De onversneden Filistijnen: Pernicious and Pugnacious Michigan Tea Party Philistines Assert a Self-Righteous Tsunami of Testosterone

There's a Southwest Michigan Dutch Hollander expression for the "enemy" unworthy of praise "De onversneden Filistijnen" meaning loosely in Dutch - the uncut Philistines - translation: "the uncircumcised" or out-group in moral and cultural terms-from whom the Hollanders actively separate and religiously abjure. The arch-conservative or "zwarte kousen"- the "black stocking" people of Southwest Michigan and environs use this foreign phrase to define their enemies. Zwarte Kousen, the radical religious extremists of Southwest Michigan, are not-at-all typical of the greater population of the Netherlands.

The Dutch Revolt - Decades of Battling for Religious Freedom (1568-1648): Dutch Protestants resisted the domination and perceived tyranny of the Spanish occupying Catholic Church (Engraving by Frederik Muller 1569)

The Dutch of Europe are:

"Long known as the bastion of liberalism and tolerance, the Netherlands has now been declared home to the least prejudiced people in Europe."

Unsavory Rogues: Well-Dressed Male Legislative Bullies & Bellicose Blockheads
A huge portion of the impulse and projection of overly zealous power of Michigan's TeaPublicans (Tea Party Republicans) arises from this unsavory group of male bullies and blockheads, men who find themselves in a super majority and cannot and/or will not limit themselves from over-boarding their perception of God's gift of power and influence is bestowed upon themselves: power and moral fitness make them "righteous." This group of men has dominated West Michigan politics and business for a long period.

These radical Republicans are sponsored in large part, and paid into politics: sustained, bought, and buoyed, by the nouveau riche Amway Clan -- the Richard M. (Rich) DeVos Sr. and Jay Van Andel families-at-large. These Amway scions, have been enriched by billions plucked from the "dead-end dreams" of suckers - (recruits churned into seeking a fortune from soap selling in a MLM/product-based pyramid scheme-where over 98% fail miserably and pay a heavy personal cost).

The Amwayites (founders of Amway/Alticor) believe themselves on a mission from God. They are the self-appointed members of the "hounds of Heaven" out to purge the state and its laws of all things offensive to their narrow and short-sighted tastes. (while enhancing in every way their grip on mega-wealth and the final say in all things business related.) As spokesperson Betsy DeVos put it, "We expect a return on our investment." Over the years the "returns" from shrewdly placed political investments has paid off for Amway, big time, they milk the game fully!

Now, amid this orgy of "rightness," the Tea Party faction in the Michigan GOP has placed US Representative Dave Agema in the top political post of the party, GOP National Committeeman. Agema will go on to "infect" the larger body politic with his special brand of self-importance and superiority. Nasty political snobbery will be his trademark and calling card.

Agema, a Frisian, is a member of a specific sub-culture originating in a ill-famous lowland province of the Netherlands. It's a Dutch sub-culture of which former Congressman Pete Hoekstra is also a prominent member-and more importantly-a direct child immigrant from that special area of Holland.

Frisians are known to members of the Michigan Dutch Community for their special characteristics which distinguish them as a sub-group (tribe): super-stubborn and opinionated, extremely hardheaded, specifically limited socially, hardly tolerant, and certainly not liberal in a religious or cultural sense.

The recent flareup against two members of the legislature who are ladies reflects a deeper and more pernicious affliction amongst this group of men, highly influenced by West Michigan's "black stocking" faction -- angst and mistrust. Theirs is an outright fear of women and female power to move agendas and influence decisions many of these "old world" / paternalistic-minded males (governing people in a fatherly manner, especially by providing for their needs without giving them rights or responsibilities.) They believe God gives them preemption over women, government is a realm left only to men.

The George Lakoff image of "strict father" - master disciplinary of his house - lay out the most appropriate and descriptive model for the TeaPublican talking-points approach to politics. "Harsh discipline" and "complete male-control morals" fits the present atmospherics in the Lansing Capitol to a "T," what with the on-going "V" revolt!

Michigan’s self-righteous tsunami of testosterone projects just the right set of overweening evil drives and vengeance on to destroy the quality of life in our state

Much of the ongoing theatrics and rudeness of behaviors in the torrent of conservative savage attacks on women and their status, their jobs, their retirement, and their health care (in larger terms) in the Michigan state legislature comes from the pre-New Testament concepts rooted in the Genesis account given in the Old Testament. This permission to override female judgment and opinion, the choices and goals of women, comes directly from the continuing belief (however quaint and mythical) that the "fall of man" comes directly from the fault of a woman (think St. Augustine).

Elaine Pagel in her book "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent" (New York: Random House, 1988) explained it for John R. Mabry, who writes:

"A recent study I did on St. Augustine of Hippo convinced me that the starting point for guilt as a staple of Christian life began with him. As Elaine Pagels points out in her marvelous book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, what the Jews and early Christians had read for centuries as 'a story of human freedom became, in [Augustine's] hands, a story of human bondage.' Instead of being a story about the gift of moral freedom, as St. John Chrysostom proclaimed, Augustine taught that 'Adam's sin not only caused our mortality but cost us our moral freedom, irreversibly corrupted our experience of sexuality... and made us incapable of genuine political freedom.'"

(Emphasis Added)

Does this sound silly or unbelievable to you? And what place does this theological contrivance have in modern, legitimate civic affairs?

Mayhap you are not attuned with the deeper theolotics behind and invasive in the present fanaticism and outrage going on in many churches (Christian Dominionists, Michigan's Citizens for Traditional Values - a well-known member: State Representative Tom McMillin (R - Rochester, MI) and in the hidden corners of the Opus Dei Vatican and Michigan's Tom Monahan (Read “Tom Monaghan becomes national power broker for GOP Catholic candidates” that appeared in the Naples News in September 2008.

Testosterone Fear Runs Wild in Evangelical Circles
Things have grown so out of hand , so irreverent and absurd, that Christianity Today has a cover story entitled “Forever Young: The Juvenilization of the American Church, the inside story: When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity” by Thomas Bergler.
Amazon Book Notes expands:

“(Thomas) Bergler shows too how this "juvenilization" of churches has led to widespread spiritual immaturity, consumerism, and self-centeredness, popularizing a feel-good faith with neither intergenerational community nor theological literacy.”

Meanwhile in the real world of pain and gain: Pernicious and Pugnacious Philistines are in complete control of the political direction of Michigan-Michissippi is on a tsunamic crest. 

Those the conservative Southwest Michigan Dutch Hollanders diss as the "De onversneden Filistijnen" they themselves have become "concubines," as it were, to another set of rogue Dutchmen: the Koch Brothers and their powerful lobby the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - the Koch's effective and secret way to legislative directly into corporate advantage.

Those the conservative Southwest Michigan Dutch Hollanders may diss the "De onversneden Filistijnen" yet it is they themselves who have become the neo-Philistines playing Animal House - a consequence of their own overblown evil ambitions and greed.

On the Reader:
Read the book "Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity" by Elaine Pagels (Vintage 1989) or an interview with George Lakoff on language and 'reframing' in "Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics" (Berkley News 2003).


