" You realize,... this means war." (B. Bunny)

--- It's mildly ironic to hear those who point out that the ongoing MSM "news" preoccupation with Anna Nicole, celebrities in general.. and now even the Imus affair... in fact serve as distractions, perhaps intentional ones, from the more important issues which comprise "politics." Uhh,.... make that "politics as usual," for the irony is in the strong case to be made that "politics as usual" is something of an intentional distraction, in and of itself.

--- Well, to be fair,.. in the former case, there's no escaping the wide-ranging human nature tendency to zone out on the various genres of popular sensationalism,.. celebrity fascination being simply the one that I dislike the most. And while a profound moralism resides at the heart of the case against Imus, that case has been fully delineated now. If we can get past that, perhaps we can get past "politics as usual," as well.

--- There seems to be a certain disconnect between the horrific potentials with which we frequently characterize the republicans, the neocons, the corporatists, etc,... and the (naive) reliance we place in a political industry not always successful at obscuring its patrician slant. Will the successful pursuit of electoral party politics solve our problems? Not if our problems in fact embrace even one of the more egregious complaints and accusations issuing from the past six years of the neocon junta. The political industry is trying, necessarily, to work both sides of the street,... at least as long as the Constitution remains nominally in effect.

--- When Lou Dobbs refers to "war on the middle class," he may be speaking euphemistically, with "war" being the squishy term. But there may be more truth in that phrase that many care to admit. It's just that not many of us are very well-versed in picturing what such a war would look like,.. and those who declared it are as ill-defined and often invisible as the vague "insurgents" we confront in Iraq. The neocons with whom we ARE familiar are only the generals in this war. My own inadequate perception of who privately sets their "mission," simply churns up hackneyed visions of unimagineably rich old men sitting in tall wingback chairs at some prohibitivly exclusive club, smoking their pipes while casually wrenching the course of human history to a path more to their liking. Or tight-lipped, beady-eyed billionaires in mirror-glazed highrises in Zurich,... omnisciently networked to their counterparts in Houston, Aspen or the Hamptons,.. playing a private game of Monopoly-for-keeps.

--- In any event, there aren't very many of them. Several hundred families,... maybe a thousand,.. that's all. These are the people who declared the war on the middle class,.. effectively a war on majority rule,... a "Battle of the Bulge," if you will, against the political initiatives set in motion with FDR's New Deal. It is a fight they always planned to fight,.. they were patient and planned it quite well,.. and now that it's underway, they know it might be their last shot. And the republican party has been at least serviceable as their primary operatives,... while the political industry as a whole serves as the curtain behind which the fraudulent wizard manipulates appearances, principally the illusion of choice.

--- What I have described is a continuum. What we react to are mere events in that continuum. It's a figure-ground gestalt problem, in which events are the figures,.. and the passage of time is the background. Let's look at some events.

--- Was Wellstone's plane crash really an accident? Was there deliberate tampering with electronic voting machines? Federal complicity in Enron's rape of California? Did someone really know that the 9-11 attack was on the way,.. and that a neocon seizure of power could result? We know that the Iraq war was launched on lies and misrepresentations, but what was the larger strategy it served? "Permanent" republican majority and a "unitary" executive? The truly salient question we should be asking in all of these cases is actually a variation on Murphy's Law: "If these guys thought they could get away with pulling shit like this,.... would they give it a shot?" I think that question answers itself.

--- How many of us consciously register that we are literally under attack,.. and that this is a war? A socio-economic class war, perhaps,.. but a war nevertheless,... one in which our advantage in numbers is being deprived of us,.. and the only weapon is wealth. How many of us see that?

"Would they give it a shot?"

Clearly. And they're this close to having made it. If Rove's "the" math had been a little more accurate, they'd have accomplished this mission. Now it's been complicated by the Democratic majority, and things are getting a little messy. Apparently they still think they can pull it off, or get close enough to last through maybe one Democratic administration. . (which they would try to co-opt like they did to Clinton)

If we could pry the mass media off their privates, we could deal them a telling blow. (too tired to deal with the pun)

"A socio-economic class war, perhaps,.. but a war nevertheless,... "

I've known for sometime. Our side has been fighting the war underground, but it's just beginning to surface because the voices in the liberal blogs are bubbling over. But their side had been launching their war from the blogs, yes, conservative blogs, since the 90s. They were at least ten years ahead of us on this one.

Sitting there and listening to my relatives regurgitate right-wing soundbites for the last ten years, I always knew that someday the table would turn once the liberals found their voice again.

--- And I cannot help but be of the mind that the the uppermost corporatist elite were in some ways forced into their "hurry-up offense" by a combination of dwindling resources,.. of which oil is but one,... a faster-than-expected advent of globalism,.. in turn challenging the sanctity of the dollar as never before. Our fiat currency system is not designed to cope with economic emergency, eh?

--- Sure,.. We the People can and will straighten things out,.. but the aristocracy well knows that our solutions will be to their detriment. You might look at their strategy as somewhat two-pronged: Loot the system of everything that isn't nailed down,.. while at the same time angling for majority-proof political power, as well. We remark semi-seriously about their intended return to a feudal state,... but that is actually pretty much what it would be.

Two things that writers and entrepeneurs have in common for the same reason: to get a captive audience.

far enough to see the big picture. And i must admit it makes me dizzy and more than a little nauseous. Thanks for an eloquent and perceptive post.

When poor and middle class people are screwed again and again, that's Ronnie Reagan's and Bushco's Morning in America.

you just have to look at the legislation being pushed through, notable the Patriot Act to see that the Bush administration meant business. Complete control, America then the world.... but there was a little hitch...the Nov 2006 elections.

Rome- brought down by combination of military over-reach, internal corruption, oppressed slave class, etc.

France- brought down by internal corruption, oppressed lower classes, etc.

The elite think they can win, but in the long run, they are dead, as in guillotine dead. That is why they are always afraid of the middle/lower classes. There are not enough bullets in the world to put down a general uprising. Unfortunately, things have to get really bad here before the masses will even notice.

Empires come and empires go. Sometimes they go down really hard.

--- You could have added South Africa to your list of vanquished elitist aristocracies. I give today's American corporate aristocracy an edge, however, if only in recognition of the liklihood that they may know things that we don't know,.... the ETA of Peak Oil, for example. Maybe the crash, itself. And I imagine their response to a general uprising would be a hasty exit to Australia or South America.