What Progressives Fail to Understand: This Is War

 

If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.

-Sun Tzu

"A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

-Ezra Pound

While America continues along the evolution into an authoritarian, fascist state that stands for nothing more than eternal war, upwards redistribution of wealth and the eradication of the social safety net it is imperative that progressives understand one thing – this is and always has been a war. The opposition, being the thug Republican right-wing machine that has seized the levers of control of the state has realized this from the outset and their victories have been legion. Despite the premature victory celebrations and naïve triumphal spirit after the 2008 election of Barack Obama amongst the sad detritus that passes for the “left” in this new American century it should be obvious to all but the most myopic and steeped in denial that nothing has really changed. The Democrats, a failed and compromised political party that long ago left behind any semblance of decency, concern for the working class, liberalism and morality have after only a brief period of holding huge governing majorities capable of enacting real change crumbled, without so much as a whimper. Obama came into office, riding a wave of energized voters, a crackerjack efficient political machine and a mandate, yes a mandate to set things right after eight years of rule by the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil. It is all gone now, timorousness (and amateurish bungling) on the part of the new president, cowardice among the Democrats in Congress and a series of mind-boggling capitulations, retreats and triangulations somehow allowed a fascist political party in the Republicans, seemingly discredited only two years earlier and on the ropes to regain the initiative and control of the government Not only did the Republicans seize control of Congress but it did so with a with a newly energized wave of monstrous animosity, racism and riding upon a pale white horse named blood revenge that the new wave was determined to leave their enemies with nothing but their eyes to cry with.

That the fascist Republicans were able to so easily set the agenda during the first two years of the Obama administration leading up to the “shellacking” suffered by the Pope of Hope in November 2010 should surprise nobody. The chronically weak and pathetic leadership of the Senate by Harry Reid , the former boxer turned politician was instrumental in the failures to attain even minimal change and one has to wonder exactly what forces truly drive the agenda of the one time Nevada Gaming Commissioner. Obamacare, is an abject joke, a backdoor giveaway to the blood-sucking insurance industry parasites who now have the power of the state backing them to strong-arm Americans into buying their overpriced, crappy product but it is what valuable time, energy and political capital was wasted on. With the Senate already being a collection of largely corrupt, venal, pompous and entitled tools of banks, corporations, the military and in at least one highly visible case Israel it was simple to ensure that no meaningful health care reform would ever be created, given that the top Senator in charge of the legislation was one Max Baucus who was in the hip pocket of the health care industry it was all a charade. The selling out of America has become a bipartisan effort and campaign cash or in layman's terms bribery is the coin of the realm. With the thorough hijacking of the political system by big money, a stacked judiciary and a Supreme Court that has even less respect for the U.S. Constitution than George W. Bush with their landmark Citizen’s United decision to further enable the buying of government by plutocrats and corporations, backed by a media machine that peddles lies, sensationalism and legitimizes dangerous highly paid demagogues as though their ‘opinions’ actually are serious we simply must admit that the game has already been lost. The extreme right-wing, being big money, energy and finance cartels, avaricious corporations and their millions of shock troops brainwashed by a bizarre doppelganger dogma of Christianity along with the twenty percent or so in the society who are authoritarian personality types have near total control now and are soon coming for the rest of it.

That the left and progressives have failed and failed miserably is not shameful, especially when understanding the decades long, enormously costly and coordinated with military style precision efforts to thoroughly destroy all meaningful change that has occurred in America since the early 20th Century. To comprehend the concerted effort to undermine New Deal programs and liberal ideals one must first realize that the spawn of the Robber Barons never went away gracefully into the good night after hard-fought and often costly in terms of life and liberty wins by organized labor. Despite the decades long onslaught of predatory capitalist propaganda the unions that helped to build this country into an economic powerhouse with a middle class that was the envy of the civilized world, a progressive education system, a mighty infrastructure and public institutions that actually acted in the interests of the American people and the betterment of the society as a whole. When you see the smoldering wreckage that we have been reduced to in 2011, thanks to he hijacking of the system by fascists, the decimation of organized labor, the assault on public education, rampant historical revisionism and the erosion of our public institutions by right-wing termites eating away from within it is hard to suppress the urge to vomit.

The war that so many denied even existed has been lost and the primary reason why it has been lost is that liberals and progressives have failed to realize that it was always a war in the first place. Not only a class war but also a war against American freedoms, values and basic human dignity. It took decades to destroy the country and it would be magical thinking to believe that it isn’t going to take decades to beat back the fascists and take the country back, many of us will not see the completion of this in our lifetimes but it is time to organize and to begin the formation of a resistance. The political system is no longer functional, we live in a failed state that has succumbed to the cancer of fascism, writing letters to Congress, wasting time on boycotts, engaging in internet campaigns with the self-centered, ipad wielding twerps that congregate at grand galas of collective masturbation like Netroots Nation and carrying signs in the streets does not work. It is time to fight back, as the writer and social activist Chris Hedges says: “We will be saved only with the birth of a new militant radicalism, one that defies all formal power structures including the Democratic party.”

It is time to find a stomach for a donnybrook, the time for debate and hope for change at the ballot box has passed, the corruption is too deeply entrenched and there is too damned much at stake for anything less. As I previously stated, the right-wing and the fascist fifth columnists have ALWAYS treated the battle for America as a WAR, as arch-conservative political activist Ralph Reed once remarked: "I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." 

“Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village.”

-Mao Tse-tung

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

-Henry A. Wallace

Part II: A Rigged Game

Make no mistake about it that the attack on progressive and traditional liberal ideals in this country has been a long running, ideologically fueled, dog eat dog jihad dating back to at least the era of the despised “class traitor” Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal policies. The pigs who run this filthy sty, many of them descended from elitist stock have opposed every bit of social and labor progress that was won at such a cost by our forebears. There were once Americans who organized and did so at great risk of injury, imprisonment and their very lives who fought to implement a system that eventually resulted in a strong middle class, largely the result of the clout of the labor unions, unions that are now in the final stages of eradication. That such progress was allowed to be rolled back to the darkest days of worker exploitation and the excess of rapacious greed that thrives in an unequal society is our enduring tragedy, that it was done without a fight is our enduring shame. Now in 2011 the final stages of the great dismantling are to borrow a treasured propaganda nugget of a corrupt media – picking up steam. The ongoing battle over raising the debt ceiling is garbage as is the sudden panic over the national credit card and the deficit, none of the swinish squealers who bleat in phony sanctimony about “the future of our children” gave a rat’s ass when the Bush administration had the national credit card and was maxing it out like a stoned teenager on ruinous wars, tax cuts for the rich and giveaways to the financial fraudsters whose worthless mortgage backed securities and derivative instruments blew a hole in the economy. The real goal of the “new normal” and the crushing austerity that will be enforced is to eliminate what remains of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society programs. They are coming for Social Security and Medicare and as the brilliant social critic George Carlin pegged it dead bang in one of his most scathing rants The American Dream:

