Nate the Great Silver at www.fivethirtyeight.com has finally delivered his House predictions. He puts the odds at 2 out of 3 for Republicans to take back the House. Feeding all the polls, money factors and other odds and ends in his kitchen sink, he comes out with probable gains of between 45 and 50 seats, slightly less than 1994. But remember this is the first time out for his House picks.
I have read two more studies of computer runs that came out identical --the GOP taking the House by one seat. That would be a 40 seat pick-up. Then with about a dozen ethics cases breaking against the GOP, within moments everything would be up in the air again.
Meanwhile, Byron York writing in the Washington Examiner quotes several off-the-record Republicans skeptical about the tidal wave election. Only Vin Weber came forth to be quoted directly. The view was that the intensity gap would start to close as traditional Democratic base groups like Labor ramp up their efforts and Democrats will come back to the fold. Weber also points out the managerial mess at the RNC and the lack of organizational structure in the Republican efforts. Robert Craemer also wrote an article pointing out the same thing that the Democrats at this point have huge cash advantages and better organization. Like Weber, he pointed to the difference with 1994 in that Republicans have a worse approval rating by far than the Democrats and that all their allies like Big Business, the Health Insurance industry, and Banks have far worse approval ratings than even the GOP.
Meanwhile on the campaign trail, Democrats are showing they are holding their own in Swing States. Eastman in Ohio now has edged Rob Portman in the Ohio Senate race; Boxer again leads Fiorina, Marco Rubio only holds a few point lead over Crist, and Democrats are out in front in House seats, which everyone has predicted as goners. In my opinion, there seems to be some solidifying in the Democratic position. However, on the overall House front, it's hard to tell.
Always remember Nate the Great's predictions are his first cut and he keeps updating the model as we come closer to the election. On another front, several pollsters are pointing to the GOP taking 27 state houses and not 30 as Nate predicts.
In any event, aren't you glad Obama got most of the big stuff out of the way first? People criticized him for doing too much too soon but it showed he understood that the honeymoon would be quick as every President knows.
The big news from today's press conference was that President Obama didn't wear his wedding ring. Really. The greatest question was "Do you think you've been a failure because you have captured or killed Bin Laden yet?" And you wonder why Republicans might have a chance? Or maybe that's Obama's October Surprise--wouldn't that be great.
Christine O'Donnell, the teabagger candidate for the Senate in Delaware, went really over the line. She has aired a commercial suggesting that Mike Castle is cheating on his wife with a man. This has been a constant theme for her in the last week suggesting Mike Castle is gay. The producer of the ad said that "We have no proof of this but we thought we would put it out there anyway." Stay classy--that's the motto of the New Conservatives. While Castle claims his own polls show he will win but today hinted he might run as an independent. (FYI--I know many of the GOP who really are gay, many who lead the conservative movement--but I have never heard this about former Governor Castle. Then, of course, so what?)
Lisa Murkowski is trying to get back into the Alaska race and is in negotiations with the Libertarian Party. How this would play out is anyone's guess.
In New Hampshire , the teabagger candidate is gaining ground on the Attorney-General Ayottte and if victorious David Hodes, the Democrat, has a real chance at picking up the seat.
While the President lectured us again about the right of Muslims to worship freely, Newt Gingrich and Calissa have released a new DVD "A Nation At Risk", which argues that the United States is in danger from Muslims because they want world conquest.
It's clear it's no coincidence that Pastor Jones was a high school classmate of Rush Limbaugh. The last we heard from Pastor Jones he gave the Imam of the Park 51 project two hours to agree to move the Islamic Center or he would burn the Quran. The Westboro Baptist Church is hurt that no one saw them burn Qurans in 2008. So now they are going to burn both Qurans and the American Flag. Kudos to the London Telegraph for being the only newspaper to have printed how Pastor Jones uses his congregation as 'slave" labor to support his for-profit business.
A correction from yesterday's post. Some of Obama's tax breaks will be beneficial, particularly the ability of business to write off 100% on capital equipment in one year. I learned this from Ed Schultz, who has several small businesses of his own. And yes David Axelrod had to clarify that President Obama would veto a bill with tax breaks for the richest. Senator Voinovich said that he would back Obama's small business bill, making it 60 Senators. So it should hit the floor next week sometime.
