Beware The Spin Doctors

By James Donahue

When the Teabaggers first hit the streets with their silly hats and misspelled signs we laughed at them. We laughed at the antics of radio and television personality Glenn Beck as he distorted American history and made so many outlandish claims we thought no one could be taking him seriously. We laughed at the behavior of Sarah Palin after her display of ignorance all but destroyed Senator John McCain’s chances for winning the presidency in 2008.

But something strange has been happening behind the scenes while we were laughing so hardily at the clowns. It appears that professional spin doctors are busy twisting the minds of a growing number of Americans and making them believe the clowns are reality. Voters are rejecting moderate-thinkers and nominating representatives of the Teabag Express as real Republican candidates for the U.S. House and Senate during the midterm election primaries.

Needless to say, this is starting to make a few political analysts somewhat nervous. Where are voters taking us during this fall’s elections? Will they be filling those key elected congressional seats with radical thinking newcomers? Is it a racial rebellion against our nation’s first black president?

We understand the anger and frustration. The nation is being hammered by a second great depression, although economists are afraid to admit that. They want to use the phrase “double-dip-recession” to explain the high unemployment, the plunging real estate values and the fact that millions of Americans are either homeless and hungry or on the brink of falling into that state.

The people are blaming Washington for failing to fix the mess they are in, and they are right in doing so. But what they seem to have overlooked, or perhaps forgotten, or maybe ignored altogether in their failure to be informed, is that there has been a strange war occurring in the two houses of our government.

While the Democrats under President Obama have tried to take important steps to repair the damage left by the Bush and Clinton Administrations, they have been cleverly blocked at every turn by the Senate Republicans who used some odd Senate rules to unite and become the “Party of No.” Consequently the bills designed to start public works projects, stimulate the economy, provide improved health care and get people working again were watered down to the point where they were ineffective. Most recently the Republicans have succeeded in blocking efforts to free small business loans.

While watching this peculiar ongoing tug-of-war during the first two years of the Obama presidency, there has been a general contention among Washington insiders that the public will certainly rebel and kick the troublemakers out of office this fall. What was expected was that more Democrats would fill those seats so the party would have enough votes to override the Republican filibuster threat that gave them the power to block key legislation.

No one ever expected voters to turn to such radical thinkers as radio and television commentators as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck to lead them into teabag thinking. No one expected Sarah Palin to rise up to become a voice of the new Republicans and to be seriously considered as a presidential candidate for 2012.

We suspect something sinister afoot. Indeed, why would the Senate Republicans pull such obviously foolish stunts as blocking extended unemployment insurance for hundreds of thousands of Americans, claiming they opposed further increases in the national debt, yet argue fiercely for renewal of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy? Those tax cuts, which affect only the high income earners, are among the causes of the current debt and if extended, will all but bankrupt our nation.

How can voters be seduced into putting such malicious thinking people back into office, or replacing them with candidates expressing even more conservative views than these?

Indeed, we think we smell a rat in the pantry. Somewhere behind the curtain lurks a wizard . . . perhaps its Karl Rove, the very man responsible for the dirty tricks that put George W. Bush in office . . . who is pulling the strings. The gamble here is that (a.) American voters are mad and want change, and (b.) those same voters have short memories, and (c.) most voters do not understand the complex workings of the nation’s financial system or the workings of Congress and the Senate.

Consequently when people like Glenn Beck stand up on the Lincoln Memorial and call on an all-white band of Teabaggers to “restore America” he is reminding a lot of people of the way things were in the country before 9-11 and before organized criminals got their hands in the public cookie jar.

What Beck and Limbaugh and the other hate-mongers are calling for, however, is a return to an all-white dominated America, the elimination of the black president in the White House, and the election of people to office that are dedicated to keeping the status quo. And the status quo as it is today is unacceptable for all but the wealthy few who hold the keys to the kingdom.

In case you don’t know this, both Beck and Limbaugh are among the small number of Americans who wallow in wealth. They have made their money exploiting Americans by planting fear and twisted thinking in the heads of all who listen.