Sunday Discussion Group

May 7, 2006

Are we near the tipping point on the Republicans’ “culture of corruption” story? Have we passed it?

* CIA Director Porter Goss resigned suddenly Friday, a move than may have been driven, in part, by his connection to Kyle “Dusty” Foggo (who is now facing a criminal investigation of his own) and the Brent Wilkes/Duke Cunningham/prostitutes scandal. In fact, the San Diego Union Tribune and the New York Daily News both reported that Goss’ departure is related to the Cunningham affair.

* The AP reported yesterday that Tom DeLay’s office knew full well that Jack Abramoff had “arranged the financing for the GOP leader’s controversial European golfing trip in 2000 and was concerned ‘if someone starts asking questions.'”

* MSNBC’s David Shuster reported on Friday night that the “tea leaves” suggest Karl Rove will get indicted in the Plame scandal, while Scooter Libby’s defense is already going poorly in his own Plame-related charges.

* David Safavian, the administration’s top federal procurement official before he was arrested last fall, will go on trial shortly for his Abramoff-related charges.

* All the while, Patrick Fitzgerald’s grand jury is still meeting, the case against Tom DeLay in Texas is still proceeding, the investigation into Bill Frist’s investments is ongoing, and Rep. Bob Ney is still this close to an indictment.

As the New Democratic Network’s Simon Rosenberg put it:

“This has never been about lobbying reform, or connecting the corruption to legislative outcomes. The corruption is of such magnitude that it stands alone as a statement of their values, of their lack of respect for the public trust. Simply put these are the largest set of scandals in American history. That should be enough for us to make the case for a new direction.”

What do you think? Have we reached the tipping point? If not, what more would it take?

Diebold

  • Have we reached the tipping point?

    Not if Russert has his way. He just tried to equate a few personal indiscretions by a few democrats and the culture of coruption in the republican party. He came across, to me, as very hostile toward Pelosi.

  • Monica got Clinton impeached. Can’t we get someone to give Bush a blowjob? Someone like Jeff Gannon/Guckert? Maybe Karl Rove? Dick Cheney?

    I’m afraid that if all we can come up is that puny list of 750 federal crimes and all the current investigations of corruption in Congress you list – even if we do win back both houses in the Fall – we’ll get no more out of this than we did out of the Rush Limburger drug case.

    The general rule is: Republicans don’t go to jail because they’re the “right sort” of people (i.e, rich); you don’t find fault with fellow Club members. Democrats go to jail because they’re the “wrong” people (e.g., marijuana users, ecofreaks and peace activists).

  • For one thing, Dems have to be something.

    Even if none of these misfortunes really turn around for the Republicans, people’s memories and having resources for self-promotion can do a lot. Notice which groups favorable to the Dems the GOP would like to make inroads with and how they try to go about it- women (for one thing, Bush picks up a feminist positive position on a single issue– human trafficking- and it turns out to be a token issue, for he’s hostile to the rest of a woman-positive agenda); minority communities that may see the health of traditional family units as crucial to the better development of their children, and thereby, their communities (GOP will try to make Dems seem opposed to families sticking together & having good values); Catholics/working-class Dems (GOP will try to get outspoken Dems so worried about the excesses of overbearing religion that they’ll say things that make them sound out of touch with those who include religion as part of their lives; GOP will try to cast Dems as not understanding the sacrifices or lives of people who don’t work at “desk” jobs).

    Notice that washingtonpost.com ran two Clinton-bashing pieces recently, “Loving to Hate Hillary” and today, “Too Much of a Clinton Democrat?” On the other hand, the recent WaPo opinion piece on McCain was “A Man Who Won’t Sell His Soul,” oddly, since the recent story about him has been only about how it’s turning out that he will sell his soul. So the uphill battle in the media for Democrats like the Clintons is still in play, and we Democrats really need to not be like “herding cats,” we need to stand by one another & recognize talent, and not join the Republicans’ bandwagon to bash our own simply because they are not perfect. None of us are Rush Limbaugh or Porter Goss, that’s for sure.

  • Second sentence there should have been “people’s short memories and the Republican’s vast resources for self-promotion”

  • What’s the status of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s “Phase 2” investigation? Last I heard, some sort of draft was to be released to members upon return from their Easter break. Not that I expect much substance, but another high-profile whitewash might be nice to add to the mix of reasons why Republicans can’t be trusted to run the Senate.

  • If Stephen Colbert can go and do what he did, then the rest of us Dems can make sure that the voters at the ballot box know about all of these things you’ve mentioned in your post, CB, and that they understand what a bad idea it was to turn the country and all our federal agencies over to Bush and his golfing buddies.

  • Notice that washingtonpost.com ran two Clinton-bashing pieces recently, … “Too Much of a Clinton Democrat?”

    Did you notice who wrote that one?

  • The reason “Stephen Colbert can go and do what he did” is because the rest of Dems, and elite of what passes for the “press” in this country, just haven’t done their job. And there’s no sign they’ve developed a sudden interest in doing it either.

  • They are certainly teetering on the edge of the cliff. I imagine that, more than anything, is what’s behind the sabre rattling toward Iran.
    I think there are 2 things that will determine how this plays out in November. The timing of any additional indictments (or convictions) and gas prices.

    Those of us who follow national politics are often stunned by the extent and audacity of repub corruption. The majority of Americans just have a vague sense that something’s not quite kosher, as seen in opinion polls on both congress, and right track/wrong track.

    That’s why Hookergate is so compelling. If it turns out the way many of think, it will provide an emblem – hell, a logo – for the culture of corruption.

  • I think many prior commenters aren’t answering the question. The question is whether the culture of corruption storyline has tipped, whether it has reached a point where it has taken on a life of its own.

    I’d say my answer is not yet, but we may be almost there. I think hard evidence of Goss’s involvement would tip it. The idea that a bribable Congressman has been appointed to head the Central Intelligence Agency is extremely frightening; if this were during the Cold War, people would absolutely freak out.

    If we get that story out there: the President appointed a bribable man to head an intelligence agency. Even our national security can’t be free of Republican corruption.

    If we get that story out there, it’ll run itself. See, this isn’t Halliburton; this isn’t wasted money and bloated, no-bid contracts or sweetheart deals. This is bribery, and that’s a much easier story to tell. If the press gets a compelling, simple story of the presidency, security, and bribery, that’s all she wrote.

  • The entire “culture of corruption” angle story could become moot if Bush has any more Caligula moments like this, from Reuters:

    “You know, I’ve experienced many great moments and it’s hard to name the best,” Bush told weekly Bild am Sonntag when asked about his high point since becoming president in January 2001.

    “I would say the best moment of all was when I caught a 7.5 pound (3.402 kilos) perch in my lake,” he told the newspaper in an interview published on Sunday.

  • There are many Americans who know how horrible it is to have a child kidnapped. If a Republican appointees are enjoying the products of this “industry”-

    http://www.humantrafficking.org/

    -it naturally wouldn’t sit well with a lot of people. Maybe something’s behind the inconsistencies CB sees in the hookergate story- maybe Goss got caught, but he’s not going to get caught, because it would look too bad for the story to come out any more than it already has.

    If it’s something along those lines, then the story coming out and a DC-linked human trafficking ring being exposed as a consequence would be the tipping point.

  • I would love to say we’ve reached the tipping point, but I firmly believe we passed that point back in 2000, when the Supreme Court almost literally appointed a President (And, actually, regardless of which party that President had belonged to, having 5 justices decide who the next president will be is really un-American, any way you look at it).

    The relentless erosions of our rights and freedom should have had every American up in arms, again, years ago.

    Have we reached a tipping point? Heck, we’re so far beyond that point that America is starting to look pretty unrecognizable.

  • I’m not sure there is or ever will be a tipping point. I see a Great Unravelling. Whether the Democrats can win in November depends on how much has unravelled.

