined attar of pure greed.  Wall Street is more than happy to serve as the handmaiden of our economic decline because it will profit either way, either by buying us or selling us.  It is up to our elected officials to intercede and regulate this behavior and direct it into the best long term interests of the nation but they haven’t bothered.  
    For our government to now say that the reckless malfeasance of Wall Street was unexpected, is itself a virtual admission of the criminal abdication of the jobs we hired them to perform.  Everyone knows that there are always Bernie Madoffs out there trying to rip people off but they only get away with $50 billion dollars of other peoples’ money when the regulators have clearly crawled into bed with those they are supposed to be regulating. 
Our leaders have made a career of preaching their undivided love for the American work ethic and then punished it wherever they see it.  They have routinely rewarded incompetence, greed and injustice; groveled to undeserved entitlement and avoided anything which approaches honest hard work themselves.  Our government has sold us out such as we have never been sold out before.

It’s a Bourgeois Town

     There’s an old Leadbelly song about Washington.  A few lines of it go something like: “I got the bourgeoisie blues.  Home of the brave, land of the free, I don’t wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie.  (They’ll)…throw you a nickel just to see you bow.  It’s a bourgeois town.”
     He was talking about race primarily but economic class bias (not exclusive of race) amounts to the same thing and is what pertains today.  DC’s still a bourgeois town and anyone who seeks to transform it has to understand this.  
     It used to be that the US had the highest paid, best educated, healthiest, safest and most prosperous and productive people in the world.  Remember?  Now we have none of these.  To hear the republicans cheerfully gloat about cutting salaries and pensions and gutting jobs and job security and not even stepping up to help save troubled mortgages is disturbing at least, at worst disgusting.   Even if a great national economic retrenchment is underway, it is hardly seemly for the ones responsible for our grief still be trying to make political hay on the backs of others, even as they are still coddling (and being coddled in return) by the very executives most responsible for our economy’s current decline.  Profit is the opiate of these elite and they are addicted to our decline.
    I expected their true colors to show sooner or later.  They hid them well but now an ugly little undercurrent has finally started to surface through the elaborate disguise.  You hear the republicans and financial mavens starting to blame American workers and unions for all the troubles that they themselves have visited upon us. 
    They say Americans don’t save enough.  Save what?  They say the greedy Americans are dependent on credit cards.  Americans are maxed out, it’s true, the elitists on Wall Street have fleeced them to the limit and congress has passed regulations to aid them in their efforts.  Still, they say it is somehow the fault of the victims for being victimized rather than the fault of the crooks who did it to them or the special interest lobbyists who abetted them.
    And now, more and more, you hear these capitalist elitists beginning to begrudge the middle class for daring to desire to be middle class.  Our financial leadership is urging the middle class to cut back, though they don’t suggest such a course for themselves. 
Settle back into second class citizenry, lower middle class status, they urge.  Quit striving to surge ahead.  Forget the idea of owning your own home. The mortgage crisis is the fault of the strivings of the buyer as much or more than the dishonest greed of the lenders.   Affordable health care, higher education for your children, forget about it.  You were foolish to think you could rise so high.  These things are reserved exclusively for the wealthy not you.
    It’s time to curb your appetite for ease and comfort, job security and quell your extravagant pretensions to equality and ease.  Accept the economic decline of America and the middle class with appropriate grace.  Wall Street isn’t worried, of course, because as I say, in a global economy they make money either way.  And of course whether we are winning or losing our politicians will be well paid to stand aside and do nothing. 
Besides, American businesses can hire workers cheaper overseas.  Who cares if they are healthy, educated or well fed, housed and clothed.   This is the message of our upper crust to America via their mouthpieces in DC.  Wall Street is worth saving, because that’s where the money is, but no one else’s life or livelihood is.  If the economy for many must be decimated to save it for a few, if the lower two thirds of the economy must be dismantled so the upper third may prosper extravagantly, so be it.

    I hope the incoming Obama administration is taking notes.  It is more than just a change of political party needed to reform us.  There is an entire strand of upper crust thinking which must be squeezed from the system.  Unfortunately the TARP money, $350 billion, has already been hoarded, stolen or lost, given away with a wink and a nod to good old boy billionaires.  This program was purposely designed with no controls or accounting or accountability as a gift to the very incompetents who got us into this mess.  Placing the future of the country in such hands is nothing less than reckless endangerment.  This is a laissez-faire recovery of a laissez-faire system broken by the very people that we now are paying to fix it regulated by the same regulators who’ve never believed in regulation.   
    Obviously the Obama administration promises to be a great leap forward.  The country and even the world is hopeful.  Early signs are that his administration is top heavy with institutionalists and political types well versed in and used to operating within the existing political structure.  This doesn’t mean that they can’t change the existing institutions but it remains to be seen if Obama’s team has enough insight and objectivity to transform a system that has produced them.  
    Unfortunately Washington is still a bourgeois town.
    My point of emphasis here is this: it is always easier in the short term to do the wrong things and generally far, far more costly in the long term, than the right ones.  We have many politicians in Washington today who have built their entire careers cohering to this simple premise.  This entire culture must be changed.  So far the democrats, even with solid majorities in both houses seem weak.  They see less interested in fighting for what’s right than in appeasing those who are consistently wrong.  
    When Roosevelt transformed a broken government he managed to locate enough unique people from outside Washington’s orbit to leaven prejudices of those from within it.  It’s easiest to think outside the box if you weren’t in the box to begin to begin with.  Theoreticians from inside a structure are fine when imbued with real world experience and ideas from outside.  This is the charge given to the Obama administration.  As they are well aware, the election is not the end but the beginning.  The hard work starts now.  The window of opportunity which seems open so wide will close quickly.  If reforms don’t go deep enough a great opportunity will have been lost for another generation.

     When I was young there was a constant well-founded cry against the increasing commercialization of Christmas.  Of course, it was all to little avail as the commercialization has continued steadily.  Now, oddly enough, there are apparently those who think that Christmas is not commercialized enough.  Wal-Mart and others are criticized if they use the terms “season’s greetings” or “happy holidays” or any other variation other than Christmas.  They are accused of irreligiousness by trying to cut Jesus out of sales.  
    Naturally, their motivation in not using the word Christmas has nothing to do with religion but with extending the selling season and increasing sales over a long period of time.  Yet somehow some profess to believe that not mentioning the name of Christ in connection to increased holiday sales is disrespectful ro religion.  When I was growing up the concern worked the other way around.  
    To solve this debate perhaps it is time we finally eliminated all distinction between the two divergent strands of Christmas, the secular holiday story of Santa and the religious holy day of the birth of Jesus, and merge them together once and for all.

The Christmas Story Updated

 Once upon a time, at that time in Judea, a census decree was put forward to force citizens to their place of ancestry to have their heads counted.  The Roman sanctioned leader of Judea at this time was an evil man who had it on good authority but dubious justification that a child was to be born who would eventually be king and threaten the ruling dynasty.  He ordered all the newborns in Bethlehem to be slaughtered.  An angel warned Mary and her hubby and they went off to Egypt just after Thanksgiving late in the year of -1 to shop for holiday savings on Black Friday in the well stocked ancient malls and agoras of Egypt.
 Now up to this time in history there had only been Christmas eves passing uneventfully that never culminated in a Christmas.
 So when they returned just in time for Christmas to Bethlehem (which always looks in our imaginations a whole lot like a little town in New England) it was crowded and clogged with Christmas travelers and holiday shoppers and the Holiday Inns of the time were chocked full.  Finally, on the edge of town they found a seedy little place called the Little Manger Inn Motel.  It was filled with shepherds and humble folk who parked their livestock out front to graze.  There was much baaing, mooing and bleating of sheep, goats and camels which was what passed for evening entertainment in the days before cable. 
 To pass the time the simple shepherds were playing a popular local game to see who could throw the most junk on a cedar tree and get it to stick.  This led to the modern practice that we now call “trimming” the Christmas tree.  Joseph and Mary had washed their respective socks and hung them on the crude chimney without particular care.  Now we put our names on them and hope to have them filled with trinkets.  Some sort of early, rowdy Germanic polka band in the Mosey Inn Motel next door was rehearsing their next gig by singing something about O Tannenbaum (whatever that was), in response to which someone in one of the rooms on the other side of them rudely suggested at the top of their lungs that all they really wanted to hear was “Silent Night.”
 Suddenly, amazingly, though it was a very warm climate where such things rarely happened, it started to snow.  Then they all heard a clatter and commotion on the rooftop.  Rushing out to see, the shepherds were astonished as Santa Claus and eight tiny reindeer swooped down from the stars and landed there.  Soon down the chimney Santa Claus himself squeezed carrying a big bag full of toys and the little baby Jesus in swaddling clothes. He laid the little baby Jesus in the crib they had prepared for him.
 At this time the luminous sky was filled with heavenly angels singing Ave Maria, What Child Is This and excerpts from the Halleluiah Chorus.  Far below, hundreds of little elves suddenly appeared from nowhere and started high-fiving each other while a crooner stepped forward to sing Jingle Bells, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and I’m Dreaming Of A White Christmas.
 As for the crèche crashing Santa he was all “ho, ho, hoing,” around, doing his thing and laughing jovially while all watched approvingly as his belly shook like a bowl full of jelly.  There were cocktails and egg nogs and gifts galore from everyone’s shopping spree in Egypt’s stores.  Joseph got an ugly tie and cheap cologne and Mary got a pink bathrobe with matching fuzzy slippers.  The best gifts, of course and hasn’t it been this way ever since, went to the kid. 
Then three “kings” arrived as if by magic from the east, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, video games and myrrh.  They said they had followed a “star” to find the Little Manger Motel, perhaps even of the magnitude of Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or Madonna, depending on who was endorsing the store whose credit card they hadn’t yet maxed out.  Fortunately, due to bank thefts and the incompetence of the authorities an economic depression was sweeping across all the land which meant all the toys and gifts were on discount.  So everyone spent lavishly and a splendid time was had by all.  The only one who was excluded from the frivolity was that old Grinch Herod.
 They were all still happily singing all the old Christmas carols which, even 2,000 years ago started up just after Halloween, just as they do today… when an unfortunate thing occurred.  Some outsiders showed up and tried to wish everyone a happy Hanukah and erect an eight branched menorah, but that tradition never really caught on.  It was just too far fetched, right, like anyone really would believe there were any Jews present at the birth of Jesus?
 Then suddenly as he had come, Santa pushed off shouting.  “Now Dasher, now Prancer and Vixen! On Comet, On Cupid, on Donder and Blitzen!  Now dash away, dash away, dash away all!  Merry Christmas to all and all a good night.” 
At this Mary and Joseph and all the shepherds angels and elves came outside to wave goodbye and heard Santa say as he made one last pass over the Manger Motel, “Remember don’t forget all the post Christmas sales where there will be many, many good buys to help fuel our stagnant economy.” 
 And that’s how Santa Claus started Christmas and delivered Jesus to the world.  Our first Christmas present.  Then, after starting Christianity, Jesus rose from the dead and went to live with Santa at the North Pole which is where heaven is.  And always remember this simple lesson of Christmas; shop baby shop and never stop, stop, stop until you drop, drop, drop.
 This is the true meaning, the true miracle, the message of Christmas in the modern world.

