When I first heard about the Baltimore tradition of painted window screens, I was intrigued by the idea, painting pictures and patterns on window screens that would keep people from seeing what is going on behind them while letting light and air in. This morning I realized that's what TV has been doing with American politics for decades.
But, to get into that, I told you Susan Collins wouldn't take criticism well, she's used to being treated like the Queen of England instead of as a politician, if you think that's bad in the national media, the Maine media is ever so much worse. She's used to the protection of one of those screens.
Raise your hands anyone who believes that Susan Collins didn't get that her ironclad guarantee of a vote on the reinsurance provisions she claims were her motive to betray the people of her state and the country for the billionaire oligarchs, wouldn't be taken up by Paul Ryan or passed in anything like a real mitigation by the House. Bearing in mind that before she was a Senator, Collins was a staffer of Senator William Cohen (former "moderate" Republican) and spent her entire adult life making a living off of governments, state and federal. She has and she will try to present her betrayal of her state, weeks after, by a large margin, the voters here voted to expand Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act which she knowingly voted to destroy, as a scene in which she was the innocent victim.
No, this was just another of the screens painted with a still life of "principle" and "moderation" so as to masque what was really going on behind them from the People of her state. If she can mount another screen through the Maine media that has put those between the people of Maine and the real Susan Collins, sheer habit of training in how to think about her might pull her fat from the flames of democracy.
And anyone who believes she doesn't understand the peril this bill puts Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security in, is the kind of sucker that she and the rest of the Republicans depend on buying the most transparent lies.
The Tax vote in the Senate has shown that there really are no decent, principled Republican members of that body, they are all the vassals of the billionaires and millionaires to whom they just delivered homage and allegiance. The corrupt media of the country has such a hold on the people who put them in office as they're told to, by the media, that they know their ability to hold office to do terrible things depends on the billionaires who own the media and fund their lie campaigns. As I will never stop pointing out, all the "more speech" in the bull shit guarantees of Nat Hentoff and Joel Gora has not prevented the multiple treasons of Trumpian-Republicanism because it is drowned out by the "speech money" of the billionaires. And the Republicans who voted in this guarantee that, at the very least, the economic implosion they almost caused as recently as 2008 will come back. I am hoping it will come much faster than we anticipate because Republicans will have to be swept out in a tidal wave to prevent even worse to come.
Susan Collins deserves to wear the results of her vote just as she so much deserved to wear something like it years ago. But that's not the most important thing in this, now that she's been unmasked the media's presentation of "moderate" Republicanism that covered up the essentially anti-democratic and fascistic elements that have made up the party since the 1980s. The party that covered up the massive corruption of the Reagan and Bush administrations and now the Neronian corruption AND TREASON WITH PUTIN is, in fact, a fascist party. A real, American style fascism of the kind that Dorothy Thompson warned would be what it would look like.
"No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument of the Incorporated National Will. When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of 'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
Dorothy Thompson 1935, the year after she became the first American journalist kicked out of Nazi Germany
And sometimes what brings it into power doesn't look like what its presented a either, "moderate" Republicans, "free speech free press" rulings, "entertainment TV". That's what got us here. Lies, the lying liars who tell them, and the media that peddles them because they're allowed to.
Every anti-democratic political ideology and system depends on lies, democracy depends on the truth, egalitarian democracy not only depends on the truth, it is damaged by lies. When lies are given legal protection, they flourish in a pattern predictably enabling the wealthiest and, so most powerful and those sufficiently amoral to serve their lying purposes, that is inevitably fatal to democracy. That is the overriding lesson to be learned from this, but you won't hear that from the media that enjoys its privilege to lie. They'll be putting up the deceptive pictures that shield us from what's really going on. The minority of the who sort of don't do that haven't saved us from this and they never will as things stand.
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