The Potentate of Puffery

This morning I tuned into Joe Scarborough’s program as I was waiting for it to get light enough outside to commence feeding my rose for the last time this season.  The usual suspects were clustered around the table, pretending to be relevant and wanting desperately to be part of the news rather than just comment.  Scarborough was cutting them off right and left as usual, seeming to insist that his opinions are actually facts. 

I am sure most people remember Scarborough’s tenure as the Congressman from Florida’s 1^st Congressional District from 1994 to 2001.  As near as I could tell he did little save thump the Bible, serve the “right” people, defend fetuses, question the need to feed poor children, and follow the silhouette of Clinton’s penis through a $42,000,000 panty raid.  Yes, Clinton and his intern offended and obsessed the mighty white and righteous, family values Scarborough until his own assistant turned up dead in his Florida office on a summer day in 2001.  The death was ruled accidental – head trauma sustained during a fall.  She was said to have been alone and fainted.  He resigned the same year, and was so affected by the tragedy that he and Don Imus joked about it on air in 2003.  Well, so much for interns and assistants alive or dead.

The incident is never spoken of; certainly not on sorta-kinda-left-leaning MSNBC where at least one Liberal voice has been silenced, that of Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos, for daring to flout the taboo.   Indeed, the network has ensconced Morning Joe like a bloated potentate on a downy throne of hubris where he pontificates Monday thru Friday.  Today was no different as he held court surround by his head nodding, always agreeing supplicants.  He led a chorus of critics opining against Obama’s foreign policy, his domestic policy, the color of his tie, the sound of his voice, the cut of his jib and on and on.  Look, I am no cheerleader for the president, many of his policies make my skin crawl; but goddamn it nobody is wrong all of the time. 

I have ask before and I will ask again, can the disinclination of our friends and allies to support us in Iraq against these maniacs driving people onto a mountain top to starve not be in some small way related to the fact that President Obama may have been reduced in the eyes of the world to a paralyzed and near impotent figurehead by a feckless, corporate shilling, yellow journalism loving media and a power hungry, resentful and in many cases well past its sell by date Rightwing Congress?  Can we be so stupid as to not connect the nearly continual and malignant verbal emesis, slander and personality assignation of the Scarboroughs, McCains, Grahams, Palins, Bachmans, McConnells, Boehners, Limbaughs and so many more to the reticence of our friends and the emboldened applause of our enemies?

Has he made mistakes?  Oh yes many, and some in my mind profoundly damaging.  However, I will say that the first president I remember was Dwight David Eisenhower.  I come from a solid, hardcore Liberal, Working Class background.  My parents were both FDR Democrats and union organizers.  I was a Fabian Socialist in my youth.  I am a committed Democratic Socialist today.  Because I have always worked for a living and aligned myself with the Working Class, I have devoutly believed that I couldn't be a Republican because I carried a lunchbox and certainly couldn't afford to be ignorant.  Accordingly, I have studied the body politic closely for nearly half a century and state without equivocation that I have never seen one man blamed for so much by so many with so little evidence.  I have never seen one person asked to unilaterally shoulder the psychic Shadow of a nation or the responsibility for the broken faith, fraud and malfeasance of generations of overpaid, over empowered, parasitic political hacks. 

No one person is responsible for the deepening mess this country faces every day.  No one person is responsible for the bloodbaths, the famines, the terror, the disease and the sorrow of this world.  It is time to start holding everyone accountable for their part.  It isn't good enough to just say Obama did it anymore.