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A very good rundown. I have an example of this going back to late childhood (being, as it were, a pink diaper baby). When I learned about the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hounding people for their political beliefs (in obvious contempt for the First Amendment), I took to calling them the House Committee of Un-Americans.
I was anything but alone in thinking like this. As the earliest Baby Boomers (just a few years older than me) came of age for political action, HUAC crumbled like a house of cards when people simply stopped cowering before it.
This is what it takes, really. Nothing elaborate, sophisticated and nuanced. Just utter ridicule and contempt.
Twenty years later, they made a comeback in a different form, racist Southern white preachers with an extreme makeover, passing themselves off as moral authorities--heading up the "Moral Majority" no less. And they've been at it ever since. Now with "left-wing" reinforcements from the likes Jim "John Locke Has Cooties" Wallis.
What these folks all have in common is that they are nothing but flat-out con-men, the exact opposites of whatever they claim to be--and what they claim to be is the very embodiment of the strengths they lack, whether those be patriotic love of America, Christian morality, common sense, tolerance, rationality, or even a sense of humor.
I used to try to explain to people that what we were up against were reactionaries--and reactionaries originally earned that name because they were reacting against the Enlightenment. Although this is historically true, it seemed a bit much to most folks, even folks on the left. But the wholesale attack on science we've seen erupt in the past 10 years pretty much proved my point, until....
Until Bush upped the ante by talking off after the Magna Charta. Which pretty much made the term "reactionary" too tame to describe what we're up against.
Which is why, for now at least, I'll go with "con-men." It doesn't take a college course in Western History to explain. It's short, and to the point. And everyone, unfortunately, has first-hand experience to draw on, so they know exactly what it means.
So, you want to know who we're ruled by in America today? Simple: it's a cabal of con-men.
And what's really pathetic is that every single one of their cons has already been exposed. Just look at them now, running the exact same con they used to get us to invade Iraq, with only one letter changed.
