Flying monkeys provide entertaining political distraction
reprinted from the Waukesha Freeman 8-11-10
You know the political season is getting started when you catch sight of your very first flying monkey. It lets you know the migration is under way. More are coming.
You know the political season is getting started when you catch sight of your very first flying monkey. It lets you know the migration is under way. More are coming.
This year’s first flying monkey is a Republican talking point and it appeared in a cute commercial I saw last week. It shows Uncle Sam digging a big hole. A voice says the national debt is too big. A little girl appears at the edge of the hole and asks Uncle Sam to stop digging. The end. Looks good, right? Too much debt is bad for the country. I’m nodding and starting to consider sending in my tea party membership form – until the fine print appeared. The commercial was financed by something called the Employment Policies Institute. Hmm, says me. Where there’s flying monkeys there’s usually a wicked witch. There is.
This flying monkey will be the first of many howling about the national debt. The national debt will be this year’s O.J. Simpson trial. Like all effective propaganda, it’ll be diverting but irrelevant, make some of the participants lots of money and will be designed to circumvent the public interest. Mainly, this year, howling about national debt is intended to give us all amnesia.
The Republican Party needs to make the rest of us forget that they have no new ideas, that everything they’ve said in the last two years is a retread of the same economic policies that put us in the current mess we’re in. Maybe the tea party needs a new flag that says “Don’t Re-Tread on Me!” I’d fly that one.
For nearly 30 years Republicans have clung to an economic model grounded in the Wild West and an ethics grounded in “greed is good,” and they aren’t going to sober up just because they crashed the entire economy two years ago. Even though David Stockman (Ronald Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget) and Alan Greenspan have come out against current Republican economic strategies, nobody in the Party apparently wants to hear “last call” on the Bush Tax-Holiday they’ve been enjoying.
The best way to keep the party going is to make sure that their owners, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, continue to enjoy the good life – even if that means putting the deficit and our national debt, and the rest of us into an even deeper hole. Just like in the commercial. Get it? It’s perfect Rovian misdirection. They’re going to distract everyone this year by blaming Democrats for the national debt even though, historically, Republicans have not demonstrated any more restraint on spending than Democrats.
The distraction is already working. I’m afraid even Mr. Gannon, who appeared in a guest editorial last week to take issue with my column on Sen. Feingold’s record of fiscal responsibility, has been taken in by this attractively howling propaganda. He wrote that after 2006, while Democrats were in control of Congress, the national debt increased dramatically. From this it’s obviously the Democrats fault, right? Only partially. The observation is accurate but it’s more truthy, as Steven Colbert would say, than true. It overlooks the fact that although Congress passes bills, only a president can sign them into law. If, by contrast, we map U.S. presidents against increases to the national debt, in point of truthy fact, we find that the largest increases in history took place under presidents Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. In fact, as a percentage of GDP, the national debt has NOT INCREASED when a Democrat was president of the United States since 1945. Weird, right? I know. And yet, there it is. This is how flying monkeys work. It’s enough to make you wonder about what’s true – and that’s where we all have to begin: We have to wonder about what’s true and then go find out. But there are people who want to make this difficult for us and one of those people created that new commercial on the national debt. He isn’t a witch, so far as I know, but back in July 2007, “60 Minutes” called him “Dr. Evil.” I’m not making this up. His name is Rick Berman. Berman operates over 15 “advocacy” groups to promote the interests of his clients. He got his start working for the tobacco industry. He has a couple of anti-union websites, one specifically targeting teachers unions for working against the interests of teachers. There’s a monkey with wings on it. Oh, and one called “PETA kills animals” and a group that fights tightening laws against drunk driving. He was also the first to attack ACORN, on behalf of the restaurant industry, because ACORN supported a minimum wage the food industry opposed. And remember that flying monkey about minimum wages actually hurting the poor? That was one of his. In fact, the idea that a minimum wage is bad for the poor and would actually drive the poor out of the job market is the operational theme for the Employment Policies Institute, the same “group” that sponsored that cute flying monkey of a defeat-the-debt commercial. So, be careful around the flying monkeys this year. They aren’t dangerous by themselves, but they are distracting and, while you’re caught by the spectacle, one of them is likely to grab Toto.
And remember, they don’t work for you.
