9.20.2009

If the rightwing blowhards seem to be hypocrites…

…it's because they are hypocrites!

John Cole considers here this shameless dishonesty and does so with respect to the big fuss the right often makes about ACORN and, for that matter, Barack Obama. I quote his article in full because it is brutal, direct and true:

To refresh:

Investigating known links to the past administration and torture — beyond the pale.

Investigating known wrongdoing within the Justice department regarding firings — partisan politics.

Investigating Monica Goodling and that entire sorry crew — unseemly.

Creating a special prosecutor to ogle Bill Clinton's penis and another one to fish for some possible wrongdoing somewhere in a connection to Obama that doesn't exist — YOUR PATRIOTIC GOD DAMNED DUTY. WOLVERINES!

The United States, as we know, never actually gave itself a proper welfare state because the whole welfare state effort could be painted black, so to speak, by its opponents, found an unreceptive audience among America's racists and, to be sure, would prove to be disruptive to deeply entrenched economic interests across the country. Like this imaginary welfare state that could not come to be, the right has made ACORN a target precisely because its very existence does the poor and thus relatively powerless fraction of the country a bit of good! Yet, ACORN does not accomplish as much for the poor and weak as Washington's lobbyists do for big capital and finance as well as for the Pentagon and its suppliers. ACORN is just a scapegoat, a convenient, weak and thus advantageous target for the right, as Glenn Greenwald suggests here:

So with this massive pillaging of America's economic security and the control of American government by its richest and most powerful factions growing by the day, to whom is America's intense economic anxiety being directed? To a non-profit group that devotes itself to providing minute benefits to people who live under America's poverty line, and which is so powerless in Washington that virtually the entire U.S. Senate just voted to cut off its funding at the first sign of real controversy — could anyone imagine that happening to a key player in the banking or defense industry? 

Apparently, the problem for middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans is not that their taxpayer dollars are going to prop up billionaires, oligarchs and their corrupt industries. It's that America's impoverished — a group that is growing rapidly — is getting too much, has too much power and too little accountability.

It is clear — at least it is clear to the Republican Party and its materially threatened base — that unions, the poor, Black folk, unwed mothers, the retired who depend upon Medicare and Social Security are the dangerous 'special interests' who would bring down this magnificent country. That so many among this Party's base will soon find themselves among the impoverished, that they will need the help of entities like ACORN, that they would be better off if the United States had a proper welfare state…

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