Republicans for Rape

Ya, so I'm a little late with this, but surely there's somebody besides me who missed this latest GOP marvel.Check out TYT for some background.

So let me get this right. The party of law 'n order is for law 'n order except when they interfere with bidness.

That about it?

Why does ANYBODY sane vote Republican? Oh. Wait....

Bottom Feeding

Parse the evening news commentary. Like CNN. The airwaves are hot with the Joe Wilson story. He's "an American hero to many." It will probably "do him good" in his Republican district. "It's going over well in the heartland." Joe raised $200K!

Yeah?

Well, Joe's opponent, the former Marine, the Democrat who's running against him, raised over $1M in the same 48 hours. But that's not something you need to know.

And let me tell you something. "Real" Americans just won the White House and both houses of Congress, so you can stop equating "real" Americans with "conservatives" and "heartland" with "real" America any second now. That would be truth in advertising, you brain-dead, programmed news droids.

And on the subject of programmed brain-washed news droids, how about making clear that Joe is flat-out wrong. Just establish that FACT, could you? The bill expressly excludes immigrants who are here illegally. There's no "yeah but" about it. End of story.

Here's what: Joe just lowered the bar for acceptable political discourse, at a time when it's already in the gutter on the Right and manufactured deliberately to take us inexorably to a place where the time for talking is over and only weapons will speak. I worry for my country. But don't let that stop you from making him into a "hero."

"Hero"? Is it the standard now that you're an American hero if you're uninformed, dead wrong, crudely inarticulate, militantly insult a sitting President, dumb as a slab of mutton, and can't tell the difference between a Joint Session of Congress and a bunch of drunken Bubbas at a hog callin'?

Hey, if he's a hero, let's just get this done right now and get it over with! Let's ditch the Bald Eagle and make the polecat our national icon while we're at it. Ann Coulter can be the new Secretary of Ethics and Integrity, and Michelle Bachman can be our new Madonna.

When formerly American heroes were men like Washington and Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., now American heroes are men like Joe Wilson? I denounce and deny that. Words have meaning. Heros have earned our highest regard, generally by putting their lives on the line for others. Joe Wilson just brayed like a jackass. He's American white trash, maybe, but he's no "hero."

I would love it if, just once, moderate, thinking Republicans--all ten of you--stood like grown-ups and called the line on the thugs that have stolen your party, the media, and the national discourse and replaced them, respectively, with the SS, the National Enquirer, and a spitball fight.

I mean, my inlaws--who would JUST DIE if they knew I called them that--are educated people. Nevertheless, they watch Fox. I DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Can someone please explain to me how educated people can watch FOX and believe it? How is it possible that they consider themselves decent, conservative, and well bred, AND Republicans, when Republicanism has become synonymous with Fox News? With Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Sarah Palin, Joe Wilson, and Joe the Plumber? Why aren't they ashamed? I mean, you just cannot be respectable AND Republican. You can't be educated AND a creationist, capable of independent research AND believe Fox, a proponent of family values AND a fan of Michelle Bachman, or respectable AND a Republican.

America really is in a race to the bottom, and Republicans are winning it.

Great Job, Folks

If there's one thing that America's brilliant, far-sighted Republicons excel at, it's spreading misery around. This from today's New York Times about declines in money that immigrants send back home:

"Nobody should think of the decline in remittances, however, as anything but unfortunate. Immigrant workers are not just vital to the American economy, their money transfers are a critical bulwark against poverty for millions of people south of the border. Cutting off that lifeline will lead to more misery in some of the poorest parts of the hemisphere — and it will feed the desperation that sends more migrants to the United States."

As it has for blue collar and middle management workers, the gutted economy has meant more hard times for both documented and undocumented immigrants. But for immigrants, the increase in intentional harrassment has meant both a reluctant exodus out of the country (leading to more home foreclosures, more empty apartments, and more trashed state budgets) and more unemployment (Always a good thing. Not.) As usual, life is tougher for them than for the rest of us.
So once again, the consequences of a hate-based, xenophobic economic/labor policy--or ideology--are more misery all around.

Good job, Dobbs. Great work, Tancredo. Outstanding, Buchanan. Oh, and very well done, AZ Rep. Russell the Nazi Pearce.

I wish I could leave it there.

However, they couldn't have gone this far if we had stood up to them. Therefore, 50% of the responsibility for this clustered duck goes right smack-dab to the great rotten-rock liberal majority, which, far as I can tell, hasn't missed an opportunity to sit out a tough one since Vietnam.

Sally Kern: Verbal Abuse is Violent Assault

Oklahoma Republican legislator Sally Kern was recently given a standing ovation by members of her party (who else?) for malicious, abusive, and false characterizations of gays and lesbians captured recently on YouTube.

For many years, LGBT people have suffered torrents of verbal abuse orchestrated, manufactured, and distributed by far-Right Republican Christianists as part of their war on traditional American constitutional values. That would be equality, liberty, and justice for all.

Kern's comments are typical if considerably milder than many of these rabid propaganda pieces. They include wholly fabricated (made-up) accusations, comparisons, and descriptions of LGBT people that bear no relationship to long-established facts.

It's important for Americans committed to common decency, honesty, integrity in public officials especially, and basic constitutional values to oppose these assaults with everything we've got. It's extremely important for real Christians--those for whom Jesus counts for more than Leviticus--to do so. It's also time for clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and others to take up the cause as well, and to do so in a new way.

Study after study shows that sustained verbal abuse causes significant long-term damage and can be more traumatizing than a severe physical assault. It is an established fact that verbal abuse is violent assault. It's time to treat it accordingly. We can call it "hate speech," which it is, but it might be more effective to call it violent assault and equate it to battery and, when it occurs in the home, to domestic violence and child abuse, which is is.

As anyone knows who has experienced it, verbal abuse, especially of children and teens, has lasting, horrific consequences. Frequently it leads to serious personality disorders. Here's the abstract of just one such study:

"Childhood verbal abuse and risk for personality disorders during adolescence and early adulthood" Comprehensive Psychiatry, Volume 42, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 16-23. Jeffrey G. Johnson, Patricia Cohen, Elizabeth M. Smailes, Andrew E. Skodol, Jocelyn Brown ....

Abstract: Data from a community-based longitudinal study were used to investigate whether childhood verbal abuse increases risk for personality disorders (PDs) during adolescence and early adulthood. Psychiatric and psychosocial interviews were administered to a representative community sample of 793 mothers and their offspring from two New York State counties in 1975, 1983, 1985 to 1986, and 1991 to 1993, when the mean ages of the offspring were 5, 14, 16, and 22 years, respectively. Data regarding childhood abuse and neglect were obtained from the psychosocial interviews and from official New York State records. Offspring who experienced maternal verbal abuse during childhood were more than three times as likely as those who did not experience verbal abuse to have borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, and paranoid PDs during adolescence or early adulthood. These associations remained significant after offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders were controlled statistically. In addition, youths who experienced childhood verbal abuse had elevated borderline, narcissistic, paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal PD symptom levels during adolescence and early adulthood after the covariates were accounted for. These findings suggest that childhood verbal abuse may contribute to the development of some types of PDs, independent of offspring temperament, childhood physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, physical punishment during childhood, parental education, parental psychopathology, and co-occurring psychiatric disorders.

People who suffer sustained verbal abuse -- and the Republican Christianist anti-gay campaign of the last 30 years is nothing if not sustained verbal abuse -- often experience such low self esteem that they attempt suicide. The rate of suicide among LGBT teens has been estimated to be 3 times as high as that among their straight counterparts, and that's relatively old data. Suicide, moreover, takes many forms. It isn't necessarily achieved in one lethal act. It can manifest as sexual promiscuity and substance abuse, among other things: that is, acts of self-sabotage whose physical consequences can take time to show up.

In other words, verbal abusers are not just violent batterers. They can also be murderers.

I doubt any studies show the socio-economic consequences of these tragedies, but anyone with common sense knows that a depressed or addicted or disordered employee is less than an optimally productive one.

This means that stopping gratuitous verbal violence ought to be on the agenda of America's CEOs as well.

Verbal batterers like Kern aren't just bad for LGBT people. They are bad for all of us. It's time we stop them.

The Chalice or the Blade: Choose Now

One way to look at the gradual rise of the Far Right is through the lens of relationship models. There really are only two ways that human beings can be in relationship. We can relate as dominator/dominated, or we can relate as partners.

I first heard this way of looking at things from my brilliant friend, Nancy Hartsock, when we were both on the editorial staff of quest: a feminist quarterly. This was in the early-to-mid 1970s. As we developed each edition of the journal, the editorial staff sat around the quest office hammering out theories of human relationship from a radical lesbian feminist perspective. Not all of us are lesbians, but all of us are radical feminists, meaning feminists not willing to settle for tweaking our social arrangement so that women have more transitory "privileges." We were and are interested, although quest ceased publishing many years ago, in identifying and altering fundamental social consciousness so that all the things we mean when we speak of "equality" are the norm.

Nancy was writing an article about power, that most basic element in social relationships. As she talked about her ideas, I heard for the first time that power can be "power-over" or it can be "power-to." It was a breakthrough moment. Maybe it seems commonplace to you now, but thirty years ago, few people conceived of power in any way other than as an instrument of domination, and often of force.

In 1987, Riane Eisler wrote an international best-seller called The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Eisler, too, focuses on human relatioships, and in this spellbinding work, sweeps through epochs and across continents, showing that there are clear patterns in human relationship. Namely, the hierarchical dominance model, represented by the sword or Blade, is associated with patriarch social arrangements, and the egalitarian, partnership model, represented by the cup or Chalice, is associated with matrilinear, matrilocal arrangements.

I can't recommend The Chalice and the Blade more strongly. Get it, read it. If anything, the predictions and patterns Eisler explores in it are clearer now than the were in the mid-80s.

Essentially, she says that we are in living through a monumental existential struggle between the patriarchal, dominatory way and the matriarchal, partnership way. She doesn't equate all males with the former or all females with the latter. She's not simplistic. But she does make an irrefutable case that the patriarchal way will not yield easily or nicely.

I'm not doing this justice, but I hope that you can glimpse in this shorthand synopsis why racism, misogyny, homophobia, and the dominion approach to nature and to religion (i.e., Christian fundamentalism) routinely ascend together or wane together, as they began to do during the US Civil Rights era, for instance. Just one metric may remind us how it was for a time. For a decade, the tide toward equality was so strong that anybody who was a racist, sexist, or homophobe was quiet about it. It wasn't cool.

That might not be much, but it's a world away from today's Chris Matthews, Don Imus, Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, etc. Using Eisler's model, these are both agents and symptoms of the ascendant Blade--the dominator model. So, indeed, is the entire Republican agenda. I mean it's hard to imagine a more explicit expression than Cheney's "one percent" doctrine, in which even a one percent chance that another nation is a threat to the USA is reason to take it out in a violent "preventive" strike. No evident is necessary. Just a hunch. As in the hunch that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, our president's macho-centric personal style conforms perfectly with his approach to both domestic and international politics. Whether business or international relations, his black-or-white polarities permit just one arrangement: Dominate or be dominated.

If I understand Eisler correctly, she seems to be saying that the closer the partnership model comes into being, the more violent and brutal the dominators will be. In that sense, the rise of a purely patriarchal Christianist Right and Republicans' parallel, swaggering contempt for the poor people of New Orleans during Katrina; pride in constructing torture chambers and "rendering" people completely out of any realm of God-given human rights; readiness to suppress the vote through violence, deception, and fraud; gratuitous slaughter and displacement of millions in Iraq; flagrant assaults on nature--air, water, national parklands, the sea, the mountaintops--all these and more are signs that the patriarchal old way knows that change is coming.

In this analysis the misogyny and racism expressed by the likes of Imus and Matthews are intentional and systemic, as well as merely symptomatic of something much bigger. And the mainstream media's relentless and fraudulent attacks on the Clintons and Democrats are simply predictable attempts by the old Dominator to squelch that change.

I certainly don't equate the fullness of the Partnership Way to a woman president. That's not the point, even though the fact of a female and a minority male campaigning for the nation's highest office are symptoms and symbols of the change I'm speaking about. What I'm suggesting, using Hartsock's and Eisler's analysis, is that we are both in for a hell of a ride, AND we still have a choice.

That choice is not merely about who'll be president. Either Democrat will effect some degree of the kind of life-affirming change we so desperately need--which Eisler represents as the nurturing Chalice. More fundamentally, that choice arises in every single threat to justice, equality, peace, and environmental sanity.

That change will come if and when WE choose it. If ever there were the time to do so, it's now.

Republicans Driving Immigrants out of AZ's Economy

As we predicted, the employer sanction law is pushing both documented and undocumented immigrants out of Arizona. Together with the Republican-engineered tanking economy, the Republican-engineered "employer sanction" law, which punishes employers for hiring undocumented workers, is driving down school enrollment, apartment occupancy, home buying, and retail sales in what undoubtedly will be a continuing spiral of decline for as long as the Republican-engineered home mortgage fraud crisis and the resulting Republican-created credit crisis persist.

How marvelous for us all.

If there's anyone in this state who has the unmitigated gall to vote for any Republican anywhere at any time in the future, it will prove beyond any remaining doubt that a sack of cement is smarter than a Republican.

Ask me if I'm angry.

Republican Russell Pearce and his merrie band of Republican racists has declared war. Unfortunately, like his White House mentors, Cheney and George, he's shot the wrong target. As Republican Sherrif Joe Arpaio and his thugs round up brown people, they are creating a climate of fear--called "panic" in this NYTimes article--that is enveloping not just undocumented workers but documented residents of 24 years and more. This is because they can't find jobs when the economy is depressed, and they have relatives here who are not documented, and they feel the flood of hostility being intentionally whipped up at Mexican immigrants. They don't feel welcome anymore, because they aren't.

The hysterical reaction of Republicans to the influx of (invited and lured) citrus harvesters, cotton pickers, farmworkers, construction workers, restaurant workers, hotel and motel service personnel, food service and grocery workers, landscapers, miners, and domestics--terrifying bunch, huh?-is rapidly worsening an economy that is already bringing record foreclosures and other disasters.

As these families leave, they withdraw their children from our public schools and school revenue, based on headcounts, tanks, too. They leave, and when they do, they leave groceries, gasoline, household goods, school supplies, sundries, prescription medications, clothing, shoes, and all other consumer goods on the shelves. Then businesses close and homes go into foreclosure, and when businesses close and homes are abandoned, city, county, and state revenues plummet and neighborhoods deteriorate. When these things happen, everybody--brown, black, yellow, red, and white, turns blue.

This is predictable in a state that historically has always depended on Mexican laborers for its prosperity. It doesn't take a genius to connect these dots. Apparently, however, it takes a bunch of Republicans.

Jaw Flapping

Obama said that the Republicans had been the party of ideas.

Did he praise Republicans?

Hillary says he did. Obama says he didn't.

I understand the dilemma. I, too, have said that the Republicans have out-thought us and, if the simple fact of new ideas were sufficient to earn a win, then the Republicans deserved to win the White House in 2000. This is not the same thing as saying I like their ideas, approve of that party, or am glad Bush got into the Oval Office.

It simply says that they rubbed their brain cells far more energetically than we did. We sat on our laurels of the last 40 years, and didn't pay attention to things like the Republicans' superior use of language to frame issues and box in their opponents. I give you "Pro-Life" as an example.

I made my comments in emails to friends. I wasn't running for office. And that makes a huge difference. Obama said much the same thing, but in the context of the campaign, his comment was a chameleon. In other words, it can be heard as a values-neutral statement, or as praise, and it was heard as praise by a lot of people.

Where Obama, the Democratic candidate for President, dropped that ball and did a disservice to his party was not following that sentence with, "Too bad their ideas were uniformly disastrous."

I think it's very likely that he did not do that because he wants to walk the fence.
Obama wants Republicans and independents to hear that statement--and the statement about Reagan as a transformative president, as well--as compliments. But, but, but: At the same time, if he should be called out for that, as Hillary called him out, his phrasing gives him plenty of wiggle room, and he took it. He said, with technical accuracy, "But oh, I didn't praise the ideas or agree with them!" "I didn't say Reagan was a good president!"

This is disingenuous in the context of the campaign, especially since Obama sees himself as the bridge candidate, the unifer. What would anyone expect from a bridge candidate but a compliment? Obama has been noticeably loathe to attack Republicans. Why would anyone hear his comments as values-free? I don't buy it.

