On the road to Election Day? This is not a candidate's campaign bus!
The 7 cees bus visits beatnik territory
Beatniks, Republicans, and Commies may sound like a list of ingredients for a surefire recipe for an Eisenhower era example of political analysis but an evaluation of this week's news stories, from the 2012 Presidential Election process, at the World's Laziest Journalist home office produced a similar roster of potential topics for use in the first weekend wrap-up column of the new year.
Glenn Beck has replaced Stephanie Miller on the (formerly?) progressive radio station in the San Francisco Bay area, so when we turned on the radio at the beginning of the week, we decided to sidestep the issue of lodging a complaint about the abrupt change in the station's tone and just listen and see if the Beckster would give us a gift rapped easy column item.
He casually noted that the Communists were making a concerted effort to enroll (enlist?) recently discharged members of the American military and that sent us scrambling for our copy of "Lenin for Beginners" (Pantheon Books) to see if we could make a viable prediction that the Republicans would be framing the Occupy movement as a new version of the battle of Patriotic Americans to protect young citizens from being seduced by the Communist Party's tendency to wage class warfare in the clever disguise of worker exploitation by the rich and greedy bastards at the top of society.
Will Beck suggest a Congressional Investigation into this new trend?
The fact that the possibility that the Occupy Movement echoes past labor struggles indicates that the Republicans might be tempted to save some voters the extensive effort necessary to read up on some very complex issues by oversimplifying the debate by resorting to some clever bumper sticker slogans. That strategy has worked very well for them in the past.
Some German guy advised: "All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to."
That worked well for the Germans, the Russians and the Republicans. The Democrats, however, still think that a scientist can do a better job of explaining the treat of global warming and so they tend to fail in their attempts to draw attention to a long beautifully written article in some academic journal.
If the Republicans, on the other hand, wanted to use the Global Warming issue to win elections they would just quietly state their case by directing the attention of the "limited intelligence" voters to the current spate of news coverage of the barren ski areas that are desperately trying to cope with a lack of snow and skiers.
The so called Liberal media (that is usually owned and operated by a conservative billionaire) may not run too many stories about the desperate ski areas as a sort of "interline courtesy" gesture among the wealthy who are unanimous Global Warming deniers.
The pundits assessment of the results of the Iowa Caucuses made us wonder if the people, who are rumored to be preparing a new roster of actors for a fresh installment of the Three Stooges comedy franchise, could possibly pay for a weekly (or daily?) half hour of cable TV political commentary featuring their new trio of sincere but bumbling fellows.
