Because the situation has become unbearable:
At its core, the history of the Iraq War has been authored by an indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite, perfectly symbolized by Kit Bond. These are people who spent four years hailing the Great Progress the Leader was making in Iraq, claiming we were "clearing and holding" neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom was on the March, that anyone who questioned any of this was either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists.
And now, four years later, with the War plainly having been a failure, and their assurances all exposed as false, what are they doing? Hailing the Great Progress the Leader is making in Iraq, claiming we are "clearing and holding" neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom is on the March, that anyone who questions any of this is either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists. Nothing ever changes. It just plods along with the same idiot slogans and the same people spouting them. And they do it with no shame, no acknowledgment of their own past behavior, and no loss of credibility. Glenn Greenwald
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The modern Republican party has perverted that idea by adopting the belief that they can manipulate the press so efficiently that the public will never really understand just what was done. This has freed them to adopt the Wall Street style of short term thinking that makes it possible to care nothing for the long range effects of their actions, as politicians might have before, and simply do whatever it takes to "win" the next play. The Democrats have never caught on to this new extreme form of politics and continue to think that these people play by the established rules. But the Republicans know that the press and the Democrats will be confused by this kind of provocative behavior and will fail to respond with any coherence because they cling to their quaint notions.
Right now, for example, we have the Republicans filibustering everything in sight and calling the Democrats a do-nothing congress. We have the president spending twelve billion dollars a month on a war the country hates and saying the Democrats are overspending. And oversight is being met with incoherence that better resembles a three stooges routine than cooperation. They are not behaving as normal politicians behave, they are behaving like reckless, emotionally deranged teen-agers daring someone to stop them. And like the nice, nurturing parents they are, the Democrats try to be reasonable and "talk" while the miscreant kids steal the money out of their wallet and take the family car --- screaming "suckers" as they peel out of the driveway.
They aren't playing by any rules and neither the press nor the public seems to quite understand that. The Dems are trying to position themselves for the next election, which is what the system anticipates, but their hapless act in the face of this anarchistic GOP response is not going to get them there.--Digby
It's not just Iraq; it's one outrage after another. The events of the last week regarding Bush's egregious claims for executive privilege confirm that the drift toward authoritarianism continues unabated, and will until there is a broader shift in the culture in which the majority becomes outraged about this kind of thing, rather than just a minority on the left. I'm not talking about approval or diapproval ratings; I'm talking about outrage.
Speaking of outrage, a quick comment on Michael Moore's Sicko, which I saw over the weekend with my teenage son. He couldn't contain his outrage or stop talking about it for over an hour after. That's the only appropriate response from anyone with a scintilla of common sense and decency. If you saw it, and had the feeling, as he did, that Americans are living in this black hole of delusion and insanity brought to us by those described above, you haven't fallen for Moore's propaganda. No, you've just got enough common sense to see through the propaganda of the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite," which at this point shouldn't be so hard, but somehow it still is a challenge for too many Americans. It's not about: "Well, that's Michael Moore's side of the story; now let's heare the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' side of the story."
I have been driven nuts by the incessant nitpicking of Libertarian ideologues like Andrew Sullivan who say Moore is unfair because he only tells the positive side of the health care systems in Canada, England, and France. The point is that whatever problems other systems have, the problems in the corrupted, broken American system exceed them by several orders of magnitude. People's lives are being destroyed in ways that would never happen in the other systems. I knew a couple in the 80s (both are dead now) who were bankrupted and lost their homes to pay off medical bills. She had a job at the university, got sick and couldn't work, lost her insurance, the husband's VA benefits didn't cover her, they lose everything. At first I couldn't believe the system could be so outrageously, yet matter-of-factly cruel. But it is; it really is.
People like Sullivan and those who look to him for political wisdom are still living in the bubble reality created by the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite." Sullivan isn't unintelligent, but he's just plain stupid, in the sense of being in an ideologically induced stupor, when it comes to government's role in solving problems the market cannot solve. Either that or he can't see beyond the interests of his class as a member in good standing of the aforementioned political and media elite.
Back to Sicko: I wish Moore had the discipline to resist the Cuban agitprop at the end. I think that it undermines the film's broader appeal to middle Americans who don't need their hackles raised about Cuba to get in the way of the film's more important message. But the key point of the film for me was the question Moore asks near the end: "Who are we?" My answer is similar to his in that we are a people who have lost our moral compass and common sense because most of us are are too easily conned by the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite." What it's going to take for these Americans to wake up the reality of what is happening to their country is for me beyond my imagining. I can't dwell on such subjects anymore. It makes me too exasperated.