brendancalling wrote this,

"...i think the democrats are in danger too. Not because they're too liberal, and not because the GOP has found its way out of the wildnerness.

Because on so many issue, the Democrats have BECOME the GOP."

and I agree to a point.

I agree that the playground has one "political party"/bully with two faces. Whenever we vote for a politician whether Democrat or Republican, i.e., the ones that seem most likely to have a chance, they are - despite appearences - working for this bully. So, unfortunately, Obama said he was all for change and hope that things would be done to defeat the bully, however, it turned out, once in office, Obama does whatever the bully tells him to do.

The point of writing stories about the 'resurgent' Republican Party is to make it seem like those people who don't like to be beat up by the bully have somewhere besides the Democratic Party to go. After what the Bush people did to us as Republicans on behalf of the bully, and now that Obama seems to be continuing the same shake down, people have to have some kind of escape valve.

The Republican complaints about Obama,i.e., objections to Obama's health care reform, or Obama's response to the 'financial crisis,' support this understanding of what's going on. Instead of complaining that Obama is working to preserve the immoral profit-making that health insurance companies make on health care in this country, the Repubs complain, instead, that Obama is trying to impose socialized medicine on us, and that he would save money by having all the old and sick killed off in the process. They don't make real complaints about Obama because, deep down inside, they would do the very same thing he is doing. They work by the same corporate playbook that informs Obama.

Politico writers push the idea that Republicans have something to offer voters, (or last year, that Democrats had something to offer voters,)not because they have examined Republican arguments and found merit in them, but because they know that the bully wants to preserve the mythology that public participation in our political process could actually make things better for the public. They think that something has to be done to polish up Republicans because Democrats in control are so obviously traitors to the cause.

During the Vietnam war, I and many others became disenchanted with the Democratic Party as an agent of change. I had assumed that Democrats would stop the war. But, after awhile, it became apparent that the Democrats lead by Johnson and others were actually promoters of the war and the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about. As a result of this disillusionment I did not decide that I could go to the Republicans and find that they would stop the war when the Democrats wouldn't. I knew they could not be a "safe harbor" for war resistance because the Republicans were known as even more supportive of the looting and killing than the Democrats. So, as a consequence of this dilemma, the war was resisted independently of the political parties.

Politico writes about the resurgent Republican Party as an "agent of change" and a "champion of reform" in order to prevent an independent anti-war, civil rights, labor, or feminist movement. It was the same argument made on behalf of Obama and the Democrats and for the same reasons.

Glenn said this,

"...Many people (myself included) have been quite dissatisfied overall with the Obama presidency, but that hardly means that we hold the GOP in any less contempt or regard its return to power with any less horror. That is now the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Jeff Sessions, Dick Cheney and Bill Kristol. Dissatisfaction with the Obama administration is hardly going to drive anyone into their despised arms. A Republican resurgence is going to take much more than some slippage in Obama's approval ratings."

I think this is well understood by corporate policy analysts. Contempt for the Republican Party as represented by those Glenn mentions as well as the growing dissatisfactions with Obama, for reasons that Glenn himself articulates, I suspect, is creating a larger and more articulate independent political culture.

The prevention of any such independence must be one of the top goals in their notorious playbook. This is what motivates much of our mucking around in foreign countries. It must be a big concern of the same folks domestically.

They have a problem. The left opposes corporate control and so supports things like 'single payer.' The "Ron Paul libertarians" also oppose corporate control insofar as it promotes extra-constitutional government metastasis. Both these movements are sucking up these independent activists especially as the initial excitement has left Obama and he's become more corporate.

People will not be driven easily into the arms of the Republican Party. But the corporate analysts have to come up with some strategy to undermine their opposition's growing infrastructure on the internet and elsewhere. They have to suggest that the only viable alternative to Obama is some Republican effort, an effort that would be manipulable, or else risk this growing independent movement getting completely out of hand.

I also suspect there's a connection here with the criticism Mr. Todd made of Glenn. Glenn's concerns about 'torture' and promoting prosecutions were said to be idealistic, meaning unrealistic. This argument is also directed more broadly at any independent criticism of the bully. That is, people like the Politico writers and Chuck Todd are saying, you may not like the bully-run playground, but your idealistic "aimed at us from 30,000 feet" criticisms won't get you anywhere. There's no other place to play. You have to play by the bully's rules, or don't play at all.