They are "The Lucky Sperm Club." A select (albeit unofficial) club populated by powerful men who owe their exalted status in life not to talent, intelligence, creativity, or hard work but to winning the sperm lotto by having the great good fortune to be born into a powerful family. These are men who were born on third base but think they hit a triple. And who are now busy trashing the stadium.
Each aspiring Republican leader wants to be representative -- or wants badly to be -- of a certain kind of conservative who fervently believe that they are more fiercely patriotic than non-Christians could ever understand and choke themselves up about how they love their country so much they'd die for it a hundred times, so long as they don't have to serve in the military, and that there's nothing they wouldn't sacrifice for America but having to pay taxes is completely unfair.
Nah, it isn't so much a matter of their positions (most of which I do disagree with, though that's beside the point), it's the character of many young conservatives that unnerves me.
Note that I'm not attempting to describe ALL young conservatives, but only to identify some things that bug me about many I've known - stress on the "I've known" part.
Comes down to this: many young conservatives tend to be wealthy and smug - they often seem to take perverse pride in their own heartlessness and their contempt for idealists and the poor. Many I've known have been quick to champion the successes of self-made entrepreneurs and to ridicule the failures of various "interest groups" to fend for themselves. ...All while living off of the largesse of their well-to-do families.
The poor and middle-class young conservatives I've known have tended to be hyper-aggressive cranks with an axe to grind against anyone they feel is "ripping them off" (i.e., borderline psychos and closet racists), or dimwitted followers of their parents' beliefs (i.e., Mormons and other faith zombies).
Finally, young conservatives are almost always guys.
Obviously, "rich kids, dutiful sheep and scary malcontents" do not fairly define young conservatives as a whole. But it seems to me that they are disproportionately represented and that they tend to control the terms of debate.
Let's cut the crap as to what Republican values really are. Republicans are club run by some of the wealthiest 1% whose interests are to maintain their "old money" wealth or for upper middle class people, to get richer. Their agenda is to get richer at all costs, profit at all costs. Nothing else matters, not the environment, not the people, not society, not culture, not civil rights, not the future, nothing. Everything they profess to believe in is contradicted by their actions. When Republican politicians talk, their audience is not the common man, they are talking to their constituents of upper middle class and upper crust wealthy contributors. The news media consists of upper middle class people who are trying to get richer. Calling the news media "liberal" is nothing more than a ploy by right-wing think-tanks to intimidate journalists to tow the conservative party line and to demonize progressive politics. There is a lot of news that does not get reported in the "mainstream" news media because that news would undermine the authority of the ruling classes. The religious conservatives claim to have a higher moral ground so they can make connections to the upper-class tiered Republicans. The Republicans use the religious conservatives as a tool to bring out the vote, but rarely do the Republicans actually follow through on their promises to the religious conservatives. Those who are poor who want to be Republicans are wannabees who want to identify themselves with wealth, power, and the upper crust of society. The real Republicans with power, the "old money" establishment Republicans who pull the strings, patronize the wannabees with a few crumbs but eventually betray them.
Seriously think about this. What person who works in a McJob (low wage, no benefits, no health care, no 401K, dead end, no fixed schedule) would support Republican rhetoric that would eliminate the minimun wage, cut social services, eliminate any corporate liability for worker safety, and just make their lives more difficult? Only poor people who have adopted Republican rhetoric as aspirational class values can delude themselves into thinking that they are Republicans and that the top Republican politicians are looking out for their (average citizens') interests.
Republican media pundits have successfully demonized "liberals" to such an extent that "liberals" are vilified in the news media as being "unpatriotic anti-American traitors who hate America and want to destroy America". In "the Midwest" of America especially, Republicans media pundits have associated "liberals" with communists, homosexuals, and traitors. If you actually look up the word "liberal" in the Dictionary, you'll see that the Republicans' definition of "liberal" is a lie: Dictionary definition of "liberal"
I'm all for "getting rich" and being as successful as you possibly can. But young Republicans don't believe in "hard work." They want to make their fortunes through finagling the "system" and breaking all the rules everyone else has to abide. Republicans "deregulated" the banking industry which led to the SNL-scandals. Republicans "deregulated" environmental regulations which allows their companies to pollute the environment today leaving the long term consequences of their pollution to future generations to clean up. Republicans "deregulated" the Wall Street regulations which lead to the dot-com-scam which ruined millions of Americans financially. The Republicans in these and many other instances changed the rules to make their highly unethical and criminal activities become "legal"; they get rich and everyone else gets screwed. Republican congressman speak against "socialized medicine" for the people, then they vote themselves huge government paid for medical services for themselves and huge subsidies for drug companies that have contributed to their election campaigns. An honest man can make an honest ROI - Return on Investment. Republicans want to make an exaggerated ROI; they will plunder companies' profits (instead of reinvesting profits into the companies to upgrade equipment and develop new products), they will pay themselves outrageous salaries/bonuses/expense accounts, they will take over the management of once profitable companies like parasites and run them into the ground then jump out with huge golden parachutes right before the companies go bankrupt. Republicans see themselves as predators in a Social Darwinist world. They are out to do whatever it takes to get richer. "Business is war" is their motto.
Republicans believe that might makes right, compromise is weakness, and that there is no such thing as "the truth." Republicans believe that compromising is what the weak do to survive. Republicans thereby divorce themselves from reality and create their own reality, regardless of the facts. Compromise is a fundamental component of the give-and-take of the democratic process. The Republican's do-it-my-way-only tactics, namecalling, fabrication of information, suppression of dissent, pushing politics as personalities over issues, and denial of accountability, are the antithesis of the approach that we need. The Republican's symbiosis with large corporations and wealthy individuals is not democratic; their way is fascism.
Greed is the center of their ethic. Republicans mask their greed with rhetoric that presumes to give them a higher moral ground. But in actions, Republicans contradict what they profess to believe in. When you get into an argument with a Republican, you can easily unhinge their arguments by using a few examples that point out their contractions. In every case I've seen where a Republican was confronted with the facts that destroyed their arguments, the Republican immediately stops defending their positions and starts attacking the other side personally and physically. You'll see Republicans react the same way in politics, the media, and in person. When you confront a Republican with facts that contradict their rhetoric, you unmask their prejudices and that makes them mad.
"But one of the great successes of the intellectual right, is that they have succeeded brilliantly during the last 20 years at pinning the intellectual label solely on liberals so that a lot of people think that to be an intellectual means that you are a liberal alone. And one of the reasons that I think that right-wing intellectuals are so dangerous is they've been so clever at doing this. They've been much more clever than liberal intellectuals have been.
They've made it look like liberals are the only-- are the, quote, elites. And-- but they're just, you know, people-- people who get huge salaries from business-financed, right-wing foundations. They're not the elites? Of course, they're the elites. I don't have-- I object to their ideas. I don't object to them. But the liberal intellectual community is really caught asleep at the switch by these people. And one of the points I make in THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, which is why I think I'm going to get killed from both the right and the left is anti-rationalism in America is not the province of either the right or the left.
It's the province of both. For example, when you will talk to right-wing intellectuals about the Iraq war-- it doesn't matter that it hasn't worked out to them. They still think it was right. And the evidence of how it got started, how it got started on false pretenses and so on, it doesn't matter to them.
"They make wishful thinking sound rational."
- Susan Jacoby, PBS Moyers Journal, 2/15/08
Rovism regards any form of compromise as weakness. Politics isn't a bus we all board together, it's a steamroller. Rovism is not about uniting. What Rove quickly grasped is that it's easier and more efficacious to exploit the cultural and social divide than to look for common ground. Division, then, is not a side effect of policy; in Rovism, it is the purpose of policy. The lack of political compromise has its correlate in the administration's stubborn insistence that it doesn't have to compromise with facts. All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don't mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is. When neither dissent nor facts are recognized as constraining forces, one is infallible, which is the sum and foundation of Rovism. In Rovism, toughness is the only virtue. The mere appearance of change is intolerable.
Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a "race to the bottom" in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public's right to know.
a recent lawsuit against FOX News underscored, there is no law requiring the mainstream media to tell the truth. Indeed, the result of this lawsuit was the legal precedent that the mainstream media can fire any reporter for refusing to lie to the public
National Libertarian Party. Weathly individuals and corporations are gaming the political system by funding right-wing think-tanks and bribing journalist pundits under the "Libertarian" banner. Right-wing Republican pundits can claim to be not-Republicans while being on the take from the same weathly individuals and corporations who fund Republicans. Right-wing pundits in the news media and Republican internet street-teamers deny being Republicans and instead claim to be Libertarians. This is nothing more than a ploy to pretend to be nonpartisan while shilling right-wing talking-points. None of the "Libertarian" pundits have ever promoted Libertarian candidates or party positions on the issues. When Republicans gain power and their ruinous policies begin to damage the country, "Libertarian" pundits can claim to not be culpable. In the corporate news media, "Libertarian" pundits spend more of their bashing Democrats and "Liberals", apologyzing for Republican failures, and reciting right-wing talking-points. The only critisism they have for Republicans is for "not being Conservative enough." You will never find a single "Libertarian" pundit in the corporate news media who will name a single Libertarian Party candidate or position on any issue like guns or drugs. Phony Libertarian bloggers and internet newsgroup posters constantly spam and troll the internet with their right-wing talking-points. When phony Libertarians are confronted with charges that they are Republican street teamers, they avoid the questions as long as they can and re-sign in under new user names. Phony Libertarian trolls never answer the question they are most asked: "If they support the war so much, why don't they enlist?" Most of the phony "Libertarian" pundits actually shill views which the Libertarian Party opposes.
Cato Institute, a "Libertarian" think-tank that only funds right-wing Republican policians and causes; they also pay TV journalists hundreds of thousands of dollars for "speaking engagements"; their most famous media pundit is ABC News' John Stossel
John Stossel, a "Libertarian" pundit who presents Cato Institute campaigns as journalism on ABC News show 20/20; he uses Cato Institute employees as authority sources for his stories; he's been caught in the past for using false and misleading information in his reports and outright lies
Reason the "Libertarian" magazine subsidized by Howard Rich
Center for Independent Thought formerly known as Libertarian Review Foundation, owned by Howard Rich, a very wealthy man who under the "Libertarian" banner actually funnels millions of dollars to right-wing Republican policians and causes; he is called "Howie" by Republican insiders; Rich also sits on the board of directors of the Cato Institute, an influential libertarian think tank founded and funded by Koch and based out of Washington, D.C.
Mallard Fillmore cartoon strip by Bruce Tinsley: Gipper, the Talking Points Duck. Mallard Fillmore is every bit a part of the right wing noise machine.
Social Darwinism, A late nineteenth-century theory (used to explain and justify social inequality) that held that the most capable people will and should gain more in the struggle for survival than the less capable. Republicans believe that it is morally right for the strong to crush the weak. Republicans are anti-egalitarian. Some of their often repeated mottos are "business is war" and "greed is good." This sentiment permeates all conservative Republican thinking. Some Republicans use the term "Ownership society" instead.
The Republican Elite are members of this exclusive club in Texas. One of the things that is significant about Henderson County is the presence there of the Koon Kreek Klub (KKK), a 7000 acre private development with houses owned by wealthy and influential persons and a large hunting preserve, between Athens and Palestine, on Rainbow Lake. Incorporated in 1902 by an ex-Confederate Captain William Henry Guston, its members pay $35,000 to join and annual dues of $2000. One of the houses in the secretive community was purchased by George W. Bush in 1991, and sold for $10 just before the 2000 election. The Klub is reported to have no black members. Ex-president Clinton is reported to have visited the Klub, and it is also reported that parties have been held there at which illegal drugs were consumed and the services of prostitutes engaged. There are reports that the tax appraisals for the properties are suspiciously low, although there appears to have been a deliberate effort to conceal the location and other details of the Klub in public records.
fundraiser for the Republican Party, Jack Abramhoff is a middle-man broker for wealthy individuals and corporations. He explicitly and openly bribes Republican politicians for favors. Much of the legislation passed as a result of his bribes were actually written by wealthy individuals and corporations and were never actually read by the Republicans who sponsored them. Jack Abramhoff's foundations and think tanks employ and subsidize many Young Republican groups.
A de facto head of the Young Republicans, he is a lobbyist, fundraiser, right wing talking point writer, and frequent corporate TV news show pundit. He is a one man clearing house for extremely wealthy Republicans and corporations that seek favor from the government. He drops in on low populated rural states with millions of dollars of Republican money to defeat Democrats who cannot even hope to match his out of state fundraising. He uses religious language to claim that Republicans have a higher moral ground to justify elimination of environmental protections and tax cuts for the rich. On corporate TV news shows he uses discredited information as a justifications for his arguments, that is, disinformation. Like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly, the factoids he pulls out of the air seem to give him the upper hand in debates, but later on anyone can see that his information was wrong and his presentation of such information was disingenuous. He gets away with it because he knows corporate news media journalists will never challenge his "facts" or ever follow up. He also sometimes uses the same neo-fascist language the "patriots" in 1930's Germany used, almost Nazi rhetoric. He actually said that the Republicans would have a "thousand year reich."
Young Republicans sometimes campaign by pretending to be Democrats who promote messages that scare voters. Men with beards will dress up as drag queens disingenously promoting Democrats to scare voters. These fake Democrats then get a disproportionate amount of media coverage by the corporate media. A million people will protest something, but the corporate media will only focus on a handful of freaks with scary messages who are actually Republicans in disguise. The corporate news media disingenously pretends to not know that scary phony Democrats are actually Republicans, even after real Democrats reveal the ruse to them.
CHRISTIAN RIGHT:
Right-wing wealthy individuals and corporations fund religious organizations to promote their agendas. The huge amounts of money the right-wing wealthy individuals and corporations have spent have been able to organize once-fringe extremist religious groups into political machines that can get out the vote for Republicans; some of these churches are "snake handlers", "faith healers", and "holly rollers" who practice "speaking in tongues". They lobby "Patriot Pastors" to tell their constituents that voting Republican is part of their faith. Republicans spend most of their money building up such organizations in "swing states". The IRS is investigating these religious organizations for their blatant political activism, but so far has done little. Only religious leaders who oppose Republicans get fined by the IRS; Evangelicans can have numerous fundraisers for Republican candidates and nothing will happen while if a preacher from another sect makes one sermon critical of Republicans, the full weight of the IRS will be on them. One of the most amazing techniques used by these organizations is to reverse logical reasoning; they claim Evangelical Christians are being persecuted by "liberals" for not accepting the Evangelical Christians' intolerance. The Evangelicals are used as tools by right-wing wealthy individuals and corporations to focus on narrow issues so they can be tricked into voting against their own economic self-interests. Evangelical Christians might not have jobs, heath care, good schools, a clean environment, savings, retirement, pensions, free speech, or civil rights, but they will feel very self-righteous about denying their fellow citizens their civil rights.
AIPAC - American Israel Public Affairs Committee, The American Israel Public Affairs Committee: America's Pro-Israel Lobby. Works to strengthen US - Israel relations by encouraging Jewish political activism and student activism in campaigns.
The Israel Project provides journalists, leaders and opinion-makers accurate information about Israel.
Federalist Society, ivy league club for right-wing "establishment" lawyers. Rpublicans require membership in this club as prerequisite for appointments for judgeships. The members are white and come from wealthy "old money" backgrounds.
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research funded by major corporations like CIGNA, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, is a conservative think tank in New York that produces right-wing policy papers as well as sponsoring speeches for judges and Republican politicians
Congressman Ron Paul - a true Conservative Republican who gets marginalized by his own party. His critisisms of GOP and Democratic policies make sense, but his anti-regulation rhetoric is purely nonsensical. He does not vote for earmarks, but he puts them in the bills.
Rise of Pseudo Fascism by David Neiwert is a seven-part essay that attempts to define Fascism in the context of modern American society and the American conservative movement. Search the internet for mirror websites.
His follows believe "those who are fit to rule are those who realise there is no morality and that there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior".
Leo Strauss Search the internet for mirror websites.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with any of those websites listed above. After reading articles from those websites you may find out the truth, but the truth is not the accepted mainstream mythology shilled by the corporate-news-mainstream-media. If you try to talk about what you've found to your friends who only know the accepted mainstream mythology, you will be treated like a fool. Those who accept the corporate-news-mainstream-media's manufactured reality will counter you with simpleton talking-points, and when their arguments fail, with insults. They will talk about politics as if it were a chess match, while you'll talk about the agendas of those who own the chess board; those who set the boundaries and move the pieces. They will talk about politics as if it were only a match between ideologies, political parties, personalities, while you'll talk about the realpolitic/realpolitik. They accept the corporate-news-mainstream-media mythology because "it works" for them now. Reality doesn't hit them until they lose their jobs, need medical care, or lose a relative in some oversees war. All you can do is just tell your friends about websites with links to real news articles and maybe they will search for the truth. Maybe people allow themselves to be blind sighted so they won't have to deal with things they can't do anything about. The truth will set you free, but it won't make you happy. The only satisfaction you'll get in pulling the wool off your eyes is the knowledge that you are no longer a dupe. People in foreign countries know more about what is going on here than average citizens here; people here know more about what is going on in foreign countries than citizens there. The corporate-news-mainstream-media is deceitful, manipulative, disingenuous, and wholly unapologetic.Pundit Gallery |
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