November 2nd, 2010: The day when America's dreams for the future after W Bush get flushed down the toilet, and all of our current problems are greatly exacerbated by GOP freshmen1.
But there is, of course, something darkly comical about this election cycle since the 2008 presidential election. The fate of the Tea Party, according to Frank Rich this week, will be a fitting and hilarious one2.
Everything will go sour for us as Americans, but it will be exponentially worse for the Tea Party, because of their gross lack of foresight.
Rich says, "What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies."
All of those charges by the "Librul Elite" of astroturfing when this mess started were absolutely correct, and we saw it, with Dick Armey's FreedomWorks Tea Party tours, Sarah Palin's $100k booking fees, and the relentless promotion of Fox News all point to one possible conclusion.
But this, I didn't even notice it, even though it was entirely obvious. The "Pledge to America" was so non-specific that even my father, a life-long Republican, was embarrassed. All this time, the Tea Party presented not a single concrete policy.
They thought Obama was going too far, so they decided to elect people--who were, quite honestly, among the most uneducated and terrifying people I have ever seen run for any kind of public office--to change that. I've already covered why this doesn't work, but Sarah Palin's devout followers failed to see the trap right in front of them. And now they've just walked right into it, ruining everything not just for the rest of us, but even worse for themselves, too.
It is worse for them by virtue of the fact that they are responsible. When Mitch McConnell states that his only goal is to ruin Obama regardless of public policy, it should make people think twice before voting for him and people like him (those who want power the most are those who should be kept as far away from it as possible), but for the Tea Party? Obama's a Nazi! Obama's a Communist! Obama's a Muslim! Obama hates white people! Nothing is more important than destroying Obama, even at the expense of America's very future.
The question is, when the conclusion to this narrative is so obvious, will they be able to see it? This is a crucial question because we've already seen how they were able to whitewash Bush's presidency to an amazing degree, and being that our political memory capacity is only about a year and a half long, maybe less, Fox News will be able to manipulate Joe the Plumbers for a long time afterward. Hell, they even had a Marine Corps veteran advocating the dissolution of VA hospitals on the charge that they are socialistic institutions. The schism between reality and perception has become that wide. Forget bending your brain into a pretzel, their worldview has become an MC Escher painting.
I hate to play this card, as I fear it will devalue what I have to say, but I keep coming back to it into my mind. Fox News really is George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. More than even MSNBC (which I will admit is quite liberal*), Fox News is the most ideologically-dependent news organization in the United States. Nearly every single news anchor save one is conservative, and Fox News itself has admitted that it devotes an extremely small block to actual news. Everything else, it says, is opinion.
But my real point here is that Fox News is directly responsible for creating and promoting the Tea Party through Glenn Beck and the other hosts. Fox News gladly gave platform to candidates who, anywhere else, would not have had a chance in hell, and thus propelled them to undeserved stardom. Consider that very few other news organizations have ever had an opportunity to interview Christine O'Donnell, or that Sarah Palin's interview rounds stopped dead after her encounter with Katie Couric. Because everywhere else, these candidates are seen for who they really are. Rand Paul's interview with Rachel Maddow only served to suggest that he was either a racist, or that he was too extreme for his own good with his suggestion that he would not have voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of its provision preventing private businesses from discriminating against different people.
I charge that this entire scenario was created and promoted by Fox News for the express purpose of pushing the Republican party back into power undeserved by way of blatant manipulation of its viewers using fear tactics and false promises. I charge that Fox News is under direct subservience of the Republican Party by unstated allegiance, and to this end it has brought on board those who have been fired by more responsible news organizations after making irresponsible remarks for the expressed purpose of causing division and enmity among its viewers and the rest of the American population.
I thus charge that Fox News is directly responsible for the coming disaster because of how it conducts its programming in service of a political cause. This political cause serves obviously not the interests of its viewers, but the interest of the company. But now even its parent company is at odds with it, as Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal is News Corps' largest shareholder, making it that much more difficult for Fox News to say just how evil those Muslims are. Our only hope is that these business politics continue to encroach upon Fox News' ideology and make such hypocrisy more and more uncomfortable to themselves.
But there is something else here, something perhaps worse than everything I have just described. Could it not be that Fox News has a vested interest in the success in Christine O'Donnell's victory, but that they present such people simply for the sake of sensationalism? Could it instead be that Fox News is so despicable that they would present or say just about anything to get attention, like Pat Robertson? That in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar, they would have scorched our political landscape by terrifying millions of people, jeopardized America's future, and presented the most terrible bigotry as virtue? To throw all of what it is to be a journalistic enterprise away simply for the sake of money. This, this is the most disgusting thing in the world. I would not dare say that this is a problem unique to Fox News, but I have never seen a more egregious example. Fox News is to politics what the RIAA is to music.
1) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
2) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/opinion/31rich.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general
* It's funny, because Meet the Press and The McLaughlin Group have some of the best conservative commentators available.
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