Integrity

Because They Work

Sep 23

That’s the reason the Republicans distort, misrepresent and tell lies. Yes, that’s an incendiary thing to say. Yes, that especially includes those who honor their pledge to Grover Norquist over their pledge to the Constitution. Yes, we’ve been fed a steady, high calorie diet of dishonesty by these people for a long time. And don’t go looking for Democratic equivalency. The D’s surely have had their day (I’m thinking now about Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap”), but this is the era of neo-con dishonesty.

The Republicans like to say that President Obama apologizes for America. On the few occasions when those making that claim have been challenged, they have not been able to cite a single instance of apology – not one – yet they continue to spread the lie.

The Republicans charge President Obama of having a failed foreign policy. Of course, they never offer any substance to support their sweeping accusation. That he has a far better record of protecting America than President Bush, that he has focused on aggressively pursuing the perpetrators of 9/11, that he has re-established strong diplomatic ties with most of the rest of the world don’t seem to matter to the Republicans. They continue to make their fatuous charges.

Indeed, President Bush and his Republicans told us repeatedly that President Bush kept America safe. That’s a very interesting claim for a president on whose watch nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Washington DC and in Shanksville, PA in the worst direct attack on America in our nation’s history. In some bizarre, Through the Looking Glass logic we are supposed to believe that the Republicans are the ones who are strong on defense and President Obama has failed. It’s strange how the Republicans falsely accuse President Obama of the most terrible failing of President Bush and his Republican Congress.

Since President Obama’s inauguration the Republicans have been telling us that what is most important is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Oddly, over the past 4 years they have managed to block every job creating bill with only one exception: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the “Stimulus”). That bill passed in spite of every Republican in the House and all but three Republican senators voting against it.

The Veterans Jobs Bill was designed to promote employment for our military veterans. It’s an important bill, because our military personnel come home to a veteran’s unemployment rate that is 30% higher than our citizenry as a whole. Nevertheless, the flag-waving Republicans in the Senate blocked that bill with a filibuster, leaving vets to suffer in their unemployment. Still, the Republicans continue to tell us it’s all about “jobs, jobs, jobs.”

Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan told us about a “welfare queen” living on the south side of Chicago. He said that she was collecting welfare under 81 aliases and living the high life. That was just the inflammatory story his base wanted to hear and, with his slick acting skills, he even sold that to middle-of-the-road voters. The only problem with Reagan’s story was that there was no welfare queen with 81 aliases. Reagan lied because it was self-serving and there’s a connection of that to what is going on today.

Mitt Romney is telling lies that blow the same dog whistle that Reagan blew. Romney tells us that 47% of Americans pay no income taxes, that they refuse to be responsible for their own care, that they see themselves as victims and are dependent on government and that they think they are “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Oh, those blood suckers, those lazy bums who steal from the rich, Mitt implies. He wants us to believe they’re wealth redistribution lowlifes who have “foreign views” and will vote for Obama, whom Romney says is not like “us”, not like real Americans. Romney does that in order to create an enemy for their followers to hate, just like candidate Reagan did, and it’s just another self-serving lie.

The continuing drumbeat of lies is successful in manipulating less informed voters into voting for the liars. And their votes, coupled with those of “the base” are enough to win elections. That’s especially effective if done in conjunction with preventing legal voters from voting. The Republicans do that through Republican generated state laws to disenfranchise low income, minority and elderly voters, who tend to vote Democratic.

Lie, cheat, steal. That’s the Republican platform and they do those things because they work. It really is so easy to manipulate people. Just inflame them with the Big Lie over and over.

But Wait – There’s More!

Sep 21

To be read aloud – fast

You’ve suffered through four years of economic stagnation and have the bills to show for it.

You’ve watched as congress has locked itself in Tea Party tantrums and has paid no attention to you.

You know that your Medicare and Social Security are at risk and feel the terror of helplessness to come and there’s been nothing you could do about it – until NOW!

Mitt Romney is here to take us back to the tried and true Republican ideal of America.

Mitt is a CEO who knows how business works. He’s the one who knows how to create jobs – in China – and get American manufacturing going – away.

