Over the weekend we passed another of the many hurdles in our way towards healthcare reform. The official debate has begun on the senate floor by overcoming a Republican filibuster. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) promised the event would be a “holy war“, drawing yet another comparison between the movement-conservatives and their Middle Eastern counterpart, the Taliban. Since the 2006 and 2008 elections took the seats many conservatives considered their birth-right, the movement-conservatives have been literally going insane. So divorced from reality have the conservatives become that they fail to realize the liberal agenda they are so fervently fighting against is largely a figment of their own imagination. Hatch’s comment encapsulates this premise perfectly to me.
Talk to a Tea Bagger and you’ll soon know the many dangers facing America today. The constitution is being torn to shreds, socialism is coming at us in all directions and our guns are going to be taken away. Nevermind that none of this is true, you see, the modern conservative movement is not about reality. It is about anger and frustration. It is fueled by ignorance and directed by leaders with corporate interests at heart. Instead of fighting for their mutual self-interest in healthcare reform these people rage about government takeovers that are completely laughable. Instead of attacking the president over bowing to the Japanese Emperor, they could be fighting for the betterment of America’s international standing by closing Guantanamo Bay. Instead of calming fears about czars and the President’s birth-certificate, the movement’s leaders encourage it. We have senators and politicians telling people that the government wants to kill them! The conservatives “know” plenty about their enemies, but know almost nothing about the people they trust – and this doesn’t seem to bother them at all! They don’t want to think for themselves, they want other people to do it for them and this has dangerous consequences.
Get enough people angry and sooner or later someone is going to act on this anger. The Department of Homeland Security understood this and tried to warn people about this. Conservative media members went ballistic and in an act that Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks called “the definition of politically correct,” retracted the warning because of the reaction. Nevermind that George Tiller was murdered or that police are being killed because of paranoid fears of guns being taken away. Nevermind that a white supremecist has shot up a holocaust museum or that guns are being brought to events that Obama is speaking at. The DHS would rather soothe the tempers of the right instead of taking precautions against this kind of behavior. Should we be surprised that billboards are being put up calling for an armed revolt against the government or that anti-gay violence is up? When Sarah Palin talks about “death panels” or Glenn Beck says that the president has a “deep seated hatred” for white people, do they not think someone is going to take that information and act on it?
The truth is, conservatives’ fears are mostly nonexistant. Obama is hardly a socialist/communist/fascist (the words are used interchangably by the right) and he’s barely even a liberal. He is getting ready to recreate Johnson’s disasterous decision to escalate the Vietnam war by sending more Americans to die in the Empire graveyard that is Afghanistan. While he campaigned for a public option in healthcare, all reports now say he has been doing everything in his power to destroy it in favor of a trigger. Reports are now indicating that Senator Schumer (D-NY) is now working with conservative Democrats to create just this so that the president can have something to sign and call it “healthcare reform” no matter how restrictive of women’s rights it may be or how little reform is actually there. Actual liberals and members of the left like Senator Sanders (I-VT) are vowing to filibuster any bill that doesn’t include a public option (a stand with which I agree). Without the public option, this bill is nothing but a gift to insurance companies as we become mandated to buy their ever shittier products. Despite what conservative media pundits would have us believe, the white house is not interested in pursuing bans on guns. As Alexander Cockburn put it in this week’s issue of The Nation, “The past year has yielded one surrender by the administration after another – whether it be renditions, phone-tapping or an accelerated schedule in giving the finger to organized labor, whose troops had done the most to put Obama in the White House.” Obama is a member of one of the two parties of the status quo; so rest assured frightened conservatives, he isn’t much interested in rocking the boat.
Whether it be from the right as displayed in Tea Parties or town hall disruptions, or on the left in the millions who voted for Obama and continue to try pushing him towards the “change” he promised us, there is a lot of revolutionary energy in America today. Both parties tap into this feeling and use it to fuel their political victories, only to shun it when they actually win. Liberals will always be dissapointed by the Democrats and conservatives will always be dissapointed with the Republicans. If you want “change” that only your candidate of choice can bring, make sure it means more to you than stock phrases like “realness” and “fairness”.