1. A Duck by Any Other Name

     There are many ways to look at the presidential election just concluded.  But if it is whittled down to its basest element and seen as a simple contest between two people, which of course, is what all the best elections usually become, there is one salient point of difference on which the vote turned.
     In the metaphorical abstract this issue was not unlike two debaters who have a table between them with a duck on it.  Obama merely had to prove his central thesis that the duck was a duck.  McCain had to convince the crowd not only that the duck was not a duck (or perhaps a figment of their imagination) but that, in the bargain, Obama was a werewolf waiting for a full moon.  
    Where Obama’s case was logical and precise, McCain’s dilemma dictated the illogic of his entire campaign.  His argument was circuitous, one step from honesty and reality removed.  It was all sleight of mind and misdirection and in the end by never forcefully separating himself from the ugly duckling policies and lame duck presidency of George W. Bush, he was the one who was a dead duck on election day.
     This was not an eider/or proposition.  There were four things prior to the election that most observers identified as necessary to the success of McCain’s campaign.  1) Divorce himself from Bush and other unpopular policies, particularly those not essential to the core republican message.  2) Move forcefully and deftly to the middle of the political battleground for, clearly, whoever won the middle would win the race.  3) Define a new republican strategic theory which would appeal to the nation’s imagination.  4a) Allay and put to rest all concerns about his age (72).   4b) Underscore Obama’s inexperience as the centerpiece of a larger case against his fitness for office.  
     To the extent he tried, he succeeded at none of these four points.  In a fateful mistake he tacked to the right instead of the middle and did nothing of a policy nature to distinguish himself from Bush.  And when he chose as his running mate an untried governor of Alaska new to the national stage (Sarah Palin) he rather neatly effected a two-fer maneuver.   Her pick tied the last of these two points together and lost them both, bringing the issue of his age to the fore while undercutting the effectiveness of his insinuation about Obama’s inexperience.
     Obviously for any republican nominee to separate himself from the politics of George Bush would be problematic, but the issue had to be ruthlessly attacked, the sooner in the campaign the better.  Very early on, much as Obama did effectively in the primary to negate the race issue, McCain had to sever the umbilical to unpopular Bush era politics.  Undoubtedly this would have cost him support in his base in the short term which he would have had to work hard regain during the course of the rest of the campaign.  Hard as it would be to find the proper formula to separate his run for the White House from the worst of recent republican policies, it was political suicide to try to merely finesse them.  
    After all, Bush was sitting on an historic disapproval rate of over 75% and polls showed that 80% of Americans thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.  To have not done more to differentiate himself from Bush was a losing position.  Once he and his advisors decided to keep their own ducks in line while ignoring the largest duck in the room it placed them even more on the defensive than his campaign needed to be.  From that point on, having abdicated an intelligent strategic position, McCain was left with only bare tactics to lean on, tactics which by their nature became predictably more shallow and negative as the campaign continued.
    The simple math of the campaign was that a vote lost on the right, as it would have nowhere else to go, might be regained by election day; but a vote lost in the middle would be lost for good.  A vote lost on the right might eventuate in a no-show at the polls.  This would be bad but not as bad as a vote lost in the middle which would swing to Obama, doubling its cost to McCain.
     McCain had a difficult task.  He was trying to bridge a fifty foot chasm with a thirty foot bridge.  If he ran to the middle he would loose his base and if he shored up his base he would lose the center.  But his only chance, the only conceivable hope he had was to move to the middle and try to the bring the right along later.  Therefore a carefully conceived, artfully arranged speech, which he has shown he is capable of making – consider his graceful concession speech – appealing more to voters’ ideals and imagination than their prejudices might have done much to hold the center in play.  A better choice of running mate – Romney say – may not have energized the base the way Palin did, but have served him much better over the long haul to bring the right back on board.  
    To be sure no one could say for certain that even with a better and more coherent campaign strategy he would have won.  But to choose the path he did in the name of party unity was a sure loser.  The alternative danger was that by running to the middle he might have split the party and been blamed for it later.  But actually, piercing his party’s worst self-destructive illusions and reforming its failures would have been the most proper and far sighted path to take.  A realistic and cathartic approach would have made the Republican Party stronger sooner rather than as weak as it is today whit no real foundation to build on for the future.  Instead, McCain took the easy and opposite route.  He tried to shore up his base with substance and appeal to the middle orally, with smoke and mirrors, a tactic which has admittedly worked before, but that in this environment was doomed to fail.  
    McCain and his advisors (many of whom – tellingly – were from the Bush camp) decided to pretend that the duck on the table was not a duck at all and duck the duck issue entirely.  From this point on, like a quack doctor he loyally donned his best duck suit, with feathers, bills, webbed feet and all, and then tried to prove the ugliest Aflac ducklings of failed republican dogma were really swans.  Finally, in desperation, as his ultimate distraction, he tried to prove the duck was really a moose.   
    He and his team consciously tried to make the campaign about personalities rather than policies.  This was not only the least honest approach and the one least likely to succeed but the one that set them up for all their later mistakes and ultimate fall.  This decision entirely misjudged the seriousness of the electorate which for a change was more determined than ever before to actually pay attention and not to be so easily duped and seduced as before by Bush type irrelevancies and dishonest campaign rhetoric.  McCain even unwisely embraced bad Bush policies that he had previously properly rejected and in so doing harmed his own identity as a maverick.
    Finally, structurally hamstrung by his inability to effectively distinguish his economic and foreign policy from Bush’s, the housing credit crunch and resultant economic collapse was the predictable denoument to his hopes.  Though waged with impressive vigor, his campaign became a series of disconnected policies, bizarre references and imagery and unfounded allegations.  The poor duck, the central, symbolic gaping flaw at the core of his campaign, was left alone to quack and waddle and poop at will while McCain could only sputter that Obama must be a socialist with terrorist tendencies.
     Running as a great maverick, McCain, in his first decision exhibited none of the characteristics of maverickhood.  His timidly conceived campaign had less chance of survival than a lawyer duck hunting with Dick Cheney, where all the ducks get away and only the shyster gets shot. McCain was banking on the mistakes Obama might make to win.  But he didn’t make any.  Roosevelt was famously characterized as not a first rate intellect but a first rate temperament.  Obama, as it has played out, has both.
     Obama’s campaign, in contradistinction to McCain’s, never lost its focus.  In place of McCain’s infatuation with personality and negative campaign vilification, Obama offered a tired, restless nation hope and unification.  Of course, negative campaigning works on the fearful and the uninformed and there was a point in the campaign where Obama had to adjust his own tactics and become more polemical in defense of himself and in attack of McCain.  This was a calibration he maintained to the end of the campaign, sloughing off McCain and Palin’s scurrilous charges as easily as a man swatting away flies.  All the while the core of Obama’s campaign strategy was religiously maintained.  
     Quite simply this was: a duck is a duck is a duck.  John McCain looks like George W. Bush.  If he looks like a Bush, waddles like a Bush, poops like a Bush, quacks, talks, taxes and governs like a Bush; he is a Bush.  To this simple obvious charge McCain never had an intelligent reply, not at the beginning of the campaign nor through to its end.   The Obama refrain remained as devastatingly simple as it stayed remarkably consistent.  And McCain, because he was afraid of splitting the party, kept it together to no particular winning purpose and drove them all down to defeat together. 
 
2. The Intellectual Terrorists Among Us

Emblematic of this whole sordid, shambling sham of a campaign was Joe the Plumber.  He burst like a badly corroded pipe joint onto the scene by seeking to entrap Obama in a hypothetical.  He said he was thinking about buying a business for $250,000 and asked innocently if he could eventually be liable for taxes under Obama's plan.

First of all, he wasn't about to buy a business for a quarter of a million dollars.  Secondly, to buy a business for a quarter of a million doesn't mean you will see a quarter of a million in profit the first year which could be taxed.  If you think so you aren't fit to think about owning a business to start with.

So Joe loudly professed he was willing to avoid real tax relief now which might actually help him achieve a greater prosperity later, all to avoid paying an imaginary tax on imaginary future profits he will never see from an imaginary business he is never going to be able to afford to buy.

With logic like this, Joe the Plumber may be dumber than the stuff you find clogging your drain at home.  And yet this is the dupe John McCain put forward down the stretch as one of the leading lights of his entire campaign?  Anyone who really was paying attention knew that Joe was really proving Obama’s case more than he was McCain’s.  It makes you think that John may have thought the public were all as dumb and intellectually passive as Joe.

To boot, plumbing was a particularly dangerous metaphor for those clogging up the pipes of government to employ.  They had to know that sooner or later the public would just decide to say, “ah what the hell, let’s just flush 'em all.”

In the same conversation with Joe the Plumber, suspiciously caught on tape, Obama said something about “sharing the wealth”, as opposed obviously to the hoarding of it.  McCain seized on this phrase in a paroxysm of disgust at the thought of equitable distribution of wealth in our society.  His campaign immediately extrapolated this fairly innocuous thought into socialism and Marxism and God could only imagine what. 

That the increasingly unjust distribution of wealth was a losing proposition for republicans to emphasize in this wobbly economy entirely escaped them.  But then republicans assume that all Americans see money as they do.  They believe in a ratchet up economy where money only travels one way, meaning that what is ours is theirs but what is theirs is never ours. 

The current government bailout of Wall Street illustrates this point rather precisely.  Our leaders assume that whatever benefits big financial and corporate institutions benefits the country.  This is not true.  In fact what benefits the people of the country will necessarily benefit the banking and financial institutions but what benefits Wall Street will not necessarily benefit the general public.  Again, what is ours is theirs but what is theirs is not necessarily ours.  They go berserk at the though of a regular American receiving a well deserved dime of relief but hardly flinch at throwing billions at undeserving millionaires.

Their patriotic use of “we” in terms of money then, when fully understood, is always selective.  So “we” in fiscal policy always really just means them when “them” only means the most elite class of the very well to do.  And what’s good for “them” (which they call “we”) must be good for us even when it obviously isn’t.  But in their minds this is not a two way street because what is good for us, in their minds, is not necessarily good for them.  

Hence “we” in their governing jargon becomes an exclusionary concept which denies the majority equal rights with the few.  Until eventually, perversely, what’s good for us and even good for the country somehow becomes bad for them and their goals become enemies of the state.  So when Bush covets a surplus and says that it’s “your” money he really doesn’t mean “our” money, he means it’s his and his buddies, or “their” money and designs a tax cut accordingly.   This means that all “our” money is mysteriously transformed in the back of their minds foreign to what they say with their mouths into “theirs.”   And voila, republican tax cuts and bailouts always only provide “relief” for the wealthy and no one else.  It’s a rule of law.

So when Obama says he will repeal this tax “relief” Bush showered on the very rich, they say that he will raise “our” taxes, when they really mean he will raise “their” (meaning the very wealthy”s) taxes, even though Obama’s plan distinctly calls for tax relief for the vast majority of all other (than them) Americans, which is to say “us.”   In the republican lexicon “we” (meaning the vast majority of the people of the country) never quite seem to ever have a pronoun of our own, unless it is turned into a pejorative of “they” or “them”.  As in “they” or “those” people (meaning us) never work, cheat or inherit like “we” do and so don’t deserve the tax breaks, incentives and benefits that “we” (meaning them, of course) good Americans already have.

These specious cries raised against Obama about his being a closet Commie went hand in hand with other outrageous claims against him.  Since he once sat on a board in Chicago with a sixties era radical McCain inferred that he was infested with radicalism from this tenuous association.  Why he wasn’t similarly affected with the disease of conservatism from the pillars of conservative society who sat on the same board was never explained.  Nope, he apparently could be influenced only leftward and therefore became culpable after the fact for actions supported by this guy when Obama was a child decades prior to his even having met him.  That sixties radical virus must have been some potent stuff to lay dormant for decades just waiting to infect Obama. 

But that’s hardly all.  Obama also chose to attend grade school in Indonesia apparently for no other reason than in order to become indoctrinated in al Qaeda type radicalism decades before al Qaeda existed – perhaps in a Madrassa - though he wasn’t a Muslim and it really was just a grade school.  Part of the time it was a Catholic grade school at that.  Talk about damning.  For a guy they were saying was dangerously inexperienced this was rather precocious, wouldn’t you say, all this suspicious radical revolutionary activity Obama was engaged in before he’d even reached the age of ten?

All denials of his complicity in these activities he didn’t know anything about were like water off a duck’s back to Sarah Palin (so sensitive by nature that she alone among humans could intuit deep foreign policy experience from Russians flying tens of thousands of feet overhead in Alaskan airspace).  She accused Obama of not only being a socialist but of “palling around with terrorists” at the same time she was more or less otherwise patriotically engaged playing soccer mom and sleeping with a secessionist.

But later Obama, this godless Marxist, Weatherman, radical Muslim – pick one - somehow segued back to the Christian religion (no one ever claimed the path to radicalism was ever straight).  His enemies were forced to tacitly admit his Christianity only because they wanted to tie him to the fiery Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of the church he attended in Chicago.  This could have been a problem for Obama if he had expressed any sympathy for the more extreme views that Wright held, but he didn’t.  In the real world to secretly support an opinion and publicly reject it are generally held to be two entirely different things.  In the odd and wonderful world of republican robo calls, however, even the two most extremely opposed positions can be made to seem as one. 

Fortunately the republicans weren’t able to discover Herr O’bama’s teenage years in Belfast with the IRA or his activities with the Red Brigade or his close sympathy with Pol Pot, General Pinochet, Che’ and Ho Chi Min or the phone lines would have really been burning.

The way they were headed, if the election had lasted longer, it was only a matter of time before the McCain Palin campaign came out foursquare against all book learnin’, new fangled idears, whippersnappers in general and insisted not just on book burnin’ but computer confiscatin’ and maybe even a good old fashioned inquisition (perhaps with a waterboarding auto da fe’ at Guantanamo as a central element) before the end days came upon us.

 I recount this stuff not with pleasure but mainly in astonishment that a modern political campaign would seemingly place such stock in such largely self-refuting nonsense.  The shallowness of these bizarre charges is proof positive of the essential emptiness of republican campaign strategy.  The amazing thing is that the extreme right wing of the republican party even today is in lamentation that they didn’t do more of this crap sooner even though the evidence is that what they did of it backfired and sent the McCain camp into a long slow spiral of low farce and high ridicule.

3. The Right's Last Rites

     This shows the extent which extremely unctuous interests have made themselves to home in the republican enclave.  Once McCain gravitated to them they fatally tainted his campaign more than helped it.  Karl Rove and his cynical acolytes who ran the McCain campaign used to be on the extreme right of the Republican Party, now they are its mainstream.  The electorate seeking change came to regard the Republican Party as an anchor tied to McCain’s right foot and Bush policies a mighty weight hung around his neck.  
    Once he came to the conclusion that it was more important to appease the unappeasable right McCain simultaneously gave up all rights to the term maverick and all realistic hopes of winning the election.  A party which becomes dominated by its own extremes deserves the oblivion to which it will be consigned.  After all, these are the same people who voted for the like minded George Bush as their leader, savior and exegesis.  He was their perfect candidate and gave them exactly everything they have always said they wanted.  Ultimately the Republican Party repents nothing about the Bush years.
    Prior to the election, to check the lunacy gauge, always a fertile resource and  barometer for such a measurement, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh.  He was playing selected excerpted Jeremiah Wright jeremiads interspersed with his own random rantings until pretty soon I was unable to distinguish one harangue from the other.  I found myself wondering if it was more harmful for millions to be infected with low level dosages of daily Rush Limbaugh on national radio for hours on end or for a few hundred to hear Rev. Wright speak once a week.
    Clearly a dishonest indoctrinaire like Limbaugh, whose record of harm is not diluted by any of the good deeds, social work and salutary religious theology that Wright is known for in his community, is the far more destructive of the two.  Wright represents freedom of speech, Limbaugh the desecration of it.  His is unadulterated propaganda without objective truth, moral compass or redeeming social consciousness to guide it.  And Limbaugh is more nimble than some other of his ilk as nuance and substance escapes most other right wing talk show loonies like nimbus clouds dissipate on a sunny day.  
     Most people understand that engaging in bombastic denial of any truth and proven fact which does not fit a prewritten script or feed an inbred advantage would seem the least effective form and least admirable betrayal of “journalism”.  This is democracy turned into sheer demagoguery.  So it’s odd, given their our-side-right-or-wrong approach to “news”, that these paragons of propaganda blame the legitimate press for being “biased.”  
    For professional, bought and paid for, right wing bloviators to criticize real journalists actually trying to do their jobs well is a claim hard to take very seriously.  Somehow, to their weirdly distempered minds, to be always on the take, to engage in prejudices by design and avocation, to embrace duplicity as a career move, to always seek to mislead and spin and smear and misconstrue as a way of life and be permanently deformed with biases for personal profit, is somehow preferable to trying to be objective and occasionally let a bias slip, is a bit hard to swallow.
    Radio propaganda, after all, is a term of art that was originally applied to the Nazis and Commies only to be perfected by the modern operators on the right wing today who dominate AM radio.  It takes a rare breed of cat to want to emulate such infamous predecessors and seek to continue their nefarious work.  Because, really isn’t it the lowest form of life known to be a paid political liar and get wealthy doing it.  .  
    A quote I’ve seen attributed to Michelangelo goes: “The greater danger is not that we set our hopes too high and fail to reach them.  It is that they are too low and we do.”  There is no bar or standard lower than the one these people have set for themselves.  Streetwalkers often at least have the justification of economic necessity to explain their actions.  Those who engage in political duplicity as a way of life have no excuse.  Yet still, even given their severe defeat in the last election arch conservatives have been quick to say that the country is still with them!  It is a center right country they say, though the center is not static, and the country has just shifted to the left.
     What they fail to understand is that an ideologue, such as they are, is really just a longer word for idiot. They have value in their way, in their time, and when their time comes they may prove a valuable and necessary tool to swell a progress, start a scene or two.   But more fundamentally an ideologue is like a broken watch, right twice a day.  In the real world, generically speaking, an ideologue may be right once or twice a generation - tops.  What the Limbaughs of the world have not yet grasped is that their hour is up.  In six months time the country will have moved far beyond their minds’ limited capacity to comprehend and left them outstanding in an empty field of their own design long after the parade they were waiting for has passed by and already faded from view. 

The Triumph and Vindication
of the Warren Court, Racial
Integration and Multiculturalism
As seen in the Election of ‘08

    Following the seminal election of Barack Obama as 44th – president of the US the Republican Party has been disoriented and confused.  They wonder where they lost the great drive of the party of Reagan begun in 1980 and which dominated American politics for the last 28 years.  
     Partly their confusion lies in a misunderstanding of themselves.  They like to remember Reagan’s reference to a “city on a hill” and paint themselves optimists and farsighted.  But honestly the power of Reagan’s movement was always more negative and reactionary than positive.  They were for tearing down and rolling back more than building up and it was always easier to tell what and who they were against than what they stood for.  Their movement in its social aspects might be called the Mayberry Syndrome as it was designed to hold fast against the irrepressible tide of progress moving ahead in our society and reverses it back to a reality that never really was. 