And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

The intention of the fascist looter class has always been to impose a new feudalism on those who are not in “the big club”.  The great wars of the 20^th Century provided the oligarchy with the cover needed to dismantle dissent and movements for economic justice in this country. With the Woodrow Wilson administration determined to feed Americans into the charnel house that was Europe during World War I, a conflict that the United States had no business being involved in and that made industrialists and Wall Street speculators obscenely rich there was the Espionage Act of 1917 (currently in the process of being revamped in order to use against Wikileaks' Julian Assange) and the Sedition Act of 1918. Promulgated by the state to stomp on criticism of the blessed war the power of the state was marshaled into also putting down the hated by the establishment American  Socialists, notable Eugene Debs who was imprisoned for his blasphemy of the capitalist war machine. The laws were used to justify the rounding up, persecution and deportation of radical leftists, notably during the Palmer Raids by an already thoroughly rotten to the core Justice Department.  The economic collapse triggered by criminal plunderers on Wall Street leading to the Great Depression eventually led to the social reforms of Roosevelt and their institutionalization. World War II, “the good war” fought by “the greatest generation” was sold as a great conflict of good versus evil for the fate of the future of human civilization itself but the war was essentially a clash of empires with the greatest spoils being won by the United States of America. Few bother to consider the hypocrisy of destroying the devil that was Hitler through an alliance with a man who was possibly an even greater tyrant, mass-murderer and evil incarnate that was Josef Stalin.

When the war was over and much to the delight of the looter class, Roosevelt finally dead, it was a seamless transition to carve up the spoils and then turn on Stalin, he was on longer useful as an ally but would provide a malevolent figurehead for the enduring menace that was Communism, a true enemy of fascism and would be used as blanket justification for the wars, witch hunts, bloated defense budgets and societal transformation until the day when the U.S.S.R. imploded. The 1950s saw the decimation of the remnants of the real left with the inspiration for today's debauched harassment of Muslims - McCarthyism. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (likely a personal hero of current fascist Governor Scott Walker) holding hearings, law abiding Americans being harassed into taking loyalty oaths, the carnival of perversion that was the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) serving as a vehicle for a vicious, conniving shit named Richard M. Nixon to slime his way into power by publicly kicking in the spleen of a needed blood sacrifice named Alger Hiss. Nixon's trademark shamelessness and anti-Commie demagogy greatly contributed to the rise of a virulent, flag-swaddled fascism that was exemplified in the John Birch Society and the new wealth of the western sunbelt. This toxic movement would vomit up Ronald Wilson Reagan, the avatar of a savagely anti-American fifth column who to this day is canonized as a saint, the Lenin figurehead for the great revolution of which we now find ourselves as victims of as it nears the endgame.

The tumultuous 1960s with the heinous atrocity of the Vietnam War following the brutal and still unsolved assassination of President John F. Kennedy would prove to be a boon to the fascists, especially those that are now concentrated in the Republican party. The Civil Rights Movement would ensure that unrepentant racists, especially southerners would shun the Democratic party for generations, the chicken-fried version of bastardized Christianity would act as an accelerator and preserve the region for the GOP for going on four decades now. The antiwar movement was a bonus and during the political resurrection of Richard Nixon that culminated in his 1968 election until his fall a young ideological media wizard named Roger Ailes would ensure that the social upheaval that marked the era would be given a black face or adorned with hippie beads and peace signs. The 1960s were going to be the last time that the establishment would ever be confronted with a serious threat to the status quo and the lessons of that era were well learned by the fascist right. The revolt against the war and the demand for economic and social justice just may have succeeded were it ever to be allowed to have serious leadership. The movement was efficiently and mercilessly decapitated in little more than two months in 1968 when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both conveniently taken out, victims of the same sort of “lone nut” that always is able to circumvent security, escape surveillance and show up at the exact optimal moment of opportunity when a threat to the status quo has to be eliminated.

The Vietnam War, social unrest associated with it and later the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon, the at the time high priest of politics as war set the stages for the crusade against social justice that would follow. The fascist right-wing and American big business fully understood the importance of controlling the media, Ailes taught Nixon of the potent tool of television, a medium that had yet to explode into its full potential as a method of social indoctrination and brainwashing as it did with the advent of cable and satellite technology. The 24/7, hundreds of channels television revolution would nicely coincide with the coronation of Ronald Reagan as America’s founding father, hell, how could anyone ever imagine anyone else being president? The Powell Memorandum, which laid out the blueprint for the media takeover and establishment of propaganda organs and “policy” organizations, known as think tanks was already being implemented. The post-Vietnam era saw the creation of a legitimized network of institutions devoted solely to ensuring that corporate power and those who would be tools of the oligarchy would be served. Nixon was a master at exploiting the resentments of others, of pushing the right buttons, of lies and scurrilous attacks that pitted American vs. American that would come to define the future of American politics. I highly recommend the great book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein to those who may be interested in a fascinating chronicle of the Nixon years that birthed the present.

The Heritage Foundation, one of the most prominent of the right-wing think tanks was funded by money from Robber Baron descendent Richard Mellon Scaife and the John Birch Society influenced Coors family. The Manhattan Institute was founded by longtime Wall Street/CIA/OSS figure William Casey. The Cato Institute was founded by the Koch Brothers (their great family fortune came from building oil refineries for Stalin) whose longtime influence is only now finally coming to light. Cato was a part of a fascist right-wing project to clean up libertarianism, transforming it in the public eye from a loose collection of true anarchists, antiwar and anti-state, pot smoking, free spirits who had to be brought to heel to promote the true party agenda which would mirror Koch and the other plutocrats’ financial interests.  These 1970s organizations joined the already established American Enterprise Institute, a prolific pro-war, looter capitalist advocacy snakepit along with all of it’s Neocon spinoffs, The Hoover Institute , The John M. Olin Foundation and a myriad of others, tentacles of the fascist right-wing octopus. Rather than get bogged down in this particular area I would refer readers to the fine David Brock book entitled The Republican Noise Machine: Right Wing Media and How itCorrupts Democracy. Brock heads up one of the lone the progressive counterparts in the hated Media Matters for America, a watchdog group so loathed by the right-wing that it has been demonized incessantly on the Rupert Murdoch terrorist FOX network. Brock by the way is no stranger to right-wing lowball dirty tactics and strategy, he was a former operative who developed a conscience and joined the battle against fascism. Brock is also gay and was ostracized by the virulent elements of the GOP who years later likely rue the day that they persecuted the wrong man.

