With all due respect, I am sure I heard the line about "con"gress being the opposite of "pro"gress from Gallagher. I can hear that southern twang of his as I think of it. I think he said it on the special where he had the giant grey couch he pulls out about halfway thru the show. That would have been around 1985 give or take.
I’ll try to keep this brief, but I think the reason you see more lies and propaganda from the far right than the far left is that the far right is so much better funded and organized. You’ve got people like the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, Foster Freize (sp?) and the hedge fund billionaires, vulture capitalists, etc pouring billion$ of dollars into organizations with innocuous sounding names like “Americans For Prosperity” and “Club For Growth” and likely dozens of other front groups all over the country, all towards the purpose of manipulating unsophisticated blue collar people into voting against their own economic well-being by playing on fear, xenophobia, racism. Divide and conquer.
George Carlin says on his album “Jammin’ In New York” at the beginning of the track “Little Things We Share”, “That’s how the ruling class operates in any society, they try to keep the lower and the middle classes fighting with each other while they the rich run off with all the money. Fairly simple thing, happens to work.”
Remember around the same time the Tea Party took off a group called Occupy Wall Street began as well (We. . . Are. . . The 99%). Well, the Tea Party is still around but Occupy Wall Street faded away, (in my opinion) largely because Occupy Wall Street didn’t have any billionaire sugardaddies to fund and organize and sustain them.
Although Lewis Black did have some praise for the Tea Party leadership. He said, “If you can convince a group of people, who barely have a pot to pixx in, that the RICH shouldn’t be TAXED. . . THAT is leadership!”
When you have two people, one, two. TWO people, spending at least $886 million dollars on one campaign, that is not freedom of speech, that is a BUSINESS INVESTMENT. I guarantee you that if their handpicked candidate gets in the White House, they are going to expect a big return on that investment, and I am quite sure that there is nothing on their agenda that is going to benefit anyone who earns a living by the sweat of his or her brow.
Please accept my apologies for being off-topic, but this seems to be the rare place on the internet where these ideas can be discussed intelligently without devolving into empty name calling on both sides. I, for one, really enjoy reading these exchanges of ideas, and hope that I am making an intelligent contribution as well.