Read these now (though you've probably already seen the links): "Defeat The Right In Three Minutes" (via American Samizdat), the Visual Iraq Body Count, and "End the Liberal Voluntary Extinction Movement."
So go now -- you can right-click on the links and open a new window or tab -- before coming back and reading more. =)
...
Already read it? Good. Repeat the words to yourself: "cheap-labor conservative." "Cheap-labor conservative." Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?
There is, admittedly, a bit of reductiveness in the Conceptual Guerilla's analysis -- using class as a lens to simply explain gender inequalities, or racial or ethnic discrimination, among others -- but it's the right kind, really, if only to circulate it as a viral catchphrase. To get people to make those connections and think for themselves. (And considering that the Democrats are all trying very hard to fly under the radar -- sorry, but that only works on Survivor, and not even all of the time -- those connections have to be made by other people.)
Why the utter wrongness of this (cheap-labor conservative) administration doesn't seem evident to everyone leaves me dumbfounded, since it's so obvious in many ways. Let's examine something really simple:
Q. We now have more evidence of a massive budget deficit that taxpayers are going to be paying off for years or decades to come. The economy continues to shed jobs. What evidence can you point to that tax cuts, at least of the variety that you have supported, are really working to help this economy? And do you need to be thinking about some other approach?Let's take a look at what's going on here. "We're all sinners" aside, Bush (in one of his blue-moon press conferences) once again makes himself sound staggeringly moronic. Consider the fact that he lamely dodges the two most important questions on everyone's mind before the conference: evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (he now says "weapons program"), and the terrible state of the economy.A. No, the answer to the last part of your question. First of all, let me -- quick history, recent history. The stock market started to decline in March of 2000. Then the first quarter of 2001 was a recession. And then we got attacked 9/11. And then corporate scandals started to bubble up to the surface, which created a lack of confidence in the system. And then we had the drumbeat to war.
Remember on our TV screens -- I'm not suggesting which network did this -- but it said "March to War" every day from last summer till the spring. March to war, march to war, that's not a very conducive environment for people to take risks when they hear march to war all the time.
Blaming the deficit on, of all things, television -- people who coddled him all the way, mind you -- is simply beyond belief. Never mind the fact that he clumsily sidesteps the tax cut issue -- he actually blames television for the "not very conducive environment" which he himself created! (Nice of him at least to mention "corporate scandals," since people do need reminding.)
His "Bushisms" have been explained away as Texas-style, plain-folks locution, or as proof of his merely scattered brain, as if the latter wasn't frightening enough. (I can see him saying to himself, over and over, while he brushes his teeth: "Stick to the talking points. Stick to the talking points.")
But this is perhaps a little too generous, for it gives him a way out, some form of excuse -- kind of like the equivalent of his "gentleman's C." Why bother cutting him some slack, since he obviously doesn't give a shit? Why are words like arrogance or malice hardly ever mentioned when it comes to him? Does Bush and his cheap-labor conservative cronies not think that people would finally make the connection between the huge deficit and the huge tax cuts, or, at the very least, the billions of dollars spent on the war on Iraq every month? Or is it because they think they can get away with it?
Lying we're used to. But now Bush isn't even bothering to lie well anymore. See, this is the kind of person we're dealing with here -- that smirk on his face says it all. He's smirking at you and me. The next time you see Bush smirking, just think to yourself: he's smirking at me.
In a month's time I will be going back to school and facing my students, who -- if they can afford to enroll -- would have had to suffer through a whopping 30 percent tuition fee increase.
In two months' time the democratically-elected governor of the severely cash-strapped state I live in may have been toppled in a travesty of a recall election engineered by cheap-labor conservatives and replaced by either a car-alarm salesman, the Terminator, or the publisher of Hustler magazine.
Mykeru reminds us that "This isn't a game." That's absolutely correct. CEOs are making more money than any of their poor fired employees will ever make in their lifetimes. Cheap-labor conservatives piss and moan about the so-called liberal media and pat themselves on the back for their "moral clarity," while at the same time indulging their various hypocrisies. Teachers are being laid off. Funding in almost all social services has been violently slashed. Too many people -- both Iraqis and Americans -- have suffered and died because of Bush's lies, and more people will suffer in the years to come from Bush's "compassionate conservatism."
Enough is enough. It's knives-out time.
Posted by the wily filipino at August 2, 2003 07:14 AM