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Sunday, November 16, 2008

Smell That Right Wing Mandate!

Center-Right America? "Center" Right?

In the topsy-turvy land of corporate-militarist media everything must always be framed in a way calculated to inflict the worst possible despair and humiliation and pain on those who, in any measure, believe in or work for progressive possibilities.

And so, if you just read the papers and watch the Sunday shows and the nightly news on the tee vee, you might not realize that the earthshattering mandate offered by the American people on Election Day to Democrats in every branch at every level of government across the country precisely because they specifically, explicitly, and repeatedly promised to end the war, provide healthcare to all Americans, create jobs and repudiate oil with a renewable energy economy, restore the Constitution to protect citizens from torturers and spies and unitary executives, tax the richest of the rich and support everyday Americans actually isn't somehow an indication that a "Center-Right" America hostile to peace, unions, gays, abortion, "socialized" medicine, the "socialism" of taxes and public infrastructure investment, or the very idea of social responsibility will be demanding that Democrats -- from the President who won with a message of Change, and across the Congressional board -- must govern according to the same old widely hated and endlessly failed right-wing principles of the last three decades of Movement Republican rule.

Of course, it's as obvious to the Villagers of the corporate-militarist media as it is to literally everybody else with a brain that hasn't been utterly brainwashed (Hi, Dad!) that this "conventional wisdom" of a "Center Right" America -- where, one must add, the most bankrupt and batshit crazy warmongering market libertarian and intolerant theocratic fantasies of the extreme right are presumably imagined to constitute that "Center" -- doesn't connect to living realities at any point at all. What they fail to grasp quite yet is that they simply don't have anything like the power anymore through the selective application of manic repetition, snide deflationary insinuation, hysterical distraction, and phony outrage to crowbar commonsense open to interpose the corporate-militarist spin of incumbent interests between our lyin' eyes and the world we share, peer to peer.

The Republican Noise Machine together with the Village vessels of the corporate-militarist Capitulation Congress (including too many defeated and defeatist but still earnestly self-described "liberals"), so smug, so suave, so sure of itself so long as an engine of consummate hegemonic substantiation, quite spectacularly suddenly just looks oafish and cheap and desperate and scarcely cobbled-together. Look at all the killer clowns with the B-movie ketchup-squirting prop-daggers, Mommy! Why are their faces so red, why are they flapping their hands like that?

This is how it goes, one day you worry that fascists are going to impose martial law and the next day they have all the threatening materiality of stale stinky steam escaping from a storm grate. You can't fool all the people all the time. History breaks out unpredictably and people start making change before your eyes.

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