Related Slates:
The Blind-eyed Marriage of the Conservative Churches to the Excessive & Corrupt Business Practices (April 2012) - Mitt Romney: America’s Nascent Holy “god” & Possible President?

More on theolitics or the role of religion in politics under "Christian Values" on the Gazette.

The Original Post was CENSORED and DELETED by the editorial staff at the Detroit News and Michigan View.

Hillsdale's Gary Wolfram Elevates Andrew Breitbart - Dean of Defamation - to "Sainthood"

Response to Prof Gary Wolfram on the Detroit / Mackinac News Michigan View in "Ludwig von Breitbart" on March 13, 2012.

Hillsdale’s Dr. Gary must be high on chalk dust. Wolfram's eulogy for Andrew Breitbart was a cold rehash of his idol Ludwig pulled-reflexively from the prof's dusty achieves and yellowing scrapbooks. What exactly connected political hit-man and truth twister Andy Breitbart in Wolfram’s thinking with Dr. Gary's hero Ludwig von Mises?

It must have been a severe allergic reaction to accumulated chalk dust in Wolfram's stuffy cubical at the Rad Right's faint mockup of  a “Harvard”, Hillsdale College, a member of the Poison Ivy League.

Hillsdale College: Leaning right since right-wing Free Marketeers forced
the exit of the founding Free Baptists (Hillsdale Historical Society Archive)

Locked away from everyday reality, Professor Wolfram dwells at this quaint institutional anachronism, hidden away in a small bucolic southeastern Michigan town.

Hillsdale College is more an archetype of civic collapse and failure, retro-progression in quest of a giant need to be noticed in its attempts to pander to the greed of national and international corporatocracy, rather than be a crystalline beacon of higher culture.

Hillsdale exists, in large part, to supply the Too Far Right with pliant foot soldiers such as the murderous mercenary, billionaire scion- Eric Prince of Blackwater infamy.

A liberal arts education seeks to instill a higher sense of history and philosophy into a continuum and expansion of understanding about eternal truth and to build upon the vast achievements and ideals of the progressive human race propelled by the Enlightenment and an ongoing rediscovery of the classic cultures of yore as woven into the march of religion, philosophy, science and human understanding.

Why perseverate? Why ramble on about "liberalism" defined in the enlightenment era as 'the importance of individual liberty and limited government' when what is being espoused at Hillsdale is regression and suppression of modernity and the 'maturing understanding' of the needs and abilities of science and human inventiveness via strangling government?

For chalk dusty Prof. Gary, Breitbart "was an inspiration to those who agree with Mises that 'the ultimate and most profound of the fundamental insights of liberal thought is that it is ideas that constitute the foundation on which the whole edifice of human social cooperation is constructed and sustained and that a lasting social structure cannot be built on the basis of false and mistaken ideas.' “ From this we may try to follow Dr. Gary into believing that Andrew Breitbart was the paragon of TRUTH and ACCURACY.

Here is where Breitbart's notoriety as a crusader in Wolfram’s mind and von Mises' liberalism is seen as versus or against "anti-liberalism," (by which Prof. Gary derides the 21st Century "Liberals"-meaning Democrats and Progressives) and thus becomes lost in that stale cloud of professorial chalk dust.

While Wolfram is perfectly at home seeing himself as a "Classic" Liberal, and not a 21st Century Democrat/Progressive [Boo Hiss] Liberal; the man-on-the-street cannot make the jump Prof. Gary demands. Liberal must always, only mean Democrats.

Prof. Gary Elevates Fellow Traveler, Andrew Breitbart - Dean of Defamation - to Wolfarm’s Constellation of All-Time Ideological ‘Saints’- How Quixotic!

Not to be defeated, Prof. Gary bravely soldiers on. Gary, obviously at grievous personal loss over the death of his grenade-throwing Too Far Right Radical brother, Breitbart) describes his ideological troublemaker and soul-mate as a man labeled by many as "an enemy of the people."  Breitbart earned that exact description by virtue of his relentless partisanship and determination to spin, distort, twist, and invent Breitbart "truth" to fit radical ideology-in the service of the moneyed masters of a growing fascist Corporatocracy.

Andy Breitbart: Lived Large in a Conservative Tub of Small Minds
(TIME posted Bryce Duffy Photo on Brietbart's 'BagNews' 2010)

Breitbart, A Hero to Classic Liberalism? Hardly.
"Governments must be forced into adopting liberalism by the power of the unanimous opinion of the people, claimed von Mises,” proclaims Prof. Gary, emitting a temporary democratic high tone. Then Wolfram goes on to list the areas where Breitbart bent the truth and altered facts to defend a true and genuine anti-classic liberalism-TeaPartisanship given to bottom feeding, dissimulation, and ideological subterfuge he leaves the path of credibility and public trust.

Perez Zagorin, a noted American historian in "The historical significance of lying and dissimilation - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception" (1996):

"...Since the appearance in 1978 of Sissela Bok's important and widely noticed book, Lying. Moral Choice in Private and Public Life, the concern with lying and deception has continually increased. Bok's work was actuated by worry over declining standards of truth-telling and for this reason apparently touched a nerve. It coincided with the growing skepticism and mistrust felt among Americans and in other western nations about the veracity of governments, officials, and politicians, as well as lawyers, the medical profession, and business corporations."

Just prior to Breitbart's demise, in Troy, Michigan  Michigan Tea Party Republicans (under the spell of and paid & played by the Koch Bros' Americans for Prosperity) hosted one of Breitbart's very last public appearances, shared by Wolfram. This event was at a Koch Brothers pay-to-play sponsored event for Goldman Sach's operative, Mitt Romney, who regaled the Troy/Koch-ish Tea Party elements with his pledges to be one of them.

On the dais was a co-conspirator with Brietbart, Michelle Malkin - a virtual vestal virgin of poisonous venom - in the pursuit of penultimate Rovian truth, skewed to serve FOX's Too Far Right Wingers and corporatist fat cats.

What did the late Breitbart and Malkin bring to the Troy Tea Party Gathering according to Detroit News' Hank Payne?  From his article "Payne in Troy: Tea Party Mitt" February 26, 2012:

"...perhaps most striking was Mitt Romney's extraordinarily detailed, right-wing message perhaps most striking was Romney's extraordinarily detailed, right-wing message specifically tailored for the grassroots conservatives assembled by Americans for Prosperity and warmed up by red meat pundits Michelle Malkin and Andrew Breitbart.”  

This lusty interpretation of the work of Breitbart is shared by non-other-than Sarah Palin:

"With the death of Breitbart, the conservative movement didn't just lose a General " we lost an entire Special Forces Division....But he didn't leave us without the tools and the knowledge we need to fight."

GOT THAT: Brietbart is lauded by Palin as a 'special forces' political/ideological, a high powered hit-man. A deceitful/unprincipled wonk-cum-celebrity in the hunt to bring down America's first Black president.

Is this the “classic liberalism” package that Dr.Gary presents to his nascent ideological apprentice warrior-types in laid back Hillsdale's Rad Right bootcamp?

Bottomline: The Wolfram veneration of Breitbart fails the high ethics and moral high ground test so vaunted by Hillsdale's über-moralizers. The following quote excerpted out of a synopsis in "Andrew Breitbart Dead: Conservative Blogger Dies Suddenly At 43", posted by Huffington Post:

1. "Republican gay rights group GOProud, of which Breitbart was a board member until recently, released a statement saying it was 'stunned and saddened,' and calling him an 'amazing friend and ally.'"
   
2. "Breitbart seldom showed restraint in his vitriol to his critics and seemed to relish in the negative attention his antics earned him. After Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts died in 2009, Breitbart tweeted, 'Rest in Chappaquiddick' and called him 'a special pile of human excrement.' When critics questioned (Breitbart's) tone, he tweeted they 'missed my best ones!'"
   
3. "Breitbart sponsored hidden camera, gottcha attacks on ACORN. Racial in nature, this tactic resulted in a firestorm of criticism. [The embarrassment it engendered stoked up such fierce partisan rants as were heard here in Michigan shrilly mouthed by former State Senator Michelle McManus while running for Michigan Secretary of State.] The edited Breitbart video featured 'some ACORN employees appearing willing to support illegal schemes involving tax advice, misuse of public funds and illegal trafficking in children.' Ultimately the Government Accountability Office cleared ACORN of criminal activities. None-the-less "public pressure led Congress to block previously approved funds from going to ACORN and to stop future payments. Roughly 10 percent of ACORN's funds came from federal grants and the group eventually disbanded."

Just another of Breitbart's tactical 'special forces' successes against Blacks and Obama? Of course.

Carry on Prof. Gary, elevate Brietbart and thereby lower the national bar for truth and civility. How "ill-liberal" in an anti-von Mises pro-Breitbart declination can Wolfram be?

On the Reader:
Read the Detroit / Mackinac News / Michigan View's "All Star" review of Brietbart's 'legacy' including the canonization by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter:

"There was no stopping Andrew Breitbart from fighting the good fight with every fiber of his soul. Good bye and God bless, Brother Andrew. You are loved and mourned and ever remembered."

Related Slates:
"Michigan View's Gary Wolfram Resurrects 18th Cent. Racial Bigotry in His Vision of Economic “Freedom” (ala Adam Smith)" - "Prof. Gary Wolfram of the Michigan View Let’s His Little Light Shine On Greed" - "Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C."

More responses to Gary Wolfram and other on the Michigan View on the Gazette.

Original.

Opus Delusional: Santorum - God’s Avenger

A Rick Santorum led "Opus of Delusions," whip roiling the "Madness of Crowds," is but a toehold clue (insight) on a larger more dangerous rad religious right "crusade" to purify America and rectify the moral defects of modern society. Heading up such a "drive" Santorum has risen to stand against the majority. America, this spring is host to the "theater of the absurd" and the highly inflammable.

Rick Santorum has lit the fuse on a ticking bomb of renewed religious bigotry and sharp sectarianism. His efforts if allowed to metastasize can poison the well in the commons for all of America.

Allowing Santorum's crusade to succeed is to see the religious cultural war-as rudely introduced to politics by radical Catholic Pat Buchanan at the Houston GOP National Convention, 1994, is alarming. Buchanan's infamous presentation of "Cultural War" (as a political goal) engulfed this nation in an apocryphal fury which, still smoldering, will and can tear asunder American's unifying social and cultural fabric.

"We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them."
-- Scottish journalist Charles Mackay

The astute observer will conclude the Religious Rightist called together as "the Texas 150" met and anointed Rick Santorum as their choice for GOP nominee. Santorum is "God's man" to be elected by their "social conservatives"- the so-called "values voters." This religious cabal of autonomous religious authority figures (and the flocks they command) are driven by what has been described elsewhere: "a binary, Manichean vision of life and a hunger for conflict."

As a group, these devote religionists (cum political powers) have a highly malleable command in hectoring the religious voting block: "Their minds appear to have no more give and take than that of a terrier staring down a rat hole," that is, they continence "no compromise" on their issue no hint of dissuasion. Note, their loyalty and their commitment to a distinct set of "social issues" (to which they are called to support by their aggressive religious leadership) is without equal. Mediocre in their vote-getting efforts, they are not!

Albrecht Durer woodcutting "The Penitent" (1510) which
shows a man scourging himself (British Museum).

Suffering Santorum ("santorum" literally means "saint") & the Martyr’s Complex

This quote is the verbatim claim of candidate Santorum describing how American institutions and our nation's way of life are falling to evil forces:

"This is not a political war at all. This is not a cultural war at all. This is a spiritual war."

"And the Father of Lies has his sights on what you would think the Father of Lies, Satan, would have his sights on: a good, decent, powerful, influential country the United States of America. If you were Satan, who would you attack in this day and age?"

Take Note: This is not a "dog whistle, it's a disaster siren to his base: Rick Santorum isn't about politics per se; in his mindset he's all about serving God and suffering for one's beliefs. Religious fervor buoys Rick and his social conservative supporters (who project into the politics of such candidates as George W. Bush, and now specifically, Rick Santorum) their fears of evil and the unknown which they harbor and labor under.

Rick's surname is a term derived from Latin meaning: "connected to someone acting as a saint, or who has connection with religious things (a sacristan)." What a perfect candidate for a kind of "martyrdom" in a hostile political arena. Yet Santorum seems to be saying: Bring it on!

For Sen. Santorum and his "values voters following" modernity, technology, and science are very spiritually threatening. Fighting off these threats feeds driving motivations for the aggressive religious right's desperate commitment to be "winning for Jesus." It all centers in promoting their exclusive, banded, "Jesus polices." This fanatical faction expects national leadership and policy to flow from their man once ensconced in White House. With close observation, we can extrapolate a partial portfolio of their prime goals and aims in this crusade. It's not a comforting picture.

The hot winds of a swilling and rabid religious storm are following, surrounding and supporting the front -running GOP candidate, Rick Santorum. Out of this storm we see that Rick has assumed role similar to that of one Father Coughlin of the troubled and turbulent 1930's, a cleric and strict Catholic. Coughlin was an arch-provocateur and agitator riling the fears and paranoia of religious conservatives. Eventually Father Coughlin crossed the line and his ranting was unplugged, long after deep damage was done to the country.

Coughlin's 1930's flock of extremists believed in no compromise. Coughlin's militant crusaders and fans were individuals for whom the Devil is real and the Devil's disciples are both identifiable and clear targets (think: liberals, secularists, 1960's activists), enemies perfectly attacked as the "enemies of God's people " and even "enemies of God himself." These terms were part and parcel of Dr. James Dobson's attack on Congress's judicial appointments and Sen. Patrick Leahy, all who opposed Dobson's intrusion into the process with his church based /national crusade designed to skew the SOUS appointment process toward the religious, extreme right's wishes.

Identify Santorum as a man lost in a one dimensionist's moral delusion, conceiving of only stark Black or lily White, he's Manichean. "Manichean" is widely applied as an adjective to a philosophy or attitude of moral dualism, according to which a moral course of action involves a clear (or simplistic) choice between good and evil, or as a noun to people who hold such a view." (Wikipedia)

-----

Operating in the religio-political arena which the "spiritual" leadership of Protestant-based Moral Majority remnants (ala Jerry Falwell) engendered are folk who can be moved by panic stampede. Appealing to them we now find Santorum. This faction, led by Tim LaHaye (still in the business of religious king-making) wants to mount Santorum's kind of red-meat political slug-fest. Santorum willingly provides fodder-hate radio style.

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
-- Scottish journalist Charles Mackay (who warned and informed his readers of "the madness of crowds.")

On the Reader:
See Also: "Diehard Fundamentalist Evangelicals & Pentecostals have essentially a no-choice “choice” for GOP Candidate for President"and "St. Santorum Fails the Defender of Truth Test".
More on Rick Santorum and the candidates in the 2012 GOP Presidential Primary on the Gazette.

Original PART 1 and PART 2.

Déjà Vu (Part 2): Buchanan's Pitch of Racial Undertones - "Suicide of a Superpower" a GOP Dog Whistle

MSNBC Sacked Pat Buchanan - Why? His "Suicide of a Superpower" & other of Pat's - Dusty Books (filled with racism, and bigotry) have found their way into the subtext of GOP Candidate's stump speeches and unscripted comments: Too much renewed interest in Buchanan’s racist & anti-immigrant rants, raises public awareness of the GOP’s "dog whistle" use of race as a  conservative voter stimulant. This harms the unity of the country and even dooms the GOP candidate in November, whoever he is.

Continued commentary on the struggles of the religious right with their candidates in the GOP Presidential Primary with comparisons back to 1996 campaign of Pat Buchanan. Pat has acted as a tapeworm in the bowels of our body politic for a very, very long time. His Cultural War speech in Houston, 1992 was but one strong example of how his exulted hyperbole and propensity for partisan fisticuffs has bruised our republic-with all respect to free speech.

"I'm like a Jesuit missionary to the Iroquois over there (at MSNBC)"
-- Excerpted from Buchanan's mea culpa to Glenn Beck concerning his (former) employment at MSNBC (10/28/11)

Ironic that the old Cultural Warrior and Race Baiter would use this analogy: The Iroquois being "an association of several tribes of indigenous people of North America. (T)he Iroquoian... coalesced as distinct tribes, by the 16th century or earlier, they came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, or the 'League of Peace and Power.'" (Wiki)

SEE ALSO PART 1 - Déjà Vu All Over Again: A Flashback to Another Fiery & Bizarre Michigan GOP Primary

Been here before: "The Suicide of the West" by former Marxist,
turned radical right conservative author James Burnham (1964)

AAP's David Bauder, AP Television Writer, reported (2.17.12):

"MSNBC dropped conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday, four months after suspending him following the publication of his latest book.

"Buchanan's "book "Suicide of a Superpower" contained chapters titled "The End of White America" and "The Death of Christian America." Critics called the book racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, charges Buchanan denied.

"MSNBC President Phil Griffin said last month that he didn't think Buchanan's book "should be part of the national dialogue, much less part of the dialogue on MSNBC."

See also this video clip of Pat Buchanan as he ruminates with Glenn Beck, who pontificates to Pat that President Obama is a "Marxist" while pitching his latest book "Suicide of a Superpower".

Power of the apocalypse: Tools of right wing encoded messaging
and political power in Buchanan's "Suicide of a Superpower"

Buchanan's recent chapter, "The Death of White America" is a textbook example of "dog whistle" and "bat language" to radicalized Republicans promoting racial fears. And should be outed for what it is.

The old warrior has fallen on his own sword.

Pat Buchanan Trumpets “The End of White America”

Pat Buchanan's key jabs, quotes, and factoids are often "clip and paste" in a clever and twisted manner from liberal or progressive sources to aggregate them cleverly into his edgyand provocative, radical racist premise found in his 2011 book, Suicide of a Superpower.

The following points taken from Buchanan's chapter four entitled "The End of White America":

• The Year 2042 is "the white peoples deadline," engenders the fears in the white minority
• Race is the real source of the over-the-top rage
• Beginnings of a 30 year racial struggle
• The Tea Party's Town Hall events were almost all white.
• What is coming is a "national existential reordering"; May cause "some Americans run off the rails"
• Last gasp of White America..."your time is limited, real damn limited..."
• "As long as you think you are white there is no hope for you" " co-opting Baldwin's quote
• Obama's 2008 victory-Payback for white bigotry
• 2009 Blue collared men have lost pace;-Blue collared white men have lost the largerportion of jobs (510K jobs lost), 17% of illegal aliens now own jobs
• Plurality of Americans lost confidence in the Federal Government
• Election sweep in 2010: WHITES MADE UP OVER 3/4ths of the vote nationally, In the South 2010, Whites voted Republican 73 to 27 Democratic
• White Democratic national congressmen from the Deep South are close to becoming extinct
• If there's an epicenter of angst it is "among Whites without college degrees" 64% of whom blamed the government in Washington

-----

"The atmosphere in this recording is, as you may expect, dark, grim, apocalyptic."

Source: Alternative Right (Alternative Right's founder, Richard B. Spencer, was formerly an editor at The American Conservative magazine and Taki's Magazine. AltRight became a media project of the National Policy Institute).

Pat Buchanan is...

"(t)he author of six New York Times bestsellers traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America's loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation.

"America was born a Western Christian republic, writes Buchanan, but is being transformed into a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world.

"'Where once we celebrated the unity, the melting pot and shared experience, that the Depression and World War gave us, our elites today proclaim, 'OUR DIVERSITY IS OUR GREATEST STRENGTH!'- EVEN AS RACIAL, RELIGIOUS, AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY ARE TEARING NATIONS TO PIECES.'
(emphasis added)

Buchanan book quotes:

"'Rejecting the commitment to a God-given equality of rights for all as inadequate, our government is engaged in the manic pursuit of equality of rewards, as it seeks to erect an egalitarian utopia that has never before existed. Less and less do we Americans have in common. More and more do we fight over religion, morality, politics, history, and heroes.

And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars.'

"How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about."

Source: Amazon Book Description

Back to the future: Pat Buchanan's version
of Burnham's sixties spirit in "The Death of the West" (2001)

Couching his ruminations and anger in religious terms and emotions, Buchanan tries to seed great fear and anxiety into the minds of the country, specifically targeting the minds and emotions of the radical religious right - a vocal mob who are the most reliable GOP base, the uber-loyal voting bloc, the angry Teapartisans of 2010.

Currently Rad Religious Radicals are seeking a way forward out of a disoriented electorate embarrassing itself here in the spring of 2012, behind all of that confusion and angst is a strand of Buchanan's race fear.


Background Reading:
James Burnham, author of "The Suicide of the West" (1964) just one of many quotes from Burnham:

"Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow."
-- James Burnham in The Suicide of the West (1964)

In a later book, "The Machiavellians", [James Burnham] argued and developed his theory that the emerging new elite would better serve its own interests if it retained some democratic trappings - political opposition, a free press, and a controlled 'circulation of the elites'." (Wiki)


Review of "Suicide of the West" by Morton Blackwell at the conservative "Leadership Institute":

"First published in the early sixties, "Suicide of the West" is a withering indictment of liberalism.  Far from serving as a bulwark against communism, liberalism, Burnham shows, is the ideology of Western suicide, communism in its preliminary stage.  Though Soviet communism has collapsed, liberalism remains, and as long as it does, Suicide of the West should be read by conservatives."

On the Reader:
A series of articles on Pat Buchanan over the years at The New Republic (1990-2009). Also Pat Buchanan book "The Death of the West" (2000) read a synopsis.

The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement by Eric Heubeck based on the writing and teaching of Paul Weyrich founder of the Heritage Foundation, CNP, ALEC and a number of other right wing institutions, on the complete defeat of "the Left" referred to by Newt Gingrich as "replacement of the Left".

PART 1 - Déjà Vu All Over Again: A Flashback to Another Fiery & Bizarre Michigan GOP Primary


Original Part 2A and Part 2B.

Plutonian Politics: Dionysian Newt v. Apollonian Barack

Newt's a clear victim of raging narcissism! Candidate Newt Gingrich is burdened with all the errors of unholy and now militant, aggressive, and angry hubris.

Newt is what Nietzsche scholars would label a “Dionysian”: Drawn from Greek mythology:  a man struggling with “his unjust and chaotic (Dionysian) fate.”  “The Dionysian embraces the chaotic nature of … experience as all-important; not just on its own” subsequently and shrewdly utilizing and getting great pleasure derived from ordering about those around him.

Newt (portraying his struggle and envisioning his “heroic” attributes and special visions for himself as his” mission,”- to be the leader of the Free World-saving America and humanity from evils real and imagined)  is (in his own crazy private,  mythical world)  delusional.  It’s Newt’s world in which he truly believes he shares glory with Gen. George Patton and Winston Churchill!

Camille Paglia writes,

“The Dionysian is a force of chaos and destruction, which is the overpowering and alluring chaotic state of wild nature”…Writer Stephen King, “"I used the terms Apollonian (to suggest reason and the power of the mind) and Dionysian (to suggest emotion, sensuality, and chaotic action)” 

Source: Wiki on Apollonian and Dionysian.

America has no place for a Dionysian Wild Man in the White House.  None!

Barack, as an Apollonian leader, represents a man guided by “the wish to describe and create order, especially with unfamiliar information or new experience.”

Newt, the Dionysian, and Barack, the Apollonian, represent sharp conflict in the present political battle. The fact that the “Dionysian and the Apollonian form a dialectic,” highlights the understanding, “they are (sharply) contrasting” conflicting, and in an ageless struggle for raw aggressive power versus creating beneficial change and recovery.

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As boldly cast in Gingrich’s new battlefield-campaign banner, Newt promotes himself to the nation and the world as: "Newt the Fighter. The only Conservative who can beat Obama."

Gingrich's newly unveiled slogan. That bodacious claim, I can "beat" Obama, holds a double meaning: Win over one's opponent , but also reek harm and hurt upon the President-even, if limited, due to social convention, to the metaphorical sense of an old fashion "beating." This appeals perfectly, in an appalling manner, to many of the "toughs" who are anti-government and anti-equality and want Newt to "take off the gloves."

Characterized like Nietzsche was during his lifetime, Gingrich is an "Atavist run amok who should gather tigers and panthers about his knees" as Newt is wont to do (being a self-proclaimed maven of the ZOO), but Newt isn’t licensed to rally the Bible Thumpers with guns-at-the-ready, the roaming and self-contained/activated cells of militias all across America, wild-eyed men inspired and prompted by Gingrichian rants, all to march out of the palmetto swamps and rid America of the "Kenyan"-the closet “Muslim”

To wit:: "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you piece together [his actions]?" -- Newt's Quip, September , 2010

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Like the strident Nietzsche, Gingrich denigrates the so-called "soft" approach to America’s challenges (Michael Borone: Hard America, Soft America), the nation's problems and civics. The issuance of "food stamps" hunger abatement to millions of Americans going hungry is but one example of the strict application of "harsh discipline" which Gingrich will mete out upon those who must work or not eat.

Newt's hard "disciplining model" of governance (select program eliminations) includes the adjunct-bashing "liberals" whom he despises. Those "soft" bleeding heart liberals are the nation's life guardians of men, women and children and their basic human needs and rights.

In turning a cold cheek away from human need and misery, Newt calls up with "increasing intensity" the "strong dark-side spirits" of the angry. Those of the disaffected filled with racial and economic angst. He speaks effectively to rally the disaffected to gather with him: "the Warrior."

"Join with me," Newt trumpets in a clarion call to mount a march, a crusade, against big government, elites, capitalists on Wall Street, and minorities who "refuse" to work, and a long list of other malefactious elements.

Knight Gingrich's militant march is built on his vain-glorious grandiosifying hope to become the "ubermensch." Gingrich aspires to become THE OVERMAN-who will mount the holy battle against the forces of evil.

This threatened political and cultural “war” includes the kinds of things Newt imagines are evilly engulfing America.

Now is a highly turbulent time, a period of economic depression in which Newt’s kind of  extremism appears to be "heroic" and erroneous ideology and misjudgments can seem like gospel. These "opportunities" Newt comprehends and relishes with a keen political predator's eye for prey.

Ruminate on this bold Newtonian utterance: "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz." --The Atlanta Journal, 1994

Let’s not go thoughtlessly into the Plutonian Darkness of the 2012 Election unaware of the extreme nature of  the forces rallied by Gingrich and amassing against President Obama.


Original Part 1 and Part 2.

RACE as the GOP’s Dog Whistle Political “Tool”

"Passion and prejudice properly aroused and directed...do about as well as principle and reason in a party contest."
-- Thomas Elder, prominent Whig politician, 1840

Origins of Race in GOP Politics: How the South Was, and Is, Won


From the masterpiece on American politics by Thomas Byrne Edsall (Washington Post) and wife Mary Edsall come these key insights:

"Within two weeks of the (1948) Democratic convention, the States' Rights Democratic Party (the "Dixiecrats) was formed at a gathering in Birmingham, Alabama. (Strom) Thurman and Fielding Wright, the governor of Mississippi, were chosen as the new party's presidential and vice-presidential nominees. Thurman, running on a segregationist platform, won only 1,169,021 votes, a twentieth if the 24 million votes received by Truman. But Thurman carried Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Alabama-the heart of the deep South, established what sixteen years later would become the beachhead of the GOP."

"The 1948 Thurman campaign was of profound importance, won the issue of race to break (the hold of) the national Democratic Party on the South, a step of critical consequence in a thirty-two-year process that would produce a regional realignment in presidential elections by 1980."

--Thomas & Mary Edsall, in Chain Reaction.

How did the Republicans become the party of choice for the segregationists in the former Dixiecrat "solid" South?

How could there be such a complete and dramatic flip from a "solid Democratic" to "solid Republican" South in such a short period? What gave rise to Republicrats?

In 1964 Barry Goldwater ran for President as a rock-ribbed die-hard conservative. "In the liberal, pro-civil rights atmosphere of 1964, the right-wing strategy of the Goldwater campaign was a short-term disaster."

Involved in Goldwater's nomination success, "the Draft Goldwater Committee used 'concepts and language so harsh that they were unfit for the day-to-day operations or dialogue of American politics," wrote Robert Novak. However, within one presidential cycle these concepts and language had become "publically accepted GOP strategy."

The shift from the support given Democrats to the Republicans in the Deep South played into Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Continued by Ronald Reagan with his trip to the Mississippi county (directly from his nomination at Detroit's National G.O.P. Convention, 1980) where civil rights workers were previously murdered, was Reagan's pandering when he spoke of state's rights. Read the account: "The G.O.P.'s own leaders admit that the great Southern white shift was the result of a deliberate political strategy. 'Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization.' So declared Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, speaking in 2005.

"And Ronald Reagan was among the 'some' who tried to benefit from racial polarization."
-- Paul Krugman in "Republicans and Race" Nov 1, 2007.

Reagan repeated his reiteration of the term "welfare queens" with targeted intent. One of Reagan's wedge statements made had especial appeal to the Southern Base; Reagan in 1980 said the Voting Rights Act was "humiliating to the South."

George H. W. Bush used the "Willie Horton ad", a racial device, and George W. Bush went to Bob Jones University to stake his claim to this line of subliminal, underlying "coded" race strategy.

Robert Novak Weighs In on Goldwater's Impact
The type of plans devised by conservatives in the early stages of the campaign to win in 1964 were, according to Robert Novak (THE AGONY OF THE GOP, 1964) the following:

"Policy A: Soft-pedal civil rights. While stopping short of actually endorsing racial segregation, forget all the sentimental tradition of the party of Lincoln. Because the Negro and Jewish votes are irrevocably tied to the Democrats anyway, this agnostic racial party won't lose votes among the groups most sensitive to Negro rights. But it might work wonders in attracting white southerners into the Republican Party, joining white Protestants in other sections of the country as hard-core Republicans.

Policy B: Assume a vigorously strong anti-Communist line...This wouldn't lose many votes among white Protestants and might snatch enough Catholic votes away from the Democratic Party to cut down Democratic margins in the big cities.

Policy C: Except for the civil rights question, stick to orthodox Republicanism on domestic issues."

How clever and effective; In fact Goldwater did all the wrong things to win the set of Southern States he won in 1964:

"Goldwater ran in 1964 as an ideological doctrinaire conservative calling for the sale of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the evisceration of the Rural Electrification Administration, a voluntary system of Social Security, and t he elimination of farm subsidies. None of these principled stands on the ideological right won him any states. In fact the states he did carry, each one of the government programs Goldwater sought to overturn had substantial, if not overwhelming, majority support."

The Edsall's expand:

"There was, in reality, only one issue that permitted Goldwater to carry five states in addition to his home state of Arizona: civil rights. Goldwater declared himself personally opposed to segregation, but even more deeply opposed on principle to federal intervention to end segregation. '(I)t is wise and just for Negro children to attend the same schools as whites,' Goldwater wrote in 1960, but, he added, "the federal constitution does not require the States to maintain racially mixed schools. Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am firmly convinced-not only the integrated schools are not required-but that the Constitution does not permit any interference by the federal government in the field of education."

Foremost and most importantly; the obvious and most important component of Goldwater's position and stratagem, Goldwater had cast the sole U.S. Senate vote against the Civil Rights Act.

This was the clear and singular act that made Goldwater the Deep South's 1964 Presidential Choice. The stunning reversal of popular vote from "solid" Democrat in the South to a "solid" vote for Goldwater, a Republican, transfixed GOP strategy going forward from that point.

It was a clarion signal to the Republican strategists going forward. Operatives discovered and would use the power of race to dislodge and covert voters who where, heretofore, thought unable to politically crack the Solid South.

The University of Michigan's Survey Research Center produced evidence that changes in the role of race in voting patterns were "significant and of lasting importance" the U of M study suggested that the "ISSUE OF RACE ACTUALLY PRODUCED AN IDEOLOGICAL CONVERSION OF POOR SOUTHERN WHITES FROM A DEEPLY HELD ECONOMIC LIBERALISM TO ECONOMIC CONSERVATISM." (emphasis added)

The U of M researcher goes on,

"By the early 1970's, poor southern whites had moved decisively to the right on these economic issues, becoming more conservative than Catholics, border state whites, and the middle and lower-status white northern Protestants . On the basic issue of government intervention to protect the less well-off, poor southern whites by the 1979's had become as conservative as upscale northern Protestants, a key Republican constituency."

The Edsalls wrote:

"As the 1964 Civil Rights bill worked its way from proposal to passage, and as the presidential campaign took its course, the public perception not only of Johnson and Goldwater, but also of the racial stands of the Democratic and Republican parties, changed radically. The biennial polls conducted for the National Election Studies (NES) reveal that the public before 1964 saw virtually no difference between the parties on issues of race."

Momentous Change Was Coming

"As recently as 1962, when respondents were asked which party "is more likely to see to it that Negroes get fair treatment in jobs and housing?." 22.7 percent said Democrats, 21.3 percent said Republicans, and 55.9 percent said there was no difference between the two parties."

"By late 1964, however, the public saw clear differences between the two parties. When asked which party was more likely to support fair treatment in jobs for blacks, 6o percent of the respondents said the Democratic party, 33 percent said there was no difference between the parties, and only 7 percent said the Republican party. Similarly, when asked in 1964 which party was more likely to support blacks and whites going to the same school, 56 percent said the Democratic party, 37 percent said there was no difference, and 7 percent identified the Republican party.'

"The events of 1964 gave rise to a process in which, over time, the partisan differences on race seen by the public would extend beyond presidential candidates to members of Congress, to the stands taken by the two party platforms, and to the attitudes of presidential convention delegates, party activists, and the much larger universe of voters who identify with the Republican and Democratic parties. BY 1964, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS ON ITS WAY TO BECOMING THE HOME OF RACIAL LIBERALISM, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS ON ITS WAY TO BECOMING THE HOME OF RACIAL CONSERVATISM."

From the Edsalls, Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, " A Pivotal Year", CHAIN REACTION: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, SEE this LINK.

"For the architects of the conservative revolution within the GOP, the southern reaction to the civil rights movement was a fortuitous and unplanned development."

"It was the civil rights movement, however, that gave the conservative insurgency a wider focus, a broader target, and an enlarged constituency. On a number of complementary fronts, the civil rights revolution interacted with the conservative movement to strengthen the right-wing drive within the GOP."

"Evidence that the Goldwater drive was mobilizing a new breed of Republican began to surface at party gatherings. At the 1963 Republican National Committee meeting in Denver, northern Republican leaders, proud of their party's ties to Abraham Lincoln and the emancipation of the slaves midway through the Civil War, were stunned to hear southern chairman carrying on 'boisterous conversation about 'n----rs" and "n----er lovers," wrote columnist Robert Novak in his book, THE AGONY OF THE GOP 1964."

Novak as quoted by the Edsalls:

"At the decisively pro-Goldwater 1963 convention of Young Republicans in San Francisco, there was according to Novak 'no doubt [the] unabashed hostility toward the Negro rights movement was fully shared by the overwhelming majority of the convention delegates...delegates from North and South talk,' Robert Novak observed: ' with a single voice on the race question...For the Young Republicans at San Francisco, their party was now a White Man's Party.'"

--Various quotes excerpted from: CHAIN REACTION: THE IMPACT OF RACE, RIGHTS, AND TAXES ON AMERICAN POLITICS, Thomas Byrne and Mary D. Edsall


What Role Will RACE Play in the 2012 Elections?
This election cycle will be peppered with all the coding and "dog whistles" associated with the GOP's tried and true use of RACE and ethnicity as keystone factors in legislation, politics and campaigning.

Even Henry Payne, The Michigan View in Detroit News, catches on; at least in part; when he bluntly concludes:

"So why are the elephants dooming their long-term viability? Having already alienated black and Jewish voters, they seem to determined to alienate the fastest-growing minority in America: Hispanics." Payne concludes: "...the GOP base wants to build a fence. And as Perry understands - and Bush and Rove before him - that look(s) to Hispanic voters like a fence around A WHITE REPUBLICAN PARTY." 

Closer to Home: Gingrich's Remarks and Race in Detroit
The crafty, often careless, but cunning Gingrich uses hyperbole and exaggeration for maximum effect. Brendon Berry, Thomas M. Cooley Law School, wrote this piece: DOG WHISTLES AND CODES: Covert Republican Message Making, May 21, 2011:

"Recent Republican race-baiting, in the person of Newt Gingrich and his allegorical references to Detroit and food stamps, raises anew the issue of Republican 'dog-whistle politics.' That Republicans habitually trip over themselves in the proverbial 'race to the bottom' with their appeals to the fears and anxieties of small-mindedness is well understood by any close observer of American politics. But the well-read and keenly alert are not the electoral targets or concerns of Republican message-makers. The people Republican strategists seek to reach-or at least not to scare-are the vast numbers of Americans who are not paying attention closely, those whose ignorance renders them susceptible to the game of bait-and-switch that the right-wing has been playing with Americans for decades."

Footnote on "Dog Whistle Racism": 

"Dog-Whistle Racism is political campaigning or policy-making that uses coded words and themes to appeal to conscious or subconscious racist concepts and frames. For example, the concepts 'welfare queen,' 'states' rights,' 'Islamic terrorist,' 'uppity,' 'thug,' 'tough on crime,' and 'illegal alien' all ACTIVATE RACIST CONCEPTS THAT THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN PLANTED IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS AND NOW ARE BEING ACTIVATED BY PURPOSEFUL OR ACCIDENTAL CAMPAIGN ACTIVITIES, MEDIA COVERAGE, PUBLIC POLICY AND CULTURAL TRADITIONS. So, what's dog whistle racism? It's pure political theater to push buttons to win elections and policies."
(emphasis added) 

For further information go to Dog Whistle Racism.


Original.

A mighty Meeting of the Minds: Judis & Kirk & Lofgren

In willful disunion sanctified by TeaPublicans, can a sovereign government survive? Are there no limits to endless their rebellion against the proper role and functions of government?

Russell Kirk laid down this the 6th of his Canons of Conservatism: "...innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence."

It is doubtful that Jesus will return to Michigan anytime soon. Yet in the meanwhile, Russell Kirk, the guardian of all things conservative has spoken, he said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another." and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."

Quotes from Russell Kirk Conservative, Michigan's own master philosopher and laureate: 1.) The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 2.) The Portable Conservative Reader 1982.

Kirk's Six Conservative Canons

1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
5. A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and
6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.

John Judis reflects on the total lack of "political value" ascribed to "prudence."  He writes:

"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."

The TeaPublican lack of civility and "prudence", respect for historic traditions and the role of honest advice and consent has raised the question of the sincerity of their religious faith. Or as Russell Kirk proclaims: "...all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."

What has happened in Washington is a breakdown of culture, a disrespect for religion, and a terrible "iron hatred" that seems to permeate every GOP partisan act of obfuscation.

Writes Veteran Republican Washington insider, Mike Lofgen has just left the party after near 30 years of service:

"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."

Here, in part, is Lofgren's analysis of the great danger- present and future - being brought on by the TeaPublican rebellion and it's anti-government putsch which has decimated the party of Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower and now threatens the sovereign success and stability of our nation. Lofgren writes that 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.

Lofgren:

"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."

This disorder and brinkmanship in Washington has not derailed the wealth sucking multinationals from having a record, banner year in extreme profits.

What is wrong with this picture?

Ask any A.L.E.C. member why so many unfairly loaded and corporate benefiting legislative proposals (prepackaged Pro-Corporate designed legislation) are getting fast tracked in the midst of our slide into the Great Bush Depression. God forbid.

The TeaPublican dysfunction and lack of "prudence" have greatly abetted and benefited the "takers" who apparently live in a world removed from those of us who work, teach or serve our fellow community members.

Original.

TeaPublicans: Civic Slackers Filled with Obstinacy, Obstruction, Obfuscation

"Extremists' obstructionism in pursuit of "our way or the highway" is no vice."
- Parody of Sen. Barry Goldwater

Eyes Wide Open
The general population is beginning to see the depth of the civic depravity of the TeaPublican agenda and the thrust of the American Legislative Exchange Council so much a part of the threat the Bush economic implosion thrust upon you and I, ordinary Americans. Two well-placed men from inside the GOP have helped us see the corrupt and malevolent nature of current TeaPartisanship:

1.) David Stockman has asserted that Bush and his cabal created a civic crime "Worse Than Watergate." Former Reagan Budget Director, Stockman was in the heart of the Regan regime and understood the guts of the "Cult of Reagan" far better than most. It was Stockman who enlightened the nation that Reagan cultists were willing to use the huge debt that Reagan ran up to control and defeat social spending in America.

Author John Judis writes this confirming Stockman's "worse than Watergate" assertion:
"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." "Emphasis added"

2.)  Now comes Mike Lofgren. Lofgren ended his career as a Congressional staffer after years as a respected professional staffer for Washington Republicans in both the U.S. House and the Senate and having served on the GOP Senate Budget Committees. From Mike Lofgren' s essay "Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult" on September 3, 2011:

Lofgren:

"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 attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was 'bring it on!'"

Lofgren:

"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."

The cultish TeaPublicans around the country have made every attempt to rally the civic slackers, those

Lofgren:

"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."

Lofgren:

"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)."

Lofgren:

"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.

" 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."

Lofgren:

"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."

Lofgren:

"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."

Lofgren:

"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."

(Emphasis added throughout these quotes)


See Also the previsous posting "Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C.".

Original.

Our Guides to the Bottomless Pit: Wolfram, Von Hayek, Lewis F. Powell, & A.L.E.C.

"Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power."
-- Benito Mussolini

Prof Gary Wolfram holds sacred Friedrich von Hayek and his theorems and postulations about economics. ("The most rapid progress toward a coherent and useful aggregate economic theory will result from the acceptance of the problem statement (in economics) as advanced by Hayek" - Robert Lucas).

****

How did we get ourselves into this tangled economic nightmare? The Cult of Reagan.

The real work of the Cult of Reagan has carried its effects into the present economy and the politics behind the "business is superior" legislation involved in the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) national putsch/winner-take-all coup using the various state legislatures to put forward a cornucopia of revisions, repeals, and replacement of items that directly benefit the Corporatocracy now so much in control of American life and economy.

