[There was a funny satiric comment here a few days ago. I asked the super patriotic author for some other stuff. Today he did send this piece – not that funny, but some interesting thoughts.]

by Highlander

Back a while, Billmon had an entry analyzing what he referred to as The Liberal Disease. 

As with anything Billmon writes, the whole entry is well worth reading. The money shot, however, came in the following paragraph:

the classically liberal approach to politics, in which the
struggle for power is treated like some kind of glorified courtroom debate, with strict rules of evidence, an impartial umpire (the judge) and 12 jurors, straight and true, to render a verdict.
…
That’s pretty much the last ten years of American political history in a nutshell. While liberals sift and weigh the evidence, debate alternative points of view, and reach for that ever elusive "fairness," the conservative machine sifts and weighs alternative propaganda points, debates the best way to manipulate public opinion, and reaches for power — first, last and always.

There’s more, and it’s all worth reading.

Billmon’s conclusion comes a few very lucid paragraphs further down, when he says:

This is the world we live in. No one is going to hand out brownie points to
progressives for being "fair"

This leads, eventually, in later posts, to Billmon’s growing belief that the liberal left has to get down and roll in the dirt with those crazies on the right wing, if it is to have any chance whatsoever of taking power back away from them again. And while Billmon prefers to make Godfather allusions, I think his point, and the point of many liberal, left wing pundits, can be summed up by a colorful quote from another well known mob movie:

If they pull a knife, you pull a gun.  If they send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue.  THAT’s the Chicago way .. and that’s how you’ll beat Capone.

Or, in Billmon’s world view, that’s the way the political game is currently played in America, and that’s the way the left will beat the right.

Other movie quotes also immediately occur .. something about "Give in to your anger, Luke" .. but let’s stay away from that morass. 

I don’t necessarily subscribe to Billmon’s call to action, although I certainly can’t find any flaws in his analysis. As a liberal, I do try to be fair and see all sides of every issue and point out the merits of every argument, whether I agree with it or not. And certainly the likes of Limbaugh, Coulter, O’Reilly, Hannity, DeLay, etc ad nauseum, feel no such ethical constraints when they are stringing together their own specious and toxic agendas of talking points. It is precisely as Billmon states on the right: they reach for power, first, last, and always.

They have, in fact, achieved their wildest wet dreams. Conservatives are firmly in power here in America. They dominate not only every branch of government, but every ‘center of strength’ (to lapse briefly in Mao-speak), such as the media, the military, the public education system, our religious infrastructure, the electoral process, and the legal system – from courts to cops to prisons – as well. Conservatives may make up slightly less than a complete majority of Americans, but by either co-opting or effectively neutralizing the undecided swing voters in nearly every election for the last decade (not to mention their outright illegal electioneering), they have managed to take great steps towards imposing their hardline right wing agenda on the entire populace (whether they vote or not) in this great nation. 

A digression cries out to be inserted here about how anyone with two brain cells should be able to see exactly what we get when conservatives govern – a collapsing economy, an increasingly corrupt government increasingly dominated by an entirely self serving corporate hegemony, and an illegal, immoral war on foreign soil that increases the danger of every American from terrorist attack with every second it continues.. but I’m going to try to stay on point here, and if memories of Sean Hannity smirking as he opines "You can be friends with liberals, you can like them, but you simply cannot under any circumstances let them govern" make me long to see him airlifted to Iraq and dropped into any insurgent hotbed our intelligence can pinpoint at the time (or, you know, just doing time in a lockdown cell at Gitmo), well, let’s move on from that and try, for the moment at least, to stick to the high road.

I mean, somebody should, right?

Given that conservatives are firmly in power, and given that I absolutely agree with Billmon when he points out that the conservative approach to governing (or doing anything) is the exact opposite of the liberal perspective – which is to say, it is unreasonable, irrational, unfair, deceptive, and, as we are increasingly seeing, absolutely contrary to anything any remotely sane person could reasonably refer to as "the common good"… well, the conclusion one has to reach is that our current government, which is utterly dominated by conservatives from top to bottom, is every one of those things – unreasonable, irrational, unfair, deceptive, and not working for the common good. 

Now, if your government is all of those things, then, clearly, if you have anything functioning at all between your ears, you would have to admit that it’s really time for a new government.

Now, I’m not calling for armed revolution in the streets, because that would be essentially futile: conservatives have all the guns. Besides, it would be treasonous, and I might get arrested, and anyway, the last thing in the world I want is to see any kind of half assed civilian putsch in this country. We’re supposed to be better than that; supposedly, we can work out our problems without getting grandpa’s shotgun down from the attic and shootin’ us some tax collectors. 

I am also not wild about the idea of getting as down and dirty, politically, as the conservatives do. I still cherish a few ideas, and one of them is that the far right wing is not a majority in this country, and will never be a majority in a free country that has even the rudiments of a tolerant, liberal public education system. The conservatives rely on blatant election fraud and employing the lowest kind of demagoguery to keep their base in line and sway a few percentage points in the perpetually undecided voter category… and let me repeat right now what I said several times during the 2004 election season: when the country is as polarized as it towards ideological extremes, with each extreme making up around 40% of the electorate, any election is going to depend on the undecideds, and in any election where the choice is between the left, which wants to tolerate all points of view, help those who need it, and, you know, not kill anyone that our government doesn’t absolutely have to kill, and, well, those wild eyed insane "bomb/gas/torture/electrocute/kill kill kill KILL THE GODDAM HEATHENS" on the right, any voter who is undecided at any point in the campaign is a moron. So we are currently living in a country that has, for the last decade or so, had its leadership ultimately decided by morons. And it shows. 

