Five Takeaways From Last Night's Debacle

And I use that term "debacle" deliberately, because seriously, Americans have no idea what they are in for. I refer to two disparate groups: 1) the energized and angry Repubs who were driven by Obama hatred to take it out on any Dem, and 2) the lazy-ass Dems who sat at home or never even attempted to vote in the first place, enabling this travesty.

Anyway, let me give 5 takeaways from this debacle which has left the Repukes in control of the Senate with a 52-48 majority so far, and also in charge of many governorships (which could allow a lot more gerrymandering to ensure future repuke domination):

1) Democratic coalition voters are politically immature and too mesmerized by the cult of personality.

This explains why they never turn out in the same numbers for  mid-terms as they do for general elections. In so doing, by their absence, they invariably cede power to the angry wackjobs who are always intent to vote in mid-terms to "teach them libruls a lesson". The numbers as displayed this morning on the CBS stat board tell the sorry story:

In the 2012 general election, young (18-22 yrs.) voters represented 19 % of the electorate while yesterday they represented only 13 %. African-Americans, meanwhile dropped from 13% to 12% representation and Hispanics from 10% to 8 %.   Given many races - such as here in Colorado for the Senate seat occupied by Mark Udall - came down to 5-7 pt, wins it means that this absence in the current election could well have explained Udall's losing his seat to the nimrod Cory Gardener.

I attribute this backsliding to political immaturity, driven especially by younger voters' need to embrace a personality, as opposed to grasping the issues in play. If they would detach from personality worship, and simply study issues in each state and the candidates, this regular falloff should not happen.

2) As usual the Right was energized by fear and anger.

And in contrast, as in 2010, the Right's loonies came out angry in their numbers, driven by the nuts on FOX and Rush Limbaugh.  They came out in larger numbers than the original "Obama coalition" and this possibly explains up to 50 percent of the losses suffered by the Democrats.

It is no secret that the handlers of the Tea Party nuts and others on the Right know how to manage their minds to drive them to the polls in higher numbers than their D-counterparts. We call it "dog whistle" politics, especially presenting numerous unsavory images of Obama to try to instill racial hatred and fear. The voters will deny this plays any part, of course, but at a deep subliminal level it certainly does. One need not go out on a black person's lawn and actually wear a white robe and burn a cross to be a racist. He need only put up a 'skunk' image on Facebook and assert that it should be the "Presidential seal" for Obama so long as he's in office, since he "smells" and is "part black, part white". Funny? Not!

3) Money, as usual, trumped votes in at least three states - probably more.

As noted on Scarborough this a.m., the Koch brothers, using their tons of money and the front of "Americans for Prosperity" were significantly better this time around at the ground game -especially in North Carolina and Florida. That easily made the difference in those states, i.e. in Kay Hagen losing to Tillis in NC and Charlie Crist losing to Columbia HCA criminal Rick Scott in FL.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, big money flooded the state to try to get rid of Mark Udall (which succeeded) as well as the ability to label GMO foods (downed by a 68% 'No' vote). In the last case, opponents - mainly the pawns of multinationals like Monsanto- deluged the state with negative ads and spend nearly $12 m to the 1/2 m of pro-labelers.

The only good news? Hickenlooper held on as Colorado governor by 48.3 percent to 47.1 percent for Bob Beauprez.

4) Democratic candidates need to embrace their leader not run from him.

This was evident throughout as Dem Senate and other candidates shamefully ran from Obama and his accomplishments rather than embracing them, touting them. This was especially critical in states like Colorado where health exchanges were set up under the Affordable Care Act and have proven a boon to many. But Udall didn't say a word about the Act, or its benefits - focusing mainly on how women will suffer by losing contraceptives if Cory Gardener is elected.

News for you, Sen. Udall: Colorado women care about more dimensions of their health care than just contraception and you ought to have made that message clearer!

5) The Democrats need Think Tanks to Craft Their Narratives.

I have said this many times before but will repeat it again: the Dems are lousy at formulating convincing narratives which are as good as the Republicans. Classic case? The Reeps call removing the Bush tax cuts a "tax hike". The Dem response? To sit on their thumbs and sing 'la-la-la'. They have no convincing response. The Reepos say that estate taxes are "death taxes" - again no response. The Dems simply appear dumbstruck at how the  other side has seized the language and used it to create multiple mind fucks.  Can they create a mind fuck of their own? NO they can't.

This is why they need real Dem dedicated think tanks to think up narratives for them, analogous to the American Enterprise Institute on the Right, as well as American Heritage Foundation.

Maybe, just maybe, these takeaways will be acted upon next time around. But I remain a skeptic.

