| Dad's Gonna Kill Me Written by Richard Thompson copyright Beeswing/Bug Music
Out in the desert there’s a soldier lying dead
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Sunday, March 25, 2007
What We're Listening To
An Analysis of the Greatness of Our Leader
One thing that is fascinating about George Bush is how little he has grown in office. No, that's not right. It's not that he hasn't grown, he has gotten smaller; less Presidential, more sad little man watching his paper boat circle the drain. After six years of playing The Decider he should at least have a thin candy shell of gravitas as opposed to coming across like one of those guys on Peoples Court who not only has an unshakable belief that people won't see through his bullshit, but that no one will notice his artful comb-over either.Link.
As bad a president as George W. Bush has been (and lets face it, not only is he the worst ever, he's actively lobbying to be considered worse than at least the next five, possibly six presidents, and that includes President Patrick McHenry [warning: video] who will come to power following the Great Munchkin Uprising of 2021. You don't want to know...) he is a worse person and it shows whenever he is under pressure; he melts down into a greasy little puddle of glares and smirks and incipient panic. But tonight was special. Tonights performance lays to rest any notion other than the fact that he's not a very bright man who has nothing but contempt for a world that refuses to dumb down for him.
And here's an exercise: Picture his future as a former president. Will there be anything substantive he can do like ex-presidential, other personal profiteering. He'll make his grubbing, slimy scumbag old man -- the father he doesn't listen to -- look like a statesman.
Atrios Makes a Joke
This is delicious:
The current leadership is toxic and anathema to a very significant portion of the (actual) voters and Big Media will not allow the GOP candidate run against Our Leaders.
OTOH, that's Rudy's great advantage: he's the least tarred by the current administration. But of course, he fully supports it in his current pandering....
And he has another one!
It's obvious that Republicans in general and the presidential candidate especially will have to run against George Bush in '08 if they want to have any chance of actually winning control.Link.
It's also obvious that fealty to dear leader is still an extraordinarily important thing to the 30 percenters.
It's also probable that our blessed media, who spent '00 demanding that Al Gore run away from Bill Clinton due to his hideous 65% approval ratings, will be unlikely to do that to the Republican candidate in '08.
The current leadership is toxic and anathema to a very significant portion of the (actual) voters and Big Media will not allow the GOP candidate run against Our Leaders.
OTOH, that's Rudy's great advantage: he's the least tarred by the current administration. But of course, he fully supports it in his current pandering....
And he has another one!
As has been the case since I've been obsessing about this crap, journalists obsess about mostly trivial ethical issues, pat themselves on the back for doing so, and proceed to ignore more serious issues.
Why was Jayson Blair a bigger scandal than Judith Miller?
Some questions answer themselves...
History Lesson
What's truly surprising about all of this is how surprised people seem to be. None of this is new — American corporations have been trading with America's enemies for as long as they have been able. They are corporations first and Americans second. A corporation's ultimate allegiance is to the bottom line and the pursuit of profit, not to American liberty or justice. American corporations have a long history of sacrificing the long-term interests of the environment, their own workers, and even the economy for the sake of the short term and the profits of the next quarter.Link.
The Ford Motor Corporation is regarded as about as American as a company can be, but they had few qualms about trading with Nazi Germany. By September, 1939, Ford's manufacturing plants in Germany were the second largest producer of trucks for the German Wehrmacht. According to U.S. intelligence documents, "of the 350,000 trucks which the motorized German army possessed in 1942, 100,000 to 120,000 were Ford-built."
The Nazi Blitzkrieg that wrecked Europe was, quite literally, built Ford tough. Ford-Werke, the German subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company in America, placed an advertisement in the Frankfurter Zeitung in January, 1941 to promote their role in the war effort. According to the ad, Ford vehicles were present for the German invasions of Poland, Norway, Holland, France, and Belgium: "German Ford vehicles were the dependable servants of the brave soldier." Some historians estimate that by the end of the war, around 60% of all the 3-ton tracked trucks used by the German military were Fords.
Compared to IBM, though, Ford was a paragon of virtue. In April, 1933, Adolf Hitler announced that a long-delayed census of the German people would occur. Although this sounds innocuous, it was not: a census gave the Nazis more accurate information about who was a Jew and where the Jews could be found. That information was worthless if it couldn't be quickly accessed and used, however — and that's where IBM enters the picture.
