A Time for Cleansing
Perhaps in the spirit of balancing potential cheery mindset vis-a-vis prior post, let us not fail to attend to the incredible effort being made by the Big Losers of 2008 to redact history, much as the rare bit of paper that got out of the current maladministration featured so much black-out.
Let's start off with a little Digby, debunking the attempt to paint poppy as warm, sort-of-Santa-like, and certainly with a record that grows more golden and flawless by the day (a la Ronnie?). Their attempt is to provide a lot more cover and latitude for those Obama appointees who still reek of their time working in the stables of bush (i and ii) to ride into office with little or no skeptical questioning or intent scrutiny, something that would obviously be a huge lapse on our part:
I'm not too sure where E.J.Dionne is coming from here, but it sounds as if he thinks it's some kind of great thing if Obama decides to become the president son George Bush Sr never had. But it pays to remember that the vaunted "realism" of George Bush Sr led to a war that's still going on today. He's the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:
That was, of course, the least of it:
I recognize that in the beltway, there is a belief that the only "serious" foreign policy schools are Neoconservative and Realist (also conservative.) We know that Obama is not a neocon and it's a great relief. But let's hope that Obama is forging a different path than that taken by the Realists as well. After all, the king of the realists is none other than Henry Kissinger and he's left his fingerprints on every American made foreign disaster in the last 40 years.
I suppose that if it makes the villagers happy to believe that the really, really old "grown-ups" are back in charge, it doesn't matter a whole lot if it's just a PR stunt. But let's hope that people in foreign lands don't get the idea that we're taking a trip back to the 80s because that wasn't a particularly successful time for American foreign policy.
And revisionists who are trying to turn Poppy into some kind of kindly, avuncular old coot need to take a little trip down memory lane. He was a ruthless piece of work.
And then there is this longer-ranging and possibly even more important take on the repub/conservative mindset over the past oh, say, six decades, courtesy of Neil Gabler at the LA Times (h/t Josh at TPM):
Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.
The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.
But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.
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McCarthy, a Catholic, was especially adept at nursing national resentments among the sorts of people that typically did not vote Republican. He stumbled onto the fact that many of these people in postwar America were frightened and looking for scapegoats. He provided them, and in doing so not only won millions of adherents but also bequeathed to his party a powerful electoral bludgeon that would eventually drive out the moderates from the GOP (posthumous payback) before it drove the Democrats from the White House.
In a way, Goldwater was less a fulfillment of McCarthy conservatism than a slight diversion from it. Goldwater was ideological -- an economic individualist. He hated government more than he loved winning, and though he was certainly not above using the McCarthy appeal to resentment or accusing his opponents of socialism, he lacked McCarthy's blood- lust. McCarthy's real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.
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Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.
And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.
The primary point is that while we have forestalled the ghastly prospect of awakening to an administration involving McCain and Palin (oh the horror - the horror!), there is truly no time for complacency. It's somewhat of a minor dream come true to have coulter's jaws wired, but I'm sure she still has her keyboard, and it would take more silver bullets, iron stakes, and garlic bulbs than I possess to even take care of that one of so many misguided enemies of our country.
We as activist citizens will have to maintain vigilance and diligence in monitoring our government's attention to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and resulting civil liberties. For starters, Obama's administration will have to cede a good deal of the power illegally usurped by the prior Executive branch to the Legislature and Judiciary.
And I think it long past time we got to working on some sort of motivational program to encourage Early Retirement by key executives in the White House. I suspect it would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy even in the shortest of terms to have gwb back cutting brush and reverting to early childhood a few weeks early. Can't we find a way to offer up a few paltry tens of millions, say, for an early holiday present to the American People (not to mention the rest of the afflicted throughout the world)?
Let's start off with a little Digby, debunking the attempt to paint poppy as warm, sort-of-Santa-like, and certainly with a record that grows more golden and flawless by the day (a la Ronnie?). Their attempt is to provide a lot more cover and latitude for those Obama appointees who still reek of their time working in the stables of bush (i and ii) to ride into office with little or no skeptical questioning or intent scrutiny, something that would obviously be a huge lapse on our part:
I'm not too sure where E.J.Dionne is coming from here, but it sounds as if he thinks it's some kind of great thing if Obama decides to become the president son George Bush Sr never had. But it pays to remember that the vaunted "realism" of George Bush Sr led to a war that's still going on today. He's the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:
Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.
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It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.
That was, of course, the least of it:
ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."Iraqgate was another of those scandals that Clinton and the Democrats in congress left on the floor because they didn't want to play the blame game. It's ended up costing a lot of lives.
Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.
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I recognize that in the beltway, there is a belief that the only "serious" foreign policy schools are Neoconservative and Realist (also conservative.) We know that Obama is not a neocon and it's a great relief. But let's hope that Obama is forging a different path than that taken by the Realists as well. After all, the king of the realists is none other than Henry Kissinger and he's left his fingerprints on every American made foreign disaster in the last 40 years.
I suppose that if it makes the villagers happy to believe that the really, really old "grown-ups" are back in charge, it doesn't matter a whole lot if it's just a PR stunt. But let's hope that people in foreign lands don't get the idea that we're taking a trip back to the 80s because that wasn't a particularly successful time for American foreign policy.
And revisionists who are trying to turn Poppy into some kind of kindly, avuncular old coot need to take a little trip down memory lane. He was a ruthless piece of work.
And then there is this longer-ranging and possibly even more important take on the repub/conservative mindset over the past oh, say, six decades, courtesy of Neil Gabler at the LA Times (h/t Josh at TPM):
Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.
The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.
But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.
-clip-
McCarthy, a Catholic, was especially adept at nursing national resentments among the sorts of people that typically did not vote Republican. He stumbled onto the fact that many of these people in postwar America were frightened and looking for scapegoats. He provided them, and in doing so not only won millions of adherents but also bequeathed to his party a powerful electoral bludgeon that would eventually drive out the moderates from the GOP (posthumous payback) before it drove the Democrats from the White House.
In a way, Goldwater was less a fulfillment of McCarthy conservatism than a slight diversion from it. Goldwater was ideological -- an economic individualist. He hated government more than he loved winning, and though he was certainly not above using the McCarthy appeal to resentment or accusing his opponents of socialism, he lacked McCarthy's blood- lust. McCarthy's real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.
-clip-
Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.
And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.
The primary point is that while we have forestalled the ghastly prospect of awakening to an administration involving McCain and Palin (oh the horror - the horror!), there is truly no time for complacency. It's somewhat of a minor dream come true to have coulter's jaws wired, but I'm sure she still has her keyboard, and it would take more silver bullets, iron stakes, and garlic bulbs than I possess to even take care of that one of so many misguided enemies of our country.
We as activist citizens will have to maintain vigilance and diligence in monitoring our government's attention to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and resulting civil liberties. For starters, Obama's administration will have to cede a good deal of the power illegally usurped by the prior Executive branch to the Legislature and Judiciary.
And I think it long past time we got to working on some sort of motivational program to encourage Early Retirement by key executives in the White House. I suspect it would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy even in the shortest of terms to have gwb back cutting brush and reverting to early childhood a few weeks early. Can't we find a way to offer up a few paltry tens of millions, say, for an early holiday present to the American People (not to mention the rest of the afflicted throughout the world)?
posted by Sir Gumbo at 8:56 PM
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