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The Platform of the Republican Party

In answer to the“Yes we can!” spirit of the Obama administration we present the don't do, can't do, won't do, try to make us, bet you can't no matter what you do, party. Nothing will work, our problems are unsolvable,your solutions whatever they are won't work and so we won't either.

This is the republican party gone W.I.L.D.E.R - Won't, Impede, Lie, Deny and Evade Responsibility. This is the new five fold motif of the modern republican party.  What kind of heroes are these, those that didn't bridge the gap and build the bridge? The ones who didn't bind the wounds or find the cures? Who didn't take the next step and forge ahead through difficulties because it was too hard? These are the backward looking leaders who didn't try harder when it was necessary to do the difficult things which achieve the great results. Find those folks in the history books, the ones that quit the race and opposed social security, rural electrification, civil rights, integration, medicare, medicaid, and every other necessary advancement our society has ever made.?

This is hardly the can-do spirit of American exceptionalism, achievement and comity at work. This is decidedly not the spirit that made America great. This is not the enterprise and entrepreneurialism that built a great nation but very much like the spiritlessness that always rips great nations apart and then tears them down. They are the eternal cowards and defeatists, in league with the forces of entropy and hate that will always profit more from disunion and demise than progress. Find something, one thing, in our history that was created by people with such a can't do track record and attitude of selfish narrow minded negation, nullification, prejudice and fear mongering indifference. Particularly when these are the very same people who created all the same problems that they now are busy keeping us from trying to fix.

To be great you must quietly work at achieving things – not not work at them at the top of your voice. The republicans unprincipled opposition to everything does not square with quality, it does not not pass the odor blotter or the stink -o-meter. For one thing do-nothingism too conveniently dovetails with the laziness and greed to which bad politicians on the take naturally incline. For another, the campaign bribery of the wealthy interests that consider democracy an impediment to their short term desire to collude and dominate and rob the society blind far outweigh the resources available to those seeking equitable,often complicated and always compromised solutions to achieve necessary long term change.  In other words, though it may impoverish us, it profits them to do nothing and then do less than nothing.

Wall Street and big business think (erroneously) that they can make more money from America by squeezing her dry now than in letting her breathe free and grow in equality and shared wealth and opportunity for all into the future. The republican party of today shares this delusion.

Goals, Tactics and Strategy

of the Republican Party

What sort of public policy does this group even believe in? It's hard to discern if you listen to them because they won't say it straight. But if you watch you'll learn. There are only two things they really care about. The only goals they doggedly pursue and make subservient to every other consideration year to year are tax cuts and deregulation that each happen to serve the wealthiest ten percent of the people. Everything else they may be for or against changes with the political winds. But these two things are their true gospel.

Every other proposal put forward by the republicans is only a tactical approach to achieve and maintain these two goals. Their platform is tactical, all camouflage and persiflage designed to disguise their true aims beneath their gut level politics of fear, hate and smear. For instance, they ostentatiously state they are in favor of religion without being noticeably spiritual themselves and patriotic without seeming to really care whether their policies are good for the country or not.

Since the majority of the republic does not profit from the two interconnected goals of republican policy – tax cuts for the wealthiest and deregulation for giant multinationals, it is therefore an essential element of their strategy to unite a following through division. The republican party today is more united through a collection of its shared prejudices rather than its positive beliefs. It's not what they are for but what they are against that primarily exercises their base.

Other than tax cuts for the least deserving and deregulation for the most predatory they really don't have anything they want to do in Washington anyway except enrich themselves so they try to undo everything that everyone else wants and finds of value. In this way they help the wealthy through a policy of governmental disarray or paralysis. And that is their policy. Nationally this serves as an almost a perfect contradiction in terms as they want to be elected to government as enemies of government in order not to govern in order to best serve the interests of the very few against the very many.

This loose configuration of shared prejudices and fears is the part of the population the republican party plays like a violin every election cycle to entice this group or that to the polls. An essential part of their strategy is Divide to Conquer. They incite half of the society against the other half in order to use them as leverage to claw and pry their way back into power. Since they really have no positive policy to point to that will stand scrutiny they pick at the natural divisions in our society like an impatient patient picks at barely healed over scabs or a vulture rips at road kill to locate the softest flesh within.

In essence then they hate gays, other religions, those who think differently, minorities and immigrants and intellectuals, even though many of their leaders and deep thinkers have the same educational backgrounds they now go out of their way to deride these as elitists. As they pretend to look back to those halcyon days of their youths when America was great they find, ironically, that the America they profess to admire was built precisely on bedrock laid with the social programs and policies and attitudes of the 1930's and 1960'swhich happen to be the very policies they now say they want to dismantle.

Vagaries of Change in a Two Party Democracy

This republican party is the Party of No, nullification and dissolution, the nattering nabobs of negativity and xenophobia. They are backward looking and selfish to an extreme; they are anti-immigrant, anti-minority, fear festering Luddites of the future. They hold the nation hostage not for any visionary purpose other than a mindless pursuit of their own political power which they have more than manifestly already proven that they do not deserve. When they had power they squandered it pursuing precisely the same deadendedness that they say, now that they are wiser, they would re-initiate if they ever got the chance again. After this long train of abuses how does one even consider rewarding a party like this for doing nothing now and for doing nothing but harm before?

This is not only destructive to the nation but to the republican party as well .Because by becoming the Party of No, for a small temporary advantage, which for simplicities sake requires no actual platform to publicly embrace as an alternative, the republicans risk huge permanent structural losses. The republican party has reduced from being a sum of its parts to a mere subtraction of its fractions. It is not based on a collation of truths but a temporary accumulation of fictions.There is no head to the tail of this dog, it wags however it will. Whoever gets the video of the day on youtube with a spurious plan or specious claim can set the new direction of the republican party for the week. So when Sarah Palin dishonestly invokes “death panels”as a way of opposing the Obama health care plan., Charles Grassley starts talking about “pulling the plug on grandma.” Or when someone proposes a repeal of the fourteenth amendment, once would-be serious Senators such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham climb on the band wagon and devolve into idiot speak about “anchor babies” and“drop and run” babies and even (according to an even dimmer wit)“terror” babies.

In this way the republican party is in a race with itself and the devil to the bottom in search of the lowest common denominator that they believe they can get away which intersects the point farthest to the right of the political spectrum. So we have the unmistakable wiff of cakes half baked, and theories not fully thought through and bridges to nowhere built to shores that never existed put forward as policy.

Like an ancient courtesan outlandishly clad, face painted garishly with cheap trinkets and bangles dangling from ears and arms, trying to allure her way through one last electoral trick, she'll chase like a filly after anyone who'll wave a few bucks in her direction. The republican party in its death throes is a nightmarishly grotesque caricature of its former legitimate self. It has Gingrich's nose, Limbaugh's girth, Beck's mouth and Palin's eyes (winking) and treats life like a charade, governing as a joke, and corruption as what they do for fun on the side as reward for their latest over the top performances.

The demise of something so large as one of the two major parties in the nation is a dangerous situation for all of us. In its last days it is capable of doing anything and harming anyone as it lashes out in all directions, thrashing and kicking with its giant extremities about in its final writhing death agony. It only remains to be seen how much damage it may yet do before it peacefully passes to the other side of history's great divide.

Yet if people are interpreting polls accurately they suggest the people are considering rewarding the republican party one more time for its obduracy and obstruction. This would be like giving a medallion to an orange traffic cone because you are upset with the inconvenience of a new bridge project under construction (If God would have wanted us to cross His rivers He would have given us either fins or wings). Obstructionism for its own sake is a negative act possible for a stump, a boulder or a dumb mule. Any coneheaded idiot can obstruct, prohibit and stop especially when there is no evident discernment necessary in the blind obstructionism. Put an orange cone in the road and it does its job without regard to whether the road project is a masterpiece or a boondoggle. Tell a republican to vote no and you get a similarly well considered rationale.

There must be a better way to express displeasure with the predictable frustration one has with the slowness and errors of hard won progress that any disaster rescue team in the heat and pressure of action faces than by giving power back to the creators of the disaster. Those who not only have no new answers but no apparent remorse or intention of rectifying their original mistakes are not to be trusted until they have proven they have reformed. But these republicans seem blindly determined, more than ever, of exactly recreating the grounds from which the first catastrophes sprung so that they might do it to us all over again.

Why else would the arrogant, unrepentant perpetrators of all our problems just stand around with their hands in their pockets refusing to help dig us out of the hole they dug us into - chewing their cud and spitting tobacco juice on the ground; complaining, grousing, posturing and pouting like spoiled brats, hoping we fail, betting against the country's ability to succeed while they deviously plot their resurgence - unless they truly, sincerely did not mean the nation well.

To be sure, on occasion to stand against something wrong when it is popular may be brave and worthy and noble. But when obstruction occurs for its own sake and perversely becomes an end in itself all to protect some ill-gotten gains or works out of mere fear of change; or when a pattern evolves to obstruct literally everything, without discernment or legitimate alternatives put forward; or when out of laziness or political calculation or mere cussedness, nope becomes just another four letter word, it is never admirable or worthy of respect or reward.

The walking, stalking, talking sit down strike the republicans are currently engaged in is much like their other tantrums that did nothing for the nation - the government shut down in 1995 for instance when they didn't get their way - is insupportable and unjustifiable. Strikes by government employees are illegal. In the past the courts have ordered them back to work. Or in Ronald Reagan's case with the air traffic controllers, they were summarily fired. That authority would be quite useful here. It is shocking to see grown women and men behave in such a churlish, childish, thumb-sucking manner as this. It is difficult for such behavior to command respect let alone earn a vote.

      To reward such people is clearly a perversion of our democracy, especially when the flip side means you will be punishing politicians who actually did do something ( which the last election clearly urged them to do), made the hard choices,worked the late hours, weighed the painful compromises, ignored the difficult consequences and took the tough votes.

But how does one evince displeasure and discontent with the democratic party without simply voting them out and putting the republican party in? The traditional ways. Get more involved not less. But the one thing you don't do is throw your vote away on someone who doesn't even carry a germ of respect for the offices they are seeking. A vote is a sacred thing. It is hard to justify wasting it on someone who will take it only to abase it with juvenile rhetoric, bizarre ideas, lockstep ideologies and devotion to causes not worthy of a major American political party.

The Prime Sources of the Nation's Unrest

These are twofold. One is actual and external and the other is perceptual and internal.

The chief External argument against the democrats in Congress seems to be first - the Wall Street bail out package and second - the stimulus package to re-energize the economy. First, as a point of honor, the Wall Street bail out was engineered and passed when George Bush was still in office. But other than that it is precisely the same problem these two remedies are trying to attack just from opposite directions.

As an example, it is as if someone carelessly drove their car too near the outward side of a mountain road. The car spun off the blacktop and skidded into the sand on the shoulder of the road from where, the sand being too soft to gain traction for the car to be backed out, it was in clear danger of continuing to slip farther down the unstable side of the shifting, sandy hillside into the deep canyon below.

The bailout then could be likened to an attempt to shore up the car from above, to stop the slide, to ensure the erosion is slowed, to regain some stability in our economy and to keep the car from sliding further down the sandy cliffside. In this the bailout succeeded.

The stimulus package on the contrary was to get the car started so it could then be driven up the declivity and back onto the road again. These two things were each entirely necessary and it is hard to see how it could have been managed differently, better perhaps, but not differently. So the popular arguments against these two things are in error. And they are especially dangerous and disingenuous now for policy members to make because the car is still teetering perilously on the side of the cliff. Moreover, it is all too apparent that the economic recovery from the Great Republican Gilded Recession has been progressing too slowly.

That puts these two arguments in contradiction. An acknowledgment of the economy's sorry state today highlights the source of its original infection which was a result of the economic crisis brought on by the collapse of the subprime market and the entirely unregulated derivative market at the tail end of the Bush administration. Apparently, to elaborate on the image, the big banks borrowed our economy and went on a long, snoring drunken joy ride with a car load of floozies.

The bailout and stimulation package together were designed to mitigate the worst of the damage caused by these unscrupulous bankers and their vacuous political enablers. That the economy is still weak argues not that nothing should have been done but that more needed to have been done because clearly if nothing had been done as the republicans now seem to claim, the economy would be far worse, and our car would have long since fallen over the cliff, floozies, mortgages, bankers and all.

I'm first in line to say that it could have been done better. The TARP bailout was far too gentle on the bankers and banks whose greed, stupidity and recklessness had caused all the problems. The voters quite properly took it into their hands in the last election to throw out many of those of the republican party who had looked the other way while the bankers had their fun with our money. Yet now many of these same politicians who loaned our car with no strings attached to these nitwit money managers in the first place have changed their tune and are singing the same chorus they were singing before the collapse. Moreover the stimulus was no more potent than it was because the republicans had raided the treasury blind and there was little money left for stimulation in light of the huge deficit they had given us.

But again since the economy is still weak you can argue that the bailout and stimulus should have been done better but not that these things shouldn't have been done at all. However this is exactly their argument. They say neither should have been done, as if the car should have been left to its own devices to drive itself back to the highway driverless. And in this case, again, not only were the obstructionist republicans as much or more to blame than anyone for the inception of these problems but their obstructionism now is only succeeding in making the situation they initially made bad, that much more ominous.

At least they are consistent, they were wrong then, they are wrong now and from their rhetoric show every intention of being wrong in the future.

To justify their current unjustifiable behavior the republicans have tried everything they can think of to change the topic and portray the democrats as either radical or illegitimate (to say that Hawaii is not really a state, for instance) - neither of which is even remotely accurate. All of this to justify their own legislative truancy, their arrogance, their own inflated sense of entitlement and their own guilty pasts. In this respect, they protest too much.

Several months ago when the republicans were being called the Party of No by the democrats, Mitch McConnell hit on what must have seemed ( to him) a brilliantly clever formulation. “We are the party of Know,” he said. Get it? If lead balloons could fly it still would have gone higher than this trial.

Because ignorance is no more bliss than it is a virtue. And yet for the first time in our history we have an American political party that has wrapped itself around willful ignorance as a core belief, like a tuxedo fitted on a chimpanzee. How else to explain such a self-serving wave of denial and persistent mischaracterizations of known facts. How else can you explain the intentional mangling of the meaning of words, changing their definitions as it suits their purposes, or their continuous assault on truth and logic, the denials of obvious truths and their continual attempts at smear tactics and libelous character assassination of all who may disagree with them? These tactics don't argue honesty in those who engage in them but illegitimacy.

Even now perhaps in league with those great patriots on Wall Street (as if there has ever been such a thing as a patriot on Wall Street) they are even trying to slow the economic recovery from their own recession, dooming millions to joblessness and millions more to reduced future earnings all for the sake of short term political posturing. The hidebound quack doctor would rather see the patient die than see another doctor's remedy succeed.

