Politicians For Sale!

I have said before that we have the best government money can buy. It is surprisingly simple to thwart the will of the majority. You do not have to buy a majority of the legislators to do it. With the filibuster rule in the senate, all you have to buy is a large enough minority to defeat a cloture vote that would end the filibuster. Obviously, the drug companies, insurance industry, Wall Street and other special interests have more than enough money to do that. Their lobbyists prowl the halls of Congress and throw money around like confetti. The drug companies and insurance companies threatened, cajoled, and bought the defeat of the public insurance option. Other special interests took note of that, and they are poised to defeat any meaningful reforms that would keep them from indulging in the risky behavior that nearly put us into another great depression.

Not being content with the power the special interests already have, the right wing injustices of the United States Supreme Court have given money even more power to rule. In what is arguably the worst decision since Dred Scott, those injustices have decided that there are no restrictions on how much the special interests can spend on candidates or issues. In other words, the court has placed our politicians on the auction block. There is nothing to keep the special interests from buying the election of politicians who will do their bidding, thereby defeating the responsible politicians who actually want to represent their constituents. Make no mistake about it. This is not a conflict of ideas or philosophies. This is a direct threat to the concept of majority rule, and that concept is the very essence of any democracy. The Republican Party is in favor of the rule of money because the special interests are already supporting members of that party. All that this ruling means to Republicans is that they can raise their price and reap even greater benefits from their masters!

The only thing ordinary people have to combat this travesty is the disclosure rule. Every CEO of a company paying for an advertisement supporting or attacking a candidate or proposed legislation must be forced to appear in those ads, state his position with the special interest, and say that he approves of the ad being run. Furthermore, those executives must not be allowed to hide behind some supposedly non-profit organization. Any advertisements run by such an organization must feature verbal disclosures of its major contributors who must also appear in the ad to approve of the statements being made therein. We must make such advertisements as expensive, burdensome and transparent as possible! We cannot allow the real rulers of this country to hide in the shadows while purchasing the government they want. The citizens of this country must have the right to know who is buying whom, even if many of those citizens are not bright enough to figure out how that impacts them.

Blatant Partisanship Rewarded In Massachusetts

Massachusetts! I always thought the people of that state were politically savvy. But the results are in. It is final. A majority of the voters elected Massachusetts the most idiotic state of the month, if not the year. I know that is harsh, but I have the facts to back it up. It is not just that they elected a right wing Republican to take Ted Kennedy’s senate seat that is so stupid; it is also the reasons they stated for doing this. The most frequent reason given was dissatisfaction over the economy. Did the voters forget that it was George W. Bush and the Republican Party that got us into the mess? Did they forget that the Republican Party’s unprecedented use of the anachronistic filibuster rule in the senate has made it almost impossible to pass any legislation to deal with the crises or pass any regulations to prevent it from happening again?

Many voters also said they were concerned about the deficit. Did they forget that George W. Bush started with a surplus and turned it into a huge deficit? The Republican candidate, Scott Brown, also promised tax relief. Did the voters forget who always gets the tax cuts when the Republicans rule. Did they forget that Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy did nothing for the middle class and created a deficit? Did they forget that George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy did nothing for the middle class and turned a surplus into a deficit?

One nimrod even told an interviewer that he voted for the Republican because he was tired of the partisanship. That is an Alice in blunderland statement. I don’t know what that idiot has been watching or hearing but it certainly is not anything resembling the news. Every time the Democrats have tried to work out compromises the Republicans have bargained in bad faith and have slapped the Democrats with the threat of a filibuster. Furthermore, the Republicans hypocritically criticized Obama for trying terrorists in civilian courts after praising Bush for getting terrorists convicted in those same courts. The Republicans even carped at something as none partisan as trying to get the Olympics in this country and for something as none partisan as accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. How can anyone object to partisan behavior and then vote for the party that is so obviously putting partisan concerns above the interests of this country? Doing that is downright delusional.

