The shiniest of all objects - Democratic Underground

Kurt_and_Hunter

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Sat Oct-30-10 06:26 PM
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The shiniest of all objects

I am a great fan of both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I was interested to see what they would come up with and very much rooting for them to succeed.

They did not succeed.

They attracted a lot of people to the Mall to watch a vapid show for children.

The message, if there could be said to be one, was that TV news does the nation little service and that political extremism is bad.

Ooooh. That’s edgy stuff.

Since the show was aimed at children and childlike adults it had to present a cardboard cutout world of comic-book heroes and villains where the great vice is not doing great evil, but rather hating the other side.

If the two sides would respect each other and get along our nation’s problems could be solved.

What the fuck? Does anyone think our problems are due to misunderstandings?

Our problems are due to the fact that the US has by far the world’s largest economy and there is beaucoup money to be gained by pillaging it.

The aspiring pillagers exploit the basest human motives in assembling their cast of cannon fodder and useful idiots: the politics of racial identity & scarcity, the fear/abhorrence of sexuality, devotion to truly loony religions as markers of exclusionary tribal identity… and, for the few with some clue as to the bigger game, greed.

The problem is not that the two sides hate each other. We actually have a serious hate shortage here. The RW has plenty to spare but the middle and center left do not like to hate because it feels disgusting so we are desperate for a civilized way out.

If only people could talk to each other civilly. Yeah, that would be swell. But the incivility is part and parcel of the system. It is tactical. It is the point, not a by-product.

The show was fun to watch but the message (sic) was inadvertent RW propaganda.

Stewart and Colbert surely did not see it that way. They sought an “honest broker”status from which to do good.

And, like almost everyone who has sought that status for the last thirty years they ended up embracing ideas that are of minimal interest to the left but are the very core of the right.

The problem is not that people are yelling. The problem is WHO is yelling, WHAT they are yelling about, and the infantile assumption that there is a compromise position between malice and decency that is superior to just plain decency.

The entire RW enterprise is built on the soft-headed assumption that no matter how insane their demands the right answers must lay in compromise.

Most people think like a Nickelodeon Jr. show about how to divide three cupcakes among six cute woodland animals while the RW thinks like a conquering army. There is no beneficial compromise available there.

So by all means… three days before an important election let’s have a big rally with the core message, “The Republicans are Right.”

Because that is what it is.

All the Republicans have ever needed is, “both sides do it.” They don’t need to be innocent, they only need to be tolerated so that their practices can continue unfettered.

We want to be loved. They want to get away with it.

In every election since 1968 some white Republican people in uniforms somewhere have gone to black neighborhoods on Election Day to stand around the polls hassling people and generally looking menacing. This is standard Election Day procedure.

It’s not an accident or a fluke. It is a standard part of their way of conducting elections.

If we can find video of one black guy hassling people at a polling place then it’s a wash. Thank heanens... both sides do it.

To brain dead conventional wisdom types “both sides do it” is emotionally satisfying because it sets the speaker above both sides. It is a snooty, wise, self-satisfied stance.

And it is a lie.

Intimidation at polling places (just stiking with the one example) is a standard operating procedure of the modern Republican Party that is tolerated because we consider bipartisanship a mark of intelligence and status and if we admitted that the Republican Party organizes the intimidation of black voters every two years then we could not be bipartisan.

We hear the stories every two years and they are swept into the moral phantom zone, much like a mother rationalizing the knowledge her son is a violent rapist.

I love Stewart and Colbert but they took a big mis-step in trying to make a difference without taking a stand.

You cannot have it both ways.