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    Interesting read (long)

    (Photo: Carolyn Tiry / Flickr) Barbara Stanwyck: “We're both rotten!” Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you're a little more rotten.” -”Double Indemnity” (1944)…


    Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of
    the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are
    rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the
    political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a
    presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be
    competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to
    corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will
    be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank
    capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order
    to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven
    surrender to Big Pharma.

    But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats
    have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen,
    egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

    To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention
    to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt
    ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican
    Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any
    political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like
    Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers
    of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King,
    Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul
    Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The
    Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

    It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent
    that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional
    staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I
    could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would
    use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure
    that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to
    concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use
    that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the
    US and global economies as hostages.

    The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of
    political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal
    Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction
    workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact,
    forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is
    that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the
    FAA reauthorization.

    Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral
    actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible
    actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the
    hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be
    obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional
    pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms
    of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement
    over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt
    ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they
    might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of
    many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"

    It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the
    Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional
    political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like
    an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian
    parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications,
    none of them pleasant.

    In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that
    it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be
    absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should
    be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include
    unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative
    machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US
    Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative
    body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any
    given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that
    contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.

    The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality
    and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance,
    the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high
    functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was
    legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current
    Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet
    having legislated the Bill of Rights.

    Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for
    Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject
    to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder
    that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus
    the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the
    Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a
    disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of
    democratic government to undermine democracy itself.

    John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:

    "Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from
    a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law
    when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the
    minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of
    the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If
    there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party,
    it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened
    to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who
    later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."

    A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me
    candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and
    disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from
    doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability
    rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an
    institution of government, the party that is programmatically against
    government would come out the relative winner.

    A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful
    one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the
    news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who
    hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone
    which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters'
    confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that
    "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further
    leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties
    are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public
    cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in
    public trust in government that has been taking place since the early
    1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at
    every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in
    1980).

    The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the
    bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard
    news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV
    political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified
    of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice
    of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as
    being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if
    one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read
    'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"

    Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right
    in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt
    ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big
    loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined:
    "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how
    bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the
    next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their
    tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation
    falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who
    precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He
    seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has
    deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve
    its political objectives.

    This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out
    of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of
    low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy
    of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped
    electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter
    participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence
    of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is
    a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the
    uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout
    of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three
    hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million
    Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively
    canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by
    69 million voters.

    This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only
    cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the
    Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the
    very federal government that is the material expression of the
    principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is
    not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government;
    I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and
    Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely
    uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections
    by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and
    self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11
    or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest
    incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they
    would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a
    profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a
    growth center for political contributions to these same
    politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government
    programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular
    to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to
    undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That
    concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.

    Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of
    self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this
    technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of
    unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall
    short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New
    Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to
    fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of
    state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted
    to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements
    (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while
    simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in
    Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours
    of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing
    registration periods; and by residency requirements that may
    disenfranchise university students.

    This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed
    direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress
    pointed toward more political participation by more citizens.
    Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing
    other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy
    (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature
    policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want
    those people voting.

    You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not
    likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who
    are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays.
    Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like
    the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their
    extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in
    the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object
    to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is
    constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is
    deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the
    Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists.
    Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may
    change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to
    need a scapegoat to hate and fear.

    It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this
    reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But
    they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry
    low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the
    disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians
    subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal -
    "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously
    slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure
    forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of
    the birth certificate.

    I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP.
    While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that
    no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans
    also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice
    fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy
    theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been
    Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in
    2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther
    myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.

    The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP
    operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is
    more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw
    material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America
    since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle
    class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and
    health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating
    in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary;
    their standard of living is shrinking.

    What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing.
    Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among
    the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that
    outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent
    most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity
    politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too
    illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]

    While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white
    working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be
    sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most
    energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage
    immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the
    faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental
    compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters,
    played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their
    anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines:
    instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the
    Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently
    manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil
    gays. Or evil abortionists.

    How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field.
    Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are
    posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and
    Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No
    wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the
    Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at
    the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why
    didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that
    theme?

    You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even
    Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative
    sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly
    claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned
    benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll
    taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats.
    Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message:
    it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid
    that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion
    fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept
    out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that
    politicians be kept on a short leash.

    It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated
    farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very
    accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting
    him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt
    little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not
    the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled
    greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting
    expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of
    wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is
    the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At
    "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide
    unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those
    economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or
    the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death
    panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which
    stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.

    Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than
    Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important
    indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is
    increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise
    and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl
    Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign
    strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.

    As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes
    in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their
    platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:

    1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors.
    The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further
    enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit
    and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President
    Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are
    highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform
    the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP
    refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one
    percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch
    brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits
    billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective
    rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that
    had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! -
    than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all
    costs our society's overclass.

    Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for
    billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond
    of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of
    an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether
    Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower
    rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job
    creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable
    quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in
    cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?

    Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up
    for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than
    to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the
    wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP
    dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment
    to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small
    businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de
    minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be
    small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy
    Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of
    total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment
    than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
    (OECD) countries.

    Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans
    are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the
    effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular,
    they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being
    confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower.
    Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid
    zero.

    When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove"
    that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the
    rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half
    of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave
    out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are
    millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute
    payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But
    according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow,
    they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust
    funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes
    apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying
    necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a
    millionaire.

    All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular
    culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC
    for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another.
    More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have
    been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values
    voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons
    (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation
    as dogma.

    And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for
    the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous
    provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public
    companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation,
    including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only
    require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this
    provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the
    public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own
    incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the
    Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says,
    "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my
    view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the
    banks."

    2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have
    set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to
    waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or
    Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading
    other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a
    nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in
    2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not,
    fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating
    for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not
    fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts,"
    who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before
    Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to
    get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a
    defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion
    over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges'
    formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.

    A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more
    complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of
    bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to
    it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of
    Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly
    uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases
    nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego,
    are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But
    there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is
    negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon
    than it receives back in local contracts.

    And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more
    fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget
    creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long
    gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor.
    Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost
    research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits
    little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out
    padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of
    political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway
    construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million
    dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs
    argument is ultimately specious.

    Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological
    predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This
    undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and
    dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly
    hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same
    psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both
    foreign and domestic.

    The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the
    Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous
    both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less
    prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism
    and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to
    abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch
    Republic and the British Empire.

    3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a
    full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious
    cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and
    grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat
    Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the
    gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are
    all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or
    Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus
    creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons,
    and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right,
    its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the
    consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also
    around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to
    science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or,
    perhaps, "misinformation voter."

    The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de
    facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are
    encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith"
    in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren
    dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to
    debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of
    course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor
    of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs -
    economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism -
    come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower
    Republicanism?

    It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism
    (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in
    America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the
    Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of
    beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all
    three of the GOP's main tenets.

    Televangelists have long espoused the
    health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it
    is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe
    in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically
    downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.

    The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the
    fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of
    slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and
    enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired
    genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the
    jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem
    to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of
    the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short
    step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of
    thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once
    writing that God is Pro-War.

    It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their
    belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them
    to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some
    evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a
    suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of
    domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most
    adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem
    was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What
    does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently
    abide in the bosom of the Lord.

    Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic
    perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the
    religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am
    not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction
    the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that
    direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to
    the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case,
    those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums
    of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought
    not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

    Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican
    could have written the following:

    "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security,
    unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you
    would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is
    a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these
    things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background),
    a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or
    business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are
    stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar
    in 1954.)

    It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional
    Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a
    Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is
    not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of
    self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in
    the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection
    of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce
    Bartlett.

    I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans,
    like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to
    this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven
    incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them.
    And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having
    gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of
    their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value,"
    the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up
    their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the
    GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under
    the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather
    than a prospective one.

    If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't
    after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of
    your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax
    cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be
    "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing
    those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you
    worked.

    During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco
    reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's
    disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further.
    Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political
    actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar.
    Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of
    assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped
    up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve
    currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as
    any that can be imagined.

    If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is
    successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy
    disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and
    America's status as the world's leading power.

    Footnotes:

    [1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the
    Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected
    illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative
    Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts
    "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft
    legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby,
    which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.

    [2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his
    foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the
    greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so
    that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch
    McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest
    legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial
    system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His
    top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president.
    Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his
    country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing
    McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less
    visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen

    [3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that
    outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant
    labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will
    be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a
    downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to
    mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no
    good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable
    result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a
    high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.

    [4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years,
    I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of
    Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book,
    "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that
    the left fears, the right hates.

    [5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the
    one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a
    natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent
    sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand
    exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who
    felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance
    of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who
    enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have
    to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic
    officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his
    offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming
    his kid "Rand."

    #2
    in for mrsleeve's comments.

    good read.
    AWD > RWD

    Comment


      #3
      A lot of good points, butttttttttt I got a lot of R's are evil because ______ and this is why ______. Which they were good points, this really isn't one parties problem or fault. I know this article points out that part of Republicans plans, this plan works for one reason; because its right. I don't vote and the reason is, I'm fucked either way.
      1985 BMW 325e
      1997 BMW M3/4/5
      2007 Chevy Silverado Crew Cab 5.3 v8

      Comment


        #4
        Originally posted by Kershaw View Post
        in for mrsleeve's comments.

        good read.
        awww I am touched you are hanging on my every word............... ;)


        Your going to have to wait a while. Its going to take my ADD brain and substantially resistant gag reflex a few tries to get all the way though it.

        Made it though the 1st 5 paragraphs. Sounds like more of the same liberal standard evil conservatives are *fill in the blank* rhetoric, so far.

        I do agree with one thing though Both sides are fucked up and both are at fault. I think I have made it clear many times over that I feel the same and its not a R or D thing its a Govt in totality problem. Will check back and edit as needed when I can stomach it to finish it
        Originally posted by Fusion
        If a car is the epitome of freedom, than an electric car is house arrest with your wife titty fucking your next door neighbor.
        The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. -Alexis de Tocqueville


        The Desire to Save Humanity is Always a False Front for the Urge to Rule it- H. L. Mencken

        Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants.
        William Pitt-

        Comment


          #5
          you need to finish reading it, because it addresses your last paragraph explicitly. and im not sure if its liberal rhetoric, since it was a GOP staffer that wrote it.
          AWD > RWD

          Comment


            #6
            Like I said so far. Keeping an open mind here, Just been really busy today.
            Originally posted by Fusion
            If a car is the epitome of freedom, than an electric car is house arrest with your wife titty fucking your next door neighbor.
            The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. -Alexis de Tocqueville


            The Desire to Save Humanity is Always a False Front for the Urge to Rule it- H. L. Mencken

            Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants.
            William Pitt-

            Comment


              #7
              I think he hit the nail on the head with the analysis of the recent debt ceiling debacle.

              Obama handed the Republicans a $4 Trillion deficit reduction package, and they turned it down because it contained $200 billion in tax increases for the wealthiest income earners. They cried bloody murder and would only agree to $1 trillion with zero tax increases. $3.8 Trillion >> $1 Trillion; they only pay the debt and deficit problem lip service, they don't give two shits about it or the american people. Their primary concern is and always will be protecting their wealthiest donors, and this is unflappable proof.

              Comment


                #8
                Apparently no one likes reading novels on this forum.



                I thought the article was good, and seems to make some very good points etc. Can even see parallels to this in Canada.


                Fucking politicians. Oh fuuuck, I'm such a pawn =( .

                Comment


                  #9
                  ^ Didn't you know that Americans don't like to read? We like our information in short sound bites, catchy one-liners, or basically anything that fits on a bumper sticker. We select our politicians based on their charisma and charm, not knowledge or intelligence. Geez, waddya think we are, Canadians or something?
                  sigpic

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by herbivor View Post
                    We select our politicians based on their charisma and charm, not knowledge or intelligence. Geez, waddya think we are, Canadians or something?
                    Don't forget level of religious fanaticism

                    Comment


                      #11
                      darin, fanaticism is such a strong word! i prefer the word zeal!

                      dont you just love religious ZEAL?

                      :rofl:
                      AWD > RWD

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Been busy this week, will get to it

                        But Kershaw I do love the word Zeal !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)
                        Originally posted by Fusion
                        If a car is the epitome of freedom, than an electric car is house arrest with your wife titty fucking your next door neighbor.
                        The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money. -Alexis de Tocqueville


                        The Desire to Save Humanity is Always a False Front for the Urge to Rule it- H. L. Mencken

                        Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants.
                        William Pitt-

                        Comment


                          #13
                          What a fucking joke this guy is. That was a waste if time.

                          Typical Democrat/Progressive and nothing else. He fails at even seeing how bad the Democrats are.

                          For those who didn't want to read this nonsense....

                          "Boohoo Republicans....Democrats aren't all that bad." Sums up the entire thing.
                          Your signature picture has been removed since it contained the Photobucket "upgrade your account" image.

                          "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the [federal] government." ~ James Madison

                          ‎"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen" Barack Obama

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Really?


                            Did you read the entire article guy?

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Originally posted by Eecen View Post
                              Really?


                              Did you read the entire article guy?



                              ^Yes I did, buddy.

                              Anyone that can write this much about one party while ignoring the other party is just as bad in other ways is beyond biased.

                              Early in the article.
                              ...
                              But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats
                              have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen,
                              egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
                              Pretty obvious right there. 80+ percent of the rest is crying over the GOP and Republicans and ignoring the vast majority of what Democrats do/have done. He even starts about the Democrats and switches over to comparison about how bad the GOP is. Worthless without speaking about the Democrats as well. He discredits himself.
                              Last edited by joshh; 09-15-2011, 05:18 PM.
                              Your signature picture has been removed since it contained the Photobucket "upgrade your account" image.

                              "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the [federal] government." ~ James Madison

                              ‎"If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen" Barack Obama

                              Comment

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