Mitt is a Republican who will take us back to the days of his Republican predecessors, all the way back to Ronald Reagan. So, you can count on Mitt to create the biggest budget deficits in history, because that’s what all Republican presidents do. Mitt is the CEO who knows how to go into bottomless debt, suck the life out of anything and do it all off-budget, just like George W. Bush’s wars.

Murray-isms

Aug 16

My friend Pat Murray is one of the clearest thinkers I know in the areas of group and individual behavior and I have learned some valuable lessons from him. See if this pairing of one statement plus two questions from Pat’s work stimulates your motivation innards.

YOU GET WHAT YOU TOLERATE – Children teach us this every day. A major part of their job is to push the envelope to find out where the edges of acceptability are. Those edges are often defined by some sort of pain, like physical pain as a result of attempting to defy the laws of physics while riding a bicycle or from adult displeasure over an inappropriate childhood behavior.

So it is with politics. Our politicians will push the envelope and keep on pushing until we tell them they’ve gone too far by punishing them with our phone calls, letters and emails of displeasure and, eventually, with election defeat. The key point is that if you tolerate their behavior, they will not only continue it but they will keep on pushing that envelope to an extreme until you actively refuse to tolerate what they are doing. Passivity and apathy on your part will result in ever more outrageous behavior on their part. You get what you tolerate.

WHAT DO YOU STAND FOR? – Are you clear about what you stand for, what you believe in down to your bedrock, the absolutely most-not-be-violated ideals you will never compromise? Tagging on to that question, motivational speaker Les Brown likes to say that you have to know what you stand for or you’ll fall for anything.

There are people in all areas of our lives who want to sell us something, who want to bend us to their way in order to help them to create a world that serves them. Some of these people are quite comfortable lying to us, misleading us with flagrant, fatuous falsehoods (my alliteration for today) and many of them have very loud megaphones. They feed us a spoonful of verifiable fact to gain our trust and then go off into their stream of dishonesty. Unless you know what you stand for, you can be manipulated easily by these people and become a pawn to serve them while they do harm to you and everyone else in the process. What do you stand for?

KNOW YOUR INTOLERABLES – Yes, I know that “intolerables” isn’t a word you can find in the dictionary, but you understood its meaning immediately. What is on your list of things that you will not put up with? What are the absolutely no-go items? Lying, cheating, stealing, dishonoring the sacred, cruelty, abandoning the helpless, disloyalty? When you make your list, be sure to do a gut check so that you don’t write hollow platitudes, because that doesn’t serve you. Rather, write what is actually true for you.

For example, you may find abridging the rights of fellow citizens to be intolerable, but do you believe in it so strongly that you’ll fight anyone who tries to silence those with whom you passionately disagree? Do you believe in the rights of citizenship with such passion that you’ll stand up publicly for those whose voting rights are being stolen right now? Do you believe in civil rights so strongly that you’ll speak out against the anti-Muslim fever that is both marginalizing and killing some Americans? Speaking of killing, it may be an intolerable for you, but do you make an exception for those who kill abortion doctors? Know your intolerables.

It is true that those are under-the-skin questions likely to provoke. Are you agitated enough to take action? A good starting place is to make two lists: HERE IS WHAT I STAND FOR and THESE ARE MY INTOLERABLES. Your lists probably won’t be very long, but they will have great power for you. And when you’re done, you’ll stop falling for anything and instead will be prepared to stop tolerating all that envelope pushing that violates what you believe in. You might even exercise your citizenship by speaking out to make things better.

It’s Personal

Aug 05

August 6 is the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and it is appropriate to remember in the ways that we can. There are millions of stories connected in various ways to that event and two are very close. They are quite different from one another, yet at root they bear the same message.

Even in the early 1940’s, when an atomic explosion was only a theory and had never been witnessed, the conflagration that would be produced was well understood. That was a different time, though, and the imperative was to win the war with a minimum of American casualties. Estimates ran north of a million dead and injured, should we attempt a land invasion of Japan, so, awful as it was even to contemplate, using an atomic bomb to subdue the enemy looked like the better option. Indeed, in those days, there was little controversy over whether to use such a weapon if doing so would avoid suffering 25,000 marines killed on every island in the Pacific on the way to Japan.

My father-in-law was a scientist, a chemical engineer Ph.D and for decades was a go-to guy for making chemical manufacturing plants operate well. He was so talented that he was called to serve on the Manhattan Project during WWII. What that meant for him and all the scientists working on the Manhattan Project was that in order to honor their duty and responsibility as Americans to help win the war, they would have to set aside their concerns over the moral dilemma of dropping a bomb on Japanese cities. Some, like my father-in-law, had to compromise a piece of their souls to do that, a compromise they came to deeply regret.

While the construction of that new and terrible weapon was ongoing, my father was posted in England and flew a P-47 fighting the Nazis, escorting bombers, dodging bursts of flak, getting shot at and shooting back, sortie after sortie. In today’s more gentle terms, he was in harm’s way, but there was nothing gentle about what was happening. He lived in a world of brutality every day, a world of sudden death and long suffering, a world where human beings saw and did unspeakable things. Indeed, like so many vets, even years later he was unable to speak the raw truth of those days and most of his terrible secrets died with him.

He did not entertain the post war moral analysis made from the comfort of peacetime over the dropping of the bomb. He had completed his tour of duty before that bombing, had served as an instructor to new recruits after his combat days and was on inactive status with the army. Had a land invasion of Japan been mounted, he would have been called back into active service and sent to the Pacific to wage war once again. Dropping the bomb made good sense to him, yet he was anything but absent of regret over those terrible days.

He had been raised to be a good boy and not do harm to others, but it had been wartime and doing what he did was his duty and responsibility, so he, like my father-in-law, did what had to be done. And he, too, had to compromise a piece of his soul, a compromise that came with deep regret. There are literally millions of stories like these from that awful time.

Today we use the word “sacrifice” to describe what our military people have to do. Yet in this country where less than 1% of our people shoulder our military burden, most of us don’t really understand what that means. My father-in-law and my father understood quite well. They did their duty and honored their responsibility for their loved ones and for our country. Their sacrifice was enormous, as both men shouldered a weight that they carried throughout their lives as a continuing torment to their souls. They paid an enormous price for us.

In their sacrifice they left us a country that remains free. Over the years they let me know in countless ways that they believed in personal responsibility and that they expected me and all of us to honor our duty and the responsibility that is inextricably bound to our freedom, just as they did. It’s likely that all of those brave men and women of that greatest generation would expect us to do that. Part of the keeping of our freedom is to sacrifice a piece of our convenience every four years and vote.

It’s personal.

National Despair

Jul 28

There’s no point in waving arms, getting red in the face and snapping at the annoying tweaks that are sent only to distract and manipulate us. If we’re to understand what is behind our national despair we need to focus on the core issue that keeps us stuck in a morass of helplessness and prevents us from the exceptionalism we’re capable of creating.

Perhaps you believe that doing the right thing is the right thing to do. If so, this may fit for you:

I despair over the paralysis of America caused by the people who are supposed to be our leaders but who, instead, feather their own nest and ensure that their system is self-sustaining, much to the detriment of the rest of us.

I despair over the abdication of the regulatory muscle that could have prevented the banking-driven recession that has hurt so many Americans and has undermined the American brand throughout the world.

I despair over the abdication of the rule of law, like claiming that torture isn’t torture, like leading us into an unprovoked war and, every bit as damaging, by the near-complete failure of Congress and the press to do their jobs to prevent all that.

I despair over the public hatred and lies that are repeated by those in leadership positions and by ordinary, angry Americans as well, spreading the venom that has come to be tolerated and even believed by a distracted public.

I despair over angry young men who take handguns, rifles and automatic weapons to movie theaters and schools and kill innocents randomly, this while the NRA tells us that guns don’t kill and that assault weapons with 100 round drums must be legal and, by all means, let’s have 34 round magazines for those Glock semi-automatics.

I despair when the meteorologists tell us that we can expect this year’s drought to be repeated for years to come and, at the same time, people we’ve elected to be our leaders blatantly lie to us and declare that global warming doesn’t exist.

I despair when a congressman or senator shouts bigoted remarks at others and, worse, when those remarks aren’t rebuked by colleagues, the press and the public.

It’s true that we’ve always had haters and liars and that we’ve always had leaders who have twisted the truth because it serves them (and not America) well. We have always had fools and bullies.

