At around 11 p.m. EST Tuesday night, there flashed through the Borg hive-mind that is the rightwing noise machine a recognition that that night's debate marked the effective end of the Clinton II candidacy. Thus, in the as above/so below cosmos of the Publican Party, Wednesday saw all hands setting about preparing a grave for Barack Obama. From the Olympian heights of the Wall Street Journal, down to that yapping street cur Sean Hannity, all good GOoPers, great and small, went digging in the dirt.
That ignorant bigot Hannity, useful-idiot extraordinaire, devoted almost all of his three-hour radio show to a hebephrenic diatribe that cobbled together nearly every slur yet unearthed against Obama, culminating in an explicitly racist denunciation of his patriotism.
But that was just for the rubes. The Wall Street Journal, in its lead editorial, also questioned Obama's patriotism, but on the only ground that really matters to the predatory capitalists who actually run the Publican Party. Obama, decreed the Journal, lacks patriotism, because he is some sort of heretical leveller who is after their money. In the world according to the Journal, you see, "patriotism" is predatory profit.
In an earlier diary I suggested that the predatory capitalists who own and control the Publican Party intended that either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani be enshrined as their party's 2008 presidential nominee, as both these men had, in their private, business lives, shown the ultimate fealty to capital, having personally participated in transactions in which human beings were killed, or made to suffer, for the benefit of money.
Like George II, these men could be expected to perform their primary function--ensuring that greater and greater amounts of capital flow into fewer and fewer hands--while meanwhile ritually shaking before the populace that fetish of fear fortuitously stumbled upon when George II didn't listen to Clinton I holdovers, didn't read documents placed before him, and then one day glanced up, befuddled, from The Pet Goat, to regard the flames of 9/11 . . . which devolved into that glorious capital bonanza, that boon of an investment opportunity, that eternal, neverending, global war on Goldsteinism, er, terror.
But alas, hubris at last caught up with the little godlings of GOoP. The potentates of the party failed to consider the possibility that bombarding the rubes of the base with 16 years of thunderations in which The Clenis was pronounced the Root of All Evil, might cause that base to shy away from embracing for their own a creepy Nosferatu whose Clenis seemed even less contained and constrained than the original. Bye-bye, Rudy.
Nor did they pause to ponder the likelihood that decades of encouraging that same base to glance askance at those who did not worship within certain devotional parameters, parameters that often excluded even Catholics, might result in that base fleeing from a roll in the rack with a two-dimensional hologram whose faith, unkindly put, seemed that of a freak. Bye-bye, Mitt.
There was a fourth-and-fifteen attempt to scrounge up some love for Fred Thompson, but, as Grandpa Fred only periodically displayed even a pulse, that went nowhere.
Mike Huckabee, a rogue golem the potentates themselves created, with all their 40-year pandering to the rubes of the religious right, had to be "put down"; after that initial scare there in Iowa, the hellhounds of "the new media" dutifully performed their masters' bidding, and the predatory potentates, with the golem safely bottled, were able to breathe easier--to say, with Jesus on the cross: "It is accomplished."
Which left them with John McCain. Though they would have preferred not to, as once every three or four years McCain has been known to agitate for something not strictly inscribed in the predatory-capital handbook. But they're stuck with him. As he's stuck with them. He's their man.
It is fair to argue that both parties, Democrat and Publican, serve the interests of capital, to a greater or lesser extent. But it is that "extent" that is of supreme importance to the predatory capitalists who own and control the GOoPs. They are never willing to settle for anything less than all they can get.
Witness the Journal's Wednesday editorial fret over a modest bill introduced last August by Barack Obama, entitled the "Patriot Employer Act":
Recently in Janesville, Wis., he repeated his intention to make it a priority as President: "We will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good jobs with decent wages right here in America."
Mr. Obama's proposal would designate certain companies as "patriot employers" and favor them over other, presumably not so patriotic, businesses.
