The Estrada-fication of American politics

We all remember former President Joseph "Erap" Estrada, the ninth President of the Republic of the Philippines. He of the famous one-liner, "Bill Clinton gets all the scandals, I get all the girls." Or something to that effect.

He uttered another famous line, this one during his wildly successful campaign for the Philippine presidency in 1998. He said, I'm paraphrasing: "We Filipinos have tried all the brilliant politicians already. All we got out of them were brilliant ways of stealing from the government." Filipinos loved this and elected him in a landslide, with Filipinos largely ignoring the fact that the movie actor Estrada was a high-school dropout whose heroism and love for the common man was on display only in the movies.

What the Philippines got during the three years Estrada sat in power were dumb ways of stealing from the government. His idiotic ways eventually resulted in his resignation from office while the people literally were storming his Palace and he had to flee for his life. Prior to his resignation from office, he had been impeached by the Philippine Congress and he was later convicted of plunder of the Philippine treasury.

He is the only Philippine President who was ever impeached by Congress and charged with the crime of plunder. Even though in comparison to the late Ferdinand Marcos, Estrada's plunder accomplishments were puny. When the dumb steal from the government, they take very little, hoping that their crime will be considered a misdemeanor. Marcos, of course, is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the number one plunderer of government funds of all time, even though Marcos' stolen billions (in dollars) have not been recovered. The late Marcos was brilliant.

But this piece is not about corruption in government, though that is always topic number one whenever people all over the world talk about the Philippines.

I am reminded of Estrada every time I turn on the TV these days. America has made a decisive turn towards philistinism and it's reflected in our politics. The Tea Party is an illustration of this surly and visceral disaffection with cerebral governance and an unabashed embrace of the uneducated leaders of the angry mob.

The mood had been building up over the years. First, we noticed that the brilliant minds in business were using their above average intelligence and Ivy League diplomas to figure out ways to starve the labor movement in America by shipping jobs to foreign countries. Americans were being laid off by the thousands, then by the millions and factories were being opened up in India, China and other foreign countries. It was brilliant, and the multinational companies that shipped jobs overseas were richly rewarded with fantastic stock market successes.

Second, the brilliant and creative Ivy Leaguers in Wall Street securitized worthless mortgages and sold them to the public, to institutions, to banks and other financials, and this led to near-bankruptcy of the the country's financial system.

Third, the brilliant among us figured out ways of spending money that the country did not have, issuing IOUs to China, Saudi Arabia and other countries, effectively mortgaging the future of Americans yet to be born to the tune of $121,000 each. Each future American now owes that amount on the day they are born. They each will be coming into this world $121,000 in the hole.

The collective brains of the best and brightest individuals of this country, it appears to a lot of Americans these days, have been used not to reach for an even higher standard of living for Americans but to squander away the legacy of all our forebears who have built this country into the greatest democratic experiment in the history of man, the most successful social contract ever devised by human beings.

We have tried the brilliant minds among us, they have only led us to the brink. It is time, it seems to try those who are short on intellect but long on passion.

Enter Sarah Palin. This woman, when asked by CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric two years ago what books and magazines she had read, couldn't name one book, or one magazine. She went to four different colleges before earning her four-year college degree. She "wrote" a book that became a best-seller, despite the fact no one in America believes that she was remotely capable of writing a book.

Sarah Palin is America's version of Joseph Estrada. She is the ultimate anti-intellectual. She once claimed that she was qualified to talk about foreign affairs because she could see Russia from her front steps. She therefore was qualified to be a heartbeat away from the U.S. Presidency.

Her political soul-mates, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck of Fox News are all anti-intellectual clowns and buffoons, reminiscent of Joseph Estrada, the clown and buffoon of Philippine politics.

There is a viscerally anti-intellectual movement in this country - "The Harvard guys and gals have sold this country to the Chinese" - and it is evident in the rip-roaring sucess of the Tea Party movement.

Tea Party activists have sucked out all the oxygen from all other movements in this country. Such as the labor movement which is infinitely much more justified in crying foul after most manufacturing and back office jobs in America have been shipped to other countries. Only the Tea Party activists are being heard from these days. The insurgent youth in America, who swept Barack Obama into the presidency in 2008, are beleaguered. They are leaderless, they are dispersed, they are busy sending out resumes because the only jobs they can find after graduating from the most expensive U.S. colleges are as car wash attendants. There is a long line of applicants for every waiter and waitressing job in America's hotels, casinos and restaurants.

Only the Tea Party activists and radicals can find the time and do have the resources to march in the streets. These activists are mainly seniors and older Americans who have already built their nest eggs. That is why the only placards you see on TV these days are those comparing Obama to Hitler, those that declare Obama is a secret Muslim, those that claim Obama was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.

They are all angry at Obama, ignoring the fact that Obama has been able to turn the country around after Bush and the Republicans had taken it to the edge of the ravine. Why hasn't Obama restored the country to its pre-eminent economic position in the world after 19 months in office, they scream. He's had 19 months, why hasn't he done anything, they cry. They ignore the fact that the economic decline of America was years - decades - in the making and that the irresponsible deficit spending in the Bush years finally brought the country to virtual bankruptcy.

The leaders who are coming out of the Tea Party movement and who are being installed as the hot new leaders of the Republican Party are all anti-intellectual anti-heroes. Christine O'Donnell, who won the Republican primary for senator in Delaware, just recently graduated from college, despite the fact that she had been claiming for years that she was a college graduate. She apparently has dabbled in witchcraft and may have committed criminal offenses in the past, using campaign contributions to pay her rent and her many personal bills.

None of this matters to Tea Party activists who are fed up with the squeaky-clean, academically qualified and golden-resumed politicians. The Tea Party activists will embrace the passion of charismatic leaders like Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin, as long as they share the American people's revulsion for the bright boys and bright girls who have brought America to the brink.

Many American voters have become like the Philippine voters in 1998, when Joseph Estrada ran for president. Americans are fed up with the Ivy Leaguers and the so-called intelligentsia and are now on the verge of handing over the reins of government to the great unwashed, the intellectual peasants, the angry, empty drums that make the loudest noise, even when the noise does not make any sense. Anyone, or anything, as long as it is something that America has not tried or may have long rejected.

Consider what the Tea Party activists who have managed to hijack the Republican Party are promising to do if and when they win control of the U.S. Congress and Senate:

1. They will privatize Social Security, meaning they will invest working people's Social Security contributions in private investment accounts, effectively killing the Social Security program, which takes working people's contributions and gives those contributions to retirees.

2. They will scrap Medicare and Medicaid, which they say the country can no longer afford.

3. They will repeal the Health Care Reform bill that Obama signed into law early this year, effectively returning the country to the old system, when 50 million Americans were uninsured and Americans could be canceled out of health insurance plans when they got sick, or others could be denied insurance for pre-existing conditions, including unhealthy babies.

4. They will scrap the Department of Education, letting each state decide on the quality of education that is offered by states to their citizens.

5. They will force the Federal government to balance its books, knowing that the only way to do this is to make drastic cuts in government services and entitlements.

6. They will shut down the Federal government to starve it of funds, if that is the only way to enforce budget cuts.

7. They will make discrimination against minorities legal in private establishments, while continuing to make it illegal in government offices. Restaurants will be allowed to refuse service to people they don't want to serve, even if the restaurant owners are making the decision on the basis of race, sex, age or national origin.

8. They will investigate Obama to find out where he was really born. They refuse to believe that he was born in Hawaii despite the fact that Obama has produced a birth certificate documenting his birth in Hawaii and a newspaper account of his birth 48 years ago.

9. They will pass a law mandating that all candidates for President prove that they are natural-born citizens and a mere birth certificate is not considered proof of this.

10. They will give more tax cuts to the rich - the people who need the least amount of help from the Federal government.

11. They will starve "the Beast," the government that they consider the problem and not the solution. By starving "the Beast" they will assure that the government will not be able to afford to pay for all the entitlements that go to undeserving Americans, especially the unemployed Americans who have been "spoiled" by the system and are not going out and looking for jobs, electing to live off the unemployment compensation that they are getting from the government. The government that continues to pay them for sleeping and goofing off, claim the Tea Party activists.

12. They will apologize to British Petroleum and Big Oil for the government's "excessive" regulations. They will apologize to Big Business for the government's meddling in private business decisions.

13. They will reduce the number of regulations governing business in this country, for they believe in the wisdom of the markets. They believe that the markets are the only reliable source of solutions for whatever ails America.

14. They will display the Ten Commandments in government offices and demand that the country be returned to its Christian roots. They claim that the country was founded on Christian principles and the separation of church and state should never have become a pillar of the social contract.

If you think all or most of these positions are extreme, you are not alone. Most Americans disagree with the Tea Party activists at the very fundamental level. Yet, most Americans seem to think that the situation in this country is so bad, how much worse could it be if the Tea Party activists ascend to power?

Well, they are wrong. The frog found out very quickly what happened when he jumped out from the frying pan into the fire. The Cubans found out quickly that Fidel Castro was not the savior that they had been waiting for. The Germans found out too late that they could not control the Nazis and Hitler by merely surrounding them with normal people.

I am not comparing the Tea Party leaders to Hitler and the Nazis. The metaphor is narrow, applies only to the mistaken notion that it is ok to choose extremist leaders, as long as there are people who can force them to moderate their positions. This, history tells us, is an intellectual chimera. Those who choose to ride the tiger often end up in the belly of the beast.