scout: we're not talking about a perfect world. we're talking about an actually functioning democracy. which the united states has no relation to.
want a good idea of what the direct drivers are of this new demonstration of the wreckage of the american system?
here are two of the weekly news coverage weeklies but out by pew research center's project for excellent in journalism.
have a look for example at the skew in the amount of time devoted by cable outlets to this issue at the expense of almost all other aspects of reality.
have a look at the analyses of the actions of conservative media personalities in the context of the 24/7 infomercials for rightwing politics that fox etc fob off as information:
Anger and Rancor Fuel Cable?s Health Care Coverage | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
Health Care, Afghanistan Emerge as the Summer?s Big Stories | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)
what does disabling debate as part of a deliberate strategy imply about how the populist right sees democratic process?
that's easy.
they have contempt for it.
you see the same thing in this thread---there's no possibility that, say, ace would recognize much less accept a refutation of his arguments. it's all just shuck and jive with the sole objective of making him feel whatever--because at this point, it's all about "feeling"---by making rational discussion about health care, and about the actions of the populist right in trying to break down any semblance of it, almost impossible. in the end, the stream of badly argued, ill-considered trivia that he's been posting functions to perform one of the objectives of all this conservative horseshit: they have nothing to say, but want to be sure that even though that's the case, the situation is all about them.
i've said it before, this is about news cycles, not about substance.
this is about narcissism, not about politics.
if anything, the right is willing to try to smother the idea of the political by rendering it a space of endless garble. they must find something comforting in generating an image of an irrational polity, even as they create it. what's comforting is that the irrational polity is all about them. they get the media exposure for their actions (compare the amount of press these people are getting as against the amount that protests against the bushwars got...try it)...
it's infantile.
and this is what they seem to want.
make an infantile polity that will someday be Saved by a Charismatic Leader.
one of the things that Charismatic Leader will do, no doubt, is officially sanction even more empty blah blah blah about america and freedom and how everyone wants to come here to the land of self-dominating infants, democracy and Heroic Individuals.
maybe that's all conservatives want, nice words to tell themselves while in their daily lives they actively participate in their own domination by trying to disable the central mechanisms that might check it.
go figure.