Addendum added (see below)
It's only March 13, yet we already have a pretty sure QOTM winner. The provisional designation goes to Paul Krugman, as quoted in an article by Jamison Poser sent out in a
Media Matters email.
The intellectual incoherence is stunning. Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.
And if Poser's quote of Krugman is my favorite so far, his own introductory paragraph to the same article is the current leader for Simile of the Month:
For weeks, the news media have been buzzing about earmarks in the recently signed omnibus spending bill. We've been told over and over that the bill is "loaded," "filled," and "stuffed" with earmarks. Since earmarks made up less than 2 percent of the bill's total spending, this is a little like saying Alaska is "filled" with people.
Way to go Jamison. Great double-bagger! And while I've got your attention, I want to tell you folks
over there at MM how much I appreciate the work you do and how important I think it is. You guys have been a nearly lone voice in the wilderness for
so long, and you're consistently the best documented and most thoroughly detailed of the voices out there.
My own belief in people (even the ones who live in America) includes a fairly non-cynical section that is pretty sure that when people in a democracy (albeit a corporate-democracy) begin to understand the enormity of the disconnect between the realities of the world around them and the fantasy world the corporate press has had them living in for - let's face it - all of their lives, they'll do the right thing. They'll find themselves a reality leader and throw out the fantasy leaders and demand that their government become a reality government which makes decisions that benefit the people first and not the corporations.
Thanks to MM and friends (greatly aided by the Fratmeister
nearly driving daddy's car off the cliff) the American people see the enormity of the disconnect more clearly every day. They've picked their reality leader. They've thrown out the Fantasy Leader, all of his cohorts and/or puppeteers, and a good-sized chunk of his most obvious enablers in Congress. More to come.
Obama has some very significant limitations, but he is the best that we could do. His own view of reality, although uniquely clear for a member of the corporate political class, is limited by tunnel vision. He sees the parts of reality that he sees (however he got there - I have no idea). So, although he is dedicated to do the right thing, he can see only a part of it, and understands neither the full scope of the need for change nor how far that change has to go in a direction very different from the one we've been on until now.
. . . . .
The best that we could do? Yes.
As the candidates for president lined up, Americans loved John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Other candidates had their followers and their detractors, but America loved John and Hillary.
While the media were amazed by there being so much support for Obama in the early primaries, Americans who had their eyes open to reality weren't surprised in the least. We saw that Hillary, while well intentioned, was still living in the fantasy paradigm. She believed that the old system of corporate government had merely been mismanaged by the Bush years and had become "ill". Her proposed policies were designed to restore proper management and thus "heal" the system back to its former, proper functionality.
On the other hand, Obama has a world view that sees very large, very important parts of reality. His campaign preached the message that what he saw didn't need to be fixed; it needed to be changed! Replaced by something that really worked. This is what he meant when he talked about "change you can believe in" -- not merely tweaking the "system", but stopping it and replacing it with something that works.
Hillary Clinton warned us that Bush's abandoned car had been left dangerously close to the edge of the cliff and assured us that she would be a responsible driver and back it up the road until it was on solid ground again.
Obama on the other hand assured his supporters that they weren't the only ones who could see that the car had gone a lot farther than close to the edge; that in fact the front wheels had gone over the edge, the car was teetering in a delicate balance and was in danger of falling, and that it was going to take a mighty big tow truck to drag it back onto solid ground. He said that there were parts of the car that had been so badly broken by Bush's joyride that they had to be completely redesigned and replaced before it could be driven forward to any kind of safety.
As events unfolded and the collapse became more obvious every day, more and more independently-minded voters were not only waking up to the fact that we'd been living in a fantasy world, but realizing that Obama was talking about leading us out of it.
While America still loved Hillary, the bank failures and rapid decline of the economy and her responses to them, made the differences between Clinton's vision and Obama's painfully obvious. The moment that the number of independents who realized the unfixability of the old way
and that Obama was the only candidate who was not only talking about it but also proposing different-direction solutions reached a majority, his election became inevitable.
In all of this, Media Matters and their fellow reality based truth-speakers played the most important roll, tiredlesly calling out the liars and distorters of the truth again and again and again. Kudos folks. Thank you and keep up the good work.
Next time: What Obama
doesn't see and some speculation about why and what the consequences might be.
Addendum
Mike Kernagis points out in a private comment that the context of "They've thrown out the Fantasy Leader,
all of his cohorts and/or puppeteers, and . . . . " is far from clear. I agree. The preceding paragraph is a no-frills statement of what I believe happens in a democracy when the people wake up. The next (which contains that sentence) is meant to be nothing more than a macro illustration of how recent events in this country relate to the premise of the preceding paragraph.
Real life political change in a democracy (just like the rest of real life) is a process that moves at a rate that for the most part is determined by the degree to which the majority of the voting electorate is aware of the dysfunctionality of the status quo. So, of course, what actually happened in the 2008 elections fell far short what the people thought they were doing - consistent with their still limited awareness of the dysfunction of the system. It's the first step in a truly different direction, and as its consequences roll out, the shortfall will become obvious, and various corrections will be tried out until the ones that work are in place. That's how change happens in a peaceful transition from idiological to practical government in a democracy - a process of evolution, not a switch we can just throw and make everything different at once.