As for the Internal problems of the Democratic Party it seems to be a bit like a line from “Cool Hand Barack”. “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” Even when they do something well or even historic, that is according to polls quite popular and timely, somehow the democrats lose the atmospherics and arguments associated with the endeavor. This takes rare political skill. Are the democrats as feckless and timid and weak as they seem? According to the polls apparently so. This is not pleasant to behold. The democrats seem afraid to stand behind their own accomplishments. This inevitably spawns doubt in the peoples' minds which is as easy to exploit as it is hard to eradicate. This is not good leadership. The people grow restless with leaders who inspire so little confidence in them because they have so little confidence in themselves.

The democrats seem to be easily bullied by the right wing and the republican party. This may not quite be fair but it is a legitimate concern because it fosters an image of weakness and lack of courage. People like strength and lack of confidence highlights many minor ills in the society that wouldn't be there if the democrats were more forcefully in their position, more thoroughly in charge, better liked and trusted. This is their own fault. It doesn't justify the actions of the republicans, to be sure, but unless the democrats can connect better with the American people and inspire some confidence in them soon it may cost them seats in Congress.

However, I am here to argue, that that is not really the problem. The democrats are hardly perfect but they are also hardly so cynical, hypocritical and imperious as the republicans were when they were in charge. It is actually far, far better for the nation to return to the days when people legislated modestly, without wild exaggeration and inflated pontification. Self-effacement is actually far preferable to bombast and self-inflation, yet it will apparently take a far more astute and intelligent electorate than we currently seem to possess in these days of cable network news to see it, much less reward it.

Take health care reform as an example, even if it is not something you can yet be certain you like, the alternative we had was clearly not working efficiently. Change was necessary. Why not give the alternative a chance to work? And yet the republicans now want to undo it prior to even seeing if it will work and waste the herculean effort it took just to get it passed ( with a super majority in the Senate made necessary by none other than the republicans own cynical filiblustery)? And so they want to rescind it to give us what, the same expensive, uncertain,exception riddled, non universal mess we had before?

But in fact, save one or two things, the republicans have voted against everything, and delayed even the things they eventually voted for, merely as thoroughly vindictive vandals of the legislative process. It's hard to argue as they do that there has been a legitimate basis for their arguments against policies enacted by the democrats. People who have legitimate alternative arguments make them, they are member of a legislative body after all and it is exactly what they are accepting our money to do. People who don't have legitimate arguments to make scream epithets and throw stones at your home and scatter nails in your driveway. It is when behavior veers toward the psychotic that you begin to understand that there is some deeper issue at work here than just a simple disagreement over policy.

People sometimes seem more confused with large enterprises than they would ever be about small ordinary day to day tasks. So if you were going to hire someone to mow and rake and manicure your lawn, who would you hire? Someone who, though dull, went about their job diligently, got a great deal of work done and was even perfectionistic and honest enough to allow that in certain areas someone else might have done it much better. Or would you hire the bombastic twit who didn't do anything but whine and cavil and complain about everything, generally do nothing while espousing bizarre and unsubstantiated theories about fertilizer and the cycles of the moon and the growth of cabbage and a thousand other absurd and unrelated things? And who, when they were finally forced to work mangled your hedges to death and broke your lawnmower by running it into a boulder and then tried to blame everything on someone else? Obviously no one would willingly hire the second character for even the most menial task, why would anyone vote for a person like this now for congress. Because the job is too important to give to someone competent?

Another black mark against the republicans should be the strange fact of the breathtaking unanimity of their voting. This also tends to disprove the alleged integrity of their actions. People who have consciences and vote them tend to show and adhere to a whole range of reasonable positions and a healthy migration across party lines will generally ensue. This is what we expect when we send folks to congress, some degree of discernment, judgment and individuality unique to our needs and their own legislative personality. Otherwise why not just send people who merely take large amounts of money from lobbyists and do as they are told and tell whatever untruth they feel is necessary to explain their actions to the public? Politicians with no consciences or knowledge or ethics do exactly this, they do as they are told and vote like pack animals.  A politician who takes money to approximate an ersatz set of principles simply proves they have none of their own.

No the Party of No has voted over the last year and a half, or chosen not to vote, not out of conscience or caution or love of country, but mere obstreperousness and shallow political calculation. Tellingly, they have derided many policies before they even knew what they were (even those that are unmitigated advancements and long overdue) before, during and after the debates which brought them into being. They denounced these policies in the harshest terms even before they could know the final shape they might take. They made up reasons to vote against issues they have always supported before and eventually voted for again. It is, as I said earlier, as if they protest too much. Are they against health care reform because they think it won't work or because they are afraid it will? Their behavior speaks more to the latter than the former.

If this is true, then the republicans have clearly abdicated their sworn duty to the nation, broken their oaths of office and forsworn what we are paying them to do. By not offering well intentioned alternatives or even trying to participate in a bipartisan way to solve the most pressing problems facing the nation, even if just to set a marker in the sand for a better way ahead, they are behaving more as America's enemies than her friends. Republicans have often famously and often infamously railed against those poor Americans on welfare and have even refused to extend aid to those out of work, claiming they do nothing but sit around all day waiting for their government checks to arrive in the mail. How are these republicans in congress today any better? In fact they are worse because they have jobs they refuse to do, leaving the work undone and the public doubly impoverished for their investment.

And yet now the republicans want more people in Congress who think just as they do? And they now not only loudly preach of a fiscal responsibility they never possessed when they were in charge, they like to talk reverentially of a freedom which they do not even seem to grasp the meaning of.

For has there ever been such a bovine congeries of gutless sheep in the history of the United States Congress as these guys? They consistently vote as a bloc according to what they are told no matter how absurd the purpose, patent the power play or self-evident the harm to the country they swear they love? To display such unwavering discipline no matter what any individual member may personally believe, in abeyance of national need or quality of the legislation before them, is unprecedented. It is inhumanly shallow. No matter how harebrained the destination each republican regardless of their oath of office or responsibility to the people climbs on board the latest train to nowhere without a quibble or thought. And as they mindlessly step on board they have the audacity to each repeat the same prearranged, prepackaged, memorized line they have been given for the occasion – whether death panels, socialism, torture works, soak the rich, big government is evil, tax and spend democrats, supply side economics, activist judiciary, yadda, yadda, yadda. And the most ludicrous mantra of all – “political correctness” - is still used by the party that will not accept any variance of its members from its ever rightward shifting creed. It's like a robot's convention short circuited by a lightening strike in 1984. It is downright un-American to be this easily intellectually enslaved. This is not freedom, nor is this what they were hired to do. Have they no minds or souls or personal opinions left? No one is afforded the right to be so unconscientious in their duties as to be so thoroughly wrong about nearly everything over such a long period of time, especially when it is their own constituencies that pay not only their unearned salaries but a much, much steeper hidden price for their unrelieved incompetence, childish propaganda and ultra-destructive do-nothingism.

Shakespeare's Take

“Thus I clothe my naked villany

with odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.” - Duke of Glouster

(later Richard III)   from Richard III

For fun and elucidation try rereading the second and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III by Shakespeare to see what happens when you have so many thugs and crooks arrayed around a single source of power like wild, growling, snarling dogs in a circle around a bone. First, in Henry VI there was a too compliant king and weak party backing him. The one person who did have his and the country's best interests at heart (Humphrey) watched as his ambitious wife was tricked by his enemies into an indiscretion and exiled. Next he was systematically slandered and betrayed and finally murdered to be put out of their way. There was even an unintellectual people's revolt, Jack Cade's, secretly fomented by the Duke of York for his own purposes which Shakespeare wittily portrayed as being intolerant even of someone being so little intelligent as to be able to write their own name.

Replace a treaty which to the people's mind gave away two provinces in France with TARP and the stimulus package put forward by the Bush and Obama administrations, and Jack Cade could be taken as surrogate for the Tea Party. Otherwise assign roles as you will – Palin for Queen Margaret, Romny for York, Gingrich for Suffolk, the politicized leaders of the religious right for the Bishop(later Cardinal) of Winchester, McCain for Warwick, etc. Some of the lesser thugs and cheats would serve for McConnell, Boehner, Beck-Baugh, etal and finally, let's say, Rupert Murdock as Richard III, and verily the past eerily repeats itself today.

Of course as Shakespeare compressed and recast certain historical events it was only endless destruction which ensued from this cast of reprobates. One by one each was unclothed, exposed and deposed (which in those day meant killed) as they tried to outlast the others for what was left after their machinations of destruction had done their worst. Because that is what we have yet to fully see with the republicans here – because when these moral clowns and nerds finally start to cut each other down to midgetry the real blood letting will begin. Duplicity and rampant opportunism as your primary political sword has a short historical shelf life. It will score gains impressively at the outset but must soon start to implode like a dirigible with an expanding pin hole, slowly at first and then with a bang. Because once a race to the bottom starts it is exceedingly difficult to to stop.

And there is no doubt the republicans are growing worse and that the bottom is where they are headed. They have always worn their hypocrisies lightly but now they wallow in them like swine in a mudhole after a spring rain.

The Futility and Danger of Repeating Yesterday Today

Let's not forget how we got here. All these problems we are faced with today are pretty much entirely the fault of the permanently unrepentant republicans to begin with. Sorry to say, but they have been more in charge of the direction of the country and its government than anyone else for nearly the last thirty years. That's why it is at least a little ironic to hear them talk of all the wrongs and evils and faults of our government since they were running it when all the faults, wrongs and evils they now criticize occurred, as if someone else was to blame for their own excesses and bad behavior other than their own selves.

And after all, what do you call someone who doesn't let anyone else fix what they have broken? The Party of No is the kindest epithet. They represent the exact antithesis of the can-do spirit of America which is what made us great. Their antics are the betrayal of our future, of democracy itself, because when one party refuses to acknowledge the legitimate majority rule of the other and as loyal opposition join together with them for the good of the nation they disrespect the constitution and despise the democracy.

Let's look back shall we, a quick trip down memory lane. I guarantee it will seem like just yesterday.

Not so Golden Moldy Oldies:

the Republican Party's greatest hits - 1980-2010

• Supply side pyramid scheme – This has been the republican party's magic bullet, its ultimate economic alchemy ( “voodoo economics” – George Bush I), the magic money machine, that states that the lower the tax rate the greater the tax revenues that will be gathered. This is a transparent fraud to enrich themselves and their patrons today as they thieve and plunder the future of the country's tomorrow. Supply Side economics as propounded by the republicans is simply a Ponzi scheme which floods money upwards like a pyramid, or an upside down funnel, enriching those upstream and impoverishing all below the very highest economic plateau. This scheme, this Madoff economics, is ongoing even today and has not been disavowed but frequently reiterated among the leadership of the republican party.

• “Deficits don't matter,” (Dick Cheney) - The republicans' massively discredited “supply side” economic theory has so far cost the American people years of growth, many trillions of dollars and impoverished millions of Americans in the process of buying us absolutely no investment in our future. From 1980-2008 this scheme (which, remember, allegedly creates more tax revenues than it cuts) has authored a tenfold increase in the national debt from $900 billion to $10 trillion. This debt was not necessary, it did not strengthen the long term interests of the nation, nor fix any of our exigent problems as they have arisen which has enabled them to continued to grow out of control unaddressed. This debt was not noble, it is not debt gathered by any shared national sacrifice for the mutual good and well being of ourselves and our children. For as the wealthiest have profited exponentially, the rest of us have suffered nearly static wages, diminishing opportunities, lowered quality of life and anemic national economic growth. Our competitive edge has been lost as America has lost ground against the rest of the world. Supply side debt has brought us nothing which could endure and was not an outgrowth but a mockery of long term economic planning. Republican economic policy has always been only about short term theft. The ones who control the republican party saw a large pool of money devoted toward public services and coveted it.  They have done everything they can do to get their hands on it and make it theirs by turning government into their own private enclave.  Nor was this debt a product of tax and spend democrats, it was not spent for social welfare issues, not spent on the poor or infrastructure projects or job growth but only for tax “relief”for the wealthiest ten percent of the people who already had the lightest tax burden of anyone in the country. And every last dime of this massive outpouring of red ink was created by the republicans. The only responsible administration in the last thirty years was democratic (Bill Clinton's) which actually abandoned supply side, this offensively corrupt gush up - trickle down economic theory, and balanced the budget. But as soon as George Bush won the White House in 2000, he blew the dam apart again. And yet now the republicans hysterically complain about democratic deficit spending. You'd need a chain saw to cut the hypocrisy

• Drill (the public) Baby Drill (the “expletive deleted” public) – Republicans as a matter of policy believe that all regulations which don't serve their purposes should either be abrogated or ignored when they are in office and corporations and lobbyists should at all times be in bed with the regulators tasked with overseeing them on our behalf. A good place to start would be “a moratorium on new regulations”, John Boehner (who hopes to be the Speaker of the House), opined recently. This even though two of the most egregious and costly examples of the evils of this non-regulation policy have reared their ugly heads - BP's monumental oil spill in the Gulf and the financial community's near implosion of the world's economy.

  Surely these cautionary examples of astonishing regulatory failure must still be fresh somewhere in Boehner's mind. Yet republicans just don't care, they still claim that regulating oil and mining operations that exploit the natural resources and people of the United States should not be the business of the people of the United States. In their minds, multinational corporations should be able to plunder our natural resources on the cheap and then sell them back to us at top dollar and we should have no say in or be able to oversee any aspect of the process which is victimizing us. We must simply stand aside like good little slaves and watch idly as our own natural resources dwindle before our eyes with no general profit or benefit to the nation.

• Weapons of Mass Destruction – Casual war as a campaign tactic; truth, American soldiers' and innocent civilians as war casualties; two-faced casuistry as ongoing justification for the unjustifiable and terrorism as a tool for fear mongering and keeping public opinion distracted and in line.

• Torture and the Imperial Government – Abu Gehraib, et al. The republicans invented a bizarre and an entirely unconstitutional “unitary executive” theory to justify disregard for the public's right to know, to allow them to ignore all cries for public disclosure, to let them torture and do illegal wiretaps and to ignore any and all lawful Congressional investigation and oversight into their malfeasance. The administration was always abetted in this domestic imperialism by servile republicans in congress. They also engaged in phony science and coverups of publicly funded and legislatively mandated studies and oversight designed to give Congress and the public the best information possible to inform their decisions whenever these true findings disagreed with their own false political prejudices.

• Campaign Finance Reform Opposition - The republicans are staunch in their belief that increasing corruption and ensuing stalemate in Congress is a good thing. They believe that outside forces which reward them for not operating on behalf of the public interest or doing their jobs properly or at all (as long as they get their cut of the proceeds) far outweighs their solemn promise to the voters to work exclusively for them. Many republicans support the Conservative Court's ongoing efforts to destroy campaign finance reform and were quick to praise the Supreme Court's narrow decision in the Citizen's United case which supports a corporation's ability to engage in unlimited financial participation in all of our political processes. Among many, many other onerous side effects this will lead to the increasing gentrification of congress as the increasing influx of money into the process invites racketeers and multimillionaires and people going into politics only for personal enrichment.  Then these insensitive and unqualified people will then exercise a determinative amount of influence over our legislative process and, by obvious implication, bend and shape the future health and direction of the country even more in the direction of the very well to do. All this so congress, just like the night manager of a cheap motel, can enshrine the revolving bed of the open door relationship between industry and government to a corrosive level in our democracy with the Court's lusty approval.

• Disastrous Financial Deregulation – Shamefully weak laws and total lack of oversight has led to the Great Republican Gilded Recession under which we are currently laboring (especially if you no longer have a job to labor at) where multimillionaire CEO's regularly give themselves multimillion dollar pay raises and bonuses as billionaire shareholders make more and more from their corporations' record profits. Many of these are the same ingrate banks and financial institutions which the taxpayer drew back from brink of bankruptcy, which now thrive while workers' wages and benefits are slashed across the board, the middle class and poor are decimated and no benefit is ever too small to be kept from trickling down to the most needy. Yet even with this few Republicans could be found to support any sort of meaningful financial regulations and reform. And yet the tea party republicans profess to blame the Obama Administration for the bank bailout at the end of the Bush administration.

• Eternal Ruinous Tax Cuts for millionaires and billionaires – The republican party wrote the manual on how to wreck the future of the country to enrich themselves today. They have systematically robbed the nation of its necessary, fairly collected revenues, systemically embedded debt into all operations of our undermanned government and continue to widen the gap between the very rich and everyone else. If proof were needed that they still have no intention of behaving with even a modicum of responsibility for love of country's sake they have pretended that the expiry of the disastrous Bush administration tax cuts is really a tax increase and want to extend them regardless of the consequent explosion of deficit spending that would inevitably ensue. On the contrary, it must be understood that any one sided tax decrease for the very well to do is necessarily a tax increase on the rest of us.
  

• Global Warming Denial - As a key part of their pernicious and constant war on the environment and everyone and everything in it, while the icecaps melt, republicans suggest we should apologize to the polluters for daring to try to survive in areas they are busy polluting while rifling our natural resources to a point beyond livability.

• Assaults on Separation of Church and State – Also to meet short term political ends, they have fostered and sponsored shameless and casual attacks on one of the fundamental pillars of the brilliant success and equity of our society. To put the kindest face on it, these attacks grew out of a pretended and very loudly expressed sense of moral superiority and spiritual insight evident to no one but themselves. This has allowed them to hack away at our religious freedoms and try to sever the mystic bonds that have held the nation together since its inception and to emotionally divide the nation against itself, brother against brother, parents against children, and neighbor against neighbor, merely in order to further their cruel regime of class warfare, social preferment policies and ruinously destructive economics.

• The Tea Party - An idea I believe was purloined from me represents a well funded fake tantrum of known untruths, radically erroneous exaggerations and smear and fear tactics disguised as populism. By this means wild extremism is being channeled mainline and shot into the veins of the republican party.

• Opposition to comprehensive immigration reform – When a republican president (Bush II) and future republican nominee for president (McCain) bravely joined forces in a good faith effort to address the immigration problem along our southern borders, many democrats stood ready to help. Republicans refused. Instead they erected nonsensically simplistic solutions to this complex set of interconnected problems solely in order to posture before an upcoming election while scuttling all serious debate of the topic which only can grow worse the longer an adult solution to a difficult problem is delayed. Amazingly, now many of these same politicians can be seen supporting an entirely unconstitutional, highly prejudicial and dangerously unworkable scheme in Arizona to “solve” the problem illegally which they didn't have the fortitude to solve legally when they had the opportunity. Instead they employ the sophistry that “government”wouldn't address this problem even though they were in charge of the government at the time and could have easily done so if they had had the heart and brains to try. Through this one maneuver you can see straight to the soul of one of their most elemental scams.  Although they have usually been in the majority, ruling part of government over these last thirty years, it is the results of their own loaded activities they intemperately rail against, which allows them to continue their basic duplicity of positively gorging on their cake and then eating ours too. They have done their best to pollute the well of public service and then dare us to drink from it even while damning up the free flowing springs of fresh water available only to them so that no one but them can use them.
  

• Polarizing fights and Phony Issues – To solve the non-existent scourge of flag burnings, although they could point to no current instance where this had occurred, for instance, they proposed changing the constitution. Or they ballyhooed a judge posting the ten commandments in his courtroom even though it was not so much his courtroom as the peoples' courtroom. Or the patently unconstitutional line item veto which they supported for years until it passed and was immediately declared unconstitutional.  Or gay marriage which they oppose every election cycle, or, on and on and on. Like, for instance, when they shamelessly and vulturously interfered in a human family tragedy in the Terry Schiavo case merely to score political points at the expense of the very people they claimed to care so deeply for. Or, lately, solely to generate ethnic and religious hate and controversy, they are belligerently opposing a Muslim prayer center in the general vicinity of where the terror attacks of 9/11 occurred even though it is a local civic issue in which they should have no involvement.

• Division as a Political Tool – Divisiveness is their only constant and contention their stock in trade. The republicans create fissures in society solely in order to divide us against ourselves for their political advantage.  They feast at poking at the tenderest, sorest spots in our society, delight in picking at scabs of barely healed wounds, and driving wedges between Americans regardless of the disruptive consequences and potential violence and hate which might ensue from their actions. To this end, they actually claim there are good and bad Americans, good families and bad families, good states and bad ones, good freedoms and bad, bad religions and good. What kind of worthless leadership would ever choose to divide a country it hoped to lead? What kind of anti-American would prefer the nation disunited and at each others throats? Certainly no real American ever would desire such a thing. With these spurious politics the republicans aim low and generally achieve their goal with head room to spare. So far they have found no swampland too base and fetid for them to avoid. They'll play every low, divisive card in the deck, whether, race, immigration, religion, class, anti-intellectualism and anti-science, to keep the people ignorant and suppressed, xenophobic and afraid of the future. They have even used such dark national fears such as terror attacks primarily for their own political and imperial ends and personal aggrandizement. They have given us a government of increased racial tensions, government shut downs, manufactured impeachments, endless investigations (whenever they have been in charge)of the other party, eternal filibusters, social unrest, prolonged recession and any other convoluted means they can contrive, whatever the cost to the nation – to get their way.

• Lies and Misinformation as a Political Gambit - Sometimes, when all else fails, they just knowingly lie, like death panels in the health care debate or yellow cake from Niger in the debate as to whether it was necessary to attack Iraq (again), or whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States and may be Muslim. Or whether he's a socialist or fascist, etc, on and on. Even though according to their oath of office, lying to the public, their employers who they are sworn to serve and who pay their salaries, is never acceptable.

• Yellow Tabloid Journalism (Rupert Murdock) – Unlike most grateful immigrants Murdock is not grateful to our democracy for his opportunity and displays no allegiance to our institutions or love for our people. His vandal like attitude is more about plundering our system for his advantage alone. His organs, Fox (Faux) News and the Wall street Journal allied with the Beck-Baugh type leeches on the body politic and a disturbingly complaint republican party at their beck and call and their win at all cost, destructive attitude toward the public as enemies of our social unity are the true anti-American force in our midst.

• They are Growing Worse – The new even more extreme crop of republican candidates have registered attacks on the legitimacy of Social Security, Minimum wages, the 14^th and 17th amendments to the constitution, the education and energy departments, the new health care reform, Medicare and Medicaid, civil rights, the United Nations and (why not?) electricity (as an earlier corps of republicans opposed the League of Nations they also opposed rural electrification), the wheel (for roundness lacks clear divisions and sides to attack) and all variances in human nature which they happen to disapprove of.

• The Party of No - Consult the beginning.
  

Even the Pledge of Allegiance, said every day by schoolchildren across the country, has been used as a wedge issue by republicans to question the religion and patriotism of others. But their belief in it apparently goes only so far. They profess to believe in the words“under God” but as to the preceding concept of the “one nation” under Him they express some doubt, as well as to the word just following the word “God” which is “indivisible”. This concept of indivisibility is apparently entirely contingent on their getting their way on everything or else, as some already have done, they are quick to threaten succession from the union. Apparently their patriotism runs as shallow as their reasoning and ethics often do.

Perhaps one could say that even these dirtiest, sleaze level politicians ( as members of arguably the least well intentioned and patriotic organized party in our history) wouldn't be quite so bad if they were attempting to achieve something, anything, exalted or noble, but they aren't. They are merely the shallow vanguard for all the usual historical suspects lurking behind them secretly in the shadows engaging in all their insidious, nefarious activities, their greed and their graft and slavish devotion to big money interests at the expense of every principle that every person in the country except themselves holds dearer than life itself.

New Journalism and the Wall of Sound

Every now and then technology runs in advance of the general public's ability to catchup. This happened in the 1930's when Hitler (him again) controlled and propagandized the airways, stage managed all his appearances and harangued his people into believing in an entirely artificial world that the majority of the German people could not see their way through. This led to nationalist hysteria and psychosis which had dire consequences for the world. Communist propaganda has been slightly less high tech and slick but, if possible, even more controlled and controlling.

The old logo of the dog with its ears perked up listening to the phonograph over the caption “his master's voice” was eerily predictive of a nation hanging on every word of an unscrupulous leader. A radio voice is compelling because it is disembodied, more respected because it is unseen, as if the voice and the person behind it were connected by invisible wires and airwaves to something higher power, ordained and irrefutable. On radio there are fewer images to clutter the senses so that imagination and psychology are free to affect the listener more directly and subliminally. Lies that if told in person would be unbelievable seem as if they could be real, first as if they might be and then as if they must be, as a person's incredulity is slowly suspended via repetition and turned into belief. New technology may loosen the bonds of reality that normally keep a nation grounded.

Of course in the1930's the same thing happened in this country but to a far lesser degree since the airwaves weren't manipulated and controlled by one source. FDR undoubtedly benefited from radio as he used it to create an aura and persona about himself which made getting public support for his policies easier to accomplish. He may not have been as successful with only the print media, newspapers and magazines, to try to sell his vision of the future as he was with the aid of radio and the new art of news reel footage shown in movie houses.

    These few examples show the possible evil of controlled sources of information in a country particularly when they are attached to or encapsulated in a dynamic new technology. The theory and the magic of the amazing technological advancement tend to merge together and blur reality.  Therefore a vast profusion of simultaneous potential sources of information must be better, right? Not quite.

     Today there is a sensory overload of new sources and technologies confronting the people. From this great Wall of Sound people tend eventually to focus on a few sources of information from the thousands available. And since many of these sources are journalistically suspect or manipulative or just wrong, a profusion of biases and misinformation can result.

      This will and has led to ideological fragmentation where an extraordinary number of conflicting opinions currently exist in our society side by side. Take for one, the myth that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US. This has been easily and widely and thoroughly debunked by any number of legitimate news outlets.Yet it persists like a rash among a vocal few, quite simply because they never bother listening to legitimate news outlets. Some people prefer to be propagandized and preached at and will invariably seek out the information sites that will oblige them.

This is not Walter Cronkite's world. Not too long ago there were just a few national networks which ran legitimate news operations. They would assimilate the vast amounts of news stories available and make news judgments as to which were most important. Then when they were ready and the time was ripe – meaning when the information had been nailed down, when all the sources had been checked, when there was space, they would air a fully crafted, detailed work of journalistic art. At least that was the theory. And to their credit it sometimes actually worked like that.  Newspapers generally operated with the same high standards.

Eventually some rather large mistakes and small oversights emerged with this process, like Vietnam and Civil Rights, that showed that their own biases had contributed to perpetuating a status quo and static view of the world that was less that fully accurate.

But at least there were very few half baked ideas floating around masquerading as truth, because good journalism ruled the roost and political lies that lacked its imprimatur could not paraded forth as news.

So where's the balance to be found today?  It will find itself. Clearly the public is working through and sifting these various news and information sources – cable TV, the internet, print journalism and even the old standby radio –trying to find a white cat of credibility in a huge blizzard of halftruths and nonsense. But so far the public which is only ever half paying attention anyway has shown itself to be more than just a little bit disoriented by all the competing voices. In this profusion of choices clearly myths and prejudices have arisen faster and sustained longer than they should and in almost any other time have been allowed to.

On the other hand,youtube and the internet and the blogs have also ferreted out and exposed many things that in another day would have remained hidden.

As far as the public goes, however, so far, predictably, they have tended to fasten on loudness and frequency and personality among all the bland noise for their sources of news. This has favored groups like Fox News which is loud, garish, opinionated and filled with personalities who are supremely self-assured, consistent and self righteous. This affords a biased argument a decidedly chiseled edge when competing with all the more carefully weighted and nuanced traditional news sources. These always react more slowly, as facts are slower to gather than preheld opinions; they must be more balanced in trying to weigh all these octagonally sided issues; and in this day of cutbacks and change, traditional media is very very insecure and unsure of their own footing in this new information age.

This same profusion of voices also favors traditional propagandists and demogogues like Rush Limbaugh. He has the disembodied voice of other worldly authority going for him that has worked well for his type to entrance the gullible. There is a reason his television show and all his other television appearances have been failures – he is not nearly as convincing when seen as when he is heard. Others are far better on TV and may be quite effective to a willing audience but in fact, lies are easier to detect on camera, where body language and facial expressions may be seen and tapes of previous statements may be played to refute and contrast later ones. It takes a different level of skill or perhaps vacuity to be convincing in this media. Yet some survive to talk on and on no matter how often they are wrong, particularly on a station like Fox because the audience they have to appeal to is, as it were, pre-screened by individual choice to be predisposed to convinced by even the unconvincing.

But before the people are judged too harshly for their occasional gullibility, newspapers and magazines and legitimate news outlets have had a very difficult time catching up to this new technology of this information age and have given them very little help. The Tea Party movement for instance. It took months for regular media to catch up to the fact that it was essentially a fairly small splinter group of the right wing of the republican party. This is because traditional journalists too, to speed up their work and make it easy on themselves, gather more and more of their own information from cable and the internet rather than original sources. They are often as much observers of the news as relaters of it. And at times they have seemed almost as easily swayed as the public is by the new propaganda and the misdirections which they are proliferating.

So when the Tea Party portrayed itself and was echoed by Fox and others as a vast new movement which cut across party and ideological lines and tapped into a massive outcry of anger welling up in the nation at large, the press believed it and more or less reported it that way as if it were true whether they believed it or not. The so-called legit press seemed as surprised as anyone to see how small and refractory and artificially manufactured the movement actually was. It is still of significance and newsworthy to be sure just not in the same way it was originally portrayed.

     Perspective is in fact the very essence of good journalism and it the thing which seems most lacking in news coverage today. To tell a good story from a bad one, the truth from fiction, a trend from a fad and to detect a cover up amid all the hype and spin is exactly what guys like Cronkite prided themselves on and is now a lost and devalued art. Often today's journalists, harried by the quickening pace of news reporting, can be led around by their noses by anyone with the position and skill to do it. Amazingly, they don't even seem to much mind.  The utter lack of journalism in the lead up to the second Iraq War would be a case in point.

     Partly the errors that are allowed to pass as truth today are possible due to the fact that it is easier to erect a scam than it is to unravel one. In this situation charlatans will always have the advantage. But in countless other less defensible ways stories that Walter Cronkite and his colleagues would have not given a second 's worth of valuable airtime his heirs will feature for days on end. Twenty four hour news programs will dote for hours and hours on the most mindless trivia imaginable even as real news stories, which they presumably know about and have the resources to air, are breaking and peaking and dying uncovered all around them,kept well out of public view.

Mainstream journalism is having troubles enough on their own but they are also under a concerted one-sided attack by the right wing.  This attack is entirely manufactured.

Because it is obvious that these refugees from good journalism have a vested interest in criticizing real journalists so their own followers and listeners will not stray or be swayed from the disinformation they peddle. So far real journalists have been too urbane to reply in kind and magnanimously afford an outlet like Fox free reign to attack them, which it does for political reasons as well as to pad their much envied and highly profitable viewership levels.

It is as if ABC came on the air everyday with a full array of deeply embedded overt and implied propaganda attacking the credibility of NBC and CBS merely to steal advertising dollars from them. It's hard to believe the two other networks would sit by idly and just watch.

And yet that is precisely what Fox news does. When bogus doctors promote bad medicine they are properly labeled by the AMA as quacks.  Perhaps like doctors and lawyers and many other professional organizations it is time for this mainstream media to have a Journalistic Board of Standards and Ethics. There should be an independent board which can condemn unethical behavior and praise good practices in the world of journalism.  There needs to be a seal of approval issued which the public can use to distinguish outlets which employ good journalistic techniques from those that are bred for bias and breed propaganda instead of news. 

By this standard Meet the Press would be approved and The O'Reilly Factor wouldn't be.  This wouldn't change anything immediately. But eventually reform might occur which make these outliers have to conform to well known good journalistic techniques, behavior and practices.  Even if they didn't reform at least the public would have guidelines to follow in separating the fiction from the non-fiction.  Even libraries and bookstores do that.

If legitimate news outlets feel constrained from criticizing bad behavior in colleagues perhaps a respected outside board would serve as an objective organization that could. If journalists won't unite to protect their own profession from this discrediting assault who will? At least with the creation of an professional board of standards they might make a pretense of fighting back and of keeping their dignity intact.

There is a reason guys like Limbaugh and political figures like Palin and contributors to Fox speak of the mainstream media with utter disrespect as the“lamestream” media.  Unfortunately the legitimate press tends to earn the appellation when once serious journalists fall all over themselves trying to cover Palin and hang on Limbaugh's every word. To wildly paraphrase Lenin, Murdock might say, “when we come to bury legitimate journalism they will give us unlimited free airtime to do it.”

They exacerbate this by increasingly running their organizations by emulating outfits like Fox. Feeling themselves less popular and successful they actually have begun to only consider themselves successful according to polling numbers and levels of viewership as if that was somehow a measure of excellence.  Of course, it's not and obviously this is no way to run a news shop except into the ground.

By virtue of these bogus standards by which they judge themselves the worst journalism always trumps quality because outlets like Fox have an inbred market share advantage. And even at that by a broader measure Fox still represents a much smaller slice of the larger media market which is divided into a much greater number of participants.

Still legitimate media seem unable to grasp the fact that if they simply ostracized Fox as being unworthy of emulation and instead limited themselves to competing for market share with like-minded, fair minded operators and other legitimate news outlets they would over the long haul be far better off.  Excellence actually will, sooner or later, be rewarded.  Even though no one network would have the resources alone that Fox can command, collectively they would be far stronger competitively and eventually financially.

Meanwhile, rest assured that the public is beginning to catch up with this new information and propaganda technology. One by one, slowly but ever so slowly, some of the worst and most egregiously bad actors and causes are being identified, brought out into the open and discredited. They can never be eradicated completely, of course, because this is a free country and there are too many aiders and abetters.  But eventually the loudest and most egregious operators are beginning to be replaced by the more dependable and more factually correct and coherent.

Because the main problem any news organization or individual is going to have naturally is veracity. Though the ever present desire for truth has been much abused of late it is not lost, it is an eternal goal. The problem that some of the players mentioned in this piece have is that they are so often wrong. Often belligerently so, but wrong nonetheless. Politicized news outlets and blogs and supporters who backed the Bush administration, for instance, had to take a hit to their credibility and slap to their journalistic face as, one by one, its most heavily invested positions turned wrong. Willfully manipulating the news to promote a political course and smear the enemies of that same course which is then discredited by events cannot help but discredit the purveyors and supporters of those policies.

It takes much longer though, for a good news source to become trusted than a bad one to be discredited. Bad journalists can create followers through sensationalism, because good journalism is more about hard work than cheap PR. So though we may be frustrated at how slowly the sifting and winnowing away takes, the false gods of the fabricated news outlets are slowly being separated from the real and enduring legitimate journalism principles they so fear and revile. This is the process currently underway. It would be helped if legitimate news operations did their part better by doing more to separate themselves from these self destructive tactics rather than try to mimic them. 

Truth and hard work will be rewarded and charlatanism destroyed – or at least put back in the box as a marginal force in society - but it takes time. The only solace is that the victory of good journalism, in whatever form good journalism takes in this new media age, is absolutely inevitable. We can only hope that not too much irrevocable harm has been done the body politic in the meantime.

I The Primacy of the Declaration of Independence

On July fourth1776 the Declaration of Independence was approved and published. Thirteen years later the Constitution of the United States was passed.

Keep in mind that there are two parts to any contract, the contract itself and the agreement prior which sets the purpose the contract has been entered into to bring about. Of these two documents the Declaration is the original agreement between the parties as to what the cause and the goals of the Revolutionary War were to be. The Constitution is the organizational nuts and legal bolts document designed to create the apparatus necessary to achieve the goals set forward in the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, were told the Declaration doesn't carry the force of law because it is too inexplicit and aspirational and because the participants were rebels operating outside of the established (British) law of the land.  But that's an odd disqualification, one the founders of the country themselves obviously no longer recognized.  In fact, there is very little difference structurally in how the two documents were approved.  Both were ratified by the thirteen colonies.  The Continental Congress approved the Declaration with fifty-seven signatories from eleven different colonies.  True the Declaration was not officially passed into law under the auspices of the United States of America but neither was the Constitution.

As the Constitution founded the United States of America the United States of America did not ratify the Constitution, the independent colonies did.  The Constitution in no way amended, repeated, replaced or refuted the Declaration which preceded it, only elaborated on it.

Therefore the Declaration of Independence is the very heart and essence of a binding contract. And given the exigencies of the times it was certainly as legal as they could make it.  It was passed with the full weight and approval of the Continental Congress of which the United States Government is descendant.

Therefore there is a seamlessness that flows from the Declaration to the Constitution that must be acknowledged and respected.  The Declaration is clearly the purpose that the Constitution was designed to fulfill. It must be consulted as the seminal documentary source, as the lodestone and foundation, to ensure that any interpretation of the Constitution is not veering off track from its initial purpose. The Constitution is certainly the letter of the law but the Declaration is just as certainly its spirit and to regard the former without reference to the latter is to begin any legal journey already seriously far astray.  

 The Declaration of Independence is what the founders intended the country they were fighting and dying to bring into being to be.  It is the true unadulterated original intent of the Constitution.  No more no less.  As the child is father to the man the Declaration is father to the Constitution and they cannot be considered separately.

But can this really true? Is the Declaration of Independence really that important? Today it is often thought of as an afterthought or an idealist's dream when rulings of the Supreme Court, which often have the solidity of lead, are handed down. They are solid and it is airy. The Declaration today is often not treated as the transcendent concept it was and still is but as the crazy old aunt who lives in the attic or an embarrassed weak sister to the all powerful Constitution.  And as it hasn't direct force of law, it is often only referred to in legal proceedings as a reference point outside of our jurisprudence, as a point of argument, a courtesy or even a vague curiosity or anachronism rather than as the primal motive ideal on which the revolutionary war was fought, blood was shed and freedom established.

It is rare if not unknown for such a seminal public document of intent to exist prior to a conflict. It is these few eloquently expressed principles and grievances which harnessed and then drove the warhorse of passion which aided the colonists (with a bit of help from France) to win against a far more formidable adversary. It was the principles put forward in this document that the founders of this country, many of whom also helped write, sell and approve the Constitution, to which these men pledged their lives, pinned their hopes and pledged their sacred honor. It was surely not a document whose words and intents were lightly taken.

It was not for nothing that Franklin said, “either we hang together or we hang separately.”

The Declaration may in fact be more important than law because it is the basis of all law in this country, more than the rough outline of the ideal the rebels sought to achieve, the agreement that led to the trouble – the difference between what was and what they wanted it to be - but the heart and soul of it. The Declaration is the only reason the United States was founded and the Constitution was brought to life. The Declaration is the deeper purpose of the Constitution without which the Constitution is just a dry and vapid shell of legalisms and structures.

This is a common enough occurrence. If you were to look at building contracts and construction codes and permits and timetables for building Disneyland or NASA or a sewage treatment plant they would each employ the same basic materials and conform to the same general legal principles and outlines. In these legal documents there would be no mention of Tinker Bell or Pirates or Magical Kingdoms nor of the wonders and beauty of space exploration nor even of how sweet the water will taste after the sludge has been removed.

All legal documents are notoriously devoid of romance and ideals and ethics and are even generally absent of what the purpose of the contract is meant to bring about. Therefore the Constitution does mention “we the people of the United States, to form a more perfect union do...” But to form a more perfect union is not an end in itself, it is a superstructure erected to effect what? It doesn't say. To consider the Constitution as a stand alone document as is usually done today outside of the context of what it was trying to achieve renders it gibberish and the nation rudderless.

On the other hand the Declaration of Independence says what the Constitution was designed to do with admirable concision.  It holds as a given that “all men are created equal.” Governments are instituted among men, so avers the Declaration of Independence, "to ensure Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."  These are among the "unalienable rights" with which we are "endowed by our Creator."   And it says that it is to ensure these things that governments derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Oh, there it is. This is what the founders assumed, what they knew so well that they didn't bother having to re-encapsulate in the Constitution. The Constitution shorn of this conceptual context is meaningless except as a particularly deft and lucid discourse in governmental structure.  If it is not grasped to be a means and method of fulfilling the goals of the revolution which were so embodied eloquently in the Declaration it will not so much lead to a NASA or Disneyland as a shopping mall or waste treatment facility.

The Constitution is an interpretive document built on precedence. It is conservative in upholding the status quo.  But the Declaration remains a revolutionary document which demands constant reassessment.  And primarily because what it says is correct, though we have often tried our best to do exactly that, its principles cannot be ignored.

Slowly as we have increased in population, it being easier to govern a smaller number of citizens rather than a larger, the complexity of our government's interpretation of the Constitution has grown more difficult and indirect and convoluted. We have evolved from a point of relative passivity in allowing equality to naturally assert and maintain itself in our society to a realization that sometimes a more activist government is necessary to ensure this equality against the forces that have ingenuously arisen to threaten it.

In some instances this has taken the form of dismantling laws and systems and prejudices and traditions which have grown up like weeds in a flower garden against the full exercise of representative democracy. The ending of slavery, for instance, or the granting of womens' suffrage and the ending of segregation and the extension of rights in the workplace and in social welfare, etc., have each broadened our democracy and strengthened the country.

In each of these examples and many more just like them the nation was not weakened by but strengthened from these extensions of freedom to those who have been shut out and shunted aside from full participation in our society.  And yet each has been opposed with an astoundingly irascible ferocity by the ineluctable forces of division and disunion and narrow vision among us.

The reason for this shift to activism has been both aesthetic and practical. For

1) Can a system of government based on the self evident truth that all men are created equal really exist and prosper and reach its ultimate social and spiritual advancement in a society where endemic prejudices and inequalities are not only tolerated but ensured?

     At key points in our nation's history our society has said no.

2) Can the ideals of the nation really be achieved if the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not equally accessible to all? Again no. Slavery is an extreme example, of course, where these rights were alienated with a bloody vengeance. But can it be said that a child born into abject poverty in this society today, ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed, without educational possibilities equal to others or with access to timely and affordable health care really be thought to be better off than a slave under an indifferent master.

  Because at some point inequality itself is a denial of basic rights of freedom, the Declaration goes on to say that achieving things dependent on an enduring equality (Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are among but it is not limited to these) is the very reason government is instituted among men. And if this equality is lacking then that government is not fit to exist. This is the genesis of the entire government, “laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them (it) as shall seem most likely to effect their (the citizens') safety and happiness.” To ignore or deny this is to deny ourselves.

There are in fact different degrees and gradations of freedom. Not all freedoms are created equal. Freedom of a type which allows one group of people absolute freedom to do as they will at the expense of the freedom of others is no freedom at all but merely another form of oppression. Similarly some might be confused with situations where individual liberties come in conflict with broader Constitutional issues of equality for all.

An illustration of this was recently put forward nicely, if unintentionally, recently when a candidate for public office called into question the basis for Civil Rights legislation. He strongly implied that (what?) a temporary inconvenience(?), wedded to the massive prejudice of a businessman who refused to serve people of different races in his establishment should carry more constitutional weight than the right of these potential patrons to be treated like human beings and afforded equal rights under our laws.

But freedom is a reciprocity, it must work for every citizen or it is not freedom for all at all. Therefore your freedom must be balanced against others and thought of as no greater or less than the rights of everyone else. If the freedom of an individual or corporation reaches its full self-worshipful expanse it must necessarily reduce and suck up the freedom of all those around them.

Therefore, trying to equate money with speech and recreate corporations as divine reflections of God's image and endow them with the full rights of citizens is nonsensical. Democracy is only of, by and for the people, not about the things they own. Otherwise you may as well say cadillacs are people too with far more rights than bicycles or pedestrians. We cannot let a thing, or any random accumulation of capital, have more basic rights than the sum of its individual parts, i.e. each of the owners and workers who comprise the organization.

That leaves democracy as it has been founded in America to be not only about individual liberty but collective equality.   This means that our ability to achieve our greatest success and potentiality as a people can not be thought separate from our ability to help all Americans attain and maintain the same equal rights as the rest of us and enjoy the same opportunities detailed in the Declaration. E Pluribus Unum - from many we are one.

We only have rights in this country to do as we want when they are commensurate to and compatible with the basic freedoms of everyone else.  We have the liberty to do what we want but only when this liberty is placed squarely and securely in the context of a collective tradition that strives to achieve and maintain the greatest good for all.

Therefore all concepts of individual liberty must be tempered with the public good.  Our idea of personal freedom, at least as far as our democratic government can be thought to be working properly, must be balanced with our collective freedom.  The one can not exist without the other.

So let's not hear any more of the original intent of the founders as if they were mysterious to track down and comprehend, they are not a secret to be lured forth with subtle occult reasonings. They are right there in front of us. They made it as clear as it possibly could be made.  What they said and signed was what they meant.

II The Twin Pillars of American democracy

Out of this democracy two clear and distinct paths have emerged which define us a people.  These twin pillars of the American system of government are: Democracy and a Free Market system of economics. Like a set of twins they go hand in hand, male and female, with their proud parents walking behind. Many consider them interchangeable and even indistinguishable and for one to exist without the other is, to many minds, even if desirable, not even thinkable.

Superficially this seem true yet when you look each of these systems objectively and break them down to their base components you will find that they are fundamentally at odds with each other in their operations. They work in opposition. Like two oars on a boat, if one is exercised more vigorously than the other for an extended period of time, rather than advancement, circularity results which then eventually spins into regression against the ongoing tide of time.

We have already detailed the basis of democracy as put forward in the Declaration of Independence.

But now let us consider the second great pillar of American society - free market capitalism. Generically, this is an economic system which at its simplest brings goods efficiently to market. There are other methods, highly organized and controlled which may do the same thing. But these require several tiers of additional management which capitalism may dispense with. A free market needs no system of external control to make it work, only an internal one of supply and demand with a sliding price scale attached.

    When a commodity is scarce the price goes up and when in abundance it declines. Where demand is, a supply should always theoretically arise to fill it and where a supply occurs a demand will be engendered to consume it. Precisely because of its simplicity this is the most efficient economic system with the least amount of waste, want and needless surplus. Except for instances of hoarding, price gouging and market manipulation this is a self regulating system.

There is one additional problem. Money is the generic medium of exchange which was invented to facilitate the buying and selling of goods as an evolution from the simple barter, pawn and trade system it replaced. Money however has itself evolved to become the most desirable commodity of all to which all others are subservient. Money has taken on a life of its own and become an end in itself.  It is, to quote a phrase, “the way we keep score.”

Capitalism therefore also creates as a by-product economic hierarchical differentiation. It inevitably spawns, the same way coal mines make slag heaps, winners and losers, rich and poor. On the high side the same economic system which provides goods in abundance to those that may afford them, on the back side cruelly denies goods and services to those who most need them, even those staple items such as food and housing and education and medicines which may be vital to life. The same benevolent invisible hand of Adam Smith which leads to prosperity and creates privilege has another cursed invisible backhand which leads inevitably to penury and privation.

Therefore we have two competing systems, both dual and dueling, joined together. There is an inherent tension between free markets and a free democracy which it would be naive to downplay. Democracy as a function of its being through its instrument of constitutional government to work properly must ensure equality of opportunity as well as protect the unalienable rights of the people from whose consent it derives its just powers.

On the contrary, free markets, when left to their own devices author the inexorable devolution of inequality, of poverty, privilege, and varying degrees of class prejudice entirely foreign to a free people and alien to the original Declaration of Independence's intent.

This is the fault line, the money river, with all its droughts and floods, which runs between these two primal forces of our society and which shifts and angles and eddys in different configurations over time. And it is always difficult to balance these competing forces properly. Current debate over health care was floating directly down the center of the money river until the preponderance by a small margin decided that coverage should be as universal as we could make it as a necessary fulfillment of the mandate of a democracy to protect life, liberty and happiness. Access to good health care touches in varying degrees on each of these three protected, fundamental rights.  Unless you have never been or ever expect to ever be ill it is hard to argue with this assessment.

You may disagree with the particular layout of this particular legislation but to suggest that establishing a new health care law is itself somehow a matter of constitutional overreach as some have done is absurd.  Extending equal rights to someone is never unconstitutional.  Granting or maintaining special rights for some and denying them to others usually is.  The latter is judicial activism the former never can be. 

Obviously the solution to the Declaration's demands can't be to try to insure absolute fratricidal equality to everyone all at the same time.  The idea is not necessarily for government to enforce actual debilitating uniformity but to ensure the equal access to equality, and ensure that the potentiality of economic and social equality is open to all.  Not to dictate upward mobility but ensure that upward mobility frequently may take place.  

Anyone may say that a person born into excruciating poverty may perhaps succeed.  A scant few do.  But the vast majority do not because the path is narrow and steep is the way and the odds are so thoroughly stacked against them as to effectively deny them a free pathway to equality.

Therefore government must mitigate against egregious disparities in opportunity and where the free market doesn't work, fill in the gaps and cut back the excesses to ensure that it works better.  Where one group or section or subset of the nation's population is endemically underachieving it not only diminishes the collective future of us all but undercuts the entire concept of a more perfect union the Constitution is committed to bringing about. It is the direct responsibility of our government (or any government) to moderate and ameliorate these differences, although today it seems most of our politicians spend the bulk of their time working to exacerbate them.

Such government can be not the abrogation of freedom or free markets but the prime necessary component to ensure that they succeed and the only grounds on which freedom and equality may be expected to flourish.  If more and more do well then we all do better and better but if fewer and fewer of us do extravagantly well and the vast majority far less well and growing numbers are kept mired in abject poverty (which is fact what is happening today) then something is seriously wrong. Something is unconstitutionally wrong.

So clearly it's well within the responsibility of government to ensure that the basics of housing, clothing, nourishment, health and education are available to all.  If any one of these may be considered to not be an unalienable right endowed by our Creator then they would certainly have to be necessary to the attainment of an elemental equality.  Either way lack of any of these primary necessities would be a key component to an indentured inequality which the Declaration explicitly forbids.

This is precisely what the Declaration suggests good governments are instituted among men to allay – "to lay its foundations on such principles and organize its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." Both literally and figuratively, to take this one example, if health care reform succeeds a healthier a happier population will unavoidably result.

In fact to have tens of millions of Americans denied adequate health care is entirely unconstitutional.  Clearly health falls into the category of an unalienable right as its denial is the present result and future cause of an enduring inequality.  If governments are instituted among men to secure the rights enumerated in the Declaration as it suggests then to not secure them for the entire population puts a government in default of its own responsibilities.   Or, in the words of the Declaration, "whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and institute new government."  This is quite clear.

And as the nation grows larger and richer with the vast resources of multinational corporations operating within and without our borders today, the government reaction must grow proportionately to meet the ever expanding challenge that these represent. Those who think the answer to an increasingly complex world is ever smaller government are misguided.

No one suggests here there is not a difference between corrupt or inefficient or misguided government and good government.  Nobody disputes we need ongoing government reform and the best government we can have but to gut the government we have before having an alternative government to erect in its place is merely suicidal, myopic and defeatist. Legislating the appropriate regulations with the supervisory clout and financial resources to contain these ever growing threats and challenges against us as they continue to mount is actually the rebirth of good government after along hiatus.

This is not really as difficult a concept to understand as some would pretend.

Through all our tumultuous history it has been the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, which has served and still serves as this basic prod of our conscience, the rudder of the ship of state, the mystic calling forth of the finer angels of our being. The Constitution may be the means but the Declaration is the way. The Declaration has always prodded us to live up to its standards rather than down to our own. Strict constructionists of the law sometimes lose their way and become legal contortionists because they have forgotten the spirit and lineage of the law they are interpreting.

Why does the Declaration written eleven score and fourteen years ago still lead us ahead toward a shore we have yet to see much less reach? No other nation on earth has such a clear guideline and canon of ideals to call on as its guide through troubled times. 

Because its words were better than those who wrote them, it's vision reached farther than the times they lived in and their own eyes could see. It calls us to actions that the authors sometimes could not institute themselves. Its ideals are better by far than we have been at certain times in our history.

And because it is both clear visioned and open ended and unequivocal and irrefutable it is something which always must be worked to be measured up to or grown into. Even when for a time you think you might have achieved a democratic balance of freedoms, it slips away from us again with the changing times.  And so each generation must be re- energized to be regained and our understanding must grow more refined to reinvent and realign our current society to our own past and renew our democracy all over again.

The Big Sting

Gather round for a sad tale of woe and tragedy shot thorough with deception, all to prey on one person's best instincts for another's lowest intents and purposes. You've heard the story of Bonnie and Clyde now sit back to hear the one about the Libs and Cons.

Once upon a time there was a proud, lower middle class church going, god-fearing man named Joe. Now Joe happened to run across a down on his luck beggar one day and to help him out hired him to do a few odd jobs around his house. The jobs were done oddly, true, because this man preferred to talk above everything else and his gift of gab usually got squarely in the way of his ever actually getting any of the jobs he was assigned done.

Now mainly this stranger loved to talk about himself and how badly he had been treated by life, by liberals, he called them, and do-gooders who always, to belie their nickname always did more harm than good and thus became classic harm-diders. Joe was as shocked at these stories as he had been at the Book of Revelation and found that his heart went out to this strange stranger, especially when he started to explain how these dirty liberals were out to get Joe too.

  It took the stranger a while to identify and fasten on the one aspect above all of the liberals character that particularly incensed Joe but once he had he never failed to include it in his litany of crimes and larcenies purportedly perpetrated by these libs.

“Really, they hate Jesus?” Joe exclaimed. “Well why would anyone do that? You say they are commie sympathizers or excuse me, were commies lovers and now they love terrorists too? My word, why would anybody love terrorists and hate Jesus? That's just not right, it's perverse and insane. Are they dying for Hell?”

The stranger would just shrug innocently at such questions, “I don't know Joe. I honestly don't, I wish I did. If we could just talk some sense to these people you know?”

“I know, I know,” said Joe, shaking his head sadly, “it's tragic.”

Now it turned out,coincidentally, that Joe had a car, a real good car, he'd put all his savings into fixing up. It was his pride and joy and though it wasn't intended for that purpose it also happened to be the fastest car in the vicinity. But Joe was a shy, self-effacing fellow. He had worked on this car in secret thinking that only when it was finished to his satisfaction would he unveil it at auto shows and special events like Fourth of July parades.

Somehow Joe's guest seemed to know all about the existence of this car and one day he came to Joe confidentially, while as usual shirking the other more tangible duties for which he was actually being paid his room and board. He hemmed, he hawed, he shuffled his feet in the dirt as if he were embarrassed.

“I'm so ashamed,” he said, “and I hate to ask but I love the Lord so much. The truth is I haven't able to go to church for so long. It's so far away and I don't like to walk and I despise buses. Oh if somehow I could find someone to give me a ride I would be so happy and so grateful. But I don't know why I'm telling you this because you don't even have a car.”

Joe's heart overflowed. “What faith! Though he had never even taken his car out of the garage, saving it for a special occasion what, he asked himself, could be a specialer occasion than church? But I do have a car,” he exclaimed, “and I'd be proud to drive you to church on Sunday.”

“You do, oh that's wonderful. But uh, I can't go to church right away on such short notice. How about in three weeks, uh on the fourteenth?”

When that Sunday arrived of course Joe had to lend his boarder his best clothes so the poor guy would be presentable. Joe was beamingly proud of himself for his rehabilitation project. He had to admit that the poor man looked better, was better fed and now he was even taking him to church?Wow, he felt pride and even a certain sense of responsibility and ownership, even partisanship, in wanting to see this miserable,lonely, humble specimen of a man do well in the world. It would indeed be a miracle.

On the way to church though, the boarder surprised Joe by telling him there were a few other passengers he wished, if it were at all possible, to please to pick up, because they wanted to go to church also. What could he do? Even though he felt imposed on, a little bit used, Joe couldn't possibly refuse. On the contrary, when he thought about it he was overjoyed to be sending more fallen souls on the long, narrow,torturous path to righteousness. Even if it was just driving them a few blocks to church. If this is how God wishes to use me, he thought, let him do it a thousand times more.

But when he stopped to pick up these forlorn fellow travelers and they piled into the back, Joe at first was slightly shocked at how rough and crude these characters were, leather jackets, tattoos, body piercings,crude language, unkempt and smelly with a certain indefinable pungency emanating from them he couldn't quite (and certainly didn't want to) put his finger on. They looked more like criminals and con men than spiritual aspirants. Joe even asked about some of the weird bulges he saw under their shirts and jackets.

“Oh,” his tall strange employee assured him, “it's the good book, Joe, and other devotional materials. But they are so shy about their faith and they are afraid liberals will see them and beat them up and take their good books away that they must keep them hidden.”

Joe was shocked again at the depths to which these libs would stoop and was more determined than ever to help these poor pious souls find their way back to the bosom of the church. But then, in another unforeseen occurrence, one of the new passengers barked, none too kindly and actually rather harshly, that they had to stop by a bank on the way.

“The bank?”Joe asked naively. “Yes, yes,” his pushy boarder interjected quickly, “to get some money for the donations box. These guys are so devotional they are afraid to show up empty handed at God's house.”

Joe couldn't stop the tears from welling up in his eyes. He felt himself so lucky,blessed really, almost as if he were an instrument of God. Imagine this, old Joe thought, being part of something larger than himself and put in the way of being able to help such saintly, sincere men,fallen to be sure, but so darn sincere, find their way back to the spare doorstep of salvation.

But the affair at the bank was beyond anything he could have expected. First the men in the back seat were very particular about where he should park the car and were explicit in telling him that he should keep the motor running. This seemed odd to Joe for a simple bank transaction but these men were very insistent, even a little bit scarily so. If they hadn't just been on their way to church he might have been more resistant.

After about thirty minutes inside Joe had been wondering what was taking them so long.If they didn't rush they might be late for services, he was just thinking to himself when all of a sudden here they came and my sweet Lord, the commotion was more than a little unsettling as, excuse the expression, all hell broke loose. His church going passengers came pouring out of the bank all at once. Police were shooting at them and then – where did they even get the guns – they were shooting back! My goodness gracious god. When they piled into the car,throwing big bags of cash in the back while others were laying down withering cover fire, Joe demanded his boarder tell him what the hellfire was going on.

“Liberals, Joe.They found out that we were going to church and tried to keep us from getting our money. Because it's all our money in there, yours too.It's not a real bank, it's a treasury bank. A government bank. But these liberals want to be sure it doesn't go to do God's good work but want to keep it in reserve for degenerate causes.

My God,” excuse my name-vaining you, Sir, but my God but that's just evil. Who are these people? Why was I never aware that such people, my own neighbors, who always seemed decent enough, could be so demented and debased.”

“You're too good, Joe. Guys like me and my friends here are all that separates you and other good moral folk like us from the godlessness that lives and breeds all around us. But, uh, we can't exactly talk any more about this now, Joe, so step on it will you, the liberals are calling in reinforcements.”

As the car tires squealed and Joe raced them away he found time to ask,“reinforcements? Who?”

“Government, Joe. The liberals control city government and the police and the newspapers, too.”

“My good God Almighty, excuse me again god, but I thought conservatives now ran the city.”

“We try, Joe.Believe me we try. You know what good moral and saintly people we conservatives are. But government is just too big. Even when we conservatives are in charge government often behaves liberally against our will and the public's wishes. It's uncanny.”

“You mean even when conservatives are in charge liberals still run government.”

“Only when it does bad things, Joe. We take credit for the good. But now at least you see what we're up against.”

“You betcha, I do.” With that Joe jammed on the gas pedal even harder. He was a former stock car driver, a real gear head when he was younger, and he soon left those lousy pursuing liberal cops in the dust of his new found outrage.

Can I tell you or can you even begin to imagine what a relief it was for Joe to finally pull up in the parking lot of his own church, his new churchgoers in tow. He never felt so holy and alive. He was doing God's work now for certain. He introduced his new parishioners to his pastor who was skeptical at first, to be sure. But in the weeks that followed as Joe explained the plot against Jesus that these good men had uncovered, he would become just as outraged as Joe.

He too had one question. “But why, Joe,” he wondered aloud?

“Well pastor we believe it's because they are in league with terrorists and hypocrites.”

The pastor gasped. You mean in addition to everything else they are traitors too, Joe?”

Joe said, sadly,that it was true.

Meanwhile, many Sundays, even while they were still sitting in church, they would hear the police sirens speeding by outside in search of the perpetrators of some spectacular bank robbery or other. Joe marveled at their luck. After all, who would think to look for bank robbers sitting nicely and quietly and calmly in church on a Sunday morning?When Joe mentioned this divine, or so it seemed to Joe, piece of good fortune, his boarder only smiled.

“Yeah, yeah that really is a very extraordinarily lucky coincidence for us that I went to work for you and all of a sudden discovered that you had the fastest car around.Isn't it lucky? Wow, we couldn't have planned this caper better if we'd thought of it ourselves in advance.”

“Yeah, wow it's true then, God really does work in very mysterious ways,” Joe said shaking his head in wonderment. When he thought how God could use such imperfect vessels as he and these crude men to do his divine work – which was apparently robbing the American treasury blind –his faith was enhanced even more. Admittedly for a while he had been slightly concerned at the lack of piety his passengers showed. For as they did this same type of god's work many times thereafter -dirty liberals always right on their tails - sometimes at a string of convenience stores, or even at individual's house, a number of savings and loans, or corporate offices or multinationals where they'd ream the liberal shareholders on behalf of the godly corporate executive officers, or even national parks – he noticed a certain pattern emerging.

In each instance,invariably, as soon as the commotion died down and the liberal police sirens faded in the distance and the danger had passed (Joe's friends told him the conservative police must have been locked up by the liberals in their own jails - “What!!!” Joe exclaimed when he heard this, more and more indignant with each and every example of liberal perfidy.) these guys would suddenly get up and go outside, not even bothering to stay for the entire service. There they'd just stand around, smoking, drinking whiskey surreptitiously,but Joe saw them, (The pastor did to but he just looked the other way) from flasks in their belts right next to their assault weapons(Yes Joe saw those too and he looked away as well).

As they gleefully divvied up the money of the day's haul among themselves, recalling how they had told him that this money they stole from the treasury was really his money too, Joe was always a little surprised they didn't offer to share any of it with him now that they had it. But he didn't care too much because heaven would be his best reward.Later these guys would start to exchange winks and nods and trysts with some very loose women (and, truth be told, even a few men) who,for some reason were always blond and often had their own radio programs, who had began to congregate out in the bushes around the church at just this time like camp followers.

“Liberals sent them,” Joe's boarder explained when Joe expressed his concern about the women, “to tempt us and then they try to suggest that there was somehow something untoward and dirty going on. Damn libs. True, some cons would fall prey to the rapturous temptations the flesh is heir to, but then wasn't it even worse, that the libs would try to use suggestions of wrongdoing to discredit God's work and to further the liberal agenda which, to hear the con's tell of it, sounded very much similar at least to Osama bin Laden 's if not Satan's.

But then, despite all of his good and upstanding work, things got worse for Joe.Because Joe lost his job. In fact, many in the church did. And those that didn't had to accept steep pay cuts and they lost their health insurance and pensions. And many businesses had to close.

It seems there had been a big crime wave in the area and many business had been hit hard and some even robbed and they their insurance rates rise and the bank which had been particularly hard hit had nearly failed and the whole town had to chip in to save it because a town their size with no bank couldn't function. So not only did many lose their life savings in the bank collapse but then taxes had to be raised and services cut to be able to afford the big bank bailout as fees were raised on the entire population to save the bank from collapse.

The only ones this helped were the largest depositors and speculators and share holders of the non-treasury banks. Joe was quite surprised that the winners in this economic redistribution didn't include him but did include the very people who he had helped to rob the treasury banks and all those other places that he was told were in league with the libs in their shadowy war against god and country. To Joe's amazement these guys, these very people that Joe had felt so sorry for and had selfishly helped in the good fight against all the liberals, had all become astonishingly, one might even say selfishly, prosperous.Furthermore, he almost came to believe that despite their rudeness,bad manners, crude behavior and tearful identification with the 'little people'” that they had been quite well off all along.

They only needed his car and his help now and then after that, every two or four years, when they needed a special ride to church which always entailed a few stops along the way and always there were liberals and shootouts and mayhem and money bags and daring white-knuckle getaways to the security of the church. And as the police sirens wailed away outside unable to figure out where these robbers had gone –yet again – the boarder and his buddies just smugged and smirked and told lewd jokes among themselves.

Otherwise although they would still treat Joe like an old friend when they saw him they never really acted like old friends and never seemed to want to stay around him any longer than they had to. Because they always seemed too busy now, in their very big stretch limos and fine clothes and lavish life styles and often, he thought, would pretend not even to have seen him when he'd wave. And when he would call on them, they'd act confused momentarily before they'd put on their faux furs of false excitement shake his hand and slap his back, looking over their shoulders as they did so as if they had somewhere else to be and someone more important to do it with and didn't much want to be seen with a guy like Joe anyway.

Deep down Joe and a few of his fellow church goers were hurt and confused. But by then the liberals had taken over the city from the cons and so they knew they had to be even more vigilant and still support their friends right or wrong in the death to the finish fight against the stinkin' libs. But deep down they wondered how things had turned out so well for their friends and so badly for them. Even the lousy liberals were doing better than they were.

Finally, and this was the unkindest cut of all for Joe, attendance at church had started to wither. All their shrill railing against libs and against poor people and immigrants had struck more than just a few people as too political, hypocritical and unchristian. Meanwhile while all the projects the church goers had helped the cons with had turned out famously, all the church projects the cons promised to help them with had seen few if any successes.

In fact the only group that had seemed to do well were the banks and chief executives of giant corporations. This was fortunate for the cons for they all seemed to sit on the boards of giant corporations and hang out at the same clubs as the bankers did. Since they had always pretended to be against the banks, at least government banks, in favor of the “little guys” it was then surprising that they actually turned out to be against any meaningful bank reform once the private banks later got so far out of line trying to bankrupt the world.

When confronted with these anomalous facts the cons responded not with reason and remorse but by merely escalating their attacks on libs. Gum everything up, hold rallies, sit-ins, sit-downs, hang arounds and mug-ins for cameras was their new strategy for logical governance of the nation. For it seems that now the libs were pushing nefarious schemes like health care reform. Could anything be more sinister?They weren't just commies and nazis and un-American anymore but some now suggested that they weren't even human beings. They had actually become aliens – like Clingons – and were determined to take over the whole planet after they destroyed the country, though it was hard to tell what vehicle they would use to control the world if they had destroyed the country they were running first.

But Joe was feeling lethargic. He was worn out and wasn't buying their reasoning so much anymore. After all, the first thing that happened when he got laid off was the insurance company canceled his insurance. And besides these spontaneous “remember the little people rallies”were organized by the same bank robbers and corporatist millionaires who had proven to be so completely wrong about everything before.

But, after railing against libs for all these years how could Joe possibly reunite with them now? He had always prided himself on his loyalty and constancy, so in the end Joe went dutifully to the rallies like he was told and booed and bleated as speakers ripped into libs as convincingly as a herd of sheep throwing a tantrum. They claimed that first libs had helped the banks rob us and now they wanted to regulate the banks so they could bail them out again. It didn't matter that their arguments didn't even make sense, the cons were against them no matter what, so Joe was too.

Finally, one day,running into his former protege as he went to the unemployment office Joe couldn't help but voice his dissatisfaction with the way this entire movement had turned out for him and his friends.

“Don't you think this is ironic? I gave up everything to help you and you wound up a powerful multimillionaire and I've got nothing, less than when I began. You were going to do all these great things for us – prayer in school; overturn Roe v. Wade; have the Ten Commandments posted on every street corner; see all foreigners run out of the country; fight easy wars to glorious victories that we would never even have to pay for; beat up, legally speaking, gay people; engineer a constitutional amendment against the awful scourge of flag burning; eliminate separation of church and state; undo social security, dismantle the departments of education, energy, environmental protection, welfare, etc.; and do it all according to sound conservative economic principles, fiscal policy, constitutional strict constructionism and moral exceptionalism. But somehow you delivered on none of it.”

“It's not my fault you believed all of that Joe, after all, just about everyone of those things you listed is either entirely unconstitutional or wildly unpopular. But don't blame us, blame those damn liberals, Joe,see what they do to good god-fearing Americans like us? And you'd sure better not blame me. It's not my fault you ran after all these quixotic moonbeams nobody had the heart to tell you you would never catch. Meanwhile me and friends just happened to keep our eyes on a more practical, attainable prize – money and lots of it.”

“But somehow even though I thought we were in this together you always seemed to manage to land on your feet, huh? While I get thrown under the wheels of your limos as they leave town. In fact, walking around town I see you and your friends going into clubs I can't even afford to enter with the heads of the very bankers and elites of society you always told me we were fighting against.”

“That's a very cynical attitude Joe. We're always sunny and optimistic about the future of the country. You should be too.”

“There you go again accusing me of an attitude you are guilty of yourself. You are the most cynical people I've ever met. You even pretend to religious beliefs you neither personify nor possess merely to gain others' trust and occasionally use as cover for some less than admirable lifestyle decisions.”

“Joe, I'm shocked. Let me ask you this, do you want government agents of our liberal, anti-god, Nazi-socialist-commie government breaking down the door to your house in the middle of the night to take your money from you just so they can give it to shiftless poor people?”

“But man, I'm one of them. Now. Thanks to you. I'm one of those poor people at the bottom of the economic scale you seem quite willing to dismiss as bad or worthless or forgettable Americans. I'm not sure I want to keep being forgotten.”

“No not at all,you're different, you're special, you go to church unlike those dirty tax and spend commie terrorists libs. I told you they were trying to keep you down and steal your hard earned money. And look, it's come to pass.”

Yeah, I suppose it has at that, just like you said. But let me ask you this. If it's the liberals who have been working so successfully all these years to take my money away from me and give it to someone else then how come you and your friends are the ones who always wind up with it?”

“This last remark was a little bit  too much on the nose for Joe's conservative friend and seemed to flummox him a bit, suddenly he recalled he had an important meeting to attend somewhere else, but before he could leave, Joe continued.

“First you robbed and bankrupted the federal treasury where, true I had some money there too that I begrudged and no it was not perfectly managed but at least when it was spent it might accidentally go to serve some public good that would eventually benefit the country which might even benefit me too. Because though I disagree with some of our government's spending when you break it down I agree with 90% of it. So while a little reform was necessary you have tried to destroy everything. That's liking burning down our house just to get rid of a few cockroaches, or burning down the outhouse to get rid of the the stink.

“And now the public treasury is so indebted, understaffed and deregulated that it can barely function at providing the services which the country needs to survive without borrowing vast sums of money from foreigners or cutting vital services at home. How's this better for anyone? That ultimately makes us all weaker. Meanwhile you and your cronies have redirected this public money which was held in trust to provide for the public good and funneled it directly into your own accounts and superior care and feeding of private banks which only a few control. And then you use a fraction of this money to fight using any of the rest of these funds for any public good. I don't pretend to know of high finance or grand geopolitical economic theory but it sure seems you cons have impoverished the nation solely in order to enrich yourselves.

“My daddy told me a long time ago, Joe, always remember, 'there are no patriots on Wall street and few Christians, when push comes to shove it's we the public they push around and shove down,' and now I think I see what he meant.”

“No Joe, you've got this all wrong. You see it's liberals who aren't like you and me. They're bleeding hearts, see? They 'd take your money and give it away to some one else.”

“Or back to me, in greater sums when I need it, than I ever paid in in taxes to begin with or that I ever had the foresight or ability to save for. The Bible tells us that when money is given generously it expands but when used greedily it contracts. It seems these public monies - and I didn't fully realize how much benefit they provided until I started to see them shriveling away - when they are well spent glue the country together in a shared experience. But you and your kind just want to drive wedges between us to keep us down and divide us all for your own profit, country be damned. You look at history and see a dog eat dog, anti-Christian, greed driven world where everyone is just out for themselves, just because you happen have bigger dogs on your side than anyone else. It's a cold, hard, class-ridden unforgiving world you envision which I don't recognize as my country at all.”

“But Joe it's the liberals you're thinking of. That's what they do. They hate Jesus and...those rotten libs...we cons, you know, have got to stick together now.”