In his press conference, President Obama came very close again to naming Elizabeth Warren as the first head of the Consumer Protection Agency. Just get it over with!
One member of the press asked why with Financial Reform passed two months ago, nothing has changed? One third of the stimulus package hasn't been spent yet so why haven't we seen the final results? Jesus Louise, these guys are amazing.
President Obama is thinking of appointing an envoy for manufacturing. I guess you can't call it a Czar or that would make Glenn Beck's blackboard. President Obama is the biggest advocate for small business since Ronald Reagan and like Ronald Reagan is one of the few Presidents actually to talk about American manufacturing. A point I told a right-winger who called me today to ask,"Are you sorry you voted for Obama yet?" When I pointed these two things out--there were crickets.
The Republicans did win a big victory yesterday. A Federal judge ruled Don't Ask Don't Tell unconstitutional. The suit was brought by the Log Cabin Republicans, whose members include many gay veterans. Think about it -- the leading conservative lawyer wins the Prop 8 case with a Republican judge ruling; Gay marriage is upheld by a Republican Supreme Court in Iowa. And the DOMA act is ruled unconstitutional by another Republican judge. This all might be an aftermath of the dominance of the conservative movement by the gays in the 1980s. What will the Focus on Your Family crowd think?
The AFL-CIO this week warned Sarah Palin that if she kept up her slander of the labor movement she would join the ranks of people like Joe McCarthy. But she already has. Her adviser is Greta Van Cistern's husband, a leader in the scientology movement, and Greta herself, is the daugher of---get ready for this--Joe McCarthy's campaign manager. Greta should fly down to Nevada to get Sharron Angle to write out her list of the domestic enemies in Congress, something Michelle Bachmann also claims. Then her destiny would be complete.
The Arnold is getting a little snarky. He tweeted while flying to Asia from Alaska he couldn't see Russia from the airport.
Tomorrow Sister Sarah and Glenn Beck will host a boozefest celebrating 9-11. Glenn Beck has already been shamed by the news media to donate his speaking fee to charity. No word from the Sister. Some wag suggested that the two were celebrating the September 11, 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende by Pinochet.
Liz Cheney is running attack ads against Admiral Sestak in Pennsylvania, claiming he was weak on Israel. Whatever that means these days. Her candidate Club for Greed candidate Pat Toomey came out today against the Hate Bill legislation,saying you can't legislate how people think. But you can legislate on how people are physically tortured and killed because of their race or gender preference.
I actually had a conversation today with a conservative Republican who really wants to repeal the 14th Amendment. He also once argued that it was a shame slavery was outlawed because it ruined the South's economy. Am reading now White Cargo: the Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America by Dan Jordan and Michael Walsh. To my horror my fantasy retirement land--Popham Beach in Maine--was the site of a Fort to house White Slaves on the Kennebec River in the 17th century. Maybe the counter to the Christian Revisionist History of the American Revolution is to consider our rebellion against Britain as the first White Slave Revolt.
President Obama's plan for a $50 billion multi-year project to rehabilitate and modernize America's infrastructure is almost two decades overdue. The last time a President addressed this issue was Dwight David Eisenhower with the creation of the interstate highway system, which created a national market for the first time in our history. So I guess it's appropriate that David Eisenhower is about to print a memoir of the last decade of Ike's life at Gettysburg. David had won the pulitzer for his account of his grandfather in war-time. The Eisenhowers, including David and his wife Julie Nixon, backed Barack Obama's bid for the White House. Maybe he felt compelled to re-insert his grandfather into the national debate. After all it was during Ike that the John Birch Society was created, and it was under Obama that the conservative movemment welcomed it back into the fold after decades of exile.
