Why Democrats Can't Win

The 2012 election for the Democratic Party and democracy itself is in grave peril.

Despite strong indications that Democratic candidates from President Barack Obama down the ticket should win in a majority of jurisdictions across the country, they have an almost impossibly steep uphill slog. The reason has little to do with policies, plans, campaign rally turnout or gaffs and everything to do with a long-term annihilation strategy that has been in development for the past several decades and got two huge gooses two years ago.

One was the U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, which completed the groundwork of transforming elections into sales that was laid by the 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo Supreme Court ruling. That ruling, in essence decreed that money is speech. Citizens United, in essence, says that corporations are persons and thus have the same speech rights as individuals.

The second was the emergence of the Tea Party, which, despite the protestations of some of the ostensible TP founders, became the tool of and ground troops for plutocratic interests, redirected the Republican Party toward a right-wing cliff, and turned political discourse and elected officials' town halls into uncivil, hate-filled, vitriolic screeds.

Those two factors have capped decades of right-wing think tanks perfecting effective messaging, infiltration of academia, use of wedge issues, and the disingenuous and exploitative partnering with religion -- particularly fundamentalist and evangelically leaning sects.

That has set the stage for finishing the competition off.

Here are the winning tactics that will lead to Republican victories in this election:

• Employer intimidation -- Pressuring their employees to vote for candidates they support, or their jobs could be at stake.Can you imagine workers, who already have the jitters about their jobs, running the risk of losing them if they don't vote like the boss says?
• Church indoctrination -- Pastors using their pulpits to influence how congregants should vote, and at least one Catholic bishop instructing priests in his domain to preach anti-Obama sermons at Mass.
• Voting machines -- The Romney family owns substantial stock in the company that makes a large number of electronic voting machines that are being used in this election. And it has been demonstrated again and again how easy it is to manipulate and hack these machines.
• Conservative media -- Pervasive right-wing take-over of the mass media, from Fox TV, to Limbaugh and other right-wing radio programming, to corporate ownership of newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, to growing and increasingly influential Internet sites, such as The Drudge Report, Breitbart.com news syndicate and Journal Communications' new right-wing multi-platform group headed by a Milwaukee WI conservative radio personality, to billboards owned by right-wing advertising and communications conglomerate Clear Channel.
• Contracting voter access -- Whether repressed by newly enacted over-reaching photo ID requirements, reducing early voting days, issuing erroneous voting information or intimidating prospective voters via advertising and poll watchers -- all tactics target likely Democratic voters. 
• Decimation of unions -- Republican-controlled legislatures and state houses have worked tirelessly to kill off unions, in both the private and the public sectors, which historically have supported Democratic candidates. The amount of campaign contributions from unions has shrunk to a fraction of previous elections while corporate and special moneyed interests contributions to Republicans have burgeoned, plus super-PAC, which are overwhelmingly Republicans, such as Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS, have flooded the airwaves with political ads.

So polls, not withstanding, which even veteran pollsters say are not only all over the place, but increasingly unreliable, I think the Republicans' strategy of intimidation, indoctrination and election fraud is just very likely to overcome

The Past Just Isn't

"The past is never where you left it," is from the book, Remembering the Good Times by one of my favorite authors, Richard Peck.

That is so apropro to what Tea Partiers are constantly refraining about wanting to take their county back. Back to what? is my retort to the reverberating radio and TV airwaves that carry the TP mantra. The good old days, is a frequent rejoinder. Back to when times were simpler, the national debt was not so mammoth, the government wasn't so invasive.

Back to a time that no longer exists and most likely never really did, is what I believe.

Those good old days are generally associated with the wishers' and TPers' childhoods. That's what they want to get back to, their childhood. A time of few worries, being able to play in the woods, ride bikes to the corner store, not have parents regimening every minute of every day. Unknown or note remembered is the manual labor and privations involved in daily life of those good old days, parents agonizing over how they were going to make ends meet or what bill or bills they were going to let slide hoping they could somehow catch up the next month, boys being drafted out of high school, sexually active girls sweating bullets when their periods were late or being shipped off to grandma's or an aunt in a distant city or state before they began to "show."

That romanticized fantasy past came to mind last week when one of my husband's friend from the early years of his military career send him an email of a rant he had received from a fellow Air Force buddy of those early days.

So here's the rant:

The really sad part of this is that most of the decisions are being made by politicians who believe the military exists as a vehicle to advance their own career. One more display of the determination to emasculate America by destroying things that have made us the best example in history of the right way to do things. Not a perfect example for sure, but far and away the best the world has ever seen so far.
What happened to our Air Force/Marines/Army/Navy............. (or Military)?
We used to go to the Officers Club or NCO Club Stag Bar on Friday afternoons to drink, smoke a cigar, and swap lies with our comrades. Drinking became frowned on. Smoking caused cancer and could "harm you." Stag bars became seen as 'sexist'. Gradually, our men quit patronizing their clubs because what happened in the club became fodder for a performance report. It was the same thing at the Airman's Club and the NCO and/or Top 3 clubs. Now we don't have separate clubs for the ranks. 
Instead we have something called All Ranks Clubs or community clubs. They're open to men and women of all ranks....from airman basic to general officer. No one is there. Gee, I wonder why!?!?
The latest brilliant thought out of Washington is that the operators ("pilots?") flying remote aircraft in combat areas from their plush desk at duty stations in Nevada or Arizona should draw the same combat pay as those real world pilots actually on board a plane in a hostile environment. More politically correct logic? 
They say that remote vehicle operators are subject to the same stress levels as the combat pilot actually flying in combat. ----- REALLY...you're bull-shitting me, right !!!??? 
Now that I've primed you a little, read on.
There are many who will agree with these sentiments, but they apply to more than just fighter pilots. Unfortunately, the ones with the guts to speak up or push for what they believe in are beaten down by the "system." 
Unfortunately there is a lot of truth in the following text --- supposedly, Secretary Gates had a force beating the bushes to learn who wrote the following:
Where have all the fighter pilots gone? 
It is rumored that our current Secretary of Defense recently asked the question, "Where are all the dynamic leaders of the past?" I can only assume, if that is true, that he was referring to Robin Olds, Jimmy Doolittle, Halsey, Patton, Ike, Boyington, Nimitz, etc.? 
Well, I've got the answer: 
They were fired before they made Major! 
Our nation doesn't want those kinds of leaders anymore. Squadron commanders don't run squadrons and wing commanders don't run wings. They are managed by higher ranking dildos with other esoteric goals in mind. 
Can you imagine someone today looking for a LEADER to execute that Doolittle Raid and suggesting that it be given to a dare-devil boozer - with these attributes: 
*he had the respect of his men, 
*an awesome ability to fly, 
*and the organizational skills to put it all together? 
If someone told me there was a chance in hell of selecting this man today, one who has risen through the ranks to Lt. Col., I would tell them they were either a liar or dumber than shit. 
I find it ironic that the Air Force put Brigadier General Robin Olds on the cover of the company rag last month. 
While it made me extremely proud to see his face, he wouldn't make it across any base in America (or overseas) without ten folks telling him to zip up his flight suit, get rid of the cigar, and shave his mustache off. 
I have a feeling that his response would be predictable and for that crime he would probably get a trip home and an Article 15. We have lost the war on rugged individualism and that, unfortunately, is what fighter pilots want to follow; not because they have to but because they respect leaders of that ilk. We've all run across that leader that made us proud to follow him because you wanted to be like him and make a difference. The individual who you would drag your testicles through glass for rather than disappoint him. 
We better wake the hell up! We're asking our young men and women to go to really shitty places; some with unbearable climates, never have a drink, have little or no contact with the opposite sex, and adhere to ridiculous regs that require you to tuck your shirt into your PT uniform on the way to the porta-shitter at night, in a blinding dust storm, because it's a uniform. 
These people we're sending to combat are some of the brightest I've met but they are looking for a little sanity, which they will only find on the outside if we don't get a friggin' clue. You can't continue asking people to live for months or years at a time acting like nuns and priests, Hell, even they get to have a beer. To make matters worse, the 'brief case' people have integrated women with men on ships....even submarines. Go figure. And this is supposed to be a war machine. 
Who are we afraid of offending? The guys that already hate us enough to strap C-4 to their own bodies and walk into a crowd of us? Think about it. The ACLU? The Gay-Lesbian folks? Our leadership has failed us. 
I'm extremely proud of our young men and women who continue to serve. I'm also very in tune with what they are considering for the future and I've got news for whoever sits in the White House, Congress, and our so-called military leaders. Much talent has and will continue to hemorrhage from our services, because wanna-be warriors are tired of fighting on two fronts - - one with our enemies, another against our lack of common sense. 
Take it or leave it....that's just the way it is, no if's and's or but's. Somebody has to change the direction. The most damage has been done recently by those in charge who have never donned a military uniform and have no clue what the UCMJ is, what prerequisites are needed to lead others in harm's way, and don't realize that the military is neither a social club or democracy, and was never intended to be. 
We've allowed it to happen. God forgive us.

