I’ve never seen such a pitiful display of smug ignorance passing for political discourse as is currently going on here in the good old USA. Now that corporate America has managed to use their puppets in Washington, puppets that they bought with campaign contributions and five-course dinners, to convince the public that spending the public’s own money on health care, education, national parks, environmental protection, and energy conservation is un-American while the imperial war-without-end machine plods onward under the Stars and Stripes, little is left to the imagination. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so depressing. Tea-baggers are enraged about any plan that the Obama administration proposes, even to the point of questioning the validity of his birth certificate, while U.S. corporations impose a twenty-first century system of serfdom on the masses, distracted as they vote for the new American Idol. It’s bad to guarantee health care to everyone, which would result in a leveling of the economic playing field and a healthier, more secure and productive populace, but the movement of American jobs to the Third World goes largely unnoticed and completely unchallenged. Unions, which for decades took power away from robber barons and returned it to working men and women, are now an evil which must be eradicated. We fear “national security threats” from distant tyrants with exotic names, while the Smiths and Joneses of Wall Street rob us blind and vacation in the Caribbean with the spoils of their conquest.

What makes this scenario doubly disheartening is the fact that information about what truly moves and shakes in D.C. is readily available from a plethora of creditable and verifiable sources, all just a mouse click away. It’s no secret to those who read and explore that the entrenched big money (largely the GOP and their corporate sponsors) began a decades-long campaign to dumb down America, steal the support of the middle class with an orchestrated syllabus of dis-information, and cynically seize on the so called “values issues” (which few if any of the long-winded orators themselves truly embrace) to propel themselves into power after Nixon fell. Suddenly Ronald Reagan, grade-B actor, union-buster, Darwinian capitalist without mercy, and closet racist became the patron saint of a frustrated Middle America. It wouldn’t hurt so much if these merchants of misinformation actually believed in their own rhetoric, but they simply spew their company line in an effort to get reasonable government regulation off their collective back. That way, they can live their splendid life, replete with piggish consumption, arrogant bullying, and “God-fearing” self righteousness. They’re entitled, just look in yer Bible dere, Edith. Little pink houses for you and me, sprawling 25,000 square-foot estates for the dear born and the greedy.

The Democrats, whose modern role as enforcers of fair play began with FDR are no innocents in this affair. Several of the Dem bigshots currently overseeing health care reform are among the largest receivers of contributions from the corporations which stand to gain from nothing changing at all. Who can trust any of these lying bastards. They have taken a page from their so-called “adversaries” in the GOP, posing for family photo-ops while they “reach across the aisle” to get theirs. Anyone who is angry at Ralph Nader for spoiling the 2000 election should remember that: a) the election was literally stolen at the polls in Florida, b) the crown was placed on W’s head by the packed Supreme Court, and c) Nader and any other visible third-party candidate are the only hope for rescuing us from our current one party rule. The Dems and GOP don’t compromise, they collaborate. They don’t represent differing political opinions, just different tailors. They may sit on opposite sides of the aisle in Congress, but their first-class seats on the planes to their tony vacation retreats are right next to one another.

Nothing about the economic and social dynamics has fundamentally changed since the Middle Ages, except that we serfs and peasants now live in an illusion of classlessness, courtesy of credit cards, cable TV, the NFL, Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Fox News. The good life without soul, Christianity without compassion, freedom without purpose, and ignorance and pride dancing together at the ball. The Paupers’ Ball, that is. Most of us corn-fed yahoos couldn’t even get a job parking cars at the real dance. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never before have so few conned so many with so little. Ain’t that America. Incorporated.