The Alternate Universe of Fox News; Buckley on Trump

My firm's office that I principally work out of is located in a business suites complex with numerous other tenants, including close to a half dozen other law firms.  Over all, it is a mixed group of tenants, all of whom share a kitchen/lounge area with a TV in it, as well as the large central printer/copier. During the 2016 election, there was an unspoken battle as to what channel would be on: Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, CNN or MSNBC, with people regularly changing the channel to their preferred channel.  Interestingly, now the TV remains almost always set to CNN or MSNBC.  Fox News, much more rarely.  On the increasingly rare occasions when the TV is tuned to Fox News, the best way to describe the coverage is as an alternate universe where major stories and facts are simply not reported.  Indeed, Fox News might as well be Russian state controlled television insofar as only right wing affirming coverage is aired.  A case in point was yesterday when news was breaking about Robert Mueller's empaneling of a DC based grand jury.  A New York Magazine headline says it all: " CNN: Grand Jury. MSNBC: Grand Jury. Fox News: Literally Anything Else."  The Founding Fathers believed that it was critical that the country have an informed electorate and that citizens had a duty to be well informed on the issues and events of the day.  One does NOT fulfill that duty watching Fox News.  Here are excerpts from the New York Magazine piece:

Earlier on Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has impaneled a grand jury as part of his ongoing investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. (The White House, for its part, just keeps reiterating that Donald Trump is not under investigation and plans to fully cooperate with Mueller.) The WSJ called it “a sign that his inquiry is growing in intensity and entering a new phase.” This is, clearly, big news. The kind of news that major networks should be talking about. . . . Frankly, once you’ve read The Wall Street Journal report about the grand jury, you might want to tune into Fox News. Seems like they’re running some very fun segments this evening.

If - or more likely when - indictments come, Fox News viewers will no doubt be in shock and ask "how did this happen."  For racists, religious extremists, and xenophobes, Fox News has become a way to stick one's head in the sand and ignore reality.

Meanwhile, some conservative outlets are reporting on the real Donald Trump.  A case in point is Red State which has a timely piece that reveals what William F. Buckley - an icon to thinking conservatives (admittedly a vanishing species) - thought of Der Trumpenführer, none of it good. Here are highlights:

There has been a lot of discussion in the last several months over whether not several conservative icons would be supporting Donald Trump for President. William F.  Buckley, the founder of National Review and host of Firing Line said during the 1964 GOP primary that his rule was to support the “most rightward viable candidate.” That has often been turned into “the most conservative, electable candidate.” 

Willam F. Buckley wrote something about Donald Trump when he was talking about running for President — in 2000. Buckley, in an essay he wrote for  Cigar Aficionado and said the following about Trump:

Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line.

Wow. He wrote this sixteen years ago. And think about it. Some of our most pressing concerns right now have to do with foreign policy and and national security. Trump’s business acumen, however questionable, is worthless in such cases.

And he wasn’t finished:

In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.

Finally, he illuminated Trump’s narcissism by comparing him with Steve Forbes:

So what else can Trump offer us? Well to begin with, a self-financed campaign. Does it follow that all who finance their own campaigns are narcissists? At this writing Steve Forbes has spent $63 million in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Forbes is an evangelist, not an exhibitionist. In his long and sober private career, Steve Forbes never bought a casino, and if he had done so, he would not have called it Forbes’s Funhouse. His motivations are discernibly selfless. . .

Buckley, a New Yorker, had more of an insight into Trump than others. At the time Trump wasn’t known to the rest of the country beyond people knew he was some rich businessman. Buckley however, was privy to the nonsense Trump engaged within NYC and Buckley was just well aware of it. Whatever it was, he had Trump pegged.

Conservatism's and Today's GOP's Ugly History

As noted in a post over the weekend, Donald Trump may not have created the ugliness that now is the mainstream of today's Republican Party and conservatism in general, but he surely has tapped into aspects of America's history that represent the worse parts of human nature and society.  Worse yet, he has driven many in the Republican Party who once stood against what I view as a growing embrace of ignorance and extremism away from the party.  So-call Rockefeller Republicans now count themselves as independents, if not Democrats, and the GOP has become a veritable coven of know nothings, religious extremists and white supremacists behind a thin veneer that purports to want small government and lower taxes. A lengthy column in the New York Times that I bookmarked last week looks at some of this history and the ugly forces now in control of the Republican Party.  Here are excerpts:

Until Nov. 8, 2016, historians of American politics shared a rough consensus about the rise of modern American conservatism. It told a respectable tale. By the end of World War II, the story goes, conservatives had become a scattered and obscure remnant, vanquished by the New Deal and the apparent reality that, as the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.”