I think Hillary is right to call him on this, and I think that this exactly illustrates what she means when she said he won't take responsibility for his votes. He won't take responsibility for his statements, either--and in the same slippery way. He should have said this: "I stand by saying that the Republicans out-thought us, in the sense of quantity of big ideas. But I should have added that I thought those big ideas are a disaster for the country. Let me make that clear: Just because I say you have more cattle on your ranch, it doesn't mean that you're a better rancher or that your cattle are first rate."

Republican Truth in Advertising

Hard to say which is more offensive: Ann Coulter's view that Jews need to be "perfected" by becoming Christians, or the idea that she has enough of a clue about Christianity to describe it.

Unless BushCo has a violent coup d'etat in store for us, if Republicans keep on their Aryan Nations crusade, it will mean the end of Republican power for the next 50 years. And by dint of the sheer number of racist, sexist, and antisemitic sentiments from the GOP, it's truly becoming a matter of intrigue. Are we seeing the lemmings rushing cliffward, or does this impunity mean there will be an October surprise?

Republicans' suicidal rampage against women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Jews is at least truth in advertising. I hope America is listening carefully.

The Long US March to Christo-Fascism: Part II

Note: This is Part II of a three-part series intended as a broad rather than deep overview of the Christo-Fascist Right's rise to near-domination of US government. Each of its links leads to a world of other links from which the range of individuals, families, businesses, and organizations which comprise it can be identified and explored. The reach and power of the Christo-Fascist Right should horrify every sentient American. See Part I. Part III. The series will be updated and revised as time and information are available.

Turns out it wasn’t drugs, sex, or hair that galvanized powerful stakeholders in a full-scale, brilliant, long-term reactionary war. It was, above all, what was framed as the new generation's “frontal assault on free enterprise”―ironically an assault grounded, among other sources, in profound regard for the US Constitution.

In the 1970s, two camps emerged, each bitterly opposed to the nation’s movement toward its constitutional potential—a Liberal society with at least some of its most cannibalistic and plutocratic capitalist tendencies at least somewhat constrained by tax and regulatory policy.

Among early leader/thinkers representing the secular conservative establishment were Lewis Powell, later Nixon’s appointee to the US Supreme Court, and economist Milton Friedman, father of Neo-conservative "free market" economics (see The Shock Doctrine).

Among early leader/thinkers representing hard-core cultural and theological dissidents were the members of a strategy-coordinating body called the Coalition on Revival (COR), headed by Christian Reconstructionist minister Jay Grimstead, then a Young Life regional leader trained at Fuller Theological Seminary. Its 60-member steering committee includes or included multimillionaire Left Behind series author Tim LaHaye, his wife, Beverly, founder of Concerned Women for America, home schooling pioneer and fundamentalist Patrick Henry College Chancellor Michael Farris, Dee Jepsen, board chair of Pat Robertson’s Regent University, and Don Wildmon of the American Family Association.

Significantly, COR members including Gary North and Tim LaHaye are also founders of the rightwing Council for National Policy, an ultra-secretive and ultra-powerful strategy organization of Republican strategists, activists, and financiers.

Another major player in the US and global Relgious Right is Sun Myung Moon, head of the Unification Church, international arms merchant, and owner of the rightwing Washington Times newspaper empire.

A good part of the back story of the intense secular effort to reverse the “liberalization” of the country can be found at MediaTransparency. Its centerpiece is a memorandum from then corporate lawyer Lewis Powell to a colleague at the US Chamber of Commerce. The Powell memorandum laid out a comprehensive, coordinated strategy for a militantly conservative takeover of law, business, economics, government, and media, and to put a stop to such self-restraint as there was on the part of most US corporations.

The story of the Coalition on Revival is a placeholder in a sense. It is a heads-up briefing intended to call attention to the wealth and power of the numerous direct and indirect allies and offshoots of Grimstead and his formative biblical Reconstructionist organizers. Because of the secrecy and sheer extent of parts of the “Religious Right” movement in the US, the full story is harder to get at, and certainly won’t be found here.

However, much of the story has been gradually exposed by folks like Frederick Clarkson, Skipp Porteous, Sara Diamond, Theocracy Watch, MediaTransparency, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Cursor.org, RightWeb, The Public Eye, People for the American Way, and others, to whom I am (we are all) hugely indebted.

At its center is a comprehensive strategic plan to transform the United States from a constitutional democracy to a theocracy governed by Mosaic law as presented in the “Old Testament” of the Christian Bible, King James translation. These strategic documents emerged in the mid-1980s. Critical to its growth and influence has been our determination not to take it seriously. We blind ourselves to it by dismissing the Christian Right as just a “lunatic fringe,” thereby becoming its greatest asset.

Actually, it turns out that what many regard as merely ad hoc attacks on “liberalism” was actually a huge movement coordinated and focused by the steering committee of COR. COR's 17 Worldview Documents are, for us, a roadmap for deciphering the enormity and coordination of numerous legislative, judicial, executive branch, domestic and foreign policy, and cultural developments that have occurred in the US in the last 20 years. Clearly, as important as the strategy itself was the covenant sworn among its members to fulfill it, even to the point of martyrdom.

From these strategic deliberations--usually unknown to the rank and file evangelical-charismatic-fundamentalist churchgoer--eventually came hugely influential, richly funded for-profit and nonprofit projects in such spheres as media acquisitions/operations, music, entertainment, fiction, video games, fundraising, public relations, political organizing, political action, social networking, church-building, education, science and medicine, the family, and, of course, in the Republican Party. On balance, the constitutional democracy that we know has been under attack from every direction for more than 20 years, with great effect.

The most significant political development stemmed, ironically, from the failure of the Moral Majority to put Pat Robertson in the White House in 1988. It was a highly successful, brilliant strategy to take over the Republican Party secretly, from the grassroots up, and was engineered by men like Ralph Reed, the deceptively baby-faced pal of recently convicted GOP operative Jack Abramoff and the then Executive Director of the Christian Coalition of America, successor to the Moral Majority. The rest of us first noticed it in 1991-1992, following what is now known as the San Diego Stealth Initiative. This strategy and its “fifteen percent solution” gave the “Christian Right” ownership of the Republican Party.

Today, entities like The Federalist Society, the Madison Project, and the Council on National Policy, among other conservative oligarchs, determine who will candidate for our appellate courts, the Supreme Court, and other high public office.

About the Federalist Society, Theocracy Watch reported:

The Federalist Society formed twenty years ago in reaction to the powers the Supreme Court was granting the federal government. It is a network of lawyers, elected officials and scholars who want to free corporations from government regulations. It is hostile to civil rights, environmental protections, worker safety laws, a separation between church and state and more.

Some prominent leaders of the Religious Right play a dominant role in the Federalist Society. For example former President of the Christian Coalition, Donald Hodel is a board member. Twenty four of President Bush's top cabinet members and most of his court nominations are members of the Federalist Society. The list includes John Ashcroft, Attorney General; Spencer Abraham, Secretary of Energy; Gail Norton, Secretary of the Interior; and Theodore Olson, Solicitor General. Other notable members are Justices Scalia and Thomas, Orrin Hatch, Kenneth Starr.

People for the American Way prepared an in-depth report. The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power

The Christian Coalition, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Focus on the Family, and dozens more obviously well-funded organizations deliver millions of charismatic, evangelical, and fundamentalist voters to the Republican Party, aided by thousands of small and large churches in flagrant defiance of tax law. Naturally, this criminal enterprise is ignored by the Republican Party, which prefers to focus its tax watchdogs on progressive churches.

Meanwhile, these and hundreds more—think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, political action organizations, media behemoths like the Christian Broadcasting Network, and even BlackwaterUSA, a private mercenary army--many of which are or have been funded by the Coors family, Richard Mellon Scaife, Erik Prince, the Texas Hunt family, and other super-wealthy scions or dynasties—exist for one overarching purpose: to ensure that the rest of us--religion and Constitution notwithstanding--live according to their fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible and the Constitution, by force if necessary.

How are they doing? It has taken 30 years, vast resources, brilliant strategizing, and dogged effort, but today George W. Bush is in the White House. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia sit on the US Supreme Court. Senators, congressmen, state governors and legislators too numerous to mention belong to this movement. The right of choice is about to go away and the right of privacy is in the gunsights. Thousands of public documents have been and are being hidden by Adminstration operatives, and the President and Vice President and BlackwaterUSA and Scooter Libby reside in a realm above the law. Gay and lesbian people—-not to mention Democrats and liberals-are being demonized systematically by techniques developed in pre-War Germany. Our President speaks only to Republicans while using our tax dollars, and as we've seen recently, Republicans speak mostly only to white people. Far-right conservatives--many Christian conservatives--have extensive involvement in the armaments industry and in the US intelligence apparatus. George H.W. Bush was CIA head before he was Reagan's Vice President and, later, President.

Colleges like Patrick Henry, Liberty U., and Regent are training cadres of lawyers every year, and now contribute phalanxes of interns to the White House, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, State, Education, and Defense. Media such as Fox, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Clear Channel determine FTC media ownership policies and decide what a generation of Americans will hear and see. Young Life and similar powerful campus-based propaganda ministries flourish, and the attack on public schools is visible in the home schooling movement mostly coordinated by centralized Christianist curriculum and materials, the voucher program, No Child Left Behind, and a national war on teachers. Government scientists are gagged on subjects like women’s reproductive health, global warming, stem cell research, environmental destruction, genetic engineering, food safety and the global practices of agribusiness. Creationism is being taught in our schools as serious science. Our military academies are being evangelized, and our military are evangelized and used by white supremacists as training camps.

These are, of course, also partly due to the influence of secular conservative corporate interests, because there is enormous overlap between the secular Right and the Religious Right, as the person of BlackwaterUSA’s Erik Prince and the Coors and Hunt families and others illustrate.

But wait, there’s more. What in the sixties had begun to be a productive dialog between corporations and progressive Americans has become a multinational monolog, a one-way, top-down, like-it-or-lump it frenzy of profit making without social accountability or, increasingly, regulation. That’s the free market way. (See Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.)

From USAID, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank bringing destitution to a country near you, to the blatant corruption associated with Halliburton, KBR, BlackwaterUSA, and other war profiteers, to the erosion of constitutional rights and fundamental freedoms brought by The Patriot Acts, to the control of healthcare by pharmaceuticals and for-profit hospitals, insurors, and providers, to the manufacture of genetically altered crops that exterminate natural counterparts just by being planted, to the privatization of water itself, to the outsourcing of US jobs, to the systematic suppression of US labor rights, to the orchestrated dumbing-down of the public by TV and radio that give 24/7 coverage to trivia and propaganda but ignore (suppress) news that might damage the Right’s agenda, to energy policy set by big oil--all this and more can be traced, directly or indirectly, to Lewis Powell’s brilliant coordinating strategy for reinstituting unregulated “free enterprise,” and to the toxic influence of the Religious Right.

This summary sketch is merely an overview. Daunting as it is, there is also good news. The truth always outs, the majority of the American people want none of this, and, as we have begun to see in the last two years, over-reaching movements have a way of falling.

Not least, as the Right learned from the Left in the seventies, strategy per se is not partisan. It can be adopted by the opposition. The Left could do worse than pursuing media ownership and well-designed, coordinated political organization, voter registration, and grassroots Party change models pioneered by the Right, while keeping its eyes, mind, and heart fixed firmly on the Constitution and the safety and wellbeing of the commonwealth.

Pressure the Swing Voters in the Senate to Get Us Out of Iraq

From Essentially Contested America, these words of wisdom:

The right question, perhaps the only critical question--one ECA has asked several times in the past year--is when will Republicans Senators depart from their perfunctory support of Mr. Bush's catastrophically failed war policy. And which Republicans will have the courage to do so. Check out the following piece exploring this issue. Check out the entire piece, but here's the challenge: "That's the question that these 12 GOP Senators must be faced with repeatedly--will you keep us in Iraq for at least 10 more years and send over the next generation of our kids? Or will you vote with Democrats to end the destabilizing occupation?" According to the piece here are the likely Republican Senators who will finally substitute reason for madness: Alexander (Tenn.), Coleman (Minn.), Domenici (N.M., Lugar, (Ind.), McConnell (KY.), Murkowski (Alaska, Sessions (Ala.), Specter (Penn.), Sununu (N.H.), Warner (VA.), Voinivich (Ohio), and possibly Dole (N.C.). Profiles in courage? Probably not.

These, therefore, are the enablers, the swingvote-Senators to pressure. NOW.