February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Stern’s students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again in my early twenties, their phraseology becoming imbedded in my own consciousness.
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe’s most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
He is not a man of the Left. He would have been on the Right side of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriat—seriously anticommunist, and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to the “revolutionary students” of 1968. He might have described himself as a conservative social democrat, of the sort that might plausibly gravitate toward neoconservatism. An essay of his in Commentary in the mid-1970s drew my attention to the magazine for the first time.
But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding something about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon in the early 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary regularly and was beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently “Kristolized.”
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bush’s policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern’s letters to the editor in the Times (“Now the word ‘freedom’ has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. … The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society—trust—has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now ‘freedom’ is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn’t demean the concept without injuring the substance.”) In the profile of him in the Times, he sounds an alarm of the very phenomenon Roberts, Raimondo, and Rockwell are speaking about openly.
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany’s foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as “the instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” This “pseudo–religious transfiguration of politics … largely ensured his success.” The Times’ Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood—drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. “There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences.”
This is characteristic Stern—measured and precise—but signals to me that the warning from the libertarians ought not be simply dismissed as rhetorical excess. I don’t think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them —hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported—generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons—cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can’t bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve.
Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component in the rise of Nazism—but I don’t think the proto-fascist mood is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment—but these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the presumption to oppose George W. Bush’s wars for freedom and democracy. The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United States as “God marching on earth.”
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn’t yet experienced organized street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing—in an unambiguous fashion—to jail its critics. The administration certainly has its far Right ideologues—the Washington Post’s recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence. But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and the Bill of Rights.
And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.
February 14, 2005 Issue
Click for copyright permissions!
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Full Version: The Brown Shirting of America
Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
I started this thread because there have been a few articles by the conservative press in the last couple of weeks on this topic.
It appears that the Bush administration and the Red/Blue state divide is not just worrying the liberals here.
I thought it was a good topic to debate, please give your opinions.
The web site is here:
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html
It appears that the Bush administration and the Red/Blue state divide is not just worrying the liberals here.
I thought it was a good topic to debate, please give your opinions.
The web site is here:
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html
Sherry's link:
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html
Rockwell, Roberts & Raimondo ..... oh my!
http://www.amconmag.com/2005_02_14/article.html
Rockwell, Roberts & Raimondo ..... oh my!
QUOTE(SherryB @ Feb 14 2005, 08:28 PM)
February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Stern’s students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again in my early twenties, their phraseology becoming imbedded in my own consciousness.
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe’s most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
He is not a man of the Left. He would have been on the Right side of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriat—seriously anticommunist, and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to the “revolutionary students” of 1968. He might have described himself as a conservative social democrat, of the sort that might plausibly gravitate toward neoconservatism. An essay of his in Commentary in the mid-1970s drew my attention to the magazine for the first time.
But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding something about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon in the early 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary regularly and was beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently “Kristolized.”
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bush’s policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern’s letters to the editor in the Times (“Now the word ‘freedom’ has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. … The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society—trust—has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now ‘freedom’ is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn’t demean the concept without injuring the substance.”) In the profile of him in the Times, he sounds an alarm of the very phenomenon Roberts, Raimondo, and Rockwell are speaking about openly.
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany’s foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as “the instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” This “pseudo–religious transfiguration of politics … largely ensured his success.” The Times’ Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood—drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. “There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences.”
This is characteristic Stern—measured and precise—but signals to me that the warning from the libertarians ought not be simply dismissed as rhetorical excess. I don’t think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them —hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported—generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons—cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can’t bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve.
Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component in the rise of Nazism—but I don’t think the proto-fascist mood is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment—but these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the presumption to oppose George W. Bush’s wars for freedom and democracy. The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United States as “God marching on earth.”
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn’t yet experienced organized street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing—in an unambiguous fashion—to jail its critics. The administration certainly has its far Right ideologues—the Washington Post’s recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence. But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and the Bill of Rights.
And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.
February 14, 2005 Issue
Click for copyright permissions!
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
[right][snapback]52074[/snapback][/right]
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
Hunger for Dictatorship
War to export democracy may wreck our own.
by Scott McConnell
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible. It led me to graduate school, and if I later became diverted from academia into journalism, it was no fault of his. In grad school, I took his seminars and he sat on my orals and dissertation committee. As was likely the case for many of Stern’s students, I read sections of his books The Politics of Cultural Despair and The Failure of Illiberalism again and again in my early twenties, their phraseology becoming imbedded in my own consciousness.
Stern had emigrated from Germany as a child in 1938 and spent a career exploring how what may have been Europe’s most civilized country could have turned to barbarism. Central to his work was the notion that the readiness to abandon democracy has deep cultural roots in German soil and that many Europeans, not only Germans, yearned for the safeties and certainties of something like fascism well before the emergence of fascist parties. One could not come away from his classes without a sense of the fragility of democratic systems, a deep gratitude for their success in the Anglo-American world, and a wary belief that even here human nature and political circumstance could bring something else to the fore.
He is not a man of the Left. He would have been on the Right side of the spectrum of the Ivy League professoriat—seriously anticommunist, and an open and courageous opponent of university concessions to the “revolutionary students” of 1968. He might have described himself as a conservative social democrat, of the sort that might plausibly gravitate toward neoconservatism. An essay of his in Commentary in the mid-1970s drew my attention to the magazine for the first time.
But he did not go further in that direction, perhaps understanding something about the neocons that I missed at the time. One afternoon in the early 1980s, during a period when I was reading Commentary regularly and was beginning to write for it, he told me, clearly enjoying the pun, that my views had apparently “Kristolized.”
It is impossible to overstate my pleasure at being on the same side of the barricades with him today. That side is, of course, that of the antiwar movement; the side of a conservatism (or liberalism) that finds Bush’s policies reckless and absurd and the neoconservatives who inspire and implement them deluded and dangerous. In the past year, I had seen Stern’s letters to the editor in the Times (“Now the word ‘freedom’ has become a newly invoked justification for the occupation of a country that did not attack us, whose people have not greeted our soldiers as liberators. … The world knows that all manner of traditional rights associated with freedom are threatened in our own country. ... The essential element of a democratic society—trust—has been weakened, as secrecy, mendacity and intimidation have become the hallmarks of this administration. ... Now ‘freedom’ is being emptied of meaning and reduced to a slogan. But one doesn’t demean the concept without injuring the substance.”) In the profile of him in the Times, he sounds an alarm of the very phenomenon Roberts, Raimondo, and Rockwell are speaking about openly.
To an audience at the Leo Baeck Institute, on the occasion of receiving a prize from Germany’s foreign minister, Stern noted that Hitler had seen himself as “the instrument of providence” and fused his “racial dogma with Germanic Christianity.” This “pseudo–religious transfiguration of politics … largely ensured his success.” The Times’ Chris Hedges asked Stern about the parallels between Germany then and America now. He spoke of national mood—drawing on a lifetime of scholarship that saw fascism coming from below as much as imposed by elites above. “There was a longing in Europe for fascism before the name was ever invented... for a new authoritarianism with some kind of religious orientation and above all a greater communal belongingness. There are some similarities in the mood then and the mood now, although significant differences.”
This is characteristic Stern—measured and precise—but signals to me that the warning from the libertarians ought not be simply dismissed as rhetorical excess. I don’t think there are yet real fascists in the administration, but there is certainly now a constituency for them —hungry to bomb foreigners and smash those Americans who might object. And when there are constituencies, leaders may not be far behind. They could be propelled into power by a populace ever more frustrated that the imperialist war it has supported—generally for the most banal of patriotic reasons—cannot possibly end in victory. And so scapegoats are sought, and if we can’t bomb Arabs into submission, or the French, domestic critics of Bush will serve.
