The Revolution is Being Televised

As everyone on the Left knows, The Palinite Right is lost to us, probably for the rest of their lives.

As a Party, as a Movement and as a cultural force, they are now nothing but these creatures;

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
...

top to bottom, through-and-through, regurgitating all day long and as gospel whatever idiocy Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity shat into their skulls the night before.

It doesn’t matter what you throw at them, these Hollow Men will just keep lumbering along that gently-downsloping road towards peonage and fascism.

And because of that -- because they are nothing but blind, electoral kamikaze-citizens acting at the command of larger forces -- they are not where the real revolution is taking place.

The real revolution –- despite Gil Scott-Heron’s beliefs to the contrary -– was, in fact, right there on my teevee this very morning.

Actually, it’s right there almost every morning and against my better judgment, during the denim-colored pre-dawn hour of morning ablutions I watched it: tugged on my tie as the central front of the war – the ritual "Morning Joe” re-enactment of the Centrist Passion Play – went on and on.

Right there in my living room.

(Which, as a brief aside, is why MSNBC give me such a splitting headache.

Like Bob Arctor -- the protagonist in "A Scanner Darkly" -- MSNBC has a malignantly schizophrenic personality: by night, it is the crusading cop, hunting down a malevolent drug lord that is laying waste to the community by purveying a particularly lethal narcotic; by day it is...the drug lord, cranking out fresh batches of fatal narcotic every single morning.

End of brief aside.)

Once again, there were Wall Street's sock puppets pining for a Third Party Plutocrat (Hey, what about billionaire media-mogul Mike Bloomberg! Hey, you’re right! He’s awesome! And he won't bring any partisan-y "agendas" with him to the Peacock Throne White House!) to ride in on a White Horse towing a Bull Market and save their investment portfolios from the smelly rabble.

Once again there was the ritual incantation of "Both sides are wrong. Both sides are bad. Nobody will compromise."

Once again, bland, glad-handing "No Labels" liar Mark McKinnon was there to moan and wail and rend his garments.

Once again the name of Saint Thomas Friedman was reverentially intoned.

Once again the persistent, single-minded might of the instrumentality of Empire was on naked display, because while money does not necessarily buy excellence, it goddamn well buys single-minded persistence.

This particular front of the war is persistent and single-minded dedicated to one objective only: the sell fuck out of the fresh minty lie that the only way to save American is to abandon all political parties and unite behind a non-partisan Centrist movement.

A non-partisan Centrist Movement led by some civic-minded local media billionaire who happens to be on friendly terms with everyone who is engaged in lucrative business selling this minty fresh lie. A non-partisan Centrist Movement whose message is persistently and single-mindedly putched pushed through the media; through the dead mechanical gaze of camera and the long square planks of prose that are extruded from America’s daily papers that are either owned or heavily influenced by certain civic-minded local media billionaires and their pals.

One big flaw in the plan, however, is that it absolutely cannot survive any direct contact with Reality.

It falls apart like a cardboard tuxedo in a hurricane if both Parties are, in fact, not always, equally and oppositely wrong about everything. After all, if the REAL problem with America is basically that the Republican Party gone completely mad and needs to be put down like a rabid dog, what need have we poor little people for a benevolent oligarchy led by our New, Civic-Minded Billionaire Overlords?

As an reminder to the rest of oligarchies well-heeled tools, this is what it looks like when one of the King of Reasonable Centrism – Our Mr. Brooks -- foolishly let himself get too close to the agonizing touch of inconvenient Reality (from the NYT's weekly, stilted, verbal midden-pile called "The Conversation"):

...
David Brooks: But of course in the crush of political battle, with its polarizing pressures, they both fell in with the partisan orthodoxies. McCain did it in 2008, and Obama is doing it now.

Do you think I’m wrong in my interpretation?

Gail Collins: I think you’re wrong — although wrong in an admirable, idealistic way — for thinking that bipartisanship works. Maybe it did back in the day, but these are hot-blooded times we live in, the getting-together-and-compromising part only comes after one party is lying on its back, hemorrhaging from a thousand political wounds and desperate to do anything to end the fight and change the subject.
...

David Brooks: Back to Obama. What disappoints me is not that he wants to raise taxes on the rich. I think that’s necessary, as part of a general budget and tax reform package. What disappoints me is that he’s playing games just to get liberal mouths watering. He’s treating liberals like Pavlov’s dogs, and some on the left seem to be falling for it. He does it by putting tax increases on the rich at the center of his politics, when in any realistic world those increases can only be peripheral.

Gail Collins: Here’s what Barack Obama has learned over the last two years: you don’t lead with a moderate, sensible plan. The Republicans will just grab it and tear it to shreds and you’ll be left sitting there in the debris and trying to console yourself by the fact that you saved the Pell grants.

I think he’s being sensible. He’s giving the public the Democratic hardball vision. Let the public choose between that and the Republican hardball vision. They will prefer Obama’s and then the Republicans will have to come back with a compromise for a change.

David Brooks: He must know that in fact the rich pay more in taxes — as a percentage and as a total than the middle class. But he claims otherwise because it gets the base salivating. …

Gail Collins: At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything — some would claim he lost everything — by being so single-minded. It was an extremely principled position, and the Republicans responded by politicizing, pandering and ruining any chance to make the plan really, really effective from the start. I haven’t forgiven them for that whole “pull the plug on grandma” episode.

David Brooks: I guess it’s going to be a grim election.
...

Notice how horribly uncomfortable Our Mr. Brooks becomes when Reality threatens to bust open the gate of his Happy Centrist Neverland, and how clear it becomes that he far, far too big a coward to ever actually answer the question that is implicit here.

The vital, terrible, utterly taboo question that is at the heart of ever critique of Our Mr. Brooks’ Centrist bullshit:

What can you do – what can any President do -- when faced by a solid wall of pure, nihilistic obstruction? When faced with a unified political opposition – political opposition from Our Mr. Brooks’ own Party -- that is literally prepared to burn down the world if doing so would deny Barack Obama a second term as President?

The honest answer to this question -- if it were ever shouted from the rooftops with half the throw-weight as the lie it annihilates -- would lay waste to Our Mr. Brooks’ ideology and leave his career in ashes, which is he never, ever permits himself to be booked into any venue where is might actually get asked.

Which is why civic-minded local media billionaires and their friends pay lots and lots of money to make damn sure not a single, contrary voice is allowed anywhere near their persistent and single-minded propagandizing.

Persistent and single-minded propagandizing which you can watch on your teevee.

For free.

Every single day.