Historic looks at effective tax rates in the US

In the run up to the election, confabulation about tax rates in the US will reach a frenzy. The disinformation coming from the Grand Old Party, now in the grips of a struggle for their identity in the face of the astroturf'd Tea Party, will likely leave the GOP candidate taking a very hard anti-tax line.

An honest look at effective tax rates in the US will be one of the many pieces of collateral damage facts will suffer. Here's the first of a few pieces I'm planning on promoting on this topic:

Ten Charts that Prove the United States Is a Low-Tax Country
Our Citizens and Corporations Pay Much Less Than They Once Did and Much Less Than in Most Other Countries

The United States is a low-tax country. That’s true for individuals and for corporations, and it’s true whether you compare us to other countries or the America of the past. No matter how you slice it the conclusion is the same.

Conservatives like to claim that our budget deficits are purely a “spending problem.” Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “We don’t have this problem because we tax too little. We have it because we spent too much.”

It’s a popular talking point, but it simply isn’t true. Deficits do not stem from spending levels alone. They are the product of a mismatch between spending and revenue. And when revenue is as low as ours is, you end up with big deficits.

Here are 10 charts demonstrating the simple, clear truth that federal taxes in the United States are very low.



Recently, President Obama met with a group of House Republicans to discuss the federal budget and the national debt. During the course of that meeting, the president noted, correctly, that taxes today are even lower than they were under President Ronald Reagan. This fact was met with “a lot of ‘eye-rolling’” from the Republicans. They didn’t believe him.

This anecdote suggests that perhaps the reason conservatives think we don’t have a revenue problem is because they don’t know the facts. Taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan. They’re lower today than they’ve been in 60 years. And they’re lower than they are in most developed countries.

We do have a debt problem coming down the road. That debt problem is the result of an aging population, rising health care costs, and, yes, revenue levels that are too low.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/06/low_tax.html

My last gift ever... okay, how about for the next 10 years

I would give up all my other wishes if we could find a way to get this one done. As a matter of fact, if the Tea Party can get behind this, we will have discovered something to have in common:

Resolution Calling to Amend the Constitution Banning Corporate Personhood Introduced in Vermont
By Christopher Ketcham, AlterNet
Posted on January 22, 2011, Printed on January 24, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149620/

A year ago today, the Supreme Court issued its bizarre Citizens United decision, allowing unlimited corporate spending in elections as a form of “free speech” for the corporate “person.” Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the dissent, had the task of recalling the majority to planet earth and basic common sense.

"Corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires," wrote Stevens. "Corporations help structure and facilitate the activities of human beings, to be sure, and their 'personhood' often serves as a useful legal fiction. But they are not themselves members of 'We the People' by whom and for whom our Constitution was established."

Fortunately, movements are afoot to reverse a century of accumulated powers and protections granted to corporations by wacky judicial decisions.

In Vermont, state senator Virginia Lyons on Friday presented an anti-corporate personhood resolution for passage in the Vermont legislature. The resolution, the first of its kind, proposes "an amendment to the United States Constitution ... which provides that corporations are not persons under the laws of the United States." Sources in the state house say it has a good chance of passing. This same body of lawmakers, after all, once voted to impeach George W. Bush, and is known for its anti-corporate legislation. Last year the Vermont senate became the first state legislature to weigh in on the future of a nuclear power plant, voting to shut down a poison-leeching plant run by Entergy Inc. Lyons’ Senate voted 26-4 to do it, demonstrating the level of political will of the state’s politicians to stand up to corporate power.

The language in the Lyons resolution is unabashed. "The profits and institutional survival of large corporations are often in direct conflict with the essential needs and rights of human beings," it states, noting that corporations "have used their so-called rights to successfully seek the judicial reversal of democratically enacted laws.”

Thus the unfolding of the obvious: “democratically elected governments” are rendered “ineffective in protecting their citizens against corporate harm to the environment, health, workers, independent business, and local and regional economies." The resolution goes on to note that "large corporations own most of America's mass media and employ those media to loudly express the corporate political agenda and to convince Americans that the primary role of human beings is that of consumer rather than sovereign citizens with democratic rights and responsibilities."

Denouncing this situation as an "intolerable societal reality," the document concludes that the "only way" toward a solution is the amendment of the Constitution "to define persons as human beings.”

Constitutional lawyer David Cobb, the 2004 Green Party presidential candidate, recently traveled to Vermont to help draft the resolution. Cobb says it is an historic document. "This is the first state to introduce at the legislative level a statement of principles that corporations are not persons and do not have constitutional rights," he told AlterNet. "This is how a movement gets started. It's the beginning of a revolutionary action completely and totally within the legal framework."

Such an amendment would be the 28th time we have corrected our founding document to reflect political reality and social change. In other words, we've done it 27 times before in answer to the call of history, and we can do it again. There is a groundswell of support: 76 percent of Americans, according to a recent ABC News poll, said they opposed the Citizens United decision.

