Thomas Frank: the one-eyed king
In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. As the beaten left reads the tea leaves in their desperate attempt to discover how people so right, so righteous, so beautiful, so good and so true could be so wrong, could LOSE....they just continue to show how blind and clueless they are. Looking for wisdom in all the wrong places. Looking, for example, in the musings of Thomas Frank, author of What's The Matter With Kansas: How Conservatives Won The Heart of America, and recent contributor to the op-ed columns of the NY Times with piece called "Why They Won." Frank's book which came out last year has shot up to the number 3 slot on Amazon at this moment, reflecting his new guru status for the left.
Frank's thesis is simple. Very simple. The Republican Party is the party of the ruling class, oppressing the workers and the poor. To distract the masses from the obvious, conservatives have invented the culture war to fool the gullible populace into thinking that the blessed liberal intelligentsia (Frank's class) are their oppressors instead: "The culture wars, in other words, are a way of framing the ever-powerful subject of social class. They are a way for Republicans to speak on behalf of the forgotten man without causing any problems for their core big-business constituency.Against this militant, aggrieved, full-throated philosophy the Democrats chose to go with ... what? Their usual soft centrism, creating space for this constituency and that, taking care to antagonize no one, declining even to criticize the president, really, at their convention. And despite huge get-out-the-vote efforts and an enormous treasury, Democrats lost the battle of voter motivation before it started." I like that phrase "soft centrism" -- by which I guess Frank means the defaming of the President as a liar and murderer, and a fraud and a traitor and Republicans as the racist rich. No matter. If the NY Times and the literati think this guy is a sage and that class warfare is the path to political victory, that'll do just fine.
Yes
In the Wall Street Journal,Spain's former prime minister and friend of America, and friend of President Bush, Jose Maria Aznar, said, "Many took for granted the fact that Mr. Bush would be defeated. They
were wrong. The mistake committed by those who create caricatures is that they believe that normal people are going to substitute reality with caricature. The America people have decided that the best option is to offer a new mandate to Mr. Bush."
Comment submitted by Jeff Garrison
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