    I take things like bribery seriously, but I think most Americans just accept it as part of being a politican (“They all do it.”). Issues that can seal Republican fate are gas prices (and the suspicion the Repubs have some responsibility) and Iraq/Iran. I think saber-rattling at Iran will just remind voters of the disaster in Iraq, which has more to do with “our team losing” than it does with real concern. Most of America wants to take its football and go home.

    If there is a tipping point or something like it, it will be a very “up close and personal” unifying statement by the Democratic Party like the “Contract with America.” And only then if Democrats get on the same page. Local elections are local, where voters don’t vote a single party in or out. The Dem message has to be short, articulate, and immediate to be welcome.

  • I think the damage to the gulf coast pushed us past the tipping point. It brought home the inability of this government to perform its mission. For example:

    http://www.merlehaggard.com/

    Listen to the song when you click on Merle’s site.

  • What more will it take?

    What it will take is someone looking long and hard at how the participants in Hookergate keep emphasizing there were no WOMEN involved.

    Going back to the Gannon/Guckert scandal last year, there has been an ongoing effort on the part of these scum to keep their closeted little gay Republican mafia from being outed – if there is one thing that would truly turn the Republicans into a minority party forever, it would be the homophobes of the Christian Right finding out just exactly who/what they have really been voting for.

    The gay connection to all this is the great white shark swimming just beneath the surface that is going to swallow them all in one gulp when he surfaces.

    There was a very interesting diary at Kos last year by a guy named Padraic who – as he said – was in a position to lay out the whole scene of closeted Republican gays and how they operate. It’s very informative. Just search for “Padraic’s Diary” over at Kos.

    Of couse, with the MSM swallowing the bullshit whole about Goss and his “failure”at the CIA that led to his immediate firing by Bush after long and painful efforts to change things, the likelihood of this getting out is somewhere up there with the sun rising in the west tomorrow morning.

  • I’m not sure what a “tipping point” is, but however
    it’s defined, the Republicans are not going down
    no matter what they do, no matter what scandals
    are uncovered, no matter how much evidence
    there is that Bush fraudulently pushed the nation
    into a devastating war, unless the American
    people vote them out.

    It simply does not matter otherwise. The Democrats
    offer no opposition, the Republicans care nothing
    about governance, only power, and the MSM will
    do anything to keep the Republicans in power
    because they are Republicans.

    It all comes down to whether the American
    people have had enough. And if they have,
    they’ll hold their noses and vote for this
    pathetic cadre of spineless, mediocre
    Democrats. Otherwise, the worst, most
    treacherous and most incompetent
    government America has ever cobbled
    together will continue its relentless reign
    of destruction.l

  • What’s up with Abramoff? At one point we were hearing that a half-dozen ReThugnicans would go down. Now, nothing much beyond DeLay. Some feeble speculation about Ney. Has this inveswtigation been smothered, stalled, and covered up like all the other ones?

  • These scandals may serve as a partial antidote to the notion in “middle america” that the Repubs are the party of moral values. Even if that is all that these scandals do, that might be enough to tip the soccer moms to vote Dem and keep the nascar dads home. Baby steps…..

  • Remember what Liddy Dole said this week to all the Kool-aid drinkers:

    “If Democrats take control of the Senate in ’06, they will cancel the Bush tax cuts, allow liberal activist judges to run our courts and undermine all Republican efforts to win the War on Terror.

    Even worse, they will call for endless congressional investigations and possibly call for the impeachment of President Bush!

    Please help the NRSC protect our President, our conservative agenda and our critical GOP Senate Majority by making an urgent online donation today.”

    That doesn’t sound to me like people who think they’ve “got it covered.”

  • I gave up my tipping point expectations a while back. If you put all of the major trend lines for humanity (population, weaponry, fresh water, oil supplies, treatment of women, religious beliefs, etc.) onto one PowerPoint slide … it just doesn’t look hopeful. Period.

  • Goss is a schmuck.

    Sex trafficking is a very dirty business. If that’s what’s really going on, anyone who’s helping these disgusting fatcat Republicans cover it up should be ashamed of themselves. If it was your daughter who was being kidnapped and forced into things, these guys would leave you standing out in the cold & the rain, right?

    Just because a lot of the girls come from another country doesn’t make them any less human. I bet it was a screwed-up sex trafficking ring, and the Republicans are desperate to keep it under wraps.

  • Republicanite politicians (and Tim Russert) like to say that corruption exists in both parties.

    The difference is, there are a few Democratic abberations. The Republicanites have made corruption a governing process. They seek to control the people who get to present the grievances. They use the legislative process to pay off their friends not with an occasional payback but with institutional gift giving.

    It is a culture of corruption. The Republicanites buy and lie their way into power by befuddling the various conservative strains into voting against the ‘liberal’ democrats rather than giving them something real (fiscal conservatism, maybe?) to vote for.

    … for which to vote.

  • We still have the media lapdogs to expose and rehabilitate. The corporate media is a huge part of the problem. PLEASE! Email all of the corporate media yes men and women and label them as Lapdogs and tell them what you think of their corporate ass sniffing.

  • “[If Democrats take control] they will call for endless congressional investigations and possibly call for the impeachment of President Bush!” – Liddy Dole

    And the American people think that the last five years have been going so well that there SHOULDN’T be investigations?

    The Democrats should be screaming from the roof tops saying they need to be in power just so there can be investigations.

    Why are we allowing the Republicanites try to make this sound like a bad thing?

  • i think when people look back, the tipping point will be seen as the moment bush said no one anticipated the breech of the levies. *nothing* has gone his way since then.

  • The Republicans have had effective control of Congress since ’94, but the idea that a ‘Democratically-controlled Congress has spent us out of house and home’ still hasn’t died.

    If the ‘tax-and-spend-Democrat’ meme is still alive, why should we expect the ‘both parties are on the take’ meme to be any less durable?

    The ‘tipping point’ is a generation away, and the Republic isn’t going to last that long.

  • The tipping point could occur when Republican corruption can be linked to something that directly affects a broad spectrum of Americans. This could happen if there is a spike in gas prices and a resulting economic downturn, and people link this to the corrupt relationship between Republican politicians and oil company lobbyists.

    The other scandals to date, like Plame, Abramhoff, NSA spying or Hookergate, aren’t tipping points because there isn’t a direct, tangible link between the scandals and their negative effect on the general population. Until there is an issue where people can make that mental leap, to connect the corruption to something that adversely affects them in their daily lives, things won’t change.

  • Whatever sense Americans have that things are very wrong in government are in spite of the media not because of it. Anything outside of our end of the blogosphere is either getting spun, being outright lied about, or not reported at all.

    I happened to catch a few minutes of Hannity’s opening segment the other day and he had the audacity to say that Duke Cunningham, Karl Rove, and Tom Delay were all victims of runaway liberal prosecutors. Most of us here can instantly see right through this BS, but the problem is all the listeners who heard that broadcast and simply accept it as truth. It there is no countering information then it will be lodged into people’s brains and become the prevailing wisdom.

    In response to today’s discussion, I’m just not sure. I see some signs that the public is starting to wake up, but if the press continues to be an accessory to the crime it may be too little too late.

  • I think the national political situation is a lot like an avalanche waiting to happen. More and more reasons for the slab to slide and bury the Repubs are piling up on an unstable slope, but there still needs to a strong enough trigger to set the whole slide in motion. I don’t think that has happened yet. That national moment of clarity has yet to arrive. If hookergate erupts as a huge story, I think the total moral decay of the Repubs will be exposed and the whole house of cards will come falling down. Just as others have mentioned, we need that idelible image that crystalizes the corruption and ineptitude that have been the Bush years.

  • What do you think? Have we reached the tipping point? If not, what more would it take?

    A free press?

  • All corruptions pale when compared to their biggest lie:

    Their bald face lies about global warming.

    I think that is the integrity issue that will matter in 2008.

    Against that… who really gives a damn who Porter Goss is poking on his Poker nights?

  • We reached the tipping point some time ago, but the Republikanners have gotten themselves a safety harness. That harness just happens to be the United States of America. As things stand now, the bums are already slipping over the edge of the abyss, but it looks like they could take a fair piece of that safety harness with them—modelled, in an odd sort of way,not by the 32% of the country that still believes in the Republikanner message…but rather by the fair-sized chunk of the country that is at risk of being seriously harmed by these bums.

