David J. Cyr, December 26 at 1:56 pm,

You are harping on a frame that excludes the 70% Majority Common Population, the American Populace, from the making and enforcing of legislated law and order in the United States.

QUOTE (MarthaA):

“The problem is not Democrat and Republican, which are only names; the problem is liberal and conservative, as for the past 30 years and more, before and since Ronald Reagan was elected, LIBERAL has been and is consistently propagandized as a dirty word”
____________

It’s not the propaganda of conservatives that’s responsible for that. It’s the behavior of liberals that has made “liberal” the pejorative word it so rightfully is.

Liberals only differ from conservatives in their wanting what conservatives want done “better” than the conservatives do it.

That’s why Democrats and Republicans reliably regularly vote together to provide 99% popular mandates for more war. Liberals are covert conservatives.

The people who admire the silver-tongued deceiver Bill Moyers vote for the same shit that the people who idolize Glen Beck do. They just want different management to provide the same shit.

David J. Cyr, December 16 at 1:54 pm,

Our government needs to crack down on the political propaganda by the FOX News Network and many churches and get rid of the Electoral College.  The Electoral College should be totally done away with as it serves no purpose other than the protection of the greater and lesser aristocracies from the 70% Majority Common Population, from which many could rule better than has been happening with the selected aristocratic hand picked nominees, like Ronald Reagan, CIA Bush I and Bush II and the Republican Heavy Democrats like the Clintons and Obama.

The problem is not Democrat and Republican, which are only names; the problem is liberal and conservative, as for the past 30 years and more, before and since Ronald Reagan was elected, LIBERAL has been and is consistently propagandized as a dirty word by monied, academic, religious, military, and genteel conservatives both Republican and Democrat throughout the media, private corporations, and all the public school systems of the United States and around the world and 70% of the population of our country fall in the liberal category, as 98% of the wealth of the nation belongs to 2% of the people, the conservatives.

Conservatives have large amounts of capital to conserve and want more, while liberals have debt and little, if any, capital to conserve, many relying on liberal government, think they are conservative Republicans or Democratic conservatives in this capitalist nation— [a democratic conservative is an oxymoron] and have no idea what capital is, much less the conservation of capital, and vote against themselves on a regular basis, thinking money setting in the bank is capital, or their house or car is capital, and even think that they have to help the capitalists in order to have a job; and are led against their best interest by the overwhelming supply of highly paid conservative propagandists, like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, as well as many pompous conservative religious leaders propagandizing politically on television and in their churches pulpits against liberals and socialism for the majority; and never discouraging the use of liberal and socialism for the aristocracies.

QUOTE (of an avatar… being a fart offered to beneficiaries):

“People vote for stupid stuff and evil stuff. But without the vote stupider… more evil stuff gets done.”
____________

Yes. When too few stupid Republicans vote, the clever Democrats get the evil stuff done.

Elections might possibly serve a good purpose in America after all the corporate party’s Republican and Democrat voters are dead.

SOLUTION: Republicans and Democrat voters should all be on the front line of the wars they keep voting for every chance they get… and all Stop Loss remain there until they each find an IED with their name on it.

Of course it’s no panacea, but at least it allows each adult SOME voice in how he/she is governed, which is a fundamental right.

And, of course, that’s the one that those with power are always seeking to control and disable as much as possible.

People vote for stupid stuff and evil stuff. But without the vote stupider and more evil stuff gets done.

ITW—Voting is no panacea, but the alternatives are usually worse, so I guess we’re stuck with it.

Anarcissie, December 15 at 11:36 pm Link to this comment

ITW—The take-away is that because people die for a cause does not mean it is a good cause.  Causes must be justified on other grounds than that people are willing to die for them.
**************

So?  I got that part. 

Are you saying that the cause of the right to vote isn’t a good cause, one even worth risking one’s life for?  Keeping raspberries out of my chocolate desserts is a good cause—I don’t like raspberries and all they do is spoil the chocolate.  It’ s a good cause, even though it’s obviously a highly trivial and parochial tiny little cause.

Yet the fact that someone, or many someones are willing to die for a cause indicates it needs to be considered very seriously.  I don’t think dying as a “martyr” (ie suicide bomber) for Islam is a good cause, but clearly these people do.  So blowing it off, as you blow off the right to vote indicates YOU don’t think it’s a worthy cause.

