The tidal wave heading straight for the hall of mirrors
By David Sirota
Created Sep 21 2006 - 3:01pm
There are times every now and again where you just have to step back and
behold the absurdity of it all. You have to step back from the day-to-day
trench wars and just marvel at how entrenched power really is in this, the
country where we still cling to Horatio Alger fables or "anyone can grow up
to be president" myths. What I find particularly fascinating is the
intricacy and careful calibration of the propaganda system that holds this
whole structure up. Like a hall of mirrors, our political debate is, in
every way, designed to perpetuate the status quo. But no hall of mirrors can
withstand the impact of a big enough tidal wave, which is why those inside
the hall are freaking out.

Consider, for a moment, the frothing, fulminating bile now being spit from
the highest reaches of Washington, D.C.'s media establishment. A few months
ago, we saw one major columnist at the largest newspaper in the world say
voters should not have the right to decide elections in America anymore [1].
Not only was he not shunned for his screed, he continues to appear regularly
on television as an objective, god-fearing patriotic American. Soon after
that, in the face of polls showing the vast majority of Americans oppose the
Iraq War, a top Washington blowhard from one of the largest television
networks in the country appeared on TV to label every Democrat who has
questioned the war "as weak, Jane Fonda-type Democrats." [2]

But really, that was only the beginning. Since then, as voter discontent
with the war, stagnating wages, job outsourcing and the general direction of
the country has escalated, Washington has battened the hatches, and gone
from spitting bile to firing tank ordnance at the oncoming battalions of
ordinary people who, goddamned them, dare to think they should be able to
have some say in their own country. Washington Post columnist David Broder -
the so-called dean of the Washington press corps - called voters who want
change "elitist insurgents" [3] - a not-so-subtle attempt to conflate
American voters with terrorists. Then there was my personal favorite - David
Brooks sitting there in his pink shirt with a smarmy half-grin [4] in
Northwest Washington telling the country "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Brooks
breathed a sigh of relief that "the Clintonite centrists are reasserting
their intellectual, financial and political supremacy" and that Hillary
Clinton gave a speech that scholars at the fringe-right-wing American
Enterprise institute "called remarkably centrist." Thank god, said Brooks,
that the "renegades who rail against the establishment are being eclipsed by
the canny establishmentarians" because, according to him, "They're the ones
who know how to use the levers of government to get things done." Ah yes,
with war raging in the Mideast, poverty rising in America, people struggling
to pay their bills, Clinton-backed free trade deals shipping jobs overseas -
thank the lord that the same old crew was supposedly reasserting itself
because that record shows "they know how to get things done."

He's not 100 percent wrong, of course - these people do know "how to get
things done" - but only exclusively for the fat cats who pay to get a seat
at the table - the fat cats that people like David Brooks feel most
comfortable with; the fat cats that way too many Democratic officials are
more than happy to go brag to reporters [5] about shaking down even as they
deride the GOP's culture of corruption.

Incredibly, however, none of the establishment's old tricks seem to be
working anymore. All of the Jedi mind tricks, all of the false storylines,
all of the Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination efforts just don't seem to
be sticking. And that's why it's gotten so ugly of late.

Today, we see David Broder quite literally losing control of his faculties
[6] on the pages of the Washington Post. You can almost see the veins
popping out of that shiny white forehead you've gotten so used to seeing on
Meet the Press. Like the bad, overdone stereotype of the crotchety senior
who is angry that the world around him is changing, Broder declares that
there needs to be "a new movement in this country" to "resist "the extremist
elements in American society." Who are these extremists? Why, people who use
the Internet to politically organize and engage. Yes, according to Broder,
"bloggers" are the moral equivalent of "doctrinaire religious extremists" -
yet again, another not-so-subtle effort to portray anyone who dares to
excercize their democratic rights as an Osama bin Laden supporter. He then
fires off a screed about various politicians such as Rep. Sherrod Brown. He
calls him "a loud advocate of protectionist policies that offer a false hope
of solving our trade and job problems." Right, becaue in David Broder's
cloistered world, the "free" trade deals Brown has opposed have done such
wonders for places like Ohio. In David Broder's world, those hundreds of
thousands of blue collar workers who have been thrown out onto the street
thanks to NAFTA and China PNTR [7] are the filth of the earth that high and
mighty elite Washington journalists like him cannot be bothered with. In
David Broder's world, any request for our trade pacts to include
restrictions on child slavery, environmental degradation, and pharmaceutical
industry profiteering off desperately poor people, positively un-American.
Why? Because David Broder lives in a place where all of these critical
issues are merely just more fodder and gossip for a newspaper column - not
real challenges in his life, nor in the life of the people he spends his
time with in the Washington Beltway.