    Kid George and Co. are more than capable of “easing the pain of their defeat” by taking a whole lot of innocent people with them. Kind of like a tyrant king who decrees upon his deathbed that “X” number of subjects will accompany him to the afterlife….

  • Ahem.

    Lied to start a war.

    Lying to start another one.

    Blatant incompentence in the face of the greatest terrorist attack in our nation’s history.

    Saying on camera that bin laden doesn’t concern him anymore.

    Saying too many fucking stupid things to cite. Actually, there are books written about bush’s stupid-shit sayings.

    At least one male prostitute making repeated visits to the white house.

    Outing of CIA assets.

    Lying in the SOTU speech.

    If the aforementioned didn’t provide a tipping point, what else (aside from a bj) would do the trick?

  • Maybe the tipping point has been reached but it’s just not going to be as noisy or filled with outraged indignation as we would hope. Xeroman’s singular comment of “Diebold” targets a critical aspect of this tipping point. We, who follow this stuff like a Labrador retriever waiting for the ball to be thrown, are so anxious for the public to see what we see and to be as pissed off as we are.

    I work for a large CA county. I work in a large dept. with several divisions and I interact with a lot of different people every day in a very conversational way. It’s also the Information Systems Dept. so everyone has access to a computer. But I can’t think of one person who I could talk to who would know what Daily Kos is or Talking Points Memo beyond having heard the names somewhere. They might have heard of Myspace but that’s because their kid is on it and they’re sort of concerned about that. The sections of the newspaper that get the biggest work out in the breakrooms are the Sports, Food, A-section and Classifieds in that order. I’m often the first to open the editorial/opinion section which I will leave open to a great Toles cartoon or E.J. Dionne column just to come in again later and find it on the bottom of the pile or covered with inserts.

    I think that there is real disgust with what’s currently happening but also there is resignation that we’re just stuck with the status quo until it’s time to vote again.

    The 33% approval of Sh*thead and 22% for congress show that people aren’t oblivious but none, (or at least 99%), of the people I work with are taking it to the streets. Unless they’re an illegal immigrant or George Clooney comes to town.

    The victory over RepubCo, if there is one, is going to have to be earned and cherished and treated with TLC. People are angry and ready for change. But the ballot box is where that public tipping point will manifest itself and it’s imperative that those ballots be counted accurately.

    Sorry, that got really long. I hope there’s something worthwhile in there.

  • Okay burro you’ve got to get with the program. You need to do some after hours subversion and change the home page of all the computers in your organization’s network to The Carpetbagger Report.

  • At this moment I am pessimistic that a “tipping point” will be reached by the seemingly sonambulent American electorate. As many of those posting before me have noted, the pubic, while willing to express their trending disapproval of the Bush presidency, have remained remarkably inmmune to the continuous evidence of BushCo’s incompetence, cronyism, and corruption, which is both systematic and systemic. By immune, I mean they take no action. They are not in the streets; they do not call or write to their elected representatives (rather they are quite patronizing to me for doing so). Hell, I know some who consider themselves “well-informed” who cannot even name their Congressman. The worse things get, the more tightly their politics seem to assume the fetal position. Perhaps the American electorate will repsond by sending Democrats to Washington in the majority with the next election cycle, but I would not bet anything of real value on it. As long as people follow the contrived intrigue of “Survivor,” the “Apprentice,” and “American Idol” more closely than they track the important decisions of their government (Politics? La-La-La-La, La-La-La-La, I can’t hear you!), I hold out no hope for a tipping point. If you weren’t tipped by Katrina, what will tip you (maybe the “hooker” element will finally grab attention)? Finally, as long as the MSM (Might Smug Media) continues to carry the water for Republicans by presenting their talking points as conventional wisdom, I wonder if their can ever be a true tipping point – for this corruption scandal or anything else.