 Here's my husband's reply to his friend:

The disconnect between the civilian bosses and those in uniform or retired has always existed. But we and our comrades today soldier on through good and bad decisions, civilian or military. However I think this guy is reliving the fantasies of days gone by. In my mind there is no way to compare one's personal military experience with another's experience, particularly from the comfort of an arm chair or a bar stool.

 

Human nature says that our lives/experiences are always better/tougher than someone else's especially if they are younger than we. Personally I think the big military change is in the draft era vs. the all-volunteer force. My guess is that if we had been drafting to send our military to Iraq and Afghanistan we wouldn't have had the wars drag on or we would have seen Viet Nam-type anti-war protests.

 

The political leaders have seriously abused the military in recent years in my opinion. As long as men and women have the courage to put on the uniform and potentially put their lives on the line, they are as brave and honorable as any one who has ever served. Criticism and comparison by another generation no matter how prominent their heroes is BS in my view.

 

Times change, our country changes, the world changes and how our military is used changes. Our Air Force hasn't done real combat since Viet Nam. The ground soldiers are really taking the hits. A wrong step and you're blown to bits. I'm for a strong military to but we need to get a better grasp on what enough power is.

 

Whether Presidents need military experience is nonsense to me. We both have seen dummies in and out of uniform. The quality of the person is what counts for me. Reagan did a good job in neutralizing the Soviet Bloc, Obama has effectively taken on Al Queda leadership. Neither had a lick of military time.

 

My hope is that whoever leads will be as careful about sending someone else's son/daughter to harm's way as they would sending their own. A good idea would be that any politician who wanted to vote for or start a war should be required to ante up a family member for combat before they get a say in the process.

 

The old-timer who wrote the rant above, it seems to me, needs to get out of the past, because it's not where he left it or it never was the way he thinks it was.

Weak Tea

Most news reports of Saturday's rally in Madison, Wisconsin, put the number of Gov. Scott Walker's anti-labor bill protesters at several times (one said possibly as much as 10 times) greater than tea party/Walker supporters.

Some people I know who attended the rally that day said they saw very few Walker supporters compared to pro-union demonstrators. Milwaukee public radio said a small group of anti-demonstrator demonstrators (translation: pro-Walkerites) chanting slogans was surrounded by a large circle of pro-union demonstators that was 10 people deep.

But you would never have known that from Milwaukee's newspaper on Sunday. Anyone looking at that paper would have been led to believe that it was pretty much of a draw, a stand off between evenly matched sides.

In fact, the inch-tall banner headline on Page 1 called it just that: "STANDOFF ON SQUARE". Two photographs of equal size were lined up side-by-side beneath that headline. One shows Walker supporters, the other union supporters. At first glance, the crowds look to be about the same size. But they weren't. The pro-Walker photo is a closer shot than the pro-union picture, so the people appear larger and more individual, and also so the group might look larger than it really is. Also signs obscure the back edge of the group, so it isn't possible to see how far back it goes.

