Sunday, March 05, 2006

 

Reagan's Legacy


   So Bill Kristol, the Dark Prince of Tendentious Journalism (as the Editor of The Weekly Standard, the most biliously far-right publication in the country; I mean fascist far right. I mean these guys make The American Spectator and National Review look like pussies) has come to the conclusion that most conservatives think Drinky is incompetent.

   In related news, Pat Robertson just lost his job.

   I never want to be confused with disastrousizers, but this is the beginning of the wheels falling off this wagon. When Bill Kristol, your batboy, the guy who went for the plate for you (along with a couple of his writers) to defend torture in the face of overwhelming opposition within your own party, comes out and says you’re a boob, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.

   This is Brutus deciding he’s bloodied his hands for Caesar one too may times. This is Hess deciding that, despite his raging anti-Semitism, he can’t follow der Fuehrer any further down the path he’s decided to tread.

   Though they’re all still criminals, some of them think that bailing out of the plane before it hits bottom is going to save them. But Hess was still a criminal, and Brutus was no better than Caesar, if not worse.

   Your opinions are a matter of historical record, Kristol, and they will forever be frozen in time in microfiche and microfilm records, in databases, on hard drives, and framed behind glass in my office, because they are shining examples of absolute evil right in the heart of the American political discussion.
They are shining examples of the diseased thinking that runs one of the parties in this country, and I’m not talking about democrats.

   I love the grudging admission of a flaw that lefties have been screaming about for six years: incompetence. I love the tip o’ the hat to that particular problem, like it exists in a vacuum, like it was invisible until now, like they haven’t been defending this president’s incompetence for six years.

   False intelligence leading to the war in Iraq? Who cares! It’s still a worthy mission! War critics are blame-America-firsters, defeatists, cut-and-runners, and traitors.

   He ignored intelligence indicating there were no weapons, that we wouldn’t be greeted with flowers, that he needed more than 120,000 troops, that it would take years and hundreds of billions of dollars to reconstruct Iraq? Not true, they said at the time.

   He appointed a horse show association president to be the head of FEMA, he was warned repeatedly about the impending Katrina disaster and dismissed the concerns, and he went on vacation as New Orleans sunk beneath the waves. But we all remember how, according to the right, local authorities were really to blame, Nagin was a clown, we don’t want to play the “blame game,” etc.

   I might cover a dozen lesser examples, but I think we all can remember the specifics of Katrina and Iraq. We all remember who was defending the President’s incompetence and who was flagellating it, only to be accused of insincerity, partisanship, and dishonesty.

   So now that we have The Prince of Darkness stating the obvious. I have read other administration critics on the web describe this as “rats jumping off a sinking ship” and “the neocon machine putting on a display of reform to mollify the masses.”

   This comes in the immediate wake of news that Fox and CNN/USA Today/Gallup have both run polls that confirm the CBS poll: Fox has Drinky’s JAR at 39% and CNN/USA Today/Gallup has it at 38%.

   Conservatives, though they have been surprisingly comfortable living in the 40’s for the past year, are now hitting the panic button. Bill Kristol is jumping ship and Pat Robertson just got thrown overboard.
Old-school conservatives are beginning to criticize the administration.

   Bill Frist, as usual, is working overtime to cover up for the president’s policies. Glenn Greenwald has a post here, as usual the best writing on the subject anywhere on the Internet. Frist is actually making the democratic cover-up of Dan Rostenkowski’s dealings pale by comparison.

   Glenn has a host of great blogs, so spend some time there. Greenwald echoes my post about conservative ship-jumpers (or is it vice-versa) here and has a great post about the NSA program here and here.

   Greenwald skewers the Administration and states bluntly that he believes Administration spying domestically goes beyond the NSA wiretapping scandal. Some choice Greenwald moments:

   I say this advisedly: the Administration is now in full-blown shameless lying mode.

   Gonzales had weeks to prepare for this testimony. He is a trained lawyer. Unlike most witnesses in a lawsuit, he was never cut off by the questioner. He was free to speak at will in response to every question for as long as he wanted, and to say whatever he wanted. Why is it necessary for him to issue a 6-page single-spaced letter, the bulk of which is devoted to "clarifying" what was his unambiguous (false) testimony to the Committee just a few weeks ago?

   Former Clinton administration State Department official Harold Hongju Koh, who is now Dean of Yale Law School, told Specter’s committee that the NSA spying was "as blatantly illegal a program as I’ve seen."

   Although it remains to be seen what the extent of the NSA wiretapping program is and if there are others, we will never know with Bill Frist and Pat Roberts blocking for the administration.

   They have ample reason to think they can sweep any lawbreaking under the rug. Reagan and his administration simply ignored (so loudly and unabashedly one might use the word “flaunted”) U.S. and international law to fund terrorists in Nicaragua. The U.N. Court of Justice ruled against them and they ignored it. The Security Council ruled against them twice and they vetoed the resolution twice. The General Assembly ruled against them in a crushing 94-3 rebuke of the Administration’s policy and Reagan ignored it, and America did too. In violating U.S. law, however, Reagan faced an onlslaught from within his own country. A docile democratic congress declined to impeach the president for his misbehavior and merely let flagrant lawbreakers like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams off in exchange for testimony, which they provided, proudly detailing how they ignored the Boland Amendment to fund terrorists by selling arms to terrorists and sneering at the presumption of congress that it thought it could constrain the foreign policy of a warlike president with law. Elliott called the congressional investigators “pious clowns.”

   The investigations dragged on for years, with the same docile democratic congress not making essentially any effort to expedite the process, although new revelations came out and the trials of some went on. But when the investigation began to swing in the direction of George H.W. Bush, with Caspar Weinburger’s people saying that the sitting Vice President at the time wes very involved with the operation, George H. W. Bush pardoned all of the Iran-Contra felons that had worked with him under Reagan to implement the Contra Affair on his last days in office, an act that is within arm’s reach of Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre for the sheer audacity of its self-servicing derailment of the workings of the legal system in this country.

   There was no Terri-Schiavo-Bill legislative process whereby democrats rammed a bill through congress to make a law that applied to one person that democrats wanted to affect in flagrant opposition to the findings of the courts and the will of the majority of America. There was no nuclear option threat to crush dissent in the opposing party and to eliminate any option of the minority in congress to block legislation by the majority. There was no Bill Frist threatening the nuclear option, threatening to rearrange the laws of any committee that ruled against the wishes of the dominant party, threatening, in short, the change any rule of congressional procedure that would give democrats a chance to stop legislation started and favored by the 5-person republican majority.

   There was no witchhunt of Reagan, no democratic congress ripping apart the laws of the country to forward a partisan democratic agenda. There were tepid investigations for years that were never aided with the extraordinary excercises of legislative and executive power that republicans have mustered for their agenda. The public, after the congressional hearings, lost interest in the Iran Contra Affair, and so did congress. Without public discontent the Reagan and then Bush Administrations stonewalled and obstructed justice relentlessly until GHW Bush’s last days, when he simply dismissed the prosecutors with a contemptuous wave.

   The media, then as now, slept through this public rape of justice like it had never happened. They didn’t care, just like they eventually stopped making a fuss about Reagan’s problem with the truth, just like they did with George W. Bush’s problem with the truth. They might report it when a democrat, like Bill Clinton or Al Gore, told a lie, but when it became part and parcel of a republican administration they simply didn’t care.

   Throw in Tom DeLay gerrymandering Texas twice in 3 years to cement a republican majority and you have an idea of what we are talking about when we say republicans are destroying democracy. They are very premeditatingly ripping the gears out of the machinery of government to further an agenda that serves only themselves.

   But the republicans have learned, through Reagan and both Bushes, that flagrant lawbreaking can work, and it can be quickly swept from the public’s eye before enough people see it to raise a furor that elected officials would have to respond to. They have made a living out of the fact that you can lie publicly and obviously to every knowledgeable person in America, and as long as the majority of your electorate agrees with you or is not paying attention, you can get away with it.