The Total Weirdness of Corporate Personhood

The corporate person is the product of some plainly weird metaphysics. This astonishing fictional "person," accorded all the rights of a human, can split off pieces of itself to form new fictional persons, can marry many other similar persons in a process called a merger, is immortal, can change its name and identity overnight, and can aggregate gigantic streams of capital with which it somehow has the right to speak. Strangely enough, the corporate person, who has neither soul nor body, is at the same time owned by many other persons called shareholders who buy and sell its parts every day -- it is owned, in fact, much the way a slave is owned.

Additionally, the many-limbed, mercurial, shape-changing god-person-as-chattel can connive to murder wretched fleshy mortal persons and not be hanged by the neck or electrocuted in a chair or go to jail for life as punishment. Instead the corporate person pays out a paltry sum and goes about his or her blithe business as if no murder was committed, no crime accomplished. The corporate person can shut down whole communities by driving out business, can spread cancers in the air and water, can destroy fisheries or lay waste to forests, and do all of this with a degree of impunity provided under the vaunted protections of the Bill of Rights. The best-known and most insidious of these rights is that which allows the corporation under the First Amendment to speak freely using money -- yet another twist of metaphysics masquerading as law, and one that has not gone unnoticed by the highest jurists in the land.

The "useful legal fictions," launched into society as creatures of commerce and ostensibly at the beck and call of their creators, have freed themselves to wreak havoc on the people they were designed to help. Mere humans are arrayed against a dangerous automaton army, the army of the fictional corporate super-persons that deploy power with real-world consequences. If corporate hegemony is rightly understood as the overarching threat to world democracy today -- the threat from which all other threats derive when governments stand captured by corporatocracies -- then it is the absurdist legality of corporate personhood that serves as the functional lever of that hegemony. In this epochal battle for the future of planet earth, the humans against the corporations, the survival of the humans will depend on a dramatic legal assault, with nothing less than the murder of corporate personhood as the goal.

Christopher Ketcham has written for Vanity Fair, Harper’s, the Nation, Mother Jones, and many other publications. He can be contacted at cketcham99@mindspring.com.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149620/

After all the hubbub over the HCR, not one word about this insidious Senate proposal

This is a good read after all the riotous activity by folks recently in opposition to HCR. The need of average folks to have an authoritative voice to follow - wherever it leads - runs strong in North Americans (and perhaps most folks around the world). The followers of Beck, Limbaugh and Bachman aren't necessarily stupid - they're just lazy and reluctant to do any of their own thinking.

Anyway, good read at http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/17/torture/index.html

French documentarians conducted an experiment where they created a faux game show -- with all the typical studio trappings -- and then instructed participants (who believed it was a real TV program) to administer electric shock to unseen contestants each time they answered questions incorrectly, with increasing potency for each wrong answer.  Even as the unseen contestants (who were actors) screamed in agony and pleaded for mercy -- and even once they went silent and were presumably dead -- 81% of the participants continued to obey the instructions of the authority-figure/host and kept administering higher and higher levels of electric shock.  The experiment was a replica of the one conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, where 65% of participants obeyed instructions from a designated authority figure to administer electric shock to unseen individuals, and never stopped obeying even as they heard excruciating screams and then silence.  This new French experiment was designed to measure the added power of television to place people into submission to authority and induce them to administer torture.

None of this should be at all surprising to anyone who has observed, first, the American political and media class, and then large swaths of the American citizenry, enthusiastically embrace what was once the absolute taboo against torture, all because Government officials decreed that it was necessary to Stop the Terrorists.  But I just watched an amazing discussion of this French experiment on Fox News.  The Fox anchors -- Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum -- were shocked and outraged that these French people could be induced by the power of television to embrace torture. 

Speaking as employees of the corporation that produced the highly influential, torture-glorifying 24, and on the channel that has churned out years worth of pro-torture "news" advocacy, the anchors were particularly astonished that television could play such a powerful role in influencing people's views and getting them to acquiesce to such heinous acts.  Ultimately, they speculated that perhaps it was something unique about the character and psychology of the French that made them so susceptible to external influences and so willing to submit to amoral authority, just like many of them submitted to and even supported the Nazis, they explained.  I kept waiting for them to make the connection to America's torture policies and Fox's support for it -- if only to explain to their own game show participants at home Fox News viewers why that was totally different -- but it really seemed the connection just never occurred to them.  They just prattled away -- shocked, horrified and blissfully un-self-aware -- about the evils of torture and mindless submission to authority and the role television plays in all of that.

Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain -- the so-called "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" -- now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown.  It's probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act.  It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect -- including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil.  The bill requires that all such individuals be placed in military custody, and explicitly says that they "may be detained without criminal charges and without trial for the duration of hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners," which everyone expects to last decades, at least.  It's basically a bill designed to formally authorize what the Bush administration did to American citizen Jose Padilla -- arrest him on U.S. soil and imprison him for years in military custody with no charges. 

This bill has produced barely a ripple of controversy, its two main sponsors will continue to be treated as Serious Centrists and feted on Sunday shows, and it's hard to imagine any real resistance to its passage.  Isn't it shocking how easily led and authoritarian the French are?  

