{"id":67044,"date":"2013-05-17T22:06:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-18T02:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=67044"},"modified":"2013-05-18T00:46:14","modified_gmt":"2013-05-18T04:46:14","slug":"trifecta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/trifecta\/","title":{"rendered":"Trifecta"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Well, it’s hit the fan now. Both the right and the left are coming to a boil on the triple threat of Benghazi, the IRS scrutiny of the Tea Party with a magnifying glass, and the DOJ manhandling AP<\/em>‘s records. The problem is that fan blades are equal opportunity distributors.<\/p>\n

\"Political All sides are getting their share of schadenfreude<\/em>, heated talking points and chest-thumping self-righteousness, punctuated by hysterical chatter and\/or outraged “I-TOLD-you-so” ringing through cyber-halls, and loudly discussed in coffee shops across the nation.<\/p>\n

Three scandals all at once is a perfect storm of Gotcha Politics, causing tongues to cluck and hands to wring, and at the center of all this is Barack Obama, seemingly the last calm person in the nation. Oh, and me. Maybe me. I’m just standing here, watching the shitstorm turn in the fan blades and wondering how it is that so few people saw this coming.<\/p>\n

We’ve talked for years about what it might take to get people involved as citizens, how close to the bone it would have to cut before politics became personal enough to arouse the sleeping giant of public outrage. Is this enough to get our attention? (I mean, let’s face it: on at least two fronts, it’s taken determined Pubs to blow copious amounts of helium up the ass of these events to make them fly.)<\/p>\n

The last time we dozed off, early in the Seventies — leaving the rubble of our draft card-burning, tear-gassed and blood-soaked Pluto\/Uranus transit behind — we must have made some kind of decision. We must have looked back in exhaustion at the years of protesting an immoral war, the killing fields at Kent State where children murdered children, the down and dirty street fight in Chicago where 10,000 anti-war demonstrators were met by over 23,000 of Mayor Daley’s baton-wielding cops and guardsmen. We must have taken too small a measure of satisfaction in Nixon’s eventual removal and decided we needed a break from politics, entirely.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That didn’t really work. We were marked forever by scars from our struggle, losing our innocence, some of us far from home on foreign adventures, some in betrayal at the hands of our very own. We tried to be apolitical, but we couldn’t hide our shaken belief in government or renew our trust in our fellows, so we allowed art to remind us where we’d come from. We bought tickets to movies that exposed the dark underbelly of humanity: All The President’s Men, Chinatown, The Candidate, Network, The Deerhunter, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Godfather<\/em>. If we’re looking for tracks of our most recent distrust of government and rejection of authority, we’ll find signs of our homegrown dissatisfaction in the movies of the Seventies.<\/p>\n

But we’d had enough of the streets, enough head-busting and chaos, we were looking for a softer ride. Cue the diversions that changed the culture, that gave us the mythos of Star Wars<\/em> and Superman<\/em> and Close Encounters of the Third Kind<\/em>. Cue the disco ball and John Travolta’s strut, the rise of cynicism and street drugs, a yearning for heroes to rescue us, while issues of civil liberty and feminism became more a (safe, but boring) legal wrangle than a march through Georgia.<\/p>\n

In the self-reflecting Seventies, Jonathan Livingston Seagull<\/em> offered a toe in to alternative philosophy that didn’t smell of patchouli, and Roe v. Wade<\/em> changed the way the world worked for both sexes. Technology captured our attention even as economic growth began to slow, and in order to “keep up,” more and more women entered the workforce. “Stuff” quickly became more valuable than character, and Jimmy Carter’s warning of excess in all things was quickly ignored as he was laughed out of office. In a frenzy of isolationism, the Me Generation was born, and cable television began its early experiment in 24\/7 mind control. In such a social climate, the darker forces were studiously growing a fledgling Orwellian future in their petrie dish, to be fully transplanted into the fertile Bush decade.<\/p>\n

