Another excellent blog from David Sirota:
http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=D11B1C17-E0C3-F090-A39EAC874F54E7D0There are times every now and again where you just have to step back and behold the absurdity of it all. You have to step back from the day-to-day trench wars and just marvel at how entrenched power really is in this, the country where we still cling to Horatio Alger fables or "anyone can grow up to be president" myths. What I find particularly fascinating is the intricacy and careful calibration of the propaganda system that holds this whole structure up. Like a hall of mirrors, our political debate is, in every way, designed to perpetuate the status quo. But no hall of mirrors can withstand the impact of a big enough tidal wave, which is why those inside the hall are freaking out.
Consider, for a moment, the frothing, fulminating bile now being spit from the highest reaches of Washington, D.C.'s media establishment. A few months ago, we saw one major columnist at the largest newspaper in the world say voters should not have the right to decide elections in America anymore. Not only was he not shunned for his screed, he continues to appear regularly on television as an objective, god-fearing patriotic American. Soon after that, in the face of polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose the Iraq War, a top Washington blowhard from one of the largest television networks in the country appeared on TV to label every Democrat who has questioned the war "as weak, Jane Fonda-type Democrats."
But really, that was only the beginning. Since then, as voter discontent with the war, stagnating wages, job outsourcing and the general direction of the country has escalated, Washington has battoned the hatches, and gone from spitting bile to firing tank ordnance at the oncoming battalions of ordinary people who, goddamned them, dare to think they should be able to have some say in their own country. Washington Post columnist David Broder - the so-called dean of the Washington press corps - called voters who want change "elitist insurgents" - a not-so-subtle attempt to conflate American voters with terrorists. Then there was my personal favorite - David Brooks sitting there in his pink shirt in Northwest Washington telling the country "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Brooks breathed a sigh of relief that "the Clintonite centrists are reasserting their intellectual, financial and political supremacy" and that Hillary Clinton gave a speech that scholars at the fringe-right-wing American Enterprise institute "called remarkably centrist." Thank god, said Brooks, that the "renegades who rail against the establishment are being eclipsed by the canny establishmentarians" because, according to him, "They're the ones who know how to use the levers of government to get things done." Ah yes, with war raging in the Mideast, poverty rising in America, people struggling to pay their bills, Clinton-backed free trade deals shipping jobs overseas - thank the lord that the same old crew was supposedly reasserting itself because that record shows "they know how to get things done."
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