Lighting backfires, pulling fangs? It’s backfiring! –Robert M. Shelby, 9-24-10.

High in the politico-economic stratosphere, ultra-right strategists pull GOP strings while jump-starting the Tea Parties. Striving to control both ends of the play, they pulled a flanking maneuver on Democrats by faking conflict within their own ranks. Strangely, they fell prey to the Law of Unforeseen Consequence. The fakery turned real. Conflict broke out in primaries all over the country between GOP candidates, Tea Party candidates and write-in candidates. It begins to look silly. The Democrats will benefit considerably from right-wing confusion. All that steamy anger may go to waste. It starts to look like Whitman and Fiorina will go down, no matter what they spend. The strategists can’t be very happy.

It started with elite manipulators and their Machiavellian hirelings like Karl Rove and co-conspiratorial sympathizers like Dick Armey  with some FOX News executives. Ten years ago they lit a backfire against popular revolt that could have flared up after the 2000 debacle in Florida, by starting to map states by party dominance in red and blue. Taking red to represent Republican electoral majorities, it seems they supposed that reversing color symbolism would reduce chances of people identifying themselves with revolutionary traditions. It scares them that Marxist socio-political analysis remains largely valid in spite of the fact that Marxist economic models went belly up like the passenger pigeon.

In this election cycle, the ultra-right elite (up in the clouds where they’ve had little better than third-hand contact with folks farther down the food chain) decided to raise a “grassroots” movement against democracy and whole-society progress by taking advantage of right-wing chagrin at losing their imagined power. Fueled by the anger of  loss, plus denial of Obama’s right to govern, they couple their anger and denial with a nearly universal disappointment among voters, including progressives, at the slow pace and incomplete results of (1) economic recovery and (2) fulfilling hopes for Democratic reform.

The various Tea Party groups grope toward convincing the public that they are the Great Engine of the Republican Party as well as the True Revolution in American politics. We seldom hear more malarkey coming from the Right-Wing than just now, but it is always the same, old stuff. “Open hand for me, tight fist for you.” “I inherit all, you earn nothing.” “I work smart, you’re lazy and dull.” No number of facts can change their views. They pretend an 1820s, frontier mentality, but few of them, or us, would make the grade back there.

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