 

UPDATE:  Led by people like Rush Limbaugh, the American Right celebrated even the most extreme torture brutalities, such as those at Abu Ghraib, by embracing them as "a good time," an "emotional release," "blowing off steam," a "fraternity prank," and S&M pornography.  At least the contestants in the French show acquiesced to torture reluctantly and even with resistance, rather than with the demented pleasure, vicarious sensations of power, 24-type entertainment, and primal arousal which many disturbed individuals on the American Right derive from it.  And, as always, no discussion of the American torture and detention regime is complete without noting that the vast majority subjected to its horrors was completely innocent.

As for the McCain/Lieberman atrocity, it's been reported that the Obama White House (a) is actively negotiating with Lindsey Graham on a bill to provide for indefinite detention power and (b) has already designated numerous detainees to be held indefinitely with no charges of any kind.  It remains to be seen what their (and, then, their supporters') position on this bill will be.

The real wolf...

My Dad is fond of David Brooks as a sane voice of conservatism for an in increasingly unstable and unhinged Grand Old Party. I go back and forth on him myself (on Brooks, not the GOP), but in this case he really does have the right of it. What bothers me most, however, is the naked use of fear - particularly since 9/11 - to eliminate the most sacred and progressive elements of the US constitution. The very ideals that have drawn millions to our shores and helped make the US unique among nations and a beacon of hope to the people everywhere is the first thing we light on fire to keep the darkness back. While this may have stated with the Orwellian-named "Patriot Act", it is this driving into the American sub-conscience the need for torture to "help keep American's safe". The weird part is that I do not believe that individually we really believe this, but somehow our negligence in not marching on Washington by the millions to stop it has made it "alright".

Anyway, my Dad was quoting the Brooks column recently and I think with Greenwald you'll get more than a blithering scree :)

PS - The Rasmussen poll listed in Update 1 is very questionable and I believe it is the result of poor polling practice (i.e., the use of leading questions), and I do not believe that a majority of Americans support torture. But as I have found myself saying repeatedly over the last few years, I do not believe that I fall in line with the majority of Americans on a great many key issues and this point continues to be a sore one for me.

The degrading effects of terrorism fears

The expectation that government provide absolute safety is both dangerous and irrational

Glenn Greenwald

Jan. 02, 2010 |

(updated below - Update II)

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but David Brooks actually had an excellent column in yesterday's New York Times that makes several insightful and important points.  Brooks documents how "childish, contemptuous and hysterical" the national reaction has been to this latest terrorist episode, egged on -- as usual -- by the always-hysterical American media.  The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe.  Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens.  Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive.  Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens:  please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe.

This is what inevitably happens to a citizenry that is fed a steady diet of fear and terror for years.  It regresses into pure childhood.  The 5-year-old laying awake in bed, frightened by monsters in the closet, who then crawls into his parents' bed to feel Protected and Safe, is the same as a citizenry planted in front of the television, petrified by endless imagery of scary Muslim monsters, who then collectively crawl to Government and demand that they take more power and control in order to keep them Protected and Safe.  A citizenry drowning in fear and fixated on Safety to the exclusion of other competing values can only be degraded and depraved.  John Adams, in his 1776 Thoughts on Government, put it this way:

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.

As Adams noted, political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels, as that is what maximizes their power.  For a variety of reasons, nobody aids this process more than our establishment media, motivated by their own interests in ratcheting up fear and Terrorism melodrama as high as possible.  The result is a citizenry far more terrorized by our own institutions than foreign Terrorists could ever dream of achieving on their own.  For that reason, a risk that is completely dwarfed by numerous others -- the risk of death from Islamic Terrorism -- dominates our discourse, paralyzes us with fear, leads us to destroy our economic security and eradicate countless lives in more and more foreign wars, and causes us to beg and plead and demand that our political leaders invade more of our privacy, seize more of our freedom, and radically alter the system of government we were supposed to have.  The one thing we don't do is ask whether we ourselves are doing anything to fuel this problem and whether we should stop doing it.  As Adams said:  fear "renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable."

What makes all of this most ironic is that the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset.  The Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety.  Even though they knew that doing so would help murderers and other dangerous and vile criminals evade capture, the Framers banned the Government from searching homes without probable cause, prohibited compelled self-incrimination, double jeopardy and convictions based on hearsay, and outlawed cruel and unusual punishment.  That's because certain values -- privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power -- were more important than mere survival and safety.  A central calculation of the Constitution was that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with less safety and a heightened risk of danger and death.  And, of course, the Revolutionary War against the then-greatest empire on earth was waged by people who risked their lives and their fortunes in pursuit of liberty, precisely because there are other values that outweigh mere survival and safety.

These are the calculations that are now virtually impossible to find in our political discourse.  It is fear, and only fear, that predominates.  No other competing values are recognized.  We have Chris Matthews running around shrieking that he's scared of kung-fu-wielding Terrorists.  Michael Chertoff is demanding that we stop listening to "privacy ideologues" -- i.e., that there should be no limits on Government's power to invade and monitor and scrutinize.  Republican leaders have spent the decade preaching that only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, matters.  All in response to this week's single failed terrorist attack, there are -- as always -- hysterical calls that we start more wars, initiate racial profiling, imprison innocent people indefinitely, and torture even more indiscriminately.  These are the by-products of the weakness and panic and paralyzing fear that Americans have been fed in the name of Terrorism, continuously for a full decade now.