     One of the greatest sociological movements in recorded history occurred over the course of the last century.  This was the changing status of women in our society and in many other parts of the world.  To illustrate, imagine a woman born in 1900 vs. a woman born in 2000.  The differences in horizons of opportunity facing these two women are so immense as to leave their positions nearly unrecognizable to each other.  A modern woman not only has the traditional role in society of motherhood and homemaker available to her but also many if not all of the opportunities traditionally open to men.
     To achieve this change took the whole of last century, evolutionary mostly, revolutionary at times but, though glacial to us, in terms of anthropology this transformation has occurred with lightening speed.  And of course, if one half of the nation radically changes its perspective and point of view about the society in which it lives it means the other half of society, the men, must change as well, but often with considerably more reluctance to do so.  
    By now there is no question as to the ultimate rightness of the women’s movement and no one openly denies it.  Yet even though it has been propelled forward with a certain momentum of inevitability and as a direct response to unprecedented technological changes which allowed it, its comprehensive nature has meant that many difficult adjustments have had to be made along the way.  It has been particularly difficult on the institution of marriage. 
    Consider that the last half of the twentieth century, and with increasing speed its last quarter especially, has been dominated by issues concerning gender.  Debates over the proper status of women in society, pressures of balancing work and family, birth control, sex education, family planning, the nature of feminism, equal pay and equal rights in the work place, glass ceilings that bar advancement, stalking by possessive partners and custody battles after divorce have dominated our courts and our public and political life for decades.  The worst of these problems seem to have been largely worked through but many still remain.  
    Republicans, though not able to oppose these changes explicitly, nonetheless tried to capitalize politically on the generalized angst that has accompanied the liberation of women.  They gathered all these disruptions vaguely together under a single rubric, labeled it “family values”, blamed liberals for all the troubles brought on by it and implied, with no evidence whatsoever, that they had better family values than everyone else.
    The emotional spike of their opposition to all this progress has been reproductive rights and abortion.  This is the ultimate visceral point of control of men over women and women over men.  On this issue they proclaimed themselves “pro life” as if those who disagreed politically with their solutions were suicidal and preferred the alternative.
    This has been the mad genius of the modern Republican Party.  Instead of trying to solve mutual problems, it identifies an area of uncertainty which exists in the population, oversimplifies it, applies a general name to it in slogans easy to understand and in vaguely expressed theologies accuse the other party of having done it and proclaim themselves opposed.  This has had the desired effect of polarization in order to kill all honest debate and allow it to consistently oppose any liberalization of our laws and policies.  
    Some of these sources of concern had to do with the decisions of the Warren Court to bar religious activities in public schools (which by default they thought might grant equal rights to minority and religious beliefs), support racial integration and encourage across a broad spectrum equalities that they came to call “multiculturalism.”
     Through an entire series of carefully coded phrases and crudely calibrated positions the republicans gradually built up as their “base,” a far “religious” right, a curious mélange of latter day know-nothings who were radically opposed to all change, intellectualism, science, culture and progress in society.  So Reagan and his followers spoke of “welfare queens” guns, the ACLU, prayer in school, small government, activist courts and lawyers, and tort reform to make it harder for the weak to question the mighty.       
    They also disparaged the increasing rights of blacks and other minorities in our society and promised to undo advances made and roll back the legal decisions which led to them.  They doubled down Nixon’s Southern strategy and made the democrats, just as Lyndon Johnson had suggested would happen, pay politically for their support for dismantling segregation.  
     Each and every one of these things spoke to a rear guard revolt against a rapidly changing world and a reversion toward a homogeneous provincialism, an ethnocentric, Christian and predominately white state which would docilely praise big money, status and hierarchy in our society.  This was a backward looking notion of our country, like the Mayberry of their dreams, totally out of touch with the reality of the changing world; devoted to regaining a world, which if it ever had existed, was fast and faster receding from view.  
     Naturally there were always visible cracks and noticeable fissures in both their logic and their coalition and as certain issues fell away and lost their punch (like prayer in school) others had to take their place (stem cell research, gay marriage) to engender the mobilizing outrage necessary to win most elections.
    Even so, remarkably, they were able to keep this predominately white biased, obeisance to wealth, exclusively Christian paradigm in place for over a quarter of a century.  In part, they were able to do this by always knowing exactly what buttons to push to reliably arouse the nervous undercurrent of societal, racial and religious unrest which exists just under the surface of any society to new levels of fear and outrage.  This manufactured outrage was what they came to depend on to get their supporters to go to the mattresses every two to four years in support of their candidates.
     But finally this regressive, revisionist movement, as such things will, wound itself tighter and tighter back upon itself, until in the George W. Bush administration it overreached, perverted its own message and engineered its own demise.  
    By 2004, like a drug addict looking for a new vein, the Republican Party had so far run out of steam that they inexcusably manipulated national security issues through fear of terror and war mongering to question the patriotism of their opponents, in order to shoehorn George Bush into an entirely undeserved second term.  This has brought us the xenophobic, narrow minded, forever partisan, greedy, self-aggrandizing, Manichean, sadistic, broke, anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, rights trampling administration we see before us today.

     Though John McCain, the loser in the last election of the Reagan revolution, tried to say he was of a different breed, separate from these degenerative tendencies of his party, he never really succeeded.  As his losing campaign wore on it soon began to play to the lowest common denominators of society and became more brutally crude and ignorant as it went. 
It spoke of Obama as “different” and foreign.  It impugned his American values and his Christian faith.  It said he was an intellectual and elitist.  It and its republican outriders called him a socialist, a Marxist or finally – amazingly – inferred he was actually a dangerous terrorist more in sympathy with our enemies than with us.  They said his supporters (the majority of the country as it turned out) weren’t even “real” or “good” Americans.  They culled and coded every racial, xenophobic, us-against-them, cultural warrior message they could from the dregs of the their arsenal of division, fear and hate to try to destroy him and arouse the cultural wars anew.
     Unfortunately for them the country has grown fully tired of their calcified vision of the world and outgrown all the artificial barriers they have erected between Americans and our own finer instincts.  The lesson of the recently concluded election could not be more certain.  Could there have been a greater repudiation of the Reagan Revolution than the election of Barack Obama?  
    Obama is multiculturalism personified, to the bone.  He is the race card and the Southern strategy reversed (Johnson’s eggs have at last come home to hatch).  He absolutely represents the finest regenerative traditions of sound immigration policy.  Before their very eyes with this last election, the republicans’ narrow, carefully crafted, constrained, bigoted, backward looking and single vantaged world has escaped the dams they had so conscientiously built up around it.  It can never be put back again.
     While it’s true that women didn’t break through the topmost glass ceiling, they did everything but.  The entirely manufactured cultural war is ended.  The ones who invented it have lost and been discredited.  The motive force of Reaganism, its raison d’etre, its dark power, the engine which provided it with the torque that turned its gears, has failed.  
     With this election, the long, belligerent dissonance of the Reagan Revolution has ended on an harmonious chord of equal parts resolution and repudiation.  Its cultural war has brought nothing noticeably good with it, no domestic achievements, no memorable legislation, no great goals established and few ideals upheld.  At base it was a movement that was divisive, defeatist, backward looking, obstructionistic and ridden with economic injustice.  Even the things it said it wanted to achieve, like smaller government, ethical reforms, and a better focused use of tax dollars, it has dramatically failed to bring about.
     The reason for the republican failure is twofold.  On the one side they indulged in pretended angst even into actual ignorance.  They put their party and one part of the country ahead of all the nation’s long term interests and sought blindly and even irrationally to kill any program, even good and necessary ones, which didn’t service them politically or financially.  
    On the other side the real movers and shakers of the party were actively trying to erect a new plutocracy atop our old egalitarian democracy.  Now the first of these has lost its force and the second has eventuated in a financial collapse not seen since the Great Depression.  Meanwhile, not one of the long term problems the nation will face as it heads into this century has been effectively addressed and most have been allowed to grow much worse over the period of this republican domination.  Quite a record on which to hang their hats.
    
    But this is not meant to be an essay about specific policies or whether Obama, who has not even assumed office, will be a successful president.  It is about the deeper movements of our society and the subtler ebbs and flows which motivate nations.  It is about the irrepressible drive of our country for greater openness and fairness and a more perfect union.  It is about our uncanny gift of reinvention.  These things may be delayed for a time with great and costly effort but never ultimately denied.
    This is why the republicans seem a little lost now, a touch fatigued and beleaguered.  Provincialism, prejudice and ignorance are indulgences we can no longer afford.  Any who want to try to return to Reaganism will discover it a shell of itself and will not be able to figure out where it went and what the furor and passion was all about when it was in its prime.  Reaganism is dead.  It’s a limp rag.  All that it has most vehemently denounced has come to pass.  The religious right was wrong.  Nothing that they sought to achieve has occurred and separation of church and state is still the cornerstone of our democracy.
    As a last gasp some diehards now sniff and claim smugly that the nation is still a center-right country.  Of course this is an entirely meaningless canard because the center is not static.  Elections set the compass points that mark the new, true center and a new administration must ratify it by means of their success in putting forward their policies and in consolidating their hold on power.  Naturally, there is a partisan right of center and a partisan left of center but the center itself in the election of ’08 has clearly moved five or ten degrees to the left.  It would be wise if republican leaders could acknowledge this, even if only to each other. 
    The recent election has proved racial integration a wonderful success. In our increasingly complex and genealogically mixed, single parented society which Obama perfectly represents, the future is here and alive.  Bans against prejudicial, or state sponsored or mandatory religious practices have been consistently upheld by our courts.  Roe v. Wade is still law.  The women’s movement is irreversible in its strength and potent as ever.  Multiculturalism is alive and well and it is the law of the land.  
     Regretfully perhaps but Mayberry too, is dead.  They built an information superhighway through the middle of it.  Sheriff Andy and Opie, I see on the internet, (and Fonzie, too) all voted for Obama.

