Have you had enough? Are you tired of being played? Have you figured out that the members of the major media are not your friends, and that they exist to mesmerize and manipulate so that you can serve their owners' ends? When was the last time a major news story made you feel better? How long did it last? Do the major media ever go 24/7 with something inspiring, or is it easier to suck you in by playing on your fears?
Remember ISIS? It was just weeks ago that a bunch of vicious terrorists videotaped themselves cutting off the heads of a few captured humanitarian Britons and Americans, and suddenly people halfway around the globe were terrorized into thinking it could happen to them. The media hyped it and the Republicans slavered over what they saw as a political opportunity. Then suddenly a man traveling from Liberia became the first person in the United States to become symptomatic with the Ebola virus, and ISIS was forgotten. A pandemic was coming! Break out your HazMat suits! Once again, the media obsessed, the Republicans with despicable cynicism tried to play the political angle, and much of the public was dutifully terrified.
This is what the major media so often do: terrify and terrorize. That's what Republicans always try to do: prey on people's deepest fears. And never mind that no American who wasn't traveling to Iraq or Syria ever was in any danger from ISIS, and never mind that Ebola is so difficult to transmit that not even one person who flew on a transcontinental plane or even lived in a small apartment with the one man in the United States who subsequently died from it ever came down with it. The major media held people enthralled, the Republicans sought to blame it all on President Obama and the Democrats, and in neither case was the general public ever at any risk.
Are you sick of it yet? Do you enjoy living in fear? Are you going to continue to fall for the hype and the lies and forget all about this week's false terror as soon as next week's false terror appears? Haven't you yet figured out that the terror has a thousand faces, but almost always it is concocted and marketed and politicized and almost never is it more dangerous than things we take for granted as normal aspects of modern existence. Like driving in motor vehicles. Or eating. What kind of people try to cash in on such sick fear-mongering? Do you continue to watch them and listen to them, and in some cases even vote for them? Are you as foolish as they presume you to be?
As you ponder these questions, jump below the fold for more.
When communism imploded under the weight of its own inherent flaws, the Republican Party lost its great bogeyman. For decades, Republicans had successfully scared people into voting against their own self-interests out of fear of a far-off cruel empire that never was as big or as powerful or as dangerous to Americans as were their own tobacco and chemical and arms industries. Then the Bush team successfully abused for political advantage the national trauma of a terrorist attack its own incompetence had allowed to happen. With the election of Preisdent Obama, it became death panels and Sharia Law and communism and whatever other shrill lies they could concoct from the bowels of their fetid imaginations, even as genuine issues went ignored or unaddressed.
The reality is that we do face real crises, such as climate change, and record wealth disparity, and inadequate educational and economic opportunities, and a healthcare system that is a tragic embarrassment when compared to those of other economically developed nations, and the state of our national infrastructure makes it no exaggeration to say that the United States is crumbling from within. But the special interests that own the Republican Party don't care about any of that, and for the most part create and/or capitalize off it. They want to suck you into voting for them ostensibly to stop terrorists halfway around the world from sneaking across the border and chopping off your head. They want to suck you into voting for them ostensibly to protect you from a disease you were never going to get anyway. In the dark dank back rooms where they strategize how to play you, they must be laughing. At you. Because all too often it works.
A year ago, after yet another Republican government shutdown, the Republican brand was in a seeming death spiral. And then Obamacare was launched, and the website was a mess, and the major media dutifully focused on the technical problems rather than the fact that the website's technical problems wouldn't have been such a big deal if so many people weren't so eager to use it, and that so many people were eager to use it because they lived in states run by Republicans, and therefore didn't have access to their own local systems. Demand was great, but rather than point to the big picture that Democrats were helping people get insured, while Republicans were making it more difficult—and still want to scrap the entire system and thus take insurance away from millions of people—the major media only wanted people to know that the website was broken. They didn't want people to know what happened when the website worked—that millions of people who previously couldn't qualify for or afford health insurance finally had it. Because good news isn't news. And a broken website that stalled the implementation of a vastly improved system became the political story rather than the vastly improved system itself. And that was when the politics of 2014 started to slip away from the Democrats.
This campaign season isn't over. As Markos keeps pointing out, so many races this year are so close, that the results really will depend on turnout. Republicans work very hard to disenfranchise people, which makes it all the more important that people refuse to do their bidding, and get out and vote. But more than anything, once again, this is a campaign season about the politics of fear. Do you, do your friends and loved ones, do your mere acquaintances, do people you merely pass on the streets, want once again to vote against both self-interest and the common good by succumbing to fear of non-existent threats? Or do you want to vote for a better future? Do you want to address climate change, and help craft a more fair and just society, and rebuild this crumbling nation so it finally, finally can legitimately begin to live up to the lofty ideals of its mythologies and make those myths become realities? The choice is yours.
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