Ever since I began writing in late 2005 about this fear-addicted dynamic, the point on which Brooks focused yesterday is the one I've thought most important.  What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result.  Policies can always be changed.  What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States.  Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws.  Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism:  the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection.   This is what I wrote about that back in early 2006 in How Would a Patriot Act?:

The president's embrace of radical theories of presidential power threatens to change the system of government we have.  But worse still, his administration's relentless, never-ending attempts to keep the nation in a state of fear can also change the kind of nation we are. 

This isn't exactly new:  many of America's most serious historical transgressions -- the internment of Japanese-Americans, McCarthyite witch hunts, World War I censorship laws, the Alien and Sedition Act -- have been the result of fear-driven, over-reaction to external threats, not under-reaction.  Fear is a degrading toxin, and there's no doubt that it has been the primary fuel over the last decade.  As the events of the last week demonstrate, it continues to spread rapidly, and it produces exactly the kind of citizenry about which John Adams long ago warned.

 

UPDATE:  Talking to one's friends and co-workers is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion on an issue.  Those who want to claim that the media's hysteria over this incident is not matched by the general public's are going to have to explain this:

Fifty-eight percent (58%) of U.S. voters say waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques should be used to gain information from the terrorist who attempted to bomb an airliner on Christmas Day. . . . Seventy-one percent (71%) of all voters think the attempt by the Nigerian Muslim to blow up the airliner as it landed in Detroit should be investigated by military authorities as a terrorist act. Only 22% say it should be handled by civilian authorities as a criminal act, as is currently the case.

Does that sound like a calm and sober citizenry?

UPDATE II:  On Fox News yesterday, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney (ret.) announces that he wants to strip search all Muslim males between the ages of 18-28, and explains that "political correctness" -- the only possible reason one might have to object to such a proposal -- is going to result in our mass slaughter at the hands of jihadists.  It's hard to overstate -- or even fathom -- what happens to people who have sat there for years and ingested this sort of ugliness and panic.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Words, what they mean and perhaps more importantly, when they mean...

Chris Hedges burrows right into my own "1984" paranoia about the democratic right of dissent. A healthy society doesn't just support the right of dissent, it in fact requires it to remain healthy. We've heard a lot of negative commentary about being "politically correct", but somehow we continue to miss this more obvious and insidious target against free speech.

"Meh" you say? Well perhaps.

One Day We'll All Be Terrorists
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on December 29, 2009, Printed on December 29, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144833/

This article first appeared on TruthDig.

Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.

This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day,  this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.

The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.

Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2½ years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His "proclivity for violence" is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.

"My brother was an activist," Hashmi's brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. "He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother's humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.

"Hashmi's right to a fair trial has been abridged," said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA, and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.

"The prosecution's case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others," Ratner added. "While Hashmi's political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities."

Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.

"Most of the evidence is classified," Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, "but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2½ years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi."

Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the "war on terror." He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read "Terror Trail" and "Web of Terror." He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master's degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more "aspirational rather than operational." And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney's actions in Al-Arian's plea agreement saying curtly: "I think there's something more important here, and that's the integrity of the Justice Department."

The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.

"Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political," said Theoharis. "This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can't get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi's political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril."

Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar's presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America "the biggest terrorist in the world," but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.

There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given "terrorism enhancements" under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility "inhumane." All calls and mail—although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials—are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill., they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.

Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.
Copyright © 2009 Truthdig, L.L.C.


Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
© 2009 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/144833/

Remembering the October Surprise

That's no moon, or how the Reagan team used the American hostages held in Iran as tools to get elected.


Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)
The October Surprise Crystal Balls
By Robert Parry
Created Nov 14 2009 - 12:39pm


In fall 1980, as President Jimmy Carter struggled to free 52 American hostages in Iran and as American voters focused on a crossroads election, key supporters of Republican candidate Ronald Reagan were confident not only of Reagan's victory but that the hostages wouldn't be released until after Reagan was sworn in.

That confidence has been one of the sub-plots linked to the political mystery known as the October Surprise case, which centered on allegations that Republicans went behind Carter's back to contact Iranians and sabotaged his hostage negotiations, thus guaranteeing Reagan's resounding victory.

The accumulated evidence – including government documents and statements from some two dozen witnesses – now points to a conclusion that the Reagan campaign did develop covert contacts with Iranian officials and that those dealings did undermine Carter's efforts. The hostages were freed after Reagan's was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981.

An October Surprise conclusion that the Republicans were guilty of a political dirty trick bordering on treason also puts into a more sinister light those crystal balls of GOP operatives who foresaw the hostages returning only after Reagan got into office.

