Donald Trump: Mr. Voldemort goes to Washington

Animal, Vegetable or Mineral?

Now that a white supremacist has just been made the next president’s closest White House adviser, and the president-elect has called conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars to thank him and his followers for their part in his election victory, we have reasonable confirmation that we are indeed in a fever-dream America. Tom Engelhardt

These days I often find myself wishing that Norman Mailer were still alive to turn this fecal moment of America's democratic saga into art. 

Mailer's The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago both dating from the legendary year of 1968 were an important help in making some sense of a period that had begun with the mysterious assassination of JFK and carried us through the civil rights battles and martyrdom of Martin Luther King, all accompanied by the obscenity of the Vietnam war... a period whose divisions and bitterness have as yet to heal.

It was a great story and Mailer told it well.

Intuition tells me we are about to enter a similar period.

We are faced with the immovable fact that someone so surreally "un-presidential" as Donald Trump has captured the White House, thus becoming the most powerful man in the world overnight ... And that he has achieved all this mostly by evoking the sordid, family demons inhabiting  the septic tank of white America's psyche.

Seeing something so improbable I'm tempted to believe that the Donald must have made a iuuge, wonderful, "deal" with none other than Old Scratch himself.

Living the sickening horror that Trump's mysterious ascension and triumph produces, I wonder if someone so reality grounded as Mailer could have handled anything this weird. Certainly analyzing paranormal phenomena was never part of his skill set.

In fact, analyzing my own shocked and sickened feelings and searching the corners of my subconscious, I discovered to my amused horror, that the only living author that might have the vocabulary to portray Trump's uncanny rise in the face of all common sense and decency, is J.K. Rowling  and she doesn't write about politics, she writes about witchcraft.

A great villain makes for a great story and we are now part of this villain's story

Nobody knows better than Ms. Rowling that the heart of a thrilling yarn is a good villain, at that she's tops. Remember it was  J.K. Rowling that created Lord Voldemort, who is the closest thing to Donald Trump I've ever seen.

See how she analyzed her creation, the "Dark Lord", AKA "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" in a BBC interview:

Rowling described Voldemort as a self-hating bully: "I think it is often the case that the biggest bullies take what they know to be their own defects, as they see it, and they put them right on someone else and then they try and destroy the other and that's what Voldemort does." Wikipedia

Now if that doesn't describe the @realDonaldTrump to a tee...

So the Good News is that Trump is a flawlessly perfect villain; and perfect villains... like perfect heroes, are of enormous value in great stories, and remember, great stories are the philosopher's stone of political action.

Think back on how many people were moved to vote back in 2008 just by reading "Dreams of My Father", but the problem was that after voting people simply expected their "hero" to take care of everything while they went about their business... that way, since the people didn't stay mobilized, "Hope" and "Change" turned out to be little more than words in the wind.

A perfect villain will keep the people mobilized.

The problem is we have our villain, but we haven't got a hero yet... Where is our Harry Potter, the one who can break all Voldemort's spells and incantations and expel He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named to the outer darkness?

The answer is one Harry Potter isn't going to get it. To change things there must be an army of "Harry Potters". An army teeming with all those citizens of America and the world who can't face sitting passively by watching President Trump crush one by one all their hopes and dream of freedom and justice. They, all the engaged and committed people must be the Harry Potters of our times, the ones who keep freedom alive.

To paraphrase a musty old slogan from the 60s (irony alert) "Let a million Harry Potters bloom"! DS

Why are the Republicans at war with reality?

"None of the major problems facing humanity in the 21st century can be solved by the principles that still dominate the developed countries of the west: unlimited economic growth and technical progress, the ideal of individual autonomy, freedom of choice, electoral democracy. As is evident in the case of the environmental crisis, facing these problems will require in practice regulation by institutions, in theory a revision of both the current political rhetoric and even the more reputable intellectual constructions of liberalism. The question is can this be done within the framework of the rationalist, secularist and civilised tradition of the Enlightenment. As for left vs right, it will plainly remain central in an era which is increasing the gap between haves and have-nots. However, today the danger is that this struggle is being subsumed in the irrationalist mobilisations of ethnic or religious or other group identity." Eric Hobsbawm, historian - Prospect Magazine - March, 2007 

"Reality has a well-known liberal bias"
Stephen Colbert

Before we really get started we should clarify our terms, things like "liberal" and "reality", because American English is so freighted with euphemisms and constantly changing circumlocutions that it is easy to get lost in the fog. For example, when I was a boy North Korea would have been described as a "red state"... now Texas is.

Let us begin with "liberal".

In American English "liberal", depending on who is saying it can mean anything from mildly progressive to the "Weather Underground"... However liberal's universal or classic, "proper English" meaning is to be favorable to free trade, "laissez faire", economics, low taxes, "right to work" laws and deregulation... that makes Maggie Thatcher a "liberal".

So since we are speaking murky "murkin", by liberal we mean the left. So Stephen Colbert is basically saying that reality has a notably left wing bias. This takes us to "reality".

The reality I will be talking about can be pretty well summed up in two popular and contemporary books: Thomas Picketty's, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" about inequality and Naomi Klein's, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate", whose title speaks for itself.

To simplify brutally, "reality" as described by Piketty/Klein means that our planet earth is literally well on its way to being uninhabitable thanks to a tiny group (0.01%) of unimaginably wealthy individuals, who have grown wealthier and wealthier, even as the middle class has withered, an oligarchy who expect to live forever, and live forever very well indeed, probably in some gated community in what is now Antarctica.

"Perhaps it is worth remembering that Noah's Ark was not built to hold everyone, but just the lucky few."
Naomi Klein
 

The growing consciousness of this "reality" is causing many individuals who come from many very different social stratae, races, sexual orientations etc. to grow restless and dissatisfied with the present system and find themselves "at last compelled to face with sober senses (their) real conditions of life, and (their) relations with (their) kind".

In short, it is "us" versus "them".