But it seems that the American train has jumped the track over the past 30 years, that dishonesty has become the purpose and dysfunction the goal. For example, Ronald Reagan told us this about the Panama Canal: “We bought it, we paid for it, we built it and we intend to keep it!” That was a huge applause line, right up until the day he gave it away.

George H.W. Bush told us over and over, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Then he raised taxes.

Bill Clinton told us, “I did not have sex with that woman – Ms. Lewinski,” but, well, you know.

Now Mitt Romney is twisting himself every way imaginable to tell us that he’s always been against all those things he was always for.

And these are our leaders.

In any relationship, each has a part in the situation, so ultimately, it boils down to what we – you and I, our neighbors, your goofy brother-in-law, the retired couple down the street and everyone who works at the businesses in your town – have agreed to settle for. We have let self-serving dishonesty penetrate our leadership as we simply went about our lives with myopic focus. The lack of public integrity is so common now that we barely lift an eyebrow when we hear the next whopper. It’s what we expect. And that is the real poison of despair.

There is a glimmer of hope, though, that holds promise for us. We can cure our national despair and it is so simple, so easy and so obvious. We have the power to change everything and it is in our hands right now.

All we have to do is to stop settling. All we have to do is to stop tolerating the intolerable. All we have to do is to demand truth and call out the liars.

It’s time.

Mitt Romney Can’t and Neither Can Bob Dold

Jul 15

Yes, of course Mitt Romney is smart. He’s cunning and he’s been enormously successful. He’s persistent and focused and undaunted by challenge.

Yet Mitt Romney can’t seem to say anything that is true. He can’t seem to say anything that doesn’t contradict his own words and actions. And he can’t seem to say anything that has detailed substance. He simply can’t.

We just had a family reunion, with its predictable mix of political views, but the most significant ones came from family members who are sick of hearing stupid political fantasy displace fact, sick of leaders who don’t lead and sick of our eunuch government. Mostly, they are sick of politicians sounding like ten-year-olds on a playground calling others ugly names, vying to see who can say the meanest thing and, thus, become the biggest jerk on the playground.

Mitt Romney is now the most visible contestant in that game to be the biggest jerk. He makes up so much fantasy-as-politics and the outpouring of his lies is so voluminous that many Americans, like some of my family members, more than anything just want him to go away and have pledged to refuse to vote in November. Such is the effect of the screeching drone of political dumbspeak that floods our news. That is dangerous, because it serves the radical dumbspeak droners so well and abandons all the rest of America.

We in the Illinois Tenth Congressional District have elected moderates for some time. For a dozen years Mark Kirk was our representative. The good people of Illinois then elected him to the senate and he was replaced in the House by Stepford wife, Bob Dold. Each is soft spoken. Each appears to be compassionate.

Except neither of them is a moderate. Each of them votes in near-lockstep with the Republican fringe crazies. They support the big money ruling class and mask their bigotry with their moderate demeanor.

By November 6 Dold will have asked for your vote dozens of times. He will have attempted to justify that by telling you that he is fighting to save your Medicare, but he will somehow forget to tell you that he has twice voted for Paul Ryan’s Medicare Ruination Plan. He will tell you that he’s all about jobs, jobs, jobs, but he won’t remind you that he voted against every job creating bill except the one for veterans and that he had to be shamed into voting for that.

All of that is to say that Bob Dold is no moderate. He’s a right wing crazy in a pleasant looking package, just like Mitt Romney. Don’t be fooled by appearances. Judge him by what he has done and you’ll want him to disappear. That would be best because neither one of them can do anything you want them to do.

The point is that anyone dropping out of the process only serves to keep the radical playground jerks in place and assure that they continue flooding your news with lies and salacious innuendo. You can stop that by getting past your disgust over the political dumbspeak and showing up to vote in November.

Conservatives, Have You Reached Your Popeye Point?

Jun 30

Immediately after President Obama won the 2008 presidential election Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, Republican leaders in the Senate and House, announced to the world, “Our number one priority is making sure that President Obama is a one-term president.” That came as quite a surprise to those of us who thought that their number one priority was to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, that they were in Washington to promote the general welfare and the other things outlined in the Preamble to the Constitution. Not so, as we continue to be reminded.