The most dangerous as well as the most secretive of the think tanks is the Council For National Policy. The CNP, is where the shadow government types or to those who on the left who may be typically squeamish of such a term – the intelligence agency rogues, the ends justify the means types who waged the dirty wars against the commie devils in Southeast Asia and Central and South America joined forces with John Birch Society veterans, big Texas oil money, right-wing media moguls and Christian theocrats. Real hard-liners such as General John Singlaub and Lt. Colonel Oliver North joined other ‘luminaries’ such as Nelson Bunker Hunt, the right wing beer magnate Coors Family, Paul Weyrich, Edwin Meese, Jesse Helms, Phyllis Schafly, revered by teabagger swine Glenn Beck’s idol Cleon Skoussen and a roster of members continually updated to include influential right-wingers of the day, and movement types as John Ashcroft, Grover Norquist, DeVos Family members including mercenary kingpin Erik Prince, Birther propagandist Joseph Farah, Rick Santorum and even possibly even former DHS head Michael Chertoff  the man who has been instrumental in putting naked body scanners into the hands of authoritarian, sexual molester TSA goons in our national airports who was a prominent speaker at a CNP gathering in 2006 along with North, John Bolton and Robert Bork. Unfortunately, the current member list is guarded like the crown jewels themselves and the organization shuns questioners. 

The fascist Republican takeover of America could not have been successful without a militant, dedicated army of activists and shock troops. Before there the phony grass roots corporate media darling Tea Party existed there was the mobilization of the true believers that are the Religious Right - America’s own Taliban. CNP was founded by the Reverend Timothy LaHaye, the creator of the Rapture death cult bible that is the multi-million dollar franchise of the Left Behind series and eerily seems to be adaptable to promote a crusader’s view of the Middle East and the need to promote the policies of Israel and the American empire’s control of the key oil producing regions. Joining Reverend Doomsday LaHaye is a who’s who of Christian zealots, the late Rousas J. Rushdoony, widely acknowledged as the father of Christian Dominionism, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer and D. James Kennedy. The CNP and the think tank networks are little understood by most progressives and liberals who still believe that change can be effected at the ballot box, they know nothing of the organizational structure that they are up against in a war for America. The CNP by the way vetted and gave their blessing to Sarah Palin as John McCain's 2008 Republican party presidential  running mate. The Council For National Policy seems to be far more than a think tank, it smacks of being the serpent's head of a serious fifth column fascist element, the presence of Singlaub and North, both no strangers to black ops would seem to give that idea some credence, much deeper investigation of this organization needs to be undertaken, I would refer readers to this recent piece by Robert Parry: The GOP's CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country to Sweep Back Into Power.

Rather than further spend time on the fascist right-wing infrastructure I am not going to bother with the thoroughly controlled and corrupt corporate media, this in and of itself presents the largest obstacle to any sort of derailing of the fascist juggernaut. Following the model established by Father Charles Coughlin the fascist right hit it big with Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, his hectoring demagoguery was broadcast to tens of millions at the crucial time when the early stages of Reagan’s dismantling of the system had to be sold. There was nothing like the pigman’s rubbing salt into the raw wounds of those whose farms had been busted out, whose lives who had been destroyed and who were easily duped into finding scapegoats in order to protect those who were responsible. Limbaugh bred an industry of strident electronic hatemongers who fulfilled the warning of the reviled liberal former WW II era Vice President Henry A.Wallace:

 

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

With the aforementioned Powell Memorandum stressing the importance of the control of the media to control the future of America this mission has been accomplished, give a big assist to neoliberal Bill Clinton and his Telecommunications Act of 1996 for the dismantling and consolidation spree that has allowed for the majority of Americans to be woefully under informed and mesmerized by lurid local stories foisted as great national crises while the country is gutted by the fascists. There may yet be some hope that the Rupert Murdoch media empire will take a big hit with the still breaking British hacking scandal, a rancid illustration of the collusion of government figures with kingmakers like Murdoch but despite tactics that undoubtedly pale next to what FOX and other components of the right-wing Republican machine are doing in America. With new revelations on the attempted exploitation of 9/11 victims phone calls this could be a spear jammed into the belly of the beast but it is not likely to get much play in our media. There will always be another dead child, sex scandal or ginned up terrorist plot to deliver the electronic opiate to the masses of asses, and perhaps NFL season will soon open after the union has been busted – move along, there’s nothing to see here.

The fascist right-wing and the corporate state have already won, our political system has been reduced to nothing more than political theatre and an ongoing duel between two criminal entities in the full blown fascist Republicans and the fascist lite Democrats to control the spoils system and obtain the regal privilege of being the ones that get to yoke the slaves and deliver them to the man.Were the RICO laws to ever be seriously enforced then the two money parties and their Wall Street and corporate owners would be targeted, then that would be in a society that respects the rule of law, unfortunately we don't live in one.

There is no hope to dismantle this machine, it’s even money that it will self-destruct though but not until every last bit of blood is extracted from the average American, every bone has been ground to provide sustenance to the machine and then there is the high-tech, militarized police state that has been constructed since September 11, 2001 to deal with matters once it happens. At this point it is no longer anything but a silly fantasy to expect that the system can be changed through the calculatedly eroded process that was once called democracy, too much damage has been done for too long a period. America is in a very dark place today, it is not often that I am in agreement on anything at all with the Neocons but I must say that their intellectual father Leo Strauss was onto something when he blamed liberal Weimar Germany and the feckless opposition to the Nazis for the horrors that would follow, he was right. Philosopher Karl Popper hit the target as well:

“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.” 

The time has come for progressives to realize that this is war, always has been war and their naivete to realize this has led us to this point.

Let the resistance begin. 

I don't want to get any messages saying, "I am holding my position." We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the enemy do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like shit through a tin horn!

-General George S. Patton

Part III: Fighting Back

I have long drawn much scorn from those who should have been allies during my affiliation with the 'left', those who insist on never lowering themselves to the levels of those that seek to destroy them, they would still be arguing that even as they were on the cattle cars being trucked to the gas showers. I have long advocated for a counterattack against the fascists on their own terms, they understand nothing other than raw aggression, eye for an eye, frontier style 'justice'. You cannot reason with them, especially those who are the zealots that comprise the shock troops, the brownshirts, the rabble and the street thugs. They need to be dealt with in the harshest of manner and if the time comes they need to be met with an appropriate level of violence that they themselves are fully prepared to use. There is really no other way, as an old Marxist acquaintance of mine liked to say, "you don't debate fascists, you destroy them", the fascist right, outside of their pederast style obsession with cannibalistic capitalism feared the unions because they understood this and confronted power with power. Were the real left still around today instead of the namby pamby collection of weaklings, sissies. utopian talkers and bleeding heart types that comprise the 'left' we would not have been overrun and crushed by sociopaths and their goons. As I previously referenced Neocon Leo Strauss he did understand one thing, that you cannot negotiate with those who would just as soon use your skull for a salad bowl. I encountered this failure to come to terms with this most basic of facts in terms of our current situation far too often with those of otherwise good intent who refused to view contemporary America in historical terms, particularly in comparison with Nazi Germany. I am fully aware of Godwin's Law damning Nazi analogies and to me it's just more of the same lame liberal bullshit. Not only are the Nazi's the predecessors of today's American fascists, specifically those who fly the Republican party's bloody red flag perfect examples for the obvious reasons but everyone knows who the Nazis were and other comparisons would be wasted on ignoramuses such as those who are commonplace in Der Homeland circa 2011. Sadly too many of them are also entirely ignorant of the level of complicity that capitalist American interests including prominent industrialists and Wall Street bankers had in the building of Hitler's death machine, that is going to have to wait for another time though. 