Or do you?

ITW—The take-away is that because people die for a cause does not mean it is a good cause.  Causes must be justified on other grounds than that people are willing to die for them.

rico, suave—Post-factuality is implicit in the Protestant idea that every man may interpret the Scriptures.  From that libertarian egalitarianism stem such important ideas as liberalism, and hence our Declaration of Independence and Constitution and supposedly limited government.  In science, there is no theory which cannot be challenged (within the rules), even though the existence of science generally implies that somewhere, somehow, there must be One True Truth.

So I was wondering where Kutler comes down on this issue, but I guess he doesn’t read the commentaries.

Anarcissie:

The mere fact that there even exists a “post-factual side” for any to take is very discouraging to me.

Anarcissie, December 15 at 4:29 am Link to this comment

People died for the right to keep slaves, too.
*************

So…what’s the takeaway here?  That voting is the moral equivalent of owning slaves?  Can you make a more absurd ethical juxtaposition?

A supermajority of Americans regularly vote to remain obedient slaves… till death they depart.

Inherit The Wind, December 13 at 6:11 pm:

‘Around the world, we have seen people dying for the right to vote, the right you dismiss so easily.’

People died for the right to keep slaves, too.

rico, suave, December 13 at 11:47 pm:

‘... Having opened his piece with that sentiment, all that follows is irrelevant. Having established that there are 7 billion separate definitions of “water” on this planet, why bother trying to make any points at all. ...

I think Kutler was really taking the One True Historical Truth side, not the Post-Factual side.

“In our post-factual world, history has become another battlefield, with far-flung hostilities over cultural and political differences as well as the imperial adventures abroad. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked, we are entitled to opinions, not to our own facts.”

Having opened his piece with that sentiment, all that follows is irrelevant. Having established that there are 7 billion separate definitions of “water” on this planet, why bother trying to make any points at all.

“Post-factualism” is the last refuge of liberalism.

Around the world, we have seen people dying for the right to vote, the right you dismiss so easily.

Local Hero:

When my grandfathers took their oaths of naturalization, they signed the contract. Every time I vote for a Congressperson, Senator, or electors for President, I’m re-affirming the contract.

Putz title. Sexist.

There are some facts about this nation’s founding
that cannot be refuted, because the original
documents are bound in the documents that the era
created over major events.

The Declaration of Independence makes it clear why it
became necessary to break with the rule of the
English Monarchy.

Two of the major reasons declared in the document
that cannot be refuted were that they were no longer
willing to be dominated was: (1)The Monarchy refused
to follow existing law to prosecute its citizens
fairly. (2) Bondage to International Monopolistic
trade was so burdensome that there was fear for
citizens own life and prosperity. Both leading to
unfair and burdensome taxation that did nothing to
better the citizens.

It is my belief that those same fundamental rules
that we are now governed by are largely ruling this
nation right now.

We have a overreaching Executive that has begun to flout the notion of rule of law and equal justice for
all citizens, for the express purpose of futhering
its own ambitions. Plus, International Corporate
Monopolies and world banking are now crushing
American businesses and threatening citizens ability
to earn a living from their own labor.

The American notion of freedom was from unjust rule
without the same laws applying to all, and freedom
from International monopolies control over our lives
and welfare.

Sometimes the perversions are just too big to ignore.

ITW,
To call the Constitution “the GREAT Contract” or any contract at all is a fraud. A contract must be signed by the parties involved. Did you sign “the GREAT Contract” by your own hand? Or did one of your direct, blood relatives sign it? Doubtful. Then you have no interest in it and you’re not a party to it. You never have been and you never will be. It is, in fact, more of a Will or bankruptcy trust than a contract. Have you ever asked yourself why, in its body, it’s so concerned with bankruptcy? It’s because that’s exactly what it is. It’s the bankruptcy paperwork for the United States of America. Gee, it was a free country for a whole 13 years.

If you really want to know about the history of the United States, read Howard Zinn’s “A Peoples History of the United States:  1492 - Present”.

gerard, December 12 at 4:23 am:

‘Part of the sick myth of “American exceptionalism” came out of a national desire to leave history behind in Europe and begin anew.  It was never possible, but that didn’t (and doesn’t) prevent people from believing the myth.  They know it isn’t so, that history can’t be left behind, but they believe it anynow.’

