The Right-Wing Prescription for Economic Recovery: Lionize the Rich and Demonize the Poor

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/141035/the_right-wing_prescription_for_economic_recovery:_lionize_the_rich_and_demonize_the_poor/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=alternet_workplace

By Dylan Headley, AlterNet. Posted July 11, 2009.

Wing-nut commentary about the crisis blames the victims. As if things weren't already bad enough.

As if the fact of the world financial meltdown – which, one is told, is the worst since the Great Depression -- isn’t dreary enough, the steady stream of right-wing commentary about the crisis makes matters worse in the salt-in-the-wound sense that it, typically, blames the victims, lionizes the villains, attempts to deflect blame from the criminals and proffers that the greed that totally poisoned the system in the first place is in fact the answer to all our problems.

Take, for instance, Ross Douthat, a young conservative pundit whose white, privileged, Harvard-educated, East Coast Money pedigree makes him uniquely qualified to lecture the lower classes on how to behave. He advises the mopey, repressed, upper-middle "creative" class to swing, baby. But he tells the irresponsible rabble of the lower orders, on the other hand, to chill:

Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.

For their own good, of course. Satisfying Douthat's own priggish sense of morality has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Neither does the right-wing, lizard-brained, shorthand of promiscuous poor people = more poor babies = more welfare = higher taxes have anything to do with it.

Actually, this may truly not have anything to do with it for Douthat, whose foremost pleasure in life seems to be scolding people about sex, but it does have something to do with it for the right-wingers who, when they say "liberty" and "freedom" actually mean "the right to economic sociopathy."

Actually, forget the "liberty" and "freedom" euphemisms wingnuts smear on their dented and creased vehicles of propaganda like so much Bondo. Why not? Francis Cianfrocca certainly forgets such safe and traditional (and mendacious to the point of Orwellian) euphemisms and goes for the gusto: Greed is goo -- well, screw it, this is better left in his own words, which read like Ayn Rand's "The Virtue of Selfishness" translated into middlebrow douchebagese:

he United States under Barack Obama may be taking a hatchet to a pillar of the American social contract, which is that Americans should be free of encumbrance in their pursuit of private wealth.

FULL 2 page story at link.

[redqueen]

1. Unless and until the lower and middle classes

stop being so gullible as to fall for the schtick, it will continue. I find it hard to fault these parasites for simply doing the same old same old... it's worked very well for them so far.