A Gentleman’s view.

Corporations Have No Use for Borders By Chris Hedges

What happened to Canada? It used to be the country we would flee to if life in the United States became unpalatable. No nuclear weapons. No huge military-industrial complex. Universal health care. Funding for the arts. A good record on the environment.

But that was the old Canada. I was in Montreal on Friday and Saturday and saw the familiar and disturbing tentacles of the security and surveillance state. Canada has withdrawn from the Kyoto Accords so it can dig up the Alberta tar sands in an orgy of environmental degradation. It carried out the largest mass arrests of demonstrators in Canadian history at 2010’s G-8 and G-20 meetings, rounding up more than 1,000 people. It sends undercover police into indigenous communities and activist groups and is handing out stiff prison terms to dissenters. And Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a diminished version of George W. Bush. He champions the rabid right wing in Israel, bows to the whims of global financiers and is a Christian fundamentalist.

The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan.

“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”

“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

The decay of Canada illustrates two things. Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

Those who seek to discredit this movement employ the language of nationalism and attempt to make us fearful of the other. Wave the flag. Sing the national anthem. Swell with national hubris. Be vigilant of the hidden terrorist. Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources Joe Oliver, responding to the growing opposition to the Keystone XL and the Northern Gateway pipelines, wrote in an open letter that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to “hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda.” He accused pipeline opponents of receiving funding from foreign special interest groups and said that “if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further.”

No matter that in both Canada and the United States suing the government to seek redress is the right of every citizen. No matter that the opposition to the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipelines has its roots in Canada. No matter that the effort by citizens in the U.S. and in Canada to fight climate change is about self-preservation. The minister, in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry like the energy czars in most of the other industrialized nations, seeks to pit “loyal” Canadians against “disloyal” Canadians. Those with whom we will build this movement of resistance will not in some cases be our own. They may speak Arabic, pray five times a day toward Mecca and be holding off the police thugs in the center of Cairo. Or they may be generously pierced and tattooed and speak Danish or they may be Mandarin-speaking workers battling China’s totalitarian capitalism. These are differences that make no difference.

“My country right or wrong,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote, is on the same level as “My mother, drunk or sober.”

Our most dangerous opponents, in fact, look and speak like us. They hijack familiar and comforting iconography and slogans to paint themselves as true patriots. They claim to love Jesus. But they cynically serve the function a native bureaucracy serves for any foreign colonizer. The British and the French, and earlier the Romans, were masters of this game. They recruited local quislings to carry out policies and repression that were determined in London or Paris or Rome. Popular anger was vented against these personages, and native group vied with native group in battles for scraps of influence. And when one native ruler was overthrown or, more rarely, voted out of power, these imperial machines recruited a new face. The actual centers of power did not change. The pillage continued. Global financiers are the new colonizers. They make the rules. They pull the strings. They offer the illusion of choice in our carnivals of political theater. But corporate power remains constant and unimpeded. Barack Obama serves the same role Herod did in imperial Rome.

This is why the Occupy Wall Street movement is important. It targets the center of power—global financial institutions. It deflects attention from the empty posturing in the legislative and executive offices in Washington or London or Paris. The Occupy movement reminds us that until the corporate superstructure is dismantled it does not matter which member of the native elite is elected or anointed to rule. The Canadian prime minister is as much a servant of corporate power as the American president. And replacing either will not alter corporate domination. As the corporate mechanisms of control become apparent to wider segments of the population, discontent will grow further. So will the force employed by our corporate overlords. It will be a long road for us. But we are not alone. There are struggles and brush fires everywhere. Leah Henderson is not only right. She is my compatriot.

Deconstructing a Demagogue By TIMOTHY EGAN

Democrats have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again. Will that change?                                    Robert Parry

There is a reason why governments refuse to give in to demands from hostage-takers: because otherwise it encourages more hostage-taking. That is an obvious lesson, but it seems it has taken Democrats many years to learn it, as they have faced Republican strategies of grabbing hostages for decades and have quietly given in, paying ransom again and again.