WHERE A.L.EC. AND ITS CORPORATE RUN DEMOCRACY ARE HEADED IS BOTH DANGEROUS AND TRAGIC.

Friends of Wolfram's hero, Hayek, speak:

"Most plans for economic reform in the socialist countries seem to be coming closer to the realization that increasing decentralization of decision-making is needed to solve the problems of rational economic planning."

From Fritz Machlup, "Hayek's Contribution to Economics", Swedish Journal of Economics, Vol. 76, Dec. 1974.

Yet what A.L.E.C. (The American Legislative Exchange Council) is attempting in its nationwide, state by state coup d'état is a precise, centralized system of decision making and legislation, not at that much maligned federal level control and regulation, but at the individual state's level. Centralized and tightly controlled by a cabal of corporations who run and control A.L.E.C, manhandling state legislators caught up its secretive web of power grabbing, regulatory rollbacks, gimmicks and boutique business legislation/advantages.

A.L.E.C.'s Model Legislation Dominance in State Legislatures

Given the homogeny and singularity of A.L.E.C.'s Model Legislation, what is being attempted is a uniform set of laws and system of decision making that is at the various state levels, diversified and separate from the national or federal government, but collectivized and centralized under the aegis of the A.L.E.C. dominance and control of state legislation and lawmaking. This is coup is becoming America's Corporate-controlled-democracy; a new and aggressive "friendly fascism" not like that of the Nazis but more akin to that of Mussolini's régime in pre-WW II Italy. An American Corporatocracy that has many of the characteristics of 1930's Italian fascism.

The real mischief maker/promotionist in the historic directed march to business-run government, by corporations and for corporations, was Lewis F. Powell.

Prof Gary has spent very little time pondering the impact of this very powerful force in the economic policies of first the Reagan reign and subsequently the follow-on which Powell created.

Powell was "corporate lawyer and member of the boards of 11 corporations" prior to being elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court. Powell's work in regards to the economy and the practices of corporatist politics was first revealed AFTER he was ensconced as a justice. Powell wrote "a memo to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court."

The POWELL MEMO, as it is now known, was not revealed prior to his senate conformation for good reason. "It was leaked to Jack Anderson, a liberal syndicated columnist, who stirred interest in the document when he cited it as reason to doubt Powell's legal objectivity. Anderson cautioned that Powell 'might use his position on the Supreme Court to put his ideas into practice...in behalf of business interests.'"

Reagan's Hands Off Policy in Service of Corporations Gets a Jump Start

"Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of:

1. the Heritage Foundation
2.  the Manhattan Institute
3.  the Cato Institute
4. Citizens for a Sound Economy
5. Accuracy in Academia
6. and other powerful organizations.

"Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's 'hands-off business' philosophy."

****

What impact has this new (focused by business chambers of commerce) sponsored economic/political/social thinking had on the nation?

Plenty.

"Most notable about these institutions was their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building..."

These areas of "hot button gripes" have fuel an entire generation of class warfare, or as Pat Buchan put it so indelicately at the Houston GOP National Convention, a Cultural War. Not satisfied with the impact of "cultural war" many rad-rightists have characterized their campaign to achieve ideological homogeny over all other groups and partisan political parties in a stronger, move evocative color: It's Civil War.

The rad-right with many new comers to immense wealth, the Waltons of WalMart, the DeVos/VanAndels of Amway, et al have carefully and abundantly funded the above group of "think tanks" with their coveted 501 (c) (3) take advantage of government tax free advantage in their "educational" activities. Most notable about these rad-right institutions was, and is, "their focus on education, shifting values, and movement-building." Progressives and other poltical groups do not have the "sugar daddy" funders that are the underwriters of the rad-right and their implementation of the Powell Memo.

Give the rad-right credit: They are patient, they are focused, they are on script and they know how to take extreme advantage of economic unrest and disaster. Pro-family, community supporting groups lack this kind of control. In opposition to the growing take-over by the Corporatocracy, citizen groups are relegated to: "band-aids and short-term results which provide little hope of the systemic change we so desperately need to reverse the trend of growing corporate dominance."

"So did Powell's political views influence his judicial decisions? The evidence is mixed. Powell did embrace expansion of corporate privilege and wrote the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a 1978 decision that effectively invented a First Amendment "right" for corporations to influence ballot questions. On social issues, he was a moderate, whose votes often surprised his backers."

A Quick Overview of the Powell Memo drawn as excerpts from Lewis F. Powell's "Manifesto":

THEME: "No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack..." "(T)he assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts.."

SOURCES OF THE ATTACK:

• "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking."

TONE OF THE ATTACK:

• Stewart Alsop: "Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men who are practitioners of 'the politics of despair.' These young men despise the American political and economic system . . . (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans."
• (F)amed Dr. Milton Friedman of Chicago warned: "It (is) crystal clear that the foundations of our free society are under wide-ranging and powerful attack -- not by Communist or any other conspiracy but by misguided individuals parroting one another and unwittingly serving ends they would never intentionally promote."
• All around one can hear criticism of business as usual. To illustrate "here are countless examples of rifle shots which undermine confidence and confuse the public. Favorite current targets are proposals for tax incentives through changes in depreciation rates and investment credits. These are usually described in the media as "tax breaks," "loop holes" or "tax benefits" for the benefit of business. As viewed by a columnist in the Post, such tax measures would benefit "only the rich, the owners of big companies."

"This setting of the 'rich' against the 'poor,' of business against the people, is the cheapest and most dangerous kind of politics."

The Apathy and Default of Business

• "The painfully sad truth is that business, including the boards of directors' and the top executives of corporations great and small and business organizations at all levels, often have responded -- if at all -- by appeasement, ineptitude and ignoring the problem."
• "In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it. The traditional role of business executives has been to manage, to produce, to sell, to create jobs, to make profits, to improve the standard of living, to be community leaders, to serve on charitable and educational boards, and generally to be good citizens. They have performed these tasks very well indeed."
• "But they (business leaders) have shown little stomach for hard-nose contest with their critics, and little skill in effective intellectual and philosophical debate."

RESPONSIBILITY OF BUSINESS EXECUTIVES
The day is long past when the chief executive officer of a major corporation discharges his responsibility by maintaining a satisfactory growth of profits, with due regard to the corporation's public and social responsibilities. If our system is to survive, top management must be equally concerned with protecting and preserving the system itself. This involves far more than an increased emphasis on "public relations" or "governmental affairs" -- two areas in which corporations long have invested substantial sums."

****

The catastrophic economic collapse brought on by George W. Bush's wars and economic policies has opened the door to "disaster capitalism" as outlined in good part by Naomi Klein and put to good and immediate use at this time as Michigan is in a 'One State Depression' and other states are close behind.

To wit: Disaster Capitalism/Shock Doctrine Explained by Professor of Economics and Public Policy Hillsdale College, Dr. Wolfram:

"As a certain Presidential chief of staff once said, you shouldn't let a crisis go to waste. We have a chance to introduce structural reforms on our educational system, our business tax, our corrections system, and our Medicaid system because the budget problems have forced an examination that would not otherwise have taken place. The budget cuts can best be accomplished by addressing how services are delivered and which services are properly the role of state government. It will be interesting to see how this ends up."
(emphasis added)

Original.