Welcome to another episode of ‘It Happened to Joan’ that vital political melodrama played out in the pages of Salon, on a regular basis. Today Joan is wringing her hands over the treatment of Barack Obama at the hands of the ‘evil’, not to speak of racist, Republicans. Now, these are the actualities of contemporary political life in America : the embracing of racism by the Republican Party, Nixon and the Southern Strategy, after passage of the landmark Civil Rights Bill and the historic mass defection of Southern Democrats to the GOP. But poor Joan is also confusing the contemporary attacks on Obama with the attacks on Bill Clinton of more than a decade ago. Although the Republican strategy has not essentially changed, but only deepened with the manufacture of the Tea Party nihilists, and their cries of permanent insurgency rather than any pretense of governance. Joan portrays Obama as the hapless victim of this confluence of mendacities rather than the demonstration of Obama’s deep faith in monetarist economic policy, bent on providing the necessary shock therapy that has been the hallmark of a failed Neo-liberalism. A confrontation with the ugly reality of the New Democrats faith in the viability of the Market rather than a faith in the New Deal and its historical evolution, proves too much for Joan and she spins a tale to forestall her shaken faith in a leader not much different from his political antagonists All the other names of political actors merely render this bit of political propaganda more believable, adding the necessary note of verisimilitude, that almost makes this bit of special pleading believable, except for the fact of the readers own experience of the untidy failures of Obama’s Progressivism and the Republican Party’s surrender to political irrationalism.
Almost Marx
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