Another thing the voters complained about was the health care bill. I will admit that it is not what it should be, but who is to blame. It is the republicans who are putting the special interest ahead to the well being of the nation. Their lock step partisanship made them unanimous in their opposition to any meaningful reform. Massachusetts already has a good health care system, but they would still benefit from a robust federal health insurance option because such a system would be good for the economy. Large businesses often say that the high cost of health insurance for their employees makes it more difficult for them to compete. By lowering those costs we would be helping our industries and we would be giving the working men and women of this country more money to spend on goods and services. It would, in fact, improve the economy, and a healthy national economy would help Massachusetts.

One of the good things about not being a politician or a news person is that I can call stupidity, stupidity. What the voters of Massachusetts did was incredibly stupid. One has to wonder if a large number of people simply voted for the pretty boy. The people of California did that when electing an Insurance Commissioner who was later tried and convicted for being in bed with the insurance industry. Electing that man was also stupid, and I said so at the time.

My advice to Democrats is to be more partisan. Call the Republicans on their hypocrisy and their pandering to the special interests. They have made it clear that they are unwilling to compromise on anything anyhow. Ram the legislation through any way you can. Insist on party discipline. Opposition to a bill is acceptable obstruction is not. Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, and Landrieu must be punished for threatening to join the filibuster against health care. We simply cannot allow the precedent they have set to stand. Above all, get out there and campaign!

No Credibility

There are lies, damn lies, and the alternate universe of the extreme right wing. I have said before that the lunatics have taken over the Republican Party, and that that party is now pandering to the tea partiers’. I suppose there is a warm fuzzy feeling when you say what that crowd wants to hear and they cheer you. “Oh, ain’t I bitchen!” The problem is that in the dark world of the extreme right wing there are only beliefs, and facts do not matter. This means that you must feed their beliefs at the expense of your credibility. Most politicians are lawyers. As such they have been practicing a profession that is as unpopular as the profession of politician. The one thing you can say about attorneys, however, is that they are smart enough to know which lies to tell and which lies to avoid. In this regard their first rule is not to make any statement that is easy to disprove. Getting caught in one lie is damaging to your credibility, getting caught in many lies demolishes your credibility.

Telling lies by falsely claiming that the health care bills contained death panels and provisions to provide health insurance to illegal immigrants did not seem that bad to the Republicans. They knew that most people were not going to read those bills. They also knew that if they threw in the issue of abortion, a very large number of people would not look beyond that single issue. In other words, the Republicans thought their lies about health care reform would not hurt them even when responsible people revealed that those lies were lies. Joining the lunatics in accusing President Obama of not being a citizen of this country was a different matter. The lunatics loved it, but everyone else denounced it as crazy. The brighter Republicans down played the citizenship issue from the beginning and the other members of that party are now avoiding the issue. The problem is that the Republicans are now telling lies that are more ill advised than the ones about President Obama’s birthplace.

Here you have prominent Republicans saying that President Obama is not serious about the war against the terrorists because he does not use the word terror or call that war a war on terrorists. The remarkable thing about this is that some Republicans even said it on the same night that Obama talked about the attempt of the underpants bomber being a terrorist act and re-iterated his commitment to carry on the war against the terrorists. Furthermore, some prominent Republicans are insisting that there were no terrorist attacks against this country when George W. Bush was President. One of the Republicans who recently said that was Rudy Giuliani. One would expect such nonsense from Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney, but Rudy Giuliani? How could he possibly forget when the nine-eleven attack took place? Giuliani said it was a slip of the tongue and that he meant no attacks took place after nine-eleven. I guess he forgot about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and other attacks that the good people at MSNBC were all too happy to point out, all of which occurred during Bush’s tenure in office.

It is tempting to believe that Republicans are suffering from alzheimer’s disease or that they think we are. There is actually something far more cynical involved. Sarah Palin is fond of referring to voters as Joe six pack. The connotation is that voters are only interested in drinking beer and watching ball games. This being the case, it is highly unlikely that they will watch Obama’s speeches or even the news broadcasts that play excerpts from those speeches. Who cares about people who think facts matter and pay at least some attention to what is happening? Who cares if those people know that the Republican Party is so intellectually and morally bankrupt that it has no credibility? If Joe six pack is representative of the independent voters, all that matters is what he thinks and how he will vote. If ignorance is bliss, he is very happy and so are the Republicans.

