Lee Atwater and Certain Republican Buzz-words

American consumers have spent record amounts on buying Christmas gifts and stuff over this long weekend starting on Thanksgiving and ending on Cyber Monday.  This is the first year more sales was garnered from shopping on line as opposed to going to brick and mortar stores as opposed to on line shopping.  But there are blogs that state that “This is the last year of massive Christmas spending”.  Even though sales records were set, it may be the last time.  Because unlike in a healthy economy- - increased retail activity is not due to increased incomes and more spendable cash.  But instead this spree is being done on credit.  And this is because (according to the authors) “interest rates are so low now that people can go into debt and don’t fear the consequences”.  This could be true with some aspects of the economy having a “capital shortfall” but I doubt you could say this about retail sales with the public.  The last time I checked, credit cards weren’t that cheap.  But there is the “Crash of 2016 Lobby” out there that keeps up the saber rattling of “This is the last hurrah” and dark and murky economic times are ahead.  In that case we’d better elect Bernie Sanders so he can move in and straighten out the mess.  

At MSNBC you can’t, if you’re a commentator, talk about media mergers or net neutrality or the Trans Pacific Partnership, or union activity in general.  Before Ronald Reagan’s time there were hundreds and thousands of independent media outlets and now there are only five or six.  The “Free Press” isn’t free any more.  Congress hasn’t passed laws against Freedom of the Press, but the dictatorship of the bourshwah has laid down the law.  It isn’t the “Dictatorship of the proletariat” as Karl Marx talked about but the dictatorship of these last few media outlets that are in an almost constant process of merging into one.

You can pretty much tell if it’s a Republican or Democrat speaking because Republicans use phrases like “envoking racism against whites” or “being politically divisive” or “dividing America into factions” or that old chestnut “class warfare”, or “political correctness” or “rewarding or encouraging failure”.   Lee Atwater had his own list of catch phrases you used now to indicate what side of the political fence you were on.  Only Republicans use “Democrat” when the proper word is “Democratic”.  This started with Senator Joe Mc Carthy in the ‘fifties, and Goldwater mentioned it in his book.  To listen to Republicans talk, Democrats just can’t wait to bring about sheria law and democrats have a secret love of jihadist Muslims.  This of course is absurd, as though the democrats would actually elect someone with a “secret Islamic agenda” like these Republicans insist Obama has- - even at this late date.

Donald Trump is so insistent that there were people in Patterson and Jersey City who cheered when they saw the twin towers come down that I’m starting to believe it.  There was talk about “tail gate parties on the roof” but unless you’re Mitt Romney how do you get cars on the roof?   We don’t know if this cheering by some Moslems took place.  I bet it’s not thousands or even hundreds.  Maybe there were as many as thirty or forty - - somewhere.  Even if it happened it doesn’t represent the attitude of the vast majority of Moslems either here or around the world, who are generally horrified by the actions of 9 – 11.  There is no TV footage of any Moslems cheering that the media archivists are able to come up with.  Both sides in this dispute are just as insistant that it either did or didn’t happen.  I don’t know who’s right.  But we do have good documentation of cheering and praise on the Christian right when an abortion doctor gets murdered or an abortion clinic is bombed, but Trump won’t talk about that.  Yesterday we hear that 86 minutes of that Burger King video in Chicago got erased by police who “looked at the video” for over an hour and when they were done 86 minutes of footage were missing- - related to the Chicago police shooting of the guy on PCP.   Yet somehow there is a video of the cops looking at the video.  (?)   The Chicago police call it a “technical glitch”.  They’d been caught lying multiple times as it is in this case.  It’s also come out that the audio of the dash cam videos has been scrubbed and all you hear is a hum now.  So you don’t know what sort of conversations were occurring among the officers or to the victim.  No reason to believe this just isn’t another lie told by the police.  Does Trump believe ALL videos of those Moslems somehow got erased?

There is a controversy concerning the Green Climate fund.  There was a World Global Warming conference in 2009 (?) but the conference almost didn’t happen because poor nations didn’t have the funding to promote non carbon burning energy and those conservation measures.  But Sec of State Hillary Clinton stepped in to propose this fund for poor nations to help them conform to the terms of the treaty.  But now the senate Republicans are withholding this fund till the treaty is constitutionally ratified by the Senate.  The Republicans work first and foremost on a program of sabotage- - - just as they sabotage the Presidents “Red line in the sand” speech by not backing the President up in 2013 with appropriate resolutions and legislation.  These Republicans are still hell bent on denying the President any “legacy”.

There is a book coming out alleging that Senator Marco Rubio has had an unspecified number of affairs with women.  And it was mused whether affairs matter any more.  In France the current leader was photographed in a newspaper front page of standing there at the grave of his predecessor with his wife on one hand and his mistress at the other.  David Vitter was cheered by his fellow male republicans in the Senate for admitting he had affairs with prostitutes.  In Europe they don’t care and it used to be that in this country we pretend it doesn’t happen.  But during the Monica Luinsky controversy- - almost of the Republicans starting with Gingrich who were prosecuting the President on impeachment charges - - were all having affairs and most of these affairs when they were found out those politicians lost their jobs.  In 1988 the American people rejected Gary Harte for having an affair with Donna Rice aboard the Monkey Business.  But today’s Republicans are a strange lot because at much as they harrang about morality and “family values” too many of these people have less than stellar moral records.