Feral Cat of Freedom's Blog

The meme of “extremes” has been around for awhile, but it is become a constant refrain since the election.  It is grating to my ears.  “”The authoritarian left and the authoritarian right are running to ideological corners and not meeting in the middle,” said Steven Weisman, author of a biography on Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on “Morning Joe”.  (It is a very tried and true propaganda technique to trot out an author who has a book on a dead politician like Moynihan, Lincoln, John Adams, etc.) Joe Scarborough then repeated, “There is a need for all of us to isolate the extremes.”

Can somebody explain to me who the authoritarian left is?  If it is the authoritarian leadership of the corporate Democrats like Reid, Baucus, Schumer, Obama he’s talking about, I would argue that they are already in the center.   There is an authoritarian right.  They are happy and proud with having big daddies and being loyal troops.  But an authoritarian left? Does Noam Chomsky have some sort of huge organization that I don’t know about?  Are they talking about the scatter shot petition sites like MoveOn.org and Bold Progressives?  They are hardly authoritarian.  They are somewhat top down movements, but an oppressive iron hand on the backs of progressives, they aren’t. Are James Galbraith, Michael Hudson, Bill Black, and Bill Mitchell becoming annoyingly ever present on the Sunday talk shows? For that matter did I miss the fact that Bill Moyers is back on TV?

So once again we are subjected to these straw men.  This meme is used by both wings of the corporate party for their common agenda which is to employ more neo-liberal shock doctrine to the U.S.  They pretend that there are crazies on the left who want to establish a Soviet state where everything from shoes to health care is controlled by the government and crazies on the right who want to put grandma on an ice flow.  So, we need to meet in the middle and tweak the Social Security system and Medicare and make sure Daddy Warbucks keeps his millions.

Hey, Joe, before “isolating the extremes”, I challenge you to have somebody on from the authoritarian left.  Who are these thugs who want us to wear baggy commie clothes and national shoes?  Let’s have the debate between these extremes.

Filed under: Media, Uncategorized | Tagged: conservativism, Democrats, liberalism, Media, REpublicans |