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  29 July 2003

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Provided below this post are the re-posted articles accumulated on my BLOGSPOT BLOG over the last few weeks.

This may be required to provide some context for my comments. Enjoy.


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Getting the Blues, Peter Schrag, The Nation, 17 July 2003

A little older article, but I find it supportive of one of my pet theories, i.e. the Republican administration essentially waged economic warfare against "Liberal" States of this Union through proxies. Aside from the high level of influence large Corporations have within a Republican run government, for example the crew Cheney invited to his "Energy Policy" meeting at the beginning of the Republican administration's term, the Republican political apparatus also has ready allies capable of doing behind-the-scenes mischief. The ENRON fraud against the State of California has already been revealed. The media has been skillfully steered away from associating ENRON-like activities with the Republican political agenda. However, there is certainly enough smoke there to look for a fire or two. All this is to suggest that Republican deceipt has not been accomplished only in the arena of foreign policy.

"In the winter and early spring of 2001, when Dick Cheney was telling Californians that their sky-high electricity bills were their own tree-hugging fault, you might have thought the Administration was just covering for Enron CEO Ken Lay and George W. Bush's other Texas energy friends and, as an added bonus, sticking it to the lotus-eaters on the Left Coast who'd given Al Gore his million-vote California majority.

But that was just the paranoia of the innocent. In the past year, as the nation's deficit-ridden states were pleading for federal help, Washington was telling them all to drop dead--reserving harshest treatment for the "blues," meaning the liberal states that voted for Democrats. While California was not alone, it was certainly the biggest target, as the only large state with a Democratic governor, Democratic legislature and a Congressional delegation dominated (32-to-20) by Democrats. "They view California," said a Washington lobbyist, "as a foreign land."

"Late in April, as states like Oregon were preparing to close schools weeks before the end of the term, and others were dumping hundreds of thousands off the Medicaid rolls, laying off cops and raising college tuition to close a collective two-year deficit estimated by the nonpartisan National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) at upwards of $100 billion, Grover Norquist said he'd like to see a state or two go bankrupt."

"Norquist, who runs the conservative Americans for Tax Reform and heads what Bill Moyers has called a politburo of conservative strategy, is also joined at the hip with Karl Rove, the President's political brain and one of his chief policy advisers. "I hope a state has real trouble getting its act together," Norquist told the New York Times's David Firestone."
[ Sun Jul 27, 08:22:45 PM | Ghost Dansing
Iraq Flap Shakes Rice's Image, Controversy Stirs Questions of Reports Unread, Statements Contradicted,Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, 27 July 2003


In this article:

The problem was NEVER THE INTELLIGENCE. While the mark falls closer to the Republican President's responsiblity for the "Africa, Uranium, Iraq" fiasco, what should still be painfully obvious to all observers: DUBYA BUSH is NOT TAKING RESPONSIBILITY for his STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS!

The entire effort was an influence campaign designed to coopt the American People. Dubya knows it, and so does the world. The intelligence contained proper caveat, but only that which supported the Republican administration's war goals was accepted.

"The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq's nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false."

"Most prominent is her claim that the White House had not heard about CIA doubts about an allegation that Iraq sought uranium in Africa before the charge landed in Bush's State of the Union address on Jan. 28; in fact, her National Security Council staff received two memos doubting the claim and a phone call from CIA Director George J. Tenet months before the speech. Various other of Rice's public characterizations of intelligence documents and agencies' positions have been similarly cast into doubt."
[ Sun Jul 27, 04:09:34 PM | Ghost Dansing
Blasts at liberal 'traitors' win US book war, Lawrence Donegan, The Observer, 27 July 2003
Another
exhibit for the museum of Republican marketing.

I've mentioned before that Republicanism is all about marketing. Republican political philosophy has been well marketed and core concepts are repeated again and again by true believers in a regurgitative mantra. Coulter and company are quite shrill and even get some negative critique from their own cadre. However, there is some demand for a Political philosophy that is marketed with the same depth of insight and superficial thought processes as a beer commercial.

"Despite being widely ridiculed for its tendentious logic - even by right-wing reviewers - Treason has sold more than 500,000 copies in just three weeks."

[ Sun Jul 27, 03:54:04 PM | Ghost Dansing
The Mouths That Roared, 'Treason' by Ann Coulter ,Reviewed by Anne Applebaum, Washington Post, 7/27/03


This is a very nice review of a couple overtly agitational right-wing books:

I've mentioned before that squelching opposing opinion and facts is a hallmark of Republican political philosophy. A right-wing avante garde propagandist is, of course, this silly woman named Anne Coulter, who simply makes modern Republicanism explicit.

These excerpts from the review pretty much sum it up:

"Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason."

"Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy."

"Liberals attack their country and then go into diarrhea panic if anyone criticizes them."

"Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn't slowed them down."

While those Liberal founding fathers of this Nation were indeed treasonous to the Crown of England, I don't suppose Coulter intends "treason" as a term of endearment.

To reinforce how this is received by a sychophantic audience, a poster from
my favorite news website provides an excerpt of the review and then comments:

Applebaum: ''Yet about halfway through Treason, an extended rant on these subjects, I felt a strong urge to get up, throw the book across the room, and join up with whatever Leninist-Trotskyite-Marxist political parties still exist in America.''