The desire to escape from history—‘indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind’—seems completely reasonable to me.  ‘History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape.’ ‘The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.’  And of course the Bible is full of escapes, from Noah and Abraham and Exodus through to the personal and communal escapes from history and culture promised in the New Testament.  One would be foolish not to attempt to escape, if one could.

QUOTE (of an unperson avatar… an inherited fart):

“The checks and balances always relied on self-interest.”
____________

The Constitution in general, and the checks and balances in particular, were designed to ensure that democracy would not occur… to thereby perpetually protect the wealthiest from everyone not the wealthiest.

This is what kleptocratic oligarchy looks like.

Contracts are always written to benefit those writing them…
to take advantage of those accepting them.
*****************

That’s just flat-out absurd and recognizes that you have no understanding of what a “contract” is or means.

Yes, when you buy a cell-phone and its service you are screwed if the provider decides to screw you.  But even THAT and their forcing of “arbitration” (a form of private, pre-bought court) are being challenged.

But anyone who has bought or sold a home knows full well that you can negotiate ANY part of that contract.

One of the reasons that Reagan began his multi-pronged attack on labor unions was to break the unions’ power to negotiate contracts to the table.

But coercive, one-sided contracts are being challenged.

However, the GREAT Contract, the Constitution, is nothing of the sort.  Perhaps you don’t believe in it as a viable document.  I think you don’t.  But it was written with the full knowledge that in reality, you cannot rely on people’s “Better Angels” and must assume they’ll try to game the system for themselves.

The checks and balances always relied on self-interest. When one party stopped doing every in its power to protect its interests and instead cowered, the system began to come apart.

For that I blame the Democrats since 1994, who have been the GOP’s ‘b****es’ since then.

Contracts are always written to benefit those writing them…
to take advantage of those accepting them.

I have no idea what American Exceptionalism is other than it seems to be right-wing justification for the masses and an apologia for every absurd military and political interference in other nations that violate US law and tradition.

To argue our history is unique is a straw man. Every nation’s history is unique.

To argue that our culture and system of government is what made us the most powerful nation and justifies what ever we do is merely to recycle a repackaged version of “The Divine Right of Kings”. (Of course, the Chinese believed as well in “The Divine Right of The People to Rebel” for over 2,000 years).

What differed the US from other nations prior to it was The Contract.  As, of all people, George Will put it so eloquently, all you have to do to be an American (in theory), is agree to The Contract, which is, of course, the Constitution.  Our oaths/affirmations are of loyalty to “Uphold The Constitution”.  While other nations were moving in that direction, this was the one that did it first.

But that’s it.  That’s the only thing that ever made us any more “unique” than any other nation.  And as our leaders bust the contract in myriad ways, and we accept it, our whole basis for claiming to be a morally founded society crumbles.

Part of the sick myth of “American exceptionalism” came out of a national desire to leave history behind in Europe and begin anew.  It was never possible, but that didn’t (and doesn’t) prevent people from believing the myth.
  They know it isn’t so, that history can’t be left behind, but they believe it anynow.  Why? Because it offers a way to escape from past sins.  It is, in a slightly different form,the same myth as the religious hope to confess and be forgiven, to escape from past mistakes. It is a hope as natural as breathing.
  All history is “corrupted” by it. It is the indestructible human desire for freedom from the past, for forgiveness of self and others, for wiping the slate clean, 12 Steps—an idea with a million applications.
  Sometimes just by believing the myth, it seems to materializes in a more believable form and turns into a spiritual talisman. At other times it takes on the mask of conceit and a cruel dominance.
  Yet without this myth of renaissance, a special providence—call it what you will.—the human race could probably not have survived.  The daily routine, with its dawns and dusks, is the metaphorical figuring forth of the idea of escape from eternal darkness into eternal light. 
  America was doubly affected by the myth because of the settlers’ expanse of what they saw as “open country”. They were so intent upon a “new day” that they have failed utterly to treasure the day that was.”  Darkness approaches, as always, and we are in need of seers. As Redhorse suggests, conscience is the “missing link” which causes us to remember the morning, and (in a manner of speaking) stay “saved.”  History is the slide show of who remembers what, and how, and why.

