Janet’s Tit, Outrage, Janet’s Tit, missing WMDs, Janet’s Tit, record concentrations of wealth and power, Janet’s Tit, Iraq, Abortion, Janet’s Tit

This hubbub over Janet’s tit is nothing more than a weapon of mass distraction. And it’s completely consistent with standard procedures used in American politics for many years.

Many of The Powers That Be use these faux-moral issues as smokescreens. If they (in this case, “they” means Michael Powell and others) can focus on this stupid little meaningless event, it means they don’t have to focus on the real issues facing this country. They’re too busy being outraged by Janet’s tit to spend any neuron power on the Bush regime’s lies and destruction, the fact that the global economy has concentrated more wealth to fewer people than ever before, etc. etc.

In an article in this month’s The Progressive magazine, Bernie Sanders writes:

So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what the Republican Party is all about.

They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers are taking their jobs–because of affirmative action. White against black.

If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive way, is a hatred of women. And they’re telling working class guys, you used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there are women running companies, women in politics, women making more money than you. Men against women.

And they’re turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country! Straights against gays.

And if you’re not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal doctrine of “preemptive war,” you’re somehow unpatriotic. And those of us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to destroy Christianity in America–and we get divided up on that. And on and on it goes.

The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical, poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can’t win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their own interests.

Sorry for the long quote, but this may be the most salient and succinct commentary on American politics I’ve seen in a long time.

America is still very much a Puritan culture, at least on the surface. How else can one explain the remarkable attention given to a breast, which I remind the reader that each of us has, being shown on television? Furthermore, this faux-Puritanical outrage being expressed over it is nothing more than political manipulation, designed to distract the masses from the real issues.

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