Yet on those rare occasions when Democrats do stand up – such as against House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s government shutdowns in 1995-1996 and against House Speaker John Boehner’s blockage of a payroll tax cut extension this week – the Democrats usually prevail politically.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the Democrats from sliding back into submission the next time the Republicans do it. That’s because standing up to hostage-takers often involves absorbing some short-term pain, like seeing more Americans thrown out of work or watching the U.S. credit rating damaged.

Knowing that the Democrats are hesitant to take those hits, Republicans have held the U.S. economy hostage to extract concessions from President Barack Obama on GOP priorities. Indeed, the practice began immediately after the Republicans won the House majority in 2010.

The Republicans vowed to block extension of long-term unemployment insurance and other recession-related programs unless Obama agreed to continue George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich for two more years. Obama gave in, but he also failed to insist on including a rise in the debt ceiling for government borrowing.

Obama explained that he left the debt ceiling out of the 2010 deal because he didn’t believe anyone would be so reckless as to risk forcing the U.S. government into default. However, in summer 2011, Republicans did just that, holding the debt-ceiling bill hostage unless they got more concessions, which Obama again agreed to grant.

The Republicans understood that by holding the U.S. economy hostage, it’s pretty much a win-win for them. Either they extract more political ransom from Obama or they allow unemployment to stay high in which case they can count on the U.S. news media and the public blaming Obama. That, in turn, improves their chances of winning the White House and Congress in November 2012.

So, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise this past week when House Republicans balked at a short-term extension of payroll tax cuts for 160 million working Americans and long-term unemployment insurance for those looking for work. This was just one more opportunity to grab hostages, demand more concessions and make the economy scream.

Yet, by taking his jobs plan to the public – a strategy that Obama has been pursuing since the debt-limit fiasco last summer – has Obama finally been able to make the Republicans pay for their hostage-taking strategy. Faced with national outrage, Speaker Boehner sounded retreat on Thursday, although more hostage-taking can be expected early in the New Year when a longer term extension is negotiated.

The Nixon Legacy

After all, this hardball Republican approach to politics did not begin in 2010. The pattern can be traced back to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign of 1968 when his political team, in essence, took the half-million American soldiers in Vietnam hostage.

According to documents and audio recordings that have surfaced over the intervening decades, it is clear that Nixon’s campaign sabotaged President Lyndon Johnson’s Paris peace talks by getting the South Vietnamese leadership to boycott the negotiations in exchange for Nixon’s promises of a better deal once he was in the White House.

In October 1968, the peace talks were on the verge of ending the conflict which had already claimed more than 30,000 U.S. lives and a million or so Vietnamese. However, Nixon feared that a last-minute settlement of the war would likely give Vice President Hubert Humphrey the boost he needed to win the election. So, Nixon’s operatives made sure that didn’t happen.

Johnson learned of Nixon’s gambit, which the President called “treason” in one phone conversation. Johnson even confronted Nixon over the phone about the sabotage, but Nixon simply denied the accusations, leaving Johnson with the choice of whether to release the evidence before the 1968 election.

Johnson consulted with Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Clark Clifford on Nov. 4, 1968. Both advised against going public out of fear that the evidence of Nixon’s treachery might reflect badly on the United States.

“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” Clifford said in a conference call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”

So, Johnson relented, agreeing to stay silent for the “good of the country,” while Nixon exploited the stalemated peace talks for the edge that ensured his narrow victory.

However, since Nixon’s side had promised South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu a better deal than Johnson was offering, Nixon had little choice but to continue the war – for four more years, with the deaths of 20,000 more U.S. soldiers and a million or so more Vietnamese. [See “The Significance of Nixon’s ‘Treason’.”]

