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Monday, May 14, 2012

The Failure of the American Experiment

Everyone is talking about the massive flow of anonymously donated money into the Presidential campaign, and with good cause.  Hundreds of millions of dollars will be used to try to sway the electorate to support principally Mitt Romney, that's where the money is, by attacking Barack Obama.  But this is just one part of the overall scenario being plotted by the right wing.  There's more, much more.

The right is hedging its bets.  Mitt Romney has proven to be a less than inspiring figure.  The religious right doesn't trust his Mormon faith.  The political right is wary of his willingness to change positions whenever it seems to suit him politically, and they properly see Obamacare as merely a national application of the Romneycare that Romney sponsored in Massachusetts.  So while they want a Republican in the White House, they aren't resting there.  Tens of millions of dollars have already been spent against Democratic incumbents and candidates for the Senate and House of Representatives, and they are prepared to spend tens of millions more to keep the House and take over the Senate.

Here's what's going on as I see it, and this is my blog, so, you know...  These folks have learned that divided government doesn't work.  This is a lesson that monopolists during the industrial revolution learned.  Being in complete control makes life really easy.  Teddy Roosevelt broke up those business monopolies, but only American voters can keep a check on government.  So the strategy is to control all three branches of government and then pass the laws they believe will make it very hard for the opposition to take it back.

State governments have been playing their parts already.  The voter fraud laws that Republican states have been passing are thinly veiled attempts to suppress turnout among the elderly, poor and young voting blocks that generally vote Democrat.  These laws are no more than modern versions of the poll tax of yore.  There is no voter fraud in the United States to speak of.  The old party machines that registered dead people have all been demolished.

The GOP members of Congress have focused on pushing right wing social issues, and those who tell us to shrug it off as mere campaign rhetoric are being disingenuous because if the Republicans get control of the Senate and White House and continue to control the House, they have promised to enact these laws.

Unlike too many liberals, the Republicans understand that the key issue in this and any other election is who will be appointing the judges, not just to the Supreme Court, but to the lower courts too.  They have failed to fill judgeships under the Obama Administration because their agenda demands that they hold off until they take the Presidency so those appointments will be of ultra right wing jurists and overturning decades of settled law can accelerate even more than it has under the Roberts Court.

What I'm saying here is that there is a right wing agenda that has been developing over the years since the ascendance of Ronald Reagan, who couldn't win a primary in today's GOP by the way.  Their patience is paying off.  The press has been cowed into timidity, except for Fox News the aggressive coordinating mouthpiece for the radical right.  The American public has been pushed to the right by the inability of a gutless, spineless Democratic leadership to press the cause of liberalism.

Only concerted efforts to inform and convince American voters that their interests are and have always been best advanced by liberals.  Not only will it take money to help neutralize the plutocrats that dominate the political process but it will also take organizing and hitting the streets.  We need to pitch in if we want to protect our rights.

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