Let's Concede Deep Politics Is Too Deep For The 'Liberal' Media

If Rachel Maddow couldn't grasp the exploitation of Lee Oswald by the Deep State, it is unlikely any of her future work will be percipient enough to expose the Deep State.

The problem with too many Americans, as I've often observed, is that they are unpracticed and untutored in deep politics - which is why so many adhere to the "middle" or what author Curtis White once called  "the Middle Mind". The 'Middle Mind' is a safe mental space where all the old verities are true. These are the tropes trotted out endlessly by our shameful politicos and news media to manipulate our consciousness, i.e.. we inhabit  the "land of the free" - never mind we have more people incarcerated than all the other nations together, and we are the "land of opportunity", never mind upward mobility has fallen steadily the past 3 decades leading to unbelievable levels of inequality.

Oh, and we are the 'do good',  most morally upstanding,  pious nation in the world's history -  never mind the CIA torture renditions  under Bush Jr., which even now Sen. Mark Udall of Colo. is seeking to expose in full. Senator Udall is  demanding Obama release a buried, 6,300 page CIA internal report that reveals the actual tortures were much worse than publicly reported See e.g.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/obama-cia-senate-intelligence-committee-torture

And we won't even get into how our Military-Industrial complex has initiated aggressive wars, as in Vietnam and  Iraq - with no justifiable basis to do so, as well as overthrown democratically elected leaders - such as Mossaadegh  in Iran (1953), Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) and Salvador Allende in Chile (1972) - merely because we didn't agree with their policies.

The media white washers, however, seek to elicit in the American people the political and historical memory of gnats. This is why politicos can play them over and over again, and why the targets never advance their insights as to what is happening to them and why. It is also why author Gore Vidal once referred to our nation as the "United States of Amnesia".

Is the "Liberal media" - assuming there even is such a thing -  any better?  The fact is that no genuine "liberal" media to remotely call by that name even existed until MSNBC hired a battery of commentators including Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and later Steve Kornacki , Melissa Harris Perry and Chris Hayes. (The New York Times, and Washington Post - often cited as earlier examples, can no longer be claimed so now that we've learned the CIA had planted Operation Mockingbird assets in both, to control the news.)

Of this group, Olbermann was perhaps most outspoken and most insightful - especially into what we call the mechanics of the 'deep state' - the confluence of interests, including political, financial and military,  that operates in the shadows.  But Olbermann's very outspokenness (and vehemence)  is what cost him his job and also why the group of "liberals" that remains behind is much more loyal to the political status quo, the 'Middle Mind' and superficial politics as opposed to deep politics.

This was on display numerous times the past year, as when one beheld Rachel Maddow avoiding like the plague Obama's proposed Chained CPI proposal. Well, at least until she had guest Ezra Klein on, explaining the Repukes were merely "hyping" it and Obama "wouldn't really do it".  Then there were Maddow's shows  - specifically segments on guns- where she kept the false narrative going that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one who killed John F. Kennedy e.g.   http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/rachel-maddow-again-lies-about-lee.html

This is perhaps the most deceitful deep politics abuse of all, given the deep state and in particularly its national security operatives,  were responsible for carrying it out. The  cover-up by nominal liberals is  perhaps understandable given that LBJ was the plausible architect of the hit, e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/02/lbj-was-reluctant-warrior-it-doesnt.html

Thus, since most liberals believe LBJ was primarily the one who conceived the voting rights act, civil rights act, Medicare, etc. they don't want to tarnish his "legacy". Never mind how he used NSAM-273 to gut JFK's earlier NSAM-263 thereby paving the way for the Vietnam War. So that by Aug. 1964 all Johnson needed was a pretext, and he concocted it with the Tonkin Gulf incident.

Sadly, all Maddow's good work (such as her recent documentary, 'Why We Did It') is overshadowed and undermined by her reluctance to delve into the deep politics of our history. Because without that deep politics understanding, including that Oswald was a pawn used by the national security state to gain power, her work echoes a shallow grasp of the political dynamics at work and the hidden forces subverting those dynamics, i.e. buried within the 'Deep state', see e.g. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-c-koehler/54637/outing-the-deep-state

Beyond Maddow, we observed the same pusillanimous quality in the assorted reports broadcast during the 50th anniversary year and month of the Kennedy Assassination. As if from one voice (like today's erroneous takes on the Ukraine crisis) all the libs refused to "go there" i.e. in examining the conspiracy basis. Typical of the sort of presentation was that from one of Steve Kornacki's shows e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/11/even-liberals-can-be-victims-of.html

The header of that blog post was 'Even Liberals Can Be Victims of Conspiracy Phobia' and it was quite apt given how they all really did exhibit their manifest fear of the c-word. We in deep politics first learned of this distinct liberal aversion (called "conspiracy phobia on the Left")  with the works of Michael Parenti (The Dirty Truth, America Besieged).  In 'The Dirty Truth', for example,  Parenti exposed the way  serious conspiracy investigators are misrepresented as 'buffs' or dismissed as  'tin foil' hat wearers by the mainstream media. Obviously, because they don't wish us to approach the machinations of the deep state - and their own role supporting it -  in these events. (Google 'Operation Mockingbird') As Parenti notes (ibid., p. 186) we are in fact:

"raising grave questions about the nature of state power in what is supposed to be a democracy."

As for the conspiracy phobics, he writes (p. 174):

" Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: 'Do you actually think there's a group of people sitting around in a room, plotting things?' For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers.  But where else would people of power get together - on park benches or carousels?"


Sadly, in the case of the 'liberal' media and particularly MSNBC, it ran neck and neck with the most conservative media in denying there was anything grossly amiss that day in Dallas, other than one disaffected lone nut 'randomly" shooting one of the most beloved Presidents of the U.S. in broad daylight,  in a major American city.

Fast forward now, three and a half months later, and we have the Ukraine crisis. Extrapolating from the shallow JFK assassination reporting - as on MSNBC - one would have been able to predict the liberal commentators, including Kornacki, Maddow, and Hayes would also dodge the deep politics of the crisis and instead hew to the mainline 'trope-a-dope' that "Russia started it all". Never mind it was actually U.S. neocons,  including Victoria Nuland at the State Dept.,  responsible for instigating a coup. Even Chris Hayes' guest 5 nights ago, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, said as much and even specifically named the 'National Endowment for Democracy' which engineered it. Wilkerson even went on to say that if he were Putin he'd have taken that aggressive action too!

Wilkerson also merited kudos for giving the historical backstory, i.e. of NATO expansion to the east during the 1990s,  even after Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev this wouldn't happen. "Not one more inch" to the east, Bush told the then Russian PM to his face.

Hayes, an intelligent commentator (and Harvard-educated) had all the deep politics substance at his disposal (and a guest who knew it), but for reason or reasons unknown couldn't handle it or pursue it.  He opted instead to follow the hollow story line of "the costs to Putin" - joining 99% of the corporate media blatherskite crowd (think Wolf Blitzer).

The effect? If a person refuses to venture outside this compromised matrix of PR he becomes a mental invalid and automaton run by the deep state. Believing whatever it spouts, or what its talking heads blab, or distort. All this in accord with Edward Bernays'  original mandate stated in his definitive work 'Propaganda' :

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country."

Here we see for the first time the use of the term 'invisible government', which Bernays instantly equates to 'the true ruling power of the country'.  Today, this ruling power inheres in the Deep State, and it requires deep politics - not its superficial media counterpart-  to plumb its depths. This is irrespective of  examining the Ukraine crisis, the JFK assassination, the yen for pretext "wars" as in Iraq, the related monstrous Pentagon budget, or the growing inequality in the country.

Just don't look for the so-called liberal media for insight.

Deep politics is too deep for them!  See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/bob-burnett/54660/the-war-on-democracy-the-deep-state

Excerpt:

Because of the recent revelations by Edward Snowden, the deep state has become a concern of the right as well as the left. In October, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, once President Reagan's speechwriter, wrote: "I have come to wonder if we don't have what amounts to a deep state within the outer state in the U.S. -- a deep state consisting of our intelligence and security agencies, which are so vast and far-flung in their efforts that they themselves don't fully know who's in charge and what everyone else is doing."

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/eric-margolis/54677/vlad-the-bad-steals-a-march-on-the-west

Excerpt:

Russia, which used to be adept at subversion, has lagged in recent years but it still knows the signs. The Kremlin is convinced that Ukraine’s latest revolution was engineered by Washington. The US Undersecretary of State for Europe admitted Washington has spent $5 billion over recent years in Ukraine to bring it into the West’s orbit – aka “building democracy.”

Two points to note. Did Washington think that tough Vlad Putin would just take its coup lying down?
Second, it’s amazing how determined Washington’s cold warriors remain to tear down Russia. The bankrupt US, $17 trillion in debt, running on money borrowed from China, with bridges collapsing and 44 million citizens on food stamps, suddenly finds the money to offer bankrupt Ukraine a new $1 billion loan – just to compete with Moscow. A loan unlikely to be repaid.

See:
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/william-boardman/55716/msnbc-can-be-trusted-by-the-established-order-thats-a-problem