Madman and Watergate

Desperate to show some results from the additional years of war, Nixon also tried out a version of his hostage-taking strategy on the North Vietnamese, devising what was called the “madman” theory of letting Hanoi think that he was crazy enough to use nuclear weapons unless they gave in. In effect, he was taking their whole country hostage.

However, the North Vietnamese called his bluff and ultimately negotiated a peace accord in Paris in 1972, along the lines of what Johnson had hammered out four years earlier. (In 1975, the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies routed Thieu’s South Vietnamese army, with him going into exile in the United States.)

Still, Nixon’s political success in 1968 encouraged him to continue pushing the envelope of what he could get away with, apparently trusting that when push came to shove the Democrats would retreat as Johnson did. Nixon’s political hubris finally undid him in the Watergate political spying scandal.

Yet, despite Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the Republicans were not inclined to change their ways. The imprint of Nixon’s “scorched-earth” brand of politics had been burned deeply into their psyches, evidenced in their harsh rhetoric, their questioning of other people’s patriotism and a readiness to coerce adversaries.

As longtime Democratic congressional aide Spencer Oliver observed years later: “What [the Republicans] learned from Watergate was not ‘don’t do it,’ but ‘cover it up more effectively.’ They have learned that they have to frustrate congressional oversight and press scrutiny in a way that will avoid another major scandal.”

In other words, the Republicans got to work building their own media infrastructure and expanding their activist organizations to make sure that if the Democrats called the Republicans out on a future political scandal, it would be the Democrats who suffered more, that the Republicans would have their flanks covered.

It’s also important to realize that even though Nixon left the White House in disgrace, he remained an important adviser to Republican politicians, including a young “bomb-thrower” from Georgia named Newt Gingrich. Nixon often urged Republicans to play the sort of hardball games that he had perfected.

Sinking Carter

In 1980, Nixon and some of his key aides, such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, were background figures in what looked like a reprise of Nixon’s 1968 gambit, when President Jimmy Carter’s reelection was held hostage by Iranian radicals holding 52 Americans hostage.

Over the past three decades, some two dozen witnesses – including senior Iranian officials, top French intelligence officers, U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives, the Russian government and even Palestine leader Yasir Arafat – have confirmed the existence of a Republican initiative to interfere with Carter’s efforts to free the hostages.

In 1996, for instance, during a meeting in Gaza, Arafat personally told former President Carter that senior Republican emissaries approached the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1980 with a request that Arafat help broker a delay in the hostage release.

“You should know that in 1980 the Republicans approached me with an arms deal if I could arrange to keep the hostages in Iran until after the elections,” Arafat told Carter, according to historian Douglas Brinkley who was present. [Diplomatic History, Fall 1996]

Arafat’s spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif said the GOP gambit pursued other channels, too. In an interview with me in Tunis in 1990, Bassam indicated that Arafat learned upon reaching Iran in 1980 that the Republicans and the Iranians had made other arrangements for a delay in the hostage release.

“The offer [to Arafat] was, ‘if you block the release of hostages, then the White House would be open for the PLO’,” Bassam said. “I guess the same offer was given to others, and I believe that some accepted to do it and managed to block the release of hostages.”

In a little-noticed letter to the U.S. Congress, dated Dec. 17, 1992, former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr said he first learned of the Republican hostage initiative in July 1980. Bani-Sadr said a nephew of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, returned from a meeting with an Iranian banker and CIA asset, Cyrus Hashemi, who had close ties to Reagan’s campaign chief William Casey and to Casey’s business associate, John Shaheen.

Bani-Sadr said the message from the Khomeini emissary was clear: Republicans were in league with elements of the CIA in an effort to undermine Carter and were demanding Iran’s help.

Bani-Sadr said the emissary “told me that if I do not accept this proposal they [the Republicans] would make the same offer to my rivals.” The emissary added that the Republicans “have enormous influence in the CIA,” Bani-Sadr wrote. “Lastly, he told me my refusal of their offer would result in my elimination.”

