And yet despite getting it so dependably, stupendously wrong, the hive-mind of the Beltway bubble seems incapable of evolving and developing the introspective faculties that distinguish sentient beings from the Real Housewives of Orange County. Its wagon wheels travel the same old ruts.
... No matter how tightly the Republicans hole up in their huddle, say no to everything including the color of the sky, Obama will get pious flak from pseudo-moderates such as the Daily News’s columnist Michael Goodwin (a frequent panelist on CNN’s Lou Dobbs’s angry-white-men sweat lodge) for failing to entice enough Republican strays from the herd. In Washington, bipartisan cover confers legitimacy, but the American people are past that, understanding that one side has delegitimized itself. As Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon, “The reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republican policies. They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.” This realization has been slow to sunflower inside the official consciousness of our overseers.
But what explains this persistent cognitive disorder? According to Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, the capital and its culture are “wired Republican.” Its default settings haven’t changed since Reagan. Asked by readers to elaborate, Marshall explained:
We’re coming off of, or at least we’ve had a period of … thirty plus years of conservative dominance of Washington. By some measures you could say forty years. But at least thirty, notwithstanding Bill Clinton’s eight years in office. ... a generation of one party holding the reins selects for certain kinds of journalists in key positions of power, the policy experts at the think tanks who get the journalists calls, the lobbyists who move the most money and so forth. You build up a set of assumptions about what kinds of people and ideas are respectable and which aren’t. Which are old-fashioned, which are “cutting edge” and so forth. Who defines conventional wisdom?
In all of these respects, DC remains overwhelmingly wired for the GOP.
Stewart:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Full Metal Budget | ||||
| ||||
You see the problem.
No comments:
Post a Comment