While those predictions might be explained away as lucky guesses or astute analyses, the timing assessment from three figures in particular raise eyebrows: former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, neoconservative activist Michael Ledeen and legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland. All three have been linked to the October Surprise mystery.

Copeland, who had taken part in the CIA's covert operation to oust Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and replace him with the Shah back in 1953, told me during an interview in 1990 that he and some of his old CIA colleagues, including Iran hand Archibald Roosevelt, were in touch with Republicans regarding Carter's Iranian hostage crisis of 1980.

Copeland said the CIA old boys drafted their own plan for a hostage rescue and passed it along to both the Carter administration and to former President Richard Nixon and Kissinger. However, after Carter's own failed rescue attempt in April 1980, Copeland said the Republicans in his circle concluded that a second rescue attempt was both unfeasible and unnecessary.

These Republicans were talking confidently about the hostages being freed after a Republican victory in November, Copeland said.

"There was no discussion of a Kissinger or Nixon plan to rescue these people, because Nixon, like everybody else, knew that all we had to do was wait until the election came, and they were going to get out," Copeland said.

"That was sort of an open secret among people in the intelligence community, that that would happen. … The intelligence community certainly had some understanding with somebody in Iran in authority, in a way that they would hardly confide in me."

Copeland said his CIA friends had been told by contacts in Iran that the mullahs would deliver the hostages to Reagan.

"At that time, we had word back, because you always have informed relations with the devil," Copeland said. "But we had word that, 'Don't worry.' As long as Carter wouldn't get credit for getting these people out, as soon as Reagan came in, the Iranians would be happy enough to wash their hands of this and move into a new era of Iranian-American relations."

In the interview, Copeland declined to give more details, beyond his assurance that "the CIA within the CIA," his term for the true protectors of U.S. national security, had an understanding with the Iranians about the hostages. (Copeland died on Jan. 14, 1991, before I could interview him again.)

Kissinger's Crystal Ball

Though Copeland was coy about describing Kissinger's precise role in the October Surprise case, Kissinger was among the Republicans who was confidently looking forward to a hostage release once Reagan took office.

After this year's death of longtime CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, one of our readers was examining Cronkite archival footage and was surprised to find a clip of Cronkite leading a discussion of CBS correspondents on Election Night 1980 about why Reagan had won a landslide after the pre-election polls had shown a much closer race.

Correspondent Leslie Stahl noted how the coincidence of the first anniversary of the Iran hostage-taking falling on Election Day had forced Americans to relive the year-long humiliation and thus they turned to Reagan, a perceived hard-liner who would confront American adversaries.

That comment reminded Cronkite of an earlier interview he had done with Henry Kissinger who, Cronkite said, was "suggesting tonight that he thinks that Reagan being in the White House will help get [the hostages] back and he bets they'll get back shortly after the Inaugural. Well, that's still some time. That means that Henry Kissinger must be thinking in terms of long negotiations in order to put the package together."

As it turned out, of course, Kissinger's prediction was right on the money. Immediately after Reagan was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were freed and Reagan basked in the perception that his tough-guy persona had done the trick.

But Kissinger wasn't just some distant observer when it came to the hostage crisis. He had been there from the outset, in 1979 when he worked with Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller – who had been the Shah's banker – to pressure President Carter to admit the exiled Shah into the United States for cancer treatment.

According to Rockefeller's autobiography Memoirs, Kissinger's role was "to publicly criticize the Carter administration for its overall management of the Iranian crisis and other aspects of its foreign policy" while other Rockefeller associates made private demands for the Shah's admission.

Carter's decision to relent – and let the Shah in – provoked radical elements in Tehran to target the U.S. Embassy for a takeover. When they stormed the Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, the hostage crisis began.

A Lingering Presence

Over the next year, Kissinger remained a behind-the-scenes figure in the crisis, as Copeland noted in the interview.

"There were many of us – myself along with Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, Archie Roosevelt in the CIA at the time – we believed very strongly that we were showing a kind of weakness, which people in Iran and elsewhere in the world hold in great contempt," Copeland said. (By 1980, Roosevelt also was working for Rockefeller as a consultant.)

The Rockefeller group was in contact with Reagan's campaign director William Casey who was at the heart of the October Surprise mystery, with a number of witnesses claiming that Casey met secretly with cleric Mehdi Karrubi and other Iranians involved with the hostage crisis.

Evidence from Reagan's campaign files revealed undisclosed contacts between the Rockefeller group and Casey. For instance, a visitor log [1] for Sept. 11, 1980, showed David Rockefeller and several aides signing in to see Casey at the campaign headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

With Rockefeller were Joseph Verner Reed, whom Rockefeller had assigned to coordinate U.S. policy toward the Shah, and Archibald Roosevelt, the former CIA officer who then was monitoring events in the Persian Gulf for Chase Manhattan. The fourth member of the party was Owen Frisbie, Rockefeller's chief lobbyist in Washington.

Kissinger also was in discreet contact with Casey during this period, according to Casey's personal chauffeur whom I interviewed.

The chauffeur, who asked not to be identified by name, said he was sent twice to Kissinger's Georgetown home to pick up the former Secretary of State and bring him to the Arlington headquarters for private meetings with Casey that were kept off the official visitor logs.