   The only people that Pat Roberts really cares about are the people who vote him into office every six years and, to a lesser extent, his party bosses (who, in a confusion of causation, help form the opinions of his constituency by controlling hate radio, national organizations with outlets in Kansas, and armies of political footsoldiers and media shills). If 51% of his electorate think Valerie Plame wasn’t really a spy, or even if 51% of them don’t care, Roberts can safely go on Sunday morning talk shows and flatly say he doubts she was undercover, even when he knows better, even when everyone sitting around him knows better. If most Illinoisans have never heard of George Soros than Denny Hastert is free to speculate or imply that George Soros might be drug dealer, a supposition that would be criticized as a McCarthyite slander in a truly polite society, but not like one in Washington and Illinois, where political power is all that matters and most people are not paying attention, respectively.

   Depsite this I never cease to get offended by people that lie to my face, especially when they do so because they think they can get away with it despite my efforts. Such contempt for the truth and my abilities would be offensive to anyone with self esteem.

   But politicians have long realized that the truth is a malleable thing, and no politicians like the modern GOP have based an entire party’s platform on lies and the defense of the same lies.

   Conservatives in prominent places usually look to Ronald Reagen as their ideal president, which says a lot about what direction their party has gone on in the last 26 years. He’s their ideal: he was good-looking and charismatic, which is very important when you’re a leader. He lied constantly and was rarely publicly criticized for it, as he was popular and his political backers were influential and his electorate was ignorant. He enacted massive tax cuts, which pleased his donors, and he relentlessly beat the war drum, which rallied the more puerile half of the country to his standard for eight years. He appointed conservative judges, which mollified the real core of his electorate, Christian and cultural conservatives.

   He was a conservative they all loved, because he delivered the key to the treasury and the courts but was still able to pull off his act as a populist. They lionize Reagan because he delivered the agenda of the radical right to them while simultaneoulsy remaining popular, an impressive feat indeed. But because Reagan did it with a cocky smile conservatives know they can praise him as the founder of modern conservativism because people who have only vaguely good memories of the eighties won’t rip them for it.

   Reagan is the founder of modern conservativism. He was so radical at the time (1979) Jimmy Carter thought he could beat Reagen, even with a 30% approval rating, just because Reagan was that radical. But he won, because Carter simply had no answers.

   So Ronald Reagan just scooted right into the history books, leaving a wake of partisan warfare waged on the American People. Let’s revisit some choice Reagan quotes:

California gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan is quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying: "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964" in 1966.

Ronald Reagan tells Time magazine: "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time,'" in May 1976.

"The American Petroleum Institute filed suit against the EPA [and] charged that the agency was suppressing a scientific study for fear it might be misinterpreted... The suppressed study reveals that 80 percent of air pollution comes not from chimneys and auto exhaust pipes, but from plants and trees," he said in 1979.

…and all the other anecdotes that he just made up. "All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk," in 1980. "History shows that when the taxes of a nation approach about 20 percent of the people's income, there begins to be a lack of respect for government... When it reaches 25 percent, there comes an increase in lawlessness," also in 1980. "Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G.I. Bill of Rights with respect to education or anything," again in 1980.

  Once elected, the circus continued. After President Reagan vetoes an emergency spending bill which would have prevented a shutdown of the federal government, House Speaker Tip O'Neill tells a reporter: "He knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can't even carry on a conversation about the budget. It's an absolute and utter disgrace."

   James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, he of the “I don’t know how many more generations will have to take care of the environment before the Rapture” quote unleashes another gem, this time describing his staff to “counter” charges of bigotry: "We have every mixture you can have. I have a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent,” which is the funniest “defense” against bigotry I’ve ever read, anywhere. He was forced to resign shortly thereafter, back in days when the GOP didn’t have a death grip on government.

   But Reagan was no fascist, no sir. In 1985 he realized that "I think that there's nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery [Bitburg], where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps," thus finding a surprising moral equivalence between the Jewish victims of Hitler and the soldiers who sent them to their graves, a moral equivalence that would have rocked Hanna Arendt’s world if she only had had the vision of Ronald Reagan.

