September 6, 2010
Why the Right is Winning
Our Long National Nightmare Isn't Over ... It's Just Beginning
By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN
.... the takeover of the GOP by Serious Money is now well into its second stage. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it is. Seriously, what is the next step after this one fails to provide any long-term solutions to what ails America, as most assuredly will be the case? For a decade or three now, regressives in America have been showing that they are capable of anything. Which more or less answers that question, doesn’t it? If you’re willing to savage military icons like John McCain, Max Cleland and John Kerry in order to win elections – and especially after you get away with it every time – you’re willing to do anything. If you’re willing to mock the 9/11 widows as scheming opportunists, you’re willing to do anything. If you’re willing to don a tuxedo and joke about missing WMD at a press banquet in Washington, just as you’re telling the American military’s adversaries in Iraq to “bring it on”, you’re willing to do anything.
Looking at the rhetoric the right throws in the direction of our president these days, questioning his very nationality (oh, did I mention that he’s black?), it’s easy to see that they‘ve gone completely over the line. But what’s really out of control is what lies underneath this insanity generated for the consumption of an ignorant hoi polloi. And what that is – what you see when you move the slime-infested rock away – is an unfathomably monstrous greed. Watching these folks in action, you could easily get the impression that they had been impoverished their whole lives. That they had been denied everything, right down to food and water. That they had been deprived through poverty especially of their dignity. You know, like the real poor people of this world, the forty or fifty percent of the Earth’s population that survives on less than two dollars per day. Those folks.
Instead, we are talking about people who are already fantastically rich. And who, despite this, are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if that means depriving hundreds of millions of people in the American middle class of their middle classness, and in many cases, ultimately of their lives. How do we explain people like this? Are they not essentially sociopathic? Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who can kill without guilt or remorse? Especially when you consider that even the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one can effectively make use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing others into poverty is no longer even for purposes of your own benefit, but instead for some kind of sick sport? Aren’t these the characters whose essential sickness preachers and philosophers and shrinks have been trying to sort out for millennia?
So they have made a concerted effort over the last generation or so to revert the country back to the bad old days of Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge. Think about that for a second. What sort of elevated sickness, what sort parental deprivation in childhood, what sort of total absence of conscience and consciousness is required to produce a group of people with that mentality?
Read the full article at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/green09062010.html
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