There’s a political war being waged in America, with the internet being it’s primary battlefield. No, it’s not between the Democrats and Republicans, that one’s over for now. Nor is it the over-hyped, fake Clinton/Obama Drama, orchestrated just to keep the bad boyz of the blogosphere busy by allowing them to pretend to be relevant. It’s not the war between the mainstream media and the blogosphere either, given the corporate influence and partisanship of most publications and blogs, the blogger bully “pioneers” have now seamlessly been integrated into the “establishment” and are little more than their ideology enforcers. This point is explored by the National Review Online in an article about how the Center for American Progress-lead progressive left movement beat the GOP at it’s own game with the election of Barack Obama as president:
The Left has created not just a collection of unshaven bloggers but a machine that beat the Right at its own game. The Left’s response to idea mills like the Heritage Foundation and AEI is the Center for American Progress, except that it produces few ideas: A reported 40 percent of its budget is given over to marketing. The tip of the spear is ThinkProgress.org, a site written ostensibly by CAP policy wonks. Its sole function seems to be to discredit conservative candidates and personalities; it contains 11,000 pages with the words “Sarah Palin” on them, according to Google. ThinkProgress entries aren’t all that original, but they frequently serve as jumping-off points for the left-wing blogosphere and Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
The entire article is worth a look, but, as I said, I don’t think this is exclusively a “progressive/conservative” battle. The Soros-backed Center, lead by Obama transition team leader, John Podesta, does seem to be the architect of a “psuedo-movement,” however, it’s just part of the story. George Soros has not hidden his desire to remake the Democratic party in an image more to his liking, and it should be noted that in the primaries, he backed Obama over Clinton, even though she is supposed to be a co-founder of CAP. He did, however, claim to be fine with a Clinton win, and I take him at his word on that. Whether it was Soros himself, the Center for American Progress, the Democratic party, or some other, unknown entity who was crafting the game plan is not important; it seems clear, at least to me, that whoever the ultimate power brokers are, they were indeed fine with a win by either Democratic candidate.
The Black Agenda Report has been making the case all along that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were war-mongering, corporatist, ideological twins with not a soupcon of difference between them. Whether or not you agree with their assessment as a whole, it’s hard to argue with the main thrust of it, Clinton and Obama agree on more than they disagree. Both candidates have themselves made that point. So, their primary battle was not about ideology, but the methodology of implementation of their mutual policy philosophy; Clinton representing the old-school, tried and true fundraising and campaign approach, Obama, the new, experimental Howard Dean, web-based, 50 state one. If the trail-blazing, Wild, Wild West of the internet approach paid off, so much the better; if not, as many of the major donors and architects likely believed, their first choice would be enshrined in the Oval Office. Win-win, no difference, safe bet. Considering that a Democratic victory was almost a sure thing, such a gamble was pretty much a sucker bet, guaranteed to pay the house no matter what.
Many groups and individuals enthusiastically took that bet, though, believing that their efforts would pay off in a way that we now see will not come to pass. A lot of the cheerleading was done by those with a vested interest in the outcome, either financial or political, some were volunteers, some were big-time, self important bloggers, others were supposedly “objective” faux journalists. Then there were those who were skeptical all along, sensing that the primaries were a sham, the outcome was a done deal, and the fix was in, without being able to put their fingers on just what was wrong. A lot of that skepticism came from reasonably informed, but not overly invested, regular voters. The kind of workaday everyman and woman people who are the backbone of politics, though the outcry came from the slightly more involved faction of that group. In other words, PUMAs.
Lets face it, the average American voter on either side is not steeped in the knowledge and traditions of the respective political parties and their policies and positions, most folks could not care less. Most Democrats see the Republican party as the predominantly white, holier-than-thou, stingy busybodies who screwed everything up. The Democrats are everybody else. Most of the time, this rather simplistic view, and it’s equally simple alternate, work just fine. We are only called upon to exercise our obligations to decide who will make decisions for us every two to four years, and we’re content to believe that if we will only vote for the best-looking candidate with the most money who we like the best, everything will be cool. Frankly, we don’t have time or energy to dedicate to becoming better informed and more involved, we’re too busy working, raising families, paying taxes and doing all the things we rely on our government to help us do, to worry about political science. And our elected officials know it, in fact, they depend on it, it’s how they keep getting elected.
But a funny thing happened when the machine tried to run it’s usual game a slightly different way this time. The very means they tried to exploit, the internet, allowed those usually docile housewives and husbands sitting behind their laptops at the kitchen table, at their makeshift home office/den/bedroom desktops, in cars, trains, buses with Blackberries and I-Phones, in office cubicles, in coffee shops and libraries, or wherever they found internet access, to actually become not only informed, but involved. Unsatisfied with the unwitting accomplice role into which they had been cast in the farcical theatricalization of the democratic process, some of them began to howl in outrage. “Party unity, my ass!”
Without funding from the shadow forces, or donations from influence peddlers or seekers that power campaigns, with no access to daily talking point memos or press releases designed to tell them what to tell other people to think, these “kitchen table PUMAs” took matters into their own hands. When their indignant objections to the party line pushers got them kicked off the mainstream media enforcement-arm blogs, they founded Blogger, WordPress and Typepad blogs of their own, countering the party driven propaganda being spewed by dedicated, though misguided partisans convinced that the official party endorsement of their point of view regarding their candidate made it not only superior to anyone else’s, but them solely responsible for his/her success. Unlike the party-supported mainstream blogs whose proprietors were motivated by either party influence or financial reward, PUMAs are motivated only by principle. We know that when the illusion of democracy is shattered, the whole house of cards falls apart. Americans have to believe that the smiling, handsome, well funded guys we elect are nobly motivated, and the process fair. Otherwise, we have to suspend our complicity and really get involved.
Thus, PUMAs objected to the caucus fraud and crossover primary voting exploitation, as well as the results of the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting, not because they promoted a candidate they didn’t like, but because those activities made a mockery of democracy, and rendered the democratic process moot. Those same Democrats, former Democrats, Independents and even some Republicans comprising the PUMA membership were equally outraged by the treatment of “Joe the Plumber” and Sarah Palin for the exact same reasons.
So, while we consider the future direction of our own patriotic “movement,” as well as the recent appointments of people like CAP’s Melody Barnes, Tom Daschle, and John Podesta, by president-elect Obama, and of his entire economic team, and what it all means, I submit we only need to continue doing what we started out to do, monitor the process. The uncontrolled, uncontrollable American voters whose ultimate allegiance is to country, not party are the bane of the establishment’s existance. Since we can no longer expect the press or the media to objectively report or investigate, if, indeed we ever could, we now have the means and opportunity to assume that role for ourselves. As we become more knowledgeable and enlist more of the disgruntled, kitchen table electorate, our path and direction will continue to make itself clear.
We’re the squeaky wheels, the masses who reject the opiates, answering to no one, now fully awake and ready to roar. And if we keep making noise, we will continue to grow, we will not be silenced, and we will be heard. And our David will ultimately defeat the political Goliaths, because we’re right, and there’s a lot more of us than them.