Frankly, I’m not sure what we’ve been doing since the Captain and Tennille crooned Do That To Me One More Time<\/em>, enchanting the Reagans and scandalizing the religious. Perhaps we spent too long babysitting our inner child. We seem to have slugged down the equivalent of a big ol’ cocktail of Prozac laced with Ambien to have to wake up this hard, a 21st century version of Orwell’s soma, purposefully distracting from reality while encouraging sleepwalking. A friend who has had to return to Prozac recently wrote to tell me she couldn’t get the pin number on her credit card to work at the gas station. She eventually realized she’d been entering her zip code.<\/p>\n

THAT’s the kind of soma-coma I’m talking about. We saw but we didn’t see — we knew, but we didn’t know. The edges stayed fuzzy until Pluto\/Uranus slapped us awake again. And now, suddenly, we discover that establishment politics comes at the pleasure of its corporate overlords, that the president — no matter who s\/he might be — has very little wiggle-room away from the expectations of the corporate agenda, that the very worst fears of those in power is that we, the people, actually DO awaken and realize we’re being sucked dry. This was a surprise? Really? Where have we been all this time?<\/p>\n

Have we asked ourselves the right questions during this last perilous decade? When corporate entities hold sway over campaigns with gigantic donations of anonymous money, state-approved and encouraged, is it an error to carefully screen for the possibility of corruption or criminality? When sexual assaults in the military come from the top, what can we expect from enlisted personnel? When we see hardcore military vehicles driving down the streets of Boston, do we connect the dots to a militarized police force, flush with federal money? When we choose ‘safety’ over justice, do we not understand that the price we pay is our liberty? When we encourage our politicians to be disrespectful to those who thwart them, can we trust them to behave decently on our own behalf?<\/p>\n

What did we think those 230,000 Homeland Security employees were doing with their time? And when we hear about Barack Obama’s devotion to “big government,” do we remember that those quarter-million hires came from the George W. Bush brain trust? Do we recall that while all the Dubby’s czars have been long forgotten, the expanded security capabilities that beefed up our ability to war here, there and everywhere, continue unabated?<\/p>\n

I suppose you’d be forgiven if you don’t remember. Apparently crusty old war hawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain weren’t aware just how much power was shifted to the Executive, either (although this hurts my brain to consider). Seems there’s this little scrap of Congressional law called the Authorization to Use Military Force<\/a>, established in 2001 and good for — well — eternity, looks like. As I’ve said before, as long as we’re “at war,” all bets are off, as are, apparently, all restrictions to aggression. Say what you will about Obama, he respects the law: if he does it, there’s a law that supports it.<\/p>\n

With a trifecta of political scandals taking up the oxygen, we aren’t paying attention to things like the Great Disappearing Deficit, with Obama presiding over the most rapid deficit reduction since World War II. How will the Pubs sell us austerity now? And is our president sufficiently beaten up to buy into it anyway? That chained CPI business for Social Security lost him a lot of credibility. And here’s another expansion of power to watch carefully: you’ll want to read this worrisome article from AlterNet, titled Military Quietly Grants Itself the Power to Police the Streets Without Local or State Consent<\/a>. When you read this stuff, you KNOW there are factions within factions within factions and you’ve got to wonder who — if anyone — keeps track of them all. So far, looks like nobody.<\/p>\n

In this three-headed hydra, there were no laws broken, but — say those who think this United States they live in is the same one they remember from the Wonder Years<\/em> — it’s all very, very inappropriate. Inappropriate? Know what’s wrong with that? I’ve waited thirteen years now for a Republican politician, ANY Republican, to put country before party. Not a single soul has stepped up. Every Pub I see holding forth on these “scandals” — Issa, Boehner, McConnell — thundering like Puritan minister Cotton Mather from his podium high above the congregation, warning about the evils of witchcraft while dressed in pride and prejudice, is wearing a George Bush mask. Every one of them is waving hypocrisy so proudly, announcing it so loudly that when I see or hear them, my eyes roll back in my head and I begin to mutter, darkly. The only relief I got this week came at the tender mercies of Jon Stewart, who soothed me with this<\/a>, along with confirmation that I was not alone in screaming “NO, NO, NO!” at my television monitor.<\/p>\n

