Four Charged in Phone Scheme at Sen. Landrieu’s Office; Or, Rightwing Politics Is Mostly Dirty Tricks
Four Charged in Phone Scheme at Sen. Landrieu’s Office; Or, Rightwing Politics Is Mostly Dirty Tricks
By Juan Cole, Reader Supported News
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion/75-politics/857-rightwing-politics-is-mostly-dirty-tricks
James O’Keefe, the rightwing activist who tried to punk ACORN by dressing as a pimp, was endorsed in a resolution by 31 Republican congressmen as a role model. Yes, the very model of an upright gentleman.
So the political right wing ruled the United States for 8 years, holding all three branches of government during some of the W. era, and the result was a Democratic landslide in 2008. The more the Right is in power, the less it is liked.
But the Right in the US wants its way no matter what, and is constantly anxious that maybe the people will wake up to the scam that is being pulled on them by people who actually represent big corporations but claim to speak for the “people.” Politics nowadays is about fatally crippling Obama and rolling back the Democratic surge, by any means possible.
Thus, you had the Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to defame at will candidates who don’t kowtow to them, deploying all the billions at their disposal. This overturning of a hundred years of precedent by five far-right Republicans on the court was a deliberate attempt to undo the 2008 Democratic victory.
And now you have a Watergate-style break-in by James O’Keefe and associates at the Louisiana offices of Senator Mary Landrieu, seeking to bug her office.
O’Keefe played a role in attempting to discredit ACORN, an organization that aims at increasing voting rates among the poor (and therefore an object of hatred on the part of the Right, which thinks you shouldn’t feed ’stray animals,’ much less encourage them to vote.)
Ironically, O’Keefe is now charged with a felony, whereas it was never proven that, despite unprofessional trash talking in O’Keefe’s videotape, the ACORN employees he sought to entrap ever actually did anything illegal.
Dirty tricks are nothing new from the Right, and are necessary, since they don’t offer good governance and their main argument is that the Market will magically take care of everyone if only unscrupulous businessmen are left completely unregulated by the government.
This ideology is what got us into the present mess. So since the platform of the Right is obviously untrue, what is left but scummy attack videos and illegal office break-ins and bugging. The public after all has an extremely short memory or mostly doesn’t much care about politics, so why not try to manipulate them? Maybe you could even convince them in the midst of a Depression that the Market loves them and will put them to work if only the super-rich can be unleashed on their behalf again and the bad Government can be handcuffed.
Why, we should even let Bernie Madoff out of jail to vindicate himself - the pyramid really does work if only you let it go on, you know.
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute.