In Your Guts, You Know They're Nuts

The CPAC frolics which will culminate in Rush Limbaugh receiving an award for preserving the Constitution gave me flashbacks to the last real conservative crack-up I first remember. William F. Buckley,Jr. gentrified conservatism by courageously at that time exiling the John Birch Society, the KKK and the isolationism of the American First Movement. It's hard to believe that the man who was to put us under United Nations rule at that time and was an appeaser was none other than Dwight David Eisenhower. Perhaps, it's no mistake that the whole Eisenhower family backed Barack Obama--they have long memories.

Barry Goldwater won the hearts and minds of conservatives with his orneriness and blunt speaking. But, dear Barry was also a founding member of the NAACP in Arizona and was more a libertarian than the social conservatives of today. Yet the monumental landslide loss in 1964 should have indicated the limits of the appeal of unvarnished conservatism to the public.

Today, Ronald Reagan would be hard-pressed to win the leadership of the GOP because as Governor of California he did raise taxes and vote for abortion rights, something conveniently forgotten in the hagiography of his Presidency.

Conservatives and the party they finally seized are faced with the same swill of neo-confederates, white supremacists and separatists that plagued them in the 1950s. It's hard to imagine today's situation where the "birthers" actually seek out approval of Pravda as they do.
The Senator from the state with the most secessionist groups and a high level of white supremacist organizations--DeMint from South Carolina--claims the enemy is the Left--presumably the 68.5 million voters for Barack Obama.

Since the election, almost all the conservative and Republican pundits have been chanting the litany that America is a center-right country. This was echoed again yesterday at CPAC when speakers claimed the majority backed their views. This assumes that ideology will always trump competence, which the last Administration sadly lacked. And curiously, these same people studiously ignore the American people's support of the president's economic programs and his huge popularity as opposed to the conservative Republican leadership in Congress. The politically astute would normally pause and try to analyze this discrepancy.

The blatant appeals to racism and nationalism by the McCain campaign thankfully failed but they have continued through the first weeks of the Obama Administration. We should recall that for the first time in my life a presidential candidate campaigned against the "socialism" of his rival, something the average voter didn't quite perceive. One would have to assume by the results of the last election that "socialism" won, since it was put up to a popular vote.

If you want to drill down and find out where the most noxious rumors about Obama come from, you should examine the hate websites. Last week the Southern Poverty Law Center posted an interactive map of hate groups in the United States. Now there are some 926 such groups ranging from the Nazis to the Nation of Islam, almost a 50% increase since 2000. They usually generate some of the Obama rumors that then get filtered into more conservative websites like the Free Republic and become somewhat accepted within that political culture.

If some adult figures don't step in and call a halt to this courting of the most noxious types in our society,so-called conservatism will become a seditious affair. So far, no respectable leader has called these groups out on their nonsense and tried to steer the debate back to Planet Earth. And, frankly, I believe it is because the Republican leaders now want to see the political possibilities in this route. The same crowd that generated the whole Clinton scandals believe this type of behavior will pay off dividends in the future. In fact, those who believe the "birthers" are stark raving bonkers believe " we should create innuendo after innuendo so that Obama's credibility is damaged." And, yes, it is as cynical as that.

The most curious new addition to the conservative enemy list is FDR. This would be understandable to the geriatric set but makes no sense to Generation X'ers. The embrace of attacks on FDR--which I find disconcerting and irrevelant--are aimed at preserving the Bush entitlements to the rich and corporations. Grass-roots conservatives are not invoking the demons from the FDR period but more the fiscal conservatives linked to Wall Street and the corporate media. Since both New Gingrich and Ronald Reagan once embraced FDR, it's hard to find where the traction is among younger types. For the rich Republicans the anti-FDR scree is a call to dismantle social security and Medicaid--a position not held by the majority or even a significant minority of Americans.

As Glenn Beck lamented, "America is addicted to Government." or as Michelle Bachman said, "What would our founders think of taxation with representation"--you can't make that up. Where is the next William F.Buckley, Jr. when the conservatives need him?