Look at this fucking idiot former mayor of New York. Rudy Giuliani: “We had no domestic attacks under Bush”. Think carefully Rudy.
For the extreme left it [climate change] provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, sort of de-industrialise the Western world. The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.
Liberals Senate leader Nick Minchin on ABC’s Four Corners. What a nutcase. This is the same guy who didn’t believe that cigarettes are addictive or that passive smoking is harmful.
This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.
“Obama, the Republicans, and health care reform”, The New Yorker
I am really struggling to understand how the Democrats are finding it so difficult to get a sane healthcare plan enacted. They have a brilliant, popular president. The American public is overwhelmingly in favour of reform, including a public option. The Democrats have a clear majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
One obvious answer is that Congressional Democrats are just as beholden to the health insurance lobbyists that elected them as the Republicans are. To me it seems like American democracy is just not working.
