RepubliKlans Desperate For Obama ‘Scandal’ Forgeting Past RepubliKlan Criminality

muckraker10021 · May 30, 2013

As the corporate ‘media-of-mass-distraction’ following the orders of their oligarch owners, continues to flail about breathlessly, seeking to create a felonious “scandal” involving the Obama ‘White House’ and in their wet dreams perhaps even the president himself, they scrupulously avoid informing their clueless viewers what and how a real criminal white house and presidency operates. We don’t have to go back too far in time to find an actual criminal white house; cheney-bushit had to compel a republiklan controlled congress to retroactively change laws in order to make themselves immune from criminal prosecution. During the Reagan-Papa Bush regime they ran the most corrupt administration of the 20th century; 138 Reagan administration officials have been convicted, indicted, and been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and criminal violations. Bill Clinton’s eight years yielded one corrupt official. President Obama so far, zero. But the most blatantly criminal regime was Richard Nixon. Robert Kennedy Jr. in the article below reminds those of you who have put such information down into the memory hole , the scope & depth of Nixon and his coconspirators crimes which included a then young cheney & rumsfeld.

young cheney & rumsfeld above

& below with with Nixon

"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal"
....Richard Nixon - 1971

Obama and Nixon: A Historical Perspective

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | May 20th 2013

For once with good reason, the GOP is exorcised with the scandals involving the IRS targeting political groups and the FBI's spying on A.P. reporters. The broader public is legitimately concerned. However, in its classic overblown breathlessness at all things Obama, the gleeful Republican leadership is already calling for impeachment and dragging out desperate comparisons to Nixon's Watergate. This, despite caveats from its own sages not to overplay Republican good fortune. "We overreached in 1998," Newt Gingrich admitted recently. He counseled restraint to the Tea Party jihadists he helped spawn. Gingrich recalled how the GOP's scandal mongering against Clinton had only amplified Clinton's popularity and cost Republicans the 1998 mid-terms and Gingrich his speakership. But this new generation of hysterical House members immune to that wisdom, are headed straight for the feinting couch in fits of anti-Obama hysteria.

In a characteristic spasm of partisan apoplexy, Iowa Congressman Steve King offered a shrill algorithm: "add Watergate and Iran Contra together and multiply by ten" to calculate the tyrannical evil of the Obama scandals.

As usual, the Fox-fueled GOP narrative swayed the mainstream press. On May 16, Reuters' Jeff Mason interrupted Obama's press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan to ask the President, "How do you feel about the comparisons by some of your critics with the scandals of the Nixon Administration?" Obama responded with calm contempt; he would leave those comparisons to the journalists. But he urged Mason to "read some history." If Mason takes that advice, here are some of the historical tidbits he might consider.

President Richard Nixon was aware that the IRS had audited him in 1961 and 1962 and presumed those audits were politically motivated by the Kennedy White House. When, early in his Administration, Nixon learned that his friends and political allies John Wayne and Rev. Billy Graham had endured recent audits by his own IRS, Nixon boiled over. He ordered White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, "Get the word out, down to the IRS that I want them to conduct field audits on those who are our opponents." Perhaps recalling the Kennedy era audits, Nixon ordered that its investigator begin with my Uncle's, John F. Kennedy's, former campaign manager and White House aide, then Democratic Committee Chairman, Lawrence O'Brien.

Nixon's minions had the IRS set up a special internal arm "the Activist Organization Committee" in July of 1969 to audit an "enemies list" provided by Nixon. My uncle Senator Ted Kennedy was at the top of that list along with a small army of well-known journalists. The IRS later renamed its political audit squad "Special Services" or "SS" to keep its mission secret. The SS targeted over 1,000 liberal groups for audits and 4,000 individuals. The SS staff managed their files in a soundproof cell in the IRS basement.

On September 27, 1970, Nixon ordered Haldeman to get the IRS to investigate my Uncle Ted who was then the presumed frontrunner in the 1972 presidential contest, sharing the field with Edmond Muskie and Hubert Humphrey who Nixon also ordered audited.

Nixon personally put White House dirty trickster Tom Charles Huston, former president of the Young Americans for Freedom, in charge of setting up the new IRS "anti-radical squad" to make sure that the laggards in IRS's bureaucracy didn't drop the ball. Huston prepared a 43-page blueprint for Nixon outlining a government agency campaign targeting Nixon's enemies. Uncle Teddy was still at the top. The scheme included tapping phones without warrants, infiltrating organizations that had been critical of the President and, purging IRS agents who refused to tow the Republican line. Huston told the President, "we won't be in control of the government and in a position of effective leverage until such time or we have complete and total control of the top three slots" at the IRS. Nixon also enthusiastically authorized a series of "black bag jobs" including breaking into offices, homes and liberal think tanks like the Ford Foundation and the Brookings Institute which Nixon believed was home to many former Kennedy Administration officials.

As a disclaimer, Huston cautioned that the "use of this technique is clearly illegal; it amounts to burglary. It is also highly risky and could result in great embarrassment if exposed. However, it is also the most fruitful tool and can produce the kind of intelligence which cannot be obtained in any other fashion."

According to historian and Nixon biographer, Rick Perlstein, Nixon "found the document splendid." Haldeman ordered Huston to draft a formal decision memo outlining the illegal plan as a mandate to the heads of the intelligence and tax collecting agencies. Nixon ordered Haldeman and Huston to order the IRS, the FBI and the CIA to proceed with the plan.

In May 1971, Nixon used an IRS investigation of Alabama Governor George Wallace's brother, Gerald Wallace, to pressure Gov. Wallace to run for President on the Democratic ticket as a spoiler rather than on a third party ticket as he planned. The blackmail scheme succeeded and most of Wallace's white male supporters fled to the Republicans after the Democrats nominated civil rights activist George McGovern. Nixon's tactic of having Wallace run as a Democrat was an indispensable element of the White House's "southern strategy".

Four months later, on September 8, 1971, Nixon raged at his counsel and Chief Domestic Policy Advisor, John Ehrlichman, about the IRS's lack of progress on finding dirt on his enemies. "We have the power but are we using it to investigate contributors to Hubert Humphrey, to Muskie, and the Jews? You know they are stealing everybody.... you know they really tried to crucify Ho Lewis [Reader's Digest editor, Hobart Lewis, a Nixon supporter who had been audited]! Are we looking into Muskie's return? Hubert's? Hubert's been in a lot of funny deals. Teddy? Who knows about the Kennedys? Shouldn't they be investigated?"

The following week he pleaded with Haldeman to light a fire under the IRS. "Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know the Big Jewish contributors of the Democrats.... Could we please investigate those cocksuckers?"

The following day he replayed that tune for Ehrlichman. "You see the IRS is full of Jews that's the reason they went after Graham." Haldeman recounted in his diary, "There was a considerable discussion of the terrible problem arising from the total Jewish domination of the media. Graham has the strong feeling that the Bible says there are Satanic Jews and that's where our problem arises."

The "Jewish-controlled media" and the "liberal media" were never far from Nixon's limbic system. Nixon also bugged reporters and used bribery, blackmail attempts, forgery, spying, burglary, and extensive bugging by national police agencies and by his own "plumbers squad" to monitor and manipulate the press for political purposes. Many of the top twenty names on Nixon's political enemies list (which eventually included 47,000 Americans) were reporters. They included Daniel Schorr, Mary McGrory, Edwin Guthman and Walter Cronkite. Nixon's staff and agencies bugged their phones, investigated their sex lives, rifled their trash, and had them watched and followed. Nixon directly ordered the investigation of imagined homosexuality by columnist Jack Anderson, a devout, teetotaling Mormon with a happy marriage and nine children.

On March 24, 1972, a group of Nixon's trusted operatives including former CIA spy E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, a murderous former Dutchess county, New York prosecutor and Adolf Hitler admirer, huddled in the basement of Washington's plush Hay-Adams Hotel, across from the White House with Dr. Edward Gund, a CIA physician, poison and assassinations expert. Nixon had complained darkly to top staffers including Special Counsel Chuck Colson that Anderson was "a thorn in his side" and that "we have to do something about this son of a bitch." According to Hunt and Liddy, Colson deployed them that day saying that Nixon had ordered Colson to "Stop Anderson at all costs."

The three spooks plotted out the best way to murder Anderson including running him off the road, spiking his drink with venom, breaking into his home and lacing Anderson's aspirin bottle ("aspirin roulette") with a special toxicant undetectable by autopsy or simply shooting him with Liddy's untraceable 9mm pistol. The plot is detailed by Mark Felstein in his 2005 book, Poisoning the Press, and elsewhere. Liddy suggested painting Anderson's steering wheel with a massive dose of LSD which would cause Anderson to crash in a hallucinogenic craze. Dr. Gund warned them that the LSD would be traceable in an autopsy. They finally elected to stab Anderson outside his house. Liddy volunteered to do the bloody work and make the crime look like a bungled robbery. Luckily for Anderson, the plot fizzled and was forgotten when both conspirators were arrested shortly thereafter in the Watergate scandal while endeavoring to reset a bug in Larry O'Brien's office.