“Yeah, I hear you, you're cons all right. But you are cons not as in conservative, because you aren't conservative. Conservatives believe in upholding and sustaining our finest traditions not in watching them implode so they can steal the remaining pieces like an unfriendly take-over of a corporation that is perceived to be of more value, at least to a few shareholders, if its broken up into smaller and smaller parts. No, you are cons the way confidence men are cons.

“You earn people's trust the old fashioned way, by lying.  You do it by telling them things you think they want to hear and then worm your way in, rob them blind and get away before they even know what hit them. Then you are ready with a prearranged frame to point to someone else when they discover their loss. You squeal and say look he did it, they did it, everyone did it but you when you're the one who did it. That's a con man.”

“Joe's old friend shook his head. “Ok, I see what's happened here, you are no longer one of us my friend. You are dead to us, you are our enemy now. I hope you know. And we may be willing to forget our friends and and impose on them and even cheat them from time to time but we will never, never forget and forgive a one time friend who dares raise a finger of doubt in question of our activities. I'm writing your name in our book now, my friend. We will bury you.”

And they tried too. When the friend he had only done everything he possibly could to help turned his back on him and walked away Joe felt limp and depressed, empty inside. What a world that would have such people in it. And as the guy walked away, Joe realized that he never even knew the guy's real name or what he did for a living. And then it hit him. That's why the sting worked. Nobody knew who the cons were or what was real or what wasn't beneath all the artifice and persiflage and continuous moralizing and constant misdirection. That's why half the people helping them in their sting were doing so unwittingly, not knowing what their real purpose was in the grand scheme.  It was diabolical, a play within a play within a play. After it was over and you discovered you'd been cheated you hardly even knew where to point the finger of blame.

After that Joe, to his total dismay, even found himself shunned at church. His pastor, the same one Joe had first alerted to the threat posed by the libs, screamed at him from the pulpit as a turncoat.  Former friends looked the other way, others blackballed him when he tried to find a new job. He was banished. I'd like to say that in the end Joe was sadder but wiser, but he wasn't. He was most assuredly sadder but never really any wiser because he never could quite figure out what he had done that was so wrong to deserve such heavy punishment. He had only wanted to do good.

The moral of this story is: Doing the wrong things for the right reasons may have exactly the same result as doing the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. But the punishment will be even steeper for the one who does it. You still wind up with all the wrongs you did weighted against you but you will pay an even heavier additional fee for the self-righteousness and arrogance you displayed while doing it than a mere crook who never had any such pretensions.

1 Graphite Graphic

Clearly we’ve reached a watershed in this country. From 1980 to 2008, which might well be called the Age of Reagan, republicans and the republican ideology have dominated Washington and American life. Arguably Ronald Reagan put together one of the most powerful political coalitions in the history of the United States. (See my crude graph below for how this coalition compares to other great change presidencies).  It encompassed Wall Street and Main Street, united large capital interests with anti-government populism under the same roof, it was supported by activist right wing religion, to be sure, but also traditional religious denominations, vectored in a new solid republican South, and united them all in a single movement. It was a true political juggernaut.

Andrew Jackson and Reagan were surprisingly similar.  Both were anti-government, regressive movements. Roosevelt and Obama are progressive, pro-government types.  Arguably it is easier to to be against building and expanding something than it is to be engaged in building something new.  But, on the contrary, once built it is easier to keep a program in place than it is to change or destroy it.  Another key to these comparisons is the fact that Democratic reformers invariably have had moneyed interests solidly arrayed against them. As a republican Reagan alone had that formidable wind at his back.  That he had credentials as a populist too, is remarkable, because generally money and populism are contrary forces and politically inimical. 

Clearly Reagan, had all these support groups in his column, five for five.  Obama's position is apparently the weakest of the four, though of course there are other ways to build a coalition than with just these five categories, and his strengths and weaknesses may change as his presidency progresses.

Oddly though,since Reagan’s was a negative based argument, an anti-government movement, like Jackson's before it, it has left little in the way of real and enduring legislative achievements after nearly thirty years to show for its domination. Its priority was defending propositions and theory of how government ought to be rather than enacting laws and legislation. And now it is on the run. It has lost its majorities, it is engaged in a fierce rear-guard action to hold on to its legislative priorities, its tax cuts, and it refuses to endorse any kind of new federal program, which it expresses dismissively through its catch all phrase – big government. All this though polls show most Americans think that change is in order,needed and over due.

Even if you don’t believe the numbers and political defeats, their dyspeptic, divisive,bitter and shrill rhetoric would lead you to believe that there is something desperately wrong in the Reagan Revolution as it reaches its thirty year mark. Its only discernible policy at this point in time is obstructionism, to oppose everything all the time forever. It is a risk and gamble and a very rare tactic in American history. It is really guerrilla politics, damn the results, damn the consequences. Even if they lose they will happy because they will have drug the government down with them.

2 Republicans and the New Nobility

A guerrilla movement arises not just from an ungovernable lust for power but because it rejects the very norms under which a government must operate. In this way guerrilla government comes to resemble guerrilla warfare, as it rejects conventional norms of democratic debate and resorts increasingly to gorilla-like behavior patterns.As everything is justified in war, as opposed to civil politics,these tactics manifest themselves in wild exaggerations, venomous ad hominim attacks, extremely disingenuous argumentation, accusing others of being guilty of random behavior of which you specialize,demagoguery and all manner of anything goes policies based solely on the principle of anything you can get away with for as long as you can get away with it. This results in apish, chimp-like propagandistic behavior where false charges are repeated over and over even after having been thoroughly denied and discredited in loosely coordinated viral fear and smear campaigns designed to overwhelm an enemy rather than arrive at any objective truth.

Even though these politicians are employed by the population to find balances between competing interests which together comprise the national interest and the greater good they nonetheless find comfort and reward in actually working only for the interests of a very few Americans either in abeyance of or actually against the interest of the many. Under these circumstances democratic government and its natural drive for equality has become an impediment to their intentions and its supporters their enemies.

Though they try to couch their economic prejudices in an objective philosophic framework this turns out to be just a cover for a baser intent. So to be in favor of cutting taxes for the wealthy in every circumstance may be misconstrued as fiscal conservatism but it is not fiscally conservative nor democratically fair and in practice merely adds to a ruinous debt. It is the theft of the wealth of the general funds of the nation which will ultimately result in the crippling dependence of the many on the few.

Partly this is because though it is not organized, not really a club, there is a new nobility that’s arisen in this country every bit as domineering and self-righteous and determined as any old European nobility’s ability to feather its own nests by plucking the chickens of the middle class. This economic nobility is fundamentally based not on equality but on the hierarchy and social differentiations necessary to sustain great wealth. This elitist coup viscerally rejects social, political economic movement toward equality and resents the very idea of a social or national responsibility to others. In other words they reject out of hand the very qualities that first distinguished America and made us exemplary among the nations of the world.

Therefore at the root of all their policies is an inbred rejection of government as an equalizing or arbitrating force in our society. Instead they see democracy primarily as an impediment to increasing inequality and growing separation of rich and poor, as economic and social differentiation serves their only purpose, the making and keeping of money.

The republican guerrilla assault on government has to be seen in this light, as an attack on the buffering effects of sound democracy in favor of an economic rule of the jungle where a few get rich for whom everyone else eventually labors. It is a type of slave economy in favor of this new nobility, these blessed cherished few, who their party feels are superior and should be in charge of permanently running roughshod over the rest of us. It is a type of stunted, feudal democracy which will result.

At its very worst,and it is not all bad, but at its worst which I believe we are seeing today, this devotion to capital at the expense of a diminished democracy is an assault on the best of our values. It is preaching greed and hoarding over generosity of spirit, in favor of a top down,dog eat dog, society rather than a freer and fairer workplace. It is an assault on the humanity of government, on our long standing devotion to a meritocracy, to fair play and of our freedom to succeed not only in spite of but because of our great diversity. Why?

Although its not widely appreciated money is the hub on which the great wheel of the nation’s history turns. It was perhaps Arthur Schlesinger Jr’s.The Age of Jackson which first illustrated this clearly. It is a thread of debate which runs clearly from Hamilton and Jefferson to the Bank War of Jackson, percolating as an undercurrent through the Civil War, to the robber barons and the Gilded Age to the Cross of Gold of William Jennings Bryant and the reforms of Theodore Roosevelt, wending up through the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin Roosevelt, to Reagan and now Obama. Though social issues come and go and wars and generations pass, the war between capital centralization and its disbursement toward the general health, wealth, well being and infrastructure of the nation is the central fulcrum on which the national debate between left and right and rich and poor has always hinged. Even if it is often confused and disguised as something else.

It has been the unholy modern triple entente of money with right wing religion and the republican party that since 1980 has propelled the US economy, not coincidentally just like in 1929 when Wall Street last held such a dominant and domineering sway, up to the very brink of what was nearly the second Great Depression at the end of the Bush administration. Having learned our lesson, this time government intervened with massive bailouts to prop up Wall Street and so the economy has so far survived short of tumbling into the abyss. But ironically this means that Wall Street has not been chastened as it was at the advent of the Roosevelt administration in 1932.

Not only are they not remorseful by the huge fraud and incompetence that nearly brought on world financial collapse, they’ve given themselves huge raises, pretty much with taxpayer money. Therefore, since Wall Street and the new nobility don’t really care about main street, or health care or our national infrastructure or the rest of the population and the republican party works on their retainer, the republicans may still feel loved and secure in their current stature as the party of no as the new nobility that bankrolls them approves of ineffectual government, the rest of the country be damned.

Instead they are adamant in their refusal, unlike what they consider happened in Roosevelt’s day, of never giving an inch of their ill gotten advantages back. Any thing even tangentially bordering on an implied hint of a weak move toward a hesitant start of a reversal of the republican ascendancy over the last thirty years no matter how harmful and ruinous it has been to the country as a whole is not a matter of compromise for them. Bipartisanship is a dirty fourteen letter word. This is why the Republican Party of today has chosen to come out into the open and opt of democracy in a fight against any perceived threat, no matter how oblique, to the centers of the continued accumulation and consolidation of wealth in this country they have so far nobly advanced into the hands of fewer and fewer actual Americans.

Sensing the public’s desire for a reversion back toward a truer democracy with the election of President Obama, this cabal is vehemently resisting change. Since they don’t really care for democracy or our system of government or the aims that our constitution was written to achieve and secure, they feel free to discount the results of free elections and majority rule altogether. They do this not only because our government is not working well, and thanks largely to them it isn't, but because they are afraid it may start to work well again.

Therefore the Republican Party that serves the interests of this New Nobility has become devout obstructionists, the party of no, nullification. nope,not hardly, nunh-uh and never.

Government at its best comprises the shared resources of an entire nation that when properly applied through sheer economies of scale can solve any problem which the nation might face. Yet this later wayward branch of the republican party today, quite divorced from the principles on which the party was originally founded under Lincoln, look at our nation’s wealth only as a mass pool of capital to get their hands on. Not for the collective good but for the private profit of those enterprising and well connected enough to corner it. Take Social Security. This is the nation’s intergenerational trust fund. It is the essence of the sound management of our resources as one generation pays ahead to ensure an entire segment of society security in its old age in the firm belief that the next generation will do the same for them. It’s not only a national trust fund but a unending fund of national trust and national reaffirmation.

But the republicans of today only see Washington like the vandals saw Rome, as a capital or a capitol to plunder. Whether the public good would be enhanced or diminished by risking social security has never been a concern of theirs. So though they are hired by all Americans to preserve, protect and promote the interests of all Americans equally, they have somehow twisted this to mean that they should screw the most if they must in order to help the least if they want, and recognize no contradiction between the two positions.

In this world of backward democracy in which they live all catch phrases such as social welfare or tax reform are placed and dismissed under the same rubric of “income redistribution” or more crudely, “soaking the rich” in favor of the usually colorful(not all white) poor. But this phrase can easily be reversed and more appropriately applied to their own actions. There was little hint of actual income redistribution downwards prior to the republican ascendancy in 1980. And to the extent there was it was entirely and unambiguously beneficial. The rich still got richer but there was a slight movement toward equal job opportunity, a rather porous social safety net and a growing and prosperous middle class – all salutary developments which have unarguably led to a stronger and healthier nation and, not just coincidentally, coincided with our greatest national prosperity.  On the contrary since 1980 there has been ample evidence of a massive shift in wealth from the lower and middle classes to the very, very rich who have in fact grown exponentially richer while the wealth of the middle class has either been stagnant or suffered actually remission. At the same time the nation has become noticeably weaker. Since 1980 there has indeed been a very unhealthy income redistribution at work - upwards.

This use of preemptive language, in this case, “income redistribution”sneeringly applied to attempts at securing greater economic justice in our society, represents a common tactic of the right. To compensate for an alleged disadvantage or prejudice which barely can be proven to exist, when they can they enact extreme policy overreactions to the minimal provocation they identify designed to result in huge imbalances in the other direction, i.e. in their favor. To prevent the rich from being“soaked” then, which they have never been in danger of, the middle class must be drenched and the poorer people must be drowned like unwanted cats in a bucket.

There is a very curious tendency at work here which is, consciously invoked or not, to accuse your political opponents first and more loudly of behavior which you are more guilty of, either before or after the accusation, than they ever were.  As most people don’t act like this or think to behave in such dishonest fashion the tactic is actually quite disarming at deflecting and diminishing criticism for their own bad behavior onto others. If the republican noise machine begins accusing you of something be forewarned, it is either something the republicans are preparing to do or have already done to a far greater magnitude than anything you have ever done or even have previously conceived.  

So for instance,“political correctness’ was a legitimate issue when a certain liberal consensus existed in this country, but it is nothing compared to the political correctness demanded by the right since, even among its own membership as anyone who steps out of line even for a moment is shrilly denounced and brought back in proper group think order or exiled forever for their apostasy. And everyone outside this select group is accused of being traitorous, terrorists, criminals and worse.

Similarly it is possible there was a subtle but distinct liberal bias in the establishment news media and academia which deserved to be identified and condemned but this easily pales to the full throated Fox News abandonment of all sense of objectivity and propriety as in the name of news they pursue undisguised propaganda in its purest form. In each of these instances the right wing fulminaters took a kernel of truth and some isolated instances of liberal bias, exaggerated them to monumental proportions and then to “counter” them have justified behavior far worse and comprehensive which they then deny either to be engaged in or to be bias at all.

As they do this they are self-consciously dishonest in characterizing their own reactions. So Fox News preemptively styles itself “fair and balanced” though it has never entertained any interest in being either.  As a proud and belligerent counterbalance to what it sees as the entrenched biases of “extreme liberalism” they are self- consciously conservative to more than just a small fault. This places them at the other end of the political spectrum and makes them extremely conservative by their own definition. To then claim they are not biased is self-contradictory. It is their entire raison d'etre.

Or look at the republicans sudden concern with deficit spending. No party ever in the entire history of the United States has a worse record of fiscal irresponsibility and deficit spending excesses than the Republican Party of 1980-2008. Yet you recently find a fool republican senator holding up a necessary $10 billion in employment payments to struggling families in the name of fiscal probity,because this money has not been properly accounted for in the budget and paid down in advance. This after voting trillions of unsecured spending to support misbegotten wars, rapacious tax cuts for the most wealthy and least deserving and a thousand and one other boondoggles without a bang, whimper or even a stray oops in passing. In fact republicans voted down pay-go the policy which the democrats actually employed the last time the budget was actually in balance while fighting the policies which achieved it tooth and nail.

The hypocrisy and cynicism is too stark here. When Glenn Beck says that social justice and welfare have no place in either Christianity or America he is perfectly blasphemous and traitorous to the finest ideals which have always motivated both. Or when John Kyl tries to hijack government until he can blackmail congress into passing the asinine and destructive repeal of the Estate Tax through a congress which has many wealthy members just elitist and corrupt enough go along, the republicans show the nature of their true priorities and allegiances.

To examine another part of this, it is illustrative that the very first measure taken up by Gingrich’s republican congress in 1994 was a bill to try to deny funding to public broadcasting. Their excuses for this were novel and typically erroneous.

They said that government never can do anything as well as the private sector. Yet public radio and television were and still are excellent on a variety of fronts from children programing to news and discussion shows, to nature shows and documentaries and at the time was easily the best thing on the airwaves then as it still remains today. Then the critics hinted at biases in the operations but couldn’t make these charges stick because the coverage was so scrupulously fair. Thirdly they claimed that the private sector would not only replace public broadcasting's programming but do it much better. It was quite clear even then that these charges were completely, knowingly untrue but how much more evident has this become today as private television continues to plunge into fatuously risque programming and mindless reality shows and radio continues to unimpress with its shock jocks and questionable political proselytizing.

Fortunately (and this might be said of an entire range of programs and departments of government from Social Security and Medicare to the Education Dept.and Energy Dept. and Security and Exchange Commission, etc.) under ruthless and withering as well as thoughtless republican attack, they were able to maim Public Broadcasting but not kill it.

The real reason the Republican Party hated PBS was because it couldn’t be bought and if it couldn’t be bought then it couldn’t be controlled. Though publicly supported it retained its independent voice. It did what government was supposed to do, fill gaps in areas where our quality of life lags and smooth over areas of injustice with the fresh new paint of old opportunity and regulate areas where private sector abuses would severely diminish the ability of democracy to function. So the problem with pubic radio and television was not its bias but its independence as, I repeat, no one could buy it and twist it to their own personal advantage. Such areas of sacrosanct inviolability and objectivity are vital if a democracy is going to survive, adjust and prosper.

Meanwhile we have seen our private news gathering organizations be increasingly corporatized and continue to decline in quality as distinguished journalistic organizations. They are unctuously dependent on polling popularity. Too timid to take on their corporate masters, in general they have become pale reflections of their own recent pasts, mealymouthed, underfunded, unenterprising, reactive and afraid. If the republicans had succeeded in destroying PBS and their money controlling friends had bought up sources of network news and newspapers and continued their domination of talk radio it is possible that today most of our journalism would simple be an elaborate, anemic house organ of the right wing. Balanced and fair though that might be in the minds of some, it would be the death of democracy. Yet the right wing still bloviates about the liberal left wing press whenever the news doesn’t report the way they want it to.

Witness the latest attempt referred to elsewhere in these pages of the Supreme Court’s back door attempt at injecting money as overlord and chaperon to political free speech and you may begin to understand how insidious and widespread and corrupt these big money influences are and the lengths to which they will go to bring democracy under their financial and political control.

Their right's unstructured scheme to control all media failed, mercifully, due to the entirely unforeseen rise of the internet and its thousands of independent voices which consistently have run circles around network news organizations. Does anyone doubt that if the internet had not arisen to undercut the domination of the network news, that the pressure corporate and republican political interests and right wing commentators could have brought to bear on every single news story generated by an “independent” press would have increased to extraordinary levels of excruciating scrutiny and control today? If you doubt it just look at the weight they brought to bear (on a topic too complicated,arcane and patriotically emotional for internet operatives to effectively mount an argument against) against anyone who dared dispute the wisdom of the second war with Iraq.

And the republicans inanely say this is not political correctness but necessary vigilance to combat political correctness on the other side. Without the internet it is possible to see that journalistic freedom and enterprise might have already been nearly extinguished in this country by now.

Similarly, though these anti-government types claim to despise government they are awfully anxious to run it, and are not shy about ramming their beliefs down our throats when they do. Take the state educational board in Texas that has unilaterally decided that our history was not properly conservative enough to suit their memories and desires.These amateur bureaucrats, a dentist uh, someone who sells real estate, a uh .., well you get the hint. No historians needed to apply for ideologues to rewrite history in Texas, as this board has suddenly discovered that they are greater historians than any real historian or teacher could be.

To cite one peculiar and telling instance of their insight they have decided to denigrate Thomas Jefferson’s historical role in the founding of the country and elevate his quite a bit less distinguished and even less admirable namesake Jefferson Davis. The first helped build the spiritual basis of the nation and actions with his words and the second to nearly destroy the spirit of the nation through slavery and civil war. This collection of school board geniuses somehow has decided the second character with Jefferson as his given name was more exemplary and salutary to the nation’s history than the first with Jefferson as his family name. This will be the second greatest crime against the nation (this one against children) associated with a school book depository in Texas.

Finally, just recently, the passage of a health care reform bill whose proponents were (with the extraordinary ability of the ignorant to use big words whose meanings they don’t understand) often labeled “fascists” by members of the right wing. Certain militia members, as described in the press, called on opponents to attack democratic offices across the country. This resulted in smashed windows in a number of states. Unfortunately for these wordsmiths this is exactly the same type of intimidation tactics fascists actually used in Nazi Germany. Here again they infallibly accuse others of behavior and ideology of which they are far guiltier themselves.

It always makes me wonder when looking into the eyes to the barrenness within of guys like  Boehner and McConnell and Gingrich and Limbaugh, etal., the whole lot of ‘em, given the singularity of their bad behavior and the mediocrity of their minds and the paucity of their purposes, that they don’t somehow in the dark of night sense a lacking. After all, why did none of the far greater Americans of the past need to resort to permanent filibusters, legislative nullification, juvenile tantrum throwing, misrepresentation and dishonesty as a permanent amoral legislative tactic to achieve their great goals? They were uniformly scrupulous in using the structure of democracy itself to achieve democracy’s greatest triumphs.

Don’t these simpletons see or care that even if they don’t have the personal integrity reproach themselves as being far lesser men than those who’ve served us well in the past that their behavior fits perfectly this pattern and that history will?

The only thing we have seen close to this kind of behavior in our entire history has been in support of the indefensible, namely, the political protection of the institution of slavery and later, it’s lame, dimwitted cousin, segregation. The only time the filibuster was so completely employed, at least in threat, was by southern democratic politicians in defense of this later agglomeration of injustices that comprised Jim Crow laws in the South.

You have to ask yourself what evil it is the republicans of today are trying to protect by all their pseudo secessionist tactics. The moneyed interests that control them or the shallowness of their own minds and hearts? Or maybe it is a pale visceral echo of this distant sordid past that they feel themselves to be modern caretakers of. I admit it seems unbelievable but the symmetry is there in a segregationist’s past to employ exactly such obstructionist tactics in defense of slavery and then segregation and then against the first Black American president. It is up to these weak minds, hardly aware of their own susceptibility to these ancient cries from ancient graves of long since vanquished slaveholders and their segregationist cousins, to these distant relations of the present that now lead the new republican party to fulfill these same patterns and forms so long discredited. I repeat, this is no longer the party of Lincoln, they don’t even claim it to be, but the party of Lincolns, of the new nobility, the new southern caretaker party, upholders of the newest line in the sand against racial impurity and democratic equality. Unbelievable as it seems it is probably true.

3 Mirror Projection Psychosis

But then unbelievable is becoming common with them. A president who cuts taxes for the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else, has the nation’s largest terror attack occur on his watch, while he was napping, doesn’t finish a necessary war he starts in Afghanistan to start an unjust war in Iraq on bogus pretenses, probably the most corrupt and mismanaged war in our history and never bothers paying for any of it… A guy who never even pretended to govern from the center or on behalf of all but only for a few of the wealthiest Americans and corporations… who through masochistic anti-government deregulation and astonishingly poor appointments presides over the worst financial calamity since the great depression… A president who runs an administration that engages in illegal torture and illegal spying on his own citizens while operating illegal and unsupervised torture prisons abroad... who wrecks our relations with the rest of the world, thumbs his nose at congress and the public while denying all legal accountability for his actions… All this while pursuing a truly bizarre and completely unconstitutional theory of the unitary executive – or virtual dictatorship in a time of war– no matter how nebulous or open ended they deemed that war to be –subject to their own definition of it.

And to do all this with unprecedented arrogance and disingenuity and ultimately, a complete lack of remorse. The administration of George W. Bush was not a threat to American liberty and worthy of protesting against. No, according to the tea partiers, it's the administration elected in reaction to that administration that must rank as one of the worst in American history. To their minds this is administration is tyrannical and fascistic for NOT doing all these of illegal and self destructive things, for trying to clean up the messes they were left with and, as far as is possible, to move the country back toward the middle of the political spectrum. And this is tyranny? Because he wants to extend health insurance to all Americans?

Man, with reaction time like this, if the Tea Party were a guy who went to the doctor for the famous reflex test where his crossed knee is struck with a rubber hammer, eight years later he may involuntarily kick someone in the shin on the subway. These people have the worst political antennae in history. Some are probably just beginning to worry about the end of the world at Y2K at the end of the millennium. Others may be starting to wonder what we should do now that the Berlin Wall has just fallen.

The tea party islike an outraged crowd being led by a bunch of arsonists reeking of gasoline, accusing the fire department that has come to put out the fire of having started it. The solution the arsonists suggest: more fires. For to consistently accuse others of things which you are or will soon be guilty of yourself is a peculiar pathology. It’scalled “projection”. Obviously the republicans and their followers so abominate all these terrible things they have done to the country, the bad debt, the false wars, the crumbling infrastructure, our declining place in the world, etc., that they can’t accept they have done them to us and are projecting the self-loathing of their own acts onto others. This is how they pretend to see flaws in others that they possess to a much greater degree themselves. It is a mirror psychosis, not recognizing themselves in their own actions which they then accuse other of.

Of course, even if you are not exactly Snow White, it’s tiresome being consistently accused of vices you don’t have by people who have them in great abundance. So the tea party fully supports those who drove the bus into the ditch they are in and reserve their criticism for the ones trying to get them back out. They are especially angry and will never forgive those who were right in the beginning when they pleaded with them not to make the very mistakes that put the bus in the ditch in the first place. These will never be forgiven by the surely bus dwellers for having been right all along.

That’s why the tea party and the republican cries of fascism and socialism and Armageddon (really!) are so deceiving and confusing to an outsider, because what they say is the opposite of what they mean. The secret to understanding them is to understand that they are totalitarians at heart. Totalitarianism was the root cause of both fascism and communism last century. Perhaps that's why a true totalitarian has such a hard time telling these extremes from opposite ends of the political spectrum apart today. Meanwhile, through the magic of mirror projection they think must see in others like tendencies that they possess themselves.

Totalitarians believe in using the levers of government even to excess if necessary in order to place more controls on more people not fewer. This is why they never flinched at wiretaps and torture by the last government. To their minds everyone must profess the same religious beliefs down to fine details of theology, they must support big business, big money, guns and Wall Street without question. They would prefer a strong unequal and dismissive government that will keep them (by which they really mean everyone else) in their places. Highly centralized themselves, they are willing to let government control them socially and make them toe a certain theological and political line because they want to use government to control everyone else.

When government loosens up and institutes equalities, such as extending health care to those who may be down on their luck or born on the wrong end of the economic scale, they are incensed at the generosity and the lack of control exercised over the behavior of the lower orders, many of whom may be of different races and different religions and all of whom might be lazy.

So when some of these tea partiers demand freedom they really only mean they should be free to control others while being subservient themselves to a higher government order, just one they approve of.

This is why they make so little sense. When they say want more freedom for the country they really mean less. When they say government is being oppressive they really mean being too lenient, by forcing them to be more tolerant of others of whom they disapprove. When they say they want less government they mean less government aid but more government prisons. When they say they hate the Wall Street bailouts but are also against the very regulations which might prevent the exact same type of excesses which will make bailouts necessary again in a few years time, to a tea partier republican this makes a certain kind of weird good sense.

It’s illustrative for instance, that Catholic bishops were against health care reforms because they believe in strict moral controls and accountability over everyone (but themselves apparently) and exist in a system that is extremely hierarchical. Catholic nuns, however, who run the catholic schools and hospitals came out in favor of the same legislation. They were thinking of human beings and the Bishops were only thinking of institutions and structures and placing strictures on people.

This is the remnants of the coalition which has formed on the right wing. The domestic economic imperialists have combined with a floating tea party of seething resentment toward all that has befallen them. The ones whom it was done to can’t help but team with the ones who did it to them against the ones who tried to keep it from happening. This is how a guerrilla movement against government foments and sustains itself against all apparent logic and hope of success.

So this is what the great republican coalition of 1980 looks like at its fag end. The unholy trinity of the Monetocracy, the Religious Right and the Republican Party is foundering on its own shoals. The end result of their historic thirty year cooperation is that the big money interests got away with all the money, the republican party is laboring in a minority (with hopes of course of rising again) and the religious right seems to have finally decided to try their luck with salvation back in church rather than through congress. The revanchist tea partiers cannot come to grips with the fact that the policies they were such loyal foot soldiers in support of have actually not only all failed but have particularly victimized them and all other down scale working Americans.

In reaction the tea party is trying to blame the same old suspects, the democrats,the liberals the minorities, etc, even though the true culprit here is the very party they have vehemently, belligerently and sometimes even gleefully supported, no matter how many people and experts were telling them that they were ultimately liable to be the victims of the very policies they were supporting. The hardship they are facing now is the direct result of thirty years of republican economic predatory misrule. Apparently they haven't yet grasped that they have spent the last thirty years working for Wall Street without having even realized it and without tangible benefit. And they most assuredly cannot and probably will never accept the reality that the very same people they have reviled all these years, symbolized by everything Barack Obama stands for, will, if they are very, very lucky, be their rescuers.