One other subordinate task of managed democracy is to keep the citizenry preoccupied with peripheral and/or private conditions of human life so that they fail to focus on the widespread corruption and betrayal of the public trust. In Wolin's words, "The point about disputes on such topics as the value of sexual abstinence, the role of religious charities in state-funded activities, the question of gay marriage, and the like, is that they are not framed to be resolved. Their political function is to divide the citizenry while obscuring class differences and diverting the voters' attention from the social and economic concerns of the general populace." Prominent examples of the elite use of such incidents to divide and inflame the public are the Terri Schiavo case of 2005, in which a brain-dead woman was kept artificially alive, and the 2008 case of women and children living in a polygamous commune in Texas who were allegedly sexually mistreated.......
Inverted Totalitarianism: A New Way of Understanding How the U.S. Is Controlled
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Just as mixing religion and science in dealing with issues like abortion or stem cell research makes for bad science (as in the case of Terry Schiavo); so mixing religion and politics makes for bad politics. The Arab-Israeli conflict is fundamentally political in nature, not religious.
American presidents, when they travel abroad, rarely take partisan political potshots at their domestic opponents. But this president, as in everything else to do with partisanship, breaks the mold. So he engaged in an unprecedented and distorted attack on Barack Obama’s attempt at renewing a U.S. foreign policy which adheres to a more traditional American sense of prudence and moderation:
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