This restless and dissatisfied state is often referred to, especially by those who deplore it, as "populism"

What does that mean?

Here is a favorable, Midwestern version of populism by Chicago's poet laureate, Carl Sandburg.

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB

I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.

So what I am getting at is that those few unimaginably wealthy, now-unregulated, individuals and corporations who finance American politicians, especially Republican/Tea-Party ones, are afraid (terrified, soiling themselves from fear) that "the mob--the crowd--the mass" might just be about to "arrive" and they are willing to do anything, including making the most powerful country on earth ungovernable, in order to avoid that.

I'm sure that you are all too familiar with how this plays, but these two snippets below give the flavor perfectly and the only surprising thing I find in them is their puzzled, "how can they be so silly?" tone.

It’s a scary thought, but here it is: If some red states were to openly defy the authority of President Obama in the exercise of his constitutional duties, would today’s Republican Congress side with him? Or would they honor the insurrection?(...) The word “insurrection” does come to mind. Yet the resistance out West to federal authority has been received in virtual silence on Capitol Hill. It’s almost as if the GOP Congress wanted an uprising against the president. This country has drifted far beyond the rough-and-tumble give-and-take that historically occurs between the parties. It’s one thing to oppose the president’s policies. It’s quite another to refuse to acknowledge presidential authority. Colbert King - Washington Post

It is a peculiar, but unmistakable, phenomenon: As Barack Obama’s presidency heads into its twilight, the rage of the Republican establishment toward him is growing louder, angrier and more destructive.(...) even by the dismal standards of political discourse today, the tone of the current attacks is disturbing. So is their evident intent — to undermine not just Mr. Obama’s policies, but his very legitimacy as president. It is a line of attack that echoes Republicans’ earlier questioning of Mr. Obama’s American citizenship. Those attacks were blatantly racist in their message — reminding people that Mr. Obama was black, suggesting he was African, and planting the equally false idea that he was secretly Muslim. The current offensive is slightly more subtle, but it is impossible to dismiss the notion that race plays a role in it. Editorial - New York Times

If Piketty/Klein are right, and I believe they are, the only logical solution that might save our planet's habitability and social peace would be very stiff and omnipresent regulations on the use of energy and very high taxes on top incomes to cushion the effects of a massive reconversion of the economy... You notice I use the word "logical"

To think "logically", people must think calmly and clearly, rationally, so obviously to keep that from happening emotions must be created to keep rational thinking out of the picture. Fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war all drive out cool, collected thinking, so obviously fear, racism, anger, selfishness, hatred and war have to be promoted at all cost... cost is no problem when the future of the 0.01 percent's fortunes and power are at stake.

For those few who still read history there is nothing new here. After the defeat of WWI, with the  German population impoverished and the recent Russian revolution fresh in their minds the great industrialists of Germany were very "concerned" about the rise of Marxism in their country and took measures to put a stop to it.

By 1919 Krupp was already giving financial aid to one of the reactionary political groups which sowed the seed of the present Nazi ideology. Hugo Stinnes was an early contributor to the Nazi Party (National Socialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei). By 1924 other prominent industrialists and financiers, among them Fritz Thyssen, Albert Voegler, Adolph [sic] Kirdorf, and Kurt von Schroder, were secretly giving substantial sums to the Nazis. In 1931 members of the coalowners' association which Kirdorf headed pledged themselves to pay 50 pfennigs for each ton of' coal sold, the money to go to the organization which Hitler was building. The U.S. Kilgore Committee - "Who Financed Adolf Hitler?"

This all finally led to 4,200,000 Germans being killed in WWII (we are leaving out the 6,000,000 Jews and the 20,000,000 Russians), and of course Germany was a smoking ruin, filled with widows and orphans, but these industrialists like the Krupps and the Thyssens  made money leading up to the war, during the war (using slave labor), and after the war and the Krupps and the Thyssens, for example, are still some of richest families in Germany today. Like Naomi says, the staterooms on Noah's Ark are limited.

Every nation has its own idiosyncrasies, for example Germans wear lederhosen and Americans wear cowboy hats, so I don't imagine we'll be seeing torchlit parades of roman saluting, brown shirts, goosestepping down the broad avenues of Washington, or African-Americans being loaded onto boxcars either, for that matter.

American fascism will, like everything else American, have its own inimitable style, but I would argue that the beginning and perhaps more than the beginning, is unfolding right before our very eyes. DS

Conservatives or neo-fascists?

David Seaton's News Links

I would think it important to separate this new "conservatism" from the traditional variety. Remember the American vice is to use language to hide meaning. I’ll quote myself from an earlier post:

One of the most disturbing things about America is the incoherence of American language, the endless euphemism-laden double talk. American terminology is confusing and perhaps the confusion is deliberate.

Examples? There are many.

For example, everywhere but in the USA, “red” is the color of the left, but in America, the term, “red state”, means one that is right-wing and “blue”, which is a color that in most countries is associated with the right, to ultra-right, in the US is used to label what Americans call “liberal”, which in the USA means the left, but which everywhere else is used to label the economic right-wing… These examples are just the tip of a semantic iceberg.

This brings us to the word, “conservative”.

The new conservative is, in plain English, in fact, a neo-fascist and the personality traits we observe on the American right these days are those of a fascist.

What is the difference

If a person is born into a well to do, stable family, where the parents respect and perhaps even love each other and treat the child kindly and his/her exposure to traditional religion is benign. He/she is likely to accept the family’s traditions and values unquestioningly.

From that point his/her attitude will be one of prudence, of not spoiling  (for him/her and his/her family) a good thing… and his/her attitude toward the less fortunate than himself/herself may even be benevolent and paternalistic and be expressed in contributions to charity and other good works.

