& The Day After

I am impressed at the spunky reactions from various liberal bloggers, and look forward to Tbogg returning to his blog (versus "twitertwating" as he says he's doing at the moment)--personally, I just do not want to go down the super-phone corridor at all, and I'd probably be cranking the Victrola still if I still lived in that house with that great basement where the Victrola resided back in 1948, with its little stack of classical platters which comprised my dad's entire music collection, carefully purchased after much thought no doubt back in '39, after he'd paid off his '36 Chevy coupe and his lovely brick house with two stories, an attic, and a full basement.  Life under Roosevelt was good if you had a job.

You have to be happy that Reid beat Angle, and Coons beat O'Donnell.  Coons seems like a potentially fine Senator; Reid is at least reasonably sane.  You have to be dismayed at the success of the advertising campaign of outright lies which has been full-tilt on since January 20, '09.  If the Health Care Bill was Obama's "Waterloo", then the efforts to suppress all Democratic attempts at explaining the Bill to the public must be give full credit.  This was out and out thuggery, and it was followed by the rallies in the fall of '09, and of course augmented by the endless day-after-day lies and mischaracterizations of the right wing punditry, not to mention a whole "network" which retains some sort of objective credibility in the face of the obvious distortions it produces daily.  I guess the brilliance of Mr. Murdoch lies in his corralling of the NFL, Major League Baseball, and various other big-time sporting coverages.  Right there he has the male part of the electorate.  If any one still doubts the simple power of advertising to affect election results, check out the example of the three Iowa judges.  That was money, pure and simple--and one focused character with a bent agenda and a willingness to spend. 

The internal contradictions within the Tea Party "organization" may create some digestive discomfort eventually.  For example, their hard-line anti-undocumented persons stand must surely conflict with their claim to want an unintrusive State, because the only way to drive the undocumented either out of the US or into the very grave of poverty is to enforce the necessity of documents at every turn.  Will we all, in a few years, be showing our "papers" at various check points on the way to the grocery store, much less when we happen to cross state lines, or even county lines?  How will that "hopey-changey future" suit ya, Ms Angle?  And as cash money is anonymous, will our new Tea Party State forbid its use in the furtherance of making undocumented life untenable?  That's the direction things are heading.

The same contradiction exists, of course, back at the big turning point for the United States, the Reagan election.  Mr. Reagan was elected a few years after the Supreme Court made it's ruling in Roe V. Wade.  This ruling was a proper Constitutional judgment which asserted that female citizens of the United States had the right to make crucial decisions concerning their health in consult with the medical profession.  Yet since Mr. Reagan placed the Presidency foresquare with the "Right to Life" Movement, the body politic has allowed a kind of Constitutional Black Hole to develop and grow larger and larger, and women's health providers are becoming few an far between, and live in some fear of lynching (see, e.g., the late Dr. Tiller).
The Tea Party view seems to be that even in the extreme cases of rape and incest, lemonade must be made.  What cashes in that "must" but State Power?  Meanwhile, the wedge issue exists to be manipulated, election after election.  Race, the wimmens, teh gays, and the mescans--it's like 'lectricity for agitating that "base."  Works every time apparently. 

Before this brave new world arrives, of course, the Tea Party will have to turn the next few years into a reprise of the Impeachment Circus the Republicans gave us in the mid-'90s, when it was decided that even the Impeachment Process would be enlisted in the on-going political struggle that is our two-party system.  That brilliant move some how inoculated Mr. Bush, or perhaps it is only Democrats who can be impeached.  At any rate, if the Tea Parties have their way, all governance will cease until the Great Issue of the Obama Birth Certificate is decided--which should get them at least to 2012.  And while "Originalists" treat our Constitution as though it were handed down on stone tablets written in fire by the finger of God himself, they also are fine with excising several of the Amendments which were added after the Civil War.  You'd think if they're ok with that concept, they might wonder about doing a bit of carpentry on the Impeachment process, so it can't be misused again.  And there might be some issues to look at re having tiny small population states which can be cheaply bought by anonymous advertising campaigns wield enormous legislative power.  Just sayin'. 

Here in NC, in my Congressional District, we now have a Republican, replacing the long-time Congressman Ethridge. (Update--Ethridge is demanding a recount, so this one isn't decided quite yet.) And in my county, Republicans have swept into the Board of Commissioners.  This should mean renewed efforts to make life inhospitable for our Mexican and Central American residents, as well as a cessation of all attempts to make plans for orderly land development and long-term waste and trash solutions. So, if you happen to want to relocate your Lead Smelting Plant to the sunny South, give Chatham County a look.  We're gonna be open for bidness from now on, and Union Labor is illegal in North Carolina--we have a "Right to Work" law.  Our out-going Commissioners lost by about 1%.  Nationwide, demographics which enabled the so-called "liberal sweep" two years ago were down by several percentage points this time around.   There's a relationship between the Satanic power of advertising and these slack asses who didn't bother to get to the polls.  Just sayin'.

It might also be nice if, one day some day, a few preachers would tell their flocks that the message of Jesus was not that it was ok to lynch people.  That seems to be the message of one Preacher John Jones of Liberty, NC.  Mr. Jones put out flyers on election day telling everyone with a windshield to vote straight ticket Republican because the Democrats were baby killers and socialists, and he suggests that while Hitler killed six million Jews, Obama and the Democrats have killed fifty million babies.  Mr. Jones is no doubt in the lemonade camp with Ms Angle.  Mr. Jones even included his email with his flyer.  If I was an asshole I guess I would include it here in the hope that it would be collected by some bot or other and cause him to be spammed ceaseless.  Fortunately for Mr. Jones, Jesus did not suggest that if your neighbor is an asshole, you should be an asshole right back at him.