FOCUS: John Cory | The Nullification of Democracy
John Cory, Reader Supported News
Cory writes: "On inauguration night, as most of the country celebrated a giant step forward and imagined the great things to come, a group of men gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant in downtown D.C. to plot the demise of hope and change."
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John Cory, Reader Supported News
Cory writes: "On inauguration night, as most of the country celebrated a giant step forward and imagined the great things to come, a group of men gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant in downtown D.C. to plot the demise of hope and change."
READ MORE
o you remember the faces that night?
Faces filled with the sudden realization of an illusive dream.
A dream shaped by Dr. King in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, in which he wrote: “We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights … humiliated day in and day out … forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodyness—’”
And that night in Grant Park, the famous and the regular folk shed tears of joy that this country, this nation with all its sins, past and present, had just elected Barack Obama, a black man, as President of these United States. The “nobodyness” had been shattered. Oprah and Jesse Jackson wept. People hugged one another and lifted their children up to see the face that looked back at them from a giant screen, a face just like them, now to be the face of America. Hope.
On inauguration night, as most of the country celebrated a giant step forward and imagined the great things to come, a group of men gathered at the Caucus Room restaurant in downtown D.C. to plot the demise of hope and change. According to Robert Draper, in his book Do Not Ask What Good We Do: In the U.S. House of Representatives, the gathering included Frank Luntz, Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and other high-ranking GOP leadership intent on uniting to block anything and everything put forward by this new usurper of their rightful presidency, to return him to his proper “nobodyness.” As Senator Mitch McConnell would later say during an interview with National Journal magazine: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
It would be too facile to suggest race was a motivation, though it was a tacit benefit. The motivation was ideology, the belief that only they, the GOP, are the true chosen leaders of the American Way. The leader of the GOP Senate wanted nothing for America, for the sick and the poor, the jobless, or the veteran in need, or even for the resolution of the great financial recession — no, he wanted the GOP to unite in blocking and quashing the people’s choice for president at every turn. Governance be damned, partisanship and the restoration of the rightful heirs to the White House was, and still is, all important. The GOP is dead, long live the GOP!
Let us be clear: this is nullification, plain and simple; nullification of a duly elected president of the United States; nullification of governance — the nullification of democracy.
Obstructionism is wickedly easy. It requires little effort, only outrageous claims and disregard for truth. Your followers will believe whatever you claim so long as you claim that this president is like no other in history and is intent on destroying freedom. The groundwork was already laid with the birtherism begun in 2008 and continued in 2012 by the huckster Trump. Carried forward by the crude and ignorant Rep. Joe Wilson, who yelled, “You lie” during President Obama’s speech before a joint session of Congress. By Newt Gingrich, in an interview with The National Review in which he claimed: “… only if you understand Kenyan anti-colonial behavior …” can you understand how foreign Obama is. Or by Rudy Giuliani, who said, “… I do not believe that the president loves America.” Add in the 47 Republican senators who sent a letter to Iran with the intent of sabotaging President Obama’s efforts to build a diplomatic solution to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran.
Claim the president has exceeded his constitutional authority and must be reined in before he destroys our freedoms, claim that it is the duty of Congress to stop him. They claim all this and more without so much as a hint of self-awareness of the very hypocrisy that drips from their lips.
And all of this is aided and abetted by a mendacious press corps and media that provides an echo chamber and nothing more, lest they lose access and ratings and the fun of the great political circus that has descended upon us all. The chief executive of CBS, Les Moonves, said: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
So brags the accomplice.
The GOP could not perform this nullification without the aid of the vacuous media and the inane professional punditry that spills its electronic vomit across the airwaves.
We, the people, are nothing more than data points, eyeballs of viewership to determine ad rates and sponsorship fees. We are empty vessels to be filled with toothpaste, shampoo, and pharmaceutical products with side effect warnings. We are, first and foremost, consumers. Not citizens. We are categories and markets. We are the binary code of demographic analysis for the purpose of profit.
Tell me, what is the difference between Fox and Friends and Morning Joe? Between The Last Word, with Lawrence O’Donnell, and The O’Reilly Factor? CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News? You could practically interchange hosts and guest panels between all these shallow programs and they would sound the same. The only difference is “tribal.” The giggling, empty snark of Rachel Maddow is no different from the flat, smirking jokes of Greg Gutfield. They are tailor-made for the “us and them” tribal market. We are entertained and smug in our knowledge that “our” folks are truth-tellers and “their” folks are liars. Tell your friends to tune in to watch The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven — Live! Tonight! (with apologies to Sherman Alexie).
The disreputable state of our media is a topic for another time, but let’s be honest here: our so-called media have become nothing more than telegenic newsreaders dumpster-diving in the alleys of fear and bigotry, for fun and profit.
Let us not be naïve about the coming election — whether it is Hillary or Bernie, to quote Hunter S. Thompson: Big Darkness, soon come.
Pull out your copy of Fools for Scandal, by Gene Lyons, or The Hunting of a President, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. The plan is there. Collusion between the Republican Conservative machine and the tabloid gossip-addicted press corps will be the order of the day if Hillary gets the nomination. Hearings, investigative committees, innuendo and smear will be presented as always with the words, “sources say …”
And if Bernie becomes the nominee, Chris Matthews will gribble-dribble every day about the ascension of a Socialist — a Socialist — in America! Fox and Friends will call in to Morning Joe and the high school heather clique will commiserate and cluck and twitter about the coming downfall of America. The carny barkers of the media midway and the snake oil hucksters of obstructionism will bay and howl at the moon for all to see, while lining their pockets with the lives of everyday citizens.
Nullification is entertainment. Nullification is a reminder of who should be in charge. Nullification is a profit center. Nullification is power.
Nullification and obstructionism are dangerous and give rise to the sort of voices that once would have been kept at a distance and muffled by the sensible gatekeepers of the body politic. But with the advent of the talking-head 24/7 media circus, outrage and demonology are the currency of discourse, with slander and hypocrisy as coin of the realm. And thus fear and intolerance march forth, a fire in need of constant feeding and a thirst that can only be quenched with bloody violence. Democracy becomes a casualty of partisanship that elevates party over governance and divides us, the people, into Us versus Them, and always blames The Other for failures, real or imagined.
We have seen this movie before. In the 1964 film Seven Days in May, faced with the possible overthrow of his presidency by a popular general, Jordan Lyman sends for Gen. James Mattoon Scott to come to the White House. His advisor remarks that is time to “face the enemy,” to which President Lyman replies: “He’s not the enemy, Scott, the Joint Chiefs, even the very emotional, very illogical lunatic fringe: they’re not the enemy. The enemy is an age.… It happens to have killed man’s faith in his ability to influence what happens to him. And out of this comes a sickness, and out of sickness a frustration, a feeling of impotence, helplessness, weakness. And from this, this desperation, we look for a champion in red, white, and blue. Every now and then a man on a white horse rides by, an we appoint him to be our personal god for the duration. For some men it was a Senator McCarthy, for others it was a General Walker, and now it’s a …”
“Our history will be what we make it,” Edward R. Murrow said.
Indeed.
And therein lies the problem and the solution — what we make it. We the people.
Bernie supporters who say they won’t vote for Hillary, and Hillary supporters who say they won’t vote for Bernie, only enable the further expansion of the nullification of democracy.
We must build on the Bernie Sanders wave and structure a movement that continues beyond this election. We must build on the good of Hillary that can shatter the glass ceiling and make way for the likes of Donna Edwards and Elizabeth Warren and more. We need to reject and pressure the Democratic Party leadership to throw off the corporatist cloak and embrace the ripple of radicalism across the base of the party. We must force our representatives to stiffen their spines and stand with us, the people — not the corporations.
We the people must turn off the corporate media and tune out the chattering class that offers nothing but vicious tribalism. We must flood the editorial boards with demands for depth in reporting, for fact-based reporting, and for holding the media accountable for their enabling of the obstruction and nullification of this president and of this democracy.
Or we can sit in the dark and enjoy the show and our cotton candy and marvel that P.T. Barnum and his merry band of hucksters have taken up residence in the White House.
President Obama will never return to the “nobodyness” that Dr. King fought to banish. Regardless of the GOP’s attempts to obstruct and nullify, he will always be the first elected African-American president of the United States in all the history books.
The footnote to that history will be that the Republican Party brought the country to the brink of ruination even as President Obama repeatedly sought compromise and bipartisanship.
The nullification of a president. — The nullification of our democracy.
“We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result.” – Edward R. Murrow
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/35895-focus-the-nullification-of-democracy
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