Part 1: Flaming Red Hot Crisis at the GOP Scandal Factory

[MeanMesa wanted to spend a little time with the current "media festival" treatment of the "burning questions of the day"  -- the desperate, over worked, GOP scandals.

The post got a little long, so it's going to be split into three pieces. Please visit all three posts!]

Part One
of three parts

Think Tank Terror

Just imagine what it might feel like to be an over paid Republican strategist nervously lounging in one of the over stuffed leather chairs deep in the bunker with FOX News grumbling in the background -- reminiscing over the past, particularly the halcyon days of the Romney campaign. Everything seems so different now.

Newscorpse (Image source)

Only months ago the billionaires would just smile and chortle confidently, full to the gunwales with the latest media fantasy of a vast Romney election victory, while they passed out the big checks to the geniuses here at the think tank.  The money was flowing like the Noatak River after the spring ice break up.  That same field which had seemed so hopeful was now painfully over seasoned with inescapable realities that not even the most obedient press could return to an edible state.

You know, "edible" like Mitt Romney's expectations on election eve.

That new beach front bungalow in Key West you bought from the real estate guy,  the big Romney supporter, has been languishing in a dead housing market since November, waiting for foreclosure.  The dealer who sold you the new Porsche has repeatedly warned you not to drive it until you pay the delinquent insurance policy, and even the buxom "Romneyette" who took such a sudden, exciting and unexpected interest in you at one of the high end cocktail parties has, apparently, found an as of then undiscovered appetite for caviar breakfasts, pudgy, middle aged Russian oligarchs, flashy yachts and the Black Sea in summer.

A Delightfully Dismal Start of 2013

The think tank strategic committee had told all the workers to prepare a final media onslaught for the economy which would, according to their ambitious fantasies, be a carefully constructed, artificial catastrophe eclipsing even the horrors of 2008.  In January this approach seemed quite reasonable.  By then the obedient House Republicans had managed to add three quarters of a million new jobless to the statistics of the already over full unemployment numbers by terminating a massive, irrational hodge podge of federal jobs.

The hastily negotiated hostage ransom called "sequester" had successfully channelled several hundred billion more from the general fund to the protection of the oligarchs' tax loop holes while the nation's citizens were crouching in their corners in anticipation of the blood letting to come.  For "icing on the cake" the  vaporizing European economy was providing fresh fright in daily doses, the President's "jobs bill" was being drawn and quartered by Congress, the Senate was stubbornly remaining in comatose paralysis and unmaintained bridges were collapsing without warning all across the states.

The thinking there at the think tank was that this would represent the ultimate "crown of thorns" to be permanently attached to the black man's head.  All it would take was just a bit of clever re-imaging and the low information Americans would "gobble it up" like a free doughnut on a morning hangover.

Unlike the rank and file of grotesque tea bag Congressmen, the brains of the think tank consistently demonstrated a formidable tactical awareness of how the country would appear to their base after each new outrage was manicured, properly teased and inserted in the right wing "news" stream.  However, a silent, nearly invisible weakness was also at play.

Further, this "strategic weakness" was not only in the "trained guns" roaming around in the think tanks, but it was also very much saturated in  the minds of that small bunch of plutocrats who were directing the GOP's every move and enforcing their unlikely authority with legions of Washington lobbyists bearing checks.

In a grisly symmetry the "thing" recirculated on its own momentum back and forth between the oligarchs and the think tank teams, growing not only more enticingly rancid but also obsessively stronger with each transit.  

There's no way to tell at this point if the think tank tacticians first persuaded the oligarchs to adopt such a self-destructive mind set by tempting them with the narcotic allure of even more illicit wealth redistribution, or if the oligarchs had, themselves, already been infected during their childhood with such a soul crushing impediment organically, that is, they had learned this horrible habit while still mere toothless infants suckling at their oligarchic mothers' breasts.

