Newspaper publisher Harry Culver
Nota Bene: The following column contains irony. Proceed with caution.
Democratic and Republican politicians, pundits both conservative and liberal, and voters from both parties want this columnist to believe that both sides in the fiscal cliff negotiations are participating in a difficult and nerve-wracking process of finding a suitable compromise that will avoid the dreaded denouement of: "what we have here is failure to communicate." A nagging doubt that the Republicans are negotiating in good faith continues to plague any attempt by the World's Laziest Journalist to handicap this struggle and when we take a look at what the Republicans have been trying to do since the day the Social Security law was signed by FDR, we come up with a bleak evaluation of the prospects for any Happy New Year celebrations in the homes of the poor and middle class this year.
If the January first deadline passes without a compromise
solution the 113 Congress which will be sworn in on January 3, 2013, will be
busy performing necessary preliminary Parliamentary procedures and will be very
pleased to let any public dissatisfaction with the results be linked to their
predecessors and President Obama.
If the January first deadline passes without a compromise, how will the American Journalism community (with Fox News as point man?) react? If Fox Television advocates a non-stop rush to hysteria as the only possible reaction to a post financial cliff crisis, will a handful of liberal radio personalities be able to stem the tide?
Haven't the Republicans racked up a track record that
indicates they might secretly want to let see President Obama take the USA over the
fiscal cliff?
When St. Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President, a part of his program was to start union busting with the Air Controllers Union being the first group to suffer the consequences. Didn't Michigan just pass a "right to work" law? Doesn't the San Francisco radio station that carries progressive talk shows just start airing commercials from the National Right to Work (www.nrtw.org) organization?
Later in the eighties the Los Angeles Times ran one or two
stories advancing not only the possibility that computers would bring time
saving and unquestioned results to the task of counting election ballots but
that some (publicity seeking?) science based college teachers (them again?)
were making the wild baseless assertion that such an innovation in the
democratic process would include an inherent risk in the form of possibilities
that the final results could be subject to tampering by some unscrupulous
fiends.
Such completely unrealistic prognostications were quickly dismissed as the work of demented professors who had lost touch with reality and quietly slipped into the twilight zone now known as Conspiracy Theory.
Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and when the voting
counting in Florida in the Presidential election of 2000 got a tad gnarly,
electronic voting machines and the laws mandating the use of that method of
letting the accountants furnish the final results were conveniently written and
waiting for the chance to get an "up or down" vote from previously elected
Senators and Congressmen.
Liberals who don't see how eliminating "likely" Democratic voters from the registration rolls prevents voter fraud are the same ones who don't realize that outsourcing jobs to other countries increases the profit margin and that more profits are, by definition, the essential ingredient in the strategy for economic recovery.
The farsighted Republicans had (in a 1996 PNAC white paper)
foreseen the possibility of the country facing the challenge of "another Pearl
Harbor," and quickly implemented several variations of the "double standard"
concept after 9/11 occurred.
Democrats would be held to a very strict level of accountability while any Republican (it was well understood) would get an automatic exemption from confining ideology such as the precepts of war established by the lead council for America at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, which held that any invasion was a crime against peace.
Increases in the debt ceiling were automatic when George W.
Bush was in the Oval Office and the cost of the military adventures in Iran and Afghanistan were exempt from
concerns about the deficit. Now that
President Obama is the commander-in-chief, the main concern of Republicans is
deficit reduction.
Meanwhile, the Republicans when they were in the majority in Congress had initiated a policy for the filibuster rule which would put the Democrats in a straight jacket if and when the loyal opposition leadership cadre ever became obstreperous.
The Liberals who see a conspiracy hiding behind every Bush
would have Patriotic red-blooded Americans believe that the rules change which
helped one particular media mogul acquire more outlets than the law previously
permitted was some kind of ominous "plot."
Now instead of a diverse group of Republican conservative publishers
owning newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations, one fellow from "down
under" does. Do they think that it makes
a difference if the media is owned by one man rather than a group of like
minded fellows? (These doubters probably
take the concepts in Jonathan Kwitny's book, "The Crimes of Patriots: A True tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the
CIA," as "gospel.") These narrow minded
liberals would have everyone believe that Plato was predicting Fox's high
ratings when he said: "Everything that
deceives may be said to enchant."
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