Election 2012 - The Invisible Progressive Agenda and The Bad vs. The Worse

By Columnist - TRB - Another Presidential election without a Progressive on the ballot, without a genuine Liberal, without even a legitimate working-class-hero Democrat. It is once again a competition fought between Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Fairness and Evil. It is another horse show. It is Punch and Judy. It is Bruce Willis, a good football game, a balloon release and a hooker in a convention hotel room praying that we don't go off the "financial cliff," while she is falling off the bed. It is Election - 2012.

The Republicrat, once thought to be a myth, a sort of hyper-conservative Republican, who talks like a Democrat and can sound like FDR from a distance, is the "new Democrat." The "new Republican is usually a White guy who can channel Adolph Hitler, while at the same time discussing the importance of "states rights." Yes, it is all a little nutty.

We have most of the nuts. North Korea is more saturated, I suppose, while we are spread out. The Tea Party. (By the way, do they bathe? They always look like an unruly crowd of people who just fell out of bed. Were they the C and the D students? Who let them out? There are so many questions.) Their central idea is that maybe more than half of all government agencies, regulations and laws are unnecessary - even illegal. Sometimes intelligent people like Ron Paul actually pretend to listen to them. Anything for their vote. Incidentally, the truly crazy vote will not be surpressed in America. I.D. will not be required of the mentally deranged. A low IQ is usually a good thing to have in some states if you want to cast that ballot. It is, after all, a visible living testiment to your legitimacy.

The Republicrat has an interesting history. He and she were invented 40 or so years ago when a thought-to-be-liberal MA politician named Paul Tsongas wrote a fairy tale about "The New Democrat," or maybe it was "The New Liberal." It doesn't matter what it was named really. It was all untrue, The now late Paul Tsongas was a respected liberal. A graduate student from Arkansas named Billl Clinton read the fairy tale. He liked it.

The fairy tale goes like this: In the story there are three types of politicians holding the majority - the liberals, the moderates and the conservatives. There are a few radical right-wingers too, but you could count them on one hand. The moderates were always good for compromises. The conservatives like Wall St. and war, the liberals wanted the Bill of Rights to mean something. They wanted inclusion, less war, etc. But the conservatives seemed to be winning too many battles and their numbers were growing. They were already big on the corporate circuit. Tsongas imagined them gaining power indefinately. So he came up with this idea of developing a friendly relationship between liberals and corporations, whom he imagined could learn to get along and compromise. But, as I have said, this was a fairy tale.

Bill Clinton liked it though. He and other Democrats formed an entire wing of the Democrat Party centered around the conservative Tsongas message. Al Gore was a big believer. So was John Kerry and so is President Obama. All of these individuals are father to the Right than Republican Richard Nixon was when he increased the budget for welfare and food stamps.

The liberals are gone. The progressives are present only in magazine articles and on college faculties. They are the Big Foot of American politics. The Occupiers don't have the numbers. African American men, and many poor, but politicallly sophisticated men are in for-profit prisons serving hard time for victimless crimes. Twenty-five percent of all the world's prisoners are in America.

So we talk about "rights" for women. But these "rights" are always under attack. We talk about peace. But we are always at war. We talk about unfair, absolutely crazed income distribution, but the rich get richer - and now The Supreme Court has given their money "rights."

The nation is run by the Republicrats and the Radical Right Wing. Everybody knows who the players are. But alas they are only frontmen for the corporate state, ultra CEOs whom you voted into power write the laws in favor of the corporations who pay them well for this service. And they are writing new laws all the time, almost all of them designed to steal more money from you, or more rights - and to take whatever is not nailed down.

And somewhere out there a progressive is writing a book about all of this.