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Tuesday, March 01, 2011

GOP nth Dimensional Chess

I don't quite understand why left commentators will sometimes attribute great cunning or even something like criminal genius to greedy banksters and GOP gangster governors.

Greedheads, regardless of party affiliation, will try to get money for nothing wherever and whenever the occasion arises. Whatever the reason to be found deep in the sticky stink of their psyches, market fundamentalists and movement Republicans are ideologically committed to demolishing every institution and convention that empowers everyday people over the oligarchs with whom they personally identify.

Why attribute to "genius" plans and schemes what can more readily be attributed to opportunistic cunning from moment to moment?

Subprime mortgages peddled to pension plans as triple-A rated was a fairly straightforward scumbag scam operation of the kind that greedy assholes inevitably go for unless they are scrupulously policed. In the aftermath of deregulation, this scam was low hanging fruit, and the low hanging fruit got plucked. Blaming the pensioners who were actually victimized by this predation now is also low-hanging fruit for anti-government low-lifes. Citizens United shoveled cash to the corporate castle-builders and now GOP governors are trying to demolish the unions that would compete with corporatists.

This is supposed to be the unfolding of some grand strategy? All of this looks to me far less like dominoes systematically falling, than it does assholes grabbing whatever is handy and attacking Democrats whenever the opportunity presents itself. Of course one can discern historical and structural relations between these events of predation and authoritarianism, creating new opportunities for the gangsters, but that hardly provides evidence of master planning.

These people are brainless thugs and con artists. The universe is a deaf dumb blind robot programmed for destruction, and it is creation, like culture, that is the intelligent, because collective, effort. It takes little effort to destroy civilization, civilization is an unnatural and even fragile accomplishment.

Walker is a dead eyed dumb-dumb. Karl Rove is a slobbering sociopathic asshole distinguished from his fellows less by his intellect than by the shamelessness of his willingness to cheat. The banksters are grafters, plain and simple, whatever their pretensions to intellectual aristocracy. We should not abet the fraud of their self-congratulation or psyche ourselves out pretending their relentlessly obvious moves are the least bit interesting just because they are so ruinous.

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