What we are seeing in the Republicans now, has little or nothing to do with that kind of conservatism. We are looking at exasperated, paranoiac, xenophobic, racist nastiness, in short a fascistic mentality of crippled personalities in reaction to changing mores and a failing economy. DS

Norway: a taste of the magma

David Seaton's News Links

Magma (from Greek μάγμα "paste") is a mixture of molten rock, volatiles and solids that is found beneath the surface of the Earth, and may also exist on other terrestrial planets. Wikipedia

The Norwegian right wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who killed at least 76 people in two terrorist attacks Jul. 22 Oslo and Utoya, is a member of a network of more than 10,000 neo-fascist groups spread across North America and Western and Northern Europe. Common to this informal North Atlantic neo-fascist coalition is the hatred of Islam, the radical opposition to immigration and to multicultural society, the belief in white racial supremacy and in Christian fundamentalism, the unconditional support of Israel, sympathies for the U.S. ‘Tea Party’ movement, and contempt for democratic institutions. Sympathetic to these neo-fascist groups are extreme right wing parties functioning in practically all European countries, from the Norwegian Progress Party, the Sweden Democrats, the True Fins, and the Danish People’s Party, to the French Front National (FN), and the Italian Lega Nord. The perpetrator of the massacre on Jul. 22 was a long-standing member of the Norwegian Progress Party. IPS

Interviewed on a popular radio show, Francesco Speroni, a leading member of the Northern League, the junior partner in Berlusconi's conservative coalition, said: "Breivik's ideas are in defence of western civilisation."(...) "If [Breivik's] ideas are that we are going towards Eurabia and those sorts of things, that western Christian civilisation needs to be defended, yes, I'm in agreement," he told Radio 24. In France, the National Front announced on Tuesday it had suspended a former local election candidate who made remarks on his blog that were interpreted as supportive of Breivik. Guardian

Glenn Beck spoke out about the mass killings in Norway on his Monday radio show. Beck said that he was troubled by the summer camp that was the site of the overwhelming majority of the carnage perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik, the right-wing extremist who has admitted to the killings. The camp is run by Norway's leading center-left party, the Labor Party, and has long been a haven for young people looking to break into the political scene. Beck said the camp "sounds a little like the Hitler Youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing." He then went on to say that he had warned that there would be horrible consequences due to the rise of what he called the "evil" strain of Islam in Europe. Islam, he said, is "squeezing the neck" of the continent, and multiculturalism is "killing" it. Huffpost

Lone gunmen running amok killing numerous people is widely seen as an "only in America-mom and apple-pie", US specialty, so no American should feel smug for a moment about Anders Breivik's Norwegian shooting spree. Nor should anyone think that America's ultra-right is any less insane than Europe's or further away from power than Europe's... The Tea Party led debt negotiations are ample proof of that.

Given the access to guns and explosive that Americans have, and the training in using them that so many Americans have received and the general craziness of the American "conservatives", the world of Glenn Beck and his wannabes, I would be very surprised if somebody doesn't try to top the Norwegian massacre in America any day now.

What is very much needed at this precise moment is a rigorous cui bono analysis of the ultra-right, in Europe and America. Who profits from this insanity, what is in it for them? What economic or geopolitical interests activate or free ride on the milieu where Breivik was nourished?

This neo-fascist culture has to be explored in depth and the dots have to be connected. That should be the first task that progressive set themselves today. DS

Sign of the Times: Glenn Beck to address the Knesset

David Seaton's News Links

We do live in a society in which things have become almost inscrutably complex. (...) I think the rise in autism diagnosis has a lot to do with children coming into a society that no longer makes much sense socially and contains within all the incentives for behavioral meltdowns, social misunderstanding and anxiety. When you consider high unemployment, high divorce rates and general unhappiness in the culture, the complexity that we've accepted and nurtured as somehow being representative of a more advanced and healthy society seems much less so. Orion

“In the quest for growth, many countries have neglected to build a reliable system of social security that will help citizens buffer the market's volatility.(...) Democratic capitalism’s greatest problem is not that it will destroy itself economically, as Marx would have it — but that it may lose its political support.” Raghuram Rajan  

Despite so many ethnic, religious and social conflicts, over the years America has plowed on in reasonable harmony because the economy provided jobs and a reasonably predictable outcome for anyone willing to work hard... That has ground to a halt and now, in America, like at some family dinner from hell, when much too much has been drunk, all the built up spleen and resentment is spewing out and things are said that can never be taken back. 

With jobs disappearing for months beyond any unemployment coverage and with health insurance coverage dependent on having a job, out, Americans live with an intolerable level of anxiety, complicated, as Orion points out, by an enormous, tectonic shift of ever increasing social changes that shake up the familiar relationships of the generations, the ethnic groups and the sexes.

This is the perfect time for someone like Glenn Beck and he knows it... In a horrible sort of way he is a genius, someone who was just waiting to happen... he doesn't need Fox or any other network or master: all he needs is to channel America's mood and it to make it his bitch. 

To take the temperature of that mood, have a look at the following from the BBC:

The difficult truth for Spokane, for Washington State, for neighbouring Idaho and for all of the US, is that hate groups - anti-black, anti-Jew, neo-Nazi - are on the rise again. And nearly everyone, including members of those groups, agrees that the election of Barack Obama has been a catalyst for the increase in support. "I wouldn't say it surprises me," says Spokane's mayor Mary Verner, "though it is alarming to me". "We are seeing a resurgence in hate groups because we are seeing democratic activity and empowered citizens who are not Anglo-Saxon Protestants." There was the same sort of reaction from the local sheriff, Ozzie Knezovich, when he heard that a bomb had been left beside the route of the Martin Luther King Jr Day march. "Surprised? No," he says. "We live in a different world now - hate seems to be a widespread phenomenon right now." And there are ordinary citizens - and their children - who are at the receiving end of hate group activity in Washington and Idaho. A sign questioning the legitimacy of Barack Obama as president Barack Obama has faced repeated questions about his legitimacy as president Rachel Dolezal, who teaches art and African-American studies, has been repeatedly harassed since word got out about what she taught. Her homes - she has moved several times - have been broken into. Nooses have been left for her, and a swastika was left on the door of her workplace. And she has acted to protect her son. "I actually bought him a pair of earphones for the bus," she says, "because he hears the word 'nigger' every day. "It seems things were kind of hush and sanitised and cleaned up, or something, and then Barack Obama just brought things to the surface that were already existent within people."