  • burro,

    Your analysis was as long as it needed to be and also quite worthwhile. You exposed the American public and electorate for what it is, a hopeless blob composed of tv-addicted dopes who couldn’t care less about the state of things which really affect their lives and the future of their children.

    Short of a revelation of a big blowjob-for-money ring in the White House, it’s going to take guerilla tactics like the one marcus a. a. suggested to pierce the brain-pans of the addle-pated slobs we call our fellow countrymen/women.

  • Off topic:

    Does anybody remember the movie “Being There”?

    Read the story about Bush’s favorite moment in the last five years? Huffington Post and the BBC are apparently the only ones who care to reveal the Emperor’s New Clothes…..

  • I think Ed Stephan and burro have delivered pretty good descriptions of American apathy. Catherine underlines their posts with an apt metaphor. Personally, I see the current state of the electorate as “Being There Meets Wag the Dog.”

    What’s the origin of such apathy? I think it is, sadly, the belief that we as individuals are powerless to influence national policy. Sadder, that’s largely true.

    I once heard a Republican explain his party’s success: “Some Republicans are wealthy. The rest think they’re going to win the lottery.”

  • The original Clinton-Gore ticket looked good from the beginning. It worked well. Untill that naughty, and utterly trivial, incident let the cat in. Clinton, in my opinion, should simply have said “I did – so what?”. Instead he tried to cover up, which has something to do with pandemic Christian guilt about sex.
    Not a single official in the Clinton administration was ever indicted over his or her White House duties, in contrast to all the recent Republican administrations (1). Clinton’s was the only administartion in sixty years to convert a huge federal deficit, inherited from Bush Sr, into a solid surplus, which Bush Jr has squandered again to a record level (1,2).
    Starr’s tarnishing of Clinton’s rapport with the American people and his likeability around the world made it difficult for Gore to carry the momentum of Clinton’s achievements into a third Democratic term. He won, of course, we all know that, but the margin was not decisive enough to escape the rigging and manipulation of the Bush machine.
    Two turning points stand out for me: the two-thousandth soldier killer in Iraq in August 2005, and Patrick Fitzgerald’s court filing on April 9th. But neither are tipping points. The only meaningful tipping point is an electoral defeat for GOP in November. Only that way can retribution be exacted on this demonic regime.
    What happens in the electorate’s mind is difficult to gauge. “Anything outside of our end of the blogosphere is either getting spun, being outright lied about, or not reported at all.” (-marcus alrealius alrightus). What can’t be spun, lied about or ignored is the death of a citizen’s son, brother, sister, or husband. After a while everyone knows someone who’s grieving the loss in war of a loved one. That reaches a critical mass – at about 2000? – and then people really want the truth. That’s when anger and resentment sets in and lies and cover-ups no longer wash. That’s when the public get really interested in and indignant about leaks and mischief in high places. Then the house that George built definitely starts to creak and crack.
    My perception is that the Democrats need not wait for a tipping scandal – the mood is already in their favor. The momentum is there and can only increase. And, when the time comes, a nice warm familiar motherly figure into whose arms everyone can rush for the security, comfort and succor so rudely and sytematically denied in recent years, will do the trick nicely.
    Well, okay, a nice story. Maybe.
    1) rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_pr
    2) jumperbailey.com/dashboard

  • The republicans have been able to skate over their corruption in significant part because the typical American voter isn’t aware of it, doesn’t want to be bothered with it, and/or thinks that all politicians are equally and unavoidably corrupt. The media also shares a lot of the blame.

    Plenty of potential revelations might well trigger an anti-republican sea change (think of all that might yet come out during investigations of Libby, Rove, Delay, Abramoff, “Fornigate”, phone-jamming in New Hampshire, the Abu Ghraib photos we never got to see, & god knows what else).

    However, I don’t think the tipping point necessarily requires a future scandal. Rather, I think that there are so many republican scandals & Bush outrages that are so egregious that simply listing them all, again and again, could wake people up and precipitate an avalanche of anti-Republican opinion.

