Media, media, media - and the NEXT one will be even harder to beat

The next candidate will be an empty suit like Mark Racicot or Norm Coleman or some other pretty boy who can parrot out the talking points while the rich, stunted, consolidation-craving entertainment-as-news structure handjobs the public into submission while the Democrats wonder what happened to them again.

The far-wrong has spent the last forty years buying up the media, inuring the public to the politics of hate by pandering to the lowest obscene prejudices inherent in race and religious differences, and distracting the public from the wrongs committed in the name of profit by immortal corporations by dangling shiny worthless baubles before their eyes.

Over-committing the military, along with the massive costs that strategy entails, is the far-wrong's answer to forcing to a head the ending of public education, social security, and whatever is left of a government-funded safety net.

Next comes the aggressive privatization of the rest of the infrastructure of society. Health care is already gone. Next comes the water supply, and the Talibanization of private education.

Already self-"regulated," immortal corporations stand ready to pick up more of the perks of humanity with none of the responsibilities. Lying? First Amendment. Criminal responsibility? Sorry, you can't lock up a Bermuda PO box.

The final act before dismissing the government once and for all will be the symbolic annointing in indulgences of the newly established government "board of directors" - lean, secret, and ready for action, absolved of responsibility for their acts by the outgoing government of fallible and sappy (yuck) "people" and ready to make the decisions necessary to succeed in the permanent war with Oceana.

Unless the opposition learns to build a separate and ubiquitous news-as-profit-enterprise network and learns to damn every single action of the party in power, and learns to spin wildly the potential outcomes possible in each of the vast privatization projects those in power will now be hawking, and learns to build an information disseminating vehicle broader than "the Internet," then the opposition can have a dozen MoveOn.orgs and ACTs and DemocracyforAmericas and it won't mean squat.

Rule the mob or it will rule you.

Dan Brown
Saint Paul, Minnesota