Thursday Afternoon With Nothing To Do

I am thinking of putting an embargo on anymore posts about Sarah Palin. If her insanity actually reaches some critical mass where there should be intervention, I'll reconsider. I still think she is the true incarnation of the Republican base as it currently stands and, even though I believe she lacks the discipline to endure a full campaign for the nomination of her party in 2012, I still consider her the favorite at this stage. But I can't insult my mind anymore listening to her shrill talk and the madness of her statements. Sorry.



Glenn Beck is also losing my interest because he truly doesn't believe anything. He is the paradigm of conservative success--even more than Rush Limbaugh--he has monetized everything. His little empire of TV, Radio, Books and Newsletters net him over $32 million a year. Sam Tanenhaus in his book The Death of Conservatism (Random House, 2009) lamented the deterioration of conservative thought. He blamed it on this instinct to monetize everything.



I remember Glenn Beck's first radio show where he was a Neil Boortz libertarian wannabe. During this time, he was mentioning his new relationship with the Mormans. During this period, he spoke glowingly of Mitt Romney and the successful people surrounding him. This was in a period after RomneyCare passed in Massachusetts. He talked about this group's virtues and the help they gave him. He at least sounded sincere. That's why it was so interesting to hear and see him throw Mitt Romney under the bus in his tirade about Barack Obama as a socialist. And, from my experience I have never seen a so-called Morman do that to another. But it makes sense if you are just the rodeo clown he says he is.



In his new rap that Barack Obama is a socialist, he decided to attack Obama's mother and father. He said he sympathized with the young Obama abandoned by two radical parents who put their causes above their son and abandoned him. This abandonment accounts, in Beck's temporary worldview, for all of Obama's political ideology, which changes from week to week depending on Beck's sobriety. Somehow Barack Obama doesn't seem like the orphan of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. And maybe because he simply isn't. Perhaps Beck just wants to finally push a button to make President Obama respond. Remember he has a red phone as a prop for the President to call him.



Let me enter the world of Beckian logic for a moment and give a more plausible alternative to the radical parents abandoning their young son. Consider his mother. His mother was a USAID employee sent to Indonesia in the midst of a Communist insurgency during the period of the Vietnam War. There she taught women microenterprise. As we know at that time the USAID was used as cover for the CIA. We also know that Barack Obama,Sr. came to the United States as part of the first group of Africans sponsored by the United States Government under JFK for graduate studies. This generation--many of whom I knew and worked with--would be considered CIA assets. Barack Obama,Sr.'s return to Kenya netted him a decent job as a bureaucrat in the new Kenyan government.



However, during this time Jomo Kenyatta found himself threatened by a young politician Tom Mboya, who he assassinated. History records that Mr. Mboya was a CIA asset, a very bright and talented one. Thereafter, the Kenyan government purged the Luo from the government and became almost exclusively a Kikuyu-based organization. Barack Obama, Sr. fell on bad times and became an alcoholic.



Later, his young son, while in Columbia University,flies off to Pakistan during the period of the Afghanistan War. His borrowed the money for the trip from veteran new York politician Basil Patterson. Pakistan at that time was an American ally and just readying its efforts to create the resistance to the Soviet invasion.



So instead of two socialist parents giving birth to a socialist son. We have two CIA agents producing another CIA agent. And the last scenario has a higher degree of plausibility.



I expect Glenn Beck will have some type of collapse or relapse into drugs, go into hiding and re-emerge like Jimmy Swaggert or another evangelical preacher and give another type of sermon. You may have read his next incarnation right here. A warm embrace of Barack Obama, son of the Mayflower , descendent from Wild Bill Hitchcock--which he is. Just as long as the cash machine keeps running.



If you want to read how this type of culture has come about, I urge you to read Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule (Henry Holt, 2009). This would have been a fun book almost like P.J. O'Rourke writing about conservatives, but it explains too much of what we are seeing today. The creation of huge money-making ventures from birthers to second amendment fanatics out of the conservative movement. The rhetoric of the tea-party people all are derived from Jack Abramoff's efforts to organize conservative cadres on campuses. They've now taken the rhetoric to adults. Some of the same corporate interests are at work in all these endeavors.



Frank answered alot of questions that have bothered me during the George W reign. I saw the ideology but never any competence. I kept asking why since I knew dozens of people with the type of expertise on a host of issues. The answer is simple. They wanted movement conservatives to hold these posts because the aim was to turn government into their own cash cow and to destroy liberal government as we know it. Frank details this with superb reporting because he started out as quizzical as I about this strange phenomenon. Like how do you appoint someone to create the Iraqi Stock Exchange, who has absolutely no experience in finance or any knowledge of economics? How was Iraq littered with movement conservatives who had never left the country before and had no foreign policy experience? Why would you allow Monica Goodling to actually initiate the firing of U.S. attorneys with vastly more experience than her? This book gives you insights into that type of mind.



One of the odd things about the Bush administration ,at first glance, was that it enlarged the size and power of the executive branch of government greater than any administration. Yet it actually cut the number of government employees. How did this happen? Almost $500 billion a year of the government's discretionary budget was allocated to contractors. Government jobs for the movement conservatives were not a form of public service but simply entry level jobs before the big payoffs at the contractors or as lobbyists. Our most famous contractor was Blackwater run by Eric Prince, the fundamentalist Christian son-in-law of Dick DeVos of Amway fame and a Republican National commiteeman. It is likely that Mr. Prince is one of the few people in history who made their billion solely out of government contracts.



And the budget deficit? We know the Reagan deficits were done deliberately for two purposes: one to break the Soviet Union; and, secondly, to hamstring any Democratic administration from embarking on any new social programs. The George W. Bush deficits--the largest on planet earth--was to show everyone of us that government just doesn't work. Only the private sector can deal with issues economically and effectively. So we urgently need to get the deficit under control by finally gutting the entitlement programs of social security and medicare. Then the conservatives would have finally accomplished their true political goal--eliminating the social welfare state once and for all. That's why a Dick Cheney could blithely say,"People don't care about deficits at all."



I shouldn't be surprised by this level of mendacity as Big Daddy used to say. Conservatives now can turn on a dime. Witness the exchange at the CATO Institute last week when the moderator asks Dana Rohrbacker how many Republicans on the Hill regret the Iraq War. He answered "100%". But most surprising was the interjection of Grover Nordquist, who piped in ,"200%". And that's all you have to know. It just didn't work out, we move on.



Thomas Frank is a very shrewd observer of the conservatives' tendency to blame bad results on the fact that the perpetrator wasn't conservative enough. This happened to George H.W. Bush when he had to increase taxes. It is now happening to George W. Bush. This was an administrative which had Justice Thomas' wife, now a tea party woman, vet all Bush political appointees at the Heritage Foundation. This past administration had more movement conservatives in key positions than any in history. Yet even someone as keen as Bob Tyrrell, writes that George W. was somehow "ignorant of the conservative movement." It's like Communists who used to say there haven't been any real Communist societies yet. We haven't experienced a real conservative government yet.



Silly me. I always joke to my conservative friends that the C in conservative stands for Cash. And when they talk about being for "small government", I remind them that however small it's still government. But I miss the point. The true enemy, as Thomas Frank exposes, is Government itself. And yes the C does stand for cash, how much they can get out of it. Remember the slogan of one of the W crowd, "The Best civil servant is the worse one."