Showing posts with label Dwight David Eisenhower. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dwight David Eisenhower. Show all posts
Friday, September 10, 2010
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Saturday Coffee--Not Tea--Thoughts on the Week
Neal Gabler in "The Extreme Republican Party" posted on the Boston Globe's blog writes that we have now gone past the time when we can pretend to have two serious political parties in this country--one right of center and one left of center. Both political parties are compromised and corrupted by their ties to Big Money, as witnessed to the nearly $1 billion being poured into the health reform debate; but one political party has gone nuts. In a recent Pew poll, only 23 percent of Americans identify themselves as Republicans. When I ran the International Republican Institute, Republicans for the first time in my lifetime had achieved a slight plurality over the Democrats with some 45% identification. From a practical political point of view, the current number means you must secure another 28% of the electorate to win--in other words the votes you must ween away from independents and Democrats is more than your entire base. We're almost at the point where Republicans might consider dumping its base to have viability in the future.
The current Republican base is so out of touch with average Americans--the charge they levelled for years at Democrats--that a majority of its members either believe or aren't sure President Obama was born in kenya, believe the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61%!)
How wacked out are the current Republicans? 71% of all Americans believe that global warming is a result of human activity, only 27% of Republicans; while Rasmussen says 55% of all Americans oppose health care reform ( recent polls counter this), 87% of Republicans oppose it and 74% very strongly. Depending on the poll, President Obama's favorability rating is between 50 to 58% but fewer than 10% of Republicans approve.
But this situation gets worse. Only 41 percent of conservatives now identify themselves as Republicans--that's how extreme the Party has become. The recent embrace of birthers, deathers, tenthers, vaxers and liars not only damages the Republicans future chances but seriously blocks the ability of there to be a real political debate in this country. Among the remaining Republicans I know,this paranoid politics also becomes a groupthink. Those not subscribing to the latest lunacy are considered Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) and are not to be trusted. The Republican embrace of the Tea Party nonsense and the Glenn Beck 9-12 project now plunge them into the treacherous waters of insurrectionists, secessionists, white supremacists and theocrats. This is not only dangerous to the country, President Obama personally but also to the Republicans themselves.
The effects of this have been dramatic. Governor Pawlenty, for instance, has announced the desire to embrace the lunacy of Gov. Perry of Texas in saying that the invocation of the tenth amendment might be a way for states to stop health care reform. This is a man who honestly has aspirations for the Presidency. And he would be representing the Party of Abraham Lincoln! The tenth amendment movement is of interest to constitutional scholars only because the doctrine of nullification, which existed prior to the Civil War, has been seriously rebuffed through countless Supreme Court rulings, including one as recently as 2005 and to see people raise this is a red flag to profound historical ignorance. For their part, neo-conservatives, who once pretended to have intellectual interests, have solicited the support of former half-term Governor Sarah Palin to press their support for President Obama's Afghanistan build-up. This is a person married--at least for now--to a former secessionist and who actively accused the President of paling around with terrorists. And somehow she's supposed to have any credibility and importance?
As I wrote in my thoughts on Republican Gomorrah, the control of the Republican Party by the religious right is pernicious enough. Now Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council believe they have a second-wind in organizing the religious opposition to health care reform. Not only are Republicans lying about the facts of bills but the religious community is bearing false witness against the bill as funding abortions, providing illegal immigrants health care, and creating death panels to euthanize senior citizens. The phenomenon of self-proclaimed Christians opposing in the name of religion, not politics, health care reform is mind-boogling. As I have written elsewhere, this is a wicked brew.
The first casualty in war is truth. But for our political system it is vital that we have reality-based debates. We should have learned through a series of policy blunders on both sides that the cold shower of fact-based analysis can lead to a more sober and worthwhile policy debate. The problem of a major political party embracing paranoid politics is that you can have no real compromise if one side lives in a a parallel universe.
Today's Teabag Express demonstrations in Washington raise serious challenges to the legitimacy of the Republican Party, not President Obama. What is it that these people are really advocating? It appears to be a grab-bag of nutty things from tax hikes (even though everyone I know got a tax cut), deficits (ignoring the Republican history of this issue), gun rights (so far Eric Holder has made not a single move in this direction),national service day on 9-11, health care reform, states rights, anti-immigration, upholding the constitution ( why not protest against Dick Cheney?), against cap-and-trade legislation, against the stimulus package, against the bailout of the banks, against support for the auto industry, against ACORN, and against abortion, the grandmother of the cultural wars. This bears alot of similarity to past nativist movements in our history that ranged from the Know-Nothings to the KKK. And, I might add it is profoundly anti-American in ways that the democratic Left never was. To actively target a sitting President only eight months into his term with the purpose of crippling his administration is the height of anti-patriotism.
Astonishingly, the vast majority of the teabaggers appear to be senior citizens--who are on social security, medicare and military pensions--and yet they advocate smaller government and the cut of government programs to help others than themselves. This is a classic generational war by seniors on the rest of society. I'm not sure they are self-conscious about this. Their mantra--"Taking Our America Back"--should disturb people who want to move forward. The last time America seemed normal to these people, and we lived in a segregated world where Ossie and Harriet were parents was under Dwight David Eisenhower, a man the ancestors of the teabaggers hated as a closet Democrat, crypto-Communist and a liberal.
The one aspect that fascinates me about this is the deliberate adoption of what they perceive as the tactics of the Left. Overtly, they are fascinated by Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayres and the Weatherman Underground. We all know they were miserable failures and that no one was persuaded by domestic terrorism--as we also found out with Timothy McVeigh--or even, alas, massive demonstrations. The anti-Iraq war demonstrations often exceeded one million people and their effectiveness was negligible. What the democratic Left discovered was that they had to organize and deal with the real problems of average citizens to have any credibility and legitimacy. The jury is still out on astro-turf protesting, turning out citizens on the corporate dime. It may well be--and I believe this--fantastic for corporate interests but of marginal use for generating real, civil debate.
Alot of commentators of the Left raise the whole issue of race. With the face of the Republican party being almost exclusively white men from the South, who personally have long ties to racist groups, this is entirely legitimate. The Republican Party, starting with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy with rhetoric provided by then speechwriter Pat Buchanan, has exploited racial animosity when it suits it. However, whole sectors of the party were both liberal and progressive on civil rights legislation but they have been wiped out with the demise of the party of the Northeast and Midwest. As I've also written, today's Republicans are banking on short-term gains in 2010 by mobilizing the white anti-Obama vote by playing the race card. How this can benefit the party in the long-run is anyone's guess.
There are no national Republican leaders with the stature or clout to distance the party from the lunatic core, which seems to be their base. I would suggest that the Teabaggers and the Glenn Beck followers are heavily dominated by small splinter parties such as Alan Keyes American Independence Party (old George Wallace's party),the Libertarians, now the LaRoucheites (who are nominally Democrats), White supremacists and neo-fascist groups. It could be one of the most embarrassing baits-and-switches in American political history. This hodgepodge of parties and grouplets has learned more mainstream language and become what Republicans believe are the real base of the party. There was some of this before but the moment when this became a reality was the nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate. A choice to appease the religious right, she brought with it libertarian, secessionist, and pro-militia followers.
The e-mails I receive invoke the American Revolution, an event my ancestors proudly participated in. And we should all remember it's first casualty was an African-American named Crispus Attucks. The extreme gun rights crowd, which is linked to the militias and paramilitary groups, invokes the Second Amendment as the paramount result of the revolution. Allegedly they argue our founding fathers believed a well-armed populace would be check on oppressive government. Well, not so fast. The post-revolutionary America faced a challenge from the Shays Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and when the constitution was ratified our revolutionary founders discovered that a government needed a well-organized militia--in order to suppress insurrections. The Second Amendment cuts both ways but customary beliefs have the left gun rights people the dominent interpretation.
So what colonial master am I supposed to rebel against?--foreign-owned banks and corporations looks like a good start, But that's not what my colleagues have in mind. They stated that our political rights and civil liberties are today threatened more than at any time since the American Revolution. Oh, Really? More than the Civil War? More than the Palmer Era? More than WWII? More than during the Cold War? More than under the Bush-Cheney Administration?
No, our freedoms are threatened by the new Emperor Jones in the White House and his coterie of socialists like--I guess--Ben Bernacke, Rahm Emmanuel,Bob Gates, Kathleen Sebelius, Larry Summers and David Geitner. Here, my friends lose me completely. My problems with the Obama Administration have to do with the maintenance of some of the Bush era restrictions on civil liberties, not any new abuses of constitutional power. And, there is an awesome and deliberate ignorance of these Teabaggers that doesn't realize the U.S. Government represents 30% of our national economy and President Obama has not done all this by himself in eight months.