Bani-Sadr said he resisted the GOP scheme, but the plan was accepted by the hard-line Khomeini faction. The American hostages remained captive through the Nov. 4, 1980, election which Reagan won handily. They were released immediately after Reagan was sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981. [For more details, see Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]

Though some Carter advisers suspected Republican manipulation of the hostage crisis, the Democrats again kept silent. Only after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in 1986 – and witnesses began talking about its origins – did the 1980 story, known as the October Surprise case, get fleshed out enough to compel Congress to take a closer look in 1991-1992.

Again, however the Democrats feared that the evidence could endanger the fragile political relationships of Washington that enable governing to go forward. Once more, they chose to ignore the GOP machinations and, in some cases, literally hid the evidence. [For instance, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden.”]

Teaching Gingrich

By caving in on the October Surprise investigation in early 1993 – out of a desire for political comity and bipartisanship – Democrats, in effect, set the stage for more Republican hardball strategies directed against President Bill Clinton.

The Republicans showed that their growing media machine – though built for defense against Democratic investigations – could play offense equally well. The machine could manufacture “scandals” about Clinton as easily as it could disassemble threats to Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush.

Indeed, the strategy to undo Clinton was egged on by Nixon himself. On April 13, 1994, just four days before the stroke that would lead to his death, Nixon spoke to biographer Monica Crowley about how Clinton’s Whitewater real-estate deal could be used to take the Democratic president down.

“Clinton should pay the price,” Nixon said. “Our people shouldn’t let this issue go down. They mustn’t let it sink.” [See Monica Crowley’s Nixon Off the Record.]

Of all Nixon’s protégés perhaps none took his teachings more to heart than did Newt Gingrich who was determined to apply Nixon’s lessons in overturning long-term Democratic control of the House of Representatives.

Gingrich, who won a seat in Congress in 1978, already was inclined to use whatever means necessary to achieve his goal. In a speech to the College Republicans, he said, “I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Nasty would soon become Gingrich’s trademark.

Four years later, in 1982, Gingrich turned to the grand master of “nasty” for advice. Over dinner, Nixon advised Gingrich that the press could ignore the House Republicans because they were “so boring,” according to an account in Gingrich’s book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way.

Embracing Nixon’s advice, Gingrich set off to ensure that the House Republicans would no longer be “boring.” Led by Gingrich, the hard-line GOP faction – dubbed the Conservative Opportunity Society – became famous for over-the-top attacks on adversaries: questioning people’s patriotism, challenging their ethics and making inflammatory remarks.

The Nixon/Gingrich no-holds-barred tactics became the M.O. of the modern Republican Party. Republicans in the Nixon/Gingrich mold would say or do whatever was necessary to advance their causes, especially the goal of tearing down Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The Democrats often found themselves in a defensive crouch, trying to protect the functioning of government, even as the Republicans followed Reagan’s credo that “government is the problem.” Thus, Republicans were inclined to take the government itself hostage as Democrats pleaded for its survival.

After using a minor ethics scandal to destroy Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright’s career and benefiting from a rash of “Clinton scandals,” Gingrich engineered the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, leaving President Clinton to insist that he was still “relevant.”

The Clinton Wars

Gingrich’s megalomania knew no bounds, however. So, he continued to press his political advantage, taking the Congress into showdowns with Clinton that led to government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996, with Clinton finally standing his ground and sticking the blame on the Republicans. Clinton’s success enabled him to win reelection in 1996.

However, Gingrich and the Republicans had not changed their ways. They simply escalated the political wars, collaborating with right-wing special prosecutors to hound Clinton and many of his senior aides. Finally, Clinton’s lying to protect an extramarital affair with former intern Monica Lewinsky became the opening the Republicans seized to destroy and disgrace him.

In a lame-duck session in late 1998, the House voted to impeach a U.S. president for only the second time in history. Clinton was forced into a humiliating Senate trial in 1999. The entire process had the appearance of taking the dignity of the U.S. government hostage.

