The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

If you want to see the best middle-of-the-road newspaper column in an Alabama paper today — that is what passes for liberalism in this state — you could drive to Anniston and pick up a copy of the Star.

But why bother?

Since you are online anyway, you could simply click on this link and read H. Brandt Ayers’s column, headlined: ‘Tea Party Tempest.’

It is well written and makes some great points, although you know me. I have a quibble or two.

Here’s the lead in:

If you feel that a huge, unseen, irresistible force is pushing you and your country toward a terrifying, cataclysmic end — “Armageddon,” as GOP leader John Boehner called it — you may be suffering from a classic case of paranoia.

That is unless there is evidence to support such a nightmare.

There is such evidence….

Really.

Let’s just put things in perspective right off the bat. That lead was written to appeal to an audience already predisposed to think there’s such a thing as Armageddon, a fanciful piece of myth-making public relations if there ever was one — from Biblical times.

Or maybe the author, like Ronald Reagan himself, believes in such things.

It was also written in the true spirit of economically objective journalism, to appeal to “both sides” and sell papers to Republicans and Democrats.

You know me. I like an editorial column that takes a firm stand.

Either way. It continues…

Just months ago, we stood teetering on the brink of a deep, dark Great Depression II, banks were near death, General Motors crashed, millions lost jobs, millions more lost their houses.

The country was hurt, angry and afraid. America needed reassurance, an all-hands-on-deck, riveting concentration on creating or saving jobs, and arresting the plague of foreclosures that were turning whole neighborhoods dark.

True. Every word of it, except that we knew way longer than “months ago.” We knew it when the recession that started in January, 2007, was officially announced in January, 2008. You know, back when our mountain-biking president was named after a Bush.

You remember him. The guy whose policies caused all of this stuff that looks like “Armageddon.”

Wait, there’s more:

Instead, the Obama administration gave the country a confusing, year-long conversation about its No. 1 priority, health care, which was not the highest priority even for people who kept their job and their house.

Had the Obama team focused first on programs that could be seen and felt on the ground, factory doors opening to armies of laid-off workers, mortgage programs that got banks to turn on the lights in darkened neighborhoods, the president would have built a reservoir of confidence.

Uh, sorry to quibble, but I seem to recall writing umpteen times, and hearing President Obama say umpteen times 10 times, that fixing our broken health-care system was critical to fixing the economy. It had to be done, and Republicans know that.

In fact, just the other day, the president said the U.S. would go bankrupt without changes to the health care system.

The Tea Party crowd didn’t get that message from Glenn Beck or Rush. They still believe the Republican mantra that “America has the best health-care system in the world,” that is if you are rich or in full-employment, with a total health insurance plan from the corporation to which you are enslaved, whether you like to admit it or not.

The health care system is the biggest drain on our economy and causing multiple social problems. The federal government can’t just write a jobs bill and go out and hire everybody who is out of work and don’t have health insurance coverage.

The fact is, the health-care reform bill comes with a jobs program. Many of the new jobs will be in the health-care field.

There’s more:

Ironically, if Obama had not made the error of putting health care before the economy, and the mistake of passing the bill to the fumbling, numb hands of Congress, there would not have been a Tea Party insurgency.

Sorry, man…

There was a Tea Party insurgency in the works within five minutes of Obama winning the presidency in Nov. 2008. They may not have been calling it that yet. According to Wikipedia’s page, the Tea Party movement sprang up right after the election of 2008 to fight Democratic Party wins at the ballot box. It grew with anti-tax protests in response to Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, and then reached a crescendo last August over health-care reform.

Karl Rove and all those little Republican operatives inspired by Rove and Lee Atwater — the guy who got Reagan anointed by the Moral Majority, a predecessor to the Tea Party — were already hard at work like Santa’s little helpers before Christmas on a plan to topple Obama and the Democrats in 2010 and 2012.

All the claims about the Tea Party movement being a true grass-roots uprising have already been debunked so many times and in so many places it is surprising this news doesn’t make it all the way to Anniston, where the Star is published.

Pick just about any day of the week and read Truthout.Org.

The Tea Party “movement” is a corporate-funded Republican outfit set up to operate outside normal fund-raising and party channels, specifically designed to get rid of the first black president in the history of America — by bullet preferably, or at the very least at the ballot box in the next election.

Even if you concede there might be a few people showing up just because they hate all Democrats, not just the black ones, it is still an anti-Democratic Party movement.

People have taken video cameras to these so-called “parties,” and no one has come away yet with one showing a reasonable middle class person who is just suffering a little economic anxiety. These people are out there on the edge, and many of them are so misled by their religion that they actually want to be alive when Armageddon comes.