The importance of IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag and the IBM machines in the Nazi persecution of Jews, as well as their later extermination efforts, probably cannot be underestimated. IBM's Hollerith machines and their punch cards made it possible for the Nazis to organize and manage detailed information about who was and was not Jewish, to trace people's racial lineage, to calculate how much they owned, to track their movements, and much more.
Willy Heidinger, manager of IBM's German subsidiary Dehomag, sent a message to IBM president Thomas J. Watson in October, 1936, about plans to build massive bomb shelters to protect the Dehomag equipment, vital for the Nazis' ability to organize and control the German population. Heidinger wrote, "The authorities have approached us with demands that sufficient care should be taken to protect our plant and operations against air attack. In view of the fact that we are located close to a railway station, such demands seem justified.... [W]e believe we should recommend immediately the setting up of air raid shelters." These Nazi authorities already knew that war was coming, and now so did Watson, who authorized the construction of two massive bunkers that would protect IBM machines, cards, and operators from future Allied bombing raids.
By mid-1944, the Nazis had Hollerith Departments (Hollerith Abteilung) "installed at the main concentration camps at Mauthausen, Ravensbrüch, Flossenbürg and Buchenwald." The SS Hollerith cards included codes for the grounds for confinement (Jehovah's Witness=01, homosexuals=02, Jews=05), birth date, gender, ethnicity (Reich German=0, Ethnic German=1, Foreigner=2), labor capacity, occupation, and reason for departure (execution=3, escape=4, special treatment=6). These IBM Hollerith numbers would be tattooed on the arms of people entering Auschwitz
All of this information was sorted and tabulated to make the administration of the massive camp system possible. Dachau alone was using 24 IBM machines by the end of the war. These machines were, in many ways, both the origin of the "surveillance society" and an example of everyone's fears about what happens when powerful authoritarians have too much access to too much information about us.
It wasn't just corporations that made a killing from the Nazi killing machine, though. In October, 1942, U.S. Alien Property Custodian Leo T. Crowely issued Vesting Order 248 under the Trading with the Enemy Act. All assets of the Union Banking Corporation of New York were to be seized because the company was being used as a front for "enemy nationals" and, in fact, wasn't even really a bank at all. Instead, it was just a front operation that laundered money for Germans who were funding Hitler's war machine and propaganda efforts.
The partner in the company who had been administering all Nazi investments was Prescott Bush, father of President George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush. An investigator for the U.S. Justice Department found that Prescott's father-in-law, Bert Walker, was "one of Hitler's most powerful financial supporters in the United States." One of the Nazi-affiliated corporations whose investments Prescott Bush had been overseeing was the Hamburg-Amerika Line which, according to a U.S. Congressional investigation, had "subsidized a wide range of pro-Nazi propaganda efforts both in Germany and the United States."
Apparently, Prescott Bush had made millions of dollars for the Nazis and had gotten wealthy himself in the process. According to John Loftus, former United States Justice Department Nazi war crimes investigator and president of the Florida Holocaust Museum, "The Bush family fortune that helped put two members of the family in the White House can be traced directly to the Third Reich." This is not because the Bush family were secretly Nazis, but because they were openly capitalist: they went where the money was and were only interested in profit. Making money from the Nazis wasn't immoral because there is no such thing as "immoral" when it comes to profiting from the free market.
This long historical discursion might appear to be irrelevant, but I'm presenting it for a purpose: large American corporations were trading with and profiting from enemies even as extreme as the Nazis, so we should expect them to try to do the same with Muslim extremists as well. We shouldn't tolerate it, but we should expect it.
The real trouble is how our government is willing to tolerate it — for all the noise politicians make, they rarely do anything substantive to punish corporations which are found to be trading with enemies. Several American corporations have been caught trading with Sudan, Cuba, Iran, and Iraq (before we invaded). The fines were little more than slaps on the wrist — which is more than what companies like Ford and IBM suffered, but not enough to serve as a punishment or deterrent.
This ensures that the problems will continue: whatever conflicts the American government gets involved in, American corporations will be making a profit from both sides. They aren't on our side, they are on their own side. They won't be on our side unless we hold them accountable — or force our elected representatives to do so. Can the American people muster sufficient will to limit the power and activities of American corporations, though?
A Leader Stolen from Us
A paean to the man actually elected president in 2000. One can dream....
by Nicholas von Hoffman
Al Gore, Global Statesman
[posted online on March 23, 2007]
Al Gore is not one of those Power Point politicians whose standard spiel is to pledge to carry on:
• The war against cancer
• The war against terrorism
•The war against sexual exploitation of children
• The war for medical insurance coverage for all
• The war against poverty
• The war against the war against the middle class
•The war against drugs
•The war for family values
•The war for God
•The war for diversity
Plus other wars which momentarily slip my mind.
Al Gore does not play those politics. Instead of a war-against list, Gore can speak on a single topic for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half. He has facts. He has figures. He has long thought out complicated ideas. The man has something to say.
There Gore was testifying before Congress the other day on the subject of global warming, and he pigmy-tized many small-minded Senators and Representatives. They dwarfed out when they were caught in the same room with him.
On the subject of global warming Gore has more to contribute than the politician's standard ethanol pitch and the promise that if you wait, the science boys will come up with something to save us from having to make changes or adjustments or do anything at all.
Some of his ideas are sweeping and some are intriguing. He proposes an immediate cap on any further growth of carbon dioxide emissions. To stop emissions growth everything from industrial plants to lawn mowers and snowmobiles would have to be rejiggered in a serious way.
To achieve that goal he would require that no new electric generating plants be built without carbon dioxide traps to prevent the gas from puffing out into the atmosphere.
He would strictly tax carbon dioxide emissions by businesses, providing a sharp and painful incentive for businesses to find ways to green up. The money, which there would be a lot of, would be used to cut payroll taxes, which include Social Security, Workers Compensation, etc. That would put more money in people's paychecks, a lot more for the millions whose Social Security tax is larger than their income tax. It would also make it cheaper for employers to hire people, thus creating more jobs.
Another Al Gore idea would be to require corporations to include an energy/carbon dioxide audit statement in their annual report and stock prospectus. Companies which do not have their energy emissions under control would be less desirable as investments than those which do.
Gore would end the era of the incandescent light bulb. They burn too much electricity. He would fix a date about ten years from now after which their manufacture would be illegal. From then on, instead of bulbs, our bright ideas will come in the form of those high-intensity, low-power squiggly bulbs which, Gore says, are getting better.
Gore has something of the 19th century about him. He is almost courtly in his manners. He can talk to Republicans, at least of the non-flat-earth variety. He has a deep voice and sometimes he thunders as few modern politicians can. At the same time you would be hard-pressed to find another major public figure so conversant with such a wide span of technology and with the earth, air, fire and water problems which are reaching crisis proportions in our century.
It has been so long since we have seen one that we may not remember what one looks like. We may not recognize that Al Gore has become a statesman.
The Genius of one of Our Leader's Enablers
The Republican National Committee (RNC) on Wednesday sent an e-mail to its followers containing a personal message from Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), the Republican Party General Chairman, and it was chock-full of unintentionally funny items.... he says in a political pronouncement.
"I have said that it is irresponsible to pronounce judgment on the replacement of the U.S. Attorneys before we have the facts. Unfortunately, some would prefer to make political pronouncements instead of getting the facts," says the e-mail, attributed to Martinez.
As he does everything possible to ensure that the facts will not be obtained.
Link.
The Genius of Our Leader and his Honesty in Leadership
From the War Room:
George W. Bush blasted back at House Democrats today by saying that the Iraq war withdrawal plan they passed today amounted to "an act of political theater" in which they "voted to substitute their judgment for that of our military commanders on the ground in Iraq." It was a nice line and all, but perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea if the reporters who go about quoting it tonight mention that the president had to oust his own "military commanders on the ground in Iraq" in order to find some who agreed with his plan to send more troops there.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
More Reasons Why We Love Our Next Leader, Rudy!
He loves leaky nuclear reactor, Indian Point, In Buchanan, N.Y. -- because he's paid to. That's principle!
He falsely asserted:
He falsely asserted:
"Our view is that Indian Point is as safe as a facility can be, and a pretty good model, if not an excellent model, for not only other nuclear power plants but other industries that in many ways are just as sensitive [to security threats]," Giuliani boasted of the plant.Giuliani Partners was hired by Entergy Nuclear Northeast to help its bid to relicense the plant, where federal approvals extend only through 2013. At a press conference yesterday, Giuliani insisted the reactors make up "one of the safest plants" in the country.
He has also... altered his position on abortion, finessing it all the way from kind of tolerant of it to completely against it. Or whatever his position is. Like the other front-runner, straight-talking flip-flopper John McCain, he changes his view to whatever's expedient -- That's principle!
Link.In 1989, when Rudolph Giuliani first ran for Mayor of New York City, he said that he thought Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision finding a constitutional right to abortion, should be overturned. Although he backed off of that position during the campaign, he lost the election.
In 1992, before the next mayoral election, the Supreme Court re-affirmed the validity of Roe's basic recognition of a right to abortion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The next year, Giuliani ran as a clearly pro-choice candidate, and won two terms. As mayor, Giuliani committed city resources to protecting women's reproductive choices.
Now that Giuliani is exploring a run for the Republican Presidential nomination, he must appeal to his party's base, which skews pro-life. And so, cynics may be excused for wondering whether it was more than a coincidence that, last week, Giuliani declared himself a "strict constructionist" who, if elected President, would nominate judges who "interpret, not invent, the Constitution." As John Kerry might say, Giuliani was against abortion rights before he was for them, and then he was for them before he was against them again.
Chronicles of American Justice in the Post-Democracy Era
My National Security Letter Gag OrderLink.
Friday, March 23, 2007; A17
It is the policy of The Washington Post not to publish anonymous pieces. In this case, an exception has been made because the author -- who would have preferred to be named -- is legally prohibited from disclosing his or her identity in connection with receipt of a national security letter. The Post confirmed the legitimacy of this submission by verifying it with the author's attorney and by reviewing publicly available court documents.
The Justice Department's inspector general revealed on March 9 that the FBI has been systematically abusing one of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act: the expanded power to issue "national security letters." It no doubt surprised most Americans to learn that between 2003 and 2005 the FBI issued more than 140,000 specific demands under this provision -- demands issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval -- to obtain potentially sensitive information about U.S. citizens and residents. It did not, however, come as any surprise to me.
Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled.
Rather than turn over the information, I contacted lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, and in April 2004 I filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the NSL power. I never released the information the FBI sought, and last November the FBI decided that it no longer needs the information anyway. But the FBI still hasn't abandoned the gag order that prevents me from disclosing my experience and concerns with the law or the national security letter that was served on my company. In fact, the government will return to court in the next few weeks to defend the gag orders that are imposed on recipients of these letters.
Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case -- including the mere fact that I received an NSL -- from my colleagues, my family and my friends. When I meet with my attorneys I cannot tell my girlfriend where I am going or where I have been. I hide any papers related to the case in a place where she will not look. When clients and friends ask me whether I am the one challenging the constitutionality of the NSL statute, I have no choice but to look them in the eye and lie.
I resent being conscripted as a secret informer for the government and being made to mislead those who are close to me, especially because I have doubts about the legitimacy of the underlying investigation.
The inspector general's report makes clear that NSL gag orders have had even more pernicious effects. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. Some recipients would have spoken out about perceived abuses, and the FBI's actions would have been subject to some degree of public scrutiny. To be sure, not all recipients would have spoken out; the inspector general's report suggests that large telecom companies have been all too willing to share sensitive data with the agency -- in at least one case, a telecom company gave the FBI even more information than it asked for. But some recipients would have called attention to abuses, and some abuse would have been deterred.
I found it particularly difficult to be silent about my concerns while Congress was debating the reauthorization of the Patriot Act in 2005 and early 2006. If I hadn't been under a gag order, I would have contacted members of Congress to discuss my experiences and to advocate changes in the law. The inspector general's report confirms that Congress lacked a complete picture of the problem during a critical time: Even though the NSL statute requires the director of the FBI to fully inform members of the House and Senate about all requests issued under the statute, the FBI significantly underrepresented the number of NSL requests in 2003, 2004 and 2005, according to the report.
I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.
A Meditation on Stupidity
A conundrum, as it were, is that, at least in the arts, self-marketing is, obviously, as important as the talent being displayed. How good can an unheard musician be, so to speak.
But other than self-promotion, what justification can there be for this person being allowed to hold himself out as any sort of expert?
Link.
Just imagine: There was never a possibility of sectarianism until we set up our first puppet government. Let's just turn the historical clock back ever so little: sectarianism was in part the reason why Saddam ruled as he did. Or for that matter, why Saudi Arabia is ruled the way. It is in fact the natural state of man: the majority tribe rules the minority in an abusive way: Darfur; Somalia; Russia; Serbia; Nazi Germany -- those are just examples off the top of my head.
And what's there to apologize for? Enabling an Administration of crazy people to go to war -- or "quagmire" -- for no justifiable reason whatsoever is not a good reason to apologize? No, that's Maoist.
Yet this expert, as it were, actually seems to think that sectarianism first came to Iraq in 2003??
And he's also wrong that an occupation qua occupation was wrong. Actually, it was necessitated by a prior mistake: destroying the Iraqi government and civil service and -- duh, Doctor -- creating a complete vacuum.
I know, I know: it's wrong and unfair to essentially call this guy an idiot when we're led by who we're led by....
But other than self-promotion, what justification can there be for this person being allowed to hold himself out as any sort of expert?
“There were failures at the level of leadership, and they’re overwhelmingly Iraqi failures,” he said. Chief among the culprits, he added, were the Iraqis picked by the Americans in 2003 to sit on the Iraqi Governing Council, many of them exiles who tried to create popular bases for themselves by emphasizing sectarian and ethnic differences.Well, some Brandeis parents should apologize for allowing their children to be any class taught by this guy....
“Sectarianism began there,” he said.
***
Then there is the small issue of American policy. “Everything they could do wrong, they did wrong,” Mr. Makiya said. “The first and the biggest American error was the idea of going for an occupation.”
At Brandeis, Mr. Makiya is exploring all these themes in a class this semester on — what else — post-invasion Iraq.
***
...Mr. Makiya refers to Dec. 30, 2006, the day Mr. Hussein was hanged, as “one of the worst days of my life.”
“It was a disaster, an unmitigated disaster,” Mr. Makiya said, his voice rising. “I was just so upset, even on the verge of tears. It was the antithesis of everything I had been working for and hoping for.”
The tribunal did little to expose the all-encompassing cruelty of the Baath Party, Mr. Makiya said. And in failing to control an execution chamber filled with seething Shiite officials and policemen, the Iraqi government “actually succeeded in making Saddam look good in the eyes of the Arab world.”
***
Talk turned to the presidential race. Mr. Morse mentioned the pressure that Hillary Rodham Clinton was facing to apologize for her Senate vote authorizing President Bush to go to war.
Mr. Makiya stared into his glass of red wine. “That’s so Maoist,” he said. “People shouldn’t feel the need to apologize. What is there to apologize for?”
Link.
Just imagine: There was never a possibility of sectarianism until we set up our first puppet government. Let's just turn the historical clock back ever so little: sectarianism was in part the reason why Saddam ruled as he did. Or for that matter, why Saudi Arabia is ruled the way. It is in fact the natural state of man: the majority tribe rules the minority in an abusive way: Darfur; Somalia; Russia; Serbia; Nazi Germany -- those are just examples off the top of my head.
And what's there to apologize for? Enabling an Administration of crazy people to go to war -- or "quagmire" -- for no justifiable reason whatsoever is not a good reason to apologize? No, that's Maoist.
Yet this expert, as it were, actually seems to think that sectarianism first came to Iraq in 2003??
And he's also wrong that an occupation qua occupation was wrong. Actually, it was necessitated by a prior mistake: destroying the Iraqi government and civil service and -- duh, Doctor -- creating a complete vacuum.
I know, I know: it's wrong and unfair to essentially call this guy an idiot when we're led by who we're led by....
Idiotic Quote of the Day
[Link.]Just in case there was any doubt just how profoundly stupid Our Beloved Leader is:
"A narrow majority in the House of Representatives abdicated its responsibility by passing a war spending bill that has no chance of becoming law and brings us no closer to getting the troops the resources they need to do their job," the president said.
[Link.]
And what about wasting soldiers on idiotic war? Not an abdication of responsibility and human decency? Worse, letting himself be pushed around by Cheney and the nutjobs. THAT's an abdication.
And of course there was recently that brilliant deal with North Korea: Agreed to only because Cheney and his people didn't get between W and Condi -- Our Leader was actually free to decide something: Agreeing to the Clinton deal shot down by the wingnuts ten years earlier -- when North Korea was a lesser threat and had done less to destabilize the nuclear balance (not that there's any reason to believe they did as much harm as our Pakistani allies).
The National Nightmare Winds Down, But Won't End for a Very Long Time....
So much for the ‘permanent Republican majority’Link. And link to the underlying Pew report.
Posted By Carpetbagger On 23rd March 2007 @ 09:45 In General | 23 Comments
This week, a Senate Republican aide said of the White House, “We just hope they leave without doing any more damage.”
If the aide was referring to damage to the Republican Party, it’s too late.
Public allegiance to the Republican Party has plunged during George W. Bush’s presidency, as attitudes have edged away from some of the conservative values that fueled GOP political victories, a major survey has found.
The survey, by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, found a “dramatic shift” in political party identification since 2002, when Republicans and Democrats were at rough parity. Now, 50% of those surveyed identified with or leaned toward Democrats, whereas 35% aligned with Republicans.
What’s more, the survey found, public attitudes are drifting toward Democrats’ values: Support for government aid to the disadvantaged has grown since the mid-1990s, skepticism about the use of military force has increased and support for traditional family values has decreased.
One should always be cautious about throwing around words like “realignment,” but the Pew Center’s poll suggests the Republicans’ problems go beyond just Bush and a tragic and unpopular war.
“Iraq has played a large part; the pushback on the Republican Party has to do with Bush, but there are other things going on here that Republicans will have to contend with,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center. “There is a difference in the landscape.”
Bruce Bartlett, a conservative analyst and author of the 2006 book “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” said, “There are cycles in history where one party or one movement ascends for a while and then it sows the seeds of its own self-destruction…. It’s clear we have come to an end of a Republican conservative era.”
Going over the details in the report, that’s probably not hyperbolic.
Increased public support for the social safety net, signs of growing public concern about income inequality, and a diminished appetite for assertive national security policies have improved the political landscape for the Democrats as the 2008 presidential campaign gets underway.
More specifically:
* Asked whether the government should care for those who can’t care for themselves, 69% of Americans said yes — up 12 points since the GOP take-over in 1994
* Asked whether the government should help the needy, even if it means greater debt, 54% said yes — up 13 points since 1994.
* Asked whether they embraced old-fashioned values about family and marriage, 76% said yes — down 8 points since 1994.
* Asked whether school boards should have the right to fire gay teachers, 28% said yes — down 11 points since 1994.
“This is the beginning of a Democratic opportunity,” said Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus. “The question is whether we blow it or not.”
Please don’t.
Maybe the oppressive control of the wingnuts couldn't last forever, anymore than, for example the 1,000 year Reich or the perverted Marxist USSR.
The foundation for the neocons' rule rest primarily on two bases.
The first is fear. Great example, of course, is the use and abuse of 9/11 -- only the wingnuts can protect us from another one. Actually, all it takes, essentially, is competent police work.
But that was then frittered away by the Iraq fandango which was completely insensible from a security point of view and has therefore greatly reduced enough people's fears -- Election 2006 was probably a tipping point.
The second base upon which the wingnuts' rule rest is politicking Rove-style. Since it's based on fear and smear (so to speak), when those two stop working and you're left with just a whole big bunch of anti-majority crappy policies... well, 'nuff said, the inevitable collapse occurs.
Now if only the damage the nutjobs wrought can be fixed....
Friday, March 23, 2007
A Glimmer Why the GOP May Actually Be in Big Trouble
Numbers-wise, the party relied on the goose-stepping Christo-fascist right.
This piece makes an interesting, if not good, case that it's history, that the true believers are going progressive big time.
I've believed that the right-left spectrum, specially in this era, is outdated. There's no real left, with the death (or at least coma) of Marxism/socialism; it's more the wingnut right and everything else (just about everything else being to the left). Really, withe triumph (if momentary) of global capitalism, right/left is meaningless.
Instead, I believe in bottom-up vs. top-down. This piece, then, shows that bottom-up, really, is sort of universal, regardless of the source. (It also shows the shallowness of Christianity but that's besides the point.)
But if the piece is at all accurate, Our Leaders are in big trouble with a not-wonderful 2008 on the horizon....
This piece makes an interesting, if not good, case that it's history, that the true believers are going progressive big time.
I've believed that the right-left spectrum, specially in this era, is outdated. There's no real left, with the death (or at least coma) of Marxism/socialism; it's more the wingnut right and everything else (just about everything else being to the left). Really, withe triumph (if momentary) of global capitalism, right/left is meaningless.
Instead, I believe in bottom-up vs. top-down. This piece, then, shows that bottom-up, really, is sort of universal, regardless of the source. (It also shows the shallowness of Christianity but that's besides the point.)
But if the piece is at all accurate, Our Leaders are in big trouble with a not-wonderful 2008 on the horizon....
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
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