On Sept. 16, 1980, five days after the Rockefeller group's visit to Casey's office, Iran's acting foreign minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh spoke publicly about Republican interference.

"Reagan, supported by Kissinger and others, has no intention of resolving the problem," Ghotbzadeh said. "They will do everything in their power to block it."

So, when Kissinger spoke to Cronkite on Election Night 1980, he may well have known a great deal about the timing of the hostage release because he was working closely with some of the Republicans who allegedly were arranging the release and the timetable.

The Ledeen Connection

A third figure who has been connected to hostage negotiations with Iranians – and who reportedly foresaw a hostage release after Reagan took office – was Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative intellectual and author.

Journalist Richard Sale, who had worked with Ledeen on an article for The Washington Quarterly, said he and Ledeen were keeping in touch after the publication when Ledeen confidently predicted that the hostages would be released upon Reagan's inauguration.

In a recent e-mail to me, Sale said he asked Ledeen how he knew about the timing and how the release was being arranged. "I will always remember his smug, 'All it took was a few phone calls,'" Sale wrote.

When I contacted Ledeen about Sale's recollection, Ledeen responded by e-mail, claiming "Sale has written outright lies about me, as I told him to his ear. At one point he promised to apologize but never did. I wouldn't listen to anything he had to say."

When I asked Sale about Ledeen's "outright lies" claim, Sale noted that Ledeen offered no specifics of any supposed lies, and Sale denied having "an acrimonious exchange, not ever" with Ledeen. "I would have had no reason to apologize nor did he ever demand one," Sale wrote in an e-mail.

Other evidence also has linked Ledeen to the October Surprise case. A "secret" draft report by a 1992 House task force which investigated the October Surprise allegations stated that Ledeen and another prominent neocon Richard Perle participated in meetings of the Reagan campaign's "October Surprise Group," though "they were not considered 'members.'"

The campaign's "October Surprise Group" was assigned the task of preparing for "any last-minute foreign policy or defense-related event, including the release of the hostages, that might favorably impact President Carter in the November election," according to the task force findings.

The draft report also mentioned a Sept. 16, 1980, meeting on something called the "Persian Gulf Project" involving senior campaign officials, including William Casey and Richard Allen. According to the draft report and Allen's notes, Ledeen also participated in that meeting.

However, both references to Ledeen were removed from the House task force's final report that was overseen by task force chief counsel Lawrence Barcella, a longtime friend of Ledeen's.

Ties That Bind

The Barcella-Ledeen relationship dates back several decades when Barcella sold a house to Ledeen and the two aspiring Washington professionals shared a housekeeper. According to Peter Maas's book Manhunt regarding Barcella's work as a prosecutor on the case of ex-CIA officer Edwin Wilson who collaborated with Libya, Ledeen approached Barcella about the case in 1982.

Ledeen, who was then working as a State Department consultant on terrorism, was concerned that two of his associates, former CIA officer Ted Shackley and Pentagon official Erich von Marbod, had come under suspicion in the Wilson case.

"I told Larry that I can't imagine that Shackley [or von Marbod] would be involved in what you are investigating," Ledeen told me in an interview years later. "I wasn't trying to influence what he [Barcella] was doing. This is a community in which people help friends understand things."

Barcella also saw nothing wrong with the out-of-channel approach.

"He wasn't telling me to back off," Barcella told me. "He just wanted to add his two-cents worth."

Barcella said the approach was appropriate because Ledeen "wasn't asking me to do something or not do something." However, Shackley and von Marbod were dropped from the Wilson investigation.

Ledeen's associate, Shackley, also had a connection to the October Surprise case in 1980, having worked with then-vice presidential candidate George H.W. Bush on the Iran hostage issue. [For more on Shackley's role in the October Surprise case, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege [2]. For a document on Shackley's October Surprise work with Bush, click here [3].]

In the context of Barcella's role on the House task force, the Ledeen connection raised another conflict-of-interest question, after task force investigators were told that Barcella's friend, Ledeen, was an informal member of the Reagan campaign's "October Surprise Group."

Like the Wilson case, it appears that Ledeen convinced his friend Barcella to go in a different direction. When the House task force's final report was released in January 1993, the draft's references to Ledeen were all deleted. [To read a portion of the "secret" draft report, click here [4].]

In my recent e-mail exchange with Ledeen, he said, "Yes, I believe I spoke to Larry Barcella about the October Surprise investigation. … And I undoubtedly told him what I have always said, namely that, to the best of my knowledge, the October Surprise theory is nonsense."

Ledeen also denied having any contact with William Casey before 1981 and added, "I was not involved in the Reagan campaigns. I was not in any 'Persian Gulf Project' or 'October Surprise Group.' I can't answer your questions about alleged Republican contacts with Iran because I don't have any reason to believe that there were such contacts. If there were, I don't know anything about them."