Year Zero was 1955, when William F. Buckley Jr. started National Review, the small-circulation magazine whose aim, Buckley explained, was to “articulate a position on world affairs which a conservative candidate can adhere to without fear of intellectual embarrassment or political surrealism.” Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society, anti-Semites and supporters of the hyperindividualist Ayn Rand, and his cohort fused the diverse schools of conservative thinking — traditionalist philosophers, militant anti-Communists, libertarian economists — into a coherent ideology, one that eventually came to dominate American politics.

I was one of the historians who helped forge this narrative. . . . Goldwater’s loss, far from dooming the American right, inspired a new generation of conservative activists to redouble their efforts, paving the way for the Reagan revolution. Educated whites in the prosperous metropolises of the New South sublimated the frenetic, violent anxieties that once marked race relations in their region into more palatable policy concerns about “stable housing values” and “quality local education,” backfooting liberals and transforming conservatives into mainstream champions of a set of positions with enormous appeal to the white American middle class.

Then the nation’s pre-eminent birther ran for president. Trump’s campaign was surreal and an intellectual embarrassment, and political experts of all stripes told us he could never become president. That wasn’t how the story was supposed to end. National Review devoted an issue to writing Trump out of the conservative movement; an editor there, Jonah Goldberg, even became a leader of the “Never Trump” crusade. But Trump won — and some conservative intellectuals embraced a man who exploited the same brutish energies that Buckley had supposedly banished.

The professional guardians of America’s past, in short, had made a mistake. We advanced a narrative of the American right that was far too constricted to anticipate the rise of a man like Trump. . . . . Which poses a question: If Donald Trump is the latest chapter of conservatism’s story, might historians have been telling that story wrong?

In the 1994 issue of The American Historical Review that featured Alan Brinkley’s “The Problem of American Conservatism,” Ribuffo wrote a response contesting Brinkley’s contention, now commonplace, that Trilling was right about American conservatism’s shallow roots. Ribuffo argued that America’s anti-liberal traditions were far more deeply rooted in the past, and far angrier, than most historians would acknowledge, citing a long list of examples from “regional suspicions of various metropolitan centers and the snobs who lived there” to “white racism institutionalized in slavery and segregation.”

[W]e can now see a history that is indeed unsettling — but also unsettlingly familiar. Consider, for example, an essay published in 1926 by Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the exceedingly mainstream North American Review. His subject was the decline of “Americanism.” Evans claimed to speak for an abused white majority, “the so-called Nordic race,” which, “with all its faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization.” Evans, a former dentist, proposed that his was “a movement of plain people,” and acknowledged that this “lays us open to the charge of being hicks and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of secondhand Fords.’ ” But over the course of the last generation, he wrote, these good people “have found themselves increasingly uncomfortable, and finally deeply distressed,” watching a “moral breakdown” that was destroying a once-great nation.

This “Second Klan” (the first was formed during Reconstruction) scrambles our pre-Trump sense of what right-wing ideology does and does not comprise. (Its doctrines, for example, included support for public education, to weaken Catholic parochial schools.) The Klan also put the predations of the international banking class at the center of its rhetoric. Its worldview resembles, in fact, the right-wing politics of contemporary Europe — a tradition, heretofore judged foreign to American politics, called “herrenvolk republicanism,” that reserved social democracy solely for the white majority. By reaching back to the reactionary traditions of the 1920s, we might better understand the alliance between the “alt-right” figures that emerged as fervent Trump supporters during last year’s election and the ascendant far-right nativist political parties in Europe.

The general belief among historians, however, was that the Klan’s national influence faded in the years after 1925, when Indiana’s grand dragon, D.C. Stephenson, who served as the de facto political boss for the entire state, was convicted of murdering a young woman.

But the Klan remained relevant far beyond the South. In 1936 a group called the Black Legion, active in the industrial Midwest, burst into public consciousness after members assassinated a Works Progress Administration official in Detroit. The group, which considered itself a Klan enforcement arm, dominated the news that year. The F.B.I. estimated its membership at 135,000, including a large number of public officials, possibly including Detroit’s police chief. The Associated Press reported in 1936 that the group was suspected of assassinating as many as 50 people.

Stephen H. Norwood, one of the few historians who did study the Black Legion, also mined another rich seam of neglected history in which far-right vigilantism and outright fascism routinely infiltrated the mainstream of American life. The story begins with Father Charles Coughlin, the Detroit-based “radio priest” who at his peak reached as many as 30 million weekly listeners. In 1938, Coughlin’s magazine, Social Justice, began reprinting “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a forged tract about a global Jewish conspiracy first popularized in the United States by Henry Ford. After presenting this fictitious threat, Coughlin’s paper called for action, in the form of a “crusade against the anti-Christian forces of the red revolution” — a call that was answered, in New York and Boston, by a new organization, the Christian Front. Its members were among the most enthusiastic participants in a 1939 pro-Hitler rally that packed Madison Square Garden, where the leader of the German-American Bund spoke in front of an enormous portrait of George Washington flanked by swastikas. . . . . Young Irish-Catholic men inspired by the Christian Front desecrated nearly every synagogue in Washington Heights. The New York Catholic hierarchy, the mayor of Boston and the governor of Massachusetts largely looked the other way.