What’s in a Title

    It’s always questionable to rely on a single issue to illuminate a larger insight.  But at a bookstore recently I saw side by side on display two books – one by Obama and one by McCain.  Without having read either I was struck by the difference in the titles.  Obama’s was “Dreams From My Father”.  McCains, “Faith Of My Fathers”.  Seemingly similar but actually quite different.
     Of course, publishers have a say in the titling of books and perhaps there was no great thought given to these titles and they were chosen off-handedly.  But for the sake of argument, assuming each took care in choosing the title of their book, what do such subtle differences mean?
     Take McCain’s first.  “Faith Of My Fathers” implies a received wisdom, a shared truth, a solidity of structure and purpose, along with a certain reciprocity demanded of the recipient of the gift.   It may even imply a certain separation or exclusion from others that might represent a proud superiority from and towards others who lack such a template as an inheritance. This “faith” becomes a part of the faithful’s gene code, at the same time it’s a birthright and a charge received and an ideal and standard of behavior to be lived up to. 
     The title of Obama’s memoir on the other hand, “Dreams From My Father”, is a very similar but yet entirely opposite configuration of the same parental inheritance.  The word “dreams” is unspecific, ethereal, expansive and redolent of openness and opportunity.  It is aspirational as well, though neutral and undemanding of the recipient, as in goals achievable but as yet unrequited.  It is more winsome.  
     The “faith” of McCain’s book is something one deepens into and comes to understand and fulfill gradually.  In his case, in a military family, it resonates of soldierly honor, dark oak rooms, long marbled hallways of responsibility and long tours of duty, discussed at length in later years among the wisps cigar smoke and reek of tradition before the fire at the club.  
     The dreams of Obama are those one opens out to, world wide and open ended and far less specified with no markers or particular achievements implied.  Faith is a relatively closed system, dreams are open to the sky.  Dreams are all open fields of endeavor and wide, unlimited horizons.
     Even the article “from” resonates differently in Obama’s book title than the “of” in McCain’s.  “From” in this context implies no responsibility or reciprocity but is more of a bequest, an inheritance that one receives and may choose to accept or not.  As the dreams of his father are more “from” him than “of” him, though these two terms are not always mutually exclusive, it is an inheritance more in a transactional sense, an optional beneficence, as to that of a spectator, or an objective observer of his own inheritance, which he may then choose to accept, fall short of or rise above without particular expectation or recrimination from the giver.
     The “of” of McCain’s book is genealogical, a heavier responsibility from which one cannot escape no matter how one might try and which one risks ignoring at the expense of a failed life.  There is no sense of onus in Obama’s life, while McCain’s is filled with it.
     The term “father,” singular in Obama’s book, is also illustrative in its differences to McCain’s conception.  It gives the sense of circumscribed individuality, a uniqueness, a singularity of detail of Obama’s particular existence.  This is opposed to McCain’s concept of “fathers” plural, indicating a long line stretching back into a distant misty past.  McCain indicates he is a smaller part of a much larger movement, or faith, which he must conform with and carry on as it has been carried on before him.  The long line must remain unbroken, it seems, or it may die out, hence the responsibility inherent in the formulation.  This is a very conservative notion in every respect of the word conservative.
     Obama’s reference to dreams from his “father,” singular, is a statement of supreme individuality and singular ambition, of a man who stands alone on the hilltop with only his own ability to transcend the norms that McCain is beholden to, and achieve things (or not) never before seen, or dreamed by himself.  There has been no leg up from familial connections for Obama.  He is one who stands or falls entirely on his own merits.
     In short Obama is more of a progressive, filled with optimism, promise and high intellectual achievement and innovation.  McCain’s is a life of effort, determination, grit, whose educational values are acquired by rote.  Obama looks ahead for inspiration.  McCain looks back.

The run to the middle

     The extreme charges and countercharges which each side’s partisans level against the other are unacceptable caricatures and not true to life, of course, but even without that, it is easy to see the visceral divide which this election has tapped into due to the absolutely divergent character types of the opponents.  The smooth talking Obama, to the fearful and unimaginative, seems unmoored by tradition to the past.  While the blunt McCain, the child of tradition; to those energetic, youthful and fed up seeking change, seems hopelessly embedded in the past.
     Therefore, it is fascinating to note, that true to the long standing tradition in American politics of running to the middle in elections, how much they have each tried to gravitate to the opposite of their inherited tendencies.  Therefore, McCain insists on his maverick nature, his youthful rebelliousness and the non-conservative, risky side of his nature.  While Obama, to the contrary, emphasizes his safeness, his regularity, his consistency and his conservatism.  Both emphasize the part of their personality that their upbringing denied them or at least does not expose to the public.  Part of this is stylized, of course, a political appeal to a broader range of the American electorate.  But surely much of it is also a yearning to transcend their own beings.
     Because, like the book titles, their natures cannot be hidden no matter how their policies try to disguise them.  Obama, for instance, has an intelligence and ease of adaptability that immediately adopts forms and formulations which might be thought to be naturally foreign to him as a way to disarm opposition and fit in.  McCain, more of an intellectual plodder, as someone trying to be just like everyone else, looks (at least while campaigning) as if he’s actually physically trying to escape himself, to jump out of his own skin.  
    For purposes of this election, Obama’s flexibility (even apparent in his loose limbs), his adaptability, his fluidity, his mental agility and the effortless grace and ease with which he has moved toward the middle ground has proven superior and more comforting than McCain’s.  McCain’s greater rigidity in upbringing (also evident in his tight smile and ill at ease demeanor) as well as the personal responsibility he thinks he bears to succeed and prove himself, have made his wild and laborious leaps toward acquiring the same middle ground seem herky jerky, halting and essentially derogatory.
     On the surface, it isn’t hard to see which attitude this election cycle would most reward.  To a large degree, to the dismay of the more wonkish, perhaps it’s on this deeper, more symbolic level that this entire election has really turned.  After all, to an electorate begging change McCain must convince people that he will represent them.  This is obviously not only foreign to his politics but to his very nature.  Obama is already there.  He is change itself.

The tribal nature of elections
 
    Still Obama’s election will not be easy.  All elections, especially generational ones, are essentially tribal.  The young pretender must take on the representative of the old guard with the weapons of their choosing and beat them at their own game.  It is inherently unfair as the old guard has had decades to rig the game in their favor.  The crowd knows the setup is rigged against the challenger but doesn’t care.  They are singularly unsympathetic to weakness or failure.  There is no room for whining.  In politics, only success succeeds. 
    In the Aught Eight election there are three significant headwinds against Obama.  
    One, generational change.  Older people are always leery and unsure of the new world they see unfolding around them.  They always have a natural reactive reluctance to give the keys of the car of the nation to the next untested driver representing the next generation.  
    Two, the unfathomable racial issue.  This is a deep subcurrent to all our history.  That Obama may be thought of as foreign or irreligious – allegedly – are due entirely to warmed over racism.  If his father, whom he hardly knew, was Irish or Italian or Japanese, and his name Timmy O’Brien or Lou Costanza or Itchy Osuma, it is hard to see how this would be an issue.  Such phony questions are all about race.  
    Three, this is a fight against the long entrenched power and might of the Republican Party.  We have seen it arise in all its furor, jealousy and viciousness in extreme defense of itself.  Such entities never cede power lightly and they have thrown every scurrilous charge but the kitchen sink at the challenger until it would seem they must surely soon run out of appliances.  They may as well someday be known as the flying toaster campaign for all the saliency of most of the arguments raised against Obama.
 
    To counter this however, at Obama’s back, is all the vigor and fresh air of a new generation, prodding change, and promising a much needed and long overdue overhaul of policies.  (No one, not even McCain who has been a party to it, dares suggest the system has not grown corrupted.)  This gale of change may well be enough to blow the pretenders out of Obama’s way.  John McCain is decidedly upwind of these changes, behind on all three of these winds that represent the status quo (puffing as hard as he can) and downwind from the cleansing wind of change at Obama’s back.
 
How the Internet saved America

     Over many years and many election cycles the press, our traditional guarantor of truth, has been tamed and regularized, beaten down, bought up, become jaded and even occasionally been intimidated.  Its resources have become stretched too far do to declining revenues and increased competition.  Because of this democracy has flattened out, polarized and become simplistic and patronizing to the public.
     Over many years, as well, the republicans have built up an elaborate support system of their own (and a tear down and smear factory system against their enemies) consisting of think tanks and talk show hosts, those kill switch tyrants of the airwaves, and mind numbingly dumb propagandists, dirty tricks hangers on, etc., to smear, concoct, libel, set false trails and create dense and elaborate theories of justification for whatever outrage they may be engaged in; in order to confound a challenger and help their anointed candidate.  
    As a cumulative result of both these tendencies our political campaigns have devolved into increasing shallow and cruelly vindictive, stylized, flag waving exercises in stupidity, fear and prejudice. All The disparate sources responsible for the degradation of our political campaigns, and therefore our government, have all supported by a vast infrastructure of money.  
    All of these things in combination (and none of it to any discernable good) have compounded together to make the republican party a very difficult party, structurally, to overcome.  And it is above all money, that has been the glue they have come to depend upon more than words or policy to ram their quadrennial electoral engine home.  This extended body of support is the republican’s inbred advantage and it is why they always been adamantly opposed to any and all campaign finance reforms and why they are very difficult to beat in elections at which they have become masters.  
    But like a ramrod straight, parade ground general who looked good in person, trained his troops to a fault, looked resplendent on a horse with a chest full of medals gleaming in the sunlight, but couldn’t fight a lick, the republicans look great in elections, but never bother governing as well as they campaign.
     Against this war machine the influence of the internet cannot be exaggerated.  Obama is a gifted politician, wise beyond his experience and years, who has run an extraordinarily good campaign.  But the internet has neutralized or beaten every one of these built up electoral advantages it has taken the republicans decades to construct.
     So far, the internet cannot be bought or intimidated (those attempts will come later), it cannot be owned by the few.  Like Guttenberg’s press it has become the great leveler.  It is the great slayer of shibboleths, the fearless piercer of bubbles, the eviscerater of the proud egos among us, the enemy of dirty bought and paid for propagandists and a fact checker of the controlled and jaded press corps.  The imbalancing, anti-democratic hold that big money and influence peddling and special interests has wielded over our political system still exists but has been nearly cancelled out by the energy of the internet.  It has been lessened by the ascendancy of the internet to raise vast sums of money, not from the rich exclusively but from the small donations of many.  
     Interestingly, in the way Franklin Roosevelt used radio and John Kennedy used TV, the progressive democrat Obama has been the first to exploit the internet.
     Naturally, like any purely technological advancement it is morally neutral and will not be always used for purely egalitarian purposes.  Like any new force arising on the political landscape it must be watched and guarded.  But thus far it has proven to be a great equalizer and a force for increased democratization in our society and the world.  Given the direction we have been lately headed future times may look back on this election and dub this the time the internet came of age and saved democracy.

     Time is the only true crystal ball we have, it will soon reveal all.

Part 2

   From Washington to Wall Street
      Anti-Government Government  
         & The New Welfare Queens

     Every nation faces pivotal turning points.  But only twice before in our history as far as I know has such a significant part of the electorate been willing to turn its back on truth and competence and harm the public health of the nation to serve its own selfish interests by holding to power they clearly no longer deserve.  To win at all costs the republicans seem willing to stoop to any political smear and to salt any wound with campaign lies in order to poison the very grounds of democratic debate so that true debate may never arise to challenge their authority again. 