While I detest Neoconservatism and it's merger of worship of the warfare state, it's manipulation of religion, fear and nationalism in order to justify conquest and oppression both abroad and at home I find a good deal of merit in Strauss's argument that it was liberalism that failed to halt the Nazi horror by not confronting it on it's own remorseless rules of engagement while the movement was still nascent. Were the populist anger that was masterfully harnessed by Hitler and his minions been redirected back against his death cult with white hot vengeance how much suffering could have been averted? Human nature is not virtuous and good and beneath a very thin veneer lurks a pitch black innate need for destruction, an instinct in which survival trumps all else and the inconvenient truths of human history have proven time and again that our better angels will ultimately be overcome by our internal demons. History is also not linear, history repeats itself but never in exactly the same way and there will likely never be any sort of a murderous state that will be as ostentatious in it's cruelty and cult mentality like the Nazis ever again. But the similarities are there between Weimar Germany and the America of the new century, the economic futility, the failed political system, the eroded civil liberties, the codification of torture, the disembowelment of the Constitution, the pollution of the judiciary, the militarizing of the national mind, the need for an enemy and most importantly of all, a right-wing movement already in a high state of readiness that is only awaiting their very own Führer.

But I Digress.....

With my differences with many progressives and liberals already well documented it was with much surprise that when on one of the radio shows that I listen to on a fairly regular basis, a regular caller got it. During the Bob Kincaid Show on the HORN, which stands for the Head On Radio Network (brilliant radio, listen and if you like it please kick a few bucks into the kitty for these people who are fighting the good fight, they need to pay the bills) on June 14th at around the 1 hr 19 min mark David in Maine, a cutting edge thinker hit the mark. David, understanding the futility of the current system, the stacking of the deck and the need for both urgency and assertiveness among progressives blew away guest host John Fox with his proposal for what he called a "universal progressive discipline camp".  This was sheer brilliance, what David proposed was straight out of the Republican playbook, a hiring of the finest strategic minds from around the globe, military types to instill an iron hard brand of discipline into those who would attend. David was inspired by the Louis Theroux BBC documentary entitled Miami Mega Jail and the concept of GABOS an acronym for Game Ain't Based on Sympathy. GABOS is the law of the jungle, as the subheading of the Guardian article that I linked to puts it so aptly - Want the bottom bunk? All you have to do is beat another inmate half to death. I was stunned, this concept in all of it's primitive, remorseless honesty illustrates exactly the strategy of the fascist Republican right-wing. It is so simple, so astonishingly eloquent in it's bumper sticker type of message that it could have been conceived by Frank Luntz (or Goebbels for that matter) himself. In the land of fuck you I got mine that is America the rich will reign and the rest of the peasants will in the streets engaging in knife fights for the daily ration of bootstraps that they are provided by their rulers. To the losers goeth the blade and to the 'winners' goeth to the for-profit prison system - GABOS be with you.

The one key aspect of Miami Mega Jail that David referred to was a boot camp for inmates in which hard ass military professionals are brought in to give the prisoners one last chance. David talked about how a program such as this was necessary to confront the right, it would provide "toughness" and "discipline", the sort of character traits that are absolutely critical to winning a war of attrition, building "an Army" so to speak. Mr. Fox was like most progressives more than a bit taken aback by the idea. Whether people want to admit it or not the Republicans have total control of the country now, they have utilized this very strategy, through their activist base organizations, their churches and their tea party bunds, their militias and their prayer groups they have already built an army and again, this has always been a war to them. David referenced spending some time at West Point during his call, it would take a veteran to appreciate this sort of thinking, as one who spent some time in the military myself I get it. In order to overcome a much more determined enemy, one that utilizes up to date strategy, is relentless and absolutely hates America as it is it is imperative to do likewise in order to combat it. He equated it with war college, but taking it to the next level.... this is a concept that I have long found alien to the 'left' with their small protests, emails, phone calls and letter writing, none of which is effective against an entrenched enemy who understands what it takes to win. There was a silence and then some fear, and it was palpable from fill-in host Fox who worried more about what Limbaugh and Beck would do were they to hear the show rather than how their ilk should be hunted down like rats. Were this a country with nads there would be a Scarface style hit team enroute to Limbaugh's tony Palm Beach compound to scale the walls once the shit really hit the fan, they could saw off his ugly fat fucking head and mount it on a pike like something out of Lord of the Flies.

Let's face it, the 'left' as it exists now are pussies, when they chased labor out of the new 'left' they discarded their backbones. Old labor, especially returning World War II veterans who belonged to unions would make very short work of the fascists who despite their numbers, their animosity and their braggadocio are as yellow as their silly-assed Gadsden flags and most of all they are stupid and blinded by their meanness. They are pack animals who have no taste for a fair fight and their leaders know this which is why they use their media to put a certain noble sheen on proto-fascist loudmouths like the vastly overhyped Tea Party, the remains of what was once a libertarian based antiwar movement. The 'left', once again proving that the one thing that they truly understand is failure never bothered to attempt to tap into the righteous anger in this country over the offshoring of millions of American jobs, the bailouts of financial terrorists on Wall Street who destroyed the economy and thanks to Obama, have been allowed to go back to their looting with impunity.  There was a serious attempt for an alliance between progressives and principled libertarians such as those who backed Ron Paul but have been chased out of their own movement by savvy Republican operatives. Alas, it never happened as if it ever could happen. One other thing that I fell out of favor with my progressive friends for was my advocacy for just that sort of broad-based coalition, we can argue about the differences later but the first and foremost priority needed to be restoring the rule of law and destroying fascism in America. 

As the great radical Saul Alinsky once put it, To fuck your enemies you’ve first have got seduce your allies. Former Marine and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in his book Waging Peace: The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement laments the demise of opposition to the wars during the Bush years, wars that continue to this day absent any form of resistance, the 'left', other than principled and consistent critics who have largely been relegated to the fringes of discourse are predictably missing in action. This from Ritter:

Bear in mind that in conflict you are in almost all occasions confronting an opponent who is determined to win as you should be. This opponent is looking for any sign of weakness on your part, and will be certain to exploit this weakness with as much decisiveness and ferocity that can be brought to bear. If you are not prepared to confront such an opponent, then don’t enter the field of battle. Conflict is not for the faint of heart. In conflict you must be prepared to knock your opponent down, and then, instead of offering a helping hand, hold your opponent down with the heel of your foot while you plunge a bayonet into his or her heart. You can be assured that your opponent would do the same to you.

AND -

The American progressive movement has not always been this devoid of leadership and structure. One only need to study the life and achievements of Saul Alinsky, a Chicago-based former criminologist who revolutionized the grassroots movements of the 1950s and 1960s into genuine political movements possessing real political power.

AND -

Simply put, if the antiwar/peace and justice movement can attract more people to its cause than their opponents can to theirs, then the antiwar/peace and justice movement will emerge victorious. Therefore, a governing principle when waging peace is to creadt an ideological foundation that is capable of appealing to the broadest possible segment of a given democratic society.