Though Clinton managed to survive the trial and serve out his term, his impeachment stained Vice President Al Gore, who sought to succeed Clinton in Election 2000. A hostile news media (both mainstream and right-wing) made Gore into Clinton’s whipping boy, giving him a public beating as a kind of stand-in for the media-disliked President. [For details, see Neck Deep.]

The harsh media treatment of Gore tamped down his election numbers, though he still out-polled George W. Bush by a half-million votes nationally and would have carried the key state of Florida if all legally cast votes had been counted.

However, the Republicans were not about to accept defeat, even if that required taking the U.S. political process hostage. So, they staged ugly rallies in Florida to intimidate vote-counters and eventually turned to five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Florida’s counting of votes.

Rather than go into the streets to battle for a full and honest vote tally, the Democrats again surrendered to the Republican hostage-takers. Just as with Nixon “treason” in 1968, there was much handwringing among Democratic leaders about the possibility that a public battle would somehow impinge on Bush’s “legitimacy.”

Now, the same pattern has come to dominate the Obama years. The Republicans use whatever means necessary – from endless filibusters of jobs bills to obstruction of vital legislation like the debt-ceiling bill – to achieve their political goals. And the Democrats usually succumb for “the good of the country.”

The question now is whether President Obama and the Democrats have finally internalized the folly of giving in to hostage-takers and will use Election 2012 to punish the GOP for these tactics – or whether they will return to form when the short-term payroll tax cut extension expires in two months and agree to pay another Republican ransom.

Been There, Thought That By Eugene Robinson

Can we please bury the notion that Newt Gingrich is some kind of deep thinker? His intellect may be as broad as the sea, but it’s about as deep as a birdbath.

I’m not saying the Republican presidential front-runner is unacquainted with ideas. Quite the contrary: Ideas rain through his brain like confetti, escaping at random as definitive pronouncements about this or that. But they are other people’s ideas, and Gingrich doesn’t bother to curate them into anything resembling a consistent philosophy. Given enough time, I’m convinced, he will take every position on every issue.

The week’s most vivid example of Gingrich’s intellectual promiscuity sent principled conservatives into apoplexy. Mitt Romney, his chief opponent for the GOP nomination, had called on Gingrich to return the $1.6 million in consulting fees he received from housing giant Freddie Mac. Gingrich replied that he would “be glad to listen” if Romney would first “give back all the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees” during his time as head of the investment firm Bain Capital.

If this were a column about Gingrich’s hypocrisy, the point would be that he has been scorchingly critical of Freddie Mac while at the same time accepting tons of the firm’s money. But this is about his shallowness—and the fact that in blasting Romney he adopted the ideas and rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street.

Republicans are supposed to believe that “bankrupting companies and laying off employees” is something to celebrate, not bemoan, because this is seen as the way capitalism works. Even in the heat of a campaign, no one who has thought deeply about economics and adopted the conservative viewpoint—which Gingrich wants us to believe he has done—could possibly commit such heresy.

Gingrich doesn’t just borrow ideas from the protesters he once advised to “get a job, right after you take a bath.” He’s as indiscriminate as a vacuum cleaner, except for a bias toward the highfalutin and trendy.

Take his solution for making the federal government so efficient that we could save $500 billion a year: a management system called Lean Six Sigma. There’s no way Gingrich could resist such a shiny bauble of jargon. Why, the name even includes a letter of the Greek alphabet—the sort of erudite touch that a distinguished professor of history, such as Gingrich, could not fail to appreciate.

I won’t argue with the corporate executives who say that Lean Six Sigma works wonders for their firms. But is a technique developed by Motorola to reduce the number of defects in its electronic gear really applicable to government? There’s no reason to think it would be, unless you somehow restructured government to introduce competition and a genuine, not simulated, profit motive. I guess Professor Gingrich will get back to us on that; at the moment, he’s too busy playing with his new piece of management-speak.