Now one the most curious manifestations of Glenn Beck's peculiar genius is to appeal simultaneously to both antisemites and to the Zionist right. You may remember this news item from back in January:

Four hundred rabbis, including the leaders of all the main branches of Judaism in the US, have signed an open letter calling on Rupert Murdoch to sanction the head of Fox News and one of the channel's most famous hosts for frequent inappropriate references to the Nazis and the Holocaust.(...) In the letter, the Jewish coalition calls on Murdoch to take action against Roger Ailes, the bombastic president of Fox News, as well as against Glenn Beck, the channel's most notorious rightwing commentator. "We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News," the letter says. Guardian

And now, only a few months later, this:

News Item: Glenn Beck to address Knesset panel in July - Jerusalem Post
Conservative pundit Glenn Beck will advise MKs on fighting the delegitimization of Israel abroad during a trip to Israel in July. Knesset Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs Committee chair MK Danny Danon (Likud) invited Beck, a Fox News and radio host and an outspoken supporter of Israel, to address the committee on how to recruit friends of Israel in the US to defend Israel’s right to exist. “When we face an international wave of hatred of Israel and Jews – which is expressed in Facebook pages and films calling for our destruction – it’s good that Israel has talented friends that can contribute to our public-relations efforts,” Danon said.

This is not quite so mysterious as it might first appear.  Glenn Beck is someone who spots all the fault lines in American society... even the Jewish ones.  Right wing Zionists are quite ambivalent about antisemitism, they always have been: obviously more antisemitism leads to more people emigrating to Israel.  Also, the Zionist right wing of Israel, would like to put pressure on progressive or liberal American Jews, who are getting rather lukewarm about Israel of late. Beck is a "wild card", the joker in the deck for them to play. Glenn Beck, knows what he is doing and so do they.

Really, Glenn Beck is nothing more than a symptom, like toadstools are a symptom of a wet spring. When the conditions are right both the Becks and the toadstools pop out of the ground overnight. The true dilemma is to face and  to overcome those conditions. DS

Glenn Beck: a clown by moonlight

"...there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight...." Lon Chaney Sr.

(hat to James Kunstler)

David Seaton's News Links

First, once again, it is important to remember that it is central to Glenn Beck's message that nothing in it make much, or sometimes any, sense at all.

This is not some sort of defect due to lack of intelligence or skill on his part.

Quite the contrary, his is a work of art in the media of cynical confusion. There is no other meaning to it than the anger he arouses.

No other fuel for the fires he ignites than the frustrations and confusion of his listeners.

To keep them confused and frustrated is the goal. Glenn Beck is a master of his art form.

What is disturbing is not so much Beck himself or even that an audience exists for Beck. What is disturbing is that there is an enormous amount of money being spent to put him into every home in America. That is terrifying.

The idea is simply to manipulate through emotions. The only real messages are the emotions.

To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system and all I can say is this: children don't try this at home.

Here is a hostile sample of Beck in full flight just to get your juices flowing:

Charming isn't it, the devil doll cuteness of it all? The little campy gestures...

What is behind this grotesque performance?

Simply this:

The USA is moving into what appears to be a long period of low growth and the rapidly increasing deterioration of the American middle class's legendary living standards, not to mention the working poor's. Also reform and regulation are necessary in the energy and financial sectors. America's infrastructure needs restoring and refurbishing. The whole thing is a mess and needs to be firmly taken in hand with the greatest good for the greatest number as the guiding principal.

This means, in the not too long run, more regulations, more control and more taxes, which means in turn that people with a lot of money are going to feel a little less free and a little less wealthy than they do today. They are paying Mr. Beck to help keep Americans from thinking rationally about their problems or thinking rationally at all.

If people could think straight for only a few days, be sure that sensible solutions that would benefit the majority of citizens would follow as night follows day. Those who have discovered and nurtured the talents of Mr. Beck and have provided him with the opportunity to reach millions of viewers are investing their money now to avoid those sensible solutions affecting their future earnings.

________________

Lately I've discovered that one of Becks favorite targets is none other than Woodrow Wilson, who he accuses of multiple sins, among them for being a fascist avant la lettre.

Watch how he does it:

Here is a little explanation of why he puts this Wilsonophobia all together, written by an egg headed, Ivy League, frau doktor-professor and published in that Marxist-elitist, Islamofascist, cheese-eating, faggot-socialist, competition-for-Rupert-Murdoch rag, the New York Times:

To the campaign to make “progressive” a slur, Wilson is useful. Much as many people admire aspects of his presidency, he has no natural constituency any more, right or left. He was opposed to female suffrage. He supported Jim Crow. He wrote about Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy. He makes a good bad guy. He was also an intellectual, the first U.S. president to hold a Ph.D.(...) This professor-president has convenient similarities to our current chief executive — a scholar of constitutional law, professorial, intellectual, even, in some people’s eyes, effete (as, for instance, T.R. and F.D.R. were not). Jill Lepore Professor of American History at Harvard - NYT

I find it curious that Beck should attack Wilson, when those who supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, neocons and the like, often portrayed it as Wilsonian. Wilson's interest in imposing American values on errant primitives by force of arms, was often used as the precedent for invading Iraq or fighting the Taliban. 

Of course consistency has nothing to do with Beck, still that he should attack the one figure that was used to add a bit of class to Bush's presidency seems a bit weird even by Beckish standards.

My particular beef with Wilson is a little different.

With the best intentions in the world, "making the world safe for democracy", Woodrow Wilson took the USA into WWI thereby setting off a series of catastrophes whose aftereffects we are still living with. I am sure that he would have been horrified to know what his meddling brought about.