On October 6, 1971, Nixon ordered Haldeman to have the IRS audit Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler who had transformed the Times from a right wing rag into a universally respected paper by recruiting top journalists from across the nation. Chandler and his very large family were close friends of my family and had spent the summer prior to my father's death running the Colorado River with us. "I want Otis Chandler's income tax," Nixon told Haldeman. Nixon then called his Attorney General and former law partner, John Mitchel, and ordered Mitchel to fire the Los Angeles Director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "The fellow out there in the Immigration Services is a kike by the name of Rosenberg." The President explained to Mitchel, "He is to be out." Fulminating on, Nixon told Mitchel, "I want you to direct the most trusted person you have in the Immigration Service to look at all the activities of the Los Angeles Times... let me explain as a Californian, I know everybody in California hires them... Otis Chandler... I want him checked with regard to his gardener. I understand he is a wetback. Is that clear?" When the Attorney General replied, "Yes, sir." Nixon crowed triumphantly, "We're going after the Chandlers! Every one, individually and collectively, their income taxes... every one of those sons of bitches."

In August of 1972, Edmund Muskie withdrew as George McGovern's Vice Presidential running mate. After my Uncle Ted demurred at McGovern's request that he join the ticket, McGovern recruited another of my uncles, Sargent Shriver. On August 9, Nixon had a meeting with his staff to discuss how to destroy the Democrats. Turning to Haldeman, he asked, "What in the name in of God are we doing on this one? What are we doing about the financial contributors? Now those lists there... are we looking over the financial contributions to the Democratic Committee? Are we running their income tax returns? Is the Justice Department checking to see if there are any anti-trust suits? We have all this power and were not using it. Now what the Christ is the matter? In other words I'm just thinking for example if there is information on Larry O'Brien. What is being done? Who is doing this full-time? What in the name of God are we doing?" Nixon abruptly narrowed his sights on McGovern's top contributor, Henry Kimmelman, and said emphatically, "Scare the shit out of him," He repeated the order to Ehrlichman, "Scare the shit out of him. Now there are some Jews with the mafia and they are involved with this too!"

George Schultz was now Treasury Secretary. Nixon directed Haldeman to order Schultz to audit Kimmelman. "Everybody thinks George is an honest, decent man," Nixon observed contemptuously. "George has got a fantasy... what's he trying to do say? That you can't play politics with the IRS? Just tell George he should do it." Three days later Nixon had Kimmelman's tax returns as well Larry O'Brien's who had by then agreed to manage McGovern's faltering campaign and whose office would be the target of the Watergate break-in.

On March 12, 1973, even with the erupting Watergate scandal and its related Congressional investigations incinerating his presidency, Nixon was still intent on using the IRS to disable his enemies. That day he asked Haldeman, "What happened to the suggestion that the IRS run audits on all the members of Congress?"

Those who bother to read these historical snippets will find many important departures and only tenuous parallels between the Obama Administration's IRS affair and Richard Nixon's Watergate-era IRS scandal. A principal distinction is the ingredient of direct presidential involvement. President Nixon was the fulcrum, the visionary and the principal conspirator in his various capers to use the IRS as a political weapon. Nixon personally directed and persistently harangued his staff to audit, investigate and gather dirt on his enemies for personal purposes. Nixon went to reckless extremes even punishing IRS agents who refused to participate in his vendetta. A mean-spirited viciousness and his contagious enthusiasm for law breaking were also distinctive Nixon bailiwicks. In contrast, there is no evidence that Obama even knew of the IRS investigations which were presided over by Donald Shulman, a Bush appointee. The most recent evidence indicate that the Tea Party audits resulted not from intentional political targeting of conservatives from the sheer preponderous of Tea Party applications among the hundreds of 501(c)(4) tax exemption requests that deluged a tiny understaffed IRS field office. The 200 demoralized officials, already drowning in tax exemption petitions, also audited several liberal groups including Progress Texas and Sea Shepard. Detailed reporting in Sunday's New York Times indicates that the problem arose because the Cleveland branch is already debilitated and overwhelmed by years of personnel and budget cuts, now aggravated by the sequestration -- and confused by new rules applying to the cascade of political "charities" unleashed by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. The GOP's comparisons of today's IRS blunders to the Watergate era scandals broadcast a willful blindness toward history.

As to the A.P. eavesdropping scandal, any spying directed at journalists should set off fire alarms in a democracy. The Associated Press is justified in its outrage at the Justice Department caper. Fear that a reporter's phone may be bugged will inhibit disclosures and discussions with the many secret sources and whistleblowers upon whom journalists rely to keep our democracy transparent and our public informed.

Obama's Justice Department's eavesdropping on the Associated Press, however, is in no way analogous to Nixon era bugging. The Obama eavesdropping was an, unfortunately, legal investigation of national security leaks involving a Nigerian terrorist bomber planning to blow up an American airliner en route from Amsterdam to New York. Nixon's bugging in contrast was illegal and his purposes were political and personal having little or nothing to do with national security.

Many states have "journalist shield" laws that make eavesdropping on reporters illegal and give a limited, but critical privilege to the relationship between journalists and their sources. Obama has long promised to support federal shield legislation. This week, apparently motivated by damage control, he finally asked Senate leaders to produce a federal shield law, a reform that could transform this scandal into a national plus for American democracy. That legislation will require GOP support. Republicans could also work with the White House to find adequate funding and training for the IRS and remedy the morale and governance problems in Cleveland. The big question now, is whether Republicans will sideline genuine reform in their efforts to exploit the "scandal". Republican legislators have apparently been ordered by their leadership to hold scandal-mongering hearings but to stall any legislation for genuine reform. The real scandal is the Republican party's devotion to grandstanding over governance and its preference for slime over substance.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/17511-focus-obama-and-nixon-a-historical-perspective

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="8"></hr>

Sorry, Republicans — Nobody’s Getting Impeached
http://www.nationalmemo.com/sorry-republicans-nobodys-getting-impeached/

<hr noshade color="#0000ff" size="8"></hr>

muckraker10021 · Jul 23, 2013

The RepubliKlans have decided that they will continue to use their gerrymandered produced control of the House Of Representatives, to engage in a strategy of total nullification (guerilla- terrorist style warfare) of anything & everything President Obama proposes despite their historic low 10% approval rating. The article below outlines how the republiklans plan to continue their self-described “Taliban style” insurgency against Obama, 24/7, despite the fact the Democrats nation-wide received more votes than republiklans. The oligarch controlled corporate media continues to propagandize the American sheeple with the bold face lie & unreality that the non-functioning US government is the fault of both parties; a false equivalency paradigm that is total bullshit. As former President Carter said last week America Has No Functioning Democracy

Anarchists of the House
The Republican Congress is testing a new frontier of radicalism—governmental sabotage.

by Jonathan Chait | July 21, 2013| http://nymag.com/news/features/republican-congress-2013-7/

A few months ago, Eric Cantor was ready to bring his latest brainchild, the “Helping Sick Americans Now” bill, to the House floor. The move was pure Cantor—a smarmy, ultrapartisan ploy. The bill proposed to eliminate funds the Obama administration needs to set up and run the health-care exchanges that are the central mechanism in the health-care law, but then Cantor’s bill would use those funds to help a handful of sick people get health insurance. There was no chance this, or anything like it, would be signed into law, as Obama obviously would not agree to tear down a program to insure millions of Americans in return for insuring a tiny fraction of that number. It was a message vote whose purpose was “embarrassing Obamacare,” as one conservative activist gloated, by forcing Obama to deny immediate aide for the uninsured. As a soulless exercise in disingenuous spin, it was well conceived.

It failed, however, because a crucial faction of ultraconservative House Republicans threatened to vote against it. The trouble was that Cantor’s bill purported to “fix” Obamacare rather than eliminate it. “Why the hell do we want to fix it?” complained conservative pundit Erick Erickson. “We should want to repeal it.” Since they have already voted 37 times to repeal Obama*care, one might think that the House Republicans’ appraisal of the law’s general merits had been made sufficiently clear. But just the pretense of working to improve the law, even while actually crippling it, offended the right. In the face of unmoved conservative opposition, Cantor had to pull his pet bill from the floor. It wound up embarrassing the House Republicans, not Obama*care.

Spectacles like this have turned into a regular feature of life in the Republican House. The party leadership draws up a bill that’s far too right-wing to ever become law, but it fails in the House because it isn’t right-wing enough. Sometimes, as with the attempts to repeal Obamacare, the failures don’t matter much, but in other instances the inability to pass legislation poses horrifying dangers. The chaos and dysfunction have set in so deeply that Washington now lurches from crisis to crisis, and once-dull, keep-the-lights-on rituals of government procedure are transformed into white-knuckle dramas that threaten national or even global catastrophe.

