Lead Ballots

Greetings good citizen,

I have been rather vocal in my accusations that the Democratic party no longer exists but I have dropped the ball, so to speak, regarding the simultaneous disappearance of the Republicans.

Which is to say today’s politics bear almost no resemblance to politics when I was a boy…

Although the ‘changes’ have been taking shape since before I was born. When I was young I had politics explained to me in very basic terms. Democrats were for the workers and Republicans were for the bosses.

Where are those people today?

You hear the ‘progressives’ wringing their hands and wailing over the ‘degradation’ of the ‘middle class’.

In counter point I came across an article this morning that Obama is (finally) wooing ‘working class’ voters, people who elected him last time and the same people who have disappeared from the political dialog almost three decades ago.

Politicians don’t talk about their biggest failure and that would be the workers of this country…and they have chosen to ignore them for the past three decades, since Ronnie Reagan stole won the White House.

Don’t you think it’s ‘too little, too late’ to be chasing the ‘working voter’ now?

One thing is for sure, there are a lot less workers now than there used to be…and that is going to prove ‘problematic’ for whoever wins the White House next.

Because the ONLY thing the capitalists have up their sleeve is deeply inadequate ‘hand out programs’.

If they stop ‘buying’ pacifism from the masses what remains of this nation will tear itself to pieces in a fortnight.

Probably less…but I digress.

Weren’t we talking about the mysterious disappearance of the ‘traditional’ Republican?

Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure within the GOP in recent years. It is easy enough to see how her tough-guy, every-man-for-himself posturing would be a natural fit with the Wall Street bankers and the right-wing politicians they fund—notwithstanding the bankers’ fondness for government bailouts. But Rand’s philosophy found most of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities.

There has always been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this?

Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.

Funny how the old lines of ‘class antagonism’ were used to split the tradition parties into something they were never intended to do.

The Fundies swallowed the GOP whole because there already existed a God based element within it’s basic structure. The principal defense of the capitalist is the insistence that the inherent unfairness of capitalism is the direct result of ‘God’s Will’.

It has always been so.

This is how we have the indefensible defended as being the best possible way…because it is ‘God’s will’.

And there are no shortage of grifters out there who will fuck you out of your birthright, insisting the whole time that it is ALL ‘God’s will’!

And sometime in the seventies it became apparent that all the wealthy had to do was keep their checkbook in their pockets when it came to those pesky ‘worker lovin’ democrats and they’d dry up and blow away!

And that’s just what happened…

But not having an ‘opposition’ to lay the blame upon for things going sour just wouldn’t do…

So the evil fuckers ‘stacked the deck’ and ran their own candidates under the long defunct Democratic banner.

Now Democrats don’t run under the worker banner, they run under the ‘progressive’ banner…which everybody is starting to realize is actually the Libertarian banner, the radical branch of the old GOP.

What’s this, Libbies on BOTH SIDES of the political fence?

Have we become a one party state?

What do you think, good citizen?

Ironically, you don’t have to dig too deep to see when we turned into an oligarchy…

When a sitting president can admit on national television that his constituency consists of ‘The Haves’ and the ‘Have mores’, YOU, good citizen, have been sold down the river.

He’s NOT ‘your president’, he’s THEIRS…lock, stock and two smokin’ barrels!

Consider this as the cold November wind creeps ever closer and vote your conscious.

Naturally, by then we may well be casting ‘lead’ ballots.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner