The Sunshine Empire

The conservative movement and the Republican party argued their case before the American people almost a year ago in November and lost by nearly 10 million votes. Faced with defeat they began to claim that in fact President Obama was not even legitimate with the beginning of the infantile “birther” movement. Hundreds of armchair economists claimed that the market meltdown in the winter of this year was nothing but the market rejecting President Obama’s policies, but were left speechless and lacking credibility when the market cracked 10,000 again. They used their television network to attempt to frame small lobbyist funded marches as some kind of national groundswell of discontent against the Obama administration. They also sent people screaming into town hall meetings across the country and declared that Obama had been mortally damaged in the polls. After all of this President Obama’s approval rating and Democratic fund raising actually went up. Left with nothing and still having approval ratings virtually the same as prior to the 2006 and 2008 elections, they have now resorted to Newspeak.

In George Orwell’s classic 1984, war is peace. People in this dystopian future are also told that ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery. This is newspeak. Conservatives everywhere are now speaking it fluently with the arguments against net neutrality. Net neutrality used to be a benign movement meant to keep large service providers from developing a tiered system of service where they would give differing amounts of access and different speeds depending on who is paying. A perfect example would be if Comcast completes a deal with GE to buy NBC Universal. In this scenario let’s say all Comcast customers would be given quicker access to sites like MSNBC.com, and would have Foxnews.com and Drudge Report either slowed to a crawl or barred outright. Net neutrality would ensure that such a practice could never occur. You would think that conservatives would welcome such a guarantee of the rights of access. But in Obama’s America if the administration takes an action then it must be opposed to destroy Obama.

Faced with a moment of cognitive dissonance conservatives have decided to employ newspeak. They are simply claiming that net neutrality is something the exact opposite of what it is. Companies like Google and organizations as rightward leaning as the Christian Coalition have show support for the idea, but congressional Republicans have resorted to claiming that it’s an internet version of the fairness doctrine meant to force liberal views on poor conservatives. Some also claim that preventing service providers from barring content to the web user because it may come from a political or business adversary would reduce broadband investment. This has been debunked but conservatives and Becktards are stating that an effort to provide more access is actually an effort to restrict access.

Saying anything in a desperate attempt to paint Obama as some kind of creeping despot is not improving the political fortunes of Republicans in any way. Eventually all of us would like to hear of actual new ideas from Republicans and the wingnut right. Until then they seem content to simply engage in childish newspeak. It works well for Fox News rating but continues to fall flat in reality land.

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