There is no evidence that the White House — specifically, Obama — had fingers in any of the three “scandals” we’ve heard about. Deeply conservative philosophy created SuperPACs, people with a problematic track-record, like Karl Rove, established them, and big money boys, like the Kochs, financed them. In 2012, a group of Dem Senators<\/a> demanded that the IRS specifically examine those requests for non-profit status, suggesting that they deserved careful scrutiny. Was that profiling? You betcha. Good thing, too. I’d expect the same with Dems who had history of finagling.<\/p>\n

Was Benghazi a major fuck up? Seems so, given the result, although twice before the attack the ambassador himself refused additional security. The resulting problem with talking points was discovered to be fallout from a turf war between the CIA and State Department. We’ve seen inter-agency wrangles before. Hopefully, studies will show this competition to have only impacted after the fact, not before.<\/p>\n

The situation with AP<\/em> is the one that seems most problematic to me and bears more scrutiny. The Attorney General apparently feels that there is nothing more to see, thinks we should move along. Again, no laws broken, although it surely seems there should have been. This is what happens when we take our eye off the ball of democratic legislation: the legislation is no longer democratic when we need it. So far, this is having a chilling effect on press coverage, calling attention to the administration’s war on whistleblowers. Momentum is building now for that conversation, one we desperately need to have on a national level.<\/p>\n

Most of us on the left believe George W. Bush to be a war criminal for sending the nation to war for subjective reasons. The notion has legs. Dubby had to cancel a recent speech in Switzerland to avoid citizen’s arrest by Amnesty International. Meanwhile, respected leftie pundit and academic, Cornel West, asserts that Obama is also a war criminal, given our drone program, neglect of due process, and presidential hit list.<\/p>\n

If what is true of Bush is also true of Obama, then we must accept the harsh truth that America is a rogue nation, flush with military power and influence but subject to failing systems, predatory capitalism and moral equivocation. Every establishment president is a war criminal, each one a tool of colonialism, in service to the empire. If the next president is a Republican, they will find themselves right at home with the power mongers and shape shifters. If the next is Madam President Hillary, she will join Big Bill as a tyrannous despot and fellow Bilderberg member, and on it will go into the future unless we demand that the policies and behaviors change. We do that with our voices, our votes, our pocket books and our intent. What we know, we cannot “unknow,” and that makes us war criminals too. What we know we must take responsibility for.<\/p>\n

Cornel West also warns of growing authoritarianism, which seems something of a no-brainer, given how it dovetails with what we know about Pluto’s journey through Capricorn, and what we’re seeing more frequently in local incidents of police brutality across the country. I don’t believe we’re any closer to fascism under Obama than we were under Bush; in fact I think we’re less, but let’s face it: we’re too close for comfort, period. Unrestricted capitalism and unshakable militarism offer us few other options. The capitalism that defines us, brands us, owns us, and if we have given it all our power, we are powerless to defeat it.<\/p>\n

But listen — that’s their game, not ours. If we engage them in kind, we lose the battle. If we get lost in this silly overblown hyper-hysteria being purposely fed into the pipeline for political gain, we will have lost our way again. That is NOT how we want to spend this deeply malleable energy we’re (hopefully) using to imprint with our intent to lift ourselves up and out of this old paradigm dance. This is the time to briefly screen everything through our intellect, take it to our intuition and then on into our heart. We will FEEL what isn’t right, HEAR what rings false, SEE the insincerity on the faces of those with much to hide.<\/p>\n

Now is not the time to hide truth from ourselves or, in truth, hide anything at all. Now is the time for “coming out” as whatever we know ourselves to be and make plain our demands of those who lead us, our desires for a restored nation and government. We will never regain our trust in government unless we learn, once again, to trust ourselves.<\/p>\n

Stay calm. This is an old game, we’ve played it before and we recognize it. Don’t give yourself away to the news loop. It’s Chicken Little, selling us a sky-falling policy. It’s hype and hysteria we don’t need. This is the time to search our values for what we want, to demand of ourselves, as well as others, what is right, loving, and healing to our wounded nation and planet. You never know. When we move together, empowered, we might just get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Well, it’s hit the fan now. Both the right and the left are coming to a boil on the triple threat of Benghazi, the IRS scrutiny of the Tea Party with a magnifying glass, and the DOJ manhandling AP‘s records. The problem is that fan blades are equal opportunity … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67044"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}