Stern points to the religious (and more explicitly Protestant) component in the rise of Nazism—but I don’t think the proto-fascist mood is strongest among the so-called Christian Right. The critical letters this magazine receives from self-identified evangelical Christians are almost always civil in tone; those from Christian Zionists may quote Scripture about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in ways that are maddeningly nonrational and indisputably pre-Enlightenment—but these are not the letters foaming with a hatred for those with the presumption to oppose George W. Bush’s wars for freedom and democracy. The genuinely devout are perhaps less inclined to see the United States as “God marching on earth.”
Secondly, it is necessary to distinguish between a sudden proliferation of fascist tendencies and an imminent danger. There may be, among some neocons and some more populist right-wingers, unmistakable antidemocratic tendencies. But America hasn’t yet experienced organized street violence against dissenters or a state that is willing—in an unambiguous fashion—to jail its critics. The administration certainly has its far Right ideologues—the Washington Post’s recent profile of Alberto Gonzales, whose memos are literally written for him by Cheney aide David Addington, provides striking evidence. But the Bush administration still seems more embarrassed than proud of its most authoritarian aspects. Gonzales takes some pains to present himself as an opponent of torture; hypocrisy in this realm is perhaps preferable to open contempt for international law and the Bill of Rights.
And yet the very fact that the f-word can be seriously raised in an American context is evidence enough that we have moved into a new period. The invasion of Iraq has put the possibility of the end to American democracy on the table and has empowered groups on the Right that would acquiesce to and in some cases welcome the suppression of core American freedoms. That would be the titanic irony of course, the mother of them all—that a war initiated under the pretense of spreading democracy would lead to its destruction in one of its very birthplaces. But as historians know, history is full of ironies.
February 14, 2005 Issue
Click for copyright permissions!
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative
[right][snapback]52074[/snapback][/right]
A good case IMO....
However I think Fascism is easier felt than intellectually identified as it is a not primarily a creature of the ego/intellect....I feel it stronger and nearer by the day. My favorite undergraduate Political Science professor who was pretty darn conservative once said, America was in no danger from Communism but there was a seed of Fascism here that if watered would grow like a cancer.
I've been reading Paul Craig Roberts for quite a while now. He's the most outspoken Republican I've seen. I agree with most of his take on the Bush administration.
It's ironic to see what the libertarians and the small government "Contract for America" folks have become.
It's ironic to see what the libertarians and the small government "Contract for America" folks have become.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 14 2005, 08:02 PM)
I've been reading Paul Craig Roberts for quite a while now. He's the most outspoken Republican I've seen. I agree with most of his take on the Bush administration.
It's ironic to see what the libertarians and the small government "Contract for America" folks have become.
[right][snapback]52087[/snapback][/right]
It's ironic to see what the libertarians and the small government "Contract for America" folks have become.
[right][snapback]52087[/snapback][/right]
It's ironic to see all the lefties who were complaining about the deficit so recently switch to complaining about budget cuts. Dems aren't going to agree with libertarians for very long. I find it's mostly political opportunism when they do.
I'm a fiscal conservative who believes in a safety net for those who need it. Not corporate farms, not the wealthy.
As far as the Contract for America, I have always consistently advocated the fiscal responsibility parts. I did not care for the moral declarations.
The fact of the matter is Bush and his party got elected partially on a fiscal conservative plank and now they are doing the opposite of what they advocated when they were the minority.
If you can't even acknowledge that ....
As far as the Contract for America, I have always consistently advocated the fiscal responsibility parts. I did not care for the moral declarations.
The fact of the matter is Bush and his party got elected partially on a fiscal conservative plank and now they are doing the opposite of what they advocated when they were the minority.
If you can't even acknowledge that ....
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 14 2005, 08:31 PM)
I'm a fiscal conservative who believes in a safety net for those who need it. Not corporate farms, not the wealthy.
If you can't even acknowledge that ....
[right][snapback]52112[/snapback][/right]
If you can't even acknowledge that ....
[right][snapback]52112[/snapback][/right]
I almost bought into it. But you made it personal so...
QUOTE(Art Vandelay @ Feb 14 2005, 09:35 PM)
I almost bought into it. But you made it personal so...
[right][snapback]52113[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52113[/snapback][/right]
seriously bud, you just don't acknowledge wrongs done by Republicans. I know you say there are enough criticisms from the left, but that just doesn't wash. You don't have much at all to say that is critical of the administration no matter what they do.
If, on the other hand you're playing devils advocate, you're going a little far.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 14 2005, 09:15 PM)
seriously bud, you just don't acknowledge wrongs done by Republicans. I know you say there are enough criticisms from the left, but that just doesn't wash. You don't have much at all to say that is critical of the administration no matter what they do.
If, on the other hand you're playing devils advocate, you're going a little far.
[right][snapback]52131[/snapback][/right]
If, on the other hand you're playing devils advocate, you're going a little far.
[right][snapback]52131[/snapback][/right]
I acknowledge my disagreements with Republicans.(including VOTING against them) What I don't do is spend day in and day out repeating the same rant. If the Dems REALLY think calling people fascists is going to win them any votes they are sadly mistaken.
QUOTE(Art Vandelay @ Feb 14 2005, 10:24 PM)
I acknowledge my disagreements with Republicans.(including VOTING against them) What I don't do is spend day in and day out repeating the same rant. If the Dems REALLY think calling people fascists is going to win them any votes they are sadly mistaken.
[right][snapback]52133[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52133[/snapback][/right]
Yeah, sure you do.
Mine is a rant. Your's is an opinion, right?
Lefties this, Democrats that. You have virtually nothing good to say about either liberals or Democrats.As far as the Republicans being called facists? If the shoe fits.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 14 2005, 09:40 PM)
Yeah, sure you do.
Mine is a rant. Your's is an opinion, right? Lefties this, Democrats that. You have virtually nothing good to say about either liberals or Democrats.
As far as the Republicans being called facists? If the shoe fits.
[right][snapback]52138[/snapback][/right]
Mine is a rant. Your's is an opinion, right?
Lefties this, Democrats that. You have virtually nothing good to say about either liberals or Democrats.As far as the Republicans being called facists? If the shoe fits.
[right][snapback]52138[/snapback][/right]
After the 50th time it's a rant. "aint no homos gonna get murrahed"
QUOTE
What is [bull], after all? Mr. Frankfurt points out it is neither fish nor fowl. Those who produce it certainly aren't honest, but neither are they liars, given that the liar and the honest man are linked in their common, if not identical, regard for the truth.
"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Mr. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."
The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."
And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/books/14bull.html
"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth," Mr. Frankfurt writes. "A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it."
The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."
And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/books/14bull.html
hmmmm, bull artists sound like "secular" bunkshooters to me.
QUOTE(Art Vandelay @ Feb 14 2005, 10:11 PM)
It's ironic to see all the lefties who were complaining about the deficit so recently switch to complaining about budget cuts. Dems aren't going to agree with libertarians for very long. I find it's mostly political opportunism when they do.
[right][snapback]52094[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52094[/snapback][/right]
"Political opportunism?" What a crock. That isn't what the Dems are complaining about.
QUOTE
Lately, Mr. Bush has been talking the deficit reduction talk, but there's no sign that he is willing to walk the walk. In his 2006 budget, he pledges to slash spending, but largely in areas that would have only a small impact on the deficit and where cuts would be politically difficult, not to mention cruel, such as food stamps, veterans' medical care, child care and low-income housing. Meanwhile, he is pounding the table for more deficit-bloating measures - making his first-term tax cuts permanent, at a 10-year cost of as much as $2.1 trillion; putting into effect two high-income tax breaks that were enacted in 2001 but have been on hold, at a 10-year cost of $115 billion; and introducing new tax incentives to allow high earners to shift even more cash into tax shelters, at a cost that would ultimately work out to more than $30 billion a year when investors cashed in their accounts tax-free.
Oh, yes. Mr. Bush also wants to borrow some $4.5 trillion over two decades to privatize Social Security, which is a bad idea even without the borrowing and a horrendous one with it.
The global financial community won't be fooled. The dollar may have bouts of relative strength, as it has recently. But these are due largely to currency traders' focus on short-term advantages, like Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes, which are perceived as a positive for the dollar, or the appearance of profit-taking opportunities. Inevitably, the budget and trade deficits will reassert their drag on the dollar, and then on Washington's ability to comfortably borrow money from abroad.
Congress can avert this crisis-in-waiting by forcing Mr. Bush to be serious about deficit reduction. The first-term tax cuts should be allowed to lapse. Cuts that are not yet in effect should not be allowed to begin. And no new programs should be started that require megaborrowing. If the president doesn't see that he has more important tasks than cutting taxes for the rich and undermining Social Security, Congress should set him straight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/opinion/14mon1.html
Oh, yes. Mr. Bush also wants to borrow some $4.5 trillion over two decades to privatize Social Security, which is a bad idea even without the borrowing and a horrendous one with it.
The global financial community won't be fooled. The dollar may have bouts of relative strength, as it has recently. But these are due largely to currency traders' focus on short-term advantages, like Federal Reserve interest-rate hikes, which are perceived as a positive for the dollar, or the appearance of profit-taking opportunities. Inevitably, the budget and trade deficits will reassert their drag on the dollar, and then on Washington's ability to comfortably borrow money from abroad.
Congress can avert this crisis-in-waiting by forcing Mr. Bush to be serious about deficit reduction. The first-term tax cuts should be allowed to lapse. Cuts that are not yet in effect should not be allowed to begin. And no new programs should be started that require megaborrowing. If the president doesn't see that he has more important tasks than cutting taxes for the rich and undermining Social Security, Congress should set him straight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/opinion/14mon1.html
They are complaining about ineffectual and "mean-spirited" (yes I'll say it for that is exactly what it is) cuts that produce no meaningful reductions in the light of the pig-rush-to-the-trough tax cuts, the curious ommission of any money for an actual on-going war, and a fiscally insane "borrow-and-spend ss plan.
Where exactly is the deficit reduction here? It only exists in Mr. Bush's head.
QUOTE
An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."
This is a great description of the Bush administration and George W. Bush himself.
QUOTE
After the 50th time it's a rant. "aint no homos gonna get murrahed"
Your speech is OK, mine is a rant.
Let me tell you something boss, unlike you not everyone survives a divorce caused by homosexuality intact. Some people hate gays so much they'll justify anything to lash out at them.
Everything else can go to hell. As long as my brother the evangelical Christian sees that homos will not be murrahed, he doesn't give a flying fuuck what Bush OR the Republicans do, INCLUDING STARTING A DAMNED WORLD WAR. As long as his extreme hatred of homosexuals (and anyone else targeted by these Christian hate mongers) is fed and USED effectively by Bush, evangelical Christianity and a majority of the Republicans they are happy as hell. Another vote.
It's an all or nothing proposition. They wrap terrorism, the war, homosexuality and abortion in one big, super-patriotic, phony Christian package to sell to all the clueless Bush cult members. AND IT WORKS.
THAT is the truth. He is not alone either.
These so-called "values" and "morals" people are neither.
I will continue to speak out against these morons and their ulterior motives.
Like I said before, if you or anyone you agree with say it, it's legitimate griping.
If I say it, it's a rant.
QUOTE
Where exactly is the deficit reduction here? It only exists in Mr. Bush's head.
What do you expect? He's a lying pig.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 15 2005, 08:15 AM)
What do you expect? He's a lying pig.
[right][snapback]52170[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52170[/snapback][/right]
Who? AV or W?
That's the thing davis, it's not a lie if one refuses to acknowledge reality. It's just a "P.O.V." or some such nonsense.
QUOTE
`I'm a poor man, your Majesty,' the Hatter began, in a trembling voice, `--and I hadn't begun my tea--not above a week or so--and what with the bread-and-butter getting so thin--and the twinkling of the tea--'
`The twinkling of the what?' said the King.
`It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied.
`Of course twinkling begins with a T!' said the King sharply. `Do you take me for a dunce? Go on!'
`The twinkling of the what?' said the King.
`It began with the tea,' the Hatter replied.
`Of course twinkling begins with a T!' said the King sharply. `Do you take me for a dunce? Go on!'
