>But do you really think
>that raising the FICA ceiling significantly is going to get through
>Congress? And do you really think that bringing up the whole topic of
>SS reform is anything but red meat for the austerity crowd? This
>invokes some version of Matthew Dowd's law - that if you argue against
>us and you're using our language, then we're still on top.
There's also this from Zizek that Dwayne reminded us of during the torture thread:
We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second negation, the "decent" democratic center, in the very gesture of pathetically rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-between, the ENTIRE FIELD of background "unwritten rules" has already changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that the anti-democratic threat is over. And the true danger is that something similar will happen with the "war on terror": "extremists" like John Ashcroft will be discarded, but their legacy will remain, imperceptibly interwoven into the invisible ethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the mainstream.
from -- <<http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>http://www.lacan.com/iraq.htm>