AND -

If his advice is taken then what will emerge will be a diverse coalition of interests who now finally understand that the system as it exists is run by global criminals who have no loyalty to America and actively have attacked everything that was great about her while usurping our democracy and undermining our freedoms and economic prowess. Wall Street looters and industrialists have always hated America because there was a system of governance here that afforded rights to all people and not only those with money. It has been a long time coming and the time to act is yesterday.

Sage advice from a man who is a military strategist, the type that David's in Maine's "universal progressive discipline camp" would likely welcome with open arms were it to come to fruition. Note that Ritter advocates the OODA Loop Theory, something that progressives and liberals can chew on while they ponder how they could possibly have ever allowed Saul Alinsky to be stolen from them by the teabagger brownshirts? Pearls before swine I guess... 

As for the progressive-libertarian joint effort, it isn't as far out as it sounds, Ron Paul and Ralph Nader get it as did 1960s radical activist Carl Oglesby but Paul is a "nutcase" despite his anti-interventionist, antiwar, pro-civil liberties, anti-Federal Reserve stance and he wants to abolish the Gestapo TSA as well. Nader is poison to the Democrats and progressives/liberals who still believe in the functioning system despite watching Bush family operatives steal the 2000 election in Florida and then have not do a goddamned thing other than jerk off and point fingers at Nader when the Supreme Court put George W. Bush into the White House. Oglesby is a "conspiracy theorist" the dreaded pejorative that is used by all establishment lackeys and those enshrouded in comfortable cocoons of denial when they dare to ask serious questions. For even suggesting such a thing, even temporarily I was shunned as a leper, mocked and derided as much for that as for my inability to suck it up, turn the other cheek and be a pacifist. I must admit that I always had a bit of sympathy for the Jack Nicholson character, Colonel Nathan Jessep in the movie A Few Good Men, his methods were unsound and his arrogance was his undoing but he had it right when he barked that:

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

The liberals and progressives are impotent and on the verge of extinction, of being hunted and persecuted in their own country simply because they never understood that there had to be someone on that wall to beat back the hordes.  Better get a clue folks, they are closing in now.

Just my two cents

EE

Kristol and Palin Reap the Whirlwind in Arizona

"They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind",

Hosea 8:7

The least surprising act of violence in this increasingly unraveling wormball of a republc should be Saturday's brutal and tragic shooting rampage in Tuscon, Arizona. Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was savagely gunned down along with a sitting Federal Judge and a nine year old girl when the latest pathetic human time bomb went off in spree of carnage that has sent shockwaves through the land. Whether or not the vicious little creep Jared Lee Loughner was influenced by the ongoing poisonous rants of right-wing payroll demagogues like Glenn Beck and his ilk still has to be determined, that such a brutal and senseless mass murder would occur in the hellhole of cacti, gila monsters and racist Sherrif Joe worshipping freaks that is the asshole of America (Arizona of course) was inevitable. Loughner, a one-man death panel walked into a local Safeway store where the hated Giffords, mortal enemy of the GOP co-opted Tea Party was making a public appearance and opened fire with the ice-cold, remorseless manner of a highly skilled assassin, once deemed too fucked up for the Army but he could have a hell of a future with some private mercenary army of brutes like Xe, Triple Canopy or any of the other 'contractors' that leech off of the taxpayer dole to murder brown people in the name of almighty mammon and American hegemony.

The only thing more dispicable than the cowardly and brutal ambush was the standard right-wing spin that went into overdrive before the bodies were even cold. Loughner's name has barely been released when already, the Der Stürmer of the American political press, arch neocon William Kristol's Weekly Standard, a fully subsidized print arm of the American fascist propaganda machine and a prized posession of the foreign parasite Rupert Murdoch was denouncing the shooter as a liberal lunatic. The apropos "lunatic" tag puts him right in the fine company of the publishers and their ilk but the idiotic canard that Loughner was some sort of leftist guerilla by linking the mention as a favorite book on the diseased little scumbag's MySpace page of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto along with Hitler's Mein Kampf was a perfect little bullshit nugget that is sure to go over with all of the scumbaggers and Palinazis. That Communism and Nazism have anything in common would only appeal to the flag-sucking, synapse-challenged sluggards whose mental laziness, internal ugliness and perpetual state of electronically induced confusion are drawn to the Palin-Beck cult as horseflies are to fresh dogshit. Only, in our degenerate, violent and ingorance worshipping culture could such idiocy be swallowed - Hitler hated Commies which is a fact that is pretty much well documented in any history of The Third Reich not produced by Glenn Beck's think tank employed ghostwriters. Long before the Jews were being hunted down like dogs by the Nazis the only serious opponents of Hitler's death cult, the Communists had to be eradicated. Not that the nitwits in our deteriorating dumbocracy bother with reading anything much in 2011. Interestingly enough, there were other notable works in the MySpace profile that are curious enough to call the whole damned thing into question, Orwell's Animal Farm, Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 are often invoked by many in this era of a rapidly closing and dangerously hellbent on authoritarian society, it's pretty convenient in my personal opinion to include those works on this maniac's alleged MySpace page. In a year when the criminal U.S. government is about to launch the full fury of the contemptibly corrupt Justice Department on a huge international witch hunt for Mr. Wikileaks Julian Assange and anyone who has remotely sympathized with him should perk up the hairs on the backs of the necks of those who really get it. Of course this leaves out the teabaggers doesn't it?

But I digress....

The Arizona slaughter is just the logical progression for the seething rancor in this once upon a time land o' plenty that has been putrifying the air since the inital launch of the neocon Project Sarah Palin. Long before the doddering old war criminal John McCain (a faux patriot who sold out his fellow prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton for favorable treatment in Nam and made propaganda films for the Commies) in an ill-thought out act of political desperation plucked her from obscurity and sent her rocketing to stardom as the kewpie doll of a virulent and deeply entrenched American fascism, she had been the apple of the eye of the once discredited, anti-American neocons. According to a 2008 London Telegraph article, Neoconservatives plan Project Sarah Palin to Shape the Future of American Foreign Policy and an in depth article by Jane Mayer from The New Yorker magazine entitled The Insiders, it was during a 2007 Weekly Standard Alaskan cruise that the smirking little chimp William Kristol met the silly, babbling bitch and in very short order achieved an erection that could crack a human skull. According to one neocon who out of fear of Billy Bad Ass declined to be named stated that Herr Kristol had a "schoolboy like infatuation" with the darling of the American dumb and from that moment he was determined to promote her as the high priestess of apple pie authoritarianism to the nigger hating, Jesus juicing, brokedick and busted out flat American peckerwoods who made up the Republican party base. With the ascension of the extremely disappointing corporate sellout Barack Obama as an antidote to the ruination of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil the cunning Kristol would have the perfect operating environment for the restoration of the neocons. By working through Palin to rebrand standard mouth-breathing Republicanism into something bold and fresh by hijacking the libertarian Tea Party movement Kristol and this fellow polemacists, fifth columnists and greed obsessed media moguls such as Murdoch the scorched Earth campaign of cultural destabilization began in earnest.