QUOTE
Who? AV or W?
blink.gif
That's the thing davis, it's not a lie if one refuses to acknowledge reality. It's just a "P.O.V." or some such nonsense.
blink.gif
That's the thing davis, it's not a lie if one refuses to acknowledge reality. It's just a "P.O.V." or some such nonsense.
Bush.
Artie is a net fighter. I think a lot of his positions are taken, not out of genuine belief, but because he can get an argument from an opponent.
QUOTE
it's not a lie if one refuses to acknowledge reality
This is the kind of unethical BS that Bush and his lying administration tries to get away with. Like them claiming Bush never said the word "imminent".
We have wade through this minefield EVERY DAY. How do I know what part of what Bush says is the truth? There is no way to tell.
So I'll just assume he's lying and try to sift some grain of info from the garbage he spews with regularity.
It's no wonder the world hates GW.
New RNC poster?
you are going to nuke those members on dialup.
I thank Jesus for you every day.
You are the perfect example of an evangelical Republican.
Thank you.
You are the perfect example of an evangelical Republican.
Thank you.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 15 2005, 06:35 AM)
Bush.
Artie is a net fighter. I think a lot of his positions are taken, not out of genuine belief, but because he can get an argument from an opponent.
[right][snapback]52179[/snapback][/right]
Artie is a net fighter. I think a lot of his positions are taken, not out of genuine belief, but because he can get an argument from an opponent.
[right][snapback]52179[/snapback][/right]
You don't have to argue, just say I'm right and it's all over. There are plenty of positions I could argue, how come I don't?
QUOTE
You don't have to argue, just say I'm right and it's all over. There are plenty of positions I could argue, how come I don't?
You are a net fighter. You love an argument. You have freely admitted that to me before. That is your style and technique. It's entertaining.
Although our senses of humor are uncannily similar, our sense of what is right and wrong are waaaay different.
You have no problem with Iran/Contra type activities, torture, hit squads ect, ect.
I do. I always have and always will.
We come from a totally different perspective. You see oversight of the military, the CIA and even Congress as inconvenient or even detrimental to national security.
I have attempted to explain why I was for the invasion of Afghanistan and against the invasion of Iraq. I got taunted for my effort.
That is weird. It is also the smallest Bowie knife I've ever seen.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 15 2005, 10:38 AM)
That is weird. It is also the smallest Bowie knife I've ever seen.
[right][snapback]52228[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52228[/snapback][/right]
That's bee attacking a poop-fly.
QUOTE(davis¹³ @ Feb 15 2005, 08:51 AM)
You are a net fighter. You love an argument. You have freely admitted that to me before. That is your style and technique. It's entertaining.
You have no problem with Iran/Contra type activities, torture, hit squads ect, ect.
[right][snapback]52214[/snapback][/right]
You have no problem with Iran/Contra type activities, torture, hit squads ect, ect.
[right][snapback]52214[/snapback][/right]
That is WAY too black and white. You folks don't even define your terms before just being "against". It's all political. I don't bother to just pile on when I agree because there's no point to it.
The same people that gutted our intelligence are now complaining because we didn't stop 9-11, didn't know more than Saddam in Iraq, and in general don't have enough human intelligence. They hated the Contras because they hated the CIA and backed the communists under Ortega. They still whine about Chavez and Venezuala. They want to let up on Castro, kowtow to France and Germany, let the UN run our foreign policy and in general let the US become a second rate power that just goes wherever the tide takes us.
Whine about fascism all you want, I'm not ever going to buy into the lefty vision of weakness and complacency in a dangerous world.
Do you have to reduce everything to politics?
bwahahahahahahaha!!
oh lordie, poop flies? lol, how appropriate.
bwahahahahahahaha!!
oh lordie, poop flies? lol, how appropriate.
What about people who arent lefties or pacifists who say bush and bushlovers are fascists?
QUOTE(Mizilus @ Feb 15 2005, 09:55 AM)
What about people who arent lefties or pacifists who say bush and bushlovers are fascists?
