WWH~~ Wake'N'Bake 101: Hard Cheese

This just grates. The hed on a post from PoliticsUSA--"Real Liberal Politics ~~ No Corporate Money, No Masters--reads: New Economic Data Shows That The GOP Fooled America Again, June 3, 2011, By Ray Medeiros..."

Whereupon follows a workman-like, quotidian rehearsal of all the factors which SHOULD militate against "America" being fooled again by the dissembling shenanigans of the Right, in a tone of bemusement, as if astounded that the sheer weight of the CONTRARY facts should NOT be enough to overwhelm all but the most obdurate and adamantine of ill-informed resistances. Almost desperately, Medeiros implores:

"At what point will the American middle class realize that the Republicans do not have and never had a strong economic plan? The GOP has been repeating the same talking points over and over again for 30+ years. Aside for the social issues of gay marriage and abortion, the Republican Party offers absolutely nothing of substance for people in the middle class to grab hold of.

They've got a colorful, fact-filled, illustrative graph, and everything!

But the answer, of course, is "at NO point." Because the people aren't "fooled" by the GOP, they're 'willing' hostages to it in the way of a Stockholm-syndrome-attachment. They believe their own fate to be so closely aligned with the success or failure of their captors that they MUST comply, they MUST.

It seems to me improbable that people who have been loyal followers of the GOP doctrine since the good, ol' Raygun days, or since (20 of 30 years) are now going to repudiate everything they have expressly or tacitly endorsed--whether the arbitrary, opportunistic wars, or the impoverishment of the middle class and the disbanding of labor as a viable political force, or the re-indenture of women to patriarchal norms, or the frontal attacks on fundamental liberties--even when the results are clearly detrimental to their own prosperity and/or security.

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The technical name for this--the art of rewriting lyrics to a popular song to make it topical--is filk (vs. "folk") music. This is a "paradigm case." We've probably all done something like it, some time or other. This is a good'n!