If there is a more tiresome phrase in the modern political lexicon than the one that cautions people "not to go there," I know not what it is. I have been watching the rise of movement conservatism, and the resultant radicalization of the Republican party, for going on 30 years now, all the way back to the NCPAC campaigns run against people like George McGovern and Frank Church by that nasty closet-case Terry Dolan, and my experience tells me that they will always "go there" and, by degrees, they will take us all "there" with them, and, gradually, what seemed extreme will become mainstream. They first "went there" when Harry Dent told them they could win elections by energizing the inchoate rage of crumbling American apartheid. They gay-baited Tom Foley when he was Speaker. The Willie Horton commercial is now remembered mainly as an effective tactic, and not as the piece of racist slime that it always was. They managed to get the respectable press chasing down the most lunatic fake scandals regarding the Clintons, and birtherism had a longer run than it would have had in any political context that was in any way sane. Alex Castellanos conjures up the "Hands" ad to gin up racist anger against Harvey Gantt and in favor of the inexcusable Jesse Helms, and now Castellanos is a respectable commentator on CNN.
They always "go there." They can't help themselves.
And now, of course, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts, who slid through his confirmation hearings because the Democrats chickened out on the filibuster, and the Citizens United decision, they can "go there" in luxury. The whole system is now rigged so that gozillionnaires, anonymous and otherwise, can purchase a private pipeline to pump as much raw sewage as they can into our elections. They look at democracy as just another bit of the landscape they can despoil. "Go there"? These people live "there." They got rich "there." Wherever "there" is in regard to a politician, they find inconvenient to their divine right to rule the country for their own profit, they will set up shop, and the rest of the political process will follow them "there" because the process is so corrupt it can't function anywhere else.
Comes now Joe Ricketts, the man behind Deb Fischer's surprise win in the Nebraska Republican senatorial contest on Tuesday, and his new super-PAC, which has set itself to "go there" in high style, indeed. The price tag is $10 million and it is almost breathtakingly cynical and vicious. It is not only going to trot out Jeremiah Wright again but, as the Times puts it so delicately today, it plans to "respond to charges" of race-baiting — which will arise because the whole campaign is, you know, race-baiting — by "hiring as a spokesman an 'extremely literate conservative African-American' who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a 'metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.' "
Let's see. They need a black mouthpiece to race-bait and fag-bait the president.
Move over, Larry Elder; we're ready for your close-up, Mr. Cain.
(Also, a note to all those people who assured me while I was in Nebraska this month that Deb Fischer was really a nice lady from the Plains, a moderate who can work "across the aisle," and not at all a wingnut: This is the guy to whom she owes her success. Without him, she's canning preserves and arguing about repairs to the county roads. Res ipse, etc.)
They used to keep this kind of thing quiet. Howard Hunt wore a wig. Donald Segretti had several aliases. People went to jail rather than give up Chuck Colson, or Bob Haldeman, or The Trick Himself. They don't have to pretend any more. They don't have to launder illegal campaign cash through Mexican banks. There is practically no such thing as an illegal campaign contribution any more.
They used to meet in secret. When conservatives decided to go all-in on the remnants of white supremacy, they developed their own code for it. When Trent Lott got caught hob-nobbing with racists, people actually were shocked about it. They don't have to pretend anymore. There is no longer a need for code. There is practically nothing anyone can say about this president in public as long as he's rich enough not to give a damn.
This is what three decades of tolerating this has brought us. This is what the Supreme Court has wrought in the past few years. It used to be, if you ran a foul and dishonest campaign, and it worked, you at least made a pass while in office to behave as though all your slandering and dishonesty was done in pursuit of a noble goal, in an attempt to gain a position worth having, so you did the occasional good government thing that you could sell to the Jaycees back home while you were slandering and cheating your way to re-election, or up to the next step on the career ladder. So some good got done by accident or, as Drew Pearson had his fictional president, Ben Hannaford, put it, "In a democracy, the right things always get done for the wrong reasons."
Now, though, there's no need to fake it once you make it. The offices were devalued as we convinced ourselves that "government" was an alien entity, and we accepted the fundamental absurdity of people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to run for office because they were "not a politician," and running for positions in a government that they pretended to distrust, instead of laughing those people off the national stage as the charlatans they obviously are. Political office became a career move, a vehicle to continue your career in business through other means. And, as this became more and more the rule, actual public service waned, and government began to fail, and the cycle fed on itself until, today, our campaigns are judged and rewarded as though candidates were pitching an ad campaign, with success measured in the same way.
We have done a remarkable thing in this country. We have privatized both political slander and political corruption.
So, yes, they appear to be going "there" in Jeremiah Wright again, and on "the campaign John McCain refused to wage," as though McCain could have saved himself by being as big a public blight as Joe Ricketts has set himself to be, as though a few commercials featuring angry black preachers could have saved the Republican ticket from eight years of Republican policies that helped turn the world's economy into a plague ship, as though just the right amount of race-baiting and fag-baiting could have saved the day. (And as though Jeremiah Wright could have bailed McCain out of the utter idiocy of choosing Sarah Palin as the person best qualified, besides him, to have her grifting little mitts on the nuclear code.) Of course, they're "going there." There is here, and has been for longer than it's comfortable for us all to admit.
No comments:
Post a Comment