I haven’t blogged for a while because it seemed so futile to put my little puff of gas into the air in the midst of a virtual maelstrom of rants and raves from both sides of this year’s political, to-the-death cage match. But the mid-term election for control of congress has reached a crescendo of mud smearing so far beyond the minimum of what constitutes reasoned debate, I’m compelled to comment.
It’s clear to me that we no longer have a choice between candidates with individual strengths and weaknesses to evaluate. That was the case when it was normal for bi-partisan legislature to result after input by both sides of the aisle met in the middle of the debate. In today’s climate of extremism, however, the candidates are merely sounding boards for ideology spawned by party leaders with agendas that have become all too clearly defined. The Republican of 2010 who screams with rage, “We want our country back,” bears no resemblance to the voter who favored the moderate to liberal views of Nelson Rockefeller back in 1964 or the pre-Watergate Nixon who created the GOP coalition that survived until now.
I grant you the many shades of gray in the following paragraph, but it appears as if the Democrats stand for “the people,” the disenfranchised who desperately need help to make it from one day to the next, the ‘little guy’ who is helpless against the dictates of ‘the ruling class,’ the African Americans and Latinos struggling to get a share of the economic pie. It appears as if the Republicans stand behind the giant corporations, Wall Street, the country’s 10% of the population who own more than 70% of the nation’s wealth (the top 1% own 38%… the bottom 40% own less than 1%).
Threatened by the inevitable realities of shifting demographics, Republicans have not adapted nor embraced the contributions of diversity. Reluctantly I have come to believe that the message behind the “ObamaCare” catch-phrase and the venomous hand painted signs depicting the president with a Hitler moustache and the patently crazy claim that he is a Moslem have nothing to do with traditional politics or congressional policies. They are blatant expressions of overt racism. As former President Jimmy Carter reiterated, “When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds.” Regreftully the radical fringe he referred to was the crowd at a rally for a republican candidate, a scene repeated on dozens of occasions all across America.
