King Arthur Movie Tristan: KNOW THY ENEMY – THE EXTREMIST RIGHT WING FORCES BEHIND THE GOP.

Friday, July 22, 2011

KNOW THY ENEMY – THE EXTREMIST RIGHT WING FORCES BEHIND THE GOP.

Posted by st at 5:06 AM

Meet public enemies number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7…not necessarily in order of evil and treachery for they all singularly possess the ability to influence and exact a right wing agenda on the Republicans.

“Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.”

Sun Tzu quotes (Chinese General and Author, b.500 BC)

You have a responsibility as a citizen of America to know who is working to destroy it, to hurt you and to obliterate this fine experiment we call DEMOCRACY. There are folks who have a very influential and powerful role in the steering and agenda of the Republican-Teahadist Party. Here they are, not necessarily in order of wickedness, treachery or askew right wing idealism.

Public enemies number one and two, the Koch brothers: The idea that Charles and David Koch are liberal bêtes noires is not new. Over the past year, the elderly brothers, head of the vast Koch Industries business empire, have occupied top spot in the demonology of the left.

Across a range of activities – from the birth of the Tea Party to undermining unions in Wisconsin, to opposing efforts to curb global warming – they have been believed by many Democrats to be forever lurking behind the headlines. Now, a brilliant piece of investigative reporting by the Washington-based watchdog Centre for Public Integrity has detailed the Kochs' vast political and lobbying operations. It makes sobering and deeply disturbing reading. After all, it is one thing to believe that out there somewhere the devil exists, but reading the CPI report feels a little like being given his phone number.

The sums of money spent in furthering Koch (pronounced like the drink coke, no matter how tempting it is to rhyme it with rock) interests and power are staggering. But what is most disturbing is how rapidly they are growing. In 2004, the CPI found, the Kochs spent a "mere" $857,000 on lobbying. In 2008, that had grown to $20m dollars. Over the next two years, they then spent a further $20.5m.

Public enemy number three: Karl Rove. He's America's Joseph Goebbels. As a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas, Karl Rove not only pimped for Richard Nixon's chief political dirty tricks strategist Donald Segretti but soon caught the eye of the incoming Republican National Committee Chairman, George H. W. Bush. Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of Nixon's 1972 campaign catapulted Rove onto the national stage. From his Eagle's Nest in the West Wing of the White House, Rove now directs a formidable political dirty tricks operation and disinformation mill.

Since his formative political years when he tried to paint World War II B-24 pilot and hero George McGovern as a left-wing peacenik through his mid-level career as a planter of disinformation in the media on behalf of Texas and national GOP candidates to his current role as Dubya's "Svengali," Rove has practiced the same style of slash and burn politics as did his Nixonian mentor Segretti. Many of us remember the Lincolnesque Senator Ed Muskie breaking down in tears during the 1972 campaign over Segretti-planted false stories in a New Hampshire newspaper that accused Mrs. Muskie of being a heavy smoker, drinker, and cusser and accused Muskie of uttering a slur in describing New Hampshire's French Canadian population. Rove's hero also forged letters on fake Muskie campaign letterhead, disrupted rallies and fundraising dinners, and spread false stories about the sex lives of candidates. Segretti's brush also smeared George McGovern, George Wallace, Shirley Chisholm, and McGovern's first vice presidential choice, Senator Tom Eagleton. Segretti of course did not go on to a high-level White House job -- he was sentenced to six months in federal prison for distributing illegal campaign material.

Public enemy number four: Grover Norquist. Norquist] has spent quite a lot of time promoting people openly sympathetic to Islamist terrorists." And this continued for years. In December 2003, David Horowitz wrote that Norquist... has formed alliances with prominent Islamic radicals who have ties to the Saudis and to Libya and to Palestine Islamic Jihad, and who are now under indictment by U.S. authorities. Equally troubling is that the arrests of these individuals and their exposure as agents of terrorism have not resulted in noticeable second thoughts on Grover's part or any meaningful effort to dissociate himself from his unsavory friends.

The mother of all pledges is Grover Norquist’s Tax Protection Pledge. First issued in 1986, it has been signed by countless Republicans over the past quarter century, including 236 current House members and 41 current senators. Yet Norquist’s success is perhaps the best argument against rigid pledges, which infantilize officials, giving them no leeway to exercise judgment.

Republicans had a miracle deal in their grasp earlier this month, but like children they rejected the ice cream cone they would have otherwise devoured -- $3 trillion in federal spending cuts -- because it had the wrong kind of sprinkles on top -- $1 trillion in revenue increases. In effect, Republicans passed on the conservative deal of the century -- huge spending cuts with no increase in tax rates -- in part because they had signed pledges to Norquist, who views every increase in government revenue as a personal affront.

To enforce his pledge, Norquist threatens free-thinking Republicans with political ruin, a threat he backed in 2010 with $7.5 million in campaign spending. But where are all the dead bodies? Norquist did help to defeat a few state legislators last year, along with California Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, who had offended Norquist by supporting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2009 budget. Norquist takes credit for the defeat of President George H.W. Bush, who broke his no-new-taxes promise, but the claim is patently ridiculous.

Fortunately, not every Republican office holder is a scaredy cat. Rock-ribbed conservative Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who has just rejoined the Senate Gang of Six seeking a budget compromise, has spent much of this year trying to break Norquist’s hold on the Senate Republican caucus. Norquist responded by claiming Coburn “lied his way” into office. The senator’s crime? Putting public policy -- curtailing a foolhardy $6 billion tax subsidy for ethanol among other things -- ahead of Norquist’s brand of ideological warfare.

Republicans looking to escape their straitjackets would do well to emulate Coburn. He has upheld the only pledges that any member of Congress should ever make: to his conscience, his constituents and the Constitution.

(Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

Public enemy number five: Rupert Murdoch. Most people realized that Murdoch was something of a conniver, that he was a bully, that his media empire was designed in the most self-serving ways. Still, that was no less true of James Gordon Bennett, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, Murdoch’s journalistic forebears.

But the telephone hacking scandal in Great Britain and the other attendant revelations reveal that Murdoch was something more than a garden variety journalistic despot. He appears to have been a journalistic terrorist as well, a journalistic KGB, a journalistic mobster whose minions used blackmail — overall, a journalistic thug.

It is not only the hacking of the phone of a missing girl, and the deletion of some messages that appalls; or the threats against officers investigating the hacking; or the use of privileged police information to track down celebrities. It is the acquisition and leaking of information that then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown’s newborn infant had cystic fibrosis – information that the Browns did not want made public. This goes beyond overzealous tabloid impropriety. It breaks the bounds of human decency. Of course, Murdoch’s most regrettable meddling into American politics comes with the ownership of Fox News which is arguably the propaganda wing of the Republican-Teahadist Party.

Public enemy number six: Ronald Reagan. Although long dead now, his askew ideology permeates and inspires present day Republicans. Arguably Reagan was one of the worst Presidents America ever had…for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is the horrific deficit he left (at the tune of 3-trillion) the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment for women and the empowering of Fundamentalist Evangelicals that set our country on a path of division and theocracy proposals.

Public enemy number seven: Ayn Rand Ayn Rand was not only a schlock novelist, she was also the progenitor of a sweeping “moral philosophy” that justifies the privilege of the wealthy and demonizes not only the slothful, undeserving poor but the lackluster middle-classes as well.

Her books provided wide-ranging parables of "parasites," "looters" and "moochers" using the levers of government to steal the fruits of her heroes' labor. In the real world, however, Rand herself received Social Security payments and Medicare benefits under the name of Ann O'Connor (her husband was Frank O'Connor).

After all, it has been faith in “free-market economics” as a kind of secular religion that has driven U.S. government policies – from the emergence of Ronald Reagan through the neo-liberalism of Bill Clinton into the brave new world of House Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan.

Her ideas about government intervention in some idealized pristine marketplace serve as the basis for so much of the conservative rhetoric we see today. “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand,” said Paul Ryan, the GOP's young budget star at a D.C. event honoring the author. On another occasion, he proclaimed, “Rand makes the best case for the morality of democratic capitalism.”

“Morally and economically,” wrote Rand in a 1972 newsletter, “the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull.”

Journalist Patia Stephens wrote of Rand:

[She] called altruism a “basic evil” and referred to those who perpetuate the system of taxation and redistribution as “looters” and “moochers.” She wrote in her book “The Virtue of Selfishness” that accepting any government controls is “delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”

Rand also believed that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco was a hoax. By 1974, the two-pack-a-day smoker, then 69, required surgery for lung cancer. And it was at that moment of vulnerability that she succumbed to the lure of collectivism.