Yawn!

From Thomas Frank's spot-on What's the Matter with Kansas?

People getting their fundamental intersts wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order; it is the foundation upon which all else rests ...

When Reagan took office in 1981, more than half the working population in [one typical Kansas] city was employed in factories, and most of them were union members. The ethos of the place was working-class, and the city was prosperous, tidy, and liberal, in the old sense of that word ...

[Yet] even as Republican economic policy laid waste to the city's industries, unions, and neighborhoods, the townsfolk responded by lashing out on cultural issues, eventually winding up with a hard-right Republican congressman, a born-again Christian who campaigned largely on an anti-abortion platform. Today the city looks like a miniature Detroit. And with every bit of economic bad news it seems to get more bitter, more cynical, and more conservative still.

In fact, then, the synonymous words "bitter," "cynical," and "conservative" belong not to any problem that Senator Obama has with describing down-trodden working-class America, but actually define divide-and-rule Republican Party policy over the past thirty years. The vicious counter-attack and attempts to smear Senator Obama for even gingerly approaching the subject show how close he came to the raw Republican Party nerve of phony "backlash" or "culture war" fascism.

Even worse, though, from the standpoint of the Democratic Party which now has to confront and roll back this crony corporate crypto-fascism, supposedly "fellow Democrats" like Senator You-Know-Her and once-believable economic analyst Paul Krugman, have effectively joined with the right-wing media noise machine in trying to falsify and discredit Senator Obama's fundamentally sound analysis. One need only read George Orwell, Thomas Frank, Barbara Tuchman, Herbert Muller -- and even, formerly, Paul Krugman -- to recognize and understand the frightful interweaving of Puritan/Calvinist top-down class warfare and modern industrial fascism waged so successfully by the Republican Party against working, middle-class Americans for decades now.

We Democrats have enough hard work on our hands undoing the enormous damage Republicans have done to America and the world. We really don't need so-called "fellow" Democrats like You-Know-Her and Bubba "all about me" Bill doing the dirty work of the Republicans in trying to undermine our efforts. I support Senator Obama and applaud his efforts to open a genuine discussion of divide-and-rule fascism and what we must do to erradicate it in America, even if he has approached the subject in far-too-tender terms to suit my wishes.