No matter what form the Gordian rationalization of avaricious greed may take, the actual indictment of the so called “Left” by the “Right”, is Human Conscience. The entire American propagandist/materialist/corporatist/war machine is an open assault on Conscience. Conscience is the common denominator of evolved Human Consciousness and its absence is the first indicator of the Psychopath.

    The “ism” (capitalism-socialism-communism-fascism) isn’t the problem. It is, seizure and exploitation of the “ism” by the avaricious thug, which creates social disintegration and human damage. Russian Communism degenerated into a criminal oligarchy and to our great horror and experience American Capitalism followed suit. Oligarchic control of our Democracy (Homeland vs. Nation—Patriot Act vs. Constitution) is the actual disease.

    American Democratic principals of human dignity, life, liberty, freedom, speech and happiness are implicit aspects of Human Conscience and were expressly voiced in our our Constitution. I suspect most of the rage and confusion expressed by TRUTHDIGGERS on these threads is the obvious inhuman violation of these principals. Bottom line, the entire oligarchic apparatus is built to batter, shout down, confuse and demean Conscience. That’s reality. The power of the oligarchy is a manufactured mass psychosis held in place by gunpoint fear. If you think words and concepts like Democracy, freedom, free speech, and liberty are passe, you’re sick in the #%@kin’ head. Seek help!!

      World Consciousness and Environmental consequence will no longer allow/sustain International Criminal Oligarchy. The Plant Earth is on the verge of Human cultural flatline. The resultant human damage and social disintegration we see around us reflects the last desperate attempts of avaricious tyranny to seize total control of a dying World. The unfortunate American dilemma is the total capitulation by its elected leadership to these forces.

      The ongoing Wikileaks saga removed the masks. The bare naked lie is revealed. Truth is the greatest enemy of an oligarchic state.

      Speak it!!

Maybe you’re being ironic, prosefights, but I hope you’re not denying that ‘History is always written by the victors’. The only honest historian I ever came across was a Frenchman who wrote in the preface to his history of France: ‘I’m French and I love France and everything in this book has to be seen in that light.’ An honest historian who warned the reader beforehand that he was only human - and, worse, patriotic. A sticker should be made for various nationalities saying exactly the same thing and put on every history book. A far right historian is always going to see things through the prism of his ideology as will a leftist or a liberal. A passionate humanist will see war as appalling and barbaric and a failure or reason and a passionate right wing nationalist will see war as inevitable and as Winston Churchill said (I’m paraphrasing), ‘The proper occupation of gentlemen.’ And surely when new facts come to light, history must be re-written or it becomes a lie, a lie agreed to by the powerful perhaps, but still a lie.

Let’s talk a little history that Truthdig seems intent on ignoring.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/post_1394_b_795001.html

From Naomi Wolf of the Huffingon Tabloid. This is chilling, spooky, all too bloody real.

* * * * *

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_wikileaks_hacker_war_rages_on_20101209/#371417

There are several ways to look at history, especially with respect to economics. Changes in current economic theory can change the perceived causes and effects of past economic events. I’ve just started a book by Murray Rothbard entitled A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II The preface explains the difference between “cliometrics”, or positivistic “new economic history”, and “praxeology”. Rothbard uses the latter technique. The book is an economic history, not a “textbook” history of names, dates, and places.

http://mises.org/books/historyofmoney.pdf

Well, maybe he believes there is one true correct version of history, and has some idea how that version can be established.  It is a question the article leaves hanging.

This article is amusing.  Think about what the author is saying, i.e., that these awful people are (re)writing their own version of history…which contradicts the author’s own version of history.  I truly believe the irony, the contradiction, has never occurred to him.

So, does Kutler say there is an Ur-history, deviation from which must be some kind of deterioration or decadence?  If so, how do we know what it is?  It looks to me like Humpty Dumpty’s dictum would come into play, and history would be whatever unique thing the powerful said it was: “The question is which is to be master—that’s all.” 

But if we deny that power should determine truth, then, yes, every man must be own historian, and have not just his own opinions but his own facts.

