How did it come to be that we became the party of grownups?
That we abandoned the field and lost control of the message to the country so badly over the years that the rampant roil of childish bullies that has become the Republican Party has convinced huge swaths of America that they're good at governing, much less the best at it? We need to rewrite and address the realities of that little fallacy and we need to do it decisively and thoroughly and then we need to keep up the drumbeat to maintain the truer perception of reality until we can drown the idiocracy of the conservative movement in a bathtub.
Rian Fike had a Recommended diary yesterday about the win in Florida over that horrible, blatant and disgusting anti education bill. About how the powers that be howled and lied and discouraged and tried to ram through the end of public education as we know it. And how they overstepped, tripped and fell on their faces. And how good it felt to have been part of the tsunami that drowned their plan. The corps and vested interests lie and spin and try to make us believe that we're just plebes, that we're helpless against their money and their might. Turns out that we're not. They may have millions of dollars to throw at getting their way, but we have millions of people, each with their $.02, and like the 50 state strategy and Obama's campaign of lots of little people all pulling together, those millions of pennies buried the special interests. That terrifies them. That we might wake up, see through their spin and refuse to be buffaloed into accepting their plans as a fait accompli. They told us for months, at a fever pitch that HIR was dead, give up, don't bother fighting for it. But we did keep fighting. We ignored their propaganda and kept the pressure up. And now it's law. Hopefully these wins pressure them and makes them try harder, makes them overstep more and fall out into the open where people can see their real, naked intent. To own everything and everybody. To make the American people, and in fact all people, an engine to make and funnel money into their hands.
But we can't just win these short term battles, we have to prepare the fields and plant crops for the long haul. We have to keep talking and keep pointing out the good sense and the success of reasonable, grownup choices and consequences. We need to keep pointing out where the Republican rule fell flat and lied about it, We need to keep hammering away at the accretions of lies and misperceptions perpetuated by the various incarnations of Republican, conservative, neocon and corporate interests. We can't go back to allowing the lies to propagate and infest and interfere with the best interests of our country. We have to salvage the people we can from ignorance and isolate the incorrigible by debunking them and keep debunking them so that there is no question of their lack of competence. So that they can't pretend that they were really the good guys.
At this point, however it came to pass, the Democrats are the party of grownups. The Republicans have been looting the public piggy banks and ignoring the nitty gritty work of running a country for almost a generation. The highways and bridges have gone unmaintained, critical infrastructure has rotted away, schools are literally crumbling, the FAA is twenty years behind on upgrades and redundancy, safety related back up systems, for air traffic control. And yet we still have $600 toilet seats, multibillion dollar planes and star wars tech that doesn’t work. And oh, the derivatives and mortgage meltdown that almost bankrupted the world and left us teetering on the brink of worldwide collapse and mired in the biggest recession since the Great Depression. All the money that should have been going to maintain and repair the things that belong to the country and that we all use and depend on has been funneled away into the selfish, grasping, greedy pockets of CEO’s, banksters, defense contractors and multinational corporations. Our collective wealth has already been redistributed. Away from us. Away from those who earned it and who fight and die to protect the concepts and ideals of our country. It’s past time to re-redistribute the wealth and to graphically show why it was ours to begin with. Claw back some of what’s been leveraged away from us through unfair and predatory practices like payday loans, essentially legalized loan sharking at 300%+ interest. Like offshoring jobs and walking away with massive tax breaks after doing so. Like hedge funds and managers that gamble away the pensions of hardworking people who spent their lives doing the responsible things. Like setting up the rules of the game so that they’re the casino, writing rules that so strongly favor the House, or in this case, the corporations, that there’s no way for average Americans to hold on to what they’ve earned. They set up the tables so it all gets reaped away into some corporation’s pocket and into private jets, fantasy islands, gated and guarded mansions and multimillion dollar bonuses for having crashed the ships of companies onto the rocks. Corporate welfare has got to end and the corporate welfare kings need to be dethroned. The irresponsible, greedy harvest of American’s hard earned dollars to further enrich the unspeakably rich has got to end. The rich and the corporations have got to quit freeloading off of us and start paying their fair share. Financial transaction taxes and regulation of super high speed trolling of bid prices need to be enacted and enforced. The playing field has to come back to level.
Democrats aren’t perfect, but at least they are only middling and pettily imperfect instead of rapaciously focused on tilting the playing field to dump Americans into the maw of corporations as grist for the corporate mills. Most Democrats aren’t quite wholly owned subsidiaries of corporations and actively against working and middle class Americans, grabbing as much as possible for themselves and their rich cronies as they can steal. And they are definitely not playing the shell game of ginning up anger against the poor and relatively helpless among us while maximizing corporate profits and loopholes. We need a return to responsible, reasonable, grownup oversight and guidance in government. We need to put a lot of irresponsible, unreasonable, greedy delinquents in jail long enough to get their attention. I’m glad the finance reform will be on the front burner for the election, we need to foment a little revolution, break out the metaphorical torches and pitchforks and start targeting some of the most egregious offenders, whip up some useful energy and direct it toward real reform. General and later President Eisenhower said that once the people make up their minds, the leaders have to get out of their way and give them what they want. It’s time to want to end corporate welfare and cheating. To raise our gimlet eye and send them packing with our basilisk stare. They do fear us. When the sleeping giant stirs, they run for cover. It’s time to stir. And keep stirring, stay focused against the chaff that the opposition will throw as distractions to diffuse our attention.
Profoundest apologies, Krewmates, I swear to Pete that I only closed my eyes for a second. :::hangs head in shame::: This was on the way to being much better, honest. ::sigh::