[right][snapback]52240[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52240[/snapback][/right]
What about 'em? They can make the same calculations I do. You can vote for Kerry, or vote third party protest. You can vote straight party Dem, or you can pick and choose. It's a representative republic, you don't get to pick and choose every policy you're for and against. (mostly against in your case)
QUOTE
They hated the Contras because they hated the CIA and backed the communists under Ortega.
I hated the Contras irrespective of their being darlings of the CIA and the Pentagon. While all para-military forces are more or less stocked with unsavory characters, my own view is that right-wing paramilitaries are invariably the worse of the two kinds.
One of the reasons that I voted Republican the one time that I did was because the Democratic Senatorial candidate was a big Contra supporter.
And, let's be honest. Anyone who's spent any significant time in or has family connections to another country in which the CIA has done its handiwork has reason to be suspicious of the CIA.
QUOTE(Nomarchy @ Feb 15 2005, 10:03 AM)
And, let's be honest. Anyone who's spent any significant time in or has family connections to another country in which the CIA has done its handiwork has reason to be suspicious of the CIA.
[right][snapback]52242[/snapback][/right]
And let's be honest, anyone who's spent any significant time in or has family connections to another country is worthy of being treated with suspicion. How much of the world would be democratic now if there had been only the KGB?
You can have any allegiance you want, that's up to you.
QUOTE
While all para-military forces are more or less stocked with unsavory characters, my own view is that right-wing paramilitaries are invariably the worse of the two kinds.
Left wingers are more dangerous by accident, especially when they win. By design either one can be bad, depending on the circumstances. On pure death toll the left wins easily.
QUOTE(Art Vandelay @ Feb 15 2005, 10:10 AM)
And let's be honest, anyone who's spent any significant time in or has family connections to another country is worthy of being treated with suspicion. How much of the world would be democratic now if there had been only the KGB?
You can have any allegiance you want, that's up to you.
Left wingers are more dangerous by accident, especially when they win. By design either one can be bad, depending on the circumstances. On pure death toll the left wins easily.
[right][snapback]52243[/snapback][/right]
You can have any allegiance you want, that's up to you.
Left wingers are more dangerous by accident, especially when they win. By design either one can be bad, depending on the circumstances. On pure death toll the left wins easily.
[right][snapback]52243[/snapback][/right]
I don't remember saying that the KGB were sweet angels that should've been allowed free reign, so . . .
I don't like where you're going with the other point. I feel a certain acronym brewing. Don't be throwing around words like "allegiance" lightly.
QUOTE(Nomarchy @ Feb 15 2005, 10:17 AM)
I don't remember saying that the KGB were sweet angels that should've been allowed free reign, so . . .
I don't like where you're going with the other point. I feel a certain acronym brewing. Don't be throwing around words like "allegiance" lightly.
[right][snapback]52247[/snapback][/right]
I don't like where you're going with the other point. I feel a certain acronym brewing. Don't be throwing around words like "allegiance" lightly.
[right][snapback]52247[/snapback][/right]
Pretty much the only thing combatting the KGB was the CIA, and they operated under no rules oustide of winning at all costs. You can only be so neutral, at some point you have to take sides at least to a certain extent.
I see that the whole point of the thread is dissolving into the same old, same old.
The point of the article is the movement toward crushing of all dissent, in the press, first, and then by the citizens.
We've seen firsthand the power of the phone trees of the evangelicals to get the half time show on the NFL turned into crap, the stupid PBS non-show of a little cartoon character showing loving families with different lifestyles, (divorced, grandma taking the kids, AND a lesbian couple), etc.
People are scared to stand up to the power these people have, as even this article, written in a conservative mag, show.
Why should we in America stand for this??
I wondered about Dean becoming the head of the DNC but the more I think about it, we need to fight this as hard as we can, for as the CONSERVATIVES say, we may bring freedom to other countries, AND LOSE OUR OWN.
The point of the article is the movement toward crushing of all dissent, in the press, first, and then by the citizens.
We've seen firsthand the power of the phone trees of the evangelicals to get the half time show on the NFL turned into crap, the stupid PBS non-show of a little cartoon character showing loving families with different lifestyles, (divorced, grandma taking the kids, AND a lesbian couple), etc.
