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Who Is Wrecking America?
By Paul Craig Roberts
03/09/08 "ICH
" -- - Does the liberal-left have a clue? I sometimes think
not.
In his book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” Thomas Frank made
the excellent point that the Karl Rove Republicans take
advantage of ordinary’s people’s frustrations and resentments to
lead them into voting against their best interest.
Frank’s new book, “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule,”
lacks the insight that distinguished his previous book. Why does
Frank think that conservatives or liberals rule?
Neither rule. America is ruled by organized interest groups with
money to elect candidates who serve their interests. Frank’s
book does not even mention the Israel Lobby, which bleeds
Americans for the sake of Israeli territorial expansion. Check
the index. Israel is not there.
Does Frank think that rapture evangelicals are conservative,
that Christian Zionists are conservative? If so, where did he
learn his theology?
Frank can’t tell the difference between Ronald Reagan and
Cheney/Bush. He conflates the collection of opportunists and
fanatics that comprise the Bush Party with the Reagan
conservatives who ended stagflation and the cold war. The
adventurer, Jack Abramoff, is Frank’s epitome of a conservative.
Abramoff is the most mentioned person in Frank’s story. In
Frank’s view, conservatives are out to ruin everyone except the
rich.
But it was the Clinton administration that rigged the Consumer
Price Index in order to cheat retired people out of their Social
Security cost of living increases.
It was the Clinton administration that vanished discouraged
workers from the unemployment rolls.
It was the Clinton administration that wrecked “effective
government” by encouraging early civil service retirements in
order to make way for quota hires.
Why doesn’t Frank know that the “Reagan deficit” was due to the
collapse of inflation below the forecast, thus reducing the flow
of inflated revenues into the government’s budget, whereas the
Bush deficit is a result of what Nobel Democrat economist Joe
Stiglitz has calculated to be a $3 trillion dollar war in the
Middle East?
Frank doesn’t want to know. Like so many fighting ideological
battles, he just wants to damn “the enemy.”
But who is Frank’s enemy? He calls them “conservatives.” But the
Bush regime is a neoconservative regime. Neoconservatives,
despite the name, are not conservatives. They have taken over
formerly conservative publications, think tanks, and foundations
and driven out the conservatives.
Neoconservatives are in the tradition of the French Jacobins of
the 18th century. Having had the French Revolution, the
revolutionaries thought that they should take it to all of
Europe. Napoleon exercised French hegemony over Europe. The
American neocons desire American hegemony over the world.
The true American conservative does not believe in foreign wars.
In US history, conservatives were derided by liberals as
“isolationists.”
There is nothing conservative about launching wars of aggression
on the basis of lies and deception in order to control the
direction of oil pipelines and to enhance Israeli territorial
expansion.
Frank misses all of this.
And what a pity that is. A false conservative-liberal fight
distracts attention from the growing police state that is
destroying civil liberties for all Americans. It obscures the
real motives of policies in behalf of special interests that are
leading to nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.
What is wrecking America is not conservatives, but a
neoconservative ideology of US hegemony.
What is wrecking America is the “impeachment-is-off-the-table”
twins, Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers.
What is wrecking America is the Democratic Party, which was put
in control of the House and Senate in the 2006 congressional
elections to stop the gratuitous wars and gestapo police, but,
instead, has continued to cooperate with the Cheney/Bush regime
in behalf of war and police repression, such as we witnessed at
the Republican National Convention.
Frank’s book, “The Wrecking Crew” falls into the scapegoat
category of blaming the innocent and irrelevant. The Democrat
Party could impeach Cheney/Bush and cut off funding for the wars
and corrupt military contracts. But they do nothing and get a
free pass from Frank.
“The Wrecking Crew” does have one virtue. Frank shows that the
Republicans have spawned a new generation of brownshirts that
lust to imprison, torture, and kill people. These ignorant
bloodthirsty thugs see enemies everywhere and fervently desire
to nuke them all. The Republican brownshirts are equally willing
to kill American critics of the Bush regime as to kill Taliban
and al Qaeda.
The latest “enemy” is Russia. The Bush regime, complicit in its
Georgian puppet’s war crimes against South Ossetia, is
attempting to hide its responsibility for ethnic cleansing by
demonizing Russia. With every threat the Bush regime issues
against Russia, the war drums beat louder. Yet, the print and TV
media and Democratic Party have jumped on the war wagon.
The rapture evangelicals and the neocons are euphoric at the
prospect of nuclear war. Frank’s misguided barrage at
conservatives, who are a brake on war and the police state,
hastens end times.
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