TomFlannery.com

It’s a blitzkrieg of negative political attack ads. They run right after each other too, which can be bewildering. One minute a candidate is accusing his opponent of being a diabolical tax and spend goat fucker, and the next moment the aforementioned diabolical tax and spend goat fucker is accusing his opponent of kicking jobless people in the teeth to keep corporate interests happy.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, if you can wade through the slime. Chris Carney is my DC rep, but I’ve never supported him since he supported the war. But to vote for a right wing crazy like Tom Marino is repulsive to me. So I do believe I’ll sit this one out. I no longer care much about the democratic process, since it doesn’t really exist. These guys are all bag men for corporations in one way or the other. And while I think it was both historic and proper to vote for Obama, if only to keep Sarah Palin on the lunatic fringe, I’m plenty pissed off that he hasn’t done more…or less depending on your point of view. Bailing out the stupid greedy fuckers on Wall Street wasn’t exactly what we put him in the Oval Office to do (nor putting in charge of the US Treasury former Wall Street hacks and expecting different results. That is the very definition of insanity). And what could have been a monumental universal health care bill was gutted by so many republican hyenas that what we’re left with is hardly FDR-ish. We’re still illegally detaining people in Cuba. We’re still waging a war.

The economy being in the toilet scares people. Fear is what drives the crazies to the front of the line. Obama inherited an 8 year spending orgy that would have made Reagan blush. But Obama is the new face. And like it or not, it’s his mess now. And he’s getting the blame. Is it fair? Of course not. But it wasn’t fair that Reagan got credit for freeing the hostages either. So it works both ways. A dog shits on my floor…guess who gets to clean it up?

Fox News. Limbaugh. The “Tea Party”. This right wing noise has always been with us. In various forms. From Father Coughlin to McCarthy to Goldwater to Nixon to Reagan. Put Spiro Agnew in drag and what have you got? Sara Palin without the good legs. Being a student of history, none of this surprises me. Hate sells. Always has. And it’s good theater. Say what you want about a gas-bag like Limbaugh. But he’s good at what he does. He knows his audience. He dumbs it down. Nobody on the left can touch him….because the left insists on explaining things. Who’s got time for details when you can just scream “socialism” in a crowded theater? It matters little that someone like Sara Palin probably can’t actually define socialism. I doubt McCarthy could define “communism” either. All that matters is that what they are talking about is them. It’s the ones who look different. The ones who talk different. The ones who interfere with the price of doing business. The ones who dare ask pesky questions.  You know, like “why”?

I really don’t think on this much anymore. I used to be a political junkie, but in retrospect it seems only because I was utterly transfixed by the sheer balls of a guy like Dick Cheney, who pissed on the Constitution with the same regularity he collected draft deferements…..and still maintained that anybody who disagreed with him did not love America. It was all a bit like slowing down to a crawl on the highway to inspect an accident. I feel almost guilty for getting sucked into it actually.

Thanfully that nightmare is over, but we seem to be mired in yet another. Just watch the ads. I’ve completely lost faith in the healing powers of politics. If in fact it ever had any. I used to think it mattered. The words. The impassioned plea’s. The pomp of it all. What it could stand for if we were even aware of what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

But then…Lou Barletta and Abraham Lincoln? In the same profession? It sounds perverse. And you know what? It is.

In a bit…

–tf