As with all of my friends here at the Planet, I was elated last night when President Barack Obama was trusted with four more years to finish what he had started and to lead this country.  I had a very difficult time falling asleep last night because I was so hungry for information on several Senate and House results and also the propositions here in California.  I won some and lost some but I think the most satisfying victory is that the nation agreed that America is not for sale nor is Democracy.  I have to say I was very worried about that, I think it probably caused the most distress I felt about this election.  Would the nation stand up and say NO to the oligarchs who are trying to buy this country for themselves?  Well I see I should have had faith all along.  Of course that is easy to say today but one thing is different, I truly realize that a nation of people who do not remain vigilant and protect that democracy, risk the possibility of losing it all.  I also have faith that others are feeling the same way.

Going forward I wonder if the Supreme Court or the Elite in this country will get the message.  Will they realize that working together is the answer and creating an atmosphere where you divide the nation is not healthy for anyone?  Will they continue to grasp for that brass ring on their merry-go-round reaching for greater power?  Will they continue to want only what is good for them and not the country as a whole?  Six billion dollars was spent on this election.  How much better off would this country have been if that money had been put back into the growth of this nation?  I am not excusing the politicians here either, they bought into the billions for election as my inbox would attest.  I also have to say I lost a great deal of respect for the parties as a whole as they continued to bombard me with pleas for more money based on scare tactics.(yes i subscribe to both parties so I know what is going on on both sides)  I get it that they were just trying to protect their turf, but I still wish they could have remained above the fray and sent a message to the powerful that elections cannot be bought.  Upon reflection that still bothers me even though the outcome was in my favor.

One thing I did learn was that social media is a powerful tool to get the message out.  I spent days pouring over the McCain campaign dossier on Mitt Romney and posted hundreds of comments to Facebook and Twitter.  Both media were excellent for getting the truth out but they were also the home of many lies and distortions.  Overall I believe they presented opportunities for many people to learn what was at stake and what the media was not going to tell us.  Speaking of the media, in my humble opinion, BIG FAIL….HUGE.  just like the powerful they used tactics to drive viewership, not truth.  The fifth column in this country needs to look at themselves as well.  From Wiki:

A fifth column is a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group, such as a nation, from within. A fifth column can be a group of secret sympathizers of an enemy that are involved in sabotage within military defense lines, or a country’s borders.  A key tactic of the fifth column is the secret introduction of supporters into the whole fabric of the entity under attack. This clandestine infiltration is especially effective with positions concerning national policy and defense. From influential positions like these, fifth column tactics can be effectively utilized, from stoking fears through misinformation campaigns, to traditional techniques like espionage.

That pretty accurately describes the Media’s failure in this campaign.  I sincerely hope that they will reflect and change their ways, but I am not confident that will happen.  In retrospect I have to say that Planet POV and all of you here were so helpful in allaying some of my fears.  I know I have not been on the site a great deal, but all of you understood the risks, so many on Twitter and Facebook did not and I hope I did my small part to inform.  During the process I met a lot of new people and I am sure made a few enemies but friends are way more important.  When the  chips were down and important activities happened, I always found my way to the Planet.  I want to thank all of you and especially the administrators of this site for keeping it up and running and providing the unique real time open thread.  The Planet will continue to be my home and over the next four years I hope we all share the good things to come and inform each other on the not so good things that may come our way.  Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.  Oh and President Obama?  I still have your back.

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Questinia
Member

I realized after the second debate when the media did not handily call the “winner” Obama that they were out of their minds and shouldn’t be listened to.

But none of us really are in the position to gauge what is “real” are we? We feel we can transcend and get a better view through massive intake of granular and meta info but that can only lead us farther astray.

The big issue for me was the clash of national consciousness and whether we were a small and frightened people or a group of people who possessed the desire for the kind of country that was reflected in someone like Obama when we first voted for him. We are the change and we are more in charge than we may think we are, at least of our own take on things and how we respond to them.

agrippa
Member
agrippa

The media is a failure.
It is not about news, facts and logical analysis.
It is about something else. It is mostly about entertainment and selling an audience to advertisers.

The entertainment includes: sensationalism, pandering. Those things, among others, delivers the audience to the customer.
The audience is not the customer; the audience is the product.

KillgoreTrout
Member

agrippa, you are absolutely right. The media has turned politics into some sort of new, weird sport. Sports are entertaining and really offer no or very little opportunities for rational thought. Sports are guided by emotion, and as we know, emotion limits critical thinking.

Emotion is also a huge factor in the success of propaganda, namely fear. The GOP and their media accomplices use fear very effectively. If it weren’t for “The Fear Factor,” Bush II would never have been reelected to a second term.

AdLib
Admin

Fifth Columnists indeed, Sue.

The problem with nailing the RW plutocrats for their racism, their traitorous actions or their terrorism is that they have already kind of insulated themselves from such accurate descriptions by pre-attacking their adversaries as being all of the above…for attacking them and their agenda.

The Repub strategy is to always accuse your adversary of your own sins and attack them for their strengths. Haven’t we had enough of that? Haven’t we figured out that ploy?

It’s time to call racists, liars and class warfare driven plutocrats exactly what they are and let the chips fall wherever they may.

PatsyT
Member
KQµårk 死神
Member

Indeed Patsy.

