Posted on 01/11/2012 9:40:45 AM PST by presidio9
Those who are professional media enemies of the Republicans are having a fine time catching the elephants lying. The only problem to me is that they do not always follow the same rules when a supposedly oppressed group proves that it, like all others, is a contradictory bundle of human realities.
Yet Rachel Maddow, for one, is remarkable when it comes to proving in high quality intellectual detail how often the elephants do and say irrational things for the sake of pure ideology. Her proof that President Ronald Reagan did things contrary to what he supposedly believed is perfectly executed with hard facts — such as the fact of Reagan raising taxes 11 times.
Though professional right-wing liars like Dick Armey of FreedomWorks and the Fox News crew will dismiss what she says, we can be sure that neither in public nor on television will they take her on, because Maddow can bring it. Her research is superb and the time she is willing to give to making an idea or a pattern of activities clear brings a high level of sophistication to what could easily be no more than howling at the elephants as though they are cartoon monsters, which is a favorite tactic of lazy liberals who would rather rely on slogans than actually do the mental work that objectively supports an idea.
She is not afraid to look into the snake pit of racism that is hidden beneath the conservative rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and his troops. Maddow knows that what we are seeing over and over is a development of redneck attitudes that began to emerge as soon as the South lost the Civil War and created a mythology with lies like D.W. Griffith’s toxic masterpiece “The Birth Of A Nation,” which depicted black people as quasi-monkeys. Insidiously, those ideas continue to this day.
I should say that Maddow’s interest in American women would be deepened if she were to read “Mightier Than the Sword” by David S. Reynolds. It is a stunning look at the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which rednecks fought against with every paranoid fantasy about black people because her novel did not depict them as anything other than human, the greatest sin in the eyes of bigots.
And she would better understand redneck Tea Party elephantiatis if she were to read William C. Davis’ “Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America.” Davis explains how the redneck South was threatened by the diminishment of what has been called “the slavocracy.”
Davis writes, “If slavery could not spread as new states were formed, then the existing slave states would be doomed to perpetual minority in the representation in Congress, guaranteeing that if the day came when Northern antipathy to slavery itself became hot enough, the majority could use the government to subvert the Constitution and abolish the institution where it already existed. In short, the South could not afford to lose any battle over slavery, nor even over issues on its periphery.”
That is how deeply we are still connected to the underlying mental forces that drove the slave-owning South to take on the entire country and bring about the deaths of more than 600,000 people. Those forces are still at work — they were at work in Griffith’s racist film, and they are at work today on Roger Ailes’ “news” channel.
The truth is that there are hustlers and truth-distorters on both ends of the spectrum. That is the American way, at least for now. Rachel Maddow is better than both ends. And she can push up her batting average. That is what the best of us do.
I know all that, I been doing the Austrian economics ping for three years now. That wasnt my point.
If everyone saves at the same time it is a great (I really mean deep) depression in the immediate present and short term. I didnt mean a 'long' in time depression. My use of the word ‘Great’s should have been clarified by me in that comment to avoid the misunderstanding.
Although it is hard to believe that fast withdrawl of > 1T $ of deficit spending per year wouldnt cause the US economy to go into a coma, much like a crack addict who depends of smoking 10 rocks a day would.
Politics are all about the short term because of elections. Deep depressions in the short term are not politically acceptable.
We also have long term structural problems that make it near impossible to have a decent recovery jobs wise, like ever increasing automation, immigration(less so now) , globalization(=imports and outsourcing services.)
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