Mr. Moderate

According to this article on the CNN web site, Rush Limbaugh spoke Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington DC, where he continued to display his deliberate confusion over the founding documents of our government. According to that CNN article, Rush said this:

We love and revere our founding documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We believe that the preamble of the Constitution contains an inarguable truth, that we are all endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, freedom — and the pursuit of happiness.

For the record, here is the actual preamble of the Constitution of the United States of America:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Rush was confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, whose text includes the words Rush attributes to the Constitution:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Continue reading ‘Rush Limbaugh Is STILL A Big Fat Idiot!’ »

Anybody who believes we ought to just adopt the proposal put forth by Secretary Henry Paulson needs to study the “Mega-Million Dollar CEO Payouts” article from ABC News. Look for Henry Paulson under Goldman Sachs. Secretary Paulson was paid nearly $164 million by Goldman Sachs when he left to become the Secretary of the Treasury. I’m sorry, but that smells an awful lot like a pre-bribe, given that Paulson made a “mere” $4 million the year before and only about $12 million the year before that.

Can anybody honestly believe that there isn’t going to be a good chunk of the $700 billion bailout going to help Paulson’s friends at Goldman Sachs? Even if it is just $7 billion of good taxpayer money going to Goldman Sachs, that is still a pretty good payoff for a $164 million “pre-bribe.” I rather strongly smell a rat, and I’m a long way from Washington DC!

Let me begin by quoting the final words of my previous blog post:

The Republican kleptocrats have probably stolen over $1 trillion this time around, and the United States is hovering ever closer to bankruptcy as a consequence. How much more taxpayer wealth are we going to allow them to suck out of the Treasury before we decide that deregulation is the real source of this fiasco? I don’t know, but it sure seems to me that the American voters just don’t get it (yet)!

In a fine above-the-fold article in USA Today, David Lynch notes that the seeds of the recent meltdown on Wall Street were sewn back in 1999 with the repeal of key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933:

By the time of the 1990s boom, the financial services industry was campaigning to repeal Glass-Steagall, arguing that foreign rivals were hobbled by no similar restraints. In 1999, Congress assented.

“The pressure was so great that Congress really couldn’t resist it,” says economist Peter Bernstein. “Nothing really bad had happened since 1982, and those bad things that did happen were transitory.”

If important financial institutions failed, market participants and lawmakers alike felt that market forces could restore order on their own, with only minimal government aid.

Maybe they were wrong.

It isn’t just that they were wrong. This isn’t a case of bad judgment. This is a case of deliberate theft where these large financial institutions effectively socialized their risks while privatizing their profits, as many commentators have noted, among them Professor Nouriel Roubini in his recent blog post. Roubini is referenced in the Lynch article:

Former White House economist Nouriel Roubini, who forecast the current financial storm two years ago, has a harsher verdict. He says the USA is turning into “the United Socialist State Republic of America.”

Those may seem like harsh words to use on alleged “conservative” politicians. However, as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, there is actually very little overall difference between communism and fascism, so it isn’t surprising that a fascist Republican Party would act to socialize those business entities they feel they need to preserve in order to continue ruling the nation.
Continue reading ‘Welcome to the Fascist States of America!’ »

Few people today will realize that one effect of the Reagan Revolution was to convert the government of the United States into a kleptocracy. Now, the United States doesn’t have the usual form of a kleptocracy, which is actually denounced by the President’s Statement on Kleptocracy. In the usual form of kleptocracy, the higher the rank of the leader (up to and including the highest ranking leader of the nation), the greater the amount of ill-gotten gains which end up in the leader’s own personal bank account. That sort of thing is just a bit too obvious for politicians in the United States as the voters still have a bad habit of usually tossing out any politician who is stained with corruption. (There are, of course, exceptions to any such rule.)

The United States has a very indirect form of kleptocracy. While in office, most politicians will only receive campaign contributions from the thieves who stand to gain from the government. However, once they are retired from political office, they will receive large advance payments for a book or books they intend to write and they will receive additional large payments for speaking at meetings of (largely) thieves and others who have benefitted from the policies followed by the former office holder. But of course, there are many ways around the usual restrictions. The boldest is to simply direct the payoff to a spouse or family member, usually through the grant of a job or participation in a “sweetheart deal” where the outcome is virtually guaranteed. Many current political campaigns have accusations of this sort buried somewhere within them. And this isn’t really new. Just research the television holdings of Lady Bird Johnson and ask yourself if being married to Lyndon Johnson had anything at all to do with her owning those lucrative franchises.

The so-called “Keating Five” scandal gives us another look at how high level politicians can be bought and paid for by high level crooks. Charles Keating used political contributions and the influence they purchased to shield his crooked bank dealings from investigation by federal bank regulators.
Continue reading ‘Republican Kleptocracy’ »

While the modern Republican Party likes to claim the mantle of conservativism for itself, in fact it is about as far away from actual conservativism as it can get while still being absolutely against socialism and communism. As I explain in my earlier essay, this makes the Republicans into the modern fascist movement.