Another example is Gingrich’s bizarre claim last year that “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior” was the key to understanding President Obama. Aside from being one of the stranger, least comprehensible utterances by a prominent American politician in recent memory—and that’s saying something—it was also completely unoriginal. Gingrich was citing and endorsing a hallucinatory piece in Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza. It was merely the idea du jour.

Gingrich finds it hard to watch an intellectual fad pass by without becoming infatuated. Do you remember Second Life, the digital realm? In 2007, he told us it was “an example of how we can rethink learning” and potentially “one of the great breakthroughs of the next 10 years.” I know Second Life still exists, but have you heard a lot about it recently? Has it changed your world?

Gingrich didn’t originate the idea of solving the health insurance problem through an individual mandate, but he supported it—before bitterly opposing it. Nor was he saying anything new last week when he made the offensive claim that Palestinians are an “invented people.” His xenophobic views about the alleged threat to the United States from Islam and Shariah law are in conflict with earlier statements praising immigration and the melting pot as great American strengths. But for Gingrich, the word “contradiction” has no meaning. His discourse knows no past and no future, just the glib opportunism of now.

Gingrich’s debating technique is dogmatic insistence, rather than persuasion. I guess he realizes that to convince someone of an idea, first he would have to understand it.
Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

1. No free speech for you!

In 2006, at an awards dinner honoring the preservation of free speech no less, Gingrich unleashed the scary specter of terrorism to argue that free speech must be curtailed, which he admitted would ignite “a serious debate about the First Amendment.”

Gingrich said:

Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while destroying us.

His remarks immediately sparked controversy, leading him to write an op-eddays later in which he clarified that the First Amendment should not be used as a shield for terrorists working “to build ‘franchises’ among leftist, antiglobalization groups worldwide, especially in Latin America.”

2. Muslims don’t count

Remember last year when the right freaked out over Park 51, the planned Muslim Community Center in lower Manhattan? Because of its location, two blocks from the World Trade Center site, the right renamed the proposed interfaith, Muslim-run community center the “ground zero mosque.”

Some of the most appalling right-wing statements against Park 51 came from none other than Newt Gingrich, who made one bigoted comment after the next. First, he demanded that America adopt the same religious intolerance that marks the repressive monarchy of Saudi Arabia: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia,” he said.

He then proceeded to equate American Muslims not just to terrorists, but Nazis, arguing that building a mosque near Ground Zero “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

3. Yay for child labor!

Newt Gingrich longs for an era when children as young as five could slave away for 14 hours a day in a sweatshop. At least that’s the impression he gave whendeclaring to a crowd at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that child labor laws should go.

“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child [labor] laws, which are truly stupid,” said Gingrich, adding, “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor, and pay local students to take care of the school.”

Weeks later Gingrich doubled down:

Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday.

They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of “I do this and you give me cash” unless it’s illegal.

But not to worry, even Gingrich has his limits. When speaking to WNYM radio host Curtis Sliwa, he clarified, “Kids shouldn’t work in coal mines; kids shouldn’t work in heavy industry,” but he still supports having poor school kids scrub toilets in public schools.

4. Blame the gays

In October, during a campaign stop in Iowa, Gingrich called gay marriage a “temporary aberration” that “fundamentally goes against everything we know.” He reminded his audience that “marriage is between a man and woman” and “has been for all of recorded history.”

This coming from a past adulterer who has been married three times. It’s not the number of marriages or even the affair that makes this statement outrageous, but rather the hypocrisy. In his personal life, he has no problem disrespecting the so-called “institution of marriage,” yet when it comes to giving same-sex couples the right to marry, Gingrich is suddenly raging with concern about the sanctity of marriage and commitment.

And, as someone who constantly reminds his audiences that he’s a historian, it’s odd that Gingrich doesn’t know that polygamy has been the most common domestic arrangement in human history.

Gingrich’s disdain for LGBT marriage equality was on display one month earlier during an interview with Catholic radio, where he cast blame on same-sex marriage for the country’s economic woes.

5. Life as a white man is so unfair

Gingrich, like most conservatives, loves to play the victim card, like the time he called then Supreme Court Judge nominee Sonya Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” This was in response to a statement made by Sotomayor during a 2001 lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

However, Gingrich and his fellow conservatives conveniently ignored the broadercontext of Sotomayor’s speech. She was making reference to former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s famous saying: “A wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Sotomayor went on to say that she hoped her gender and race would give her unique insight into cases that others on the bench, such as wise old men, may lack.

Gingrich was so outraged by her remark that he went to Twitter to air his grievances. “Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman.’ New racism is no better than old racism,” wrote Gingrich, adding: “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

6. Obama the secret Kenyan

It seems like it was ages ago that Gingrich told the National Review that President Obama was some sort of undercover Kenyan out to destroy America. That is the conclusion he reached after reading a Forbes article by Dinesh D’Souza that accused Obama of having an “African socialist” agenda that he adopted from his Kenyan father. From the National Review interview:

Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

“I think Obama gets up every morning with a world view that is fundamentally wrong about reality,” Gingrich says. “If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.”

The words speak for themselves.

7. Religious radical atheists?

In March, Gingrich gave a chilling speech about the frightening future in store for his grandchildren if godless liberals have it their way. Or was it Muslim liberals?

I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age, they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.

Who knew that one could be both a secular atheist and radical Muslim at the same time?

8. So what if women get paid less?

In the land of Gingrich, the fact that women still make less than men isn’t all that important. During a recent campaign stop at Harvard, Gingrich fielded a questionfrom freshman undergraduate Holly Flynn, who said:

I’d like you to clarify your stance on women’s rights. And I’d like to know what you’d do to ensure gender equality in the United States. Given that even today, women make 77 cents to every man’s dollar.

Not only was Gingrich dismissive of the pay gap, he even twisted the facts around to showcase men as the real victims here:

Well, the latter is going to change dramatically in the next generation, because more women are going to college than men. And they’re doing better than men and entering professions more than men,” replied Gingrich. “In fact, if anything, you’ll be here in 15 years wondering what we’ll do about men inequality and male unemployment. Because the people who had the deepest decline of income are males who don’t go to college.

His analysis feeds into a larger narrative that says women are rising to the top and men are losing out, which is most apparent in what Alice O’Conner calls “the myth of the mancession,” referring to the notion that the recession has been far more devastating for men than women. O’Conner notes that men lost a greater share of jobs when the recession first hit, but only because “they are disproportionately represented in traditionally hard-hit and better-paying sectors of the economy.”

9. Guilty until proven innocent

At the Nov. 22 CNN Republican debate on National Security, Gingrich said, “I think it’s desperately important that we preserve your right to be innocent until proven guilty,” but only “if it’s a matter of criminal law.” He rejects applying these same basic standards in cases of national security — crimes for which he believes due process should be thrown out the window.

Gingrich makes the bizarre argument that if we allow alleged terrorists due process, America could be nuked. His words: “If you’re trying to find somebody who may have a nuclear weapon that they are trying to bring into an American city, I think you want to use every tool that you can possibly use to gather the intelligence.”It’s unclear what this unlikely Jack Bauer scenario has to do with trying people who are already in custody.

10. Torture is not torture

At a town hall last week at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, an audience member asked Gingrich about his position on torture. Newt replied:

Waterboarding is by every technical rule not torture. [Applause] Waterboarding is actually something we’ve done with our own pilots in order to get them used to the idea to what interrogation is like. It’s not — I’m not saying it’s not bad, and it’s not difficult, it’s not frightening. I’m just saying that under the normal rules internationally, it’s not torture.