The Republican Party has spent 30 years careering ever more deeply into ideological extremism, but one of the novel developments of the Obama years is its embrace of procedural extremism. The Republican fringe has evolved from being politically shrewd proponents of radical policy changes to a gang of saboteurs who would rather stop government from functioning at all. In this sense, their historical precedents are not so much the Gingrich revolutionaries, or even their tea-party selves of a few years ago; the movement is more like the radical left of the sixties, had it occupied a position of power in Congress. And so the terms we traditionally use to scold bad Congresses—partisanship, obstruction, gridlock—don’t come close to describing this situation. The hard right’s extremism has bent back upon itself, leaving an inscrutable void of paranoia and formless rage and twisting the Republican Party into a band of anarchists.

And the worst is not behind us.

Republicans in 2009 made an intellectual breakthrough of sorts when they grasped that the conventional folk wisdom of Washington, which held that they risked public scorn if they refused to cooperate with a popular new president, had it backward. Americans don’t pay much attention to legislative details, Republicans realized. If some of them supported Obama’s proposals, they would only help the proposals seem more sensible. “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together,” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell later said, “because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is okay.”

And so the Republican strategy during Obama’s first two years was almost total gridlock. Republican leaders aggressively pressured their members to withdraw support for any major Obama initiative, even denouncing ideas they themselves had previously endorsed. This obstruction strategy was not a novel invention; it was more of a Moneyball-esque *refinement—one of those situations in which one team realizes how to play by the rules a little bit better.

Since the 2010 midterm elections, though, the Republican strategy has transmogrified from a particularly ruthless version of legislative opposition into one in which incidents of reckless behavior—tactics like hostage-taking, say, or economic or political sabotage—become more frequent each passing month. After they won the midterms, giddy Republicans took their victory not just as a check on Obama but as a full abrogation of his presidency. America had snapped out of the trance Obama had briefly cast over it in the haze of the financial crisis. As John Boehner announced the night he won back the House, “The president will find in our new majority the voice of the American people.”

The task the Republican Congress set itself was not just to oppose the president but to restore the American way of life before it was too late. One can find historical precedent for a Congress seizing control of policy from the president—post–Civil War Republicans running roughshod over a reluctant President Johnson to enact Reconstruction, or the GOP Congress overriding Harry Truman to force through Taft-Hartley anti-union laws. But since 2010, Republicans in the House have lacked anything close to the numbers to override Obama’s veto, and those in the Senate have lacked even a majority. And so, not possessing the conventional tools of governance, Republicans in Congress set out to create new powers for themselves.

In the Senate, the Republican minority retooled the use of the filibuster, leveraging its ability to block presidential appointments into the power to block existing laws. Republicans paralyzed the National Labor Relations Board by refusing to confirm any appointees and blocked the appointment of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for three years, telling Obama that unless he agreed to handcuff the new agency, “we will continue to oppose the consideration of any nominee, regardless of party affiliation.” This is the tactic that Senate Democrats finally defused last week, when their threat to ban such filibusters altogether persuaded some more moderate Republicans to break rank.

It is the House, of course, where the real locus of the Republican guerrilla war has been located. The first clue that the Republican House would not settle for mere obstruction came when Republican leaders threatened in 2011 not to lift the debt ceiling unless Obama met unspecified demands to shrink the government. The debt ceiling is a formal authorization by Congress to pay existing debts, and voting for it has no effect other than preventing the global economic meltdown that would ensue if Congress somehow decided to let those debts default. Such votes had often been an occasion for the minority party to scold the president for his lack of fiscal responsibility, followed by a preordained vote. Nobody had ever used it before to obtain concessions. Obama naïvely thought he could turn the hostage demand into an ordinary budget negotiation—he would agree to cut spending, as Republicans demanded, if they accepted higher taxes. But as the deadline for the debt limit approached, House Republicans only jacked him up, extracting over a trillion dollars in spending cuts.

Here was an unprecedented model of legislating. When, say, Democrats won back Congress in the 2006 elections, they halted George W. Bush’s domestic agenda. They did not threaten to instigate a global crisis to force Bush to scale back his tax cuts or end the Iraq War.

In retrospect, the most ominous thing about the episode was not that Boehner was carrying out an audacious power grab. It was that the speaker tried to strike a deal with Obama but could not deliver his own caucus. Though in some way a success for the Republicans, the hostage gambit was also the chaotic outgrowth of the party’s own internal dysfunction, simultaneously a strategy and the opposite of a strategy.

The full-scale nature of Republican opposition has harnessed a rage that, while potent, has proved impossible to modulate. Justifying the stance of total resistance has required Republicans to paint Obama not as simply a liberal but a dangerous socialist bent on eradicating the best traditions of America. The caricature justified the hostility, and the hostility, in turn, has authenticated the caricature.

Obama mused last year that his reelection would “break this fever,” but in the months since November, the Republican House has only spun further out of control. After November, the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts created another moment for a potential deal, which Boehner very nearly struck, only for it to emerge yet again that his party didn’t support the terms he was offering.

The most conservative members didn’t merely drive a hard bargain; they refused to acknowledge any limits on their power at all. A few months before the tax cuts expired, I privately asked an influential conservative aide how he expected his party to deal with Obama, and he told me in apparent earnestness that he expected Republicans to demand the tax cuts’ full continuation, not a penny less, and for Obama to acquiesce. Boehner tried to strengthen the House’s hand by extending almost all the Bush tax cuts except those on incomes of a million dollars a year and above. Obama would never have accepted that deal, but it might have lured moderate Democrats in the Senate, many of whom are rich themselves and were hearing from affluent donors. Arch-conservative Republicans refused to vote for it, leaving a helpless Boehner to pitifully recite the Serenity Prayer in a closed-door meeting.

The House leadership managed to stumble through the tax fiasco by letting Senate Republicans negotiate a bi*partisan compromise, then standing aside to let Democrats pass it through the House. This has since become a model. With the House Republicans effectively on strike, other important bills have passed with Democratic support (the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, Hurricane Sandy relief). In each case, House Republicans have walked away from opportunities to tailor the final versions of legislation more to their liking. In other words, they have chosen not to use their power to pursue their policy interests. They seem to prefer abstaining from the legislative process altogether.

The rational way to view these events is that Republicans have marginalized themselves. But the hard-liners see it differently. In their minds, every bill that passes is a betrayal by their leaders. They know that letting Democrats carry bills through the House has been the leadership’s desperate recourse to avoid total chaos, and since chaos is their leverage, they are now working feverishly to seal off that escape route. This year, an increasing proportion of conservative media is given over to conservative activists’ extracting pledges from Republican leaders not to negotiate with Democrats. In the wake of the tax-cut deal, Republican leaders in both houses had to pledge that they would not engage in any—to quote the ubiquitous buzzword—“backroom deals.” Since all deals get made in back rooms (there is no such thing as a front room, and leaders in Western cultures like the United States habitually transact their business in rooms), this means no negotiation at all.

A recent joint op-ed by National Review editor Rich Lowry and his Weekly Standard counterpart Bill Kristol denounced the bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate as “a stew of deals, payoffs, waivers, and special-interest breaks.” This echoed the conservative critique of all major Obama-era legislation—Liz Cheney, launching her Wyoming Senate race last week, called on Republicans to stop “cutting deals”—but it applies just as well to any major bill in American history, including the ones passed by the sainted Ronald Reagan. Crafting a major piece of legislation means cutting some side deals. That’s how lawmaking works. But conservatives have increasingly come to see the entire process as a morally unacceptable compromise of their ideals. “The idea of Boehner’s negotiating with Pelosi over how to proceed is implausible,” a recent story by Jonathan Strong, a National Review reporter, noted as an aside. “It would telegraph weakness.”

Sometimes the paranoid really do have enemies, and in this case, conservative fears of betrayal have a basis in reality. Republican leaders, including staunch conservatives like Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, actually do want to pass bipartisan immigration reform. This has only aggravated the base’s fear of treachery and forced the party leadership to ramp up the confrontation with Democrats on other fronts. If Republican leaders are going to try to get their base to swallow an immigration shit sandwich, they’re certainly not going to feed conservatives more shit sandwiches beforehand.

Yet there seems to be no way around it. Congress has to pass some kind of farm bill—failure to do so would, through a bizarre legislative quirk, cause the law to revert to where it stood in 1949, which would wreak all sorts of havoc at supermarkets. Congress will also have to pass bills to keep the government running, or else shut it down. And then it will have to lift the debt ceiling again. House Republicans have ignored constant pleas by Senate Democrats to sit down and negotiate their differing budgets. Instead, they plan to hold off any budget talks until late fall, when we will likely hit the debt ceiling, at which point, they believe, they can force Obama to accept their ransom demands.