What makes the modern Republicans distinct from the fascists of old is that the fascists of old emphasized street violence to intimidate the body politic into granting them political power while the modern Republican fascists emphasize lies and propaganda in order to gain and retain political power. Another great distinction is that the fascists of old were truly interested in the success of the nation as a whole, while the modern Republican fascists are mostly interested in crookedly enriching the wealthy mob which provides the money to keep the Republican Party viable in American politics.

In his seminal book on conservativism, The Conscience of a Conservative (see the ad to the left), Barry Goldwater defined the essence of conservativism as an adherence to the principle of extremely limited government, particularly at the federal level. And the conservative philosophy, as defined by Goldwater, also contains a very strong streak of libertarianism. Today (2008), the libertarian conservatives, as represented by Bob Barr and Ron Paul, are largely abandoning the modern Republican Party precisely because the modern Republican Party has abandoned its commitment to individual liberty. True conservatives would be aghast at the huge databases of financial and personal information about every American that our government has accumulated as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” When I was part of the Republican movement myself back in the 1970s, personal privacy, particularly financial privacy, was a top concern. While true conservatives are strongly anti-crime, many were also quite upset at what the federal government was doing as part of the War on Drugs to control the health care options available to people. And, in the 1970s and 1980s, I largely agreed with the political and economic views expressed by the extreme conservative right wing as written in publications such as The Spotlight.

Where the Republican Party took a wrong turn is when it abandoned true conservativism and instead married the religious right. This was a pure power play, as true conservativism has never been a popular movement within politics. In fact, the individualism inherent in true conservativism is almost the antithesis of “a movement.” In other words, it is virtually oxymoronic to conceive of a mass political movement made up of truly conservative individuals.
Continue reading ‘Republicans: Liars & Crooks’ »

In my last post, I described why the Republican Party is a modern-day fascist party. In this post we will look at John “Il Duce” McCain and his current campaign for President of the United States and compare that with the advent of past fascist regimes, particularly that of Benito Mussolini. The key parallel is control over the media (or “press” in the days of Mussolini) and the use of intense propaganda to gain consent from the people to near-dictatorial powers for the leader.

Mussolini was himself a journalist, so he well understood how control over journalism could be used to wield propaganda as a weapon against any opposition. Accordingly, as Mussolini’s power grew within Italy in the 1920s, it became impossible for anyone to become a journalist without a certificate of approval issued by the fascist party. The United States of today is, of course, far larger and much more diverse than was Italy in the 1920s. While no single authority over journalists now exists, there are certainly spigots of control which do still exist. Among those are the great concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few media barons such as Rupert Murdoch and the fact that a single entity, the Associated Press (AP), distributes most news stories to most of the media outlets across the nation. The AP is controlled by its member media outlets, the majority of which are controlled by a small group of “media giants” (corporations which own vast empires of newspapers, radio stations, television stations, and other media outlets). While the level of control has not yet approached the veto power of the fascist party in Italy during the 1920s, there is now (in 2008) enough control to ensure that right-wing biased propaganda has wide distribution while left-wing biased propaganda is largely prevented from reaching most of the public.
Continue reading ‘John “Il Duce” McCain For President?’ »

Calling some group “fascists” is the rough equivalent of comparing the leader of some group to Adolph Hitler. In both cases, the mere use of the label “fascist” or “Hitler” is enough to cause any set of discussion or debate participants to lose their temper. And many people would see that as justified anger, as the very terms are among the worst labels which can be applied to anybody in polite company. In other words, only swear words not used in polite company, could even possibly be viewed as more justifiably intended to cause anger and outrage at the mere fact of applying the label. But I wish to consider the word “fascist” as being actually descriptive of a particular set of political and social circumstances and not as just a vague epithet to toss out at your political opponents. But before we get to that discussion, let me offer an introduction to the topic by relating some stories about my own personal political evolution over the past several decades.

I am asked repeatedly to explain why I no longer call myself a Republican even though my self-description of my political stance remains that “I am a Goldwater Republican.” This is all the more poignant today, in September of 2008, now that Goldwater’s successor in office (as Senator from Arizona), John McCain, is running for President of the United States after McCain swung his positions on most issues so far to the right that he would be considered to be acceptable to the neo-fascists who now run the Republican Party. As late as 2000 I still personally liked, respected, and would have voted for John McCain for President. But in view of his now extreme right-wing views, I can no longer stomach the man, and can only wish him less success than Goldwater had in his run to be President (in 1964, Goldwater carried 6 states and won 54 electoral votes).