   After giving a speech at the Bergen-Belsen death camp, President Ronald Reagan accompanies German Chancellor Helmut Kohl to the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany. There Reagan lays a wreath in memory of the German war dead. In addition to roughly 2,000 German soldiers of both World Wars, 49 members of the Waffen SS are also buried there, which didn’t faze him one bit.

   I seem to remember a much less “inappropriate” Nazi comment from Dick Durbin raising a firestorm of phony conservative resentment, but then again, Reagan’s comments came at a time when a partisan congress hadn’t co-opted government. Democrats were a wee bit more understanding.

   Reagan wonders aloud about the AIDS pandemic: "Maybe the Lord brought down this plague... [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments." [Dutch, p. 458] his official biographer quoted him as saying.

   This panoply of deceptiveness reeks of purposefulness because of two reasons: one, how repeated it was; two, because all of his lies and false anecdotes had a similar theme: the cultural/Christian conservative belief system. Look at the lies above in order and go find the point of the lie and see if it doesn’t echo the GOP agenda point for point:

  1. Racism, if Martin Luther King has taught us anything, is explicit here.

  2. The New Deal, social programs, etc. are all evil.

  3. The environment is not in jeopardy, as oil industry funded scientists will be happy to tell you.

  4. Taxes hurt countries.

  5. See #2.

  6. When you are a bigot you surround yourself with bigots.

  7. OK, the Nazi quote is inexplicable to me, aside from the affection Republicans have for authority when it is strong and conservative.

  8. Christian fundamentalism on full display, here. Falwell was proud.

   So in reflecting on Reagan’s poisonous legacy, I see an exact equivalence in Drinky’s presidency, point for point. Despite what they may say when their depravity is made too obvious for further defense, they have defended Drinky at every opportunity because his policies have been in a strict lock step with Reagan’s.

  1. Bush has been an opponent of Affirmative Action and many other programs that are aimed at ameliorating the condition of minorities.

  2. Bush has worked hard to dismantle or renovated the New Deal and other programs aimed at helping the poor, including privatizing Social Security and suffocating the Americorp.

  3. Bush has repeatedly denied the existence of global warming and pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol, put former industry lobbyists in charge of the Department of the Interior, undermined the EPA, and worked hard to lower pollution standards.

  4. Bush has delivered relentlessly on the tax cuts conservatives cherish.

  5. See #2.

  6. Bush has surrounded himself with sycophants and repeatedly ignored or demoted critics of his policies within his own administration, as I have detailed previously and as even many conservatives now admit, belatedly.

  7. Reagan and Bush both believed in a strong central authority (when that authority was a republican, of course) and a belligerent foreign policy. Though his supporters will still say his foreign policy was “strong” while that of democrats like Bill Clinton was “weak.”

  8. Bush is a born-again Christian who never ceases to make a point of his conservative Christian values. He is opposed to abortion, of course, but goes further than that to oppose stem-cell research and gay marriage.

   So what are conservatives like Bill Kristol getting antsy about? Maybe the Katrina debacle, many also doubt the war in Iraq, after two years of little progress. Even Bill Buckley, among others, has publicly criticized the administration’s war effort.

   But these criticisms are weak indeed, coming from a group that still backs the president’s NSA wiretapping program and even seeks to block even an investigation into it.

   These guys aren’t concerned about the rampant lawlessness of the executive, only his ancillary incompetence at war planning and disaster management. They’re still on board with the whole torture/extraordinary rendition/intelligence manipulation/environmental destruction thing. And they will still go to back for the next republican congressman or presidential candidate that advocates this.

   They haven’t changed. Their party has been run by Ronald Reagan for 26 years and it still is.

# posted by BitterHarvest @ 3:02 PM
Comments:
I've got a good link back at my place. It shows 14 hallmark traits of Fascism.

BushCorp. matches up with all 14.
# posted by Blogger Wadena : 6:05 PM
 
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