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”  Santayana, George

More liberal arts educated BS.

http://www.prosefights.org/cs/w2kbelkin/w2kbelkin.htm

Citing two phrases from which I see conjunction: G.Anderson, December 9 at 3:13 pm

[People usualy see what they need to see….. ]
            &
[As Marx pointed out a long time ago, infrastructure, determines superstructure. The mode of production, determines social consciousness.]

We no longer make the simple things that the “common man” can readily identify with. He is effectively cut off from his inherent nature to make things, by out-sourcing and service to abstract, pan-national concepts beyond his ken from (non-vantage) of the cloistered service-based office cubicles. Cut off from the collective knowledge base of his ancestors, he can no longer articulate a concerted “raison d’etre” in the ontological sense. Hence, the artificial pop culture superficiality quelling true aspiratins with soul-less, addictive, trendy plastic pacifiers that never satisfy deep desire. Be appraised that your increased productivity will go directly to the company’s bottom line.

Is there really an uncluttered vista remaining wherein a social consciousness may be resurrected? 

REDHORSE said it well: [Pop cultural “its me” values and the manufactured “celebrity” reality of our propagandist press severed the living connection with our Historical past. It’s a plastic reality that sees Soul and Consciousness as the enemy. There is no longer a transcendent vantage point available and no moral center to provide direction.]

Education? A college education these days is tantamount to indentured servitude.

“Let me shoulder you with 20 years of debt for your undivided attention and unquestioning contribution to our corporate brain trust.”

Extreme tuition rates are (note Britain), exacted in order sustain funding to university overseas study institutes and six figured tenured professor who never show up to actually teach.

QUOTE (of paint in many (D)evious shades of blue):

“a viable solution…
a concerted effort by a progressive Democratic Party Primary challenger, if that challenger should fail in his bid to unseat Obama, the country would still have the option of electing a less than desirable Democrat, instead of a completely undesirable Republican who won the election because of a divided Left/Center electorate splitting it’s votes between Democrats and a Third Party.”
____________

That’s the same “viable solution” with which the corporate party created the Clinton and Obama monsters. It’s the “solution” that the most devious of corporate party operatives disingenuously promote.

The “progressive” Democrats purvey a false history to persuade people to ignore the true history they possess in their own living memories.

Our living history provides positive proof that Democrats don’t do the good they could when they can… that getting more Democrats elected only provides greater Democrat betrayals the greater the number are that are fooled into trusting them.

Whole natural persons actually wanting some good to possibly result from elections would never ever vote for any corporate party candidate, whether they be an honest (R), or a dishonest (D).

I am very impressed by peoples knowledge of history here and it has inspired me to learn more, but I am often offended by people who reference history to promote a P.O.V. in every instance for some reason.

Maybe the more things change the more they DO NOT stay the same.

Maybe more often than not history DOES NOT repeat itself.

Maybe every situation is unique according to it’s own set of circumstances.

The Union armies used the rhetoric of freedom as an excuse to defeat, occupy,
and dominate the South for generations. Then Americans turned the same
armies and the weapons and armaments industries that had grown during the
war against the tribes of the West. American armies took Arizona, New Mexico,
Utah, Nevada, California and part of Colorado from Mexico. They faked an
incident in Cuba, akin to the Tankin Gulf incident, and went after the remaining
colonies of Spain. They dropped more tons of bombs on Southeast Asian in the
1960s and 70s than in all of World War II, in order to keep those people free to
be puppets of the West. Today they claim that they are freeing Afghan women.
It is the same cynical use of “Enlightenment” nonsense about human freedom
to justify aggression as used by Napoleon.

The European and American exceptionalism that is expressed so blatantly and
crudely in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq - this notion that the
European race has a divine mission to rule the world comes intellectually from
anti-religious Enlightenment intellectuals, some of whom founded the
pseudo-sciences of anthropology and sociology. It is not from surviving
religious traditions that modern ideas about race come. It was secular,
“scientific” intellectual circles who gave us the racism of Nazism and Zionism
that extoll specific races as special and more worthy of money and power. The
leading American anthropologist in Afghanistan for example was Louis Dupree,
and when he died a speech praising his long years of service to the CIA was
read into the Congressional Record. Nancy Dupree’s first husband was CIA
Chief of Station in Kabul. The complicity of American academia in the American
domination of Asia and Africa is a naked reality obvious to most leaders in the
unindustrialized world.

