Reply #99: Unfortunately, waking the fuck up requires...

[warren pease]

Useful information and the capacity to evaluate it in context. First, we have no useful information available from any "trusted" sources; even the NYT has apparently decided its future lies in backing fascism and contributing to the screech of the right wing noise machine.

Radio isn't even pretending, as the NYT still does, that impartiality exists in its spectrum of programming. Wingnut radio has been the driving force behind the devolution of America into Dumbfuckistan and blasting the big lie 24/7 such that, to more suggestible citizens, resistance is futile and all hail the fascist boot -- as long as it's identified with the GOP and guarantees to stamp out libruls and their godless, anti-family values.

Anyone with access to the internet and the desire to seek out information from non-US sources already knows that TV news is worse than useless -- its overt mission is delivering brain-destroying content and serving up the resulting mental mush-balls to the advertisers in a state of drooling compliance.

And in its more important though unofficial role as ministry of disinformation, it's charged with continuous pompom waving for corporate orthodoxy and maintenance of the oligarchical status quo.

All of which guarantees that never is heard a discouraging word about domestic fascism and murderous overseas resource grabs, all tarted up by TEEVEE with patriotic idiocy and justified with the usual appeals to religiosity, love of country (which actually means "love of the current administration"), and good old American xenophobia and racism.

So US-based mass media, particularly TV news (which is where about 92 percent of the US public says it gets most or all its information) is dangerous to everyone it comes into contact with. It's a classic air-borne virus that attacks higher-level brain functions and can only be cured by a decade's exposure to the reality of fascism American-style, after which even the most slavish BushBots finally get the fucking point.

But it's too late by then, the republic's ruined every way you can imagine, it's a third-world country ruled by corporate predators, overflowing with former members of the now-defunct middle class who never saw it coming.

Sick thing is, democrats could have stopped the whole process in its tracks. They were elected specifically to do exactly that. And they thumbed their noses at their "base" and, within hours of the 2006 elections, were declaring that impeachment was off the table, that they wanted to work in a bipartisan manner with their colleagues in the GOP, that they were eager to meet with The Commander Guy to see how they could avoid partisan bickering, and blah, blah, blah...

Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, they tossed up a horde of presidential candidates who, with a couple of notable exceptions, might as well have been moderate republicans -- if such existed anymore. Militarists, corporatists, globalization supporters, free traders all, willing enablers of the status quo. Certainly less fascistic, but not necessarily less imperialist, than the average republican.

We've all been told that Kucinich is "unelectable." The fact that this is the opinion of those same rotten apologist bastards who pollute mass media, posing as insiders when they're just the usual liars from the Happy Face Department at the AEI or the Heritage Foundation... that fact is conveniently forgotten in the frenzy to handicap the horses. Issues? We don't got to deal with no stinking issues...

Ahhh... The only thing left, at least legally and within the constraints of an increasingly repressive system, is work like hell for any real progressive challenging any democratic incumbent who didn't co-sign Kucinich's bill to impeach Cheney, who didn't throw a monkey wrench into the BushCo machine, who didn't stand up for the Constitution, and who folded every single time it mattered -- which, with this administration, has been just about daily.

And if the progressive can't overcome the money and power of incumbency? Well, voting republican is just insane, and voting Green produces almost the same outcome. How does anybody who can't afford to buy a senator or congressperson compete with those who can?

Campaign finance reform; public financing of campaigns? Off the table. And you can see their point; why vote to cut off the world's greatest supply of "the mother's milk of politics?"

So, I have to conclude that we're utterly fucked and probably beyond the point at which we can depend on any outside help -- unless the EU gets pissed enough to oppose the US militarily, in which case I'll be at the front of the line to greet our liberators. Might even get a decent health care system out of the deal.


wp