The Wall

[Joanne98]

This week, George Lakoff published a piece called “Disaster Messaging” and Eric Alterman penned an essay called “Kabuki Democracy: Why a Progressive Presidency is Impossible, for Now.” Lakoff and Alterman know what is standing in the way of progressive achievement in America. Let’s call it The Wall.

Lakoff speaks of the conservatives’ message advantages. Democrats are constantly playing a game of catch-up to the Right’s framing savvy and a multi-billion dollar media machine decades in the making. With neither the framing smarts nor the message machine, Democrats resort to “disaster messaging,” adopting conservative frames and policies.

Alterman surveys our current political environment — the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the effectiveness of FoxNews and the spinelessness and waywardness of its competitors and others in the press, regressive parliamentary rules that hand the advantage to an obstructionist and dangerous minority, etc. — and concludes that progressive achievement will take revolutionary changes in our current campaign practices.

Conservatives, of course, know this. And that’s why they’ve built The Wall. Among its bricks: unlimited corporate campaign spending; regressive, complicated voter ID requirements; xenophobic immigration reforms intended to intimidate all non-white Americans; trashing of public education; trashing of science; regressive tax policies that keep the poor poor while the rich get richer; a health care system intended to cause suffering, death and demoralization; a collapsing infrastructure and the destruction of government oversight and regulation.

It’s callous, inhumane and anti-democratic. But its cruelty is just the conservatives’ means to an end: their insulation from the will of the people who will, one day, wake up to find themselves powerless to change the punishing status quo

http://firedoglake.com/2010/07/11/the-wall/

[whyverne]

1. Why can't one democratic administration defeat a right wing

system that's been consolidating itself for two generations?

Gee, I don't know. Maybe because they stacked the deck. Everybody including Obama are being held hostage by the corporatist mob. They're saying "Nothing moves until we say so, and we don't say so unless we keep the power". They laugh at democracy and they laugh at Obama. What's Obama gonna do? Draft them?

It's going to be a long slog out of this hole and as long as people are against big government, it gets a lot longer.

[pscot]

2. Pre-emptive surrender

on the enemy's terms is not a winning strategy.

[Demeter]

3. +1000

Obama and Rahm don't want to, that's why. I don't know why not, but they sure have no interest in acting like Democrats.

[Daveparts still]

4. A. They Don't want to be Progressive

they want to be Rockerfeller Republicans

And B. They don't want to fight.

"They (the Republicans) did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person... Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people."

He called for National Health Insurance; he wanted to raise the minimum wage not by a nickel or a dime but by more than 55% he called for a poor mans tax cut. "Our first goal" he said "is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens."

With his approval rating at 36% in June he took to the rails as the press had already written him off. He told the crowds "I am coming out here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then you make up your own mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President. Yet every where he went the people turned out 1,000 at Crestline, 100,000 in Chicago in Republican Omaha
160,000 lined the streets. In Missoula they waited late into the night, He appeared in his bathrobe and pajamas, "I'm sorry I had gone to bed, but I thought you would like to see what I looked like even if I didn't have on any clothes"


"I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who's hitting you? These Republican gluttons of privilege are cold men. They are cunning men... They want the return of the Wall Street economic dictatorship."

" I'm not asking you to vote for me, Vote for yourself,"

"Something happens to Republicans when they get control of the government... Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and special interest."

"You don't get any double talk from me, I'm either for something or against it, and you know it.

Give 'em Hell, Harry! "I just tell the truth and they think its hell!"