The Republican Party has devolved into nothing more than opposing anything offered by Democrats and the President. They have even opposed their own bills, once President Obama said he supported them. They continue to oppose the mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act, even though it is exactly what the Republicans proposed in the ‘90’s, then accompanied by their battle cry of personal responsibility.

Since the 2010 mid-term election the Republicans have been telling us that what is most important is “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Since that time, though, the House, led by John Boehner, has passed bills against gay marriage and women’s healthcare. They have voted against immigration reform and have had temper tantrums against ending Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. None of that has anything to do with promoting jobs for Americans. The only job related legislation the Republicans passed was one promoting jobs for our military veterans, and they had to be shamed into passing it.

Two things are clear. First, the Republicans don’t want President Obama to have any wins, so they oppose anything he supports. Second, the Republicans want to run in 2012 against President Obama’s record on the economy and jobs, so they stonewall any effort to make things better for Americans, completely ignoring the suffering of the people in their selfish quest for power.

They have opposed keeping our promises to creditors in hopes of blaming President Obama for a global humiliation of their own making. They have repeatedly called the president a liar, most recently by flagrant fact falsifier Sarah Palin. Oddly, they offer absolutely no proof of prevarication.

They call him “Mr. Obama,” instead of using the proper title, “President.” They accuse him of being an un-American Kenyan, a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist. In short, they have reduced themselves to being pitiful name-calling schoolyard bullies throwing taunts.

Republicans, is that all you have? Tell us you have something more than that, because if that’s all you have, you have nothing.

There is nothing conservative about the party of personal responsibility abdicating its responsibilities. There is nothing conservative about ignoring the suffering of the American people. There is nothing conservative about preventing Americans from voting. There is nothing conservative about going to war and refusing to pay for it and lying to Americans about nonexistent death panels. In short, there is nothing conservative about today’s Republican party. Conservatism is dead. Radical dishonesty has taken its place.

The old Popeye cartoons had a recurring theme. Popeye would get into terrible trouble, pummeled and nearly helpless, when suddenly he would declare, “That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!” A can of spinach would magically appear, he would eat the contents and be revived and then go about righting the wrongs.

The question now is whether you have reached your Popeye point. Have you had enough of the lies, the abdication of responsibility, the demeaning of the highest office in our land? Have you had enough of being manipulated? Is this all you can stands and you can’t stands no more?

Get your can of spinach right now. It’s time for you to start righting the wrongs and reclaim your party.

The Common Wisdom

Mar 10

We all know that the country is center-right. Perhaps it’s there as a result of a pendulum swing from the socially farther left pendulum of the 60’s and the politicians and pundits now like to tell us we’re center-right almost as throw-away line. Or maybe people just keep saying that and have done so for such a long time that we’ve come to believe it, but repetition doesn’t make the claim accurate. Take a look at just a few issues before us.

Jobs – About 306 million of we 307 million Americans want the government to take energetic action to ramp up the economy and create jobs. The noise from the far right is the only thing that is making it seem like there is huge opposition to that. As a nation, we are left of center now on jobs.

Voting rights – Americans believe overwhelmingly that all of us over the age of 18, with the possible exception of convicted felons, should vote. That’s pretty much smack dab in the center, not center-right. On the other hand, there are Republican strategists who have openly stated that the only people they want to vote are those who will vote Republican.

In the 2010 election many states voted far right legislators into office and they have enacted laws they have fraudulently proclaimed are to protect us from a blight of voting fraud. The thing is that voting fraud almost never happens – not even in Chicago. These laws serve solely as an obstacle to voting for young people, the elderly, the poor and those in minorities who tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Let’s see, righty R’s preventing D’s from voting. Hmmm.

Immigration – Most of us believe that if people do something wrong that they should bear the consequences. And most of us believe that children of illegal immigrants, born in this country and who have broken no laws should not bear those consequences. Righties don’t want to pass the Dream Act and they are completely out of step with the majority of Americans. The R’s continue to oppose it because they’re afraid they’ll get “primaried” in the next election by a fanatic on the lunatic right fringe. That keeps them disconnected from everyone but the aforementioned lunatic right fringe.

This issue is complex, but as a nation we’re pretty much in the center.