It goes like this:

In 1917 Britain and France, Germany, Austria and Turkey had basically bled themselves white and had fought World War One to a draw. 

If left to themselves, they couldn't have continued much longer, especially with the Russian Revolution at their doors. Soon they would have had to come to the peace table and split the difference.

Thus there would have been no Versailles treaty and Germany wouldn't have had to pay the crippling reparations that caused the hyperinflation that helped bring Hitler to power, thus avoiding WWII.

The Austrio-Hungarian empire would have had time to collapse more gracefully and Turkey might still have control of the Middle East, thus avoiding many of the problems we have there today such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

Ask yourself, if Palestine were still a Turkish protectorate and the Holocaust had never taken place and European Jews were living happily in Germany, would Israel have even come into existence?

By entering the war, when it did, the USA was directly responsible for humiliating Germany and thus, in my opinion, is directly responsible for creating Hitler.

So for me Wilson is the father of the most evil century in humanity's history.

And so, logically, to top it off, without Woodrow Wilson there would be no Glenn Beck.

Way to go Woodrow! DS

American fascism and musical chairs

David Seaton's News Links

I've had a few comments on my last post from people who didn't really see any similarities between today's America and Germany and Italy of the 1920s and 30s.

I'm sorry if my previous  post on American fascism wasn't as clear as I would have wished. When I talk about fascism in America I do not envision torch-lit parades of brown shirted skinheads giving the roman salute. Anything America is going to do is going to have a distinctly American flavor. I am saying that we are already there.

What you see is what you get. American fascism has already arrived and we have to deal with it.

We have to ask ourselves why people like Glen Beck, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are having such success communicating (ideas?) that any levelheaded person can easily identify as absurd, abominable, horseshit?

Why is what these creatures serve so widely consumed?

Because with limited menu choices, many people, faced with eating cold reality straight out of the can, would rather gulp down steaming horseshit, that's why.

Why is that?

What it all boils down to in the end is that the party is over, but nobody want to go home.

The era of phenomenal growth that has lasted for over 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution began, is drawing to a close. It is literally running out of gas.

From now on the world will operate more and more in the "zero-sum" mode, which is going to be like old fashioned musical chairs.

In the Industrial Revolution version of musical chairs the music hardly ever stopped and the system kept adding more and more chairs: anybody who didn't have a chair now could dream of having one in the future or at least dream of their children having chairs someday. Who cared if some had more chairs than others? Everyone was going to have some sort of chair sooner or later.

That seems finished.

Now we are going back to the classical game of musical chairs, the version we used to play as school children, where they take away the chairs when the music stops and the music stops often. You remember how it goes, more and more people are left standing.

In this new version of the old game we are playing, a few still are sitting and they are afraid that those standing will start thinking about taking their chairs away from them and sitting on them instead.

This has to be avoided at any cost.

What are the political consequences?

If people really understood that there wasn't going to be future abundance on its previous scale, that it was going to be like in a lifeboat, or like the buried miners in Chile, with only so much water and so much food, survivors would demand, as in a lifeboat, that the provisions be shared equitably. This would mean that people with huge fortunes would have to take an enormous haircut, as their abundance would have to be shared out... they don't like that idea one bit.

They don't want anybody else to like that idea either and that costs a lot of money to pull off.

The key phrase would be, "if people really understood". So it is important for those who own the chairs to keep the chairless from thinking, from understanding what their situation really is.

This is especially difficult for Americans to come to grips with, as America's whole culture, both the real everyday one and the Hollywood mythical one, are built around the idea of limitless horizons and unlimited opportunity. There has always been a lot of unreality in this, but it is the foundational myth and emotionally a very sustaining one, especially for Americans now going through a rough patch. It will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, for most Americans to face the new reality soon and to think clearly about its implications.

That is what the Tea Party, Fox, etc is all about: keeping people from thinking straight. The idea is to play on people's emotions: fear, hate, racism, xenophobia, just to keep them from doing the math. The Teabaggers, Beck, Gringich and Fox are often criticized for not making any sense... this is not a failure of communication or an error on their part... that is the object of the exercise: to make rational thought difficult or impossible due to emotional overload. This is a slippery slope that usually leads a country that travels it into more emotions,  more war and less and less cool headed thinking.

This is the world that readers in their teens and twenties are going to spend the rest of their lives trying to make habitable.

We are already there.DS

"Feeling the Hate"... looking on the bright side

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This is certainly the year that a lot of stereotypes have bitten the dust: of course the top of the list of broken prejudices is symbolized by our president, Barack Obama, the first person of known African descent to occupy the Oval Office and soon we will have the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.

This is wonderful. But the destruction of other stereotypes, though they fill the observer with wonder are anything but wonderful.

Max Blumenthal's little film "Feeling the Hate" has broken more stereotypes for me, personally, than the election of Barack Obama or the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

The success of either Obama or Sotomayor is no surprise to me on racial or ethnic grounds, as I have never thought that the color of a person's skin or ethnic origin had any bearing on their ability to carry out the duties and responsibilities of high office.

However, I also never thought I would ever hear Jewish people throw the word "nigger" around with such practiced aplomb as in this video.

As a matter of fact, I don't ever remember seeing a Jewish person as drunk as those portrayed in Blumenthal's interviews in my whole life; in my youth it was proverbial that, "Jews don't drink": getting roaring drunk was something that was left to brutish, wife-beating, Polish peasants and to feral Russian Cossacks.

So here, thanks to Mr. Blumenthal, we have a group of future "my son the doctor(s)" and Jewish Princesses, stumbling drunk, talking with the same disgusting bigotry as the Polish peasants and Russian Cossacks that used to rape their great grandmothers or the rednecks that spat on the Jewish Freedom riders in the 1960s or that lynched Leo Frank.

To whom do we owe this transformation, this leveling?

To the USA?

To Israel?

In the words of a great American poet, "C'est la vie say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell". DS

Dr. Tiller or why search the world for Taliban, when they grow wild at home?