In an e-mail to me, Sale noted that Ledeen's sweeping denials must always be taken with a grain of salt. Sale wrote that when Ledeen is confronted with troublesome evidence, he behaves as if "disinformation is perfectly permissible and deserved. Michael's tragedy is that he has chosen to service such ignominious causes."

Ledeen and other defenders of Ronald Reagan's legacy did win out in the House October Surprise task force's conclusions. With Barcella and his team deleting the references to Ledeen and concealing other incriminating evidence, the task force – headed by Reps. Lee Hamilton, D-Indiana, and Henry Hyde, R-Illinois – rejected the allegations of Republican dirty tricks regarding the Iran hostage crisis.

However, it turned out that even chief counsel Barcella had doubts about those findings. He told me years later that so much evidence poured in near the end of the investigation that he lobbied Hamilton to extend the inquiry for several months so the new material could be evaluated. Barcella said Hamilton turned him down and insisted that the debunking report go forward.

For Official Washington in early 1993 – as the iconic Ronald Reagan struggled with early Alzheimer's disease and the well-liked George H.W. Bush left office – it was easier to sweep the disturbing evidence of Republican misconduct under the rug.

But the October Surprise mystery -- and the curious predictions of a hostage release upon Reagan's inauguration -- have never been fully explained.

[For the fullest account of the October Surprise case, see Parry's Secrecy & Privilege [5], or the first two parts of the Consortiumnews.com series, "How Two Elections Changed America [6]," and "The Crazy October Surprise Debunking [7]."]

Strange New World

It has been very interesting to watch this iteration - the post-Obama anti-intellectual movement - take the reigns of the Republican party and lead it off into the wilderness. I think that in some part it is a reaction to the strong anti-Bush commentary that ran throughout his term but picked up steadily during his last few years. The ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party was appalled that anyone could doubt, much less actively criticize, "their" president. And the wounds of those years of Bush's every movement, speech and activity captured in real-time by a very responsive group of bloggers and activists left the hyper-conservative right deeply scarred. I have often lamented the death of the 4th Estate over the last several years as the consolidation of media outlets under a very select number of corporate owners whittled and changed - to my eye - the very nature of journalism. That said, I did not really see the logical extension of that to the wounded hyper-conservative press. I think Boehlert has the right of it this time - from the Fox led "tea parties" to Beck's 9/12 project, there is a new game afoot. I do feel deeply for authentic conservatives - old school conservatives - whose belief in limited government, states rights and fiscal restraint were based in genuine and principled belief that, where government was concerned, less was more. I look forward to seeing their champion return and watching the battle for the convservative soul - it will be a good fight to watch.


Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh Stoking GOP Civil War
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on November 11, 2009, Printed on November 11, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/media/143868/glenn_beck,_sean_hannity,_rush_limbaugh_stoking_gop_civil_war?page=entire

It's not easy to flip a congressional district that's been Republican since the late 1800s, but after being willingly hijacked by the right-wing media -- after getting steamrolled by Fox News' embrace of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman -- Republicans managed to hand Upstate New York's 23rd District to Democrats last week. And they did it just in time for the newly elected Democrat to help (barely) push health care reform through the House of Representatives during Saturday night's historic vote.

Doug Hoffman was, first and foremost, a media candidate (a media creation), which means we are entering a very new and different realm in American politics. We're entering a sort of Fox News Era where media outlets -- where alleged news organizations -- essentially co-sponsor political campaigns. We've moved well beyond the time when Fox News, for instance, leaned right and gave conservative candidates more air-time and tossed them lots of softball questions. We're now watching unfold a political reality where Fox News literally selects candidates and then markets them through Election Day.

There's a reason Hoffman described Glenn Beck as his "mentor" and pledged his "sacred honor" to uphold the "9 Principles and 12 Values" of Beck's 9/12 Project. There's a reason Sean Hannity wanted to "declare" Hoffman the election winner, and why Fox News' on-screen graphic read "Conservative Revolution?" when Hoffman was being interviewed (i.e. prematurely crowned) by Hannity on the eve of Election Day.

Hoffman's outsider bid, originally opposed by the Republican Party, was a media production, plain and simple, which means his loss was a media loss, as well.

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had it right when he told The Washington Times that Hoffman's rise as a third party candidate was the "result of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Fox News." Gingrich, who originally opposed Hoffman's candidacy, added: "This was not an isolated amateur; this is an entire movement."

Indeed, it's a media movement that's doing it's best to obliterate the line between journalism and politics.

As I've been noting for some time, Fox News has transformed itself into the Opposition Party of the Obama White House. So it makes sense that, as a purely partisan player, Fox News would immerse itself in backroom horse-trading. It makes sense that rather than covering the campaigns and the candidates, Fox News would insert itself as a political player within Republican contests and throw its support behind a specific candidate, the way it did in NY-23.

The looming problem for the GOP, though, is that the right-wing media can't pick winners and stands poised to rip the Republican Party apart. (Did you notice how Limbaugh last week claimed "Newt" had "screwed the whole [NY-23] thing up"?)

