Although the stench emanating from Washington's moralizing, revolutionary cadre has finally triggered a gag response among the electorate, I question whether it's possible, at this belated date, to clear the air. More on that in a moment. First, the latest gag-inducing news for the voting masses, which, however, isn't really news to others who take the time and trouble to follow the bloody stuff.
As this morning's Washington Post reports: "Five conservative nonprofit organizations [bear with me here: Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform; the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, co-founded by Norquist and Gale Norton, Bush's Former Interior Secretary; Citizens Against Government Waste; the Heritage Foundation-sired National Center for Public Policy Research; and the religiously oriented Toward Tradition of Seattle] ... 'appear to have perpetrated a fraud' on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, [Democratic] Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday.
"The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups ... produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients' positions ... or introduc[ed] Mr. Abramoff's clients to government officials in exchange for payment ... [or] agree[d] to act as a front organization for congressional trips paid for by Mr. Abramoff's clients."
And here we thought all those ideologically pompous, right-wing think tanks actually believed in their own propaganda. As it turns out – nope. They've simply been whorishly regurgitating whatever self-interested cowdung that Republican-mobbed-up plutocrats wished to spread around at the time.
We did, however, know that these political revolutionaries are congenitally cynical and, accordingly, that power has always been the highest priority. Nothing new there in the realm of politics, I suppose; yet things have changed in ways that can indeed make their revolution permanent.
A true rarity these days is the political observer who would dispute that the American right has perfected the art of demagoguery, or mass leadership – the individual practitioner of which was once described by Huey Long-biographer T. Harry Williams as possessing the qualities of “audacity, an iron will, faith in his cause or in himself, unbounded brazenness, and a capacity for hatred, without which he may be deflected from his goal.” Add to that the right's now-ingrained practice of scapegoating – it's all the liberals' fault – and the definition is nicely rounded out. Then ponder the reigning careers of our country's Grover Norquists and Karl Roves, to name just two king-makers in a corrupt cast of unbalanced thousands. Enough said.
What tops it all off, however – what poses the most danger – is a twofold addition to the formula: the well-funded, organized right's growing control and manipulation of mass media, and an increasingly uninformed, hence gullible, electorate. Feed enough well-financed hogwash to ignorance, and liberty has a real problem on its hands.
Next month will give us some indication as to whether the right can at least be body-blocked temporarily. Perhaps if accomplished with sufficient force, the right's pols – the plutocrats' puppets – will even rehuddle and re-strategize. But I have my doubts. Everything is at stake for them over the next 25 days, and they'll throw everything they've got, which is considerable, at what they know are the millions of the walking gullible.