Can you imagine any of these people who aligned themselves with the Tea Baggers being able to manage the complexities of the world's largest economy and the largest component in that economy? That's the stakes in getting two political parties back to a place where policies can be rationally debated.
I'm usually snarky in my replies. If Obama has achieved all this in eight months, created a socialist America and torn up the Constitution, then we were left with a pretty weak nation when he took over and there's nothing that can be done to reverse it.
One hoped that after President Obama's health care speech and his paramount reasonableness we would have heard some responsible Republican commentary. Instead, the almost universal response was to double-down on the deliberate lying about the president's proposals. This has provoked condemnation of Obama from the Left for maintaining the fiction that any bipartisanship is possible.
At least in the House, they are absolutely right. The President's plan will receive no Republican votes in the House because the leadership is listening to Newt Gingrich's advice that 1994 will repeat itself. In the Senate, Voinovich, Snowe and Collins are the only likely candidates for support for Health Care Reform. Voinovich because he's retiring. The Maine Senators because Collins won in 2008 and Olympia Snowe doesn't face re-election until 2012. And also they represent the last of the Northeast Republicans, who take commonsense positions.
How vile has this become? Former First Lady Laura Bush, a librarian by trade and someone who like her mother-in-law is devoted to reading, supported President Obama's school speech and condemned the partisan attacks on it. For this mild call to civility, conservative blogs attacked her, recalling her past history as a non-active Democrat before she met George W. and went on to attack the most conservative President in my lifetime as a RINO. In the crowd of teabaggers who arrived in Washington for today's festivities, many condemned George W. Bush's domestic policies and his deficit-spending. They called for a true conservative to be President.
But their means appear to be at odds with their goals. It's not the American revolution that is there real model it's the French Revolution. The Republican Base has become the latest version of the Jacobins and we know where that went. The present situation is very dangerous. Leftwing writer Naomi Wolf in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot wrote movingly of how important it was to keep the Idea of America alive for us and the rest of the world. Whatever imperfections exist in our struggle toward a more perfect union, the idea of America has and continues to inspire the rest of the world. Today, the very idea is being threatened by the parnoid politics that have taken over the Republican Party.
The current Republican base is so out of touch with average Americans--the charge they levelled for years at Democrats--that a majority of its members either believe or aren't sure President Obama was born in kenya, believe the House health care bill calls for death panels to euthanize senior citizens, and believe that Obama is responsible for our economic woes (61%!)
How wacked out are the current Republicans? 71% of all Americans believe that global warming is a result of human activity, only 27% of Republicans; while Rasmussen says 55% of all Americans oppose health care reform ( recent polls counter this), 87% of Republicans oppose it and 74% very strongly. Depending on the poll, President Obama's favorability rating is between 50 to 58% but fewer than 10% of Republicans approve.
But this situation gets worse. Only 41 percent of conservatives now identify themselves as Republicans--that's how extreme the Party has become. The recent embrace of birthers, deathers, tenthers, vaxers and liars not only damages the Republicans future chances but seriously blocks the ability of there to be a real political debate in this country. Among the remaining Republicans I know,this paranoid politics also becomes a groupthink. Those not subscribing to the latest lunacy are considered Republicans in Name Only (RINOs) and are not to be trusted. The Republican embrace of the Tea Party nonsense and the Glenn Beck 9-12 project now plunge them into the treacherous waters of insurrectionists, secessionists, white supremacists and theocrats. This is not only dangerous to the country, President Obama personally but also to the Republicans themselves.
The effects of this have been dramatic. Governor Pawlenty, for instance, has announced the desire to embrace the lunacy of Gov. Perry of Texas in saying that the invocation of the tenth amendment might be a way for states to stop health care reform. This is a man who honestly has aspirations for the Presidency. And he would be representing the Party of Abraham Lincoln! The tenth amendment movement is of interest to constitutional scholars only because the doctrine of nullification, which existed prior to the Civil War, has been seriously rebuffed through countless Supreme Court rulings, including one as recently as 2005 and to see people raise this is a red flag to profound historical ignorance. For their part, neo-conservatives, who once pretended to have intellectual interests, have solicited the support of former half-term Governor Sarah Palin to press their support for President Obama's Afghanistan build-up. This is a person married--at least for now--to a former secessionist and who actively accused the President of paling around with terrorists. And somehow she's supposed to have any credibility and importance?
As I wrote in my thoughts on Republican Gomorrah, the control of the Republican Party by the religious right is pernicious enough. Now Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council believe they have a second-wind in organizing the religious opposition to health care reform. Not only are Republicans lying about the facts of bills but the religious community is bearing false witness against the bill as funding abortions, providing illegal immigrants health care, and creating death panels to euthanize senior citizens. The phenomenon of self-proclaimed Christians opposing in the name of religion, not politics, health care reform is mind-boogling. As I have written elsewhere, this is a wicked brew.
The first casualty in war is truth. But for our political system it is vital that we have reality-based debates. We should have learned through a series of policy blunders on both sides that the cold shower of fact-based analysis can lead to a more sober and worthwhile policy debate. The problem of a major political party embracing paranoid politics is that you can have no real compromise if one side lives in a a parallel universe.
Today's Teabag Express demonstrations in Washington raise serious challenges to the legitimacy of the Republican Party, not President Obama. What is it that these people are really advocating? It appears to be a grab-bag of nutty things from tax hikes (even though everyone I know got a tax cut), deficits (ignoring the Republican history of this issue), gun rights (so far Eric Holder has made not a single move in this direction),national service day on 9-11, health care reform, states rights, anti-immigration, upholding the constitution ( why not protest against Dick Cheney?), against cap-and-trade legislation, against the stimulus package, against the bailout of the banks, against support for the auto industry, against ACORN, and against abortion, the grandmother of the cultural wars. This bears alot of similarity to past nativist movements in our history that ranged from the Know-Nothings to the KKK. And, I might add it is profoundly anti-American in ways that the democratic Left never was. To actively target a sitting President only eight months into his term with the purpose of crippling his administration is the height of anti-patriotism.
Astonishingly, the vast majority of the teabaggers appear to be senior citizens--who are on social security, medicare and military pensions--and yet they advocate smaller government and the cut of government programs to help others than themselves. This is a classic generational war by seniors on the rest of society. I'm not sure they are self-conscious about this. Their mantra--"Taking Our America Back"--should disturb people who want to move forward. The last time America seemed normal to these people, and we lived in a segregated world where Ossie and Harriet were parents was under Dwight David Eisenhower, a man the ancestors of the teabaggers hated as a closet Democrat, crypto-Communist and a liberal.
The one aspect that fascinates me about this is the deliberate adoption of what they perceive as the tactics of the Left. Overtly, they are fascinated by Saul Alinsky, Bill Ayres and the Weatherman Underground. We all know they were miserable failures and that no one was persuaded by domestic terrorism--as we also found out with Timothy McVeigh--or even, alas, massive demonstrations. The anti-Iraq war demonstrations often exceeded one million people and their effectiveness was negligible. What the democratic Left discovered was that they had to organize and deal with the real problems of average citizens to have any credibility and legitimacy. The jury is still out on astro-turf protesting, turning out citizens on the corporate dime. It may well be--and I believe this--fantastic for corporate interests but of marginal use for generating real, civil debate.
Alot of commentators of the Left raise the whole issue of race. With the face of the Republican party being almost exclusively white men from the South, who personally have long ties to racist groups, this is entirely legitimate. The Republican Party, starting with Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy with rhetoric provided by then speechwriter Pat Buchanan, has exploited racial animosity when it suits it. However, whole sectors of the party were both liberal and progressive on civil rights legislation but they have been wiped out with the demise of the party of the Northeast and Midwest. As I've also written, today's Republicans are banking on short-term gains in 2010 by mobilizing the white anti-Obama vote by playing the race card. How this can benefit the party in the long-run is anyone's guess.
