Sunday, January 24, 2010

The 2010 Perfect Storm

Not a month has passed since my 2010 predictions and already my inability to see what is coming is apparent. While I don't mind missing the earthquake in Haiti, since natural disasters can and will happen anytime, I'm cut to my prognostication quick by the other political earthquake. The Republican upset in Massachusetts and the Supreme Courts decision to allow corporations and unions to pay for political campaigns ads for and against candidates will reverberate through out the rest of the year and I didn't see it coming.

Like a perfect storm, wouldn't you just know it would happen in an election year? The conservatives are already giddy with their triumph in Massachusetts, and now with the court's decision, the conservative businesses and CEO's can fill the airways with their brand of politics. While liberal geeks and technocrats may have been the first to realize the significance of the new invention, television as mass communications, the conservative cavemen finally caught on and have become its master.

How and why the Massachusetts quake occurred is the mystery in this political who done it. How much did Martha Coakley loose it and how much did Scott Brown win it? How much of the Fox News cool aide is being consumed in such a blue state? Supposedly, the great unwashed of Mass. objected to a national health care bill that was very similar to their state health care program currently in place? The pundits are trying to tell me the tsunami on the polls was over something they already have. Something is amiss here.

The quake in Mass. Is more about anti-government than anti-democrat or health care. Anti-government can go against Republicans just as it can go for them. But they don't see that. Drunk with celebration, feeling vindicated in there movement, they will rush into the fire thinking they are inflammable. In their drunkenness, they will get into the car and DUI on a complex highway.

And to string out the drunken metaphor, the court's decision makes DUI legal. However, as legal as it might be, drunk driving still kills, and that is what will bring the Republicans down. While the Democrats cannot organize, the Republicans organize way too much.

Democrats remind me of Mark Twain's story of the drunk returning home and stumbling repeatedly trying to get in his front door. Finally sprawled on his front stoup, he looks up and says, "God pity the poor sailors out at sea on a night like this!" If only Bush had the majority the Democrats still have, he and his movement conservative could have enacted their entire agenda.

I kind of agree with the conservative members of the court. Free means free to all. I believe in the ideal, but it's the implementation and practice that bothers me. Only a jaundice eye will detect the message in some political ads. 1984 here we come. We won the Cold War. We overthrew the communist and don't have to worry about a central government controlling everything we see and hear, and then we go and do it to ourselves – freely. We have met the enemy and he is us.

Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?

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