"HATEFUL DAYS!" Will Pitt has Excellent Post UP at this Link...Truly Excellent!

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Hateful Days
by William Rivers Pitt | November 22, 2010 - 11:35am | permalink

— from Truthout

There is a great deal of hate in my heart today. Not the healthiest condition to find myself in, but these things sometimes cannot be helped. The hate is a free-flowing thing, expanding in all directions because, simply put, there is something to revile and despise in virtually every direction I turn. Sarah Palin's ridiculous reality show was a ratings blockbuster. Hateful. George H. W. Bush is getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, because Mr. Obama just can't help sucking up to the very Republicans who are about to make a project out of throttling his administration. Hateful. There will be no punishment for those who destroyed CIA evidence of rampant torture during the Bush administration. Wildly hateful.

One cannot swing one's dead cat by the tail these days without striking something that makes me want to give up on this tepid reporting job and take up firebombing. Barring that, the only other reasonable solution would seem to be undertaking a deep and profound heroin habit. Just shoot up and float away, leave all this mad and awful noise behind and go chase the dragon for a bit. Why not? Thanks to our Afghanistan adventure, there is a glut of the stuff on the world market. It makes perfect sense, in a way; where is the fun in enduring a massive global economic and political meltdown and rampant joblessness without an ample, cheap supply of good smack?

Heroin is bad for you, I know. But so is politics. These days, both are equally poisonous to the body and soul.

More than half the members of Congress are millionaires - 261 of them, to be exact - which puts the stalled conversation on erasing the Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthy into much greater and more nauseating perspective. The Democrats squandered this sure-fire winner of an issue in the run-up to the midterms (two-thirds of Americans want those tax cuts repealed) while simultaneously dropping the ball on extending the tax cuts for the middle class. Why, we asked? What's the point? Did they want to lose in November? No, I suppose they didn't...but it sure looks now like they want to be rich more than they want to be in the majority, and the rest of us, again, are left to suck on it.

The Democrats...ah, yes, the Democrats. Seldom in history has there been a larger collection of utterly useless people than the motley mob of elected officials who rally under the banner of the Democratic Party. They had the House, the Senate, the White House and put two new Justices on the Supreme Court, and yet with all that power and influence, found themselves blown out yet again in a midterm election. It's not that they were ineffective during those years - quite the contrary, in fact. But if a tree falls in the forest and the media doesn't report on it, did it happen? The virtual blackout of reporting on what the Democrats got done can certainly be blamed to a degree on the "mainstream" news media, but it goes far beyond that, and must in the end be laid at the feet of a hapless party and a president who appears to have attended the Blind, Deaf 'n Dumb School of Political Messaging.

During the dark days of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt pushed through a massive slate of federal programs aimed at getting the economy back on its feet. There was serious right-wing resistance to these programs, just as there is today, but with one vital difference. Back then, Roosevelt and his administration made damned sure the American people knew where and how they were being helped by these programs, and who exactly was providing that help. The Nation's Stephen Duncombe explained it thusly:
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AT: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-rivers-pitt/32671/hateful-days