No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Center-Right said Fred

The latest Karl Rove-Fox Noise talking point to saturate the media is the bald assertion that the US is still a center-right country. Let me get this straight. The rethugs spent months, and millions of dollars, screaming at us the Barack Obama was a socialist Marxist secret Muslim who palled around with terrorists, and we voted for him anyway, and by a significant majority, yet we're still center-right? I don't know which planet these people live on.

Apart from being totally at odds with reality and its well-known liberal bias, this soundbite is dishonest on many levels. For one thing, labels like "liberal" and "conservative" have been used as sticks to bash people over the head with for so long that they have lost all meaning. Sure, you can stack the deck by forcing people to put themselves in little boxes and only giving them two choices, liberal or conservative. But when you poll people on the issues, you consistently find that decisive majorities say, Yes, women should have the right to control their own bodies. Yes, we should protect the environment, not destroy it for the benefit of a handful of megacorporations. Yes, the rich should pay their fair share of taxes. No, we should not go to war just for the hell of it. In other words, most people hold liberal positions!

Secondly, by no stretch of the imagination can the rethugs be called a center-right party. On the contrary, they are an extreme fringe right cabal whose ideology is about catering exclusively to the wealthiest 1% while imposing born-again fundamentalist totalitarianism on everyone else.

However, by all means let the rethugs continue to delude themselves and live in denial (which is an anagram of Denali, which was Sarah Palin's Secret Service codename). Let them flock behind Palin as their new leader and continue to wallow in ignorance, backwardness, inverted snobbery and resentment against anyone who is halfway smart and/or educated. It guarantees them many years of exile in the political wilderness, which is the least they deserve after their incredibly destructive monopoly on power over the last eight years.