I finally had some time to watch HBO's "Recount" last night, and it's remarkable how the events of November and December 2000 were predictive of the presidency we got. From the incompetence and corruption on the state & county level to the intellectual dishonesty at the Supreme Court.
Incompetence, corruption, intellectual dishonesty. That's pretty much the Republican brand. Anybody paying attention to McCain's campaign the last several weeks sees more of the same. He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, he's up to his eyeballs in K-Street lobbyists, and he just makes no sense when he talks about the economy or the war. I think it's also important to note that the Clintons differ from the Republicans in that they are more competent and not as embedded with the K-Street system, but in their intellectual dishonesty they are right there with them.
It was hard for me to imagine how anyone in his right mind could take the Bush act seriously. I feel the same way about Clinton. Both the Clintons have become a national embarrassment. No, her presidency would not be nearly as bad as Bush's, but Bush's is the worst in American history. He'll be hard to beat for decades to come. Indeed, his administration is the full flowering of Republican incompetence, corruption, and intellectual dishonesty. The DLC and Blue Dog Democrats differ from the Republicans in essentials only in that they are likely to run the government more competently. Look at the people she has surrounded herself with. Can anybody seriously want this crowd running the White House? In what way do they offer a real change from the modus operandi of the Republicans?
I haven't said much about the McClellan revelations.The only thing that struck me as remarkable about them was that the MSM still gives a prominent place to administration attempts to discredit McClellan. Are they just going through the motions, or are they too clueless to recognize that if there is any connection between the truth and what the administration says, it's purely a coincidence? Isn't McClellan's book just another insider account of what every sane American knows already? And yet the MSM still behaves as if this administration and its statements are to be taken seriously? I wanted McClellan, when asked about administration attacks on him, to say: "You're kidding, right? You still think that what Bartlett, Rove, Fleischer, or Perino say have any credibility?"
One of the main takeaways from "Recount" is that the Republicans saw the conflict as a "street brawl" in which party is more important than country. McClellan's points about the permanent campaign and its tactics show that "street brawl" has been the mentality of the Republicans certainly for the last eight years. Rick Perlstein's Nixonland points out the history of this kind of thuggery is much longer. But what happened during the Nixon administration was the beginning of the southernization of the GOP, which reached its culmination in the Bush administration. As the viciousness of converted southern Democrats joined forces with the viciousness of corporate interests, a new GOP was created for which crony capitalism is its animating principle. If the GOP is allowed to stay in power, it would turn the country into a kind of corporate plantation society, for which Wal-Mart is the pioneer. Everything the GOP does can be understood according to the logic of promoting its crony capitalist agenda. The cultural wedge issues are simply a tactic to keep low-information Main Streeters on the GOP bus in a 50% +1 electoral strategy.
It serves the interests of crony capitalists to have incompetent, corrupt, and intellectually dishonest politicians in office. Crony capitalism thrives in a political atmosphere dominated by the mentality of the extreme right. But unlike Fascism, rather than requiring that business interests serve the state, crony capitalism requires that government serve the interests of the corporations. Isn't that precisely what we are seeing? However badly the war has gone from a political and human standpoint, it has worked out quite well for the defense and energy industries. This is the single most dangerous trend that is overtaking our politics. That the American public takes seriously in the least the picture of American politics that is portrayed in the MSM, knowing that huge corporations like GE, Time Warner, etc., own the media is astonishingly naive.