    Here’s the message: Do we really want America to stand for torturing people, do we really want secret prisons, do we really want to start wars on the basis of secrets and lies, do we really want massive unjustified disenfranchisement of voters, do we really want elections decided by who has the most friends on the supreme court, do we really want to waste vast sums of money on incompetent military adventures followed by incompetent nation-building, do we really want government by a party that lost most of one major American city and the heart of another on its watch, do we really want a dictatorial president who ignores laws and the Constitution according to his whims, do we really want a vice president who can shoot a friend in the face and not face any meaningful legal investigation, do we really want a White House that can happily expose its CIA agents for small partisan political gains, do we really want to saddle our children and grandchildren with a crushing debt burden because we wasted the nation’s wealth on give-aways to oil barons, arms contractors, and fat-cat Republican donors? If not, vote Democratic.

  • Okay burro you’ve got to get with the program. You need to do some after hours subversion and change the home page of all the computers in your organization’s network to The Carpetbagger Report.

    Comment by marcus alrealius alrightus

    That is hilarious to contemplate. There would be wandering and outcrys and consultation and confusion. The Helpdesk would be overwhelmed. It would be a thing of beauty. Surely though, there would be some enlightenment, (which always happens at TCR), before the county homepage and thus reassuring familiarity was restored.

    m.a.a., anarchy is in your blood.

  • It’s time for phased-in term limits – ready to just say noe more? This country isn’t ready for Jack Abramoff, Duke Cunningham, Porter Goss, or Tom Noe.

  • Catherine, Being There is one of my favorite movies. Except Chauncey was lovable, not loathsome.

    This entire thread might be my fault (since I sort asked a similar question in an email to Steve), but whether it is or not, after reading this thread, Im almost too depresed to think about it. But I’ll try…

    First, I agree with Burro – the majority of the electorate is probably just not clued in as to what is going on. Even here in San Francisco, you’d be surprised how many people still dont know about all the stuff we chat about here, on Kos, C&L, etc. It’s scary really. You bring it up and get these dazed looks. Really depressing.

    Anyway, my feeling is that no amount of continued news of the sort we are hearing now will make a tipping or breaking point. There is ample information already which should have almost every incumbent Republican tossed from office, possibly even before the election with a good old fashioned pitchfork led mob. It would seriously take something extreme (and most likely would require video, and sex, and drugs (and rock and roll?)) to make an impact. But I dont see that happening.

    What I DO think is going to do it though, is the crack in one of the many instabilities in our economic system. A major drop in the dollar, a continued long deflation of the housing market, or a crash in the stock market, which starts in one of the overseas emerging markets (which are completely mad) will do it. Once it hits people’s pocketbooks that vote Republican, they are in trouble. For now, the economic stress is only really hitting the poor Dems.

    It’s not looking good for us either way. The only way we get rid of these morons is by getting us all killed economically. That really sucks…man, I hope Im wrong and somebody can screw up so royally politically that everyone will notice. But I doubt it. Fox will just make excuses for it, and thats what everyone watches and believes.

    How did we come to this? Youd have thought that in 2004 we would have realized the error of our ways, and our Supreme Courts error….oh well. I’ll just sit and pray for a miracle.

  • I too keep wondering what else will it take? What is the tipping point? And then I realize all the resignation and apathy that was mentioned in the previous comments and what I see and hear. What I think people need now for a tipping point is positive motivation, motivation to feel good for a change and to feel good about taking charge by voting for change. The one thing that I sense from people that I talk to throughout the country is that they feel that whatever they do, Democrat or Republican, it will be just more of the same. I think that unfortunately Rove and the Rethugs have successfully painted Democrats in negative tones. As a result, Democrats have a lot of “damage control” to do and should expect to be doing it for quite a while (the damage is extensive).

    As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that people don’t need another scandal. The apathy and resignation are typical of people depressed by hopelessness and helplessness. What we need now is an effectively and successfully communicated message that Democrats can provide a better alternative. That message is not getting delivered, regardless of whether it is being made or not.

  • What’s the origin of such apathy?