When The Obsession With Total Cynicism

 Loses Its Glamor

The oligarchs who now operate the tragic remnant of the Republican Party for their own interests have made a gradual, yet historic, miscalculation -- at least hopefully, it is a historic miscalculation.  For what it's worth, make strong your heart -- MeanMesa is convinced that it is, in fact, a miscalculation.

In their most ambitious ideological fantasies the oligarchs have dreamed that Americans were just as cynical as they are.

This mind numbing cynicism has led the "masters of the think tanks" to

Believe us.  We're rich. (Image source)

base all their scheming on the premise that policy would mean nothing to the average voter, but -- with enough biased media --  that politics and imaging would mean everything.  The destructive nature of this misinterpreted fundamental has led them utterly disregard the reality now appearing clearly in the sight of the exact voters they had previously blinded with their exploitive manipulation and deceptions.

In this sad tale Rupert Murdoch plays the drug dealer. He detected a malleable voter base some time ago, one which would be easy enough prey to the incendiary products of his propaganda network.  Temporarily, we watched all sorts of depressing manifestations of his development of this relatively gaseous base, but these early successes were only possible when the reality of the nation's condition remained mortally wounded after Bush W., that is, while that condition remained usefully morose because it could be embellished to appear  threateningly precarious.

Murdoch's "candy" predictably became the "bright shiny object" when viewed through the oligarchs' blinding cynicism.  At first everything suggested that simply maintaining a chaotic hopelessness among voters would usher in a ground swell of obedient, oligarchic political candidates, surfing on a massive wave of hatred, bigotry and despair.  The misery of the economy's injuries was to be the fodder for these guns.

Amplifying all these weaknesses, another element of the oligarchs' grander strategy came into play.  The six corporations controlling the US commercial networks -- including PBS now -- were "suddenly" assigned an even greater role in consummating the fraud.  It may be convenient to single out the FOX News Corp as the leader of this advancing media barrage, but believe MeanMesa on this one, the remainder of the "alphabet networks" had also been ordered to assist with the "heavy lifting."

Final Shoot Out At The Fantasy Factory

What we see in the prevailing despondency of their "think tank strategists"  is also revealing.  Panic.  The reality of national conditions continues to improve while they continue to issue precisely the same crushingly despondent talking points through their "spokesmen."

Not surprisingly this last desperate gambit of scandals -- when coolly considered -- reveals more panic than scandal.  The denizens of the ethereal "FOX world" are now -- and will remain for the foreseeable future --  terminally inebriated with their own propaganda, but the immense remainder of Americans, although once fairly well persuaded by it, are now beginning to stray.  

The scandals, while deliciously inflammatory to the remnants of the tea bag base, were not exclusively targeting that periphery of manipulated opinion.  Instead, the scandals were one last, glorious attempt to recapture the more rational public of the center, a last glorious attempt to rekindle the useful suspicions the oligarchs had spent so many of their "hard earned dollars" to nurture and foster with their "wholly owned" media.

While the cynical public opinion investment is interesting on the surface, the manipulative ambitions which lie just below paint a grim picture of billionaires attempting to recover some of their -- now clearly ill advised -- vast investment in their failing coup d'etat.  It turns out that, while the oligarchs' initial take over attempt seemed to be gaining ground for the first several years of the Obama Administration, it is now foundering -- not because of any formidable resistance from the other side -- but simply because the rhetoric has failed to keep up with the changing, improving conditions which the rhetoric continues to present as horrible.

These days the comedy quips on MeanMesa's favorite radio are no longer snarky, imaginary fictional scripts designed to amuse.  They are now directly quoted audio taken straight from position statements as the right wing, worn out, sold out pundits, politicians and political hacks obediently parrot the now irrelevant think tank talking points.  The profound credibility problem arises from the obvious contradiction between what is being so vibrantly proclaimed and what is being so clearly seen.

 

Next, visit Part Two of this series:  "the scandals."