1. The first instance of willful single party nullification in America was the democratic party of Andrew Jackson’s policy prior to the Civil War previously referred to.  That policy was built around a massive injustice and untruth – that slavery was an economic good and moral necessity.  That led to the perverse principle of states’ rights (and eventually to secession) which outweighed allegiance to the nation and to the public good.  Knowing the intellectual and moral thin ice they were on, in order to protect this corruption at the heart of their policy, like thorns arrayed around a rotting, smelling rose, the democrats in that day opposed any centralization of government power which threatened even obliquely to challenge the principle of slavery.  
     This made the democratic party prior to the Civil War an essentially deconstructive and nihilistic political entity.  Like the republican party of today it was an anti-government government.  So fearful were they that any effective utilization of government power, from building roads to the establishment of a central bank, would represent a potential threat to the discrete outrage of slavery they wished to protect, they tried to cut the sinews and dismantle the power of Washington.  Because this was taken to such extremes that compromise was impossible, it eventuated in the founding of the republican party, the election of Lincoln and the American Civil War.

2. Founded in the throes of the crisis just referred to, once triumphant, the republican party eventually grew fat and heavy in that power.  Republican economic predatory practices multiplied and became entrenched throughout the gilded age and the phony gay nineties.  Reform movements like the stillborn Populist Party and the republican reformer Theodore Roosevelt couldn’t begin to turn the tide against the ensconced vested interests of their day.  This era grew into the high greed and blatant excesses of the twenties - the churlish mantra of the time being ‘the business of America is business” - until, like today, big money, big churches and bad politicians unified in a concerted effort to gut regulation and funnel all the wealth and resources of the nation to the money managers and robber barons at the top of the economic scale.  
    This rendered (again, just like today) the economy obesely top heavy, at the same time fatally weakening the resiliency of the middle class and poor until eventually the economy, when as it were, looked down from the great heights to which it had risen without proper supports, had its confidence pierced by panic and the entire structure collapsed.  This gave us the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and the rise of the modern democratic party.
 
    The situation we find ourselves in today has elements of both these crucial junctures from our past.  There is a similar insular self-destructive urge apparent in a faction of the republican party of today that values the inbred ideals of the party far more than the traditional interests and ideals of the nation.  The party of Reagan has become, at its end, just like the party of Jackson, a nihilistic, anti-government government that puts its short term ideology above those of long term national interest.  Even the duties of government they technically agree to be necessary to our nation (like the military, FEMA, FDA, and the SEC to name a few) have been hollowed out in practice by greed, intentional underfunding and willful, ideological mismanagement.  
    Once they had proclaimed that government was no good and impossible to run, the enemy of the public good, they have had no drive to improve it, only an incentive to continue to make it worse.  This goes far to explain the relentless drive to mediocrity they have championed.  At this, and at this alone, they have been wildly successful.  Until, as our final comparison, from James Buchanan at the fag end of the Jackson era to George W. Bush, who may well be the last president of the Reagan era, we have two presidents who for essentially the same reasons are destined to be united in history as two of the worst presidents in our experience.
     Though we will certainly not experience a new Civil War we are at the present time teetering on the very brink of a financial crisis not seen since the Great Depression.  Here too, since the republicans have been a deconstructive party, given their unalloyed allegiance to moneyed interests, they have yoked the interests of the people to the interests of Wall Street and big money and slipped the reins necessary to draw us back from the edge of our own destruction.
     The lessons here should be obvious.  As the current world wide credit crunch threatens to wreck our economy and destabilize the world economy with unpredictable ramifications, these politicians’ irrational anti-government bias, deregulatory fervor and pandering sensibility toward the interests of big money has left no one more responsible for these problems, both from omission and commission, than these same politicians who are now tasked with the responsibility of reforming the corrupt operations they created.  
    In this respect, Wall Street took its cues on corruption from the kings of corruption in Washington, not the other way around.  The income redistribution upwards mindlessly championed by the republicans has been mirrored in the board rooms of our corporations and regulatory agencies.  Just like oil companies, these corporations and financial institutions, siphoning profit and investment from their own corporations the way congress was siphoning solvency and investment from the national treasury, knew that whatever they did, however often or blatantly they screwed the public, that their buddies in congress and the White House would look the other way.  This nullification of their responsibilities to their own firms and clients and shareholders was symbolic of the lack of accountability and of responsibility many of our public servants have to the public whom they treat like servants.  
    Like Coolidge and Hoover, Bush and his cronies have served as devout obstructionists of the public good, refusing to help government stop the rampant speculation, irreversible environmental harm, rapacious executive wage scales, golden parachutes that reward incompetence and the ever accumulating debt which made the impending financial collapse inevitable, in the same way the democratic party of James Buchanan gutted government and rigged the courts to allow the disease of slavery to continue to spread unchallenged.

     The thirst for personal gain by republicans today has taken such a virulent position in their party that it has replaced all else.  Today many republicans are offended when money is used for anything but for the pandering of gifts to the rich.  Some republican propagandists even ridicule charity and deride generosity as anti-Christian.  On the contrary, greed and selfish self-interest they promote as the height of a sort of machismo patriotism and pseudo religious piety.  
    They have corrupted the simple, more efficiently designed, closed system of tax money going from the public to the government and then back as services to the public’s benefit.  Wherever possible they have outsourced the traditional responsibilities of government to politically connected companies without adequate bidding, effective quality control or even rudimentary oversight, often duplicating responsibilities or allowing government programs to atrophy in the meantime, adding another unnecessary step or two to these programs while compounding costs over and above what they would have amounted to if merely done in-house.  
     Instead, they now insist that public money must never actually be spent for the benefit of the public or tax money go to the benefit of the tax payers.   They say it must be recycled through politically wired middle men and corporations (even in life and death situations like health care and Iraq) and back into the hands of the wealthiest of us so their patrons may extract very private profits from these erstwhile “public” expenditures before they ever reach the public’s hands.
    Republicans call these “free market” inducements, though they are obviously just predatory corporate welfare and extraneous costs that victimize the taxpayer exponentially, getting them both coming and going.  On the other hand, tax money spent to provide health care or ensure social security or as subsistence payments to the weakest of our citizenry, the republicans of today, with exquisite sensitivity and selectivity, dismiss as socialistic, and an “extravagance” somehow injurious to the poor who depend on them for their sustenance.  
     Concurrently, a seven hundred billion dollar (as an initial ante) bailout of Wall Street which their careless deregulation and decided lack of oversight did so much to make necessary, they hypocritically deride as unfair to the same humble tax payers they despise and caricature as freeloaders.  Yet at the same time they are secretly and indefensibly trying to continue to abet the depredations of the same corrupt corporate interests they are pretending to criticize with craven little baubles like additional capital gains tax cuts.
     Since apparently the republicans consider themselves part of a New Aristocracy rather than our old democracy, they dismiss as parasites and begrudge tax dollars to all those who are only down on their luck primarily due to the predatory practices of the unregulated corporations these politicians have promoted with our tax dollars. They praise the same Wall Street business interests and political patronage lobbyists who have been so assiduously selling us out as omniscient entrepreneurial geniuses even though they are more glued to the teat of big government handouts than a middle aged 300 lb. baby to its poor overworked mother struggling beneath him to get free.  
     Along the same lines (which render the wealthy double and triple dippers at the public trough, squeezing out the public which is left to fight over the leftover slop), even though the wealthiest Americans already pay the least taxes, their representatives in Washington continue to leave no stone unturned, or no public service undiminished, or no deficit unenhanced trying to relieve their non existent tax burden from their backs.   The middle class and poor, meanwhile, more burdened with individual and household debt than at any time in our history, are increasingly reduced under the onerous weight of the very injustices the republicans are anxious to increase.  
    The only difference between these wealthy individuals and giant corporate multinationals and the “welfare queens” once made infamous by Reagan is that they are a drug habit that costs us many, many more billions to support than the poor ever did or possibly could.  The only real difference between these two groups being that the rich can afford to offer sweet bouquets of campaign kickbacks and golfing junkets to the politicians that the poor and middle class cannot.

     This, of course, encapsulates in practice their infamous “Trickle Down” theory of economic stimulation which only considers the already proven wealthy worthy of more wealth and worthy of receiving and managing the nation’s fiscal largess.  The economic formula its partisans employ, without any particular evidence to support their theory, works something like this: money invested at the upper end of the economic ladder is always worth more than the same investment in the lower end.  Or, millions of dollars given to a few thousand wealthy people is far more stimulative to our economy than a few thousands of dollars given to millions.  This implies that money is not a fungible commodity and is theory that clearly stands directly opposite the truth.  
    “Flow Up” economic policy through investment and aid to the underprivileged is far more conducive and stimulative to the general good, and eventually even conducive to the health of the wealthy, than “trickle down” economic policy, which merely starves the nation of its just revenues and crushes for millions any real opportunity for advancement.  Investment at the upper end of the economy, like indiscretions done in Vegas stay in Vegas, largely stay at the upper end of the economy.  Investment at the bottom end causes money to rise of its own measure and eventually reach the upper end of the investment cycle.      
    Stimulation of the entire economy in a Flow Up economy is guaranteed.  In a Trickle Down economy such widespread stimulation is generally limited. By giving a hand up to the weakest and most vulnerable of our citizens, we provide an investment in the foundation of our economy on which a stronger economic edifice may be built in the future.  Trickle Down consumes the wealth of our past others have provided through hard work while offering no guarantee of the hard work necessary to ensure long term future growth in return.
    Yet the republican party of the last lost twenty eight years has only believed in living off the land, adding more gaudy penthouses to the top of our economic skyscraper while simultaneously allowing the neglected foundation of its core structure to grow ever weaker and debt ridden.   It is hard to either respect or fathom such incompetence and shortsightedness and greed as this.
     The republicans have reneged on their deal with the people.  The optimism and promise of Reagan has been lost by these pretenders of the public good.  Put aside for a second the unfairness of their tax cuts, which always go to benefit the already well to do at the expense of the yet to have and never can hope to see. For decades the republicans have pretended that cutting taxes is a good deal for the American people even though the money they “save” us with one hand is merely added to the federal deficit with the other which will have to be paid down at ruinous interest rates and much greater costs later.  This is not savings but the worst kind of expenditure, deferred costs, waste and debt.  It is bait and switch, a shell game, a pyramid scheme on the taxpayers.  It is a borrowers’ economy they have created, a sordid embrace with the devil of permanent decline.
     This is not even “supply side” economics since its benefits go only to a small proportion of one “side” of the population – the top.  It is “another day older and deeper in debt” economics.  It is easily the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on a free people by its own government. 

     So, as inevitably as a lead parachute with a fist sized hole in it these republican fiscal policies have led us first in slow motion, then ever faster toward an approaching violent crash with earth.  In this way the republicans of today are exactly like the democratic party of Andrew Jackson.  As one examines their popularity and their sources and cynical abuses of power, the parties of Jackson, Hoover and Reagan have been almost identical in their destructive approach to government.  
    Each, to enhance their party’s power, steadily exhausted their country in pursuit of their own failed policies and prejudices, which were designed more to hold and expand their own power than to utilize it properly on behalf of the general public.  They each plundered the nation of its resources, each cynically worked to keep the people divided against each other for their own purposes and each eventually burrowed the country into a bottomless pit from which they offered no clear extrication.  Yet, still, even now, even with all the evidence of their failure around us, the republican party of today is profoundly unrepentant and seems gleeful at the opportunity to destroy the functionality of government in America further.
     The naked intention of these policies has slowly emerged into the open and simultaneously reached its nadir with our current president, George W. Bush.  He has served as perfect cipher to all the worst and weirdest ideas of each group of his supporters and amalgamated them into a perfectly dreadful brew of fiscal profligacy and anti-democratic demagoguery. He has simply tried to bludgeon the American people with the worst of these ideas without regard to democratic principle, tradition or balance of power.  He has intentionally tried to uncheck the checks and imbalance the balances which have always held our nation together.  He has tried to unhinge the democratic pendulum and ripped apart the fabric of consensus government in order to draw absolute power to himself and make himself into exactly the type of tyrannical chief executive the constitution was carefully written to prevent. 
     Why?  Because the republicans had reached the limits of what power was available to them under our laws.  The consolidation of unilateral power in executive was necessary in order to continue the consolidation of money and power into republican hands without the troublesome and balancing and unpredictable intermediary of representative government able to intrude to prevent it. At heart the Bush administration, using terror as an excuse, was a crude attempt to disenfranchise democracy from any effectual control of or check on their actions.  They used their power not to help the country but only to increase their power over the country.  If they had been competent enough to keep the public’s trust it is hard to see where their actions would have reached a natural end.  Certainly they would never have stopped on their own due to any sense of propriety or self-restraint or ceded power back to the people once they had usurped it.  
     This is a cautionary tale.  Just because this virtual coup of our democratic principles failed does not mean that it wasn’t close to succeeding.  The precedents of autocratic and unilateral behavior the Bush administration tried to impose on our government must be carefully and thoroughly discredited and disavowed or, rest assured, they will live inside our system like a cancer and in a time of structural weakness begin to spread again.  After all, ultimately, the Bush administration was never reined in by law or by congress or even by the courts but by their own ineptitude.  
    In fact, one of the architects of their insidious power grab, David Addington, was quoted as having said that they would continue to grab authority until someone made them stop.  Clearly this was one of the most dangerous moments in US history, no less terrifying or destructive just because their own incompetence finally undercut their own pretensions.  
     Amazingly the republican party, from its principle representatives in Washington to its foot soldiers across the land, has blindly supported even the very worst of these policies with nary a flinch of conscience.  From the Bush administration’s sordid beginning with the conservatives on the Supreme Court abrogating a free election to elevate the candidate they preferred to office; to rigged intelligence leading us into misbegotten and mismanaged warfare; to torture and the illegal wiretapping of American citizens; to bizarre signing statements unilaterally pretending to negate congressional authority; to ludicrous claims of executive privileges which don’t exist in law and have never been previously claimed; to constant cover-ups, lies, scare mongering and abuses of authority; to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the republican party has fiercely supported it all.  
    From their dreadful foreign policy, their pork bloated spending bills packed with extravagant favors, their ignorant anti-science and anti-intellectualism, and all their autocratic excesses, the republican party of today has consistently placed its own interests above those of the nation, all while working only two days a week for a scant half the year.  Seldom have so many worked so little to achieve so much harm.  For all of this the republican party will be remembered over the last eight years of the Reagan era as the worst functioning political party in American history.
    Particularly now, when we are the world’s only superpower, the scale of their irresponsibility and betrayal of our ideals is breathtaking, as their mistakes and errors in judgment are not just our own but are visited on the whole world.  The great power this generation of leadership has been given, accumulated at such great cost, effort, diligence and sacrifice over many generations by Americans whose greatness we revere, has been treated like a dog to be kicked, chained and starved.  Our great inheritance has been used and squandered casually, profligately, callously, carelessly and even vindictively for small purposes by small minded men and women with nothing of the care, responsibility, wisdom and effort it took to accumulate it.  
    But this scheme against the country, the so-called conservative "agenda” (apparently distinct from any American one) has about run its course, we hope.  You can tell a movement has reached its downward spiral when its supporters are known primarily not for what they are striving for but mainly by who or what they are ranting against.  Even Reagan used part of his message to preach optimism and say what he believed in.  Yet the McCain - Palin campaign only speak the language of fear, character assassination, vituperation, terrorists and “pro” American parts of the country vs. some unmentionable alternative part.  They look at this nation as a country of winners and losers rather than as equals.  When basically, all they seem mainly to be against is losing power.   As Mr. McCain’s supporters become increasingly shrill and delusional, his campaign becomes increasingly dirty and shallow.
     George W. Bush, the so-called “uniter”, has actually practiced the politics of deception and division.  His would-be successor John McCain, has wholeheartedly adopted his win at all costs by all means necessary tactics even as he has aligned himself with many of the same political operatives who were privy to and responsible for the poisonous policies of the last eight years he now pretends to decry.  So when John McCain - arrayed in his new foul fitting, faux fowl, fox suit - claims he is going to Washington to root out and roust all the opportunists who have created all the problems the country now faces it sounds more like the leader of the old foxes sent to determine what has happened to all those dead chickens.
     But, it’s too late as here in the late great Election of Aught Eight, all those imaginary chickens seem to be coming back home to roost against them.  Where did they expect they would go?

PART I

 Political Compass Points:
   True Left and True Right    

     Ask most people what single characteristic defines the difference between republicans and democrats today and they will say that republicans favor small government and democrats prefer large.  But this difference, though prevalent recently, is much more a symptom of the politics of the times than a fundamental of enduring distinction between the two parties.  The real difference between them, the only one that has remained constant from the beginning of the republic to now, is the method, means, acquisition and disbursement of the resources of the nation as it pertains to the government’s management of taxes and expenditures and natural resources.  In other words, it is about the nation’s money and who gets it. 
     All the contentious social and regional and ethical issues are generally just cover and tactical ornamentation for the core debate at the center of our politics.  Obviously with an impending financial collapse at hand the money divide has been pushed ever more obviously into the forefront of our political debate. 
     The money divide between the two parties may be most distinctly seen, historically, by comparing the presidency of Andrew Jackson with the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  
     Both these presidents were for small government as the central tenet of their presidency, strict constructionists it would be termed today.  Both were martial in attitude and somewhat sharp and bellicose in their opinions – Jackson, of course, was a military man, and Reagan merely military by inclination.  Neither cared too much for minorities, Jackson a slave holder and Indian fighter; Reagan, an opponent of affirmative action and “special” rights for minorities, used the residual resentment of racial integration as a base of political support.  Neither was an intellectual, both average men of the people who had a rare capacity of understanding and communicating with the common mean of society. Both were larger than life characters, tall, who looked good on a horse.  Both exuded the ideal of rugged individualism.  Both had nicknames, “Old Hickory” and “the Gipper.”  Each was not only successful in his own presidency but founded a movement larger than themselves on which their names were bestowed.  Thus you had Jackson democrats and Reagan republicans.
     For two politicians elected a century and a half apart the basis of their popularity was remarkably similar in its makeup and their appeal to the public mind was especially strong at the time, only to diminish later.  It was not an idealized or remote democracy they preached but down to earth, pragmatic, limited democracy with all the hopes, prejudices and independence of spirit that Americans saw in themselves factored in.  It was small government “of” the people more than it was by or for them.
     Yet for all their similarities of style and policy no one would ever confuse Jackson with a republican or Reagan with a democrat.  Why?
     Money.  Jackson sought to disenfranchise the Bank of the United States, the crudely instituted, privately held precursor of the Federal Reserve founded by Hamilton, the original republican, and opposed by Jefferson, the original democrat.  On the other hand, Reagan’s first act in office was to rewrite the tax code to unabashedly favor the rich and restore the true hierarchical nature of society back to its traditional order.
     Some might disagree with this characterization of Jackson and Reagan and say that the real lesson to be drawn from their legacies is that government is never right and can never be trusted and must always be opposed when we have the proper people in place to do so.  But this is to misread the comparison for Jackson and Reagan saw government as an evil from their perspective for exactly opposite reasons.  Jackson resented government’s becoming an enabler of big money’s consolidation into too few hands.  Reagan saw government as evil precisely because it had become a meddlesome impediment to this same consolidation.  
    In addition, another democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, later used big (for its time) government exactly counter the record of Jackson to achieve the same result – the establishment of a counterweight strong enough to rein in overbearing and entrenched financial institutions which were threatening democratic freedoms and equalities.

