Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

During that same season, however, a phenomenon occurred that rocked the corporate establishment and the Cheney-Bush Junta on their collective heels.  A former governor from the small New England state of Vermont who the media upper echelon was convinced would rise and fall with barely a flicker demonstrated support that commanded immediate attention.  

Howard Brush Dean III was a candidate who secured solid support from a new source, one that worried the martini swilling penthouse crowd.  

Dean and his campaign team, led by veteran political consultant Joe Trippi, recognized and utilized the new growing power dimension of the Internet to draw into the political fold scores of individuals from America's cities and villages who had been previously distant viewers and now, through harnessing their actions cohesively behind a fiery and outspoken candidate, saw themselves as players.

The corporate elite and their highly paid lobbyists, political consultants and media propagandists immediately cried "foul" in that the process was not supposed to operate that way.  Didn't these upstarts know that they were the professionals and opinion molders?  

The nation was supposed to be controlled by them and these invaders from cyberspace were totally unwelcome.  They were the loud guys holding the beer cans seeking to crash the private party of the tuxedo clad champagne crowd.

Robert Novak, inveterate corporate media lap dog, expressed his outrage during a CNN Crossfire broadcast.  Taking time off from his campaign for capital gains tax cuts, Novak vented his frequently outraged spleen on the Dean upstarts as he fumed, "We don't need political advice from people on the Internet!"

Indeed, these individuals did not know their place.  Didn't they recognize that the established protocol was to sit and listen while the Karl Roves and Lee Atwaters set the tone and determined how America should be governed?  

If there is one lesson to be learned from analyzing right wing propaganda presented as news by the mainstream media it is that consistency is irrelevant.  The objective is to tarnish repetitiously and hopelessly destroy through the exhaustive determination of the exercise (and exorcise) process.

What the prevalent powers that be could not fathom was the launching of a grassroots process.  This would remove clout from the power brokers and kingmakers intent on placing those they control in office.  It is anything but mystifying to those who study the process why a George W. Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger is a godsend.  

A media apparatus is sent to work to elect a supplicant who knows enough to take orders without raising a solitary howl.  These robotically trained "leaders" are then touted as men of the people displaying the common touch.  

In the case of the Howard Dean candidacy a two-pronged approach, albeit illogical, was brought into play.  In the first instance Dean was described as an absurd upstart surrounded by amateurs.  As such he should not be taken seriously for the presidency.  Ann Coulter took deadly aim and hurled her familiar bile at the Dean candidacy, ridiculing the effort after observing the supreme amateurism at work.  

When one idealistic young college student was showcased on television exercising her commitment Coulter waxed sarcastic, noting that with inexperienced young college students assuming positions in the Dean movement that it could not be taken seriously.  The young woman responded by stating that she was flattered to think that Coulter found her important enough to aim one of her verbal Molotov cocktails in her direction.  

Others in the mainstream cognoscenti took the same position.  Could this doctor and former governor from Vermont be taken seriously when so many college youngsters along with retirees with no previous political experience descend on Burlington, Vermont and fan out to primary locations such as Iowa and New Hampshire, often bringing their own sleeping bags along?  Can they actually be serious?

This criticism called to mention California's two fabled Republican governors, Reagan and Schwarzenegger.  This same mainstream media wrote of them as folk heroes because they were citizen politicians.  The beauty of Reagan and Schwarzenegger was that they were not traditional politicians and as such were noteworthy originals.  A different evaluative standard clearly applied to Howard Dean.

With the right and their mainstream media fellow travelers the objective is not to be logically consistent but to tear down, and as such contradictory arguments are not discouraged but welcomed, provided the criticisms stick.  

Since Howard Dean came from a wealthy background and the family had an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment and a home in the Hamptons the man must be, and here comes that dirty word that Ann Coulter recites with mindless repetition, Dean must be an elitist.

While forgetting for the time being about the unpaid volunteers with sleeping bags on headquarter floors, Dean was attacked for elitist propensities.  A commercial began airing on Iowa television featuring a stiffly acting and speaking would be husband and wife duo who hurled epithets at Dean.  

Dean was blasted for being the choice of the cultural elites and was, hold your breath, a "tax hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show" who had no business trying to talk to the kind of Iowa plain folks that the caricature-acting couple was supposed to represent.

The logical question to ask concerning the ad was the identity of the group running it.  This commercial was sponsored by a curious entry in the grassroots populist sweepstakes.  The Club for Growth is a Washington-based organization dedicated to linking pro-business rich people with pro-business politicians, in short an economic mating game for upper dogs.  

The organization is comprised of anti-government economists, essentially men who stay in five star hotels, sip latte as well as champagne, eat brie and perhaps caviar, and have no identification with the Dean supporters bunking out on headquarter floors on sleeping bags.  Yet these are the individuals calling Dean and his movement elitist!  

The Club for Growth celebrates the "geniuses" that have spent the last decade burning incense to the Cheney-Bush deregulated economy.  On their web page the club salutes "the Reagan vision of economic growth through limited government and lower taxes."  Once more logic was hurled out the window.  

In eight years as California's governor Reagan doubled the last budget of his predecessor, Pat Brown, who had been lambasted as a tax and spend liberal.  Reagan also gifted the Golden State with the three highest tax increases in its history.  

On the national front in an identical eight-year period, then President Reagan tripled the national debt.  On the limited government front CIA operatives prepared an assassination manual in support of death squads waging a proxy war in El Salvador.  

Meanwhile a rag tail group of former supporters of deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza, known as the Contras, received covert military support on the fear that the presumably dangerously radical Sandinista regime of President Daniel Ortega was a threat to attack America by way of Harlingen, Texas.  

Reagan was consistent on this front since in his earlier right wing phase he feared that the Viet Cong, if not stopped, would cause a ripple effect as waves of Asian Communists were threats to attack San Francisco.  

Reagan's role in implementing "limited government" also involved a foray into dangerous Grenada to attack Cuban construction workers serving as a potential threat to invade America.  He also traded arms for hostages on the sly, sending sophisticated weapons to Iran.  Reagan in the process violated his own international embargo.

Iran was then at war with Iraq, which was not left out of the mix, either.  After all, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had helped preside over the sending of weapons to Saddam Hussein long before it became fashionable to attack that country and to U.S. style democracy.  

During that period the wherewithal was also supplied through Reagan Administration largesse to manufacture chemical weapons, which Saddam Hussein used in the war with Iran as well as against the Kurds in his own country.

Somehow or other this record does not comport with the frugality and limited government standards that the Club for Growth trumpeted as symbolizing the Reagan era.  It does not appear to be what George Washington had in mind when he warned his fellow countryman of the fledgling republic in his memorable farewell address to "avoid foreign entanglements."  

Then again, the club members have a lot on their minds and perhaps their attentions were distracted.

It did appear to be quite a stretch, though, for the Club for Growth to denounce Howard Dean as elitist.  

The central thinking of the New Economy preached by the economic gurus they support calls for tax cuts weighted to assist those who can afford all the latte and brie they could ever consume as well as stimulate so-called free trade to expand the reach of such bastions of the blue collar lunch pail crowd as the Carlyle Group, Kissinger and Associates, Bechtel, Halliburton and Monsanto.  Who is the real elitist here?

The anti-Dean contingent was just getting warmed up.  The trick was not to be consistent in labeling but consistent in attack.  Just keep flooding the media with enough unsupported absurdity and hopefully, through sheer weight and volume, the message will sink through to enough of the gullible that Howard Dean has to go.  

A new ploy would soon be invoked that bore fruit for the Dean decriers and it will be examined in detail in the next installment of this series.