Martin posted earlier about the proof emerging that Democrats did know and did approve of the unconstitutional domestic wiretapping of their fellow citizens.
Martin described the Dems’ complicity in the outrages of the War on Turr as a ‘clusterfuck of corruption’. So I thought I’d quote from this post of mine from April 2007, which tried to describe just how big a clusterfuck it actually is. It’s not just the spying or the torture and it’s not just the Democrats. Very few are clean.
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Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.
Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull. That’s where the spying comes in. One ill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo…
It doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.
There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo‘s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example.
Such is the venality of politicians that most involved walked right into what was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA, but they did it anyway. Have penis, will follow.
That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country. I expect there’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.
Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly upright people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.
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Since the days of Reagan, networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.
The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why? Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.
A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.
Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?
Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president.
If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they?ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.
Was I right or was I right? I could link back to or repost the many posts we’ve written over the past 7 years about the complicity of Democrats in the corporate coup, but no need, they’re all in the archives over to your right. Feel free to browse and be disgusted.
[Edited slightly for sense and grammar]