Anti-Semitism in America declined after World War II. But as Leo Ribuffo points out, the underlying narrative — of a diabolical transnational cabal of aliens plotting to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilization — survived in the anti-Communist diatribes of Joseph McCarthy. The alien narrative continues today in the work of National Review writers like Andrew McCarthy (“How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda”) and Lisa Schiffren (who argued that Obama’s parents could be secret Communists because “for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or ’60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics”). And it found its most potent expression in Donald Trump’s stubborn insistence that Barack Obama was not born in the United States.

Trump’s connection to this alternate right-wing genealogy is not just rhetorical. In 1927, 1,000 hooded Klansmen fought police in Queens in what The Times reported as a “free for all.” One of those arrested at the scene was the president’s father, Fred Trump. (Trump’s role in the melee is unclear; the charge — “refusing to disperse” — was later dropped.) In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a resident of the Beach Haven housing complex the elder Trump built near Coney Island, wrote a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing developments. In 1973, when Donald Trump was working at Fred’s side, both father and son were named in a federal housing-discrimination suit.

The 1960s and ’70s New York in which Donald Trump came of age, as much as Klan-ridden Indiana in the 1920s or Barry Goldwater’s Arizona in the 1950s, was at conservatism’s cutting edge, setting the emotional tone for a politics of rage.

In 1965, Congress once more allowed large-scale immigration to the United States — and it is no accident that this date coincides with the increasing conservative backlash against liberalism itself, now that its spoils would be more widely distributed among nonwhites.

The liberalization of immigration law is an obsession of the alt-right. Trump has echoed their rage. “We’ve admitted 59 million immigrants to the United States between 1965 and 2015,” he noted last summer, with rare specificity.

A puzzle remains. If Donald Trump was elected as a Marine Le Pen-style — or Hiram Evans-style — herrenvolk republican, what are we to make of the fact that he placed so many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly policies? More to the point, what are we to the make of the fact that his supporters don’t seem to mind?

Here, however, Trump is far from unique. The history of bait-and-switch between conservative electioneering and conservative governance is another rich seam that calls out for fresh scholarly excavation: not of how conservative voters see their leaders, but of the neglected history of how conservative leaders see their voters.

It is a short leap from advertising and reality TV to darker forms of manipulation. Consider the parallels since the 1970s between conservative activism and the traditional techniques of con men. . . . . The dubious grifting of Donald Trump, in short, is a part of the structure of conservative history.

Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage. It will not be a pleasant story. But if those historians are to construct new arguments to make sense of Trump, the first step may be to risk being impolite.

Days of Republican Desperation

If one looks at so-called establishment Republicans floundering in their pursuit of the GOP presidential nomination there is an air of desperation.  They are peddling the same old GOP policies that have not worked since the 1980's even as the world has changed radically and the country's demographics have changed significantly.  Moreover, much of the party base has descended into utter insanity and now embrace ignorance, white supremacy and religious extremism that is anathema to the once stereotypical country club Republicans.  A piece in Politico by Michael Lind, author of Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, looks at how the GOP went off the rails and argues that it is time for the party to throw away the 50 year old playbook and embark on a new course.  Here are highlights:

There is an air of desperation out there on the GOP campaign trail. It’s impossible not to sense it in the kinds of things being said by teetering establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and John Kasich, both of whom started off the last debate virtually pleading with base voters to come to their senses about Donald Trump, who is barely identifiable as a conservative by any standard measure of ideology.

What happened to the conservative movement?”  It’s an excellent question. And maybe it’s time we stopped blaming the lack of traction experienced by establishment conservatives like Bush, Kasich, and Chris Christie on things like personality and debating skill, and started talking again about that thing known as “the conservative movement.” Maybe the real problem is less Jeb’s awkwardness, or Kasich’s personality, or Christie’s New Jersey bravado, than an issue that runs much deeper. The establishment candidates in this year’s Republican primary nomination campaign are out there reciting all the formulas that worked for Ronald Reagan . . . . Yet the old-time conservative religion doesn’t seem to fire up the congregation

[N]o one is quite sure what the Republican Party’s vision is or should be any more—least of all those hapless “establishment” presidential candidates who are flailing away out on the trail. Today, the greatest obstacle to majority status for the Republican Party may not be demography. It may be a superannuated conservative ideology that is increasingly disconnected not only from the values of the larger society but from the values and interests of Republicans themselves.

Today’s legacy right originated 60 years ago as “movement conservatism.” It was born with the founding of William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review in 1955. In 1964, movement conservatives captured the Republican presidential nomination for Barry Goldwater. They lost the general election that year, but in 1980 and 1984 the White House was won by a leader of their movement, Ronald Reagan.

Yet by the 1980s, movement conservatism was running out of steam. Its young radicals had mellowed into moderate statesman. By the 1970s, Buckley and his fellow conservatives had abandoned the radical idea of “rollback” in the Cold War and made their peace with the more cautious Cold War liberal policy of containment.

Indeed, it’s fair to say that the three great projects of the post-1955 right—repealing the New Deal, ultrahawkishness (first anti-Soviet, then pro-Iraq invasion) and repealing the sexual/culture revolution—have completely failed. Not only that, they are losing support among GOP voters.

This is nothing less than a failure of conservatism itself. After Buckley, Reagan and Goldwater had jettisoned much of their earlier hard-edged conservatism, there should have be an intellectual reformation on the American right in the 1990s. And there were a number of candidates for a redesigned conservative ideology.

But instead of fading from the scene and opening the way to new thinking, old-fashioned Buckley-Goldwater-Reagan movement conservatism came back, in an even more radical form in the 2000s, catching me (by then an ex-neoconservative) and others by surprise.

When George W. Bush was elected, like many others I expected him to combine the “kinder and gentler” domestic policy of his father with the realist foreign policy symbolized by his father, Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Instead W. doubled down on all the elements of the old “conservative movement” policy and left utter wreckage in his wake. Reagan had wrecked the budget with his tax cuts for the rich, but later in his two terms he presided over numerous tax increases. George W. Bush pushed through budget-wrecking tax cuts for the rich again, invoking the same supply-side theory that had been discredited in the 1980s.

Following 9/11, George W. Bush not only invaded Afghanistan but also invaded and occupied Iraq, which had nothing to do with the Al Qaeda attacks and posed no serious threat to the U.S. or its allies. The country is still paying for that mistake more than a decade later, and its reverberations have robbed neoconservatives of most of their credibility.

The original conservative movement of Buckley and his allies was called “fusionism” because it sought to fuse three strands: free-market economics, militant and militarized anticommunism, and social traditionalism. Once conservatives wove this into a comprehensive political vision. But as time went on that vision started to come apart, and in the hands of different right-wing groups each strand grew more and more radicalized and unrealistic.

[I]t is this incoherent package of ideas that is being recycled by Republican presidential candidates today, more than three decades after Reagan effectively abandoned it after winning the White House. . . . . Thus you have the spectacle of insiders like Jeb Bush, Kasich and Christie trying to sell policies that were unworkable even in the Reagan years and since have become far more radical and therefore less palatable.

The reformocons are the Gorbachevs of the right. They want to reform the system without questioning its fundamental premises. What the Republican Party could use instead are a few Boris Yeltsins, willing to abandon the old orthodoxy altogether and start afresh.

It’s about time. Today, we are nearly twice as far from 1962, when Milton Friedman published Capitalism and Freedom, than Friedman was from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. When he founded National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley, Jr. was closer in time to William McKinley than to Barack Obama. The particular synthesis of free market economics, hawkish foreign policy and social reaction that defined movement conservatism was the product of particular circumstances half a century ago.

College-Age Grandson of William F. Buckley, Jr., Comes Out

Nothing shakes up a sane, rational family's approach to gays and gay rights issues more than having a family member come out of the closet.  Note, I prefaced my statement with the words "sane and rational" which by definition excludes Christofascists, far too many of whom react by merely disowning their family member.   But those not totally obsessed with Bronze Age myths and fairy tales more often than not find themselves suddenly having to reevaluate old prejudices and beliefs.  A case in point is what is likely happening in the family of Sean Buckley, grandson of William F. Buckley, Jr., viewed by many as a founder of modern conservatism.  In a piece in The Daily Beast young Buckley makes the conservative case for marriage equality.  In addition, he relates the anguish and self-hate that many of us raised in religious homes suffer as a result of religious based ignorance and bigotry.  Here are article highlights:

If you had asked me a few years ago if I supported the freedom to marry, I’d have been one of many young Republicans at the time who’d have given you an unequivocal “no.”

As the grandson of former Conservative Party New York Sen. James L. Buckley and great-nephew of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., I believed that gay rights were inherently anti-conservative and anti-Catholic.

But I began to reexamine my views after acknowledging a part of myself that I’d suppressed for years—I am gay.

My family is loving and compassionate but they have been active in the fight to keep marriage limited to heterosexual couples. Because of their influence and the views expressed by so many in my religious community, I grew up with an extremely negative view of gay people.

I was taught a “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach to moral issues while always being told to respect those with whom I disagreed. But given that you can’t separate yourself from who you love, teaching someone to hate their sexual orientation inadvertently teaches them to hate themselves. For me, this led to an intense self-hatred and a reflexive rejection of anyone that resembled the part of me I was so desperately trying to fight.

A clear majority of Americans now understand that being gay is not a choice. Gradually, this understanding is also extending among conservatives. And over 60% of millennial evangelical youth now support the freedom to marry.

It was not until the dawn of the Enlightenment in the 18th century that the idea of marrying primarily for love arrived. Those who opposed this shift saw it as an affront to social order, and rejected it as a dangerous change in the definition of marriage—similar to the arguments today.

But we’ve evolved, and learned that marriage matters for other reasons. At its core the institution of marriage hinges on two individuals committing to one another in life, for life, on a bedrock of love and self-sacrifice, which results in a better environment for raising children.

Above all else, the greatest gift our parents can give us is to teach us how to love—an emotion that gives the human experience both the purpose and meaning that is so critical to a happy and healthy life. I count this as one of the greatest gifts my parents have given me, and hope to one day give the same to my kids. Conservatives are right to argue that the best environment to raise children is within a marriage. However, it has nothing to do with the gender of their parents but instead the love they have for one another.

[G]ranting the freedom to marry to all loving couples is not a shift from the central tenet of marriage, but instead a fulfillment of its most basic ideals.

Gay couples today are building families and raising children. If we as conservatives care about preserving marriage and family, we must include gay people in the equation.

I believe that individuals have the power and ability to make decisions for themselves better than any government can. For conservatives who likely agree, I ask: why does this suddenly change when it comes to whom one loves and chooses to marry? This is a fight specific to the LGBT community, but it is also a fight for the rights of individual self-determination—a cause conservatives should always be ready and willing to fight for.

As the Supreme Court prepares to consider whether all loving couples should have the freedom to marry, it is time for conservatives to recognize that just as individual liberty should not depend on a person’s gender or race, it should not depend on whom a person loves, either.

When Will the GOP Kick Out Ted Cruz and Similar Crazies?

I find it somewhat scary when conservative/GOP columnist Jennifer Rubin starts to sound like me.  But she is onto something when it comes to the need for the Republican Party at both the national level and certainly here in Virginia to kick the crazy elements – principally Christofascists and racist,  Until this happens, I believe that the GOP is in a long term death spiral.  The irrationality and refusal to accept objective reality of these folks makes it impossible to reason with them or to appeal to a majority of voters when GOP nomination contests have become a contest as to who can be the most certifiably insane in order to win the nomination.  Here are excerpts from Rubin’s column in the Washington Post:

ignorance embracing Tea Party lunatics – from the Party.

When the John Birchers had to be kicked out of the Republican Party, William F. Buckley Jr. effectively excommunicated them from the GOP. When the “smoking gun” Watergate tape came out, it was the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) who urged Richard Nixon to resign. And when Pat Buchannan’s views could no longer be called anything but anti-Semitic, it was Buckley who called him out.

If the GOP has one big problem now it is that there is no Goldwater, no Buckley to tell Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his ilk that enough is enough. The Republicans interested in governance are now participants in the political scrum. The biggest of the conservative magazines, whose editors should know better, are too timid. They poke and prod here and there, but really stand up to the destructive right wing? No. They fear a full throttle debunking would put at risk their place in the conservative cosmos. They mistakenly believe that their role is to rebuke only liberals.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page or a conservative eminence like George Will or Charles Krauthammer can call the tune of charlatans, but the Cruz crowd dismisses even them as pawns in the Great GOP Sell-out.

There is no single governor, no party senior statesman to say, “It is intolerable to impugn the motives of those who fought long and hard against the liberal welfare state. Mr. Cruz, you are not helping; you are hurting. Please sit down and learn for a few years.”

The politics of the right becomes akin to university politics — bitter and small-minded with small spoils at stake. And the architecture that encompasses Cruz, talk radio, Heritage Action and the rest can sustain itself –in fact does better — when the party loses. It is not obvious how or even if the GOP gets back on track.

The saying goes that we get the government we deserve. The same is true of political parties. Republicans collectively have to decide what they want to be and what role they want to play in the next few decades. They can be participants in a majority party — eager and capable of governing, optimistic and inclusive – or they can be the party run by Heritage Action/Ted Cruz. But they can’t be both.

Karl Rove - Can He Beat the Tea Party and Christofascists?

This blog has looked at the declaration of war that Karl Rove and members of the so-called GOP establishment issued against the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the Republican Party and their plan to block the nomination of lunatics to candidate slots for the U. S. Senate and other high profile political offices.  I personally do not see Rove and company winning this war because they refuse to recognize what drives the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd: fanaticism that has no place for logic, reason, or objective reality.  For these true believers, it is simply beyond their mindset to grasp that most people do not want what they are selling: hate, racism, bigotry and homophobia with a major dose of male chauvinism.  As noted many times on this blog, the Christofascists and Tea Party crowd are like a cancer that has metastasized within the GOP.  I simply do not see the GOP ridding itself of the insane patients who have taken control of the asylum. The GOP leadership allowed these people into power at the grassroots level years ago and the cancer has now spread beyond anyone's control. Howard Fineman has drawn a similar conclusion.  Here are highlights from a recent column:

Rove gained clout in Texas politics long ago -- and boosted the fortunes of George W. Bush -- by crushing the hard-line conservatives in the state. These were ideologues that Rove and the Bushes rightly viewed as deadly to the family's chances of winning the presidency.

After Rove outmaneuvered the proto-Tea Party types in Texas, he was free to define Bush conservatism in a "mainstream" way, as "compassionate" on issues such as health care and education and open-minded about Hispanics remaking the Lone Star State.

Well, what goes around comes around, and with the Bushes temporarily quiescent and the Tea Party in control of the U.S. House -- and much of the GOP grassroots -- Rove is fighting a rear-guard action in a far more difficult position than a generation ago.

The party of Paul, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and many others is a throwback to the nativism and principled know-nothing-ism of conservatives whom the likes of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan purged from the party long ago, making it safe for the Roves of the world to advance.

It took the likes of Buckley and Reagan two decades to rid the GOP and the mainstream conservative movement of the John Birchers, ultra-isolationists and flat-out segregationists and to create a party and a platform that would win a national election.

Now leaders and potential leaders such as Cruz (a rising force to be reckoned with) and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida need to perform the same cleansing task -- and will probably have to take on the Paulites (who are paranoid conspiracy theorists at heart) to do it. 

The war for the soul of the Republican Party is real, deep and reminiscent of that earlier conflict. For the GOP it ended well: they harnessed the energy at the grassroots to take over Washington.  This equally bitter GOP civil war may end in the party's revival, too. But it won't be Rove, or one of his clients, who is able to end it. He's done.

Candidly, I despise Karl Rove.  But I equally despise the Christofascists and the Tea Party.  What is being launched is a war between equally poisonous forces.  Its only a question of which poison one prefers.

The GOP Descent Into Insanity: 64% of Republicans Are Birthers

How does one begin to describe the mass insanity that has taken over the Republican Party?  My Republican ancestors would be spinning in their graves if they could see the batshitery that now qualifies as mainstream GOP thought.  Ditto for William F. Buckley, Jr., who worked to bring intellect and reason to conservationism.  Now, to be a Republican one literally must have had a lobotomy or be clinically insane.  How else to explain the findings of a new Fairleigh Dickinson University survey of register voters that found that 64% of Republicans are so-called "birthers" who continue to believe that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States.  Apparently, Hawaii doesn't qualify as a part of the nation in the minds of those who inhabit the fetid swamp that is today's GOP.  A piece in Salon looks at the off the charts delusion of Republicans.  Here are highlights:

A whopping 64 percent of Republicans think it’s “probably true” that President Obama is hiding important information about his background and early life, including his possible birthplace, according to a new nationwide survey of registered voters from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind project examining Americans’ belief in political conspiracy theories.

The report goes on to state that purported levels of knowledge generally reduces susceptibility to belief in birtherism and conspiracy theories and birtherism in general - except among Republicans where claimed knowledge of current events has an opposite effect:

In general, higher levels of actual knowledge about politics tends to reduce belief inconspiracy theories. In the poll, respondents were asked a series of four questions about current events, and respondents who were able to answer more questions correctly were less likely to endorse the conspiracy theories. Fifteen percent of people who got none of the questions right thought that three or four of the conspiracies were likely, compared to three percent of those who answered three or four correctly. Education also tended to reduce belief in the conspiracy theories.

However, the relationship between current events knowledge and belief in conspiracy theories is conditional on partisanship. Among Democrats, each question answered correctly reduces the likelihood of endorsing at least one of the conspiracy theories by seven points.Among independents, each additional question reduces it by two points. For Republicans,though, each additional question answered correctly tends to increase belief in at least one of the theories by two points.

Given that evangelical Christians - the mainstay of today's GOP - have lower levels of education and higher levels of belief that the Bible is literally true in every respect, perhaps the staggering levels of birtherism correlate simply correlate to the increasing ignorance of the GOP base.  Whatever the cause, it is sad that a political part that once valued intelligence, education, logic and reason has been reduced to a group of ignorance embracing Neanderthals. 

Conservatives at a Crossroads: Christianists and Tea Party vs. William F. Buckley

I notice a piece on Politico the other day by did not get back to it until today - in part because of having cocktails with one of the boyfriend's oldest clients who actually knew William F. Buckley, Jr.  Her parents and Buckley's parents had even hoped to arrange her marriage to Buckley.  Being strong willed and one to be in charge of her own destiny (she still is at 93), she said "no" to the marriage hopes. She is an amazing woman and has many truly interesting stories about her "adventures," including meeting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor back during WWI.  

But back to my point.  There was a time when conservatives and Republican valued logic, reason, legitimate debate and did not flee from objective reality.  It was the type of conservatism that wasn't an embarrassment to confess to.  But that was then and now we see a form of conservatism that refuses to listen to facts and reason and shuns honest debate.  A piece in Politico looks at the descent of the conservative movement into a form of know nothing ignorance.  Here are highlights:

The GOP’s trouncing has triggered a wave of “soul searching” typical in its post-election timing, but more significant in its impact for our politics and for the conservative movement — if there is one. We think not. The conservative crisis of 2012 is not just a crisis of messaging; it is a crisis of conscience.

The cast of characters now presenting themselves as conservative leaders bear nothing in common with the intellectual cadre that brought the movement to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s. For months we watched in horror as a parade of Harold Hill hucksters mouthed empty tea party phraseology, followed the advice of Dick Morris and Karl Rove, and parroted Frank Luntz’s magic words — all the while selling a boy’s band that simply does not exist. Their polls, their news, their understanding of America, are a façade. The people of River City — the conservative base — were willingly sold a bill of goods. They got their reality check on Nov. 6.

To be clear, media access and its persuasive power have always been central to the conservative cause. But how far we have come from the days when William F. Buckley, Jr. hosted a PBS program called “Firing Line,” where conservatives of all stripes, liberal intellectuals and policymakers debated issues in depth. Today the conservative base prefers the endless recitation of things it already believes.

The movement, once a coalition of cold warriors, traditionalists and free marketeers, no longer exists. Buckley did not preach an ideology; he helped maintain a fusion of different factions. The key players, and candidates, came from very different camps but were united in a fundamental understanding of the limited role of government and the power of the individual. These groups often disagreed. But their differences were worked out through reasoned debate and exchange

What we see today, in contrast, is a dialogue of empty sets of talking points with no intellectual content or critical thinking to back them up — epitomized by Mitt Romney’s foundationless candidacy that pandered to a shrinking and ideologically extreme base. But conservatism, as it was understood by those who built the movement in the postwar years, was never an ideology.

Ideology and ideologues were imported into the party in recent years, especially by extreme theocratic types whose embrace of an intrusive Big Government is in fact antithetical to Republicanism and conservatism.

A different conservative intellectual legacy extends back to Edmund Burke and beyond, a legacy emphasizing the long view over the short one, which thrived not on political marching orders but on debate and diversity. It is a tradition that dates to the dawn of Western civilization and the invention of democracy grounded in the practice of rhetoric. The modern conservative media machine, in its vapid self-congratulation, is a total negation of this tradition. While a few survivors still try nobly to maintain the real conservative tradition, their voices are drowned out by those who want to blame the media, demographics, Obama flimflams, and anything else — except themselves.

We are saddened to observe what has become of its legacy — and its cast of pretenders to the throne. If you are a Republican, it is a sad day for your party and the movement that built it. If you are a believer in American democracy, it is a sad day for the country.

It is noteworthy that one of the authors of the piece was in the Reagan administration.

The Moral and Intellectual Decline of the Right and GOP

The Republican party loves to wrap itself in religion and claim to be the party that really loves America, but then in the next breath its spokespersons launch into nasty tirades against anyone and everyone who isn't a far right leaning white Bible beating Christian. The actual Christian message of love and compassion towards others is utterly lacking from the equation. Moreover, the Party and folks like Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum are obsessed with forcing their generally extreme religious views on all of society. In their view, the U. S. Constitution applies only to themselves and gives them a license to persecute those who hold different views. Indeed, they denigrate those with other beliefs and opinions as the recent Rush Limbaugh circus has demonstrated so well. A quick perusal of AFA's or FRC's websites further confirms this truth. A column in the Washington Post reflects on the recent death of Andrew Breitbart who in some ways symbolized this phenomenon. Here are some highlights:

It is not nice to speak ill of the dead, my mother once told me. But it is okay, I think, to speak ill of those who praise the dead when the deceased was best known for sliming a well-intentioned and wholly commendable public servant or for exposing a politician who had already exposed himself. I am referring to Andrew Breitbart, whose passing was noted and mourned throughout the conservative firmament. His eulogies tell us more about the movement than they do about him.

Almost immediately, conservative commentators let out a wail signifying the passing of one of their own. True, Breitbart was shockingly young, a mere 43, but then in those few years he had done much — a good deal of it revolting and some of it unethical or sloppy.

Breitbart reported that Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official of epic obscurity, had confessed to discriminating as an African American against whites. Breitbart had a tape of her remarks and he put it out there to a grateful nation. But the full tape — not the snippet he offered to the ravenous Internet — showed nothing of the sort. It was just the opposite, in fact. Breitbart had failed to check it out, he claimed. Why?

Every journalist knows the expression “too good to be true.” But for Breitbart, the Sherrod story was too good not to be true. It had to be true. She was exactly the kind of person that a left-wing, socialist, Muslim president like Barack Hussein Obama would like to appoint to high federal office. Call Breitbart’s tactics what you will, it wasn’t journalism.

James Q. Wilson also died last week. He was a scholar and a damned fine writer and also a conservative. . . . Wilson was my kind of conservative. He was ruled not by dogma or ideology but by common sense. He was of the same school of intellectuals who once wrote for Commentary or the Public Interest and National Review. . . . . The writers who created and wrote for these publications would never have abided rigid pledges about not raising taxes or wondering about evolution or rejecting global warming for ideological — not scientific — reasons.

The distance from Wilson to Breitbart is one way to measure how deeply lost the American conservative movement has become. The recent lineup of earnest fools who have proclaimed their readiness to rule the nation and the world was — and remains — a depressing and frightening sight. Imagine President Perry or Santorum or Bachmann or Palin or Gingrich. This horror is partially the product of a Republican intellectual and political establishment that has only one value: to win. The party’s hierarchy patronizes its own base. It will use its energy and grievances to regain power so that a select few can lead. It offers nothing by way of rebuke to religious figures, such as the astoundingly bigoted Franklin Graham, who dress their prejudice in the glad rags of piety.

Peggy Noonan writes that Andrew Breitbart had many charming qualities. I take her at her word. But it’s not a huge leap from Breitbart’s libel of Sherrod to Rush Limbaugh’s sliming of Sandra Fluke . . . . A public man should be judged by his public acts. And in Breitbart I can find nothing of value. He thought politics was like war. Wilson thought it was about ideas. That’s why you can only read about Breitbart. You can, however, always read Wilson.

The Palinization of the GOP

The caption of this post is the title of a new column in the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker - one of the increasingly rare breed of rational, thinking conservatives. Parker will not be winning any friends among the knuckle draggers who predominate in the Christianist/Tea Party base of the GOP, but what she has to say about the cult of ignorance in today's GOP is 100% true. This fusing of religion with politics and a complete abandonment of reason and logic are the reasons why I and so many people that I know have fled the GOP. Other than serious election defeats, I truly do not know what is going to turn around the intellectual decline of a party that once liked to view itself as educated and rational. Here are some highlights from Parker's on target column:

The headline on Democratic strategist Paul Begala’s recent Newsweek essay dodged subtlety: “The Stupid Party.” “Republicans used to admire intelligence. But now they’re dumbing themselves down,” was the subhead. Democrats couldn’t agree more. And quietly, many Republicans share the sentiment. They just can’t seem to stop themselves.

Republicans aren’t really stupid, of course, and Begala acknowledges this. But, as he also pointed out, the conservative brain trust once led by William F. Buckley has been supplanted by talk radio hosts who love to quote Buckley (and boast of his friendship) but who do not share the man’s pedigree or his nimble mind. Moreover, where Buckley tried to rid the GOP of fringe elements, notably the John Birch Society, today’s conservatives have let them back in.

Meanwhile, the big tent fashioned by Ronald Reagan has become bilious with the hot air of religious fervor. No one was more devout than the very-Catholic Buckley, but you didn’t see him convening revivals in the public square. Nor is it likely he would have embraced fundamentalist views that increasingly have forced the party into a corner where science and religion can’t coexist.

Scientific skepticism, the engine that propels intellectual inquiry, has morphed into skepticism of science fueled by religious certitude. In this strange world, it is heresy to express concern about, for example, climate change . . .

[T]he Republican base requires that candidates tack away from science toward the theistic position — only God controls climate. More to the point, Rush Limbaugh says that climate change is a hoax and so it must be. Huntsman may as well be a Democrat.

It takes courage to swim against the tide of know-nothingness that has become de rigueur among the anti-elite, anti-intellectual Republican base. Call it the Palinization of the GOP, in which the least informed earns the loudest applause.

Even so, there are signs that the GOP is recognizing its weaknesses and is ready to play smarter. To wit: The sudden surge of Gingrich, who, whatever his flaws and despite the weight of his considerable baggage, is no intellectual slouch.