The medium is the message

Hope and no money has got to be better than no money and no hope... I hope

"The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge" Jeremiah 31:29

Mr Obama’s laudable ambitions to extend health insurance to all Americans, to refurbish the country’s failing infrastructure, to make a college education affordable and to cut nearly everybody’s taxes will run up against the amazing demands that the rescue will place on present and future taxpayers. The fiscal mess left behind by the Bush administration makes the problem much worse.(...) Circumstances will force the next president to be a fiscal conservative on matters other than temporary stimulus and financial stability. Clive Crook - Financial Times

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George W. Bush with his wars, with his tax cuts, with his incompetent profligacy, and now with the measures he is taking to save our toxic financial system, is leaving behind him a weight, a legacy, so poisonous that any major change of direction in American social policies looks impossible in this generation. A death trap for social democracy.

America, of all the developed countries, is probably one with the least safety net. Already many Americans are suffering for lack of health insurance or adequate schools and lacking other programs that citizens of most rich and advanced countries take for granted.

This lack of a basic welfare state means that in any economic downturn poorer Americans suffer much more than their counterparts in other wealthy countries.

To be sick and to be hungry is always bad anywhere. To be sick and hungry in "the greatest country in the world" is to add insult to injury.

We have thus laid out before us many of the classic ingredients of fascism.

According to Wikipedia:

(Fascism) is primarily concerned with perceived problems associated with cultural, economic, political, and social decline or decadence, and which seeks to solve such problems by achieving a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation, as well as promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.

The same article quotes Robert O. Paxton, the author of "The Anatomy of Fascism", who defines it 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.

It is easy to see that this is the direction that the Republican party has been taking since Nixon's "Southern Strategy" and which we are now seeing in full flower today. Joe Sixpack's, the evangelical's and the rural poor's "uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites" has proven a remarkably effective strategy in good times.

Now with a deep and long recession on the menu and the prospect of a Democratic government despite solid legislative majorities, impotent, without money to institute wide, sweeping social reform, while at the same time America's influence in world affairs steadily declines, is an invitation to classical nativist paranoia of the grossest kind.

And not just for Republicans.

Barack Obama himself succinctly explained the yeast culture of American fascism in a few candid words that brought him much pain:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The present crisis may very quickly turn heretofore prosperous suburbs all over America into "small towns in the Midwest," where the jobs have all gone, leaving bitterness and "clinging" in those whose educational attainments might have previously made them immune to those vapors.

With a weight of present and future debt so heavy that social policies to ameliorate the lot of suffering citizens will be nigh impossible; in a moment of dreamlike gravity, at the end of some unmarked line, leaden footed, molasses blooded and peering into an abyss of clinging bitterness and rage: the American people find themselves at the point of handing a blank check to an unknown quantity who has until now announced the vaguest of recipes for how to solve the situation... and now there is no other viable choice left

At this point, unless (God forbid) Osama bin Laden intervenes, that is what there is.

The idea that Obama's inexperience might be important has always been considered irrelevant by the millenarians who cling to him. Those with experience of experience would say that inexperience is only a virtue in young, marriageable girls; and only then in traditional societies, but today, many of America's most hopeful, in the aching audacity of their hope, apparently see some sort of political or administrative virginity to be as essential to redeeming America. Much as the Taliban see value in the hymens of their future wives.

Not only poor midwesterners "cling" it seems.

I hope they all are right for their sake, for my sake, and for the world's sake.

Surely it is better to hope than to despair

We can only wish President Barack Obama and ourselves Godspeed. DS

Huckabee: squaring the circle

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Sinclair Lewis

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Mike Huckabee is not to be underestimated. He has managed to re-mix the traditional "po' boy" southern populism and Evangelical fanaticism, remove the traditional southern hostility to African-Americans and replace it with "Islamo-fascist" paranoia... and repackage the whole concoction as "Republican", with all the freight that word carries as "tough on terrorism".

Just as Shakespeare was able to take the plots of mediocre playwrights and turn them into masterpieces, Huckabee has taken George W. Bush little slogan "compassionate conservatism" and fed it on steroids. Huckabee as a pastor and as a man of humble origins has a credibility when talking this talk that silver spooned Bush never had, (although the slogan took Dubya within stealing distance of the presidency in 2000).

The year 2008 looks like being a very hard year indeed with many families losing their homes and jobs and ever emotional Americans will be easy prey to all this talk about Jesus loving the poor while building a fence to keep out Mexicans.

Unless Huckabee does a "Howard Dean" and implodes very soon, he is going to be an extremely hard man to stop.

Huckabee is a reactionary's Barack Obama: "visionary", charming, inclusive, feel good, plus ironclad, rigid, repressive, social conservatism. American fascism, when it comes, will have a flavor all its own.

There seems to be some idea that either Hillary or Obama is going to be "crowned" next year and that we will all live happily ever after. It's not that simple. You have to ask yourself how an espèce d'ordure like George W. Bush ever got elected president in the first place and then accept that those very same forces are still at work today. Mike Huckabee is what George Bush only pretends to be. As the Reverend Huckabee would put it, "God help us all". DS

Holy Huckabee! A Pastor's True Calling - Newsweek
Abstract: On the campaign trail, Huckabee quotes Scripture so often that his stump speeches themselves could be mistaken for sermons. He has spent less than $400,000 in Iowa, compared with Romney's estimated $7 million. In a recent speech at Liberty University, the Baptist school founded by Jerry Falwell, Huckabee said his surprise surge in the polls was the result of divine intervention. "There's only one explanation for it, and it's not a human one,"(...) "Faith doesn't just influence me; it really defines me," Huckabee says in a TV ad now running in Iowa. "I don't have to wake up every day wondering, 'What do I need to believe?' " Just in case his meaning is not clear enough, the words CHRISTIAN LEADER flash on the screen in capital letters.(...) In 1992, he resigned from his church and ran for the U.S. Senate.(...) Huckabee ran on a hard-right platform. (On a candidate questionnaire, the Associated Press reported last week, he advocated isolating AIDS patients. The campaign did not respond to a request for comment.) Huckabee lost. He was crushed. "I thought, 'Why?' " he told the parishoners at New Beginnings. Months later, he got his answer. The post of Arkansas lieutenant governor opened up. Political supporters asked him to run and he won a long-shot campaign, making him the Republican No. 2 to Democratic Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. Three years later Tucker was indicted and then convicted on charges related to the Whitewater scandal. Huckabee was governor. He says he knows now why he lost his Senate race: God had other plans for him.(...) Huckabee has gotten noticed in part by politely exploiting the voters' dissatisfaction with his rivals. He has positioned himself as the only true conservative in the campaign, the one candidate who hasn't conveniently inched rightward on issues like abortion or stem cells just in time for '08. He believes the Bible is the inerrant word of God and says creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution. All the same, he is careful not to come off as all hellfire and brimstone. As he likes to say, "I'm a conservative, but I'm not mad at anybody about it." Huckabee hopes his charm will help overcome any qualms secular voters or those of other faiths might have about the possibility of a minister in the Oval Office.(...) Arkansas voters saw the funny, down-to-earth Huckabee. Political pros who tangled with him away from the cameras say the governor they dealt with was anything but easygoing. Republican state Rep. Jeremy Hutchinson says Huckabee has an explosive temper. He recalls one heated conversation with Huckabee about a health bill Hutchinson didn't want to support. Huckabee began screaming at him, and banged his fists on his desk so hard that "trinkets started falling off."(...) Jim Hendren, the state's Senate minority whip, says he gave up trying to debate issues with Huckabee. "It was like you became the enemy," he says. "There wasn't ever a negotiation. It was, 'It's going to be my way or else'." READ IT ALL

Huckabee: and you thought things couldn't get worse?

"Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It's a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext -- who's the Christian in this race? -- would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear."
Charles Krauthammer

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God (any god you like, take your pick) only knows that I don't like to find myself in agreement with Charles Krauthammer about anything, but today I think he's hit the nail on the head as far as Mike Huckabee is concerned.

I would add that Huckabee, like Krauthammer, forms part of America's slide toward its own unique brand of paranoiac, whimpering, Jesus ridden, Disneyesque, something or other that we might even call "fascism", if that word hadn't lost almost all its meaning; as by now the word "Fascist" has become degraded into an all purpose term of abuse without its former precision.

In one speech, however, his CPAC "islamo-fascist" speech, Huckabee went well over the line (YouTube link) directly into classic fascism as defined by former Columbia University Professor Robert O. Paxton in Wikipedia's article on the subject:

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood 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."

Paxton further defines fascism's essence as:

...a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond reach of traditional solutions; 2. belief one’s group is the victim, justifying any action without legal or moral limits; 3. need for authority by a natural leader above the law, relying on the superiority of his instincts; 4. right of the chosen people to dominate others without legal or moral restraint; 5. fear of foreign `contamination."

Here is an extract of the speech at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference, some of whose phrases I have highlighted to emphasize their conformity to Paxton's definition:

We all understand we are in an unconventional war. I have said, and I believe with all my heart, we are not on the brink of; we are in the midst of a World War III. (Applause)

And the Islamic fascists who have declared enmity against us are not interested in settling the types of lines of demarcation that normally settle wars.

Because this is not a war about property. This is not a war about personalities. This is not a war even about power.

What makes this so unusual is that the radical Islamic fascists—not representative of the entire Muslim religion, but the radical Islamic fascists who have declared war on us do so not from a political perspective but from a theological perspective.

And a lot of people I don't think understand that when that is the basis, there can be no negotiation. Because while one may be able to negotiate with diplomats, one does not negotiate with God.

When they declare that their sole purpose is the destruction of Israel, the United States and anything that resembles us, let us be clear. They are not interested in detente. They are not interested in some type of peaceful co-existence.

They are not just interested; they are solely determined for one and only one thing, and that is not our decline. It is our ultimate and absolute annihilation and destruction.

This is a war we cannot and must not lose. Because it doesn't mean that we have a shrinked (ph) border. It means that we have a nonexistence.

They are not marching under the banner of a flag and wearing the uniforms of soldiers and carrying the banner of a country. It is an unconventional war.

And I am convinced it will require an unconventional response, through unconventional means, with special operations and heavy use of intelligence and a different kind of approach to fight it and to win it.

But the one thing that we must be committed to as a nation—be we liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, urban or rural—is that we understand the nature of this enemy and we understand that at stake is not simply higher taxes, changed lifestyles, but existence itself as a people and as a civilization.

We must win this war. (Applause)

Much of the Huckabee "movement" has to do with decontenting and eviscerating language. Try listening to Huckabee answering the evolution question: Youtube link. Or on Gays in the military. Youtube link. Here is my 'guru' William Pfaff on this language question:

"The debasement of language is political, due to the American electoral system, by which campaigning is entirely by unlimited paid television (or radio) advertising, imposing demagogy and simplism, frequently testing the limits of defamation and calumny. It also is due to the power of special interests in Congress and their influence on the public debate in Washington, distorting argument, cultivating euphemism, setting the media agenda, and imposing demagogy." William Pfaff

That debasement of language (in the widest sense of the meaning of "language") is at the heart of it all. Remember "compassionate conservatism"?

What we are seeing with Mike Huckabee is a post 9-11 retread of George W. Bush's year 2000, oxymoronic "compassionate conservatism": with the difference that Huckabee is much more credible than Bush was at delivering that oxymoron and it is an oxymoron that has resonated mightily with the American people and still does.

In fact "Compassionate Conservatism" is a magic phrase that holds in itself all the contradictions of contemporary America and certainly Huckabee is much better suited to deliver it than the hapless present tenant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Huckabee's political skills are of quite another order of magnitude than Dubya's and can only be compared to fellow Arkansan, "Slick Willy" Clinton's. (is there something in the water in Arkansas that loosens the tongue so prodigiously?)

