This is a year where all the expectations I’ve had about the political landscape have proven to be very wrong. What I’m hoping for is that the expectations of the Media Mavens, the Republicans, the Tea Party movement, and organizations like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and the US Chamber of Commerce, which are spending untold millions of anonymously sourced contributions to defeat Democrats, prove to be wrong as well.
I’m not expecting that to happen anymore, but I am hoping that enough “sane” people like you and me prove that just as my earlier expectations were unfounded, so are their expectation. Let me elaborate …
In NY this year we finally have those nice expletive deleted electronic voting machines, the ones with all the bugs in them that many, many people have shown can be hacked very easily. So on election night if Carl Paladino, the tea party endorsed racist, homophobe, pornography lover and threat maker to conservative newspaper reporters unexpectedly wins in a major upset over Andrew Cuomo, that would constitute proof to me of Election Fraud with a capital T and that spells big, big Trouble.
I don’t expect that to happen, but then I didn’t expect Paladino to win his primary either. Nor did I expect Sharron Angle, Joe Miller and Christine “I’m just like you” O’Donnell to win their Republican primary elections either, or that Harry Reid would be trailing Angle in the general election polls in Nevada. I didn’t expect Rand Paul to win his primary in Kentucky. I didn’t expect Russ Feingold to be in trouble in Wisconsin.
I didn’t expect the constant media drumbeat for the last six months that a Republican tidal wave that would turn control of the Senate and the House over to the most extreme slate of candidates the Republicans have run for office. I didn’t expect a lot of the insanity and nastiness we’ve seen this election season.
If there is one thing I’ve learned this year it is that I have no idea what’s going to happen and that my expectations and educated guesses, even when they have been partially on point (I expected massive corporate spending on defeating Democrats after the Citizen’s United case came down, just not as massive as it has been), are worthless for the most part.
We are living in uncharted territory, where the wealth disparity between those at the top and the rest of us is larger than it has been since the 1920’s. Where the median income of US citizens is almost half that of people living in “socialist countries” like Canada:
Consider Canada, a nation with national public health insurance. Credit Suisse calculates the 2010 median wealth in Canada — the wealth of the typical Canadian family — at $94,700, about double the $47,771 U.S. median net worth.
And yet the polls tell us that so-called “angry voters” are prepared to vote for the most radical Republican politicians, people who support the elimination of nearly all restraints on Big Business and the further lowering of taxes on wealthy people (already among the lowest in the world), the very policies that got us into this economic mess in the first place.
“Gut-level feelings of tremendous anxiety quickly turn into rage,” says psychology professor Drew Westen of Emory University and author of the 2007 book The Political Brain. “Men in particular don’t like feeling anxious, so they very quickly convert anxiety to anger at what made them anxious.” That anger is aimed at anyone perceived as failing to pull the country out of the recession—mostly Democrats, as the party in power. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 23 percent of voters say they’re angry; 54 percent are frustrated. Angry voters say they’ll support a Republican rather than a Democrat by a margin of 73 to 19. Similarly, a Quinnipiac University poll last week found that 33 percent of likely voters in Connecticut say they are “angry” with the federal government. They support GOP Senate candidate (and pro-wrestling tycoon) Linda McMahon 78 percent to 20 percent.
Well, I’m mad as hell too. Angry that so many of my fellow citizens are falling for the bullshit being shoveled at them by lying attack ads and a lapdog news media that often appears openly praying for a massive defeat by Democrats.
I’m angry that Republican thugs can deny someone half their size her right to free speech by literally beating the crap out of her.
I’m angry about constantly being told there is this enormous “enthusiasm gap” between the support that Republicans have for their moronic and extremist candidates and Democrats and Liberals have for our candidates.
And I’m fed up with being told that a “gridlocked” government, where Congress is run by people who don’t want to govern (but who likely will try to impeach Obama for god knows what trumped up horse manure) and believe that the magical tax cut fairy and “drowning the government in a bathtub,” will solve all our problems.
Mostly I’m angry at the people who have let there fear, stroke by a complicit media, convince them that pawns for the wealthiest people and corporations on the planet have their best interests at heart.
As a character in a highly underrated movie once said:
[T]he truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, … but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? … There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you…
Well, it’s time to show that fear is never a good reason to vote for someone. Dictators and Tyrants and Oligarchs and Lying SOB’s (see, for a recent example, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and too many Republican politicians and lobbyists to name here during the years 2001 – 2009) from time immemorial have used fear and the anger it engenders to divide people and use that fear and anger to acquire power. Power they then have then used to benefit themselves and their benefactors and cronies at the expense of everyone else.
Election day is fast approaching. I suggest you channel your own anger at the reprehensible politics of the right to get out and vote, and then get your friends and anyone else who isn’t blinded by the lies of the right wing to vote with you and against the fear-mongering monsters that the money power has created.
As my title says, to hell with expectations. On this upcoming 2nd of November we very much need to send these creatures of greed and selfishness and hunger for power (i.e., Karl Rove, the Koch Brothers, and the rich bastards and multinational corporations who cowardly hide behind the skirts of American Crossroads and the US Chamber of Commerce), “persons” who think they can buy this election and this country and rob you and your families of their future, a message that that will never “be forgot.”
