Bloodless Coup 3

3 comments

1. George Smith

   October 9, 2013 at 4:40 pm

   You know, tbey keep wanting to blame this on the Kochs but it’s been coming for a lot longer and it’s much more complicated. It was just the Kochs that empowered the radical right, the neo-Confederacy. I keep going back to Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy and the basic prediction in there is that this could happen. One of the central theses of the book was the virulent spread of intolerance from the theocrat south. Phillips would not have predicted the presidency of Barack Obama or it coming at a time of economic calamity, calamities of similar nature which through history have given us examples of authoritarian minorities seizing power, or just enough, to trigger a disaster. The creation of idealogical bubbles where the people inside can’t be reached by any reality isn’t new. This is a bigots’ southern revolt aimed at destroying the presidency, it has a personal and obviously racist basis in that they despise the black man in the White House, and it has its hands around the throat of the US government. And while neo-Confederacy and “the south” are being mentioned more in some news pieces, the majority of people — and I mean white people — refuse to acknowledge it properly because they can’t look in the mirror. They are extremely uncomfortable with any such discussion because if they acknowledge it, no matter how far removed, we realize it’s -our- tribe that is the problem. I post more quickly on Facebook now because of this. I have people in my ‘friends’ list, who if they comment or ‘like’ things I post in some way, it bleeds into their feeds and they tend to have ‘friend’ lists of mixed political persuasion. There’s an uncomfortable sweat on them, they just want it to go away, when this was not the case during the election and everyone was posting. This time is different. This is a white largely southern or southern disposed radicals trying to toss the president of the US while a lot of people who shouldn’t just stand by because they cannot look squarely at what they have been responsible for. And if  presidential authority cannot be erased they’ll pull a Samson option.   Here is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: 
    http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bca4c114-29d8-11e3-bbb8-00144feab7de.html#axzz2hGNRSrVq
   “Half of the legislators who called on John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, to defund the health law come from the old south … In a democracy, people overturn laws by winning elections, not by threatening the closure of government or even an outright default. It is impossible to run the government of a serious country under blackmail threats of this kind.” 

    
2. Frank

   October 9, 2013 at 5:20 pm

   Well, I think Shaun latched onto the Kochs and their fellow-travelers, dupes, and symps because they are the human faces and human enablers of insurrection.

    

   But, yeah, without a pool of dupes, symps, and fellow-travelers to provide soil for the seeds of the poisoned tree, the tree would not have taken root.

    

   And they loudly proclaim their “American” values, just as the least Christian folks I know most loudly proclaim their “Christian” values.

    

   Others have seen this coming, also:  http://politicalprof.tumblr.com/post/62919050713/sometimes-i-think-im-onto-something-i-was-just

    
3. George Smith

   October 9, 2013 at 6:54 pm

   The professional left pumps the Kochs pretty hard on this and a New York Times story on their funding organizations and the formal plan to defund Obamacare was convenient for that. But we agree it goes a lot deeper. The sentiment has always been there.