This brings up questions about the news media and journalistic integrity. Forget about Fox News. Fox news is an oxymoron. The Fox organization is not a news organization; it is a propaganda machine, and it has absolutely no concept of journalistic integrity. In all fairness, I have to admit that there is a bias in most news organizations. It stems from the fact that news organizations are businesses. As such their profits depend on how large of an audience they can draw. Since most people like to hear things that confirm their opinions, news organizations keep an eye on the demographics. If the country swings to the right, so does the media. If the country swings to the left, the media follows in that direction. This, however, does not mean that the responsible ones throw away their journalistic integrity. I grew up watching the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite. They had both worked as reporters gathering the news before they went into television, and they had a strong sense of journalistic integrity. Facts mattered to them. They were not content to simply report what someone said; they would also point out the obvious lies. In those days, the media tried to confine the bias to their editorials, but they tried to accurately express the facts even in their editorials. They felt a responsibility to inform the public. Today the main stream media still tries to accurately state the facts and what people say. What is missing is the sense of responsibility to inform the public by pointing out the obvious lies.

I watch MSNBC, which is really more about editorials than straight news. I also watch CNN and the news broadcasts of other networks. I am a liberal and proud of it. What I try to avoid is becoming an ideologue. I look at different news sources in order to consider different perspectives. I also try to do some fact checking. I enjoy discussing issues with people who do not share my opinion if those people do not misrepresent or ignore the facts. I have very little tolerance for the opinions of people who do misrepresent or ignore the facts. The reason why right wingers continue to insist that there is a liberal media bias is because the facts do not conform with their beliefs. Fortunately, there are some conservatives who do care about facts. It is a pity that we cannot hear them over the screams of the lunatics. I do not think I would agree with the opinions of those conservatives, but I do think we should listen to them.

Partisan Hypocrisy

There is nothing new about the extreme right wing and its connection with the Republican Party. The Republican Party went along with Joe McCarthy and his paranoid witch hunts. It did not do much to discourage the lunatics in John Birch society either. This is really remarkable considering the fact that the idiot Birchers even accused President Eisenhower of being a communist sympathizer. In spite of its connection to the extreme right, however, the Republicans of the nineteen-forties, nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties were smart enough to read the polls. Most Americans identified themselves as being moderates, and the majority of the legislators from both parties acted accordingly. Containment of the Soviet Union was a bipartisan effort, and we did not pull out of the United Nations in spite of the right wing’s paranoia about that organization becoming a world government that would usurp the sovereignty of the United States. Politicians from both parties also worked out reasonable compromises that allowed the passage of much needed legislation. Members of both parties knew that being a good politician went beyond getting elected; it also meant governing. The minority party (whether Democratic or Republican) continued to compete, but it also accepted some responsibility for the government and for furthering the interests of this nation.

That has now changed. The fear mongering tactics of Rove and Cheney fed the paranoia of the right wing and empowered those nihilistic lunatics. The result is a major party that is incapable of compromising. It now resorts to partisanship for the mere sake of opposing the party in power. It does this regardless of the harm it is doing to the country and regardless of how obviously hypocritical it must be in its criticisms. Even George W. Bush said the prison at Guantanamo had become a liability and should be closed. Yet the Republicans are now saying that closing it is dangerous for the nation, and are accusing President Obama of being soft on terrorists because he is closing it. There were no complaints from the Republican Party when the Bush administration successfully tried three terrorists in Federal Court. Yet they are now screaming that Obama is putting the nation in peril by trying terrorists in Federal Court. Furthermore, the Republicans are taking absolutely no role in trying to govern. Instead, they are using the filibuster in the senate in an effort to prevent the Democratic Party from passing any legislation. They are ignoring the will of the electorate and are metaphorically telling the nation that the Democratic Party will only govern over the dead body of the Republican Party. I cannot recall a time in history when a major party behaved so irresponsibly and survived.

I consider the upcoming elections of this year to be an IQ test. I believe that the vast majority of the people of this nation are still pragmatic moderates rather than mindless ideologues. The only real question in my mind is whether the electorate will be smart enough to prove the pollsters wrong and punish the Republican Party for behaving so irresponsibly. There is no way I can overstate how dangerous of a precedent the Republicans are now setting.