Powerful Leader !
That's the Real Deal for the people who own and operate CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC and the other large corporations.
Here's CBS this morning, echoing an historical complaint against democracy -- echoing corporatist fascism in Italy and then Germany from the 1920s:
"Fewer people than ever believe Obama is a strong leader...."
-- CBS, morning of Monday, August 29, 2011
How sad, Obama's not a dictator, not an American Mächtigerführer.
That's not a bit from international news or the budget or immigration or the Mexican drug war. This twisty-sneaky Ad Biz attack came inside the network's weather report on Hurricane Irene.
For corporatist CBS, democracy is the problem.
Democratically elected leaders are weak. Everybody knows that. Our federal government is hopelessly broken. Obama can't lead.
The Ministry of Disappointment tells us what to believe. The swill gets mainstreamed 7/24/365... more on this pattern below the fold......
Helluva fat turd in the CBS punch bowl this morning.
If you don't see the "weak leader" attack as a brain-turd, maybe you could read and re-read this diary. That was the main line of attack on the Weimar government. Too weak.
Schwachen....
No question about it, America has had Far Right screamers -- preying on male paranoids -- from Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s to Rush Limbaugh today. Coughlin made his mark on the radio with supporters who focused first on hating Jews and then Franklin Roosevelt:
"Must the entire world go to war for 600,000 Jews in Germany who are neither American, nor French, nor English citizens, but citizens of Germany?"
"When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."
When Coughlin referred to the "poppycock of Democracy" and quoted Goebbels repeatedly slamming Roosevelt, his superiors stepped in and took him off the radio. Took till the 1990s for Limbaugh to go national with equivalent rightie shill-swill:
“Right. So you go into Darfur and you go into South Africa, you get rid of the white government there. You put sanctions on them. You stand behind Nelson Mandela — who was bankrolled by communists for a time, had the support of certain communist leaders. You go to Ethiopia. You do the same thing."
President Obama remains Limbaugh's "halfrican American."
Coughlin and Limbaugh have made "racist pig" an insult to the pigs.
Mainstreaming hate-speech themes really took off with Ronald Reagan.
The Great Communicator had a knack for disguising Coughlin/Goebbels slams as folksie, home-spun personal advice. Everybody knows that democracy/gubmint 'n libruls wanna steal yer money -- right !
This got rolling full force with Reagan when he wroked for G.E. and was honed to a sharp edge with Peggy Noonan, his primary speech writer :::
-- Democracy is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.
-- Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
-- And I have to point out that democracy doesn't tax to get the money it needs, democracy always needs the money it gets.
-- Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say "But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time."
-- Democracy is not the solution to our problem; democracy is the problem.
Slight re-do, of course. Government-changed-to-democracy.
But what is American government but democracy ??? The lies of definition spread out from democracy to science and to health care.
At a Fundamentalist gathering......... this rotten Reagan-spew:
[Evolution] has in recent years been challenged in the world of science and is not yet believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was believed. But if it was going to be taught in the schools, then I think that also the biblical theory of creation, which is not a theory but the biblical story of creation, should also be taught.
-- Reagan in 1980
And this lie about public sector medicine:
The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally divided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . . . All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.
-- Reagan in 1961
Republican backers want a Mächtigerführer. A Cheney or a Reagan or a Bush -- reported as a Powerful Leader by all the corporatist media -- and democracy be damned.
A militarist dictator in the White House and a free pass of corporatist theft/bribery/phone-hacking/identity-theft/banking. And Obama's a weakie and disappointing and a flaccid Black Boy faker.
And the rest of us are niggerlover, stupid-librul fools. Tom Drake has focused the constitutional battle for us all:
It is a basic precept when taking the oath to defend the Constitution as a government employee and providing for the common defense that you do not sell out intelligence or national security to the highest bidder, or keep our nation’s decision makers in the dark, or turn information into a political tool and, driven by self-interest, use it to hammer whistleblowers.
Such egregious behavior sends a chilling message about what the government can and will do to those who speak truth to power — a direct form of political repression and censorship.
His fight as a NSA whistleblower is our fight. The hate-radio screams and the subtle propaganda in our corporatist media seek to throw the White House over to a Far Right Mächtigerführer. These fights are lateral extensions to Mr. Drake's battlefield.
Indeed, for Drake as with Wendell Phillips, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty - power is ever stealing from the many to the few."
We have to apply that demand every day. Every time the Far Right propagandists would steal our minds or our hearts. They're professionals, hired on 24/7/365. We're the targets.
And God bless both America and President Barack Hussein Obama.