Taxes on the wealthy – Depending on the week and the poll, anywhere between 62 – 80% of Americans favor increased taxes on the rich. Only the righties who signed Grover Norquist’s pledge to never raise taxes, along with some already wealthy people are opposed to that. That is to say, the country is center-left on this issue.

Contraception – Do you really need an explanation about this? Even 98% of Catholic women have used some form of birth control and only some fundamentalist righties have a problem with it. It’s just that a few of them have very loud voices. We Americans are far left in favor of contraception.

Women’s choice – The majority of Americans continue to be pro-choice, although by a smaller margin now than in past decades. In part that’s because of the loss of institutional memory of how things used to be before Roe v. Wade. It wasn’t pretty. We are center-left on this.

Global warming – It’s not just all the environmental scientists; most Americans believe that the Earth is getting warmer and that mankind’s activities like burning fossil fuels is contributing to it. The only question is why anyone denies that. To find the answer, follow the money. It’s way on the right. (Ref: “And another thing” below)

Social Security & Medicare – These are the two most popular programs ever created by the federal government and America is far left on them. Only the righties want to abolish or privatize them.

Note to budget hawk absolutist righties: We made a contract with the American people, who pre-paid for these services and we must keep our word. I know you’ll understand that.

Education – The righties want to abolish the Department of Education at both the federal and state levels. They are starving schools of funds, so teachers, administrators and janitors are being laid off. School maintenance and improvement projects are being halted and the disparity between the education of our poor children and the rich kids who get to go to elite schools continues to widen. Our children are suffering, their future becomes bleaker every day we fail them and we are putting the future of America in peril.

Americans don’t like this. They want their children to be educated and think public education is a very good thing. The righties are completely out of sync with America on this. This country is way left on education.

Healthcare – Most Americans want the government to do more to fix it. All that is standing in the way is the resistance borne of the hundreds of billions of dollars being collected every year by the medical insurance companies, big pharma, big hospitals and a few others. We’ve tried letting the market fix this. That has resulted in our having the most expensive healthcare in the world, while at the same time we’re getting just middling results. Only the far righties with megaphones attached to their faces think that continuing to let the free market work is the solution. We want affordable healthcare and are at least center-left on this issue.

The list can go on until sunrise. Those saying that we are a center-right nation have either bought into the Big Lie or think they will benefit by making you believe it.

It turns out that the common wisdom isn’t so common, nor is it so very wise after all.

—————————————————————————–

And another thing . . .

Have you seen the TV commercials with the pleasant looking blonde lady in a black pants suit talking about American energy? She tells us how plentiful it is and all we have to do is go get it. As an example, she walks across a map of the lower 48 and tells us about, ” . . . tapping Canadian oil sands for U.S. consumers.” Sounds great.

Except the plan for the Canadian oil sands crude is to transport that heaviest, dirtiest crude oil with the greatest global warming footprint via the XL Pipeline to our gulf coast for exporting to other nations. I need for them to explain once again how that stuff is for U.S. consumers because I’m not seeing how exporting it makes it for us.

One last comment: That ad and the others like it are sponsored by the American Petroleum Industry, the promotional organization of Big Oil. Just so you know.

“We move through life like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.” – William Landay

O’ See Can You Say?

Jan 21

Scratch any neo-con and you’ll instantly hear the vision: “We want small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives.” Clear, crisp and compelling.

Scratch a progressive and you’ll hear paragraphs of theory and a rant that will make your eyes cross and will hurt your brain. And the message will change with each progressive you listen to, leaving you confused and reaching for something solid on which to steady yourself.

The righties have been selling their message consistently at least since Richard Nixon. He wanted to discredit the press – he called them the “eastern liberal press.” They were the people he saw through his paranoia as always attacking him. So, he had his felon vice-president Spiro T. Agnew call them “nattering nabobs of negativity” and Agnew used that moniker over and over. It didn’t matter whether people knew what a nabob was, because the message that the press can’t be trusted got through. And it is continuing to get through.

The attack on the press (now the “media”) has most recently and shrilly been blared through the snarling lips of Sarah Palin, who calls the press the “lamestream media,” which is odd, since she is a regular on Fox News, making her part of the “lamestream media.”

The press used to be called the Fourth Estate. It was seen as a de facto check on government and was trusted to do that job. Not so much any more, though, after 44 years of being slimed by the self-appointed Republican attack machine.