Earlier this month, House Republicans issued those demands. They are staggeringly grandiose. If Obama wants to lift the debt ceiling for the rest of his term, they announced, all he has to do is … agree to sign on to Ryan’s plan to cut and privatize Medicare. If that’s too much for him, Republicans have generously offered the choice of letting Obama accept a package of deep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps in return for a shorter debt-ceiling extension. Of course, if he chooses that route, he’ll have to come back again later and offer up further concessions.

The list is utterly deranged—Obama has sworn he won’t bargain over the debt ceiling again at all, and his entire administration would resign before he could agree to anything remotely like these demands. It’s not clear whether Republicans actually expect the president to succumb to their Bond-villain hostage scheme. But it is significant that Republicans are demanding even more from Obama than they demanded during previous debt-ceiling ransoms and will decry the inevitable failure to achieve it as yet another betrayal.

Rubio, who now passes for one of his party’s respected moderates, gives a sense of what a Republican negotiating strategy might look like this fall. The GOP, Rubio says, should shut down the government unless Obama agrees to defund health-care reform. (“If we have a six-month continuing resolution [postponing a shutdown], we should defund the implementation of Obama*care by those six months.”) Rubio has likewise demanded a second confrontation over the debt limit, insisting that failing to cut spending would risk a fiscal crisis: “They will say, ‘You’re going to risk default.’ The $17 trillion debt is the risk of default.”

In the actual world, the economy is recovering and the deficit, currently projected at half the level Obama inherited, is falling like a rock. Yet messianic Republican suicide threats in the face of an imagined debt crisis have not subsided at all. The swelling grievance within the party base may actually be giving the threats more fervor. The reign of the Republican House has not yet inflicted any deep or permanent disaster on the country, but it looks like it is just a matter of time.

<img src="http://www.whatnowtoons.com/images/GOP-fillibuster-what-now-299.jpg" width="500">

FACT 1. In Robert Draper's book, "Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives"

download entire book for iPad, Kindle

Code:

http://depositfiles.com/files/7kaf8o1g9

Draper wrote that on inauguration night, 2009, during a four hour, "invitation only" meeting with GOP Hate-Propaganda Minister, Frank Luntz, the below listed Senior GOP Law Writers literally plotted to sabotage, undermine and destroy America's Economy.

FACT 2: Draper wrote the guest list included:
The Guest List:
Frank Luntz - GOP Minister of Propaganda
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA),
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX),
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA),
Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R),
Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ-R),
Sen. Tom Coburn (OK-R),
Sen. John Ensign (NV-R) and
Sen. Bob Corker (TN-R).
Non-lawmakers present Newt Gingrich

FACT 3: Newt Gingrich confirms meeting took place in an interview with Al Sharpton's Politics Nation on June 12, 2012

FACT 4:
Two months after Paul Ryan's covert meeting where they plotted to sabotage the US Economy, in March 2009, Rep. Pete Sessions said Republicans should follow the model of the Taliban in its battles against President Obama.

In the March 2009 interview with National Journal Rep Sessions said:
"Taliban Insurgency, we understand perhaps a little bit more because of the Taliban. Insurgency is the way they went about systematically understanding how to disrupt and change a person's entire processes. And these Taliban -- is an example of how you go about to change a person from their messaging to their operations to their frontline message. And we need to understand that Insurgency may be required with the other side"

~Rep Pete Sessions, March 2009 to National Journal

Rep Pete Sessions went on to say:
"If they do not give us those options or opportunities then we will then become Insurgency ... I think Insurgency is a mindset and an attitude that we're going to have to search for and find ways to get our message out and to be prepared to see things for what they are, rather than trying to do something about them"

FACT: Newt Gingrich confirms meeting took place in an
interview with Al Sharpton's Politics Nation on June 12, 2012
<table border="9" width="700" cellpadding="2" bordercolorlight="#800080" bordercolordark="#800080" bgcolor="#FFFF8A" height="400">
<tr>
<td><div>

SHARPTON: "In fact, let`s go to a book that Mr. Draper wrote about the night of the inauguration. There was a meeting at a hotel near the inaugural ball, about a mile away ... He writes about that night the plan was to show united and unyielding opposition to the president`s economic policies ... And Draper writes that you told the group -- you, Newt Gingrich - said",

"You will remember this day...you will remember this day the seeds of 2012 were sown. " 

SHARPTON: If there was a commitment from day one, before he ever took a seat behind the desk of the Oval Office, that everyone was going to obstruct him, then what he`s done has been almost unbelievable, against those kind of odds, Speaker Gingrich. 
NEWT: It was an important meeting and I was glad and honored to be part of it.
 
SHARPTON: I`m glad you admit you had it. </div>

</td></tr></table>

It is not difficult to find out if Mr. Draper's book is accurate. Let's look at the digital video.

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="8"></hr>

QueEx · Jul 23, 2013

The Larger Story

muckraker10021 · Jul 26, 2013

Interposition and Nullification are the RepubliKlan's strategy against "The Black President", they are willing to destroy the entire U.S. if necessary. They believe that the American sheeple are to dumb to care, and that their gerrymandered districts will protect them from political extinction in 2014. We'll see.

House G.O.P. Sets New Offensive on Obama Goals

by Jonathan Weisman | July 23, 2013 | http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/24/u...nsive-on-obama-goals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are moving to gut many of President Obama’s top priorities with the sharpest spending cuts in a generation and a new push to hold government financing hostage unless the president’s signature health care law is stripped of money this fall.

As Mr. Obama prepares to deliver a major economic address on Wednesday in Illinois, Republicans in Washington are delivering blow after blow to programs he will promote as vital to a more robust economic recovery and a firmer economic future — from spending on infrastructure and health care to beefing up regulatory agencies. While Mr. Obama would like to keep the economic conversation lofty, his adversaries in Congress are already fighting in the trenches.

On Tuesday, a House Appropriations subcommittee formally drafted legislation that would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 34 percent and eliminate his newly announced greenhouse gas regulations. The bill cuts financing for the national endowments for the arts and the humanities in half and the Fish and Wildlife Service by 27 percent.

For the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, Mr. Obama requested nearly $3 billion for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs — a mainstay of his economic agenda since he was first elected. The House approved $826 million. Senate Democrats want to give $380 million to ARPA-E, an advanced research program for energy. The House allocated $70 million.

A House bill to finance labor and health programs, expected to be unveiled Wednesday, makes good on Republican threats to eliminate the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The labor and health measure — for years the most contentious spending bill — will protect some of the White House’s priorities, like Head Start, special education and the National Institutes of Health, but to do so education grants for poor students will be cut by 16 percent and the Labor Department by 13 percent, according to House Republican aides.

“These are tough bills,” acknowledged Representative Harold Rogers, the Kentucky Republican who leads the House Appropriations Committee. “His priorities are going nowhere.”

The Democrat-controlled Senate will not go along with the House cuts, but the different approaches will complicate negotiations. With just 24 legislative days remaining before Oct. 1, talks to resolve the disparities have not really begun, lawmakers said, putting Congress and the president on a collision course that could shut down the government after this fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

“This is as serious a challenge on fiscal matters as I’ve ever seen,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat and a veteran of more than three decades in Congress. 

In the Senate, Republicans are circulating a letter to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, warning they will not approve any spending measure to keep the government operating after Sept. 30 if it devotes a penny to put in place Mr. Obama’s health care law. Signers so far include the No. 2 and No. 3 Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and John Thune of South Dakota, as well as one of the party’s rising stars, Marco Rubio of Florida. 

The letter, drafted by Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, states: “If Democrats will not agree with Republicans that Obamacare must be repealed, perhaps they can at least agree with the president that the law cannot be implemented as written. If the administration will not enforce the law as written, then the American people should not be forced to fund it.”

Taken together, efforts in both chambers amount to some of the most serious cuts to domestic spending since the Republicans in 1995 tried to shutter the departments of Energy, Education and Commerce — and ended up shutting the government down for 28 days.

“It’s about time we cut some spending around here,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee.

A senior White House adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, said Republicans were offering no plan “other than indiscriminate cuts as far as the eye can see and repeal Obamacare as often as possible.”

“We need them to step away from the brink, stop the gridlock and work with Democrats to make progress,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “If they don’t, a train wreck is inevitable and the country will suffer.”

If the White House can reach the coming fiscal year without economic disruption, the fight will transition immediately to the next showdown: raising the government’s statutory borrowing authority. The Treasury has been shifting money within government accounts for weeks to keep the government solvent, but by October or early November, such “extraordinary measures” will have been exhausted, Treasury officials have told lawmakers.

Mr. Obama has said he will not negotiate terms to raise the debt ceiling, but Congressional Republicans say they will not let the deadline pass without concessions, either on changes to entitlement programs like Medicare or on some statutory timeline to put in place a sweeping overhaul of the tax code next year.

“We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling without real cuts in spending,” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said Tuesday. “It’s as simple as that.”

