Jefblog

Hunter on Dubya:

Let's face it--the yo-yo president of the U.S.A. knows nothing. He is a dunce. He does what he is told to do--says what he is told to say--poses the way he is told to pose. He is a Fool.

This is never an easy thing for the voters of this country to accept.

No. Nonsense. The president cannot be a Fool. Not at this moment in time--when the last living vestiges of the American Dream are on the line. This is not the time to have a bogus rich kid in charge of the White House. Which is, after all, our house. That is our headquarters--it is where the heart of America lives. So if the president lies and act giddy about other people's lives--if he wantonly and stupidly endorses mass murder as a logical plan to make sure that we are still Number One--he is a Jackass by definition--a loud and meaningless animal with no fundamental intelligence and no balls.

To say that this goofy child president is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon.

Whoops! Did I say that? Is it even vaguely possible that some New Age Republican whore-beast of a false president could actually make Richard Nixon look like a liberal?

"We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world - a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us. George W. Bush does not speak for me or my son or my mother or my friends or the people I respect in this world."

- Hunter S. Thompson

I don't blog much...I surf the web a lot, I read blogs and opinion and news a lot. I play strategy games to unwind.
I'm a writer, but a very, very lazy one. I hope to write more to this blog, and with that in mind, I will now do more than just link to political columns. I'll comment on more things, and get a bit personal. We'll see....

One thing I would like to make clear about my political views is that I am primarily anti-authoritarian, and I would hope anti-dogmatic as well. My political views cannot be easily categorized (the same for many Americans, I suspect), and I abhor "sticking to the party line" as much as I abhor demagougery, so wide-spread in this country.

I can tell a scammer when I see one most of the time, when I am thinking clearly, and the last 2 presidents have certainly been that.

The Bushies are in my opinion, the scariest group of folks to come along in a long time. Skillful in the world of delusion, they have captured the hearts and minds of many otherwise sane and loving Americans, and used greed and hate and fear and ignorance to keep a hold of power and stuff their pockets. Which is what the bottom line of Bush is. It isn't G-d, it isn't values, or "freedom" (except their own), it isn't "democracy" (that'd put them out of business). It's about grabbing and keeping as much wealth as they can, no matter what.

Some of the most trenchant criticism of Bush has come from the American Conservative, and Lew Rockell and other more traditional conservatives and libertartians. (SEE POST BELOW) This carries more weight in some ways than the liberal critiques because it comes from closer to home for most Republicans. Lew Rockwell recently even advocated libertarians reaching out to the progressive green side of the aisle, as the Repubs seem to have gone round the bend, trapped as they are in the destructive delusions of the neo-cons.

As for the Democrats....well, maybe Howie Dean can help them out... we'll see. They are fairly worthless right now, 'cept for Barbara's Lee and Boxer...two very brave ladies.

I don't always agree with Pat Buchanan's American Conservative, nor Lew, nor the lefties, nor the Dems. I admire them all to some degree, and take the great commentary where I find it, and where it makes sense.

We need to think independently and carefully about how we build our society and interact with the rest of humanity. Neither the left or the right, Rush or Al, Christianity or Islam have all the answers all the time. We cannot rely on anything but the clearest and most pragmatic thinking possible when it comes to making our society. Not that I am that clear or pragmatic.....

OK, long enough. From now own dear reader (me) more about music, life, and self-absorption.

This is a good one...


February 14, 2005 Issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Hunger for Dictatorship

War to export democracy may wreck our own.

by Scott McConnell


Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.

Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.

Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”

I would argue that Rockwell—who makes the most systematic argument of the three—overstates the libertarian component of the 1994 Republican victory, which could just as readily be credited to heartland rejection of the ’60s cultural liberalism that came into office with the Clintons. And it is difficult to imagine any scenario, after 9/11, that would not lead to some expansion of federal power. The United States was suddenly at war, mobilizing to strike at a Taliban government on the other side of the world. The emergence of terrorism as the central security issue had to lead, at the very least, to increased domestic surveillance—of Muslim immigrants especially. War is the health of the state, as the libertarians helpfully remind us, but it doesn’t mean that war leads to fascism.

But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled ... advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
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