The federal hand is elite, multi-racial, and corrupt beyond belief - do you agree?

That's why I am chagrined.

I am struggling valiently to square Old Joe's insistence that Obama's color doesn't matter to him with his curious inclusion of "multi-racial" in the parade of horrible adjectives he uses to describe the despised "federal hand."

Barring some catastrophic string of events I cannot foresee Republicans winning national elections or even doing well outside of their base states. How long will it be before centrists and conservatives in States outside of the Old Confederacy give up on the Republicans once and for all and start casting in new directions? Not long, I wager.

Here's why I'm not so sanguine about that. As early as the run-up to the 2010 midterm election, or perhaps not fully until the 2012 season, the media is going to seize in its unthinkingly vice-like crocodile jaws the impervious notion that the Republican Party is "due for a comeback," no matter its actual state or credibility. This has already been occurring, of course, on smaller scales, a recent Politico article about the GOP's resurgence being just one example. But it will get qualitatively worse as the elections near.

In what is perhaps the quintessential expression of American zombie-claw conventional wisdom, our vaunted and amply compensated political prognosticators will chant from behind their Elizebethan cakes of makeup that nothing matters as much as the need for and expectation of a pendulum swing to knock the uppity swagger from these impetuous libruls. With no vicarious blood orgy to be had in the triumphalist promotional marketing of a new war against Savages, and with the less bombastically "patriotic" party in power, the pundits' previous obedience to extended single-party domination will magically dissolve into a newly remembered love of "balance" in politics.

These disappearing/reappearing rules will, inescapably, take complete precedence over any substantive discussion of the political debates occurring between parties and candidates during the election seasons. The savagery, stupidity, hypocrisy, and rank incompetence of the Republican Party will be beckoned like small children to hide beneath the great ballroom dresses of our preening media stars as they waltz blithely toward another national calamity of their own making. The "winners and losers" section of every glossy political magazine and magazine news show will pulse and shimmer in the stultifying fluorescent lights of phony importance and false equivalence.

The burning need to gruesomely sacrifice another hapless virgin of national well-being to the imagined deities of "balance" will put our dead-eyed media elites into a sweaty, ritualistic frenzy impenetrable to every alien utterance. And why not? Sitting within their climate controlled box seats, high above the scrum and consequence of issues gone ignored or abused by their obsession with the toys of pettiness and triviality, when would they ever have to experience the destruction and devilry they treat as an equal adversary to those who actually seek to improve the neglected circumstances of those actually exposed to the reaped whirlwind?

But you simply cannot have a powerful and incorrupt government, and you cannot get rid of the wealthy.

Another irony: this from a person who in this same thread accused me of using a straw man.

Gotta go now.

GG tirelessly documents the complete corruption of your political process, from the President, the Congress, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the DoJ, and on down the line; and people here are prepared to go to the barricades in defense of putting healthcare into the hands of the most venallly corrupt and murderously indifferent government you have ever had, and THAT is going to make everything "OK"?

"Ironic" barely describes the fact that you can ask whether I "actually READ the 'ideas' presented here" while being apparently unaware that those also most opposed to the public option (or single-payer) are in fact some of the parties Greenwald and others have repeatedly described as corrupting the political process.

I think I speak for most liberals/progressives/whatever when I say that our complaint with the influence of economic elites over government isn't that government is being influenced or that it has powers that are worth influencing. After all, a healthy democracy, even a republic such as ours, depends on government being influenced from the outside in some way - otherwise it is little more than a dictatorship.

The problem we have is that only the most economically powerful ever seem to influence government anymore in the most consistent and meaningful ways - that again and again, attempts by popular masses to influence government are subordinated to an almost mechanistic process of narrow, wealthy interests winning each and every argument in which they participate.

Accordingly, the problem is, at its core, the disproportionate influence of money and power networks on public policy, not the fact that anyone would want to influence public policy in the first place. In light of this, the libertarian "solution" to make influencing government supposedly unattractive (by dramatically reducing its powers) completely misses the mark.