That is not something newspapers ought to be encouraging in their readers, in my view.

But let’s just say the president tried to reach out to them and meet them half-way.

Woops! Oh, that’s right. He already did! Let me count the ways…

He and the Democratic Party-controlled Congress gave up on passing a public option, and the president came out for nuclear power. He just announced last week he would lift the ban on oil drilling off the East Coast. That policy was not designed to appeal to the left. The environmentalists are at first perplexed, but will be angry soon enough.

Some on the left have already formed a Coffee Party to counter the Tea Party.

This is a political struggle. Here’s the problem.

Public acceptance of radical views against this president at this time in history by the leaders of the Tea Party movement, as well as the Republican Party leadership — and newspaper publishers – only embolden those who have more sinister plots in mind. Like this guy:

Living in a Land of Rising Right-Wing Hate

By all means challenge this president’s policies if you don’t agree. I will at times.

But all this talk of “revolution” from the right is going to result in more violence — let’s call it what it is, domestic terrorism – and when that happens, the economy is only going to get worse.

Can’t we all just get along, for once just for a little while, to tackle the major problems we face — including health care?

If not, we may very well face an Armageddon of sorts.

But the real enemy lurking out there is not the Democratic Party or president Obama or a 2000-year-old prediction by a prophet trying to make a name for himself.

Our real focus should still be on al Qaeda, and China.

In spite of opposition from the peace movement on the left, Obama has done more to get rid of the threat from al Qaeda than Bush did in seven years.

Then lurking out there half-way between the past and the future is China, sitting over there with a billion people plus and fondling all of our bank notes, all while making just about everything we consume. They lend us the money to buy the stuff — and sell it to us too!

Who’s plan was that again?

Here’s an objective truth. I bet if you sat down with old Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Karl Rove and gave them a Xanax and a drink or two, they would admit it too.

The Republicans and the Democrats are to blame — for kowtowing to corporate America and for allowing deregulation and the export of so many jobs overseas. They won’t admit it on the air, though, because that is not the Tea Party line. Look where it got Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN.

The Tea Party line is this:

Obama is black (and not one of us because he wasn’t born here and doesn’t look like us).

Democrats are liberals and thus socialists and fascists (never mind the academic difference).

“Kill Obama” or maybe just “Target Obama!” Either way, get rid of that bug.

The Tea Party song should be:

“We don’t want no, we don’t want no, we don’t want no satisfaction.”

That would require government, and we don’t LIKE gov’mnt, by damn.

No wonder we ended up in this fucking mess…

For the record, again, I have no desire to be alive to see something like Armageddon. I would rather see humanity come together to prevent it.

Is it possible that one of the reasons the prophet wrote about it was NOT to say it is inevitable, but perhaps to suggest it will happen if WE ALL don’t do SOMETHING to prevent it?

If you are a praying person, wouldn’t it make more sense to pray it doesn’t come — than to pray for the worst?

It’s not simply an escape, since I tend to flip around a lot and watch more than one show at a time sometimes, especially when watching the educational commercial channels. Two of the best are The History Channel and The Discovery Channel. This past week, they both ran simultaneous specials in prime time dealing with all the literature of possible scenarios on what might be the end of the world as we know it, or looked at another way, a time for a new beginning on Earth.

While the titles sound apocalyptic, as in the end of all things, the word actually means a revealing story. And in this case, both the nature shows on Discovery that deal with potential environmental disasters that could spell the end for human civilization, and the historical looks at prophesy, both have a potential happy ending. Even in the writings of Nostradamus, there are always in the end two females forms, representing two potential fates. And the way these shows end up seem to have the right message for us all. We have a chance to choose a better path closer to nature, not down the road of greed and war.

The only thing we Web journalists can do is sit back and watch what happens, and report on it to some extent. Like the seers in a way, we are here to say people have a choice. And we can editorialize about what we think that choice should be — yes trying to influence people in those choices.

Here are a couple of video samples to think about. We urge you to take a break from the relentless nature of cable TV news and think more broadly about some of these things. After President Barack Obama is inaugurated January 20, and the new Congress is in session, we will be thinking about the broader picture as we get into specific policy debates in the months and years ahead.

While it is not going to be politically correct to talk about it publicly in these terms, all of these shows end up mentioning the date December 21, 2012 — when the Mayan calendar and other evidence points to either a dramatic end to life on Earth, or some kind of a new beginning. That’s when the Earth and Sun will line up with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, a time of potential upheaval in nature’s forces.

Let’s hope that is the time when we figure out the answer to begin ending our dependence on fossil fuels. Otherwise we may very well see the four horses of the apocalypse in our time as a self-fulfilling prophesy.