To resolve the brewing fiscal crisis, the House and Senate must first agree on a total spending number for the next fiscal year, then adjust their respective spending plans to comply with it. Republicans would have to drop their insistence that spending in fiscal 2014 be set at a level equal to the total fixed by the 2011 Budget Control Act, then cut further by the automatic, across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration, something Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said Tuesday that he will not do.

Democrats will almost certainly have to come down from the spending levels set in the spending bills being drafted in the Senate. And Mr. Obama, who has issued veto threats on every House spending bill, will have to give up on some of his priorities, Republicans say.

But beyond a few casual conversations on the Senate floor and between White House aides and Republican senators, no real negotiations have even begun.

Republicans are open about their intentions to target the president’s priorities.

 The House transportation and housing bill for fiscal 2014 cuts from $3.3 billion to $1.7 billion the financing for Community Development Block Grants, which go mainly to large cities and urban counties for housing and social programs, largely for the poor. That level is below the number secured by President Gerald R. Ford when he created the program — without adjusting for inflation. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been flexing its muscle against hedge fund managers and insider trading schemes, would see financing cut 18 percent from the current level. Though Mr. Obama will finally get a fully operational National Labor Relations Board under a Senate agreement that forced Republicans to drop their filibuster of his three board nominees, House lawmakers are slashing spending on the board’s operations.

Under other House legislation, the budget for the Internal Revenue Service would be cut by 24 percent, Amtrak would lose a third of its financing, and clean water grants from the Environmental Protection Agency would be slashed by 83 percent.

muckraker10021 · Jul 29, 2013

Racist Roots of GOP War on Obama

Right-wing Republicans in Congress are plotting to cripple the U.S. government if Barack Obama,
the first African-American president, doesn’t submit to their demands. The battle pretends to be over
the size of government but it echoes the whips, chains and epithets of America’s racist past.

<img src="http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/scan00012.jpg" width="150">
by Robert Parry | July 24, 2013 | http://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/24/racist-roots-of-gop-war-on-obama/

The United States finds itself at a crossroad, with a choice of moving toward a multicultural future behind a more activist federal government or veering down a well-worn path that has marked various tragic moments of American history when white racists have teamed up with “small government” extremists.

Despite losing Election 2012 – both in the presidential vote (by five million) and the overall tally for Congress (by one million) – the Republicans are determined to use their gerrymandered House “majority” and their filibuster-happy Senate minority to slash programs that are viewed as giving “stuff” (in Mitt Romney’s word) to poorer Americans and especially minorities.

Republicans are gearing up to force a series of fiscal crises this fall, threatening to shut down the federal government and even default on the national debt, if they don’t get their way. Besides sabotaging President Barack Obama’s health reform law, the Republicans want to devastate funding for food stamps, environmental advancements, transportation, education assistance and other domestic programs.

“These are tough bills,” Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, who heads the House Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times. “His priorities are going nowhere.”

A key point is to slash help to what the Right sees as “undeserving” Americans, especially people of color. The ugly side of this crypto-racist behavior also surfaced in the gloating by right-wing pundits over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Fox News pundits, in particular, have mocked the outrage over the verdict from America’s black community and Obama’s personal expression of sympathy.

It is now clear that Obama’s election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a “post-racial” America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their forces to “take back America.” The fact that the modern Republican Party has become almost exclusively white and the nation’s minorities have turned more and more to the Democratic Party has untethered the GOP from any sense of racial tolerance.

There is now a white-supremacist nihilism emerging in the Republican strategy, a visceral contempt for even the idea of a multi-racial democracy that favors a more vigorous federal government. Some of these extremists seem to prefer sinking the world’s economy via a U.S. debt default than compromising with President Obama on his economic and social agenda.

Though the mainstream media avoids the white supremacist framing for the political story – preferring to discuss the upcoming clash as a philosophical dispute over big versus small government, — the reality is that the United States is lurching into a nasty struggle over the preservation of white political dominance. The size-of-government narrative is just a euphemistic way of avoiding the underlying issue of race, a dodge that is as old as the Republic.

The Jeffersonian Myth

Even many liberals have fallen for the myth of the dashing Thomas Jefferson as the great defender of America’s Founding Principles – when he was really a great hypocrite who served mostly as the pleasing political front man for the South’s chief industry, human slavery.

The popular history, perpetuated by authors such as Jon Meacham, downplays how Virginia’s plantation owners and other investors in slavery served as Jefferson’s political “base” helping to fund his propaganda battle – and then his political war – against George Washington’s Federalists who were the real designers of the Constitution with its dramatic concentration of power in the federal government. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Made-Up Constitution.”]

Prominent Anti-Federalists, such as Virginia’s Patrick Henry and George Mason, were alarmed that the Constitution’s overturning of the states’ rights-oriented Articles of Confederation would inexorably lead to Northern domination and the eventual eradication of slavery.

After ratification, many of these Southern agrarian interests grew even more alarmed when the Federalists began using the expansive federal powers in the Constitution to begin creating the framework for a modern financial system, such as Alexander Hamilton’s national bank, and promoting a potent federal role in the nation’s development, such as George Washington’s interest in canals and roads.

With every move toward a more assertive national government, the Southern slaveholders saw a growing threat toward their economic interest in human bondage. After all, slavery was not just a cultural institution in the South; it was the region’s biggest capital investment.

Though Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was written in 1787 and ratified in 1788, his return in 1789 marked an important political moment in early U.S. history. The Anti-Federalists, stung by their bitter defeat at the hands of Washington’s Federalists over the Constitution, finally had a charismatic leader to rally behind.

Jefferson, who was a critic of the Constitution but not an outright opponent, retained an outsized reputation from the American Revolution as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. He was also a star intellect and a crafty political operative who, perhaps more than anyone else, personified the hypocrisy of the slave-owning Founders.

Though he had famously declared, as “self-evident” truth, that “all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” he also was one of Virginia’s major slaveholders. And he engaged in the pseudo-science of racial supremacy, measuring the skulls of his African-American slaves to “prove” their inferiority.

Known as a harsh “master” when having runaway slaves punished, Jefferson lived in deathly fear that his slaves would rise up violently against him and his fellow plantation owners, much as the slaves of St. Domingue (today’s Haiti) did against their French plantation owners in the 1790s.

So, like Patrick Henry and George Mason, Jefferson wanted a strong state-controlled militia in Virginia to put down slave revolts while opposing a professional federal military which white Southerners saw as a potential threat to the future of slavery.

Rose-Colored Glasses

Despite Jefferson’s interest in maintaining slavery and his racist pronouncements, many modern writers have bought into the Jeffersonian version of early American history. In part, that may be because Jefferson was among the most handsome, most complex and most intellectual of the Founders. But that modern fascination with Jefferson frequently involves averting one’s gaze from the dark – and racist – underbelly of Jefferson’s personal beliefs and his political movement.

For instance, Meacham’s best-selling Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power says almost nothing about Jefferson’s real source of power, the South’s plantation structure. Instead, Jefferson’s advocacy for “farmers” and a “small-government” interpretation of the Constitution is taken at face value. Plus, few questions are asked about the fairness of his vituperative attacks on the Federalists, especially Hamilton and Adams. Those assaults are seen as simply an expression of Jefferson’s sincere republican spirit.

Meacham’s writing is instructive, too, on the Jefferson-slavery issues. Meacham focuses mostly on Jefferson’s taking a teenage slave girl, Sally Hemings, as his concubine, what could be regarded as rape, pedophilia or both. While Jefferson’s sexual exploitation of a vulnerable girl is certainly noteworthy in evaluating Jefferson’s character, the liaison is less significant historically than Jefferson’s role in defending slavery by revising the original (Federalist) interpretation of the Constitution.

The Federalists, who included the document’s principal drafters, understood that the Constitution granted very broad powers to the federal government to act in the national interest and on behalf of the general welfare. That was also the interpretation held by Anti-Federalists, explaining the intensity of the battle against ratification. So, by substituting a revisionist interpretation, stressing “states’ rights” and a tightly constrained federal government, Jefferson negated much of what the Framers had sought to do with the Constitution. He also set the country on course for the Civil War.

Before becoming President, Jefferson secretly conspired with some political forces in Kentucky on possible secession, and he helped devise the theory of nullification, the supposed right of the states to nullify federal law, which became a driving force in the South’s belief that it could secede from the Union.

Jefferson was one of the eight early presidents who owned slaves while in office (another four owned slaves while not in office). But Jefferson was one of the most unapologetic, insisting that blacks could never live as freed citizens in the United States and refusing to liberate his own slaves after his death (except for a few relatives of Sally Hemings).

When I visited Monticello some years ago, the tour guide pointed out the beautifully manicured Jefferson family cemetery, which was for white members of the household. When I asked where the slave cemetery was, I was told that no one knew. By contrast, Washington’s Mount Vernon has a respectfully maintained slave cemetery.

