Fish out of water

One of our western North Carolina wingnuts, Susan Boyer of Brevard, has taken up this month’s Republican squeal that the media are to blame for the McPain campaign’s utter collapse. As I read Boyer’s Oct. 20 guest commentary( http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200881017051) in the Asheville Citizen-Times, an image kept flashing into my brain: a fish caught on a line, leaping and flailing as it’s pulled out of the polluted water in which it’s spent its entire life and into the fresh, brisk air of reality.

“Don’t wanna go there!” “Lemme go.” “Obama’s a terrorist.” “It’s the media’s fault!” “You’ll skin me and gut me and sauté me and then throw my bones back into the muck!” “I don’t want to end up on the dust heap of history.” “EEEEEEEEEEEeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkk.”

Here’s how Boyer actually opens her column:

“Pundits and polls indicate that the biggest concern of voters this election cycle is the economy.” Hello, Susan. It’s more than pundits and polls; it’s actual people indicating that concern. Does the collapse of Wall Street ring any bells? Merrill Lynch? Ding-dong! Goldman Sachs? Ding-dong! Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Ding! A $700 billion-dollar bailout? Dong! Recession? Gas lines? Unemployment? Ding-a-ling! I guess it’s the pundits’ fault, and those darn liberal media polls. Hmmph.

“Apparently only a small percentage cares about Barack Obama’s radical, anti-American associations and whether he’s lying about them.”

You’re right, Susan. Nobody cares, because there are no such “associations” or lies about them. The entire story is out; it’s been out for weeks and weeks; the “radical” is Chicago’s Citizen of the Year and a highly regarded professor and a board member of a Walter Annenberg-funded foundation. No matter how much you and your wingnut friends try to pump up this flat tire, it just won’t roll.

“We’re also told that the economy trumps social issues. I guess most of us submerge our reservations about a stacked leftward Supreme Court.”

Yes, believe it or not, for most of us, feeding our families TRUMPS worrying about whether somebody else, far away, might actually be considering whether or not to abort a fetus conceived as the result of being raped by an incestuous uncle – and having the right to make that decision – that choice – for herself.

And making the mortgage or rent payment TRUMPS most peoples’ concern that a gay man in California might want his partner to determine his end-of-life medical treatment rather than letting his parents, who disowned him twenty years ago when he first came out of the closet and have never spoken to him since, now decide THEY should be the ones to make life-or-death decisions for their estranged, hated son – and incidentally inherit his estate.

Yes Susan, keeping up with the car payment and helping with Grandma’s prescriptions and buying school supplies and heating the house this winter, and all those tedious, mundane, boring, non-issues that you dismiss (“the threat of Islamic terrorism is more important than a few extra bucks in my pocket”), actually TRUMP people’s nervousness that the Supreme Court might move slightly closer to the middle of the jurisprudential road – and actually apply the Constitution instead of using it to prop up wobbly justifications for its anti-citizen, anti-Bill of Rights, pro-corporatist tilt of the past dozen years.

After lamenting all this economic selfishness on the part of a whining public, Boyer really hits her stride when she dismisses Obama’s plans to make the tax structure more equitable and to take on corporate corruption. “Do you really think the wealthy will open their wallets and say, ‘Take more, please?’. . . . Do you really think the CEOs will let stockholders take the hit or do you think we’ll all end up with higher gasoline and prescription prices as a result?”

YES! The rich really are different, says Susan. She proudly admits – no, proclaims, that the crooks and liars who have been running things for the past 12 years ARE crooks and liars and that they are NOT going to change. They’re not about to follow the law! “That’s why they pay for high-priced accountants and lawyers” – to evade federal taxes by “pursu[ing] financial transactions which will shelter and protect their big bucks.” Corporations will pass on costs to consumers while maintaining payouts to shareholders and executives, no matter what laws the Congress and President pass. In other words, watch out, Obama, because they are going to fight you all the way, and even if you win, they’ll find new ways to cheat.

Boyer has given you fair warning, because she clearly understands how corporations keep all the money they “earn.” But apparently she has yet to grasp one of the fundamentals of capitalism: how they make all that money in the first place. As Dr. Alan Inglis writes on his web site, www.healthrevelations.com, “Drug companies aren’t in the business of making you healthier. Their goal is to sell pills!”

But Boyer’s terrible fear is that “big government” will do something for America in spite of big business, especially big pharma. “Personally, I don’t think it’s a good idea to turn control of our health care system over to the same folks who run the U.S. Postal Service.”

No, she would keep control in the hands of the health insurers that staff entire departments with people whose entire job is to figure out how to deny claims, and the pharmaceutical giants that brought us Zelnorm, Permax, Rezulin, and various forms of pemoline (see links below) – wonder drugs that were finally taken off the market after scores of patients died from side effects like heart and kidney failure. The people Boyer trusts with our health care are cut from the same cloth as the men who brought us Enron, Washington Mutual, Lincoln Savings & Loan, and the rest of the financial fiascos our “nation of whiners” are whining about.

Now, I’ve lived in the U.S. all of my 50+ years, and I’m pretty happy with my postal service. When I mail a local letter for 42 cents, it gets to the recipient the next day. Same with bulk mailings from nonprofits I’ve worked with: overnight, every time. Letters to and from my brother across the country in New Mexico arrive within two or three days, for the same price of 42 cents. If I’m in a big hurry I could pay from $12.60 to $19.50 (depending on weight and zone) to mail him a letter overnight.

Alternatively, I could support private enterprise and send the same letter to the same place using UPS ($29.85 to $68.52) or FedEx ($42.86 to $79.76). At under $20 bucks, I think I’m getting a pretty good deal with the US Postal Service.

Note also that UPS and FedEx get to cherry-pick the most lucrative parts of parcel delivery while not dealing with anything less profitable, like magazines and newspapers. Those, the Post Office has to deliver at the lowest possible price, because of that darned ol’ Constitution and its not-very-cost-effective guarantee of freedom of the press. Yep, that same dang media, which says the economy matters to people more than Susan Boyer’s fright-night social issues, gets a subsidized ride with the Postal Service, courtesy of the public, while competing head-to-head with big business, which gets to skim off the cream. And the public service STILL comes out ahead. I think I’d be happy as a clam with comparable health care and insurance.

The good news from Susan Boyer is that she has apparently given up hope of a McCain victory. “I’ll just sit back and wait for this center-right country to realize that a slick talker and the left-wing media persuaded it to embrace ‘change’ that was never honestly defined.”

Assuming the Democrats win this November, and take a veto-proof majority in the Senate, Republican wingnuts will truly be fish out of water for the first time in a generation. And then maybe, just maybe, the rest of us can sit back and wait for all of them, from Puppetmaster Rush Limbaugh to little local Susan Boyer, to realize that the nation isn’t quite as “center-right” as they hope; nor is the media nearly as “left-wing” as they pretend; nor is the emergence of an informed, determined, knowledgeable, progressive – yes, even “liberal” – electorate half as frightening as they want us to imagine.

(www.webmd.com/ibs/news/20070330/ibs-drug-zelnorm-taken-off-us-market) (www.webmd.com/parkinsons-disease/news/20070329/parkinsons-drug-taken-off-market)
(http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/03/22/diabetes.drug.01/)
(www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/business/25warning.html)