Critique from the left

Chris Hedges is always provocative.

Of liberalism, too often bought off by conservative corporations:

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform — the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions — we are left defenseless against corporate power.

Of the current ugly capitalism itself, less restrained every day by anything moral:

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything — wealth, power and privilege — and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.

Between the lines, Hedges visibly calls for revolution. He doesn't call for violence the way so many Teabaggers do, but he has put my liberal program behind him for direct action and presumably peaceable rebellion.

The year in deja vu

American and European elites fucked up 2011:

The bottom line is that 2011 was a year in which our political elite obsessed over short-term deficits that aren’t actually a problem and, in the process, made the real problem — a depressed economy and mass unemployment — worse.

Of course, moronic teabaggers - members of the 99% fighting for the 1% - aren't elite. They may think of themselves as elite. After all, they're white and old, so they expect to be elite as their birthright, as their due of Confucian filial piety Ten Commandment Christian honor. And the teabaggers contributed with every vociferous shout-down and reactionary vote to the total fuck-up that was 2011, due to the completely irrational mindfuck of the 2010 midterm elections.

The elite central bankers took care of other bankers and told the rest of us that our dire straits were our own damn fault, never mind that the very same profligate bankers crashed the world economy. But they went to Harvard and the Sorbonne and Heidelberg, so we have to take care of them and their vacation homes and their taxpayer-funded bonuses, even if it means they have to sacrifice - oh, the humanity - by witnessing with their virgin eyes the homeless living in refrigerator boxes - how gauche, how outré, how lacking in fellow feeling toward their noble betters. Where's a Potemkin village when they need one for their refined sensibilities!

I am really fucking sick of the blind selfish wealthy, tired of being an upper middle class peasant with a white-knuckle death grip on my job, destined for Ayn Rand penury in old age, blamed for my own laziness, when in fact I work much harder than the shitheads who cream off an ever-larger proportion of the GDP.

Let me say this right now: If I find myself broke and hungry in old age, screwed out of Social Security and Medicare in a giant profit-making game of three-card monte, discarded by craven plutocratic feudal elites, I will not go gentle into that good night.

Is that a threat? You're goddamn right it is.

Paul Revere, Second Amendment fundamentalist

Just when you think she can't possibly be that ignorant, something like this comes along.  Sarah Palin can't even keep track of the mythic legends of American history that conservatives normally love (this one with the added benefit of being true).  She just makes up bullshit to suit her own weird inchoate opinions.

Why don't all Americans laugh her out of the room?

The long dirt nap

What to hope for in Egypt?

The American media appeases its audience with just-so stories that make it appear everything could turn out, like, totally cool and schweet.

Friday’s protests were the largest and most diverse yet, including young and old, women with Louis Vuitton bags and men in galabeyas, factory workers and film stars.

Freedom-loving patriots of all stripes and walks of life!  They undoubtedly hope for freedom, free markets, and a life of peace seeking rapprochement with all other nations and religions.  It's the dawning of a new day.

This is the New York Times, so they follow up with a little un-Disneyfied reporting:

Street battles unfolded throughout the day Friday, as hundreds of thousands of people streamed out of mosques after noon prayers on Friday in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and other cities around the country.

Something tells me that they're not going to have to suffer the outrageous wall of separation between church mosque and state.  Oh, snap!  If only Southern Baptists would riot just a little...

A dictator like Hosni Mubarak is like a loan from the mob.  The vig is tough to pay in the best of times.  Sometimes it might even be worth it.  But when the loan is past due, someone's going to start losing fingers.

It's hard not to sympathize with the heady feeling of Egyptians, who are no longer too afraid to shout what they want, who have reached the point where they can boil over and they know that Mubarak can't liquidate them all.  Realists on this side of the world should remember how an organic revolution worked out in Iran under similar circumstances.

All the Muslim Brotherhood has to do to topple the government might be to assassinate Mohamed ElBaradei and make it look like the secret service's work.  He's the great Western hope, a man who has worked for peace.  But radicals know - witness the Bolsheviks - that killing or marginalizing the moderates to polarize the country is a path to decisive victory over a weakened foe.  Or maybe they'll capture our embassy.  That works too.

It's no coincidence that Teapublicans in the U.S. now think Orrin Hatch is not conservative enough.  The GOP has been marginalizing anyone who ever had a moderate thought - or even listened to a moderate expression.

Why we should have hanged Jeff Davis

Secession was treason and should have been treated as such.