It's yet more evidence that during President Bush's pro-war tenure, far-right radio and TV talkers, along with fringe bloggers, convinced themselves they represented the mainstream -- the majority -- of the GOP. But they don't. They represent the radical CPAC wing of the GOP, and it shows on Election Day. We saw that in 2008, when bloggers and talkers opposed Sen. John McCain in the GOP primaries yet were completely unable to sway Republican voters in the process. In the immortal words of Republican strategist Mike Murphy, "These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination."

 What's different now, though, is that the right-wing media have become even more powerful within conservative circles, while the Republican National Committee and traditional Republican leaders have receded even further into the background. (Does anyone really see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as the leader of anything?) That power vacuum means it's Fox News that sets the conservative agenda in America. It's at Fox News where partisan strategies are hatched, rallies are marketed, and smear campaigns are launched. And it's Republican politicians and traditional Beltway professionals who are forced to play catch-up to the conservative media.

In other words, in just the last 12 months, the balance of power within the conservative movement has completely swung in the direction of the right-wing press, which is stoking the flames of the GOP civil war. It's a partisan press corps that no longer documents internal Republican squabbling; it initiates the infighting.

National political parties go through all kinds of evolutions; all kinds of natural expansions and contractions over time. (Barry Goldwater, for instance, oversaw perhaps the GOP's most radical contraction in modern times.) It's quite rare, though, for the catalyst of that change to be external media forces. Sure, permanent Beltway insiders such as Bill Kristol have routinely hopped back and forth between "the role of Republican flack and alleged journalist without changing even a comma in his prose 'style'," as columnist Eric Alterman noted last week.

But what we're seeing unfold in 2009 is something entirely different. This isn't a few conservative pundits dipping their toes into Republican political waters during election cycles and trying to generate an electoral wave. And this isn't like 1994 when AM talk radio morphed into an RNC echo chamber and helped spread the Republicans' anti-Clinton message.

This is a case where huge swaths of the conservative media, including television, radio, and online, have shed any façade of being journalists and embraced their king-making role. Or, if savaging a GOP candidate is what's needed, as was the case in NY-23 and Dede Scozzafava, then they'll do that as well.

Looking forward, it's inevitable that during the 2012 GOP Republican primary season, there will be, for the lack of a better term, a Fox News candidate in the field. There will be a far-right darling of the Tea Party movement (cough, cough, Sarah Palin) who has both the official (Limbaugh, Beck, Malkin) and unofficial (Fox News) endorsement of the right-wing media.

But will that do any good in the real world? Ask Doug Hoffman.

Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and Malkin, among others, all put their reputations on the line in NY-23, touting the contest as a referendum on the anti-Obama, Tea Party movement in America. And they lost, big time. Not unlike the way the same right-wing media leaders put their reputations on the line in early 2008 and went all-in against McCain in the South Carolina Republican primary. (FYI, McCain wasn't sufficiently conservative.) Result? McCain won the SC contest in a walk.

See a pattern here? Me, too. The Republican Party is now attached to a political movement -- a media-led movement -- that cannot win elections. It's a movement that cannot even win elections in traditionally red districts (NY-23) or in very red states (SC). By refusing to separate itself from media players who claim the president of the United States is a racist and a Nazi, the GOP may be assigning itself a permanent minority status.

And I'm sorry, but belated and feeble attempts by Republican leaders such as Rep. Eric Cantor to create the slightest glimmer of daylight between the GOP and the right-wing media aren't going to do the trick. (For the record, comparing health care reform to the Holocaust was the line Limbaugh and company recently crossed, according to Cantor. Good to know.) Republican politicians in 2009 have made it blindingly obvious that they lack both the courage to consistently stand up to the far-right media's hate merchants and the resources. Meaning, without the energy of the fringe activists who insist Obama is destroying America on purpose, the Republican Party would be virtually kaput today.

Disillusioned "Right Wing" blogger Rick Moran, recently bemoaning what he sees as the rise of an "anti-reason" movement on the far right, may have put it best when he asked, "What is it that possesses certain conservatives to fool themselves so spectacularly into believing that they can create a majority out of a minority?"

His definition of "anti-reason" conservatives, who now anchor the right-wing media, seemed dead-on, as well: "[T]hose who reject reality in favor of persecution complexes, wildly exaggerated hyperbole, and a frightening need for vengeance against their imagined 'enemies.' "

Moran actually penned that lament before the votes were counted in the NY-23 congressional race. And incredibly, the "anti-reason" fanatics Moran described were encouraged by the results in Upstate New York, which, in a strange way, actually made sense. Of course anti-reason conservatives would celebrate as a victory the fact that a district that hadn't elected a Democrat to Congress in nearly 150 years did so last week. Of course they'd announce that it was good news that by backing a candidate who did not even live in the district and who, according to a local newspaper editorial board, was woefully ill-informed about local issues, the movement had helped toss a Republican seat to the Democrats.

Anti-reason conservatives watched Hoffman go down in defeat and immediately announced they were going to target more Republican candidates, which means the right-wing media stand poised to unleash even more wingnuttery on the GOP establishment.

Grab the popcorn. This is going to be fun to watch.

 


© 2009 Media Matters for America All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143868/