because it works

The American political community's cohesion has been seriously compromised by the cynical tactics that makes co-operation and compromise difficult. The huge amounts of money at the disposal of those who use these tactics to gain and maintain control may well be the means by which our Constitutional republican form of government will be destroyed. Money = speech, indeed.

One of these tactics is the smearing of people, getting them fired or forcing them to resign. Once that happens the idea is "reload and repeat"--to move on to a new target. The basis for the attack is always a distortion of an actual situation and the person upon whom the heat is being raised most recently is Kevin Jennings, who works at the Education Department.

The whole right wing propaganda apparatus is repeating the distortion about him over and over, ginning up demand from Congress and the base to fire him. If this plays out as it has in previous situations, the palaver over Mr. Jennings will soon be such a distraction that he will resign (and have his reputation ruined, in the process).

(Note: one of the sites to which I link, above, has had the integrity to correct a crucial, germane and material factual error in its original smear report--congratulations to Fox News--and the other--shame on you--Human Affairs for proving you don't care about truth only about what works to whip up your base--has not.) (Yes, Fox News corrected a factual error that discredits the substance of its report!)

Here is a fact check on the substance of this situation.

But the resignation for which the smear artists are howling will not end the distraction because the distraction is the point. There is a lot of good stuff going on in the Department of Education at the moment and a lot of it is not to the liking of big piles of money that fuel "conservatism" today. All the babble about "homosexual agenda" is a cover for the Obama administration's efforts to strengthen public education--a prime target of the right for economic and religious reasons. The point of all this is to discredit those efforts and slow down change we can believe in to improve education rather than let it disintegrate and be replaced with Christian schools for the lower middle class and classy college prep schools for the wealth (there is no middle class in the right wing vision).

The secondary benefit of all this to right is, of course, to discredit the Obama administration in general.

So, the Lily, today to the New York Times, who can accept the award on behalf of those to whom I linked above and all the rest it it joins in creating the cacophony of distortion that repeated enough times become believed by enough to people to give them the successes they are after--to stop education reform and keep public schools crippled until they die for lack of support and to pull the Obama administration down..

In the long run these "successful" tactics will create, if they have not already, a country that is not governable except by by dictators and the charlatans they employ to keep the lies coming.

When pulling the community apart becomes the means to govern then the republic is dead and the country will have moved into a new phase. We are near that now.