The real difficulty for me today is that fascist-leaning elements have hijacked the Republican Party of my youth and what is now considered “mainstream Republicanism” is actually a sort of moderate fascism that in my day would have been (and sometimes was) justification for expulsion from, or at least shunning by, the organized Republican Party.
Continue reading ‘Republicans: Moderate Fascists’ »

Anybody who is learning to be a political wonk these days had best read the Thomas Frank book: What’s the Matter with Kansas? This book provides a liberal education about why the right wing is so politically powerful these days and just what drives the people who have been sucked into their propaganda arena to continually vote against the interests of the common people and for the interests of the wealthiest Americans. From an economic standpoint, if you want to understand why the disparity in wealth between the upper regions of the American economy and the rest of us is so great, you start with this book. The more that Americans vote for Republicans, the more wealth is sucked out of the lower classes and into the pockets of the super-rich, and the State of Kansas is merely a microcosm for how the Republicans gained power through deliberate manipulation of public opinion using advertising which is pure propaganda.

You see, Kansas didn’t used to be the reddest of red states. As Frank points out, over a century ago, Kansas was a hotbed of socialism and populism, as was most of the Midwest. In those days, the small farmers had power, and it was the power of the voting booth which eventually led to the sacrosanct agriculture subsidies provided by our modern federal government. Ever since the “free soil” Republicans wrested control of Kansas from the pro-slavery Democrats before the Civil War, the identity of Kansas was closely tied to Republicanism in politics. But even into the middle of the 20th century, the Kansas politicians who made a splash in national politics were almost universally from the moderate or progressive wing of the Republican Party. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Senators Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum would have much more in common with the policies of progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt than with any part of the leaders of the modern Republican Party. The turning point for Republicans was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that law, he knew he was signing away political control of the south for at least the next several decades. And as people re-thought their political affiliations in the wake of that single act, the face of American politics was being changed for decades to come.
Continue reading ‘What Is The Matter With Kansas?’ »

You ought to read John Dean’s article about impeaching presidents. Dean is best known for telling the truth to Congress right at the point when the consequences of telling the truth were the worst for the President of the United States. But Dean is (was?) an old-style conservative and there were just certain ethical boundary lines he would not cross, even if it meant severe damage to the nation, his President, and the Republican Party. Dean’s article makes clear that most old-style conservatives maintain certain bedrock ethical principles which they would hold to no matter what. Dean ends his story with these words:

Disturbingly, it has been clear for some time that Bush and Cheney did indeed lie – and that their lies fit within a clear, extensive pattern of abuse of power. Yet condemnation from Congressional Republicans has yet to be heard. Sadly, it seems possible that today’s Republicans — unlike Wiggins and the other Nixon apologists who changed their minds when confronted with proven presidential lies — have no moral lines that they will draw.

I wrote yesterday about the “win by any means” archetype, which unfortunately includes lawyers, politicians, cops, military members, and criminals. Dean points out that elder conservatives didn’t use to lack moral boundary lines. It is only the newer conservatives (or “neocons”) that align most perfectly into this archetype. And Dean isn’t the only one noticing this change. In an article dated last Wednesday (7/23/08), Paul Craig Roberts, another “old school” conservative, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and a Contributing Editor to the National Review also wrote that the Republican Party was now the worst enemy of American values. And I consider myself to be among them. Please read my own “Confessions of a Goldwater Republican.”

So, what do all these people (Dean, Roberts, Goldwater and myself) have in common? None of us are willing to see the Constitution of the United States disrespected in any way. We all have an ethical floor which requires respect for the founding principles of our democracy as enunciated by that document.
Continue reading ‘New Conservatives Lack Ethics’ »

I’m involved in a long-running but gentle discussion with another old-style Republican who is uncomfortable enough with the modern Republican Party to strongly consider not voting for McCain. He isn’t to the point where I am yet, voting for Obama, but he clearly recognizes that the Republicans have strayed so far off track that they no longer deserve his vote.

As our discussion of Obama continues, he expressed discomfort with the family history of Obama, particularly the doings of Obama’s own father. Barack Obama Sr. fathered Barack Jr. (the current candidate for President) while messing around in Hawaii with a white woman while Sr. was still married to Kezia Obama back in Kenya. This explains why two of Senator Obama’s half-siblings are older than he is while two others by the same mother are younger. The reference for this discussion was a tabloid newspaper article in The Sun.

The question that my friend raised was whether or not there might be some “criminal gene” which somehow managed to infect Obama, Jr. that was somehow deemed to be present in Obama, Sr. since Sr. was seemingly involved in a number of shady dealings, not the least of which was whatever story he told to Obama, Jr.’s mother about his family in Africa. In reply I pointed out that it really hardly matters since so many politicians are lawyers and since lawyers, cops, criminals, politicians, and military members are all part of a common archetype that believes in “win by any means.” We have a lot less to fear from politicians than we do from other members of the archetype because politicians are so addicted to power and so much in the public eye that they learn to behave better, more often than not, so as to retain the power that the people entrust them with.
Continue reading ‘Hating the “Win By Any Means” Archetype’ »