    Comment by Alibubba

    Nothing original here but I think it has a lot to do with folks being told constantly that it’s all about them but it’s really all about selling them endless crap. There are so many ships waiting at the Port of Long Beach because the trucks can’t carry away the junk fast enough. It is our national duty to buy the crap. That is our purpose. We are consumers. But deep down, owning crap is not that rewarding of an end in itself. Storage units from coast to coast are stuffed. Landfills from coast to coast are bulging. Garages, attics, backyards, front yards. Human bodies themselves are full to bursting. But the ships keep coming. Buying stuff is our highest patriotic purpose. We are not a country. We are a market. It’s hard to get too excited about that so we are told it’s our duty to buy more stuff. Support the war, buy a lot of something. Buy something big. Really big. The biggest thing you can find.

    I’ve never been to D.C. but I’m sure there’s a plaza or someplace with the 50 flags of all the states. Imagine those flags being exchanged for the logos of the 50 biggest American based corporations. That is what the politicians see.

    The real tipping point will come when/if people get tired of being nothing more than debtors and transportation for credit cards and the endless junk purchased with those cards. It’s not what you buy, it’s how much you save. And as long as purchasing stuff no one needs just because it’s cheap is an unquestioned pastime in this country, it’s going to be hard to get people to understand their unease as to why none of it feels like it makes any sense.

  • A correction. Not the logos of America’s 50 biggest corporations. But the logos of the 50 biggest corporations in the world. That’s what globalization is all about. The breaking down of barriers to free trade. It’s not about countries or borders. It’s about the freedom to buy/sell unimpeded and unchecked. The concept of “America” is becoming a quaint anachronism. We are just part of the North American market and a source of soldiers, technology and funding in the Global War for Capitalism and the Struggle for the Removal of Hinderances to Free and Wide-Open Markets.

    I mean like….Wow! Sounds pretty exciting to me. Who could be apathetic about that?

  • What metric or metrics do we use to monitor the “tipping point”? Approval ratings? If so how low must they go to indicate a tipping point? Mass protests? How large and how often? The percentage of registered Republicans? How small must it be?

    A tipping point is akin to a phase transition in physics. For example, as you raise the temperature of a magnet one reachs a temperature, the Curie temperature, at which the magnetism vanishes. This phase transition is continuous. There are also discontinuous ones such as the melting of ice at 0 degrees C.

    My point is that I don’t think this is a relevant concept in this context.

  • Catherine

    The “Being There” mention broke me up.

    “I like to cut brush…..”

    Chauncey Gardiner would have made a great press secretary for this administration.

  • I’ve always remembered this scene from the movie network which ties into burro’s comment.

    Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT and T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon – those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state – Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and mini-max solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime, and our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale.

    That’s not entirely on the mark but it’s still fairly prescient.

  • I may be naive, but I still believe that a politician with guts can fight all this. The economic world of 1890s was more corporatized, centralized, conglomeratized and anti-labor and anti-environment than the current assembly of mutli-nationals amd their stooges in DC. Teddy Roosevelet (and his successor) blew them out of the water. Franklin Roosevelt blew them all away (and his successor didn’t do badly either). In the end, the ones who have the courage to make the laws, and back them up with force, trump the Ken Lays and other corporate weasels of this world.

  • Interesting examples that you provide, Ed. They sort of make my point because both were individuals skilled in their own unique ways at rousing others. However, Teddy Roosevelt achieved his position of President by accident. The bosses of New York wanted to get rid of the do-gooder there, and so they kicked him upstairs by placing him on the national ticket as the vice-presidential running mate of McKinley. Who knew that he would become President because McKinley would be assassinated? However, once in place as President, Teddy certainly led the charge.

    But FDR is the better of the two examples. He led this country through two of its most dire circumstances, the Great Depression and WWII. Aside from his policy decisions, he offered both hope and an example of resoluteness. And that’s what many, not all, but many are hoping for now in quiet desperation.

    People (including many in the democratic base!) are tired of hearing how we’re going in the wrong direction or making the wrong turn. Instead, they want to know why we should let someone else have the map and whether that new leadership will actually get us out of the woods and the mess we’re in.

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