You’ll forgive me since I wasn’t paying attention, but a prominent right-wing radio talk show host — as in “the” prominent right wing talk radio host — initials R and L — apparently used the word “Regime” in describing the Obama Administration.  Apparently a prominent tediously-inside-the-beltway television news network personality — oft times called “liberal” due to having worked in the Carter Administration — initials of CM– called him out on such a thing.

I was not aware of this controversy, and today I find myself encountering it and being puzzled due to the lack of there is no story here.  In terms of “toxic rhetoric”, this is a misdirection.  Blah blah blah — Get your “Regime Change Begins at Home” stickers out.  I hate anti-president paranelia of this type because of its sucker-pack character: just roll out the new model and you can make a mint.

I suppose I could dig into RL’s sentences.  He states that Obama’s is a “Regime” because he’s “Governing Against Will of People and Purposely Killing Jobs”.  It’s mostly not worth figuring out.  But I will suggest that the “I Want My Country Back” sentence never much impressed me back in the Bush Administration.  (As when John Kerry adopted the Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again” for his campaign purposes.)  Roughly every perfidy of the Bush Administration can be found in the historical record through American history.  I suppose this is the price one pays for evading nationalistic claims.  I suppose for the flip side in thinking about the use for opposition to the Obama Administration (or “Regime” if you must), the thing to do is to discern the differences of what “back” one side wants from America’s past as against the “back” from America’s past lopped off by the previous Administration/”Regime” —

Excuse me for a moment while I laugh at this weasel — NG — wait.  There’s more where that came from!

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, is a reader—and something of a postmodern interpreter—of the works of Albert Camus and George Orwell. A few days before President Obama’s big health-care “summit,” Gingrich addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. He cited Camus’s “The Plague,” summarizing its message with Jack Nicholsonian authoritativeness: “The authorities can’t stand the truth.” His discussion of Orwell was more narrowly targeted. The message of “1984,” he explained, is that centralized planning inherently leads to dictatorship, which is why having a secular socialist machine try to impose government-run health care in this country is such a significant step away from freedom and away from liberty, and towards a government-dominated society.
I could point out that rhetorical black-balling is not new.  Compare the conservative William Graham Sumner’s “Forgotten Man” with the way Franklin Roosevelt used the phrase — arguably in parts re-inverted back by Richard Nixon’s class with the rise of “The Silent Majority”.  But then again, Roosevelt never referenced Sumner, so maybe he’s more home free than Newt Gingrich with respect to specifically citing Camus and Orwell.

Orwell’s position on the House and Senate health-care bills is unknown, but, like Camus, he was a lifelong democratic socialist (he was a member of the Independent Labour Party, which regarded regular Labourites as wishy-washy) and, as such, a big fan of government-run health care. Confusion about who is and who is not a socialist and what is and what is not socialism was endemic at C-PAC, as the conference’s participants affectionately call it. “The hope and change the Democrats had in mind was nothing more than a retread of the failed and discredited socialist policies that have been the enemy of freedom for centuries all over the world,” Senator Jim DeMint, of South Carolina, said, adding, in a reference to the President, “Just because you are good on TV doesn’t mean you can sell socialism to freedom-loving Americans.” Representative Steve King, of Iowa, listed the enemy within: “They are liberals, they are progressives, they are Che Guevarians, they are Castroites, they are socialists.” Then he mentioned a few more key segments of the Democratic coalition, including, besides Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, and Leninists, “Gramsci-ites—ring anybody’s bell?” Strictly speaking, that should be Gramscians, followers of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist Party leader of the nineteen-twenties. Ding-dong!
When we’re upa gainst the Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, and Gramscians —
Some people deign the “get America back” as sticking it to a simple matter of black man in the White House — and I suppose that old chestnut of a political wad out of Virginia lends some credence to the various coalitions gelling for political effect.  A long time back there was a fuss about cartoons plastering Obama in the guise of Urkel.  Was this racist?  Sure, though I know from experience you don’t have to be black to be compared to Urkel.  The bigger point is the parody didn’t even really make sense.

But in a world where ACORN is brought down by deceptive pieces of misleading editing — from a video filmer whose benefactor can with a straight face insist that there were no racist slurs tossed to black congress members at their walk past — that — such a thing is somehow not possible.  I don’t understand the automatic denial, except by putting it in the context of the fabricated ACORN video.  In terms of the colors of the hats in old Western movies, the White Hats need to always be wearing the White Hats and the Black Hats need to be wearing the Black Hats.

I have heard argued that talk radio, by which we mean conservative/right wing hosts, and the conservative media — biggest item in the mix is Fox News — cannot be all that powerful, as evidenced by the fact that for all their screechings against Bill Clinton — he was easily re-elected.  But that misses the point.  Back when the younger Bush was filling one of his Supreme Court picks, and I wish I could find this — The Atlantic published a piece about the true ideological breakdown of the Court — apparently by dent of Clarence Thomas being insane, the five to four division we always presume the Court holds (as shown with the “Citizen’s United” decision) is untrue, and we can find something like a 3 – 4 – 2 division definition.

Barack Obama is set to put up a Supreme Court Justice.  Stevens, important for such reasons that he can occasionally nab Kennedy and taper the 5 Justice Majority down – makes his escape before it’s too late politically.  We’re in for a political posturing battle with the definition of the word “mainstream”  justice up the air.  Take a page from GB — ignore the headline for the moment — and figure what this “RADICAL” coming is supposed to mean.  In a world where the old President George Bush threw out CT, and in a world where whoever Obama picks is going to be defacto the most Radical Pick in Human History — just … because.

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