Ancient History

United Press, 1948
U.S. Information Agency/National Archives

Oh, for the days when Democrats turned defeat into victory. Instead of the other way around...

Now that Scott Brown has given the GOP a "41-59 majority in the Senate," it's a golden opportunity for Dems to lose even more seats, by moving even farther rightward.

The salivating of the media over Brown was disgusting, yet completely unsurprising. After all, who wants a Ted Kennedy working for a better country, when truck drivin' Republicans are the real Amurka.

And electing a guy you want to have a beer with—it's worked so very well before.

The degradation of any remaining pretense of democracy got a big boost from the corporate operatives who decided this one.

All during a month that began with the Underpants Bomber serving as the media's non-stop setup for a Republican narrative. And with airtime provided for Dana Perino and Rudy "9/11" Guiliani to claim there was no terrorism under Bush... It shouldn't be long before that version is in the Texas-approved history books.

Authentic US history lost a giant, with Howard Zinn's passing. Educated under the GI Bill: a fine example of why the owners oppose education for the masses.

Liberal NPR provides equal time for rabid spittle aimed at Zinn's corpse.

At least there was one bright spot in the month, with the vote to raise corporate taxes in Oregon—by an electorate, as Digby notes, very like the one in Massachusetts.

And it's encouraging that Scott Roeder was convicted, given the judge and venue. His handlers will see that he's made into a martyr, but we can hope that he doesn't again see the light of day.

The SOTU address was gratifying in terms of hearing Obama call out Republicans and the not-so-Supremes. Not so much, in terms of policies that 40 years ago would have been to the right of moderate Republicanism.

The same policies—and the continuation of Bush policies—that gets us nothing good, and gets Obama nothing but a media narrative of, "Biggest Socialist in History!"

Except for the media slant, this is just like the Bush years. And it takes as much constant effort to counter the narrative being pushed, the events being ignored, the celebrity doings placed in the forefront—just to try to keep a grip on sanity. The big difference between then and now: the media will endlessly dissect what they see as Obama's shortcomings.

And there's the relentness effort to eliminate truth from public life—as driftglass puts it, the reality of "living in an America where larger and larger chunks of recent and inconvenient history are just being whisked away with the giddy recklessness of a four-year-old who has just discovered lying."

Scott Horton unsweeps a previously whisked away story: the June 2006 "suicides" of three prisoners at Guantánamo. Horton reports a military whistleblower's grim evidence of torture and murder.

And Horton's story clarifies just why the commander, Rear Admiral Harry Harris, was in a hurry not only to call the sudden deaths "suicides," but also to insist they were "an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."