The Page 1 story continues on Page 20 where a large photograph at the top depicts a line of police officers facing a group of Walker supporters holding professionally made signs. On the other side of the officers is a lone union supporter holding a handmade sign.

In a smaller photo beneath that picture is a woman standing alone and holding a handmade sign that says, "Silent Vigil for Workers' Rights."

In other words, the photos show what looks like many Walker supporters, but only two union supporters who are seen separately in different pictures.

That makes an impression, however subliminally, that Walker supporters outnumbered union supporters and that they were more well organized because of the quality of their signs. The rest of Page 20 is all text, except for a small map of Madison's Capitol Square.

The facing page is a full photo spread. No text, just pictures with captions. The two largest and another smaller one, dominate the center of the page and are unmistakably of Walker supporters. Huge signs say, "Support Walker," "Thank you God for Scott" (their incorrect punctuation, not mine), "Vote for Freedom, sponsored by: Mayville T.E.A. Party" and "I Stand with Walker and Wynn" (whoever that is). The caption says a sign holder at the edge of the smaller photo is a union supporter, but the sign is unreadable. Two small photos at the top and bottom of the page appear to be neutral, although a caption says one is of pro-union demonstrators. The only photo that can be easily and clearly identified as showing union supporters is the smallest at the very bottom of the page. 

Aside from a Page 1 subhead mentioning the "larger union crowd," little is said until the jump on Page 20 about crowd sizes or the lopsidedness of the huge pro-union crowd compared to the 1,000-to-4,000 tea party/Walkerite estimate in other news reports. In the second column near the bottom of Page 20 is a single sentence that says, "The number of protesters opposed to Walker's bill, however, outnumbered by far the groups representing tea party organizations and other groups backing the governor."

The pro-Walker picture on Page 1 includes five readable pro-Walker signs--all but one professionally made--and a billowing American flag in the background. In the pro-union photo, one and part of another sign are visible, both handmade. No flags in sight. Again, subliminal impressions.

So were there no flags among the pro-union demonstrators? Well, there sure were when I was there on Friday, all over the place, large and small, and hard to miss by anyone taking pictures or not. And contrary to the dominance of handmade pro-union signs in the photos Milwaukee editors selected to publish in their paper, most of the union-supporter signs I saw on Friday were professionally made.

The Milwaukee paper did report that pro-union rallies had been going on at the capitol all week, so perhaps its editors thought the news was that the tea party had finally shown up. But after tea partiers overflowing and disrupting town halls across the country during the 2009 summer of healthcare reform, and turning out in numbers large enough to determine many 2010 mid-term elections, it seems to me that the real news on Saturday was the pitifully weak tea party and Walker supporter turnout in Madison.

So what does any of this have to do with being truly conservative? Well, as a former newspaper journalist, I consider myself truly conservative about the news media being objective and not misrepresenting the reality of an event or going overboard in trying to "balance" something that isn't balanced at all.

Where IS the outrage?

Bob Herbert’s column “Winning the Class War” in Saturday’s New York Times about the race to the top—of money, not academic excellence—hit on a popular theme these days; the relentless consolidation of our nation’s wealth at the top 1 percent of the richest Americans.

This is another area in which I’m truly conservative. I truly don't think that is an American or democratic value.

U.S. laws , unfortunately for a good 90-plus percent of the rest of us, are increasingly liberal and generous in enabling the rich to pile it up to the detriment to those not in their rarified bracket.

Herbert focuses on how that negatively impacts the nation, including even the wealthy elitists themselves.

A telling paragraph in Herbert’s column says, “Recessions are for the little people, not for the corporate chiefs and the titans of Wall Street who are at the heart of the American aristocracy. They have waged economic warfare against everybody else and are winning big time.”

But, he points out, history—including our own—is replete with the rich in such aristocratic societies ending up being the losers. (Although we haven't had a U.S. version, yet, the French Revolution comes to mind.)

More telling than anything in Herbert’s column, though, is this comment posted by Times reader JLT of Palo Alto, California, (which, for anyone who might not know, is an exclusive enclave where the wealthy can live untouched, unaffected and uncontaminated by the hoi polloi):

“What we need is even more inequality,” wrote JLT, “so that people are motivated to study hard, work hard, and be successful. Bob Herbert wants a society in nobody is rich and everyone is equally poor.”

