BUSH BEGONE

Get Straight

Let me start off with the starkest fact about the 2004 election:  it's all about stopping Bush.

I strongly support Gov Howard Dean, MD;  I believe he will be the Democratic nominee, and that he is the best choice.  But, it almost doesn't matter who is the opposition candidate.  Whoever it is must replace the Grinch who is stealing America,  George W Bush.

If Americans don't stop George W Bush in this election,  it won't matter what happens to the Democratic party after that.  America will be remade in the Fascist image;  many of us who oppose that will probably be dead or in jail.  This election is just as important as November, 1932,  or January, 1933 in Germany.  This election is about fundamental political principles.

The incumbent President, George W Bush, is a radical far-right Republican who has undertaken to redesign America in his own nitwit fashion. For Bush and his cronies,  the Constitution does not matter.  Equality and social justice does not matter.  The plight of the poor and unfortunate does not matter.  What does matter is the welfare of his aristocratic friends, his class.  This is a man who consorts with crowned heads,  not commoners.

Note,  these are not Cassandra words; this is real.  The last time I said anything like this was 1964.  In 1964,  there was a vast difference between LBJ's philosophy  and that of Goldwater.  Now,  Goldwater's descendants have come to power,  and they mean it.

As I said in a previous letter,  laugh if you like.  La-De-Da.  Walter's finally gone off his rocker.  But,  here is Bush's America:

Had Enough?  Let me know, if not.  There are many more examples. Please save me some work:  Check out the conservative political websites.  They'll tell you the whole story, right then and there, in their own words.

Do you remember that Hitler wrote "MEIN KAMPF", and no one believed him?

Hexed America

That's what's happened:  the conservatives hexed us.

The triumph of conservatives - the far right - was long in coming,  starting as it did in 1964.  It was nurtured just enough,  in Reagan's California Governorship,  to grow and take control of the California Republican Party.  From there,  it gained strength and took over the national Republican Party following Gerald Ford's 1976 defeat.   When Reagan got lucky in 1980 with a little help from the Ayatollah Khomeini, the conservatives became the right wing Establishment.  They got even with their moderate fellow-travelers, the Rockefeller (moderate) Republicans,  such as John Anderson.  Does anyone remember Anderson?  How about Gerry Ford?

Conservatives never accepted Clinton's election. Almost as soon as the 1992 election was over,  wealthy conservatives started to undermine the new Democratic Administration.  Picky little things - like who would man the White House Travel Office - became major controversies.  The real point of the Travel Office episode was that, unlike previous Presidents,  Clinton was not entitled to fill the office with his appointees.  Instead,  the incoming Administration was being forced to accept Republican holdovers.

That same partisan, poisonous, Republican philosophy was applied over and over again to almost everything the Clinton people did.  Republican propaganda was especially effective in the South and rural States,  making possible Newt Gingrich's rise to power.  The importance of the Gingrich "Contract with America" is not merely its political content,  but its claim of representing the country.  What Gingrich did in "nationalizing" the election was mesmerize large numbers of non-Southern populations into believing they had common cause with Southerners.  So, in 1994, the fundamentalist, conservative movement came of age and expanded beyond its rural Southern origins.

What we discovered about Clinton in the following years disgusted almost everyone.  His re-election,  like that of Nixon's,  was the triumph of a rare political master over his enemies.  And, like Nixon, his Administration was doomed to failure by the master's flaws.  Opportunism and vanity overcame political principle,  not just among those in power but also among the opposition.  Corruption corrupts.

Bush's election was the consequence of the creeping rot.  It doesn't matter whether the Florida vote was correctly assigned.  What matters is that there was a Florida, 2000, at all.  The Bush Administration was born of the corruption of its predecessor.

Hillary Clinton's outrageous comment, that there was a "vast Right Wing conspiracy" against her husband was not exactly true. Her statement was mainly defective in underestimating the extent of the right-wing conspiracy.  It the very pervasiveness of the far right which is the hex on America.

All along,  conservatives had the advantages of wealth and position and, especially, extreme fervor.  Thus, they grew and grew,  until they were able to control the entire government.  First the Congress, then the President,  and, soon, the Courts.  They've got most of the media frightened of them,  since their advertising money can be directed elsewhere if they don't tow the line.  (That's why most of you haven't heard anything really political for years,  unless you consider CNN's namby-pamby "Crossfire" real.)  They've also cowed lots of other, once independent, institutions such as National Public Radio (NPR).  They've bought and paid for writers,  whose books they publish.

As in all far-reaching revolutions,  the reactionary forces are corrupt.  There is no limit to the power they seek.  Having nearly thrown out a President,  and appointed one of their own as a replacement,  they now want to control American society.  On broad fronts,  from school vouchers to privatized social security,  a privatized Post Office,  and an end to civil rights protections,  the far right means to mold America in its own image.

That image is the status quo ante,  and, for the reactionaries, "ante" is at least 1896; maybe even before the Civil War.  It is the fiction of a "golden age" right-wingers hold before them,  of a day when heaven and hell and everything between were in their right places.  A day when virtue was recognized and rewarded;  when the lower classes of men respected their betters.

Opponents of these reactionaries have history on their side.  Conservatives have much to fear,  including the return of the Guillotine. More importantly, reactionary regimes rarely last as long as a generation.  The reasoning is the same as that involved in time travel:  you cannot change anything or you wouldn't be here.  For things to be the same as they once were,  everything has to be as it was.  You cannot restore the bourgeois aristocracy,  the Victorian Era,  without also abolishing computers, TV, radio, the movies, cars, airplanes, microwave popcorn - need I go on?  You get it,  don't you?

Our age cannot be the age of reactionaries' dreams,  or even conservatives' wishes,  because the stuff of our age is immiscible with those fantasies.  This "contradiction" may take a while to enforce itself,  but it will.  Corrective forces will arise when and where we aren't looking for them,  but eventually, retrospectively,  everyone will say what happened had to happen.  Read Tolstoy's "Lecture on History" after "War and Peace."

So, it is my faith the evil of the conservative hex will be lifted from us, sooner or later.  I hope it is in my lifetime.

For those who will not heed my words,  remember the Republican song, "Don't Worry.  Be Happy."  La-De-Da.  Your fate is assured.

5 Big Things

In this Presidential election,  it will be important for the candidate who would defeat Bush to summarize what must be done.  This cannot be a long list of detailed promises.

Herewith,  in no particular order, my suggested list of large Presidential promises:

1.  American foreign adventurism must end.  The Conquest of Iraq must come to an end.  We must seek reconciliation with our allies and friends,  and return to the United Nations as one nation among many.  America's foreign policy should be multi-lateral,  not unilateral and not isolationist.

 

2.  The destruction of America's Middle Class must stop,  and things put right. As many as 14 million jobs are about to be exported;  not just low-end jobs,  but so-called "good jobs" as well.  We must re-affirm America's promise to workers of job opportunities, fair wages,  and a middle class life.

 

3.  Social Security and Medicare must be guaranteed as they were intended, not privatized.  The Republican Medicare legislation needs serious amendment.  We must re-affirm America's promise of support for the old, disabled and unfortunate.

 

4.  Americans must be guaranteed equal opportunity to fulfill their dreams in America.  Ending discrimination and unreasoned hatred is long overdue.  Our strength is uniting people, not dividing them.

 

5.  The Federal government must exercise budgetary discipline based on reasonable economic ideas. The government should not make some people rich at the expense of others.  The influence of the rich, the powerful and their lobbyists in Washington must be reduced, so that, as Lincoln said, "... government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth."

 

All of that was captured in the French Revolution by,

LIBERTY, FRATERNITY,  EQUALITY

It's time.

December 24, 2003

Last update: 11/02/2007

© Copyright California Expert Software 2007

All rights reserved.