At the very least, Broder realizes that the American public is outraged at
the twisted moral compass that govern him and his buddies. That's why he is
freaking out. But there are still some who are prancing around, spewing
happy talk, making a fast buck, totally unaware of what's really going on
out here in the real world, and perhaps even more insulting, totally
unconcerned about their own naked hypocrisy. For instance, just this week,
we see former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now the head of Citigroup,
standing on a stage with a straight face [8] and holding a seminar about the
best ways to alleviate international poverty. That this man was the top
architect of the international trade policies that have exacerbated both
domestic and international poverty is an afterthought. That this same man
holding this seminar still refuses to acknowledge [9] the culpability of the
trade policies he has jammed down the world's throat is not to be mentioned.
All that matters to the fawning media and political establishment is that
this much-worshipped moneyman is on stage saying we need to help poor
people. It makes you wonder if at some point soon, we'll be seeing Jack
Abramoff holding a seminar on ethics and morals in the political arena.
Simultaneously, courageous reformers like Sen. Byron Dorgan (D) who has
written a serious, bestselling book [10] about how to really fix our
economic policies are shoved to the side, barely getting mentioned in the
press, while financial-industry-hack-turned-congressmen Rahm Emanuel and his
buddy Bruce Reed who heads a corporate front group are given oodles of press
attention for publishing a barely-selling pamphlet of warmed-over hollow
talking points [11] perpetuating the status quo and reinforcing negative
stereotypes [12] about those who want real change.

At this same conference, we see images of New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman laughing it up with Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf [13].
That's right, the columnist who piously champions his supposed commitment to
spreading democracy is happily, publicly hamming it up with a brutal central
Asian dictator. Ah yes, because it's all just so goddamned hilarious to a
New York Times columnist who can sit back in his 12,000 square foot Bethesda
mansion, count his $2 billion family fortune [14], tell the world how much
he really truly cares about freedom, push American soldiers into the Baghdad
shooting gallery, advocate destructive trade policies that he brags about
not having even read, and blaming Americans whose economic lives have been
decimated by those trade policies for not better educating themselves [15].
It's all just so goddamned funny for Tom Friedman, because he gets to do all
that, yet still also gets to ham it up every few weeks on national
television with Tim Russert, and gets to be on stage with his good friend
Bill Clinton and pretend to be serious.

Of course, Clinton, who convened the conference that featured Rubin and
Friedman, was recently the recipient of a 20,000 word New Yorker article
that was the journalistic equivalent of what Monica Lewinsky did to him in
those steamy Oval Office days. In the article, New Yorker editor David
Remnick [16] proclaims from the mountaintop Clinton's supposed devotion to
solving the African AIDS crisis, but never once - not once - bothers to take
a moment in between lavish banquets and starfucking exchanges to actually
ask Clinton why, if he was so committed to stopping this awful plague, he
insisted on passing trade deals that included provisions specifically
designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to inflate AIDS drug prices in
the developing world [17]? But then, if you are David Remnick and all that
really gives you a professional hard-on is getting to eat barbeque in Bill
Clinton's private apartment in his palatial presidential library, why would
you ask such a question? Because really, the only ones who care about the
answer to such a question are the millions of impoverished peasants who were
never able to afford AIDS medications thanks to those trade provisions - and
those aren't the people David Remnick hangs out with or is writing for.

The same disconnection from reality is prevalent among many politicians -
which might explain why some of them now are reacting so angrily to the fact
that yes, they do have to face voters for reelection. Take Joe Lieberman.
When confronted with the fact that he skipped more than half of all U.S.
Senate votes on the Iraq War [18] and most of the votes on the destructive
Medicare bill [19] so as to attend fundraisers for himself, he angrily
claimed there is a moral equivalence [20] between him as a full-time,
$160,000-a-year U.S. Senator skipping decisions on the most pressing
national security and health care questions in American history, and his
opponent missing 6 votes on a part-time town council 15 years ago. He also
says with a straight face that the reason he worked so hard to stop health
care reform in the 1990s was because he cared about small business - but
then he conveniently forgets to mention that he authored legislation to
raise taxes on small business health benefits [21].

Then there is Rep. Nancy Johnson (R) who is now airing television ads [22]
saying that asking President Bush to obtain search warrants after he's
wiretapped phones as the law requires would dangerously slow down the
original wiretapping. Put another way, she's actually asking audiences to
quite literally believe that the basic laws of space and time do not exist.
Meanwhile, chickenhawks [23] who refused to serve in the military when they
had the chance continue to sit comfortably in their Washington think tank
offices and transform their sick insecurities of personal weakness and
frailty into screams for more American soldiers to be sent to die in Iraq.

What you see here, folks, is that all of it - the elections, the public
policies, the future of the country - is one big joke to the people in
power, and they are willing to lie, cheat and distort anything to protect
the integrity of that joke they are so happily enjoying. They don't want
anyone asking questions of them. They don't want anyone thinking they have a
right to use democracy to change things. They are fat and happy and putting
the pedal to the metal in their sleek sports car on the great American
highway overpass - and anyone who tries to slow them down, run them off the
road or make them just glance at the blight below gets the big, road-raged
middle finger.

When I get up everyday at 5:30am to start working, it is still dark out. I
read through the clips and digest the daily does of ever-more raw hatred
coming from our nation's capital and directed at the majority of Americans.
Then I try to have some breakfast without feeling totally demoralized. But
as I look out on the darkness outside, I always remind myself of the famous
parable: "It is always darkest before the dawn." Win or lose, November 7th
isn't going to change everything. But win or lose, it's clear that things
are already changing. The rising anger coming from the halls of power are a
reflection of the establishment's deep understanding that change is coming.
The screams from the angry pundits and the desperate politicians and the
paying-to-play lobbyists are like the early warning sirens at a beach. And
just over the horizon, they see that tidal wave coming.
_______

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson