Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next.
Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
-- Legendary Journalist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
The GOP, RIP
They're on the way out - and good riddance
by Justin Raimondo
September 8, 2006
For a good 75 years, the Republican Party has been the party of
conservatism, the anointed vehicle for the hopes and dreams of those who
believe in limited government and seek to preserve the legacy of the
Founding Fathers.
No more.
It hasn't been true for quite a while, but at least the Republicans were
rhetorically committed to conservative principles right up until the second
Bush presidency. George W. campaigned on a platform that old-time
conservatives found at least recognizable: he opined that Americans ought to
be able to keep a larger proportion of their income than the Clinton regime
found permissible, and even on foreign affairs he sounded like a Taft
Republican of the old school, promising a more "humble" foreign policy.
How far we have wandered off that road!
Under George W. Bush, today's GOP is in the vanguard of the biggest
expansion of governmental power since 27 B.C., the year Octavian was crowned
with laurel leaves in the Roman Senate, and the yeoman's republic on the
Tiber morphed into an Empire.
Government spending has not only increased, it has engulfed us in a
veritable tidal wave of unsustainable debt and force-marched us to the brink
of bankruptcy. More ominously, the coercive power of government has expanded
exponentially, and basic civil liberties - the right to a fair trial, the
right to be secure in our own homes, the right to speak out against
government policies without being harassed, spied on, and otherwise
encumbered by said government - are in danger.
If, on the home front, the Republicans represent a brazen authoritarianism
that seeks the overthrow of the Constitution, on the foreign policy front
they are also revolutionaries. Professor Claes Ryn, the noted conservative
scholar and past president of the Philadelphia Society, calls them
"Jacobins," after the French revolutionaries who sent so many of their
enemies to the guillotine. The Jacobins sought the revolutionary
transformation of society via a purifying violence, and their brief rule was
a paroxysm of nihilistic carnage unprecedented in the history of European
nations. The neoconservatives, with their self-proclaimed objective of
"creative destruction," are playing a similarly sadistic game in the Middle
East today. Having seized the reins of government in Washington and
commandeered the U.S. military in the service of their hubris, the neocons
are on the march, like Orcs gathering at Isengard, shrieking their war cries
and shaking their spears - first at Iraq, and now at Iran.
I won't go into the history of how the neocons migrated from the Democratic
Party to the GOP, since that subject has been covered, here and elsewhere,
in mind-numbing detail. Everybody knows about the neocons by now: Alcove B,
the Trotskyist Irving Kristol and his fellow apostates, James Burnham and
Max Shachtman, the infiltration of the Democratic Party by Shachtman and his
confreres, and their effective control over the so-called "Scoop" Jackson
wing of the party. Their own whining and complaining memoirs, of which there
are far too many, have informed us of their reasons for abandoning their
historic home and migrating to the GOP.
It was the Vietnam War, and the whole issue of what foreign policy is best
suited to the U.S., that precipitated their break with the mainstream of
their party. The neocons - grouped around Commentary magazine, and, in the
alternate universe of left-liberal politics, around Social Democrats, USA -
stomped out of the Democratic Party when that party rejected the failed
policies of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In rallying around the candidacy of
Eugene McCarthy, and later, George McGovern, the party's activist core
rejected the Cold War liberalism that had prompted John F. Kennedy to mount
the Bay of Pigs invasion - and vaingloriously declare that we would "pay any
price, bear any burden" in the service of an interventionist foreign policy
devoted to upholding "freedom" around the world.
Boring old hypocrites like Hubert Horatio Humphrey - a hero to the neocons -
foundered on the rocks of the Vietnam conflict, and the pro-war AFL-CIO,
long a bastion of neocon-Shachtmanite influence, had already passed the apex
of its power. Their policies discredited, their political fortunes in ruins,
the neocons retreated to the tall grass and regrouped to fight another day.
The first stage of their strategy for a protracted conflict was a complete
ideological makeover, a radical transfiguration that would catapult them to
the opposite side of the political spectrum - but without, of course, in any
way altering their core principle: devotion to the cult of the war god.
Militarism, not only as a foreign policy but as the organizing principle of
the domestic order, is the central doctrine of the neoconservative creed,
and they have never betrayed it no matter what their party registration.
The neocons, in their takeover of what used to be the conservative movement,
have Prussianized the GOP. The movement of Taft and Goldwater, of the
Chambers of Commerce and the Rotarians of the old America where prudence and
modesty, rather than revolution and grandiosity, were in style, is no more.
In its place is a party that stands for what the neocons call "national
greatness," which derides prudence as cowardice, and knows nothing of
modesty. Their role model is no longer Barry Goldwater, who questioned such
government-guaranteed entitlements as Social Security, but Otto von
Bismarck, whose name is a byword for militarism - and who introduced a
government welfare scheme similar to our own Social Security system well
before the New Deal came to America.
For libertarians, the GOP is a total loss: like the neocons and the old
"Scoop Jackson" Democrats, they are bad on everything, including domestic
policy. Today, whatever skeptics of the government's power to effect
positive change, at home and abroad, still exist inside the Republican Party
are lonely guardians of a nearly forgotten tradition. This is the party of
Big Government, and Big Ambitions overseas: in the new Bushian GOP we are
witnessing the triumph of "National Greatness" Republicanism. Gone is the
plain, republican cloth coat: in its place GOPers flaunt the imperial
purple.
Libertarians no longer have any place in the GOP coalition, and any who
remain will have long since betrayed their ostensible devotion to liberty.
The Republican Party is today hopelessly authoritarian. Maddened by war, its
leaders are so corrupted by power and their desperation to hold on to it,
that they will resort to any tactic, any subterfuge, no matter how
contemptible and/or self-defeating. A good example is their secret funding
of the campaign of Democrat Joe Lieberman against their own candidate for
U.S. Senate in Connecticut. As Insight magazine reports, the GOP's Karl Rove
steered millions of dollars from big Republican contributors into
Lieberman's coffers.
Lieberman, an advocate of Big Government and out-of-control spending if ever
there was one, supported the president on the Iraq war question and has
signed on to the campaign to provoke a similar conflict with Iran. His
defeat in the Democratic primary at the hands of Ned Lamont was a big blow
to the War Party. It marked the effective end of neoconservative influence
within the party of Jefferson, and represented a real setback for the neocon
strategy of effectively controlling the foreign policy stances of both major
parties - a maneuver that has worked well in peacetime, but is always frayed
as the consequences of our interventionist policies come back to haunt us in
the form of body bags.
Republican support for a dyed-in-the-wool statist like Lieberman is proof
positive that the GOP leadership could care less about their ostensible
principles when it comes to domestic policy. In truth, they care about one
issue and one issue only: the war, including the one to come. In supporting
Lieberman, they are, in effect, saying: To hell with less government. We'll
settle for more war!
As Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, the founding father of "netroots"
Democratic activism, has said, there is room for libertarians in the
Democratic Party - and especially now, when the Libertarian Party has thrown
its wonderful platform overboard and adopted a self-consciously "pragmatic"
stance that has rendered it indistinguishable from the majors. If anyone is
skeptical of government power and its dangerous increase in the era of Bush,
he or she is probably a Democrat.
This skepticism of government power is particularly sharp when it comes to
critiquing American foreign policy. Although there is a growing contingent
of Republican critics of the war, in Congress and among the ranks, the
Democratic Party activists who are the most energized are solidly opposed to
our presence in Iraq. Significantly, many are extending their critique of
intervention in that particular instance to a more generalized skepticism of
our power to democratize the world at gunpoint.
This doubt of military power abroad is bound, in many cases, to translate
into a similarly jaundiced view of the promiscuous employ of government
coercion on the home front. Not always, but often - and certainly more
often, as the years of the "war on terrorism" drag on and the proto-fascist
Republicans launch fresh assaults on civil liberties.
The sad decline of the GOP into a party that could credibly be described as
scary, if not outright fascist, is bound to depress many longtime
Republicans, particularly those with libertarian inclinations. Yet I would
not linger over this gravestone too long, mourning the demise of a tradition
remembered by few. And it isn't all bad news, either. The good news is that
the American people are not going to look with favor on a party that stands
for perpetual war and eternal debt. Against all evidence and common sense,
Republican leaders defend a war that has rightly been called the biggest
strategic disaster in our history, one that even a full third of GOP voters
reject as not worth fighting. Against the principles of their modern leaders
and their own platform, they are the biggest promoters and enablers of
government expansionism, a trend that has provoked a rebuke even from
Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a potential presidential candidate and GOP
stalwart with impeccable conservative credentials.
Republicans are headed for a drubbing at the polls, and it couldn't have
happened to a more deserving party. Ever since the neocon takeover of this
administration, they have been headed for disaster, and now that it is
finally striking I just want to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of their
extended and agonizing demise. That's right, "stay the course," guys! Until
you fall right into that inviting abyss.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9669
__._,_.___
--
Who is Keyser Soze? He is supposed to be Turkish. Some say his father was
German. Nobody believed he was real. Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody
that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody
could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest
trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Keaton always said, "I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him." Well I
believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze. - Verbal
Kint
"They seek him here, they seek him there,
"those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
"Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
"That damned elusive Pimpernel."
"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the
impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"
The little things are infinitely more important."
"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for
trifles."
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