There are no national Republican leaders with the stature or clout to distance the party from the lunatic core, which seems to be their base. I would suggest that the Teabaggers and the Glenn Beck followers are heavily dominated by small splinter parties such as Alan Keyes American Independence Party (old George Wallace's party),the Libertarians, now the LaRoucheites (who are nominally Democrats), White supremacists and neo-fascist groups. It could be one of the most embarrassing baits-and-switches in American political history. This hodgepodge of parties and grouplets has learned more mainstream language and become what Republicans believe are the real base of the party. There was some of this before but the moment when this became a reality was the nomination of Sarah Palin as the vice-presidential candidate. A choice to appease the religious right, she brought with it libertarian, secessionist, and pro-militia followers.
The e-mails I receive invoke the American Revolution, an event my ancestors proudly participated in. And we should all remember it's first casualty was an African-American named Crispus Attucks. The extreme gun rights crowd, which is linked to the militias and paramilitary groups, invokes the Second Amendment as the paramount result of the revolution. Allegedly they argue our founding fathers believed a well-armed populace would be check on oppressive government. Well, not so fast. The post-revolutionary America faced a challenge from the Shays Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and when the constitution was ratified our revolutionary founders discovered that a government needed a well-organized militia--in order to suppress insurrections. The Second Amendment cuts both ways but customary beliefs have the left gun rights people the dominent interpretation.
So what colonial master am I supposed to rebel against?--foreign-owned banks and corporations looks like a good start, But that's not what my colleagues have in mind. They stated that our political rights and civil liberties are today threatened more than at any time since the American Revolution. Oh, Really? More than the Civil War? More than the Palmer Era? More than WWII? More than during the Cold War? More than under the Bush-Cheney Administration?
No, our freedoms are threatened by the new Emperor Jones in the White House and his coterie of socialists like--I guess--Ben Bernacke, Rahm Emmanuel,Bob Gates, Kathleen Sebelius, Larry Summers and David Geitner. Here, my friends lose me completely. My problems with the Obama Administration have to do with the maintenance of some of the Bush era restrictions on civil liberties, not any new abuses of constitutional power. And, there is an awesome and deliberate ignorance of these Teabaggers that doesn't realize the U.S. Government represents 30% of our national economy and President Obama has not done all this by himself in eight months.
Can you imagine any of these people who aligned themselves with the Tea Baggers being able to manage the complexities of the world's largest economy and the largest component in that economy? That's the stakes in getting two political parties back to a place where policies can be rationally debated.
I'm usually snarky in my replies. If Obama has achieved all this in eight months, created a socialist America and torn up the Constitution, then we were left with a pretty weak nation when he took over and there's nothing that can be done to reverse it.
One hoped that after President Obama's health care speech and his paramount reasonableness we would have heard some responsible Republican commentary. Instead, the almost universal response was to double-down on the deliberate lying about the president's proposals. This has provoked condemnation of Obama from the Left for maintaining the fiction that any bipartisanship is possible.
At least in the House, they are absolutely right. The President's plan will receive no Republican votes in the House because the leadership is listening to Newt Gingrich's advice that 1994 will repeat itself. In the Senate, Voinovich, Snowe and Collins are the only likely candidates for support for Health Care Reform. Voinovich because he's retiring. The Maine Senators because Collins won in 2008 and Olympia Snowe doesn't face re-election until 2012. And also they represent the last of the Northeast Republicans, who take commonsense positions.
How vile has this become? Former First Lady Laura Bush, a librarian by trade and someone who like her mother-in-law is devoted to reading, supported President Obama's school speech and condemned the partisan attacks on it. For this mild call to civility, conservative blogs attacked her, recalling her past history as a non-active Democrat before she met George W. and went on to attack the most conservative President in my lifetime as a RINO. In the crowd of teabaggers who arrived in Washington for today's festivities, many condemned George W. Bush's domestic policies and his deficit-spending. They called for a true conservative to be President.
But their means appear to be at odds with their goals. It's not the American revolution that is there real model it's the French Revolution. The Republican Base has become the latest version of the Jacobins and we know where that went. The present situation is very dangerous. Leftwing writer Naomi Wolf in The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot wrote movingly of how important it was to keep the Idea of America alive for us and the rest of the world. Whatever imperfections exist in our struggle toward a more perfect union, the idea of America has and continues to inspire the rest of the world. Today, the very idea is being threatened by the parnoid politics that have taken over the Republican Party.
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