The Election March of the Trolls

• The corporate coup is over. We have lost. The trolls have won. We have to face our banishment.
• The Unacceptables
• Lesser-Evil Math Doesn't Compute: Freedom Plaza Has the Same Name as Tahrir Square

Chris Hedges, TruthDig

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Lydia Howell

Illustration by Mr. Fish

We have begun the election march of the trolls. They have crawled out of the sewers of public relations firms, polling organizations, the commercial media, the two corporate political parties and elected office to fill the airwaves with inanities and absurdities until the final inanity—the 2012 presidential election. Journalists, whose role has been reduced to purveyors of court gossip, whether on Fox or MSNBC, descend in swarms to report pseudo-events such as the Ames straw poll, where it costs $30 to cast a ballot. And then, almost immediately, they blithely inform us that the Iowa poll is meaningless now that Rick Perry has entered the race. The liberal trolls, as they do in every election cycle, are beating their little chests about the perfidiousness of the Democratic Party and Barack Obama. It is a gesture performed not to effect change but to burnish their credentials as moralists. They know, as do we, that they will trot obediently into the voting booth in 2012 to do as they are told. And everywhere the pulse of the nation is being assiduously monitored through polls and focus groups, not because our opinions matter, but because our troll candidates understand that by parroting back to us our own viewpoints they can continue to spend their days lapping up corporate money with other trolls in the two houses of Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court and television studios where they chat with troll celebrity journalists.

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Related:

The Unacceptables, William Rivers Pitt, Truthout

• And so begins again the Herculean task of wrapping my poor, abused mind around yet another crop of Faustian caricatures lined up to scrap and scrape for the Republican presidential nomination. They seem to get worse every year, but this time around, there are definitely a lot more bananas in the bunch.
• Michele Bachmann: Crazy Like a Fox
• All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure. -- Mark Twain

Lesser-Evil Math Doesn't Compute: Freedom Plaza Has the Same Name as Tahrir Square, David Swanson, Truthout

• There is one action that could put a stop to our downward political slide within four or eight years. We could all refuse to support candidates that make things worse than they were in the past, even if it risks allowing the greater of two evils to win an election or two. "Are You In?" they will ask us. "Are you Insane?" we will respond.
• The left has lost its nerve and its direction