The end of the slave trade was not a victory for science and Enlightened
secularists. It was the last great moral victory led by the Church and especially
by Protestant Christianity. They defeated secular intellectuals and scientists,
who at that time were backing slavery with scientific explanations of race.
Slavery was after all the first real test, the first great success of modern
industrial and financial systems. It was the Atlantic slave trade as it was
practiced by the West that began the intentional using of humans as machines.
Those early business men and bankers made the conscious decision to use men
up in five years of debilitating toil, because it was cheaper to bring in new ones
than take care of them. Slavery was the way the great financial systems of the
modern European and American world took off, and Mr. Science was for most of
the 19th century talking about the superiority of the white race and explaining
the degeneration of the rest.

The Union armies used the rhetoric of freedom as an excuse to defeat, occupy,
and dominate the South for generations. Then Americans turned the same
armies and the weapons and armaments industries that had grown during the
war against the tribes of the West. American armies took Arizona, New Mexico,
Utah, Nevada, California and part of Colorado from Mexico. They faked an
incident in Cuba, akin to the Tankin Gulf incident, and went after the remaining
colonies of Spain. They dropped more tons of bombs on Southeast Asian in the
1960s and 70s than in all of World War II, in order to keep those people free to
be puppets of the West. Today they claim that they are freeing Afghan women.
It is the same cynical use of “Enlightenment” nonsense about human freedom
to justify aggression as used by Napoleon.

The European and American exceptionalism that is expressed so blatantly and
crudely in the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq - this notion that the
European race has a divine mission to rule the world comes intellectually from
anti-religious Enlightenment intellectuals, some of whom founded the
pseudo-sciences of anthropology and sociology. It is not from surviving
religious traditions that modern ideas about race come. It was secular,
“scientific” intellectual circles who gave us the racism of Nazism and Zionism
that extoll specific races as special and more worthy of money and power. The leading American anthropologist in Afghanistan for example was Louis Dupree, and when he died a speech praising his long years of service to the CIA was read into the Congressional Record. Nancy Dupree’s first husband was CIA Chief of Station in Kabul. The complicity of American academia in the American domination of Asia and Africa is a naked reality obvious to most leaders in the unindustrialized world.

The end of the slave trade was not a victory for science and Enlightened
secularists. It was the last great moral victory led by the Church and especially
by Protestant Christianity. They defeated secular intellectuals and scientists,
who at that time were backing slavery with scientific explanations of race.
Slavery was after all the first real test, the first great success of modern
industrial and financial systems. It was the Atlantic slave trade as it was
practiced by the West that began the intentional using of humans as machines.
Those early business men and bankers made the conscious decision to use men
up in five years of debilitating toil, because it was cheaper to bring in new ones
than take care of them. Slavery was the way the great financial systems of the
modern European and American world took off, and Mr. Science was for most of
the 19th century talking about the superiority of the white race and explaining
the degeneration of the rest.

Let me throw in my two cents. Excellent posts all; lacking only one thing, a viable solution.

Kutler rightly points out the fallacies of contemporary “conservative” thinkers, and the shortcomings of Hamilton’s royalist philosophy. What to do, go right, go left, go straight ahead, or stand and ponder the futility of going anywhere. Burr the traitor [?], had one thing over Hamilton the patriot [?], the divine guidance of his bullet.

Here’s my two cents, a concerted effort by a progressive Democratic Party Primary challenger, if that challenger should fail in his bid to unseat Obama, the country would still have the option of electing a less than desirable Democrat, instead of a completely undesirable Republican who won the election because of a divided Left/Center electorate splitting it’s votes between Democrats and a Third Party.

Great posts!! TY each and all. A “vacant lot” protected by “Delta Force”. I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

      Though other modern nations have difficult times they seem to have leveled the economic/social/cultural playing field in a manner that prevents the senseless human damage and chaotic disintegration of social systems “average” Americans now experience. The inability of our political leadership to address or even acknowledge the countless symptoms of our decline and implement sane economic/social programs to provide stability is psychopathic. Most journalist don’t have the correct frame of reference and the chasm between D.C. and “the People” is so great they don’t even share the same dialogue. The National shift in discussion from political to moral realities is the “tell”.