You probably think that the United States cannot produce a worse president than George W. Bush... You are wrong. The best thing about Bush is how clumsy and inept he is. Imagine someone with Bush's ideology and Bill Clinton's political skills. Bush is only Huckabee's "John the Baptist", the "good news" is on the way. DS

"Us" versus "Them"

Mom and Pop - Albrecht Durer - 1507

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A very wise man once said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those that think that there are only two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.

The other day I posted an article by Gabriel Rachman from the Financial Times, dissecting neocon-über-guru Bernard Lewis's view of Islam.

Rachman said something very basic that I'd like to underline.

The tell-tale danger sign in Mr Lewis's argument is that he constantly refers to Muslims in Europe as "they" - an undifferentiated mass. (...) Once you start thinking of the more than 15m Muslims living in Europe as a single, hostile bloc, you close the door to understanding and open the door to racism.

This readiness to quickly divide the world into "us" and "them": this need to stimulate tribalism, is at the heart of right wing populism and the only difference between right wing populism and fascism is the degree of organized violence that they finally produce.

If you observe humanity closely it is hard to apply the word "them" to any mass of it. Perhaps only creatures from outer space could really be "them"... Humanity is "us". This is not to underestimate or obviate the cultural differences that exist. They exist because our species is unique in having memory, unique in its ability to accumulate and tell stories about itself. And also unique in living under the shadow of death, which other species ignore until it is upon them. Geography, climate, memory, language and death are the origins of culture.

Under our important cultural differences we have a species that that is defined by living in society with its fellows. Different cultures facing different geography and climate have devised different strategies to make that possible, but all cultures have been faced with the same problem of integrating large groups of "us" into something manageable and productive enough to survive.

Most if not all of these strategies for social survival place value on such concepts as truth and peace and what the Chinese philosopher Mencius called, "human heartedness" or "innate goodness". His famous example (hat to Wikipedia) is called "The Four Beginnings" (benevolence, righteousness, respect and the capacity to distinguish right from wrong).. To show innate goodness, Mencius used the example of a child falling down a well. Witnesses of this event immediately feel:

• Alarm and distress, not to gain friendship with the child's parents, nor to seek the praise of their neighbors and friends, nor because they dislike the reputation [of lack of humanity if they did not rescue the child]...

• The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity; the feeling of shame and dislike is the beginning of righteousness; the feeling of deference and compliance is the beginning of propriety; and the feeling of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

• Men have these Four Beginnings just as they have their four limbs. Having these Four Beginnings, but saying that they cannot develop them is to destroy themselves.

These values make it possible for human beings to live together, to eat, to breed and to buy and to sell... and to realize their humanity.

Mencius's Four Beginnings could probably be a practical starting point for a constructive dialog, leading to peaceful coexistence, between any groups of human beings who have ever inhabited this planet. The challenge today with globalization and the phenomenon of mass immigration is to simultaneously respect that climate, geography, memory and death have made us all "different" while our common humanness has made us all "the same". DS

America's very own road to fascism

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Below are some excerpts from a wonderful article about nascent, American fascism in Slate. Many people use the word fascism without any practical experience of it. I lived in Spain at the end of the Franco regime, which was universally (except to this day by Spanish fascists) considered "fascist". Sinclair Lewis said that if fascism ever came to the USA it would come wrapped in the flag and wielding the cross. Certainly that would be a fair description of Franco's "Nacional Catolicismo," whose legacy is today's Spain, with its vibrant, regional-separatist movements and its empty churches. Franco had been in power for nearly 40 years and his regime was very decadent when I encountered it, and the country had changed under its feet; but one thing that stuck with me as characteristic of the universal fascist mentality was the paranoia/phobia about the free circulation of information. To give you a wonderful example: Madrid taxis were not allowed to carry radio-dispatch, CB radios until nearly ten years after Franco's death... They had been in use in the USA since the 1930s. My impression is that, human nature being what it is and the authoritarian, malignant-narcissist type being universal; that without free movement of information and the will to use it, in the natural course of events, beatings, torture, corruption and every other abuse occur as night follows day. Freedom has to won perpetually on a day to day basis. DS
Abstract: There's been something weird about the denouement of the midterm elections, starting with the pronounced absence of Democratic triumphalism. The prevailing mood has been stunned relief rather than glee, and nobody seems eager to delve too deeply into what exactly it was about George W. Bush that the voters so roundly rejected. Put another way, what were the sins included under the shorthand summary for the president's failures, "Iraq"? For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a "great many Americans" would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? "Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work," she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush's policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our own reality"?(...) We have become such "good Americans" that we no longer have the moral imagination to picture what it might be like to be in a bureaucratic category that voids our human rights, be it "enemy combatant" or "illegal immigrant." Thus, in the week before the election, hardly a ripple answered the latest decree from the Bush administration: Detainees held in CIA prisons were forbidden from telling their lawyers what methods of interrogation were used on them, presumably so they wouldn't give away any of the top-secret torture methods that we don't use. Cautiously, I look back on that as the crystallizing moment of Bushworld: tautological as a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, absurd as a Marx Brothers movie, and scary as a Kafka novel.(...) If the midterm election was a referendum on nothing more than Bush's competence, then the message the Republicans have gotten is: Next time, make it work. READ IT ALL

Gingrich "reexamines" free speech

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It says in my profile, on the top of the page here, that I am an "expatriate", but if Gingrich has his way you'll soon be able to consider me an "exile". Not only have these fools not been able to catch Osama bin Laden, they give me the distinct impression that bin Laden has won his war... He has destroyed the United States or what was truly worth defending of the United States: what any American anywhere considers his/her birthright. DS
Abstract: Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism. Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message. "We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994. Gingrich spoke to about 400 state and local power brokers last night at the annual Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment award dinner, which fetes people and organizations that stand up for freedom of speech. READ IT ALL