Crackpot Conservative lunatic problem circa 1954: Your agenda is insane and no one is actually suicidally stupid enough to enact it.
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."
-- Dwight Eisenhower, November 8, 1954
This was a seemingly insoluble problem until the Brain Caste of the GOP hit upon the same solution for average Republican voter intelligence that "Q" suggested for the gravitational constant of the universe in Star Trek.
Just use your near-omnipotent power to lower it until you can flick any obstacle out of the way.
And that is exactly what those Republican millionaires and billionaires and politicians and businessmen have done over the course of the last 40 years: spend billions of dollars buying or developing teevee networks, radio stations, churches, magazines, book publishing houses, think tanks, political action groups, fake grassroots organizations and "respectable" institutes all with the goal of relentlessly dumbing down and angrying up the average Republican voter to the point where they eagerly eat shit, ask for seconds and die of shit-poisoning while cursing Evil Libtards with their last breath.
And it worked.
Trump is the Party and the Party is Trump.
And it worked.
Trump is the Party and the Party is Trump.
10 comments:
Only 40 years? I think that you can actually go to about 1960 - 1963. Among the oil millionaires Eisenhower spoke was H. L. Hunt. Along with the elder Koch, et alia, they started the John Birch Society. Jane Mayer goes into the history very well.
Exactly. One of the three legs of the Republican stool, Ignorance, Racism, and Greed.
Why do you think they put sugar and corn syrup in everything? Why do you think they prescribe so many anti-depressants? So that people end up feeling nothing and have to move up to hatred and anger to feel anything at all.
Grr.. don't get me started.
Love your site.
It wasn't until 1971-1974 that it became an organized plan. Before that, it was just an emergent property of the rentier class's efforts to protect their hoards from "the bums and the Russians" (as Al Capp put it in his declining years). But the issuance of the Powell Memorandum, and the struggle to avenge what the Liberal Media had done to that blameless holy creature, Saint Richard of Yorba Linda, made them step up their game, with the results our host outlines, using a metaphor I have myself used on several occasions, one of them at this very blog:
Until I moved here from what I now recognize, by comparison, as the enlightened liberal paradise of Mississippi, I thought farm people knew in their bones the difference between the stuff that comes off the side of the bull that you put in your mouth and the stuff that comes out the back end of the bull that you put on your fields. But it seems an awful lot of the good people of Franklin County have some sort of bone disease that not only causes them to eagerly swallow the bovine end product spewed by Fox News and its political arm the Republican Party, but mistake it for filet mignon combined with the most exquisite sex in the history of history itself.
I'm not actually saying DG outright stole that comparison from me, but I'd be pleased as punch to think I inspired him a little.
Oh lord how it works....as I continue to hear the bought and paid for "respectable" news outlets that my contemporaries consume still working on repainting entire election as being about "economic anxiety!," recast Trump as a potential modern day Williams Jennings Bryant, tisk tisk anyone who "oversimplifies" the Republican voters as an trained army of anti-fact fascistic bigots, and paint the candidate that got 69+ million votes as "a disastrous candidate."
Trump is the party and the party is Trump.
How this needs to be riveted daily into the media. You know, as one of our greatest Presidents once said, "sort of catapult the propaganda".
But use the facts and truth on the catapulting.
I do not begrudge those that have made fortunes. There are exemptions to this rule.
And it was a Roosevelt that addressed it.
Read; President Teddy Roosevelt's New Nationalism Speech
A republican I could approve and a Filthy wealthy man I could admire.
All I know is that the mainstream media is slowly morphing into the National Enquirer without even the decency of pretending to struggle.
What's odd, though, is these strange authoritarian right-wingers are kickng the left's butt around the world right now. It's not just the U.S.
OK, so now Ryan has admitted that defunding Planned Parenthood will be in the same bill that repeals the ACA. Are you listening yet, ladies?
-Doug in Oakland
What caught me on this article was the stupid angle. The quote my Eisenhower, far sighted as usual, "...and they are stupid." They are no longer few in number, but they are still certifiably stupid. It is worth looking at the study by Carlo Cipolla, his "Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" to see this election as a classic example of the power of stupidity.
Briefly, this is based on things that happen as a result of our actions. Good things happen moving out to the right on the x-axis and bad things move out to the left, from zero-zero there is a vertical axis that carries the results of our actions, good up, bad down, on others. This creates a quadrant sectioned off with the things we do that are good for us, and good for others residing in the upper right and labeled as "intelligent." Bad for us and good for others resides in the Hapless quadrant upper left, lower right is good for us and bad for others which is where we are a Bandit. And in the lower left, bad for us and bad for others, are found the stupid actions in our lives.
The danger of stupidity is is lack of predictability. Intelligence is not a good predictor of stupid behavior. The results of the last election were without question a demonstration of mass stupidity in action.
Yeah, could you not smear those of us who actually need medication with this Scientology-born bullshit? Thanks.
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