More Hypocrisy

Meacham and other Jeffersonian apologists also miss many other layers of hypocrisy surrounding their hero, such as his near-hysterical condemnations of the Federalists as they struggled with the herculean task of building a functioning government under an untested constitutional framework, amid extraordinary international pressures and threats.

It is surely true that Washington, Hamilton and Adams made missteps in their efforts to pioneer this new form of government – and thus left themselves open to political attack from Jefferson’s paid propagandists – but historians who buy into Jefferson’s narrative ignore the unprecedented challenges that the Federalists faced.

The Federalists also were the ones, particularly Hamilton and Adams, who demonstrated sympathy and support for Haiti’s black freedom-fighters, while Jefferson did all he could to undermine their success. But Jefferson is the Founder who is praised for his open-mindedness. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Rethinking Thomas Jefferson.”]

Though Jefferson skillfully exploited examples of the Federalists’ elitism and overreach to win the presidency in 1800, President Jefferson proved to be hypocritical, too, regarding his insistence on “limited government” narrowly defined by the Constitution’s “enumerated powers” as well as his supposed respect for freewheeling dissent and his love for freedom of the press.

After undermining President Adams over his signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts – a wartime measure meant to suppress alleged foreign influence seeking to induce the young Republic to take sides in a European conflict – Jefferson expressed his own sympathy for harsh measures against dissidents.

For instance, in 1803, President Jefferson endorsed the idea of prosecuting critical newspaper editors, writing: “I have … long thought that a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one,” as cited by Meacham’s largely pro-Jeffersonian book.

On a similar note, after leaving the White House, Jefferson advised his successor and ally James Madison on what to do with Federalists who objected to going to war with Great Britain in 1812. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg write in Madison and Jefferson, “Jefferson called for different measures in different parts of the country: ‘A barrel of tar to each state South of the Potomac will keep all in order,’ he ventured in August [1812]. ‘To the North they will give you more trouble. You may have to apply the rougher drastic of … hemp and confiscation’ – by which he meant the hangman’s noose and the confiscation of property.”

In other words, Jefferson, who has gone down in school history books as a great defender of freedom of speech, urged the sitting President of the United States to “tar” war dissenters in the South and to hang and dispossess dissenters in the North.

Jefferson was similarly hypocritical when it came to his views on “limited government.” He arguably was the first imperial president, dispatching the Navy to battle the Barbary pirates before seeking congressional approval and then negotiating the purchase of the Louisiana Territories despite the absence of any “enumerated” power to that effect in the Constitution.

As even an admirer like Meacham was forced to acknowledge, Jefferson “believed … in a limited government, except when he thought the nation was best served by a more expansive one.” So, Jefferson’s opposition to the Federalists’ view of the Constitution was less philosophical than political. He, like them, adopted a pragmatic approach, accepting that the Constitution did not anticipate all challenges that might confront the country.

While one might commend Jefferson’s flexibility – even though he decried similar actions by the Federalists – the public impression of Jeffersonian “small government” principles became more absolute and dangerous. As the nation’s early decades progressed, Southern slaveholders seized on Jefferson’s constitutional positions in defending the South’s investment in slavery and its expansion to new states.

Jefferson had put a powerful stamp on the young country through his own two-term presidency and those of his Virginia colleagues James Madison and James Monroe. By end of this so-called Virginia Dynasty in 1825, the permanence of slavery had been burnt deeply into the flesh of not only the original Southern states but new ones to the west.

In the ensuing decades, as the national divisions over slavery sharpened, the South escalated its resistance to federal activism, opposing even non-controversial matters like disaster relief. As University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh noted in his book, A Government Out of Sight, Southerners asserted an extreme version of states’ rights in the period from 1840 to 1860 that included preventing aid to disaster victims.

Balogh wrote that the South feared that “extending federal power” – even to help fellow Americans in desperate need – “might establish a precedent for national intervention in the slavery question,” as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne noted in a May 22 column.

The intensity of the South’s hatred toward a reformist federal government exploded into warfare once an anti-slavery candidate, Republican Abraham Lincoln, won the presidency. The South rekindled Jefferson’s old flirtations with nullification and secession, even though Lincoln was willing to continue tolerating slavery to save the Union.

But Southern politicians saw the handwriting on the wall – what Patrick Henry and George Mason had warned about – the inevitability of Northern dominance and the eventual demise of slavery.

The bloody Civil War ended slavery but it also stoked the bitterness of white Southerners who reacted to federal amendments granting citizenship rights to blacks by engaging in the terror of the Ku Klux Klan and broad resistance against Reconstruction. Finally, the North’s determination to reshape the South as a place of racial equality dissipated and Union troops were withdrawn in 1877. A near century of Jim Crow laws, lynching of blacks and racial segregation ensued.

When the federal government finally moved to outlaw the South’s apartheid system in the 1950s and 1960s, white racists mounted a new political resistance, this time by forsaking the Democratic Party, which had spearheaded the major civil rights laws of the era, and migrating in droves to the new Republican Party, which used racial code words to make white racists feel welcome.

The key subliminal message was opposition to “big guv-mit,” an allusion that white racists understood to mean less interference with their suppression of black votes and black rights.

Second Reconstruction

Just as the civil rights victories of the 1960s were viewed as a resumption of America’s march toward racial equality that was begun a century earlier with the Civil War, so too the petering out of this so-called Second Reconstruction paralleled the original Reconstruction, which ended also about century earlier.

With the emergence of right-wing Republican Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s, the white racist resistance to civil rights found another charismatic front man, who – like Jefferson – pushed the message of “small government” and “states’ rights.”

The Reagan era marked a reversal of the strides that America had taken after World War II to open mainstream society to black citizens. But it also signaled a retreat on other federal initiatives, including regulation of Wall Street and other industries.

So, besides worsening the financial standing of many blacks and other minorities, Reaganomics returned to a boom-and-bust economy of an earlier capitalism. The Great American Middle Class, which had emerged with the help of federal laws after World War II, began to shrink, though many whites, especially in the South, stuck with the Republicans because of the party’s hostility to helping blacks.

But there was still a national push-and-pull over whether to resume a march toward a more equitable society or to embrace Jim Crow II, a more subtle and sophisticated arrangement for disenfranchising black and brown Americans.

Some political observers believed the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president was a point of no return toward a multi-cultural America. However, instead of heralding a day of greater racial tolerance, Obama’s presidency intensified the determination of right-wing whites to do whatever is necessary to make his presidency fail.

That battle appears likely to get even uglier this fall as the House Republican “majority” plots to shut down the federal government and even default on the nation’s debt if the African-American president doesn’t surrender to their political demands.

Pundits are sure to frame this donnybrook as an ideological fight over the principles of “small government,” but behind that will be a replay of the South’s historic insistence on maintaining white supremacy.

QueEx · Jul 29, 2013

muckraker10021 said:
Racist Roots of GOP War on Obama

Right-wing Republicans in Congress are plotting to cripple the U.S. government if Barack Obama,
the first African-American president, doesn’t submit to their demands. The battle pretends to be over
the size of government but it echoes the whips, chains and epithets of America’s racist past.

<img src="http://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/scan00012.jpg" width="150">
by Robert Parry | July 24, 2013 | http://consortiumnews.com/2013/07/24/racist-roots-of-gop-war-on-obama/

The United States finds itself at a crossroad, with a choice of moving toward a multicultural future behind a more activist federal government or veering down a well-worn path that has marked various tragic moments of American history when white racists have teamed up with “small government” extremists.

Despite losing Election 2012 – both in the presidential vote (by five million) and the overall tally for Congress (by one million) – the Republicans are determined to use their gerrymandered House “majority” and their filibuster-happy Senate minority to slash programs that are viewed as giving “stuff” (in Mitt Romney’s word) to poorer Americans and especially minorities.

Republicans are gearing up to force a series of fiscal crises this fall, threatening to shut down the federal government and even default on the national debt, if they don’t get their way. Besides sabotaging President Barack Obama’s health reform law, the Republicans want to devastate funding for food stamps, environmental advancements, transportation, education assistance and other domestic programs.

“These are tough bills,” Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Kentucky, who heads the House Appropriations Committee, told the New York Times. “His priorities are going nowhere.”

A key point is to slash help to what the Right sees as “undeserving” Americans, especially people of color. The ugly side of this crypto-racist behavior also surfaced in the gloating by right-wing pundits over the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Fox News pundits, in particular, have mocked the outrage over the verdict from America’s black community and Obama’s personal expression of sympathy.

It is now clear that Obama’s election in 2008 was not the harbinger of a “post-racial” America, but rather the signal for white right-wingers to rally their forces to “take back America.” The fact that the modern Republican Party has become almost exclusively white and the nation’s minorities have turned more and more to the Democratic Party has untethered the GOP from any sense of racial tolerance.


There is now a white-supremacist nihilism emerging in the Republican strategy, a visceral contempt for even the idea of a multi-racial democracy that favors a more vigorous federal government. Some of these extremists seem to prefer sinking the world’s economy via a U.S. debt default than compromising with President Obama on his economic and social agenda.

Though the mainstream media avoids the white supremacist framing for the political story – preferring to discuss the upcoming clash as a philosophical dispute over big versus small government, — the reality is that the United States is lurching into a nasty struggle over the preservation of white political dominance. The size-of-government narrative is just a euphemistic way of avoiding the underlying issue of race, a dodge that is as old as the Republic.

What I don't understand is how do so-called "Black Conservatives" defend this.

Do they simply deny that there is some kind of rising or emergent white-supremacist nihilism ???

How can they square these tactics with themselves ???

This is where I would really like to hear from some of those who call themselves "Black Conservatists" explain or dispute Robert Parry's opinions in the article above.

muckraker10021 · Aug 6, 2015

The Holocaust, American Slavery and the Republicans' Routinely Repulsive Rhetoric

http://www.perrspectives.com/blog/archives/003271.htm | August 5 2015

In the course of American and world history, slavery and the Holocaust are sui generis cataclysms. Any comparisons--especially casual ones--to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry and the bondage and oppression of African-Americans necessarily diminish these unique and unparalleled horrors. To seriously equate the ordinary to the almost unimaginable is a special kind of blasphemy that rightly prompts most reasonable people to recoil in disgust.

Sadly, the ranks of reasonable people apparently don't include many of the leading lights of the Republican Party and its amen corner in the conservative movement. Over just the past several days, former Arkansas Governor and 2016 GOP White House Mike Huckabee accused President Obama of preparing to "march Israelis to the door of the oven" with the Iran nuclear deal. Conveniently forgetting 50 years of history during which the GOP welcomed southern conservatives, the Klan and the Confederate flag with open arms, the Oklahoma Federation of Republican Women displayed an image declaring Democrats had traded the lynching ropes for welfare programs. And just hours before Confederate flags were found outside Martin Luther King Jr.'s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the GOP's 2008 Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin took to Facebook to ask between the Confederacy and Planned Parenthood, which "killed 90,000 black babies last year?"

And that was just the past week.

As it turns out, these grotesque misappropriations of the Holocaust and slavery aren't the exception to the GOP rule; they are the rule. As a review of recent right-wing rhetoric shows, for today's Republicans Obamacare, the national debt, tax hikes on the rich, abortion, federal regulation of for-profit colleges, gun control, social safety net programs, marriage equality, torture detainee rights and just about everything else conservatives hate are little different than Hitler's slaughter of six million Jews or America's original sin. The only question for GOP sound bite manufacturers now isn't whether to use such abominable analogies, but which one.

The National Debt
Sarah Palin's conflation of slavery and abortion was bad enough. (After all, women exercising sovereignty over their own bodies is the very antithesis of slavery.) Making matters worse, Palin had already dipped into the slavery well to denounce the national debt. Even as Uncle Sam's annual budget deficits were plummeting in November 2013, John McCain's legacy proclaimed:

"Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that money comes due - and this isn't racist, but it'll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master."

Texas Representative and fellow Tea Bagger Louie Gohmert agreed. As he put it that February:

"Slavery and abortion are the two most horrendous things this country has done but when you think about the immorality of wild, lavish spending on our generation and forcing future generations to do without essentials just so we can live lavishly now, it's pretty immoral."

Now, Republican voices were largely silent as Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt and George W. Bush nearly doubled it again. But with Barack Obama in the White House, the GOP discovered, federal deficit-spending to recover from the most severe economic catastrophe since the Great Depression was putting America on the path to the Final Solution. We know this, because Mike Huckabee and Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told us so.
Addressing the NRA during its 2011 gathering in Pittsburgh, Huckabee declared, "Never again." Sort of:

Huckabee gave a speech to the National Rifle Association. He spoke of how, at Israel's Holocaust museum, he looked over his 11-year-old daughter's shoulder as she wrote in the guest book, "Why didn't somebody do something?" Then he said, "We cannot afford to be a generation that leaves our children with nothing but a huge debt and the very erosion of the freedoms that our founders and our fathers died and gave us so valiantly. And that's why I say, 'Let there never be a time in this country where some father has to look over his daughter's shoulder and see her ask this haunting question: Why didn't somebody do something?'"

Bachmann, who at this time four years ago was briefly the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, couldn't have agreed more. As the AP reported her Holocaust non-analogy analogy:

Bachmann recounted learning about a horrific time in history as a child -- the Holocaust -- and wondering if her mother did anything to stop it. She said she was shocked to hear that many Americans weren't aware that millions of Jews had died until after World War II ended. Bachmann said the next generation will ask similar questions about what their elders did to prevent them from facing a huge tax burden.
"I tell you this story because I think in our day and time, there is no analogy to that horrific action," she said, referring to the Holocaust. "But only to say, we are seeing eclipsed in front of our eyes a similar death and a similar taking away. It is this disenfranchisement that I think we have to answer to."

For his part, Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock concurred with a resounding Ja! Mourdock, whose previous claim to fame was pronouncing that pregnancy from rape was "a gift from God," explained the threat from Fuhrer Obama last year:

"The people of Germany in a free election selected the Nazi Party because they made great promises that appealed to them because they were desperate and destitute. And why is that? Because Germany was bankrupt...The truth is, 70 years later, we are drifting on the tides toward another beachhead and it is the bankruptcy of the United States of America."

Taxing the Wealthy
At the very time Bachmann issued her warning, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and other analysts reported that the federal tax burden as a percentage of American gross domestic product was at its lowest level since 1950. But something else--income inequality--was at a record high. Ultimately, with federal spending lower now than when President Obama first took the oath of office, one unavoidable step to reducing both America's long-term debt challenges and its currently obscene income inequality will involve increasing taxes on the wealthy.
But that, too, would be a slippery slope to Hitler's crematoria. While Powerline warned, "First they came for the rich," Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins fretted that the smashed windows and gold stars could not be far off:

Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich"... I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

Not to Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman. President Obama's proposal to eliminate the "carried interest exemption" that helped make private equity titans like Mitt Romney so rich, Schwarzman predicted, would augur a blitzkrieg against the rich. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."

Obamacare
To hear Republicans tell it, President Obama and the Democrats who voted for the Affordable Care Act were like Hitler's henchmen at the 1942 Wannsee conference. Obamacare, which all told has enabled 32 million people to obtain health insurance, is instead akin to a final solution for health care.

In Maryland, for example, the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County explained in 2009 that "Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common." Three years ago, Maine Republican Governor Paul LePage reacted to the Supreme Court's ruling upholding Obamacare:

"We the people have been told there is no choice. You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo -- the IRS."

In 2014, now former Tennessee Republican legislator Stacey Campfield scoffed that "Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory [sic] sign ups for 'train rides' for Jews in the 40s." While even the Volunteer State GOP denounced his "ignorant and repugnant" comments, Campfield was merely regurgitating a talking point first vomited forth by Idaho state senator Sheryl Nuxoll. State insurance exchanges helping millions of people in the United States obtain coverage are just death trains taking insurers to the market equivalent of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen or Theresienstadt:

"The insurance companies are creating their own tombs. Much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps, private insurers are used by the feds to put the system in place because the federal government has no way to set up the exchange."

If the federal government savings tens of thousands of lives each year doesn't sound like Hitler, Himmler and Eichmann extinguishing millions to you, you're not alone. In the fall of 2013, famed neurosurgeon and 2016 GOP presidential contender Ben Carson explained to the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit that Obamacare isn't like the Holocaust at all:

"You know Obamacare is really I think the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And it is in a way, it is slavery in a way, because it is making all of us subservient to the government, and it was never about health care. It was about control."

Washington Post columnist and Fox News regular George Will certainly thought so. When the Supreme Court upheld the Obamacare health insurance mandate in 2012, Will was quick to point to the South's "peculiar institution":

"I hear Democrats say, 'The Affordable Care Act is the law,' as though we're supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law and then we change them."

Will was hardly alone. That famous ersatz libertarian, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, took to the op-ed pages to declare that Obamacare, like slavery and Jim Crow before it, would not stand:

The liberal blogosphere apparently thinks the constitutional debate is over. I wonder whether they would have had that opinion the day after the Dred Scott decision... Think of how our country would look now had the Supreme Court not changed its view of what is constitutional. Think of 1857, when the court handed down the outrageous Dred Scott decision, which said African Americans were not citizens. Think of the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, which the court later repudiated in Brown v. Board of Education.

When it came to slavery, of course, the Court didn't "change its view of what was constitutional. It took the Civil War and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to do that. Then again, it was just last month that the soon-to-be failed presidential candidate Rand Paul proclaimed, "If we tax you at 50% you are half slave, half free."
This year's 6-3 King v. Burwell Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act's federal health insurance exchange once again prompted conservative catcalls like "the Roberts court's second Dred Scott decision." But to fully appreciate the indecency of that libel, it's important to look back at the 1857 Scott v. Sanford case which helped make the Civil War inevitable. In his odious opinion, Chief Justice Roger Taney didn't merely declare Dred Scott must be returned to bondage in Missouri despite having lived as a free man in Illinois for years. "A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, "Taney argued, "is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States." And that, the Chief Justice insisted, was as it should be:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.

GUN CONTROL
According to the new conservative history, the slave would have benefitted even more if he had just carried a gun. As Gun Appreciation Day chairman Larry Ward explained in 2012, the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow could have been avoided altogether if it hadn't been for gun control:

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history."

Rush Limbaugh was quick to bloviate in agreement:

"If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? If John Lewis, who says he was beat upside the head, if John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?"

Given the bloody history of Southern white supremacy both before and after the Civil War, Limbaugh and his ilk must be suffering from head trauma of their own. (After all, Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, where self-styled neo-Confederate killer Dylann Roof slaughtered 9 just weeks ago, was burned to the ground by South Carolina whites in 1822 after a slave revolt planned by Denmark Vesey.)
Joe "The Plumber" Wurzelbacher exhibited all the signs of Second Amendment derangement syndrome, too. As a campaign spokesman explained during Wurzelbacher's ill-fated campaign for Congress three years ago, "Well, blacks weren't allowed to own guns in the south, that's a historical fact." And gun control didn't just cause slavery; as John McCain's favorite prop lectured in a campaign spot:

"In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917 one-point-five million Armenians, unable to defend themselves were exterminated. In 1939, Germany established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, six million Jews and seven million others unable to defend themselves were exterminated."

MARRIAGE EQUALITY
In the new right-wing orthodoxy, the next Holocaust is always right around the corner. But this time its victims will be American Christians, rounded up and slaughtered by the LGBT community. As Christian Broadcasting Network founder and one-time GOP presidential candidate Pat Robertson put it 25 years ago:

"Do you also have a ghetto chosen to herd the pro-life Catholics and evangelicals into? Have you designed the appropriate yellow patch that Christians should wear... ?"

As the tidal wave of marriage equality was sweeping over the nation in 2014, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council sounded the same alarm:

"I'm beginning to think, are reeducation camps next? When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?"

But when the Supreme Court overturned all state same-sex marriage bans in June's Obergefell v. Hodges case, Republicans and their religious right allies once again dredged up Dred Scott. In a USA Today op-ed, Mike Huckabee rejected the very idea of judicial review settled in 1803 by Marbury v. Madison. Gay Americans, a Taneyesque Huckabee seemed to suggest, have no rights which the straight man was bound to respect:

Let me be clear: If the Supreme Court abuses the limits of its power and attempts to create a right that doesn't exist in the Constitution, it will be the duty of the president to reject this threat to our religious liberty as "the law of the land." As president, I will never bow down to the false gods of judicial supremacy.

But Huckabee and the usual suspects on the right aren't just refusing to "bow down to the false gods of judicial supremacy." He and the other signers of the "Marriage Pledge"--a who's who of the extremist social conservative movement--promised civil disobedience as well. As the self-proclaimed guardians of "family values," including Jim Bob and Michele Duggar, warn, they will never comply with a Dred Scott-like ruling for marriage equality:

We will view any decision by the Supreme Court or any court the same way history views the Dred Scott and Buck v. Bell decisions. Our highest respect for the rule of law requires that we not respect an unjust law that directly conflicts with higher law. A decision purporting to redefine marriage flies in the face of the Constitution and is contrary to the natural created order. As people of faith we pledge obedience to our Creator when the State directly conflicts with higher law. We respectfully warn the Supreme Court not to cross this line.

And by crossing that line and allowing loving couples to marry, Iowa Rep. Steve King, the Supremes may have split the nation in two. Just like--wait for it--the Civil War:
"Well, that turned into a civil war - 600,000 people killed to put an end to slavery *- to sort that mess out."

ABORTION
Of all issues, abortion is the one for which both the Holocaust and American slavery most do double-duty for the sound bite scribblers of the Republican Party. The millions tortured, enslaved and butchered by the German killing machine and the American slave industry are just pawns in the conservative campaign to eradicate reproductive rights for women in the United States.
With their casual comparisons of abortion to slavery, Sarah Palin and Louie Gohmert have plenty of company. For them and other Republicans the private decisions women make about their reproductive choices are no different than four million black slaves kept in bondage by five million Southern whites, one-third of whom were slaveholders. In fact, Arizona Rep. Trent Franks argued in 2010, for African-Americans it's even worse today:

"In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say 'How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible.' And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery."

Anti-abortion groups have been running with that message for years. In 2010, Georgia Right to Life rented billboards to declare, "Black children are an endangered species." In 2011, the conservative Radiance Foundation similarly used billboards to mark Juneteenth which read, "The 13th Amendment Freed Us. Abortion Enslaves Us." That same year, billboards in New York and other cities announced:

"The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the womb."

But for many Republicans, those free choices by free people can only mean one thing: abortion is slavery. Ohio GOP legislator and "personhood" supporter Matt Huffman suggested pro-choice Americans are little different than slave owners. Mike Huckabee, too, also reassures his audiences that abortion is akin to slavery. In July 2012, the Texas Tribune reported, "Huckabee compared abortion to slavery, asking if society could reject slavery and 'come to the conclusion that one person can take the life of another person.'" As Huffington Post recounted of Huckabee's Transitive Law of Slavery:

"It's the logic of the Civil War," Huckabee said, comparing abortion rights to slavery. "If morality is the point here, and if it's right or wrong, not just a political question, then you can't have 50 different versions of what's right and what's wrong." Two years later, he told an anti-choice group that he believed the issue of abortion was resolved "150 years ago when the issue of slavery was finally settled in this country, and we decided that it no longer was a political issue, it wasn't an issue of geography, it was an issue of morality." In 2011, he again argued against abortion rights being determined at the state level, saying that "it was wrong to own a slave in Mississippi and Michigan."

It's more than a little ironic that the Baptist minister Mike Huckabee would present himself as some sort of 21st century abolitionist and declare "the Supreme Court was wrong when it denied Dred Scott his rights and said, 'blacks are inferior human beings.'" After all, Huckabee's Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 on that very claim.
Just in case, Governor Huckabee has a back-up anti-abortion talking point. In 2011, the Fox New host joined the extremists behind Mississippi's failed "personhood" initiative which, among other things, distributed 600,000 DVDs declaring, "Saying it's OK to choose is the same thing as saying it's OK for Hitler to choose." As Salon reported:

Mike Huckabee, who supported Personhood USA's failed efforts in Mississippi, has often compared the Holocaust and abortion, saying of Nazi extermination, "educated scientists, sophisticated and cultured people looked the other way because they thought it didn't touch them." The day before Phil Bryant was elected governor of Mississippi -- at the same time the state's voters rejected the Personhood amendment -- he evoked the Jews of Nazi Germany "being marched into the oven," because of "the people who were in charge of the government at that time" as an argument to vote for it.

In 2013, Virginia Republican Dick Black marked the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by comparing family planning clinics to the Nazi's death camps:

I recall back to the days of Nazi Germany, there was a place called Auschwitz. And over the gates of Auschwitz was a sign, and the sign said "arbeit macht frei," which means roughly "your labors will make you free." People who went behind those doors never returned. Their labors didn't make them free. And I'm reminded that we refer to our clinics as "women's health clinics" and we talk about women's reproductive rights and so forth.

And so it goes. Conservative talking head Michelle Malkin denounced the contraception coverage mandate in the Affordable Care Act, warning "first they came for the Catholics." North Carolina Congresswoman Virginia Foxx attacked federal regulation of for-profit colleges by declaring, "They came for the for-profits, and I didn't speak up." Three years ago, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) explained that federal student loan programs were unconstitutional and represented "a very slippery slope" to "something bad," like "the Holocaust that occurred in Germany." In 2008, Bush torture enthusiast David Rivkin agreed with Newt Gingrich that the Supreme Court's Boumediene ruling recognizing the habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo terror detainees was "one of the worst decisions by the Supreme Court I've ever read, on par with Dred Scott decisions and Plessy v. Ferguson."
And if Boumediene was the equivalent of declaring human beings property and codifying the racial segregation and white supremacy of Jim Crow, then the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran must be "a Second Holocaust" and "a death sentence for Israel" and its citizens in which President Barack Obama will "march them to the door of the oven."

As President Obama lamented this week, "The particular comments of Mr. Huckabee are I think part of just a general pattern we've seen ... that would be considered ridiculous if it weren't so sad."

Part of a general pattern, indeed.

RepubliKlans Desperate For Obama ‘Scandal’ Forgeting Past RepubliKlan Criminality

muckraker10021

Superstar *****

muckraker10021

Superstar *****

QueEx

Rising Star

muckraker10021

Superstar *****

muckraker10021

Superstar *****

QueEx

Rising Star

muckraker10021

Superstar *****

Similar threads