        Pop cultural “its me” values and the manufactured “celebrity” reality of our propagandist press severed the living connection with our Historical past. It’s a plastic reality that sees Soul and Consciousness as the enemy. There is no longer a transcendent vantage point available and no moral center to provide direction. I’ve been on run away horses a time or two. No matter what your opinion you’re bound to take the ride. The entire planet has crossed some line of mojo demarcation. I think we’ve defined the symptomology and the disease. What and where is the medicine?

        I enjoy you guys!! See ya.

Real life, real complicated international history is being enacted right this minute in the form of “Cablegate.” Millions of people are able to see behind the smoke screen of “foreign policies” into what is actually happening to the human race.
  Other millions not only do not want to learn, but want to persecute the revealers. As usual, a huge and powerful effort is being made to shape real history into what “authority” wishes the people to believe, even if it’s not true.
  This is another testing time in the crowded classrooms of Living History 101.  Here’s hoping we don’t flunk.

Most history is “official” history—extolling the State and its glory and grandeur. Even if they sometimes get it wrong, thank Heaven for revisionists!

People usualy see what they need to see, unless of course, they have some sort of education or training.

But that’s just why we send people to college, so they can learn to think and reason beyond their own personal experience. To some extent that is the basis of science, that personal experience often is little more than a delusion.

As Marx pointed out a long time ago, infrastructure, determines superstructure. The mode of production, determines social consciousness.

Conservatives or wealthy plutocrats, have an ideology, that accomoplishes two things, it rationalizes their greed, and salves their conscience, if any. And since many conservatives, are wealthy it also entraps those that believe in the power of wealth as validation.

Liberals, are famous for guilt. And for creating, victims, that they exploit, while ignoring the root cause of social problems. They are like a vast social tit that needs constant nursing. They don’t seem to understand, how they enable the living hell out of many of society’s ills. Or why people don’t want to be helped, but rather to help themselves, so they don’t have to be anyones victim. Conservatives understand this, and exploit it.

The constant ideological barking, of progressives,and conservatives, only Demonstrates,  the failure of American politics, a hypocritical inabiliy to face new political realities, and new solutions. An attempt to live in the past.

There a catastrophe, in our land, and it’s here now.
And our politicians, and their plutocratic masters have caused it. If the plutocracy, wasn’t completely bankrupt, they might have been able fullfill their hearts greatest desire, to turn this country into a totalitarian state.

Instead all they will create is a vast wasteland. Guarded, by razer wire, homeland security, and an array of the most sophisticated snooping on their own people. But it’s like protecting a vacant lot with Delta Force.

I suspect it’s not really to protect the people, but to protect the plutocracy, from their enemies, i.e. the people and the rest of the world.

“History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.” Voltaire

The big lie repeated often becomes as truth. There is no doubt that this is, in a nutshell,  the tactic of the right and has been at least since Reagan. The lack of direct and factual opposition to these myriad of lies leaves the field to them and thus we find a confused and misdirected electorate hearing only the one side.

I wonder which is the worst, those who preach the lies and distortions for personal and party gain or those who remain silent in the face of these continual misleading and misdirecting opinions as fact?

We have a Party, Democratic, and a President seemingly unwilling to stand up for truth, thus they, in my opinion, are complicit and cowardly. I offer that any support for, or vote for,these cowards is misplaced loyalty. Any expectation that reform of these self serving rascals or the Party itself is simply not possible at this time.

Most recognize the duplicity of the GOP, most see their loyalties lie, not with the people, but with the corporation. Yet there remain those who refuse to see with the same unbiased eye that the Democratic Party has refused its obligation to those who join them, vote for them and support them in any way. These supporters rail against the Republicans as if they were demons risen from Hades yet make endless excuses for the silence of the Donkeys.

As we do not have two distinct parties in this nation any longer, only a Duopoly seeking corporate cash above all else I suggest that everyone think honestly and at length about the need for a third party presence, one pledged to refuse corporate cash and strings. Short of violent revolution, which I reject vehemently, I see no other way to salvage our democracy and turn it back to its real duty, supporting and protecting the American worker, family and even American businesses.