One of America’s worst traitors, a man who had committed or condoned far worse acts against his country than Benedict Arnold, was allowed to go home after his brief detainment in Virginia. But even that lenient punishment was enough to elevate [Jefferson] Davis to Southern martyrdom. Rumors were spread throughout the South about his mistreatment at Fortress Monroe, although Davis himself said the stories were untrue. Until his death in 1889, he found a stronger voice in passionately defending the right of secession and extolling the nobility of the Lost Cause. He became, like so many of his fellow Confederates, an unreconstructed rebel. As one might expect, he never believed that he had committed a single traitorous act; in fact, he boldly, even arrogantly, affirmed that every one of his actions was legal and constitutional. Unlike Lee, he never sought a pardon, which is just as well because he probably would not have gotten it (although President Johnson, who was courting the Democratic Party at the time, could have easily caved in on this issue). But he also never uttered a single word of regret or remorse for the bloody revolutionary war he had willfully led against his country.

It was and is unpatriotic to adhere to the Confederacy.

When wingnuts attack

The wingnut coup will be bloodless because ... they're just so darned virtuous!

Taking power at the point of a gun from the duly elected President non-violently honors and defends the Constitution.

They don't have the slightest idea what simple words mean. They put words in two categories, good and bad. Any word in the good category they assign to themselves, irrespective of its meaning. Any word in the bad category we get. That's how we came to be socialist/fascist/communist liberals.

What happens when those of us who are true to our founders' ideals fight them for our Constitution? Are they then going to spill our blood? Will they then claim that their junta only spilled blood that doesn't matter?

Mordred rules

It's not surprising that a political party that drove its entire public position for a decade off of perjury traps should view the law as pliable to whatever ends they desire.

A central theme of "Camelot" (the musical, not the Kennedy drama) is that the king is bound by law, too. Republicans such as John Ashcroft (though he's hardly the most extreme) could find no law that they would not run roughshod over. The fact that they would hold a man for more than two weeks on a pretext is just one more in a long series of usurpations.

Yet conservatives now want to refresh the tree of liberty. Glenn Beck thinks (I use the word think metaphorically) President Obama achieved coup by election. There's just no oxy in the man.

The Republican Party is a blight on American politics and, until responsible conservatives excise it, America will be unable to make the rational public policy decisions and compromises that are required for the survival of our democracy.

What he said

Ellis Weiner nails the tea bag astroturf would-be movement:

2. These same people, whose economic and physical well-being are a matter of supreme indifference to the richest families in America, have been persuaded to insist on policies that will only benefit the richest families in America. There is a term for these people, and it isn't "right-wing" or "conservative" or "patriotic" or even "Republicans." The term is "sucker." These people are suckers. They have been tricked and manipulated into working against their own interests and for the interests of people who could literally not care less about them. Their patron saint isn't Barry Goldwater or Thomas Paine or Ronald Reagan or Jesus H. Christ. It's P.T. Barnum.

...

6. Fox News, a factory of propaganda and lies on the best of days, has decided "the hell with it" and become an outright partisan fomenter of "revolution." ...

...

[I]s all this manipulated, phony "grass-roots" outrage fated to lead to some serious danger to innocent people? For every thousand citizens who gather in public to scream idiotic slogans and proudly flaunt their ignorance, how many more are laboring away in basements and garages, building bombs or assembling arsenals? How many does it take to lead to disaster?

The anger and fear of these people are real and, probably in most cases, justified, however much they misidentify their causes. That's what the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Becks depend on exploiting in order to make themselves rich and famous. But this entire cycle (rage; exploitation; more rage) seems to me worse than usual, as does its manipulation by the wealthy and their servants.

Laugh all we want at the ridiculous foolishness on the right. But more wingnut violence is coming. Count on it.

(h/t Main St. USA)

Listen my children

Two hundred thirty-three years ago tonight, Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, William Dawes, and the nameless but patriotic other riders made a choice. They improvised, adapted, and overcame the British who wanted to seize the powder in Lexington and Concord. That powder would propel the shot heard 'round the world.

The patriots, true patriots, not blowhard posers wearing flag pins on their well-tailored lapels, were fighting the most powerful nation in the world, the nation they identified with, the nation whose blood ran in their veins. They had not yet pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But they would. They were ready to govern themselves, to throw off the bogus pomp of monarchy.

They were willing to risk their own disgrace and death and bills of attainder for their families to achieve what we now have - and fritter away: liberty and self-government.

These words washed over me in childhood, became part of who I am today, and still bring loving tears to my eyes:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Those who think in this sophisticated time that Longfellow's poem is bad or overwrought, that his opening stanza is a limerick because of its rhyme scheme, should read it again. It remains a great, mythic poem, filled with brilliance and passion, despite its accessibility to a child such as I was when I begged my mother to read it to me again.

The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

...

The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

...

And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

...

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

And, today, I found myself bittersweet in Concord here in Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberty, crossing ground that the founders themselves crossed in a much wilder time. Our forebears accomplished so much in creating liberal democracy out of nothing but words and yearning, and we have let it slip through our fingers like the short-lived blooms of a crocus.

Who today would take the chance that they took to breathe life into a new world?