Russell Simmons, HuffPo: Don't Vote and We'll Get the Alice in Wonderland Congress From Hell!

[highplainsdem]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/dont-vote-and-well-get-th_b_777133.html

Russell Simmons
Posted: November 1, 2010 02:09 PM

Don't Vote and We'll Get the Alice in Wonderland Congress From Hell!

-snip-

If we don't wake up on Tuesday and rush to the polls, by the end of the day, we will find ourselves with an Alice In Wonderland Congress, where up is down and wrong is right, and lies are truth and hating diversity is seen as patriotism. In the new Alice In Wonderland that is today's Republican Party, Sarah Palin is the Queen of Hearts screaming "Off With Their Heads"; Glenn Beck is the Mad Hatter with all his tears; Rush Limbaugh is the Cheshire Cat, laughing at the madness and loving it.

Unless moderates and progressives quickly put aside their disenchantments and VOTE on Tuesday, we will wake up on Wednesday to newly elected politicians whose meanness, duplicity and downright madness is unique even by the standards of past American moments of extreme right.

Just a few years ago there were unshakable standards of American inclusion in American politics. Trent Lott lost his Senate Majority Leader job for one speech in which he praised the politics of Jesse Helms; George Allen lost his senate seat and with it his presidential ambitions, with his famous "Macaca" moment. These gaffs however are nothing compared to what is now accepted, by a large part of our voting society, as not just acceptable but actually energizing hate speech by candidates for high office. Sharon Angle, with her overtly racist statements and ads against "brown" immigrants, sanctioning of the violent overthrow of a democratically elected US government, and forced births to raped children, is actually ahead in Nevada. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Joe Miller of Alaska and Carl Paladino in the New York Governor's race, allow their storm troopers to trample on reporters and activists. Lies about the president's nationality, about "death panels", about immigrant crime, FEMA internment camps and other loonie theories, keep getting repeated in the vast echo chamber of a joined up paranoid blogosphere hard-wired into public discourse via Fox News, even after they have been soundly refuted. This is new territory for America. And if we don't come out in droves on Tuesday, the message we send is: we didn't know that change takes hard work, and because we didn't know that, the hate filled rhetoric won.

-snip-

If we don't vote, we will open the door to a dark, hallucinatory chapter in American politics of deep unconsciousness, hatred and lies. The Republican establishment can't tame this movement - history is filled with examples of the opposite happening - of the movements taking over the party, both from the extreme left and the extreme right. When money and fringe movements meet at the right time, and the majority doesn't act to stop them, the movements take over and destroy civil society. And today those movements want to kill government, when we need it functioning and active in a fragile recovery from the worst recession in our lifetimes. They want to blame ethnic groups that have nothing to do with why we're in a recession.

-snip-

[highplainsdem]

1. kick

[lafayettelonewolf]

2. Russell is right...

If we don't wipe the floor with them, then America's history.

[highplainsdem]

3. Kicking again, for anyone thinking of NOT voting tomorrow.

[struggle4progress]

4. gotv

[highplainsdem]

5. Yes!