One final news update--this one from the ground: as most readers will know from the international media, in the first round of primary voting yesterday in my home state of Arkansas, incumbent Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln ran dead-even against her challenger Lieutenant-Governor Bill Halter. Ms. Lincoln had the backing of former President Bill Clinton and current President Barack Obama. The campaign was nasty on both sides, with lurid ads that went beyond stretching the truth to outright lying--though I fault the Lincoln campaign more in that regard than the Halter campaign.
I'm interested in Jane Hamsher's take on the election at Firedoglake today. Hamsher thinks that many Arkansas Democrats are repudiating Lincoln because of her refusal to support the public option during the health-care reform process. I also suspect that many of us are tired of her capitulation to wealthy interest groups, and her attempt to convince the people she represents (we're poor, uneducated, and many of us are African Americans) that those groups have our own best interest at heart. When their real objective is to exploit us.
I think that there's, in general, a diffuse sense of rage in the air in this part of the country right now, which has several roots. One of those roots is, sad to say, the deep, historic racism of many white citizens. For whom having a black man in the White House is unthinkable.
Another root is, as I've noted, that we're generally an impoverished state with low levels of education. That makes us sitting ducks for those who want to use us in battles we don't quite understand, because we lack the critical information necessary to help us understand.
Because we were perceived as a "swing" state in the health-care debate, with a number of blue dog Democratic political leaders opposed to health-care reform, we were inundated throughout the health-care deliberations with constant phone calls, letters, and television ads from both sides. We were inundated with disinformation and lies that many of us do not have the critical tools to see as disinformation and lies: Obamacare will put Granny to death; Obamacare will take your good health insurance and give it to illegal immigrants and lazy (read: black) people who don't work; Obamacare is socialism, etc.
Being inundated constantly with toxic lies when you do not have the skills to identify the information you're being given as lies, when you are economically deprived and economically vulnerable, elicits rage. And that rage is dangerous. It is dangerous for the particular area in which the unfocused, inarticulate, destructive rage of people who have a right to be angry but whose anger is misdirected has been stirred up.
And it is dangerous for the nation as a whole. Those bombarding the American people with a steady diet of toxic lies at present (read: most Republicans) are doing a tremendous disservice to the nation. They are undermining its future.
And the consequences of what they're doing will become tragically apparent, I suspect, in the fall elections.
(On a joyful note, a person I very much admire and am happy to call my friend, Judge Wendell Griffen, won a circuit judge seat last night. A note of hearty congratulations to him.)
