Today,
on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, Congressman Paul Ryan, otherwise known as the Eddie
Munster of American Politics, took the stand to testify that newly minted
President Obama in his inaugural address did not properly pay obeisance to
their conservative agenda. Indeed the
Scums have, since the days of Bill Clinton, behaved as if it is the responsibility
of the opposition to adopt in part, if not in whole, the Rescumlican position
or earn the wrath of the conservative-entertainment complex and be thereby
savaged from pillar to post. The
contempt, as befits “true believers”, has manifested itself not only by the “birther”
and “deather” movements but by referring to the President as Rush Limbaugh so
poignantly put it as “in over his head”.
John Sunnunu, former Rescumlican governor of New Hampshire and White
House Chief of staff, emerged last year as a chief spokesman for Mitt Romney
calling the President “Lazy”. Newt
Gingrich has called Obama the “Food-Stamp President”. So bad has it become that the Speaker of the
House, John Boner, has declined White House invitations to six state dinners,
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Rescumlican Kentucky) has even declined invitation to a White House
function to honor the NCAA National Champion University of Kentucky basketball
team.
It’s
become so bad that the Scums have withdrawn support for their own proposals—tax
cuts on small businesses for instance—if the White House comes across the isle
and supports them. Gridlock has
descended upon Washington and it looks like at least two more years of it.
Much is
being said in the national media about how the well has been poisoned and that it
is due to the partisan rancor that plagues the land. This is true, but only in part, but in any
case we must remember that the people voted for it.
As
discussed in previous posts, the great partisan divide, as wide as anything
seen in my lifetime, certainly as divisive as anything seen since the Teddy
Roosevelt led the “Bull Moosers” out of the Republican party a century ago, or
perhaps since the civil war, has many causes.
First there is the fact that the middle class now controls less of the
national economy since the 1920’s and is declining. As outlined in previous posts this
bifurcation of the economic strata leads to a polarization of politics. Secondly, with the deregulation of the
communications industry and the abandonment of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”
in which political expression on the nation’s or in political advertising
required equal access to opposing points of view. The result is that the airwaves have been
taken over by a group of howlers and hate-merchants peddling paranoia and
conspiracy in order to hype ratings and sell more soap. The result has been the creation of the
conservative-entertainment complex in which , as President Obama said so
eloquently in his Inaugural Address, name-calling has taken the place of
reasoned discourse.
On this
note let us take a moment and note the passing of former South Dakota Senator
George McGovern. Senator McGovern passed
away late last year and it is time to pay tribute to an honorable man, a
courageous man, who though afraid of heights forced himself to become an
aircraft pilot during the second world war and flew many bombing missions over
German controlled territory. Here was a
warrior who honorably served his country and rose to oppose another war in another
time and place. His eloquence in
opposition to the madness that was Viet Nam inspired a generation and for that
he should be remembered.
Following
the chaos that was the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the party chose
Senator McGovern to head a committee to rewrite the party rules to insure that
the party became as close as a mirror-image of America as was organizationally
possible. Accordingly if a local party
elected a man to chair it, a woman would have to be chosen vice-chair and
vice-versa. Delegates to state and
national conventions had to be chosen so that all groups, were represented
proportionately. Witness to these
changes can be seen in the present national conventions in which the Democrats
present themselves as the polyglot aggregate of the American “melting-pot”,
whereas the Rescumlicans appear the party of angry old white men.
But
there were other changes whose effect on the national polity are far more
problematic. The explosion of Presidential
Primaries and Caucuses have indeed taken the selection of Presidential
candidates out of the hands of the political “bosses” in their “smoke-filled
rooms”, but it has given the process over to the political interest groups and
the “one interest” voters, in low-turnout elections. The result is that the tail now wags the dog,
small vocal groups, organized around single issues with committed following and
money can now challenge long established fixtures on the national scene and
remove them from office. Senator Richard
Lugar, a 4 term senator once considered a Vice Presidential possibility and
long chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was summarily dismissed
by the voters of Indiana in a low turnout Rescumlican primary. Similarly Senator Saxbee Chambliss
(Resumlican GA) has announced that he will not seek another term. A name being floated to replace him is none
other than Paul Broun, the political Neanderthal
hailing from Athens Georgia. We suck
ever deeper the dregs of the barrel.
My point
is that we have not seen the last of the Boomers influence of the
Republic. As Senator McGovern wryly
observed some 30 years ago “I opened the door (to the Democratic Party) and
three million people ran out.
It never
occurred to the followers of George McGovern that in the wake of the party
reforms the Dems suffered more than a landslide loss to Richard Nixon. Other, more systemic and structural, damage
was done to the Democratic Party and its ability to defend the American Middle Class. Re-reading Teddy White’s “The Making of the President 1972” brought home the point. I remember my class mates savaging the work
when it came out, but his criticisms still stand. The
McGovern reforms had succeeded in changing both the means of gaining
representation within the Democratic Party but in so doing it also changed the
nature of the party—particularly in the state and national organization. 1972 stands as a symbol of what went so
terribly wrong. New faces meant the
removal of old. It wasn’t that the new
faces were mixed with the old, for in 1972 organized labor—the backbone of the
old “New Deal” coalition—were, by the reforms, asked to leave the table. Accordingly, by the fall of 1972 George
Meany, President of the AFL-CIO, joined the Teamsters and other in support of
Rescumlican Richard Nixon. The war on
the middle class had begun.
In the end even
the Boomer’s, Hunter S. Thomspon and “Rolling Stone” magazine notwithstanding, couldn’t stomach it casting the first vote of
their newly-minted majority for that old scoundrel from Whittier.
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