MEDIA ROOTS — Some of us will do our best to counter the two-party dictatorship, recognising they are both financed by the same Wall Street, corporate, paymasters with the obvious attendant consequences.  Yet, due to the grip corporate media has on the minds of hundreds of millions of people in the U.S., the anger against non-two-party candidates isn’t just coming from the two-party establishment leaders, but from its constituent voters as well.

Glenn Greenwald quotes a Matt Stoller essay about how “the anger [Ron Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear.”  Greenwald continues, “Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.”

Ron Paul has been deemed “more progressive” than Obama on civil liberties issues by the ACLU, and his strict non-interventionist foreign policy views makes him a much stronger opponent against the military-industrial complex than the President.  However, most progressives are still going to vote for Obama this year, even though he “advocates views…liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.”

On New Year’s Eve, Greenwald cut through much of the U.S. Presidential Election spin cycle, as it further dumbs down the already embarrassing state of U.S. political discourse.  Our job is to understand our political process as clearly as possible in order to make informed decisions as voters.  To that end, this article is among the more thoughtful analyses of Election 2012 to date. 

MR

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SALON – As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture – obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.

Read more about Progressives and the Ron Paul fallacies.

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