Turning Back Time. In case you still don't understand that the Sarah Palin/Tea Party Republicans are out of their mind, I just yesterday got around to watching a podcast of MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann from November 4th. It showed a SarahPAC commercial in which Palin says, "This is our morning, in America", and the sun is shown moving behind the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, the sun is shown moving from west to east! The footage was plainly of the sun SETTING.
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I live in northern New Jersey and know that the Statue of Liberty faces east-southeast, from the west side of the Hudson River/Upper New York Bay. The sun rises nowhere near the Statue of Liberty seen face-front (you can tell it's face-front because the torch is held in the statue's right hand), but behind you, over the Atlantic Ocean. The only way you could see the sun behind the statue, moving from right to left (lower to higher) is if you took the video at SUNSET, then ran it BACKWARDS. So what the commercial is really showing is time moving backwards.
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The Palin/Tea Party people could salvage that portion of the video if they wanted to say that the Nation is now headed into its sunset, and only the Radical Right can turn back the clock and restore our fading glory. But that's not what they said. They said, and I do quote, "This is our morning, in America." No, you showed sunset, and called it morning. You showed the sun moving backward in time, west to east. You lied. And you are not going to take us back in time to The Bad Old Days, pretending that they were Good. They were not.
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Name one time in American history that was better than today. One time! The days following the defeat of Fascism in WWII? Hundreds of thousands of American families were grieving the death of their sons, nephews, and friends. The Soviet Union had just taken over Eastern Europe and installed Communism in North Korea, beginning 45 years of Cold War and hot proxy wars all over the planet. Black soldiers came back to segregation, voting restrictions, and Jim Crow. Gay men were regularly entrapped and arrested, and gay bars raided by the police. The Nation's cities were about to be subverted by deliberate Federal policies to create suburbs and move white people and jobs out of central cities chopped up by superhighways and loaded down with highrise "projects" that concentrated the poor and isolated them from the world of work and integration. Try again.
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No matter what period of U.S. history you care to name, it was worse than now. The closest you can come to a time when things weren't just plain awful is the 1990's, under a Democrat, Bill Clinton, and that was the era of "Greed is good", the dot-com bubble, and the "Me Generation", which set us up for the hypergreed, trade deficits, and export of millions of jobs during the 2000's that led to the economic catastrophe of late 2008, from which we are still suffering. But we have a black President now, and the Nation is much less bigoted toward black people, homosexuals, Hispanics, Asians, lesbians, and other formerly despised minorities. We have the ability to fix our economic problems with a few simple reforms: soak the rich, end the export of jobs, and end unfair free trade.
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Who would go back to The Bad Old Days? I wouldn't.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,427 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:01 AM