PatsyT
Member

Well you can try to buy it, but thank goodness, this time, the deal for Romney fell apart.

choicelady
Member

Wonderful post, Girlfriend! I think you remember that well over a year ago I was thumping the drum for ‘Get out there! Register voters! Drive them to get ID! PAY for it if you have to! Then drive ’em to the polls!” And that is EXACTLY what happened.

I was watching Leo Gerard, President of the United Steelworkers, who put his folks out walking precincts. I spent my weekend on phone banks in the Sac Labor Council. I had door hangers when I got home from candidates AND on issues. The people phoning were everybody – white, Black, Latino, old, young, male, female. It was so cool! They are my fave folks – and this is RIGHT in the middle of a strike at a supermarket, too. But they never stopped. Worked right up to 6 pm yesterday. GREAT people!

We went back to basics. We have not got billions in money – but we have millions of PEOPLE. And we had to know that what works is – WORK. And we did it. And we won.

Now I suspect the RW plutocrats will take away this message – WE LOST! THAT MEANS WE DID NOT SPEND ENOUGH!!! OUR MESSAGES WEREN’T MEAN ENOUGH!!!

Well, I love what a Black preacher taught me once: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you always got.”

They failed. They will fail again. We won – so we will win again. You cannot get where you want to be by doing what did not work the first time. Even progressives think you can win by doing the losing thing BIGGER.We know we win by doing the right thing all of the time.

You have real people standing up for themselves. You have real candidates hearing that and responding. That is what wins.

For forty years too many of the progressives have sat on their butts and wanted an Imperial president to save them. And they let a lot of what occurred happen. We, the REAL people, have been out doing what needs doing, and we cannot stop, we cannot sit back, we cannot let the passivity of the left and the power hunger of the right become the mainstream again.

We can keep the power if we want to. But it will take eternal vigilance. Now and always. Democracy is a right, but it’s also a gift, and it needs tender and eternal care. No slacking off!

KQµårk 死神
Member

Spot on an as eloquent as usual CL.

Like Patsy posted the White House is the one you cannot buy.

But of course the GOP will learn all the wrong lessons AGAIN. George Will just thinks the GOP needs to employ tokenism and nominate someone like Rubio. Base Republicans think they just need to nominate a REAL conservative. They have not learned that even though teabaggers are like 2-10 the last two election even at the Senate level that America is not buying radical conservatism (sure and oxymoron but we are talking about the batshitecrazy GOP). Last but not least like you said the GOP will still think they can win with another plutocrat. They just need a better salesman to be the plutocrat. Damn the torpedoes (real issues) full steam ahead.

Kalima
Admin

Wonderful article Sue, looks as if we were thinking along the same lines about CU and the moneybags losers.

No, thank you Sue, we might be the glass, but you are the fine wine keeping us alert and informed with your wonderful insight into the dark side, and we are eternally grateful for that. Cheers!

I found this interesting.

50 States/Results

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/2012-election/50states-results.html?wpisrc=nl_fix

And this.

Unraveling secret money in California

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-unraveling-secret-money-in-california/2012/11/06/de91c954-2851-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_story.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

kesmarn
Admin

[img]http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/75940_470897336293938_620765265_n.jpg[/img]

Sue, we owe you a debt of gratitude as well. I think you were among the very first people here to sound the alarm about the dangers associated with and the agenda of the religious right. You picked up on that before many others did.

Thought you might be interested in these post-election reflections by our friend Frank Schaeffer:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2012/11/do-christians-have-something-better-to-do-than-spending-the-next-4-years-hating-and-lying-about-president-obama-the-way-they-did-for-the-last-4-years/

KQµårk 死神
Member

Kes that is the cutest thing ever.

kesmarn
Admin

Unlike Romney, he is a baby-magnet. Even through the screen.

KQµårk 死神
Member

Excellent piece Sue. The good guys won despite all the efforts on the dark side.

Indeed the media is wholly complicit for what went on during this election. Faux News and right wing radio was just a continual ad for the GOP. I hate to say at least prime time MSNBC was about the same. Of course the big difference was that the right wing media was selling an inferior product and MSNBC was endorsing a good product. CNN was simply the definition of corporate MSM but by keeping pundits like Erick Erickson they proved they want to lean right.

One of my biggest disappointments is how Gallup joined Rasmussen in being propagandists using their influential polling firms to forward the right wing media’s delusions. For Gallup to have Romney ahead by 5 points a couple days before the election and for both Gallup and Rasmussen to be tied for the 24th most least accurate polling firms was part of the propaganda machine. Both polling firms had obvious bias toward Republicans on the order of 3+ points which is huge in such a close election with so many polls.

However nothing was worse than the media letting Romney and the right wing getting away with so many lies. Romney will go down as the most mendacious general election candidate in modern history with not just flip flops on every single major issue but continuous lies about the President’s record. I’m not naive. All campaigns spin and stretch the truth but Romney ran a post truth campaign. But what should we expect from a candidate who lied about his name in his first debate during the primaries and in his first attack ad about Obama.

I wish I could say that Republicans or at least the media will do so honest soul searching but they will not.

No wonder 4 out of the top 6 groups you discuss also happen to have the highers percentage of psychopaths.

1. CEO
2. Lawyer
3. Media (TV/Radio)
4. Salesperson
5. Surgeon
6. Journalist
7. Police Officer
8. Clergy
9. Chef
10.Civil Servant

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-barker/which-professions-have-the-most-psychopaths_b_2084246.html