People are scared to stand up to the power these people have, as even this article, written in a conservative mag, show.
Why should we in America stand for this??
I wondered about Dean becoming the head of the DNC but the more I think about it, we need to fight this as hard as we can, for as the CONSERVATIVES say, we may bring freedom to other countries, AND LOSE OUR OWN.
QUOTE(Art Vandelay @ Feb 15 2005, 10:20 AM)
Pretty much the only thing combatting the KGB was the CIA, and they operated under no rules oustide of winning at all costs. You can only be so neutral, at some point you have to take sides at least to a certain extent.
[right][snapback]52248[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52248[/snapback][/right]
Now, that's entirely different.
My point was that it's not the most far-fetched notion that folks ought to be suspicious of the CIA. Yes, yes, I am a cynical realist as well, and push comes to shove, I'd support my country's unsavory characters than another country's, but that doesn't mean that I will assume that whoever is suspicious of my country's unsavory characters is thereby in support of another country's unsavory characters.
In addition, you argued that folks like Pelosi et al disliked the Contras because they disliked the CIA. I responded that there are plenty of independent reasons to have disliked either one of them or both. In the final analysis, if your own clandestine operations are supporting vermin, and you see no great value in that vermin, you may find yourself disliking that vermin even more than you would otherwise.
QUOTE(SherryB @ Feb 15 2005, 11:23 AM)
I see that the whole point of the thread is dissolving into the same old, same old.
The point of the article is the movement toward crushing of all dissent, in the press, first, and then by the citizens.
We've seen firsthand the power of the phone trees of the evangelicals to get the half time show on the NFL turned into crap, the stupid PBS non-show of a little cartoon character showing loving families with different lifestyles, (divorced, grandma taking the kids, AND a lesbian couple), etc.
People are scared to stand up to the power these people have, as even this article, written in a conservative mag, show.
Why should we in America stand for this??
I wondered about Dean becoming the head of the DNC but the more I think about it, we need to fight this as hard as we can, for as the CONSERVATIVES say, we may bring freedom to other countries, AND LOSE OUR OWN.
[right][snapback]52251[/snapback][/right]
The point of the article is the movement toward crushing of all dissent, in the press, first, and then by the citizens.
We've seen firsthand the power of the phone trees of the evangelicals to get the half time show on the NFL turned into crap, the stupid PBS non-show of a little cartoon character showing loving families with different lifestyles, (divorced, grandma taking the kids, AND a lesbian couple), etc.
People are scared to stand up to the power these people have, as even this article, written in a conservative mag, show.
Why should we in America stand for this??
I wondered about Dean becoming the head of the DNC but the more I think about it, we need to fight this as hard as we can, for as the CONSERVATIVES say, we may bring freedom to other countries, AND LOSE OUR OWN.
[right][snapback]52251[/snapback][/right]
Perhaps your choice of thread title and sub title had something to with it. Start a thread intended to spark controversy, call people nazi's by proxy and expect the results you get.
Lefties are do not own, and are not the only people allowed to exercise their first amendment rights. Learn this and be happy.
Bart,
I posted an article by a conservative writer, written in a conservative magazine, who quotes other conservatives writing in the Wall Street Journal and other nonliberal sites.
I called no names, you did.
Liar.
I posted an article by a conservative writer, written in a conservative magazine, who quotes other conservatives writing in the Wall Street Journal and other nonliberal sites.
I called no names, you did.
Liar.
QUOTE(SherryB @ Feb 15 2005, 10:23 AM)
I see that the whole point of the thread is dissolving into the same old, same old.
[right][snapback]52251[/snapback][/right]
[right][snapback]52251[/snapback][/right]
It started out with the same old, same old. If you call people Nazis, that's where it will go. I took a lot of time posting political tests so that people would show up on various places in the political world. This type of thing merely puts the discussion back to "You're a fascist, so we're better than you".
I recall the left calling people that landed at Normandy and Sicily Nazis and Fascists. It's just plain silly.
Lefties are do not own. What the hell does that mean???????????
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.