The Crack in the Edifice

You can see the cracks forming in the GOP edifice. Everywhere you look another scandal or example of glaring incompetence and outright indifference. They were on an amazing run, in control of all branches of the federal government, most, if not all, of the corporate media, a majority of statehouses; their corporate allies and benefactors were pleased with the services they received in exchange for beefy campaign contributions.

They could do no wrong it seemed. George W. Bush won reelection despite a record of failure and deceit unrivaled in American history. Bush told us that white was black and black white, and if we couldn’t see it, well, that meant we were unpatriotic or anti-American, against free enterprise and individual initiative. Bush gave us his monkey sneer and cowboy strut while Karl Rove stood behind the velvet curtain pulling on the strings.

They mastered the political game with message discipline, quick retribution against those that wavered, and slick spin. When the news refused to fit their vision they created their own. “It’s hard work,” Dubya said during one of his debates against John Kerry, but Dubya never worked that hard, preferring the solitude of his Texas ranch instead, hunkering down with Laura while Iraq burned and New Orleans flooded.

Calling oneself a Liberal or Progressive hasn’t been easy during the Bush/Cheney/Rove regime. The thunderous right-wing media machine ridicules everything we believe in, and the Democratic Party stumbles around like a blind man in a dark room, looking for its soul and passion in all the wrong places. Sorry, folks, but Hillary won’t get us where we want to go. She’s part of the ruling apparatus. Ditto Joe Biden. Those folks play the center and tinker around the margins.

But all along our values were right. We knew the Iraq invasion was a disaster before it happened; we knew that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would only make the gulf between rich and poor even more grotesque, concentrating wealth and power in so few hands that even our democracy would be threatened; we knew that the crony capitalism practiced by the Bush junta would lead to wide-scale corruption; and we never bought into the failed lie that government is inherently incompetent and therefore incapable of playing a moderating role in society.

There are millions of us, and we’re fed up. We look around the country and wonder where we are. Is this America? Is the almighty greenback and what it can buy the only thing that matters anymore? What about justice, equality, widespread prosperity, and social responsibility? Don’t those things matter?

We believe they do. There’s a crack in the ruling edifice. This is our chance.