Perhaps I didn’t read into that comment what JLT might have intended—like hidden meaning, sarcasm or irony—but I detected no tongue in cheek in it.

So, 90-plus percenters, our problem is that we just haven’t studied or worked hard enough to keep from getting laid off, losing our pensions and savings or facing foreclosure on our houses.

I can’t help but wonder, though, what JLT’s story is. Who paid for his/her college education (assuming he has one)? Mom and dad? Athletic or government-funded scholarships? State taxpayers via a state university? Legacy admission? And who gave him/her a hand up in her/his career/life?

I truly believe former First Lady, now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was right in her book, “It Takes a Village.” No one ever does it alone.

Herbert’s column and JLT’s comment reminds me of an acquaintance who is about my (advanced) age and decries having to pay taxes, “big” government, the U.S. as “nanny” state, and so much more that echoes libertarianism, yet he, himself, has been cared for in total and benefitted from government in so many ways his entire life. (I’ll go into detail about him in a future post.)

A friend, referring to the increasingly wild gush of lucre into coffers of the already obscenely wealthy, recently asked where the outrage in this country is.

The answer is long and complex, but it wasn’t the TPers, despite all of their vitriol and recent political clout. No, if the real 90-plus percenters haven’t been completely overdosed into celebrity, shopping and other such vapid trivialities apathy, my guess is, the real outrage is yet to come.

I'm on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jerrianneh

Revolution

Recently defeated South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis was interviewed a couple of days ago on National Public Radio in a piece headlined, “Republican Swamped By The GOP Wave.”

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/20/131474413/exiting-inglis-laments-conservatism-s-derailment

Contributing to Inglis’s electoral defeat was what has become the right-wing political career-ending position of daring to say he “believes in” climate change (apparently, although not said, as having some degree of human cause).

As an aside, use of the term “believe in” in this and similar contexts, sends my eyebrows skyward, as if one would “believe in” climate change as though it were some kind of religious ideology or deity.

Despite Congressman Inglis’s 93% conservative” voting record (yet not “conservative” enough for today’s South Carolina voters), I agreed with much of what he said on NPR.

He lamented the disappearance of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, whose platform as both a Republican and a Progressive of the Bull Moose Party, was conservation. I think that must have been the Republican Party of my parents, or at least my father, who thought the best light switch was one in the "off" position.

That concept of conservatism has been flipped on its head as today’s conservative archetype, instead of being frugal and thrifty, comprises the bigger-is-better, consume-and-throw-away crowd.

New York Times right-of-center columnist David Brooks snarked about the nation’s capital being awash last month with famously high-gas-mileage Priuses—Brooks’s stereotypical vehicle of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating, tree-hugging liberals—during The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

So are “conservatives’” ideal vehicles gas-guzzling, super-sized SUVs and trucks? I think driving high-gas-mileage cars, eating healthfully and caring about trees are truly conservative virtues.

Also in the NPR segment, Inglis, in discussing the Tea Party, harked back to the French Revolution in which a populist movement turned the streets of Paris and other parts of France into rivers of blood—quite literally—with the wholesale purging of the nobility and privileged classes. (Inglis didn’t mention the rest of that story, in which the insurrection split into factions, attempted counter-revolution and countless pay-back executions (better hang tight to your heads, latter-day Robespierres), followed by the Reign of Terror years, which eventually produced Napoleon.)

Inglis’s reference to the French Revolution resonated with me as that bloody era in which innocents were indiscriminately killed off along with aristocrats and royalty has and continues to come to mind amidst the Tea Party rage that has morphed into elected officials with questionable qualifications and what might turn out to be anything but populist agendas.

Another nail in Inglis’s political coffin was veering off the conservative page by decrying faux assertions about President Obama religious faith, birth certificate and being a socialist/communist/fascist and the vicious attempt to destroy reputations and institutions.

I agree with the soon-to-be former congressman on that, too.

I'm on Twitter @jerrianneh