Dancing With The Distracted

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

I’ve been hearing a lot of jokes about ADD — Attention Deficit Disorder — in the last few weeks. Either the American public has an advanced case of ADD, unable to process facts or focus on outcomes, or it’s leaning on that as an excuse for having made a series of tantrum-driven political miscalculations that are already having ramifications we’ll regret. You know how this goes: we’re destined to repeat history, even so recent as a few years ago, if we don’t … LOOK! Squirrel!

With apologies to those who actually suffer this disorder, I’d feel better if our recent shift rightward had been produced by such a malady instead of by the weakness of character that seems to drive the cynical, specious tone of our current politics. Tell a lie often enough, it becomes true, and lately, with lightning speed. For instance, it took the public about three weeks to make Sister Palin’s Twitter gaffe, ‘refudiate,’ into an actual word that shows up without quote marks. Within a year or so, no one will question its validity. [This seems to be a morph of ‘refute’ and ‘repudiate’, a newborn cousin of the word ‘ginormous’. -ef]

Speaking of stuff we forget, former Bush henchman, House Leader and money launderer Tom DeLay is back in the news after his brief return to our TV screens in Dancing With The Stars. Tom has been keeping a low profile for a few years now, after spending 20 years rising to power in the House of Representatives only to fall from its heights. Known as The Hammer, a reflection of his cut-throat, arm-twisting style, Tom had his fingers in a financial scheme that turned the Texas House Republican for the first time since Reconstruction, then gerrymandered the districts to see that it remained that way. The gerrymandering was legal; the political money swap wasn’t. He has been found guilty of charges and could face so harsh a judgment as life in prison, although that’s highly doubtful. Here’s a quote from a McClatchy editorial:

“This is an abuse of power,” Tom DeLay said Wednesday after an Austin jury found him guilty of politically inspired money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. “It’s a miscarriage of justice. I still maintain my innocence. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system.”

It’s odd that he would put it that way, given that criminalization of politics is exactly what the jury said he did.

Mr. DeLay’s defense failed him. How did he defend against the cross-currents of money exchange that bought six pivotal Republican congressmen? According to Tom’s lawyer, DeLay did nothing wrong. He was simply playing politics “as usual.” Tom was simply doing what he did best.

The legal system effectively, if belatedly, policed a corrupt political system in this instance, and kudos to Texas for a rational judgment. Our judicial system is, itself, being pressured and assaulted from the political wing that would make it a lapdog, if possible, but that’s another post. In this instance, at any rate, we have a firm refusal to cave in to the pernicious and dangerously epidemic notion that the Republican way of doing politics is the American way.

The Big Lie — that this government is no good at providing for its citizens — has ultimately convinced the populace not to trust government, which explains the recent vote to punish politicians of every stripe. On the other hand, we haven’t taken the same message about corporate America yet. We continue to back business, promote it as necessary to our continued wellbeing and — even as we roar in anger at Wall Street — pay it lavishly with corporate welfare and tax giveaways.

Some 40% of the population, according to CNN, thinks that the top percentile of wealthy should receive continued tax cuts that will add billions to our debt load, even as the unemployed, over a million, get stiffed. So we don’t trust government but we trust business interests? Really? See, like I said: ADD. We might question the wasteful efficacy of the mammoth privatized government we pay taxes for, recoil at the unvarnished truth of a decades-long plan to steal political power and squash the dreams … LOOK OUT! Squirrel!

mmm, where were we again?

Perhaps in this potent season of whistle blowing and data dumps, we’ll stumble across something to defuse that Big Lie. Something that will blow our socks off, grab us by the nape of the neck and shake us hard; keep our attention long enough to awaken us to the plot to strip public service away and replace it with private profit. Previous news dumps on Iraq gave us a sense of the kind of money frittered away to both potential allies and private contractors. WikiLeaks is giving us a picture of our diplomatic dysfunction and the business concerns that lurk behind the various players. The Fed has had to dump out a record of some 3 trillion bucks worth of activity, thanks to Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders, who have pushed to know who got what in Bush’s banking giveaway of 2008.

If Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, can stay out of jail long enough, it appears his next target is the internal workings of Bank of America, whose stock took a tumble when that news leaked. I’d love to take a peek at that, even though Amazon has apparently caved to big power and disabled WikiLeaks servers. Sunshine or treason, you decide. In an era when citizens of this nation are better off getting news from European providers, Assange feels more like friend than foe.

Perhaps there is no one piece of information that will stun us into action to put the plutocracy in its place, but the totality of the information might weigh us down long enough to actually examine it. While the passions of the culture war trump the drab calculations of the auditor’s pencil, “follow the money” has always been the path back to cause. We now have more than enough material to examine, looking for the hand that opens the wallet and expects that it has bought access to power. Perhaps we’ll even notice that the human cost, to our great shame, is the one least valued.

We have enough information to awaken from the delusion that government will always screw us but corporations are still our warm, fuzzy friends, providing us jobs and trickling down our good. That’s some very expensive, very effective PR, that turns reality on its head so effortlessly. We’ve got to wonder what enormous victimization needs to be perpetrated on us before we stop trusting what Monsanto and Exxon and GE are really doing in our name, and whether we’ll still have time to do anything about it when we notice.

Government does not need more business-types in the administration, as has been declared these last few weeks. It does not need to attempt even more bipartisanship, which means literally caving in to stonewalling Republican solutions to every bill or proposition, pushing the money back up the ladder toward the wealthy. Government needs to draw a line in the sand beyond which it will no longer pay to play. It needs to find its moral center, as Obama does when he brings Colin Powell back into the White House to add credence to the START treaty, encourages the Pentagon to quickly put a DADT repeal together that will satisfy the fusty old McCains of the nation, or sends his party out to pass a tax extension for the middle-class, not the rich, even as the hypocrites on the right yelp that he’s acting ‘in bad faith.’

Government is NOT a for-profit entity. It is a public service entity, disbursing public funds for the betterment of the whole and the benefit of the commonwealth. That may not be the business model developed at one of the many conservative think tanks, but it’s the only one that will stand up to the incoming influx of 21st century energy redefining this nation and this era of human endeavor. “Of, for and by the People,” does not ask how much the people make, what they have or how they vote. That may not be the Tom DeLay way but it’s damned sure the American way.