    Therefore, in their past, as it suited their purposes we see that both parties have at one time or another embraced the concept of lean government and both have been the representative and upholder of fat government.  Reagan’s election also reoriented his party and extended its axis to incorporate political domination to an area of the country in which it had never been previously accepted, the south.  Driven away from its traditional bastion in the South the democrats inherited the historically republican stronghold of the Northeast as compensation.
     Though in general republicans have been more overtly moral and straight-laced, and the democrats have attracted the live and let live set, it is inarguable that both parties are religious in their own ways.  In religion then conservatives are the church militant; liberals turn the other cheek type believers.   In this respect the South used to be less rigid than the Northeast in its religious practices but that tendency has reversed along with its political orientation.  
    To this end, conservatives are proponents of the hardware of dogma, they are law enforcers, who, from the Puritans to the fundamentalists of today, from burning witches to prohibition to anti-abortion laws, seek to have their beliefs ensconced into law whether or not they are universally shared.  Liberals traditionally concern themselves more with the software of theology, concern for the meek, generosity, tolerance, economic fairness, etc., and write their laws accordingly.  In this regard both parties have been for tighter morality and both have been for laxer when it is appropriate to their other current beliefs.
     Democrats today are generally more forward leaning and problem solving (although they weren’t in the Jackson era) and progressive in their attitudes, while republicans see themselves as conservators of some older and sometimes highly idealized established order.  With the exception of matters of money, where these tendencies are exactly reversed, republicans like to regulate behavior where democrats prefer to allow freedoms to expand on their own.  
    This has led each party, in its past, to insist that their opponents were consistently misinterpreting the Constitution.  Both sides have been in favor of the advancement (relatively) of blacks and minorities and both parties have been in favor of their suppression.  In foreign affairs each party has at one time or another been rather more isolationistic than interventionist than the other and vice versa.
     At their worst republicans are more accommodating of authoritarianism and class structures.  Democrats when they are at their worst blur all distinctions between people to indiscernible chaos.  This is because republicans tend to see America more programmatically, from the top down, through the prism of corporate structures, law enforcement agencies, the military services and large economic movements of capital; while democrats see the nation demographically, from the bottom up, as an accumulation of vast numbers of equals, with individual problems and concerns. 
    Republicans primarily regard our freedom as consisting of freedom from regulation, a type of social and economic laissez-faireism, which ensures the survival of the fittest and devil take the hindmost; while the democrats regard freedom as more of a delicate balance, as an organic whole, where the freedom of each can only be maintained when commensurate with the freedom of all.  In this respect democrats regard a central role of government to be the protection of democracy, the regulation of its excesses and the alleviation of abuse and domination of the weaker and poorer by the stronger and richer.  Republicans frequently recognize no such necessity and regard law only as the protector of capital, private property and civil order.
     Naturally in addition to all of these tendencies both parties have large reservoirs of other self-interests veined in their beings.  That’s unavoidable.  Neither party is perfectly pure, that’s perfectly clear; nor always right, that’s forever true.  It would be wild exaggeration to say that one party is the repository of all that’s good and the other the cesspool of all that’s wrong in the nation, though some would try.  In its turn each party has been the party of reform and each party has been the party in need of reform.  Each has been the party on the outside of power fighting against the entrenched power of the inside power of the other.  
     Obviously the republican party is not only composed of wealthy people nor the democrats only of the less well to do.  The real roots of the differences between the two parties is far more complicated and deeply cross purposed and psychological than any single explanation of partisanship could ever provide.  Science has even lately tried to prove that propensity toward one party or the other is embedded deep in the gene code of each individual. 

     However, among all the myriad shifts, nuances and changes between the two parties over time it is the one central affiliation of money that for each of them has never changed or altered.  The republicans have always supported the interests of Wall Street and the democrats have always been more egalitarian in their pretensions and populist in their political orientation.  
    Put another way, republicans have always deferred and offered allegiance to the inevitable hierarchy of big money and become reactionary when it is curtailed.  This invariably endears them to large religious and economic and political organizations which also require obedience to authority.  The democrats have always been more likely to take to the streets to fight against these power structures when they unite and turn oppressive in order to reestablish a more humanist approach to democracy when they feel it is lacking.
     This invariably pits democrats (when they are being true to their democratic heritage) against the moneyed interests because democrats – from Jefferson, to Madison, to Jackson, to Franklin Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Obama - traditionally regard the accumulation of large centers of capital, much like standing armies or too much power in the executive, as a threat in itself to equality, democratic procedures and the ability of the voice of the individual to be heard over money’s deafening din.  Great disparity between rich and poor and employer and employee is seen by them as a failure of democratic government to properly fulfill its function. 
    Republicans - from Hamilton, to Teddy Roosevelt, to Hoover, to Reagan, to Bush, to McCain – are more likely to accept the “natural” accretions and density of great wealth and power into the hands of fewer and fewer people and not only accept and honor that eventuality but often even attempt to expedite it.  They tend to see conspicuous consumption and profound inequity as a successful and desirable summary of democracy rather than the visible sign of democracy’s materialistic injustice, corruption and decline.
    In short, democrats consider the country only as strong as the weakest of its citizens; while republicans tend to consider the wealth of our strongest and most powerful members as our apotheosis.  The pain of the poor is to be pitied more than alleviated.
     Therefore, throughout our long political history it is this one salient fact of the distribution of wealth and its effects on the public well being and the operations of our government which has most clearly distinguished republicans from democrats.

     And the distribution of money is one of the natural tensions which is meant to balance and meet somewhere in the middle of our political spectrum.  In truth, for the country to work and progress properly, both these divergent tendencies must be acknowledged and respected by the other.  When one party gets too much power and seeks to oppress and disenfranchise the other the balance is destroyed.  For the public, an extreme right or left leaning government is like buying a car that only turns one way.  This leads the country mainly in circles.
     Unfortunately the balance is difficult to maintain as there is a natural animal temptation for each party to want to carry its tendencies and prejudices to a debilitating extreme when afforded the chance.  The longer a party is in power the more peevish and perversely inbred its policies become.  It develops hoary old aphorisms which continue to be repeated long after they have ceased being true.  Yet, myopically, the possession of this lust for power may grow insidious until it becomes sinister and self-destructive of the very platitudes it continues to use to ensure its remaining in power.  
    This is what is happening in the United States today.  Few could successfully argue that big money isn’t out of control and hasn’t become an enemy of sound government and effective democracy.  Elected officials of both parties have shown themselves quite willing to be influenced by the interests and wishes of capital, often to the exclusion of the interests of the country.  There is no other single fact or issue which affects their decisions and opinions more.  This is primarily due to the unhealthy domination of the republican party as it has come to be practiced.
     The republican ideology of Reagan has been preeminent in America for 28 years.  The point of its original purpose – the weaning of society off an overbearing influence of Washington – has long since achieved its purpose and yet has continued into the realm of fiscal irresponsibility and intellectual bankruptcy.  Like a wind up doll it has continued to beat our heads into brick walls of incompetence, dissimulation, irresolution and wasteful and deficit spending.  
    Our government has been systematically looted by its protectors.  We not only have seen no necessary investment in our infrastructure or support for existing valuable programs, but this group of politicians has actually overspent our budgets by nine trillion or so dollars over this period with no investment in our future to show for it.  Their astonishing incompetence is escalating.  They have actually doubled the nation’s entire deficit built up over our first two hundred plus years in the last eight years alone.  They have effectively emptied out the country’s larder and redistributed it among themselves and their friends and only left the nation with a massive pile of IOUs to show for their belligerent stewardship.
    The debit side of the nation’s ledger has been filled with no corollary benefit to weigh against it.  We not only have accumulated enormous debt which must be paid down with interest but tremendous shortfalls which have gone begging and still must be paid for even as their costs continue to grow greater.  This has been nothing short of the theft of our future for the ease of third rate politicians and the windfall profits of their handlers.  The Vandals were more beneficial to Rome than the republicans have become to us today.
    As our debt burden steadily increases through the incompetence and venality of our leaders and Wall Street, our status in the world, like a patient with the stink of death on them, continues to diminish, and our interior controls, from ethics, to safety, health, and the primary education of our citizenry deteriorates to an unfathomable bottom somewhere from where it may never be redeemed.  Half of an entire generation may be left permanently lagging as a result of this indifference.
    The improvident and destructive financialization of our economy has led to the gradual impoverishment and enervation of the nation’s core economic strength and well being.  The republicans, (primarily, but often with the assistance of the democrats) have proudly presided over the de-industrialization of our economy.  They have tried their best to dismantle our social services while insinuating the “invisible hand” of greed into the taxpayers’ purses and pockets.  Showing no consciousness of guilt over these crimes, under any continuation of our current leadership, this malign influence is doomed to continue unabated.   
    Because when one side of the political debate has become so arrogant or greedy that in refusing to lose they reject all principles of honest democratic debate.  And when, they consistently cheat and chisel and refuse to bow even to greater logic or greater public good to achieve equitable solutions to common problems they have clearly moved beyond point of repair.      
    There are elements of this infestation apparent in the republican party today.  
    For despite the manifold failures of their specific policies to achieve promised results, they have arrogantly come to believe that they are so right in general that any means justifies any end as long as it continues them in office.  
    The weapon of choice for the desperate is one of the most devious and destructive known to mankind.  It is crime against truth and the war on meaning.  It is moral relativism, the political equivalent of jury nullification and any means to an end.  Any lie, any misdirection, misconstruction and artfully misapplied word or explanation will do.  The only question is not whether it is true but whether it is believed.  Perception is reality, reality is what you may convince others to believe.      
    This is pernicious but thoroughly on display throughout recent elections and prevalent as a tactic in the Bush administration.  To them, the public, like the old joke, are like mushrooms, to be kept in the dark and fed manure.
    They have acted as if they can willfully engage in any distortion, exaggeration, or dishonesty they are able to get away with, for as long as they can get away with it, until all our democratic procedures (or scientific method which it resembles) have been effectually undercut and rendered useless.  They have even frequently rejected the basis of the Constitution’s aegis over their actions when it has suited their purposes.  
    In such an instance, the best ideas aren’t seized on, the bad ideas are promoted, the proofs are covered up or distorted, self interests become the only rule and means of measurement and objective truth becomes merely another fact to be manipulated and mutilated before it’s discarded.  The soul of democracy and the common good that democracy is instituted among men to promote is in these instances fatally compromised.
    The last eight years of government have been a laboratory in incompetence and dishonesty.  The only thing we have learned is what not to do.  Such people and their supporters should not be rewarded for their incompetence.  
     But here is the genius of the elasticity of democracy.  As one party veers too far away from the center of the public good, democracy ideally, through the agency and leadership of the opposition party, like a pendulum, steadily builds pressure to yank it back toward equilibrium the farther it removes from the center.  We have seen both parties guilty of overreach and self-aggrandizement like this in their pasts.  Now we are engaged in a presidential election which will determine which party’s representative leads the country for the next four years.  In our own past we have always risen above our differences and prejudices and limitations to find a greater glory in a higher good.  It is yet to be determined whether we will succeed or fall short this time.