When the crazies and the morons have taken over your government, what do you do? Billmon says we rational, reasonable folks on the left should drop our principles (oh so briefly, no doubt; just until the next election) and play in the mud with the nutjobs and the dimwits. 

I say, when the government has been co-opted by all those guys who used to shove your head into the urinal in the school bathroom, it’s time to do something, certainly. But I’m not sure trying to find some way to get their heads into the toilet instead of yours is the best idea. They are, after all, bigger and stronger than you, and they enjoy being bullying, tormenting pricks, which I, at least, do not, and don’t want to learn to do, either. 

Maybe, instead, we should try to figure out some way to keep them from dragging us into the men’s room in the first place. 

What is a government? Where does its power lie? Mao would tell us that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, and as always, he has a point, in his sly and inscrutably Celestial manner. However, in point of fact, the power of any government is mostly economic, and there is no government in the world where this is more true than ours. 

America is a super power because we have a large population that works and pays taxes. Those taxes form an unimaginable wealth base, which our government then leverages through various different forms of financial chicanery into even greater and more unimaginable sums of money, which it then spends however the hell it wants to, regardless of what any of the people who contributed the money have to say about it. Taxpayers do not get any sort of veto over any government expenditures at any level. All we get to do is elect representatives who supposedly look out for our interests when our money gets spent. However, given that a majority of Americans now feel (according to the latest polls) that the war in Iraq was a colossal mistake and we should get the hell out of there as soon as possible, and our elected representatives continue to vote to continue to spend several hundred billion dollars of our money on a war we don’t want, well, you can see that the system has some flaws.

Nonetheless, it is important to understand: our government’s power does not ultimately come from its military might. Mao is correct; power does grow out of the barrel of a gun… but he didn’t trace the chain back far enough. Somebody has to build those guns, someone has to manufacture the ammunition, someone has to carry the gun, someone has to point it, someone has to pull the trigger… and all of those people want to get paid. Our government pays all those people with tax money, which is to say, with OUR money.

If the people currently in power in America have a nightmare, it certainly isn’t armed insurrection in the streets. For one thing, as I’ve already pointed out, the conservatives have all the guns; if the left wing actually tried to shoot it out with the right wing, the right wing would win in a heartbeat, and then they’d have an excuse to stick any of those of us who survived in jail for treason, where we would be making little corporate widgets at slave wages for the rest of our lives, which is a treasured goal of the right wing that otherwise is probably going to take them at least another two generations to achieve.

No, the conservative nightmare is when half the country decides to stop working all at once.

See, if half the people on the tax rolls suddenly drop off the tax rolls, our government’s power is, all at once, crippled. Our government relies on a never ending flow of revenue from those pricks in your employers’ accounting office who calculate everyone’s withholding every week and forward a fat check to the local authorities. That never ending flow of revenue is the primary reason why Congressmen can take expensive fact finding junkets to the Far East on the public dollar and defense contractors can charge the Navy $200 for a roll of tape. When you have an endless and infinite source of funding, you don’t exactly have to shop at Dollar General. 

But in fact, the source of the money river is neither endless nor infinite, and if you were to abruptly subtract half or more of the tax producers from that flow, well – it would hurt. And it would hurt BADLY.

Another huge source of government income – government at every level, state, Federal, county, and municipal – is gasoline. Stop driving to work every day, and you stop filling your tank as often. If half the country stops filling its gas tanks as often, that’s going to hurt, too.

These are observations, mind you. I’m not sounding any call to action. I’m certainly not suggesting any kind of organized civil disobedience on the part of the left in this country, or any sort of concerted effort at tax avoidance. I’m not calling for a nationwide strike of all liberals until, say, every member of the fraudulently elected Shrub Administration steps down, or Congress convenes an investigation into the current Administration’s criminal deception of the public in regard to our reasons for invading Iraq, or even until the Shrub gets enough cojones to fire Karl Rove for doing immeasurable harm to our national intelligence community. 

No, I’m not calling for any of that, because, for one thing, no one ever listens to me (except maybe for the NSA, who might arrest me if I did that), and for another thing, even if people did listen to me, we are all, as Mike N. sadly notes, "too comfortable" to do anything that would inconvenience us so drastically. How would we pay our light bills, keep the mortgage current, feed our kids, or buy boxed sets of The Sopranos if we all decided to stay home from work until… you know, the very bad, nasty, rotten, unreasonable, mean, unprincipled, deceitful, dishonest, illegitimate, murderous punks in office decided to, just once, Do The Right Thing?

I mean, it’s a tempting option, and it would, probably, eventually, see some kind of success. Even the PATRIOT Act doesn’t give our current crop of turdmongers the right to throw us in jail simply for being voluntarily unemployed. And they can’t shoot us; they need us to go back to work and start paying taxes again. It is the one possible course of action that really honestly could be effective – because when it comes down to basics, the government needs us more than we need them. We pay for the privilege of being alternately oppressed and ignored. Wouldn’t you like to stop giving Halliburton money for screwing up?

I mean, you gotta know, staying home for a day or two isn’t going to get it done. We’d be out for months. Who’s going to support us while we refuse to put more of our money into a corrupt government that no longer even tries to create a credible illusion of representing any of our interests?

Hmmm. Anyone got George Soros’ phone number…?