Lucianne"You have,dear. Look for whom you are writing."
[ Sun Jul 27, 05:43:46 AM | Ghost Dansing
It Looked Good on Paper, Daniel Altman, New York Times, 27 July 2003


Speaking of Republican propaganda, here is an interesting article which discusses an example of pseudo-academic hyperbole which is used to fuel right-wing economic thinking. This is unusual, since the hyperbole is seldom revisited when flaws are revealed.

From the article:

"When word of his findings entered the public domain, Professor Boskin instantly became a darling of the business news media. "The doom-and-gloom red-ink budgetary forecasts of recent years have overlooked some astoundingly good news for the government," crowed Barron's in its issue of June 16. BusinessWeek declared Professor Boskin "clearly back on top of his game" in its June 30 issue, calling him "the Alan Greenspan of his generation."
[ Fri Jul 25, 11:03:44 PM | Ghost Dansing
Analysis: U.S. wants more help from allies, Roland Flamini, UPI Senior Writer, UPI, 7/24/2003 8:03 PM
The
UPI Report indicates: "The Bush administration is almost phobic about expanding the U.N.'s role because that would let in France and Germany the two leading opponents of the U.S.-led war. But even some Republican analysts blame the current White House policy of going it alone in Iraq for President George Bush's declining ratings -- and they wonder how long the administration can live with the damage."

Regardless whether one is pro-Iraq war or anti-Iraq war, this Republican administration botched this entire episode from beginning to end. A failed foreign policy provides context for a failed bid as a world leader. Now, holding the proverbial "bag", the Republican administration will have to "eat crow" and re-enlist the good feelings of Europe and the UN in order to obtain broader participation, and relieve the economic burden of unilateral (or thin coalition) conquest. The Republican administation adds failure in foreign policy to its failed domestic policy.

[ Fri Jul 25, 12:02:55 PM | Ghost Dansing
WMD May as Well Be a Four-Letter Word, Al Kamen, Washington Post, July 25, 2003
Al Kamen says: "The administration has been moving quickly to quash the brouhaha over the president's use of questionable allegations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the State of the Union address in January."

"A reliable staple of past addresses, the four words did not cross his lips during two public appearances in Pennsylvania and Michigan on Thursday," Reuters reporter Patricia Wilson wrote yesterday. "Nor did Bush use the phrase on Wednesday in a formal update on the progress U.S. forces have made in Iraq that he delivered from the White House Rose Garden."

Go figure. This entire episode is very revealing.
[ Fri Jul 25, 08:46:54 AM | Ghost Dansing
New GOP chair accuses Democrats of feeding 'steady diet of protest and pessimism', Ron Fornier, AP Political Writer, Newsday, 25 July 2003
The Republican party's first and formost
propaganda strategy, both internally and externally, is to squelch criticism. The theme that criticising the Republican administration, Republican ideas, philosophy and policy is always somehow irreverent, irrelevant, unpatriotic, unhelpful or downright malicious, is a typical theme. Also, the idea that the Democrats offer no alternatives is also prevalent in Republican rhetoric.

The alternatives offered by the Democratic party are like night and day. The Republican political philosophy is, at root, government laissez faire, pro-Corporate, spoils, and oligarchical. They can deny it, but whenever there is a contest, look at where a Republican politician sides. The Republican party has institutionalized organized influence peddling. All Republican efforts end up in deregulation, which allows that which was formally illegal to be legal activities for large corporations. If Enron could have hung on a little longer, without getting caught in their own deceit, Dick Cheney and the boys would have fixed it so that the Enron model would have been the status quo. Also, with Republican efforts Government spending always ends up in the Corporate profit margin, regardless of the issue; education reform ends up in vouchers to private schools, reforms in medicine end up with subsidies to large insurance Corporations and caps on amounts injured parties can claim in a law suite, and tax cuts always go to the wealthiest people in the country, because, well, just because. The examples go on day after day. The Democrats alternative is very simple. They might actually govern; protecting the citizens that have no other protections or avenues of influence, other than the government that is supposed to be working for them. For the Republicans, government is just an extension of the Corporate boardroom.
[ Fri Jul 25, 08:06:43 AM | Ghost Dansing
Cheney says war critics ignore proof, Joseph Curl, The Washington Times, 25 July 2003
In terms of
spin, what Cheney ignores is that the proof that he cites was true in 1998, when the UN inspectors departed, and the same proof that was in place for the last decade. The case for unilateral, premptive war was not built on defiance of the UN, humanitarian issues, the fact that Saddam was a "bad man", or all of the other truisms that have been around since Desert Storm and before. It was built on an imminent threat of WMD (including a reconstituted nuclear program) and proximity to terrorists who might recieve WMD from the regime.

So, instead of ridiculing Clinton for attacking Al Qaida with cruise missiles (to divert attention from the Lewinsky scandal), and decrying the Clinton administration's intervention in the Balkans on behalf of the UN, for humanitarian purposes, the Republicans should have been pressing Clinton for more direct military action everywhere, including Iraq.

Confrontation with Iraq was a political agenda for this Republican administration on inauguration day. 9/11 actually diverted their attention for a brief period. But ultimately, the focus returned to Iraq.

The message from the adminstration was nothing less than information designed to market war with Iraq.

If you doubt this, imagine if the UN would have requested the Clinton administration intervene in Iraq, militarily, in 1998. The Republicans would have been screaming! Now, with their knickers down around his ankles, Cheney and the rest are simply aghast at Iraq's chronic defiance of the UN. And of course, since they haven't found the imminent WMD, that and other side-bars become the "real reason" for the war.


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