Political Weather

So . . . we made it to March and February won’t go away. This weather just lingers on as though the border slipped and Canada is now in Missouri. It’s as though March can’t face the facts and own up to its responsibility to bring warmth and daffodils into our lives.

It reminds me of my Republican friends – able to keep hanging on to their belief in the righteousness of their party even in the face of mountains of evidence that they’ve been had.

Of course, most of us are in the same boat. Most people still think they are well informed and free, but the fact is that our press does little more than to delude us by not printing what is actually happening in the world while they do print all the newsertainment we don’t need to know at all. The end result is that we are easily manipulated by the people we elect to national office.

We cling to the hope-filled belief that our country stands for something nobler than the accumulation of material wealth, but we ignore every fact around us to do so. The tingles the Star Spangled Banner used to give us have long faded into the smog filled, ozone depleted air we breathe these days, but hope still remains.

We look at a youthful presidential hopeful with his March-like flashing eyes and huge smile and hope against hope that his hope is real; and we look at the outgoing president, whose history is as bleak and cold as the worst February, as we sigh thankfully that we will not much longer have to watch his manipulative machinations steal away the soul of our Constitution and our own hope rises in spite of the fact that we are well aware that the system has so long been irrevocably broken that these cold dreary February skies will hang over us forever.

We maintain our hope in spite of knowing that in our two party system you and I have no representation. We have two political parties and both are wholly owned subsidiaries of the top earning 1 to 2 percent. The remaining 98 -99 percent – that’s you and me – have no representation at all. And yet, we hopefully look to the ephemeral skies of March for relief.

I support Barack Obama for president, but only for two reasons. First because he is not a Republican and so is not as obviously a lackey for the super rich as every Republican president since Eisenhower, and second – and most people seem to think this is a liability – because he is apparently naïve enough to think that he can really accomplish the things he talks about.

It may be that he is just a good enough actor to fool me into believing his exuberance, but failing that I find his naivety to be evidence that he has not yet been co-opted. That puts him in the same class as Jimmy Carter, who came into the presidency with even less Washington D. C. baggage than Obama carries and was resultantly the most truly moral president we have ever had.

Republicans hold him in disdain, but the fact is that Carter brought with him many ideas of great value to America, and the Congress – shutting him out for his independence and lack of loyalty to big money – put the brakes on his every initiative. Ultimately he was undone by the hostage crisis when a sand screen failed on a helicopter and scotched his rescue attempt. At the same time, Reagan was negotiating to have the hostages held until he was elected. They were released the day after he took office and the news media failed to investigate the connection. They had already been co-opted you see, but that situation has greatly worsened over the past twenty years with deregulation that has allowed virtual news monopoly.

Should Obama win this election, I expect that he will meet with the same kind of fate. Even if we manage to bolster the Democrats’ majority in the Congress, he will be faced with overwhelming economic and foreign policy difficulties left him by the Bush administration. He will also most likely be saddled with a Congress that, just like Carter’s bunch, will not have the gumption and foresight to support his lead. The result will be that he will be left swinging in the breeze and vulnerable to a failed attempt at a second term just as Jimmy was.

That really scares me, but what scares me more is if I’m wrong. What if Obama wins the election then gets to work hand in hand with an aggressive, forward-thinking Congress? That would put his life in great jeopardy.

The real problem, you see, isn’t just that we have had to suffer through the BushCo years. The real problem is that BushCo is just the first grossly transparent product of the Orwellian mess this country is in. The real problem is that we are living Orwell’s 1984, and 90% of the population doesn’t even know it. The real problem is that our system is already so broken that even our Congress is either so out of touch with history as to fail to understand the Constitution or so corrupt by their power and the support of that top 1% that they don’t care that people like dick Cheney and Karl Rove and W can ride roughshod over the balance of powers and the rights of the people and get away with it.

In the last eight years we have witnessed the theft of two presidential elections, the bald-faced denial of the presidential responsibility to obey the laws of the land, the breakdown of the protections of the Constitution for the rights of the citizenry, the attack of another sovereign nation without cause, and the politicization of every bureaucracy within the federal government including the Justice Department and the Supreme Court.

And we voters think that we can elect an optimistic young black man then sit back and watch him turn all this around??!!

Given the chance, I will vote for Barack Obama. I will watch to see what he tries to do in his first six months in office. Then, if he really seems to be trying to make the changes he talks about, I will do everything I can to support him because I think that unless the citizens of this country get out on the streets and actively support him, we will be doomed to watch him fail (thanks to a fat cat Congress and a wholly owned media) or, worse yet, watch him be successful enough to end up being buried in yet another pompously crocodilian state funeral.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but in this kind of weather what’s the chance of that?!


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle