The rightwing complains about Sharia? What about “Born Again” fantasies? Sharia is no threat to America or to its institutions… “Born Again” fancies like the Manhattan Declaration are clear and present dangers to America and all Americans (especially, real Christians not contaminated with Sectarian notions)… end of story.
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It’s cheaper to invest in politicians than in pollution controls…
Cynical Texas saying
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Read these:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/162913/rick-perry-governor-sale
Note this:
Conservatives’ view of history is either a warm, patriotic tale of American exceptionalism or a tale of Big Government oppression. It glides over or misrepresents progressive triumphs like the New Deal or Great Society and ignores unpleasant episodes like the Jim Crow era. Only studying the United States’ “best hits” ignores the contributions of minorities, labour, and other groups. “Historians constantly challenge each other, and understandings of the past evolve (for whatever reason). However, these people are different in that they aren’t really reality-based and don’t have much standing or credibility among scholars”, William Link, a professor of history at the University of Florida, told The Nation. …
Perry has been elected governor three times, and has proclaimed his state a model worth replicating at the national level. Yet, Texas has the highest number of residents without health insurance in the nation, among the worst-ranked food stamp programmes, one of the highest child poverty rates, the lowest percentage of residents with a high school diploma, and one of the highest teenage birth rates. These are stats that deserve swears, not swagger.
Texas’s political system is also as brazenly capable of corruption by money and special interests as that in Washington, and unabashedly so. Long before the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United allowed unlimited contributions to begin flowing into national super PACs, Texas had some of the most lax campaign finance laws anywhere. At the state level, there are no limits on the amount of money individuals can contribute to candidates, allowing wealthy donors to directly bankroll campaigns. In such an environment, Rick Perry didn’t just survive, he flourished. He didn’t just embrace the system, he shattered records with it, raising more than anyone in Texas history. Indeed, for as long as Perry has been governor, the governor’s mansion has been ostensibly for sale.
Instead of commenting myself, here’s what I saw in the comboxes:
- Wow. That doesn’t even include Jonah Goldberg’s masterpiece Liberal Fascism, which claims that Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all leftists and that Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Jimmy Carter are just “softer” versions of these monsters.
- Right-wingers lie and make stuff up. We all do that a little, but the talking crotches on FOX make it an art form. More worrisome is their appeal to the perpetually-dim bullies among us.
- While both left and right use history to further their own agendas, I find the right’s message to be more insidious. The left tends to focus on the historical warts such as genocide, exploitation, unjust wars, economic inequality, and minority struggles. The right on the other hand glosses over the dark side and paints a picture of American exceptionalism where manifest destiny is triumphant and we always advance towards the light.
- They look at the economic growth during the period of 1950-80 and see nothing but the failure of unions and liberalism. They see a 10 percent drop in poverty rates as a failure. They see the rise of the middle class as being related to only taxes, not wage growth. They look at the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and see nothing but total failure. They see the War on Drugs as a money-saving success, but the War on Poverty as a complete failure. They see cleaner air and water as job killing, regardless of the fact that “green tech” is going to create jobs as energy prices climb. Moreover, they see a divorced man who was the father of a dysfunctional family, an ex-union president, a signer of liberal abortion rights in California, a guy that raised taxes and added national debt as a hero of Family Values, a deficit hawk, and uniting force.
- What the neocons can’t either remember or choose not to remember was that the economy sucked royally when their Messiah Ronnie Raygun was president. I don’t know how old these guys are, but I recall the job market back then, it sucked. If you wanted a job and you didn’t have a rich mommy and daddy, the military was pretty much one of the only options there was, unless, of course, you could flip burgers or scrub toilets for a living. Reagan’s “ramping up military spending” destroyed the US job market in that time.
- George Orwell summed it up thusly, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”. There’s not much more to be said on the subject, except that we must be alert to the re-writing history and to the motives of those who’re doing it.
Keep this in mind… the Republican Party wants the entire USA to be like Texas… lowest in the country as far as education goes, first in the country as far as putting people to death goes (it’s fair to point up that there’s good Texans who stand against the Republican Moloch… they’ve been squashed so far, but they’re there). That’s a “nasty, brutish, and short” Hobbesian future… yet, that’s what the New GOP advocates… I don’t think that’s hard to fathom, is it?
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Wednesday 24 August 2011
Albany NY
The End of the American Empire
Tags: Americas, Anastasio Somoza García, Brazil, Central America, Cuba, Cuban Revolution, Franklin D Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Hugo Chávez, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, James Monroe, Latin America, Mexican, Mexican War, Mexico, Monroe Doctrine, Nicaragua, Panama, political commentary, politics, South America, United States, USA, Venezuela, Washington, Woodrow Wilson
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The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías knocked Washington off-balance and stripped it of confidence. Breaking the traditional rules of diplomatic courtesy, US President Obama refrained from extending condolences to the people and government of Venezuela, unlike the heads of state of most other countries. Those in the American corridors of power must have lost their nerve.
In this case, Chávez’s extraordinary personality didn’t cause this state of affairs; rather, the tectonic policy shift that embodied Chávez’s philosophy devastated the USA. For two centuries, South America provided solid and reliable support for a country whose very name… the United States of America… incorporated claims to speaking on behalf of both parts of the American continent. In 1823, the fifth US President, James Monroe, proclaimed in a message to the US Congress that all territories south of the American border were the USA’s “exclusive sphere of influence”. It’s worth remembering that the text of the so-called Monroe Doctrine stated that the USA would consider any attempt on the part of any other country to interfere militarily or politically in the affairs of any state in the Americas as hostile, a threat to its peace and security. Without any diplomatic frou-frou, Senator Lodge explained the essence of Monroe Doctrine by saying, “The American flag must fly over the territory from the Rio Grande to the Arctic”.
The Monroe Doctrine was a guide for several generations of politicians as they replaced one another at the helm of the American state. After World War I, US President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Monroe Doctrine be part of the Covenant of the League of Nations. By using brute force, Washington kept South America under its thumb. After American troops invaded Mexico in 1846, the USA de facto carved that country up {part of it became the south-western USA after the American victory: editor}. Besides that, the USA propped up bloody puppet juntas in Central America like those of General Anastasio Somoza García in Nicaragua. US President Franklin D Roosevelt threw out a famous cynical bon mot concerning him, “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch”.
After the Second World War, Washington didn’t loosen its iron grip on Latin America; it still held it under its tight control. Subservient Latin American delegations at the UN comprised an infamous “voting machine”; it was one of Washington’s major policy tools in the early years of the Cold War. The Cuban Revolution was the first peal of thunder. The multiple, but unsuccessful, attempts to suppress it marked the beginning of the end for the empire south of the American border. A bloc of states chose to reject Washington’s diktat… Brazil’s economic and political weight grew exponentially, Nicaragua broke free, Panama snatched the Panama Canal from America’s grip, and Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela went on to head an anti-American front in Latin America. All this became a nightmare for the proponents of the outmoded Monroe Doctrine. The 200-year-old American Empire is no more, never to return. Judging from their nervousness, the power élite in Washington is unaware or is unwilling to recognise that. So much the worse… for them!
Valentin Zorin
Voice of Russia World Service
A View from Moscow
http://rus.ruvr.ru/2013_03_19/203903965/