Thursday, October 3, 2013

Charlie Pierce's Brilliant Take on The Electeds out to Destroy our Government. We Did This. (Well, not ME)

Have you read this?  Charles Pierce is a genius at grabbing the god-awful truth and shining bright lights on it.  His latest Esquire piece, "The Reign of Morons is Here", is pure Charlie--raging, brilliant, and, of course, spot on: 
We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.
We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.
 And this:
We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.
This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.
But you really need to read the whole thing.  In a nutshell, it is what we've done to ourselves.  It did, in fact, start with Ronald Reagan. and many of us could see the handwriting on the wall even then.  He wasn't called "the Teflon president" for nothing.  The press saw a sunny personality and a gift of gab, loved reporting on this former-actor-turned-President of the United States, and ignored what was really coming out of his mouth.  His mission was to decentralize and eventually decapitate a government that, on looking back fondly now, was working just fine for most of us.

Bill Clinton, instead of working to fix the path to destruction, followed the yellow brick road.  Outsourcing and off-shoring gained a friend, much to our dismay.
 
George W. Bush proved to the crazies that they could win as long as they kept their leaders mediocre and clueless and talkin' like good-ol-boys.  
 
And Barack Obama, given the gift of an entire progressive movement standing by his side and ready to go to work, blew it almost from the start by bringing in Wall Street cronies and by thinking beyond any reason that he could compromise with people who made it crystal clear their main goal was to destroy him.

So here we are.  They're doing what they've promised to do:  they've already shut down the government, if even just temporarily, and if we've got it right--got their message--this is only the beginning.   
 
If the people who voted those crazies in, and are still cheering them on, can't be persuaded to do the right thing and get them out of there, we either have to do a better job of convincing them, or we have to give in and enjoy the ride.
 
I don't know about you, but I'm with Charlie.  No way in hell are we going to do that.
 


5 comments:

  1. Yeah, and now we are faced with a pile of subservient asshats bowing to the 1%, and LOVING them some theocracy on the side, because hey, going to need that "opiate of the masses" to keep the serfs in their place when the full measure of this crap becomes clear.

    If Congress doesn't want to do a REAL job, perhaps Obama should seriously investigate the rights of the Chief Executive to send Congress home. I mean, the GOP has been all about revolution, so if Congress doesn't want to STAY in session continuously until this crap is dealt with; the President might at last have to play that final card on saying when they are DONE wasting America's time.



    I know, it isn't going to happen...but damn, if they want to act like kids in need of a time out, I say give 'em one.

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  2. The stuff they get away with in incredible. They've done nothing they can ever be proud of and everything they should be ashamed of, and they're still there!


    if they're back in 2014 I don't know what will happen in this country. I hope to God we'll never have to find out.

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  3. The problem is within the narrative itself of the Progressive Movement. Victories in Politics are never secure.

    The 1% had no intention of saying well looks like we've lost and there's a middle class with good pay, benefits and pensions.

    Ronnie Raygun, that mentally-addled, terrorist-loving, cut-and-run Chickenhawk, tax-raising, war criminal, tool of the Plutocrats opened the Ultra-Reactionary War which is culminating in the Coup we are under siege from now.

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  4. The one percent--even the TEN percent--are not going to give up without a fight. It'll take a resurgence of heavy duty union activity plus an enlightened government that recognizes the need for a middle class if we're ever going to get back even a portion of what we've lost.


    We have to prove to them that money can't buy entire governments--nor can they finance the destruction of an entire class of workers.



    The press has to be more active in this fight, as well. They've all fallen down on the job and this is what it got us. Time for some big changes. I'm wondering if we can do it.

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