I don't know if this was diaried in 2010, but even if it was, it's worth taking another look at. Robert Parry wrote a fascinating blog post on how the GOP has attempted to maintain power in Washington through a very well coordinated propaganda machine. The main gist is that what the right is doing to this president is what they have done to all democratic presidents through the last 40 years - only now it's much more obvious and blatant as the currents of self-righteousness and their thirst for power reach a crescendo. The fact that taxpayer dollars ($100M/year) are actually helping keep this propaganda machine alive as well as funding neocons through periods where they are out of power was but one surprising tidbit in this excellent analysis.
It's really worth the ten minutes to go read his entire post. It really makes one wonder, "Where is the outrage?"
A little background on Parry from Wikipedia:
Robert Parry is an American investigative journalist. He was awarded the George Polk Award for National Reporting in 1984 for his work with the Associated Press on the Iran-Contra story and uncovered Oliver North's involvement in it as a Washington-based correspondent for Newsweek. In 1995, he established Consortium News as an online ezine dedicated to investigative journalism. From 2000 to 2004, he also worked for the financial wire service Bloomberg.
And some snippets from this particular writing:
. . .the Republicans believe they can reclaim the lucrative levers of national authority by making the country as ungovernable as possible while a Democrat is in the White House, essentially holding governance hostage until they are restored to power. Then, the Democrats are expected to behave as a docile opposition “for the good of the country” (and usually do).
While I thought the GOP House intransigence and Senate record filibusters was particularly aggressive because of Barack Obama's race and personal biography (he's not born from one of the elite American political families), this writing takes you back to the incredible attacks on Clinton and Carter that I admit I wasn't paying much attention to at the time. I was far too young when Carter was president and wasn't very political through the Clinton presidency. Voting for him was enough political action for me at the time.
Does this sound familiar?:
Rather than accept Clinton as a legitimate president, the Republicans unleashed their newly minted right-wing media machine (much of it having been assembled during the Reagan-Bush-41 years with the help of conservative foundations and right-wing media moguls).
Magazines, such as The American Spectator, and newspapers, like the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, spread ugly rumors about the Clintons, while radio talk show hosts, such as Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy, filled the airwaves with hours and hours of Clinton-bashing.
In Congress, House Republican firebrand Gingrich whipped his party into line against Clinton’s top legislative goals. For the first time, every Republican voted against the federal budget, which included tax increases to rein in the deficit that had surged to unprecedented levels under Reagan and George H.W. Bush (41).
Parry goes on to talk about the undermining of Carter with the October Suprise, and the surprising acquiescence to this American hostage-taking of the political system:
For his part, ex-President Carter appeared more concerned about the danger of being accused of sour grapes than learning anything new about how the Republicans sank his presidency. In 1996, while meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat, Carter reportedly raised his hands into a physical stop position when Arafat tried to confess to his role in the Republican maneuvering to block Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations.
“There is something I want to tell you,” Arafat said, addressing Carter at a meeting in Arafat’s bunker in Gaza City. “You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal [for the PLO] if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the [U.S. presidential] election.” Arafat was apparently prepared to provide additional details and evidence, but Carter raised his hands, indicating that he didn’t want to hear anymore.
So what we are seeing today is just an ongoing effort that may not target this president as specifically as it would seem - it's just much more obvious in it's disdain for the American public and it's purpose to keep democrats out of power. But because he is black, it sure does make it easier for them to foment negative feelings toward him in their overwhelmingly white, rural base.
I think the most interesting point of this post is that while we were building a propaganda infrastructure to undermine the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, they were building a mirror image of that infrastructure here in the US.
Finally, in 1990, Nicaraguan voters – faced with a choice of electing the U.S.-financed candidate Violeta Chamorro or suffering a continued U.S. economic embargo and a resumption of attacks by U.S.-supported contra rebels – opted to accede to Washington’s desires and voted for Chamorro.
By the second year of the Clinton administration, it seemed something similar was occurring in the United States, in part, because the Reagan-Bush-41 administrations had left behind not only a capacity for “information warfare” in the Third World but a domestic version of that propaganda infrastructure.
Scary, depressing, wholly infuriating stuff. I thought it deserved some more eyes.