Ronald Reagan was up front in selling distrust of government. He told us that the nine most feared words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” He played into people’s stereotyped attitudes and frustrations and got himself elected as the head of the government, strangely doing this by denouncing government.

He told us he was for small government, low taxes and the government out of our lives. Then he set about massively increasing government, raising taxes twelve times and building national debt that surpassed all other presidents combined. Yet strangely, he’s still remembered as the president who was for small government and low taxes. That disconnect can be traced to neo-cons selling the Reagan image (not the substance) consistently for twenty-four years, so that few Americans hear the lie and realize that the Republicans are largely responsible for the terrible economic situation in which Americans find themselves and their country today.

At the most recent Republican primary debate one of the candidates used the post office as an example of government failure and illustrative of how we don’t want government running our healthcare. The South Carolina Republican audience loved it, even though the post office is a model of low cost mail delivery that consistently produces excellent results. It was fiscally solvent until the Republicans required it to fully fund the pensions of workers not yet born. Furthermore, the government runs Medicare and nobody on Medicare – not a single person – will say they don’t like it. Still, the image of government bungling and inefficiency sells to an already jaded public.

The point is that the Republicans have had great success in keeping their hands on power by selling a clear, crisp and compelling vision in a clear, crisp and compelling way. And they have done that while pursuing exactly the opposite of what they promise. To be sure, that dichotomy is not solely the province of Republicans; however, what is most important to learn is the excellence of their messaging. It sells. It gets votes. It wins elections.

People have chuckled for decades over Will Rogers’ declaration, “I’m not a member of an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Somehow, that isn’t quite as funny today, when America is desperate for organization around a clear, crisp and compelling vision that is worthy of us and doesn’t pander to extremists.

We’re struggling through the largely fact-free world of politics with little but lies and distortion to be seen. It’s time the progressives got it together to produce a clear, crisp and compelling message to go along with a clear and vibrant strategy. The best products don’t always win, but the best marketing does.

Not Very Brave New World

Jan 11

During one of the Republican primary season debates Wolf Blitzer posed a question to the candidates about healthcare. He imagined a young fellow who was significantly ailing and was in the emergency room of a hospital where they determined that he would die if not treated immediately. Blitzer further said to imagine that his hypothetical subject was without financial means and did not have healthcare insurance. His question was about what the hospital staff should do.

After a couple of beats someone in the audience shouted, “Let him die.” There were cheers from others in the audience. And every one of the Republicans running to be the party nominee for the office of President of the United States went silent. Not a single one of them stood up to the hate, nor chastised the meanness of the shouted comment. Not one had the spine to display compassion for a fellow human being.

They displayed that same kind of spinelessness at another debate when a gay serviceman was shown on video with a question about gays serving openly in the military. Audience members booed him and once again these would-be leaders were silent. Be clear that this soldier is a man who puts his life on the line every day to protect those very same candidates and audience members, yet the candidates displayed neither spine nor compassion for him or for others like him.

Those yelling the loudest today are the far right radicals and they are not conservative. They are not even defenders of the Constitution. They are short sighted and closed-minded bullies masquerading as bible thumping Christians. America is suffering through an aggravated case of absolutist minds and it is killing our democracy.

In the early part of the last century one of the hateful signs hung on the doors of some companies read, “No Irish need apply.” There were signs all over the Jim Crow south that read, “Whites only.” And for decades and perhaps centuries there was and, in some places there still is, a “gentlemen’s agreement” to exclude Jews. That’s rapidly metastasizing to include Muslims. It’s more complicated than this, but at root it is a discrimination against anything that is not “us.”

We are seeing a willful brain numbing that says that anything that is not just like “us” is wrong, unpatriotic, godless and perhaps evil. How odd that is in a country that draws its strength from its diversity. We’ve always had that schizophrenic duality, but now the hateful side, the Mr. Hyde personality, is dominating the landscape in a razed earth war against everyone and everything that is not just like him. Worse, those who would be leaders are spineless against Mr. Hyde’s voice of hate and exclusion.

This is America, so the haters have the right to their hate and the candidates have the right to their cowardice. The key question is this: How long will you tolerate the hate?

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JaxPolitix

Disambiguation from the political and social musings of Jack Altschuler