The legislation takes four pages to define "patriotic" companies as those that: "pay at least 60 percent of each employee's health care premiums"; have a position of "neutrality in employee [union] organizing drives"; "maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in the United States relative to the number of full-time workers outside of the United States"; pay a salary to each employee "not less than an amount equal to the federal poverty level"; and provide a pension plan.
Seems pretty reasonable, don't you think? I mean, a 1% tax credit on the profits of any US company that chips in on health insurance, pays wages that keep its employees out of poverty, leashes the goons when a union comes around, and actually hires people to work in the United States . . . this is not exactly the Rising of the Commons, or the Paris Commune.
To the Journal people, though, it is anathema. Because:
To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad.
Yeah, well, so what? You're an American company: pay American taxes. I flee to France, because, say, I can't bear to remain another instant on the same continent with George Bush, I still have to pay American taxes. I should have to pay, when some US company that gallops overseas to use Africans as guinea pigs in pharmaceutical trials, shouldn't?
The Journal then trots out some craven bloviaters to repeat the stupendous lie that "offshore activities of US companies tend to increase rather than reduce domestic business." There is handwringing that the crazed leveller Obama, after stealing money from US companies operating overseas, will next tax the rich, as well as the playthings of the rich--capital gains and dividends. There is the right's new favorite Orwellian formulation: that corporations "don't really pay taxes." Finally, the Journal moans that what really prevents the US economy from achieving eternal bountiful life everlasting is that nasty corporate income tax--which must be immediately reduced, by at least 10%. Because, you see:
[t]o borrow Mr. Obama's language, what's really unpatriotic is the 35% corporate tax rate.
You see what kind of sick fucks we're dealing with. It's all about their fucking money. "Patriotism" means allowing these amoral buccaneers, these people who have, in William Burroughs' memorable phrase, "transformed this planet into an annex of Hell," to reach out with their claws like great dredges to scrape even more money into their yawning maws.
You'll rarely find a more bald expression of what these people are about than this. Patriotism means giving them money.
All the rest--flag pins, flag salutes, national anthems, supporting the troops, respecting the police, honoring the office of the presidency and the rule of law, walking in the hallowed footsteps of The Founders, borders! language! culture!--all just a dumb-show for the rubes. Just "American populism," as Robert Stone put it, "notorious as a pious front for venal corruption[.]"
The rubes would never vote Publican if the predatory capitalists who are the heart and soul and raison d'etre of that party admitted, as they do in this Journal editorial, the truth: that "patriotism" involves bamboozling the rubes into digging ever-wider canals to channel ever-greater amounts of money to the already stupendously wealthy.
So instead they send their little rat-dog of a Cerberus, Sean Hannity, out there to yip and yap about the "unknown," "untested," "unprepared," "unqualified," "unpatriotic" Barack Obama, to roll Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayres, domestic terrorist, Louis Rezko, no-flag-pin, no-flag-salute, 9/11, Somali dress, bombed the Pentagon, Barack Hussein Obama, Osama, "really proud," Muslim, "white oppressors," into noxious, truthless little shitballs.
The Kossack CheeseMoose is right: this is going to be one fantastically ugly campaign. The filth will pile so high and so fast "[we]'ll "need[] wings to stay above it." Already they're trying to unspool a rerun of 1988, when, as Sydney Blumenthal observed in Pledging Allegiance, George I slimed into the White House by dumbing down the campaign to a tour of flag factories, obsessive-compulsive reciting of the pledge, and whispered hints of the unAmericanism inherent in the "swarthy" Michael Dukakis. This time our candidate isn't just "swarthy"--hell, he's black. I don't think, in the end, it's going to matter--I think we're going to prevail--but that's another diary.
Just remember, of this diary, that whenever in this campaign they talk about "patriotism," these shameless ones, that they've outed themselves, at least this once, and by "patriotism," these predatory capitalist Publicans, they . . . mean . . . their . . . money.