Albert Einstein, a very smart man, once said, "In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep."
He was right. To what extent are we conditioned to follow along with those in authority, and accept what they tell us? Something I think people are forgetting is that ultra conservatives are employing a method perfected by Southern Democrats and carpetbaggers after the Civil War which takes advantage of the propensity to follow and agree rather than balk and argue.
They are employing a type of flim-flam con game that once used misdirection to turn the thoughts of disadvantaged white southerners away from reparations levied against the South, to focus their fear and anger toward ex-slaves, and in doing so, take their minds off the fact that they were being fleeced. “Don’t blame Northern Reconstructionists for your problems. Blame [black men] who earn wages on farms. They are taking away jobs you should have.” Never mind the fact that southern white men did not want to pick cotton for low wages, and farm owners did not want to pay a higher wage to white workers, when they could con former slaves into accepting slave wages. (I wonder if that is where the term comes from, because slaves typically do not earn a wage.)
To prevent those white men from turning against the elite bankers and carpetbaggers, who were extracting their pound of flesh from the South, elites had to give them another enemy to hate, one that was traditionally reviled anyway. That attitude is now so ingrained in the thought process of our entire society because the attitude propagated through many generations of families, and as people moved away from the impoverished south, they took that con job into their hearts and carried it north and west with them.
The modern conservative flim-flam is much like that. It tells you who you should hate and fear. It tells you who is the cause of your misery, or gives you a plausible reason for your discontent. It keeps your eyes trained on the left hand while the right hand performs its trickery.
(Below are some examples of the con, and a bonus section on why conservatives lie.)
For instance, “Liberal women are the reason for the breakdown of the modern family, from taking jobs outside the home, to free government funded abortions feeding profits to clinics that are abortion factories.” But they do not mention the hundreds of thousands of fathers taken from their families and jailed on minor offenses. Nor do they mention the fact that fatherless young girls seek reassurance and love from their fellow teens, and without knowledge of contraception, they get pregnant and have babies out of wedlock. (I could go into the whole vicious cycle of feedback that perpetuates and exacerbates that problem, but not here and now.)
“Illegal Mexicans are taking your jobs in this country,” or are “the reason for high unemployment,” but they do not mention the fact that immigrants, illegal or legal, fill jobs most Americans don’t want. Nor do they mention the billions of dollars in assets and equipment that have been removed from our economy to hire nearly enslaved Mexican nationals just across the border in auto factories that opened in Mexico after NAFTA was passed.
“Government giveaways to lazy unemployed are the cause of a rising debt crisis,” ignores the widely acknowledged Iraq/Afghanistan war debt, and they do not mention the billionaires who are sequestering investment assets and puppet business entities offshore to avoid taxes.
They won't discuss the corporations that closed manufacturing plants here to employ government-enslaved Chinese to man the machines taken from plants here and shipped overseas. The widely touted wonder of outsourcing, for which venture capitalists give awards, is not acknowledged as one reason for slumping sales and profits in the U.S. because they don’t want to admit that Americans no longer have the money to go shopping. Instead, they blame President Obama’s failed economy.
Those are just a few samples of the con game that Republicans are running so lower middle class people will blame liberals for their problems. They refused to fund infrastructure, and now blame Obama for current profit declines, yet can't acknowledge six years of falling wages, and fewer job opportunities offering adequate pay for a family to live on.
Look beneath the scam, and find the con. I guarantee you will find one for every scare tactic they shout about and every accusation they hurl at liberals.
Something else I want to mention before I close: Many have pointed out the lies that are pervasive in the rhetoric from the right, and wonder how they get away with it. These lies are part of the scam, part of the con job. Republicans started with name calling, like ‘lazy takers,’ to get people riled up, but they also use terms like that to forestall accusations they expect to need to counter.
Early in Obama’s presidency, they called him lazy, and aimless. Soon, their tactic of doing nothing and not having real goals became known. But the left could not call them lazy and aimless, because it would sound like a petulant child saying, “No, you are the aimless one,” or “Na-na, Na-na, Na Na. You’re the one who’s lazy, not us.”
While the Republicans said they were focused on jobs, the misdirection was that they were focused on blocking new jobs. While they said they were interested in working out finance reform, their focus was on deregulating the banking and investment industry, or retro-reform.
When the Senate minority was telling America that Democrats refused to work with them on budgets, jobs, or the debt, House Republicans were in fact physically shutting Democrats out of all important policy meetings. And so on, etc. ad infinitum. When they are pulling something shady, the first thing they do is accuse President Obama and the Senate of doing exactly what they plan to do, or are already doing. The sad thing is that, the only things new members of congress know how to do is blockade, misdirect, obfuscate, and lie. They do not know how to govern.
Let me tell you, they know their jobs well. Republicans are expert flim-flam artists, skilled at misdirection and preemptive accusation.
Do not take your eyes off the ball. Do not look where they direct your eyes and ears. It is only con job to hide their true intent.
What that is, I have not yet figured out, since after Obama is no longer president, they still have to live in this country, despite the mess they have created.