From the earliest Palin bund rallies in the runup to the 2008 presidential election the meme of "taking our country back" was promulgated by Kristol's rat-fuckers, the feverish intensity of those October rallies where Obama was denounced as a secret Muslim, a traitor and in more than one instance were worked into such a dervish by Palin that they were screaming for his murder was a flashing danger sign for what was to follow. Once Palin and the Tea Party had been hijacked and melded (along with some help from a greasy little CNBC shill named Rick Santelli) with the perpetually angry and willfully ignorant GOP base as some sort of cultural populist insurgency the game was on. Now admittedly there is much jusifiable rage in this country, with two never-ending and costly imperialist wars, a zombie financial system where the politically connected criminals on Wall Street are bailed out by their whores in D.C., rapacious corporations that offshore former American jobs by the millions and the now obvious myth of the American Dream being exposed people should be as mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. But the sheer ludicrousness of the Tea Party and the cult status of Sarah Palin and how it could somehow be successful is stunning even to a hardened cynic like myself. That millions of Americans who have been given the shaft by the plutocracy that owns the entire government lock, stock and smoking gun barrell can be duped into actually supporting a movement fueled by corrupt insiders like Dick Armey and billionaire tax chiselers like the Koch Brothers seems like Bizarro planet. The entire phony Tea Party insurgency is less fueled by any sort of ideology than by the perfect storm of economic collapse, cynical political operators like Kristol and America's first black president, an absolute irresistable target for the bigots, haters and dregs of society. Kristol and the neocons have very obviously been trolling for a shooter for years now, finally they got their wish.

That the American left has failed to capatilize on the righteous indignation in this society, ceding the opportunity to build an actual movement for social and economic justice to the stone crazy fascist element also has played a role in the toxicity but that is a story for another time. Once Kristol and Company had successfully turned the shrill Alaskan hockey mom and pride of white trash Wasilla, the great northern meth mecca into a celebrity, fueled by a pathetically lazy and venal media the angry army had gained legitimacy, so much that the entire Palin family was able to ride the gravy train. America has long had an infatuation with horribly fucked up, dysfunctional, dipshit families, I mean where else could The Osbournes become a megahit and FOX's cartoon series The Simpsons which is now poisioning the minds of a third generation remain on TV for 20 + years? And now Bob's Burgers is coming to FOX to join the electonic lobotomy fest. With Palin's mass cultural popularity providing cover for the real message of seething cultural hate, dog whistle politics and race baiting that has been the bread and butter of the neocons since founding father Leo Strauss perfected the formula the destabilization of the hated BLACK man in the WHITE House's regime was on. I don't know if anyone recalls those nasty little anti-Muslim DVDs of the lurid trash entitled Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West, 28 million of which ended up in newspapers back during the runup to the 2008 election but that was a neocon job all the way. The rise of the idiotic Birther movement, the Republican Tea Party's browhshirt storming of congressional town halls to ensure that there would be no legitimate health care reform and the ongoing demonization of Muslims, gays, illegal aliens fueled by cynical multimillionaires like the insidious Glenn Beck all have fomented the hatred leading to Saturday's mass murder, that it would come in Arizona is only natural.

The Copper State as Arizona has as a moniker which is much more benign than befitting of a colony of bigots, fascists and armed to the teeth paranoid freaks that would make Barry Goldwater puke has been at the forefront of the rising tide of hate in America. With the embittered old goat John McCain being slowly pushed out of the limelight as Arizona's preeminent public face and replaced by the psychologically unstable and butt ugly Jan Brewer the state has been on the cutting edge of the new normal in America. An ugly and uncontrollable problem with cross-border crime thanks to Mexico's drug wars and Arizona's Guns R' Us culture along with the economic decimation courtesy of corporate America has ratched up the heat to the next level. With a publicity starved and shameless fascist Sheriff Joe Arpaio being exalted as some sort of folk hero among the haters for his Meskin' bashing style of law enforcement and a degenerate like Brewer leading the way with a racial profiling law straight out of Nazi Germany the state has been a shining example of Palin's America and the frontlines for the war against Obama's militant Negro socialist army. When Jared Loughner opened fire at the Giffords rally it was nothing short of an escalation of that war. In an armed to the teeth, paranoid land of fear and anger, the flames fanned by Kristol, Murdoch and their stooges would it surprise anybody if librul [sic] huntin' season soon opens across the land? There will be calls for a national discussion on the vitriolic nature of our politics, mostly by cynical swine like John Boehner and Eric Cantor who had no problem with it all as long as it delivered votes and nine year old girls weren't being murdered by lunatics, they are even putting their ridiculous farce of a vote to repeal Obamacare on hold for a few days, of course their complicity in ginning up the lies about death panels spread by Palin to her droogs on TWITter and Facebook is ignored.

There will also be calls for a government crackdown on the internet and more surveillance, Michael Chertoff must be absolutely drooling over how much money that he is going to make when the Giffords shooting is used as justification to force already cash-starved local governments to further cut down on essential services in order to put those great naked body scanners in malls and stores. Not that it matters to Kristol and Palin and the dopes with Gadsden flags shrieking about the evils of big government, they are perfectly down with a mass expansion of state power if it is oppressive power that they can use to crush their enemies and the more money that gets shovelled into the police state is great because after all, they are doing nothing wrong and have nothing to fear from a government run amok, eaten throughout by the cancer of corruption and building an iron-plated firewall to put down a citizen uprising if and when people stop being duped. Just as long as that big government money isn't going into anything that helps minorities, the poor or drags America back from the brink of becoming the world's largest banana republic, something like a stimulus program that creates jobs or a real national health care single payer system. The hate feeds them and those who encourage that hate in order to benefit politically have just as much blood on their hands as Jared Loughner does.

If and when this country ever awakens, reforms and begins to punish the fascists it should be noted that Julius Streicher was hanged at Nuremburg despite his never personally killing one Jew. Kristol, Palin, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, O'Reilly, Goldberg, Gabriel, Levin and their ilk should keep that historical analogy in mind the next time that they sow the seeds of hatred.

EE

Why The Tea Party Loves Big Brother

I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.


-Jim Garrison

The falsely advertised anti-big government Republican Tea Party never utters a peep about the growth of the out of control police state that has been erected largely under the radar since 9/11. For a pack of GOP talking point spewing automatons seemingly concerned about massive growth of government, the ongoing pissing away of tax dollars on bloated bureaucracy, job creation and the huge deficits are totally down with the massive expansion of the Homeland Security Industrial Complex. This is just another one of the examples of the mass fakery of the Republican co-opting of the libertarian Tea Party movement. The biggest secret of all that the fascist leadership of the GOP doesn't want to slip is that the original libertarian Tea Party (along with 9/11 Truth) were out in the streets protesting exactly that which the useful idiots of the Dick Armey of Darkness now fully embrace. As the storyline goes, the faux revolutionaries were incited to action by the staged tantrum of CNBC's greasy derivatives pimp Rick Santelli, my local Tea Party bund chapter held a huge birthday celebration for the one year anniversary of the activation of the fifth-columnist sleeper cells that was Santelli's orchestrated call to arms.  When it comes to being mortified at the  the rise of the police state, the unaccountable powers of government run amok and the incursions on civil liberties. The co-opted Tea Party of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and the rest of their ilk won’t utter one peep about America’s Stasi secret police. Instead, they will distract the Becked-up, FOX lobotomized zombies and their 9/12 bunds with more of the same smoke and mirrors about that horrible Negro in the White House, the coming black enslavement of whites, black revenge on the rightful white inhabitants of Der Heimat and the shrine to Islamofascism that is the mosque at the American Mecca that is Ground Zero and the despised secular socialist machine that will be used by the illegal aliens to put them all into prison camps.

Such is the state of our pitiful Idiocracy in the second decade of the new American century. While the country continues to be bankrupted by illegal wars sold by the lies of the charlatans in the ruling class, strip-mined by Wall Street gamblers and corporations that won’t be satisfied until millions more jobs are offshored to third world sewers where children work for pennies a day in sweatshops and the infrastructure is all sold off to foreign investors who will then tax Americans for driving on roads that they have already paid for, the buffoons that are the Republican jihadists joust at windmills while those who manipulate their feeble minds piss their selves from laughter on the way to the bank. The Founding Fathers feared the detrimental effect that a mass of poorly educated, indolent slobs would have on American democracy and are likely spinning in their graves today, especially galling is when said imbeciles adopt their language to in a historical context take to the streets and raise hell to ensure that the British Monarchy remains in power.

The truly big story of the week despite the bought and paid for corporate media’s insistence that the great Mel Gibson-Brittney Spears alliance is of critical importance or of Tiger Wood’s slow and painful climb down from the cross on Golgotha to regain his rightful place as America’s Christ is Dana Priest and William M. Arkin’s Top Secret America series in the Washington Post. This is a story that were the teabaggers to practice what they preach instead of merely regurgitating Frank Luntz/Newt Gingrich slow-cooked gruel that should justifiably have them descending on Washington en masse to protest REAL tyranny. But of course the Tea Party doesn’t have any firm footing in reality outside the mess of illogic, madness and pumpkin seeds that fill up the space inside of Sarah Palin’s noggin. Lenin (Vladimir, not John to your teabagger morons) labeled tools like yourselves as “useful idiots” and it is proven on a daily basis. Whether shrieking like demented banshees about the government keeping their dirty hands off of their Medicare or serving as human carrier pigeons for the racist propaganda of degenerate scum like Andrew Breitbart, a diseased swine embitterd by his years of apprenticeship more than likely spent sucking farts out of Matt Drudge's seat cushion. You really have to give the scumbaggers one thing though, they are predictable which is what makes them so valuable to the Republican fascists and to a larger degree to the oligarchy that rules this shithole. For a group so supposedly opposed to tyranny, socialism and a Soviet style state led by the black Antichrist they sure as hell don’t seem to be bothered by the most menacing, out of control and costly system of surveillance in human history. Think Again!

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.


-Vladimir Lenin

The new American police state never bothered Republicans under Bush and it doesn’t bother them under Obama, which it should. It's another tell about just how fraudulent that the entire Republican Tea Party truly is, were they to despise and fear Obama as much as they do why in the fuck would they want the man to be allowed to preside over the most awesome surveillance colossus on the planet? Hell, you would think that they would be marching on Washington with their precious penis extensions (guns) to bring an immediate halt to a system that could be theoretically used by a dictator to haul their mangy, uneducated, unwashed asses to reeduction camps at any minute. But not in reality, the scumbaggers may have their litany of fallacious grievances that are funneled into their lizard brains by the electronic crack pushers like Glenn Beck n FOX but they don’t sweat the big stuff. Every reactionary party needs minions, stooges, thugs, spear carriers and shock troops. Like the Weimar era Germans who flocked to the Nazi Party the dregs of the country that are now the S.A. for the Republican party via the Tea Party are quite simply authority worshippers. There are  books that examine such a fanatical type of mentality, for example, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer , Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, and John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience,  ross-reference those with any decent historical volume of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia and it fits them to a Tea.. There is always a certain percentage of a population that are wired to worship authority, especially the sort of sociopathic type that uses demagoguery, slander, race-baiting and thinly veiled promises of blood revenge against those which the movement has been conditioned to hate and blame for the failures of both the system and their own pathetic, botched lives.

The allure of revenge is deeply embedded in the psyche of the authority worshipper and in actuality Obama is doing them a huge favor by failing to dismantle the police state, As the Washington Post series illustrates, the culture of surveillance is becoming even more deeply ingrained in America, the third installment which is entitled The Secrets Next Door describes the neighborhoods that surround the surveillance centers as affluent and with schools that:

The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

This is perhaps the most horrifying sentence in the story, the children are being prepped to become the next generation of the American fascist police state, more appropriately the managers and bureaucrats who will run the system. The low-rent, economically ruined types who populate the Republican Tea Party will be the enforcers. The typical American sheep, now completely conditioned to hate, fear and distrust will become the spies, snitches, sneaks and stool pigeons who will direct the watchers and the thugs to those with unseemly and dangerous ideas. The oligarchy will be preserved, Wall Street will reign supreme, the wars will go on and only those who dare to question why will be targeted with precision and ruthless efficiency by the savage armies of droogs that are the Republican Tea Party. The indoctrination of the young into the fascist society of post-9/11 America is now entering its second decade and future generations will have known nothing other than what is now the permanent surveillance state, Orwell was a prophet.

This whole scenario has worked to perfection, once it was done under the cover of religion with the Christian extremists, Raptureheads and theocrats being the primary enforcers for fascist Republican social engineering plans. This worked out perfectly well for awhile until the fall from grace of homophobe Pastor Ted Haggard for smoking rock and chugging cock in a seedy Denver hotel room, the exposure of de-facto leader of the Religious Right, President George W. Bush exposed as the incompetent dunce that he always was courtesy of Hurricane Katrina, the death of Jerry Falwell and the massive Tom DeLay led overreach during the Terri Schiavo circus. The Religious Right had too many built in limitations to become a vehicle for Karl Rove’s permanent majority. The easily duped dittohead dolts in the Tea Party however do not have such limitations, they are able to wrap themselves in the flag with the full blessing of the propagandistic, jingoism spewing corporate media. There have been several recent bumps in the road, such as the recent focus on the intense racism within the movement (a virus that was carried in by Republicans) but the spinners, public relations flacks and Congressional Republicans are already working desperately to circle the wagons. The racism, were it identified and focused upon would be the one thing that could blow the whole game wide open and send the fascist Republicans back to square one in finding a turnkey movement. Not to worry though, when Bibi Netanyahu's bootlicker Joe Biden comes out and denounces charges that the scumbaggers are a racist movement and the demented harpy Michelle Bachmann sets up an actual Tea Party Caucus within Congress to legitimize protect the American brownshirts it's official that the political system has been fully infected and minus any sort of a mass counter-movement on the left (fat chance, they are too obsessed with waging the culture war crusade to institutionalize gay marriage than be bothered with preventing fascism) the rabble will continue to be conscripted into service for the new Republican Reich.

As I stated in my recent piece - Tea Party Racist? You Betcha! - the Republicans have long used race-baiting as a path to political power. Historically, nothing works better, the Arizona test programs for the discrimination against illegal immigrants being used in order to justify laws that potentially green light the overly zealous type of personality that is often found in police forces to shakedown naturally born American citizens for the color of their skin are already proving to be a phenomenal success. Soon, if not stricken from the books and stigmatized as the tools for tyranny that they are they will spread, become more inclusive and expand to include more than alleged Mexican illegals. The Constitution was eviscerated during the Bush years and Humpty Dumpty has not been put back together by the increasingly inept Obama administration. Habeas Corpus is gone, Posse Comitatus is gone, NORTHCOM is already operating in the U.S., the airports are filled with naked body scanners manned by drooling TSA goons and as the Top Secret America series shows, the surveillance system is growing exponentially. How long is it going to take for the fascist Republicans, once back in power with all of these tools at their disposal decide to do what past totalitarian regimes always did and start to eliminate the opposition? As with the Third Reich the early targets weren't so much the Juden (Tea Party translation: blacks, gays, Hispanics, liberals, Muslims) as they were all who were seen as potential threats to the final solution. Now wouldn't that make Michelle Bachmann's pussy get wet?

The Epitome of Sheer Irony

The Tea Party sign in Iowa that drew much attention to the sinister nature of the miscreants who comprise the majority of the movement comparing Obama to Lenin and Hitler was ironically somewhat accurate. While it will be lost on the standard mouth-breathing type of imbecile that is attracted to the Republican Tea Party, the historical analogy is pretty accurate in that Hitler had the Gestapo, Lenin gave way to Stalin who had the NKVD and Obama (at least for a brief period before he is ousted from office) has Homeland Security. The failure of Obama in holding the Bushreich criminals accountable instead of granting total impunity to all future torturers, war criminals and moral reprobates will ultimately prove to the the final nail in America's coffin. The Democrats are about to be wiped off the face of the map thanks to the betrayal of what remained of the party base who isn't about to turn out in sufficient numbers come November to counter the storming of the polls by the Republican Tea Party out to 'take their country back'. With an even more repulsive and reactionary Congress than under either Gingrich or DeLay in place there will be a near immediate drive to impeach Obama over some bullshit on the trivial level of Clinton's blow job, say for failing to produce his birth certificate. That will further embolden the vicious swine on the extreme right for 2012 as well as weaken the spineless and flaccid Obama for the full Republican restoration. Of course the oligarchy is down with it all too, big business backed Hitler and Mussolini's fascism was openly touted as corporatism. As robber baron Jay Gould once so aptly put it: "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half". Let the streets run red with blood and the prisons be filled with the rational people, the real owners of this country will never let such trivialities get in the way of the perpetual profit machine.

The maneuvers by the fascists in this country are about three moves away from checkmate and they are unfortunately only becoming stronger and more deeply embedded. I am going to close with two articles that came out this week, the first from Ted Rall that is entitled Protofascism Comes to America and makes some important points about the fascist Republican Tea Party:

But racism is only one facet of a far more sinister political strain. It's more accurate to categorize the Tea Party as something the United States has never seen before, certainly not in such large numbers or as widespread.


The Tea Party is a protofascist movement.

Robert O. Paxton defined fascism as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Typical Tea Party rants fit the classic fascist mold in several respects. America, Tea Partiers complain, is falling behind. Like Hitler, they blame leftists and liberals for a "stab in the back," treason on the homefront. The trappings of hypernationalism--flags, bunting, etc.--are notably pervasive at Tea Party rallies, even by American standards. We see "collaboration with traditional elites"--Rush Limbaugh, Congressmen, Republican Party bigwigs (including the most recent vice presidential nominee)--to an extent that is unprecedented in recent history.

Tea Partiers haven't called for extralegal solutions to the problems they cite--but neither did the National Socialists prior to 1933. Then again, they're not in power yet. Wait.

Exactly. Read any serious history of the Nazis, William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans trilogy, The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War or other notable accounts as Sebastian Hafner's Defying Hitler or Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, and you can't help but be terrified at the similarities to America today.

The second article is from the crusading blogger Glenn Greenwald, one of the first columns that I read each morning for information. This particular piece speaks of the deafening silence in the media, the establishment  and most importantly the government over the Top Secret America Series. While not exactly breaking new ground for most of us who follow the surveillance society one would have at least expected that this series, especially in a time of economic crisis as the massive waste of taxpayer money on a vast privatized spying apparatus could be better spent. The piece is entitled: Why has the Post series created so little reaction?:

Remember how The Washington Post spent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one? After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin -- most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this -- the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again, easily subsumed by the Andrew Breitbart and Journolist sagas.


And

It's not hard to understand why. Why would the political class possibly want to subvert or weaken their ability to exercise vast spying, detention, and military powers in the dark? They don't. Beyond that, as the Post series highlights, Top Secret America provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government. Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that. It's probably best not to hold your breath waiting for Dianne Feinstein -- the Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who lives in lavish wealth as a result of her husband's investments in the National Security State (and whose Senate career has a way of oh-so-coincidentally bolstering their wealth) -- to meaningfully address any of the issues raised by the Post series. Despite Feinstein's rhetoric to the contrary, doing so is decidedly not in her interests for multiple reasons.

And

The secret, omnipotent National Security State highlighted by The Washington Post will endure and expand as is because those who control the Government (or, as Dick Durbin put it, who "own" the Government) benefit endlessly from it. Major scandals or citizen-infuriating crises can sometimes lead to some modest and easily circumvented restraints being placed on this power (as just happened with the recently enacted Financial Regulation bill), largely to placate public rage, but it's simply impossible to conceive of the political class taking any meaningful steps to rein in a limitlessly powerful and unquantifiably profitable National Security and Surveillance State -- at least in the absence of serious citizen revolts against it. That Post series produced so little reaction because what it describes -- a Secret Government bestowed with the most extreme powers yet accountable to nobody -- is something to which the nation, as part of our State of Endless War, has apparently acquiesced as a permanent and tolerable condition.

The most disturbing thing is that the people in this country do nothing to resist any of this, rather through their willful ignorance, their constant fear and their insistance on existing inside of state media enforced cocoons of denial they enable it. Some, in the case of the reactionary thugs, haters and fanatics in the Republican Tea Party embrace it as a weapon that will one day be theirs to use when it comes time for the cleansing. As Milton Mayer wrote of the rise of the Nazis to power: "Now I see a little better how Nazism overcame Germany - not by attack from without or by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler. It was what most Germans wanted - or, under pressure of combined reality and illusion, came to want. They wanted it; they got it; and they liked it."

Just my two cents

EE