A Note From The Useful End Of The Telescope. Just Because. Just So.

Booman recently wrote an article called Stimulus Procedure about…duh…the convoluted politics inside of both houses of Congress as the various congresscritters in the congressherd blather and blowhard regarding their own little patches of political turf and how much stroking each of them will receive by the time the stimulus bill is passed and enacted.

After apparently a great deal of poking and prodding through the endless corridors and codicils of the Congressional will, Booman came to the following conclusion.

Congressional procedure is painfully opaque. It’s difficult for me to determine Senate procedure on a conference committee report and that is making it hard for me to predict what is going to happen next on the stimulus bill.

And then..of course…he did come to some sort of prediction.

I think the Dems can pass their conference report with whatever they want once the originating bill passes with 60 votes in the Senate. Am I wrong?

No, he’s not wrong.

But he coulda figured it out easier.

How?

Why?

Read on for more.
How?

Why?

Because it all really depends on the vote in the third house of congress.

The media.

Oh.

You didn’t know?

Just like the Senators and other Congresscritters, the major news orgs have a vote too. Or of course they can not vote, also just like Congresscritters. They can simply not cover a story, as they did not cover say the violent right-wing Christian connections of Sarah Palin or the real reasons behind Blagojevich’s railroading. (Which is not that jolly Blago wasn’t guilty of something, just that he wasn’t any more guilty of “something” than is almost every powerful politician in the United States of Omertica, right up to and including the winningest one of all, Mr. Fabulous himself. Bet on it. That is how Obama won…the presence of Rahm Emanuel on his inside track is all the proof that you should need on that account..,.and it is the only way to win a series of primaries and/or elections here at the present time.)

The vote among the news orgs presently seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of passing any goddamned relief bill so’s their constituents…the hypnomediaed-out, clomp-clomp-clomping sleeple consumer masses…will have enough money (For at least a little while…remember, corps don’t generally think much past the next quarterly financial reports.) to buy their McDonald’s shitburgers, GM rolling breakdowns, Geico jive insurance policies and Big Brother Pharma poisonous drugs.

So it goes.

Booman spends a great deal of time figuring out the mechanics of government and politics and I suppose that I applaud his efforts to some degree, but the problem remains that he…admittedly along with about 99.99% of commentators on the subject… invariably enters the mystery tunnel of American politics from the wrong end. The fact of the matter is that Congress…its opaque processes being the mechanism that allows it act in relative secrecy…will assuredly vote “the will of the people” in the end. Why? Because that’s the job of the people who are in congress. First they have to get elected and then of course they have to stay elected. It’s their career. That is what they do. It is what puts extra-nice bread on their table, allows them to drive cars that do not break down much and send their children to schools from which a degree means an almost guaranteed good living if the system remains only as partially broken as it is today.

In some perverse way, that system is working just as the people who drafted the Constitution meant it to work. They could not have predicted the power of the media or giant corporations in the equation, but as the Sufis say, “As above, so below.” A system that functioned in a certain way in their time has grown monstrously large, but it is also simultaneously identical to the way that it started in many respects.

In other words, the general tenor of the cast remains the same, only the scale of the production has changed.

The cast? It remains the power elite, the opinion makers (including the infinitesimal sliver of real leftiness people that produced the Tom Paines of revolutionary times…the Thomas Paines that were betrayed and cast aside by the elite once their usefulness was at an end as did Washington to Paine.), the clomp-clomp-clompers and the disenfranchised.

Why am I writing this?

Certainly not in the hope that most of you people will start looking through the useful end of the political telescope.