I think the right balance is that a prisoner can only be waterboarded at the direction of the President in a circumstance which the information was of such great importance that we thought it was worth the risk of doing it, and I do that frankly only out of concern for world opinion. But we do not want to be known as a country that capriciously mistreats human beings.

Besides the fact that (a) waterboarding is morally reprehensible and (b) torturedoesn’t work, there is no doubt under international law that waterboarding is indeed a form of torture, according to Juan Mendez, the United Nations’s Special Rapporteur on Torture. The U.S. Army Field Manual also bans the use of waterboarding, because it’s considered a form of torture.

11. Bonus: Death to drug dealers

In 1995, when Gingrich was Speaker of the House, he advocated using the death penalty against drug dealers, saying, “You import commercial quantities of drugs in the United States for the purpose of destroying our children. We will kill you.”

When recently asked in an interview with Yahoo News whether he still supported executing drug dealers, he danced around the question, suggesting that drug cartel leaders should face the death penalty (which they already do in some circumstances).

He then praised Singapore, which enforces corporal punishment such as caning for minor offenses and the death penalty for drug offenses, as a model for drug policy, saying, “Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They’ve been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.

Since President Obama took the oath of office in January 2009, Republicans have reversed their stances on many policies and beliefs. Here are 24 of them. By Stephen D. Foster Jr.

1. Health Care Mandates) Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act by Democrats, Republicans widely supported the idea of an individual health care insurance mandate, Newt Gingrich being perhaps the chief supporter. Republicans have always preached about how people need to take responsibility for themselves, and now that a law exists that makes people take responsibility, the GOP is rejecting it simply on the grounds that President Obama and the Democrats passed it.

2. The Nuclear START Treaty) Republicans shamelessly filibustered the ratification of the Obama START Treaty for quite a period of time and criticized it tremendously and continue to try and find ways to circumvent the treaty today. What Republicans conveniently forget is that Ronald Reagan, the man that Republicans worship like a God, negotiated the very first START Treaty which was signed by yet another Republican, George H. W. Bush in 1991. That treaty expired in 2009 so President Obama negotiated a new one to continue the Reagan legacy. But since President Obama negotiated this treaty, Republicans retreated from Reagan’s policy faster than the decade it took to create the START Treaty in the first place.

3. Dream Act) Immigration reform has been touted by Republicans for decades now. Reagan granted amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants in the 1980′s. Most recently, Republicans worked on immigration reform under the Bush Administration and failed. President Bush and Senator John McCain both supported immigration reform and were willing to cross the aisle to work with Democrats, most notably Edward Kennedy. All of that work and bipartisanship ceased after the 2008 Election. Staunchly opposed to President Obama and anything his administration supports, Republicans turned their backs on immigration reform in favor of militarizing the border and laws that violate the civil rights of Hispanics. Obama’s Dream Act would do much that Reagan would approve of, but Republicans refuse hear anything of it.

4. TARP) Republicans supported TARP when they helped pass it in response to the economic collapse in 2008. President Bush even signed the legislation into law. But since it’s been up to the guiding hands of President Obama to deal with TARP, Republicans have since revoked their support and have been highly critical even as they take credit for it when presenting stimulus checks to their local constituents. The fact is, TARP is successful because President Obama oversaw it and Republicans hate that fact.

5. Bail Out of Auto Industry) Republicans once supported this too but abandoned it once President Obama called for it. The auto industry is a vital manufacturing sector that supports millions of American jobs and Republicans WANTED the industry to fail simply because President Obama wanted the bail out. If it had failed, Republicans would have blamed President Obama for not supporting the American auto industry. The bail out has been a resounding success with most of the money plus interest paid back to the taxpayers. Mitt Romney has since tried to take credit for the idea because it has been so successful.

6. Israel Going Back To Pre-1967 Borders) Many Presidents have suggested this, even George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. But once President Obama repeated it, Republicans immediately denounced the President and threw their support to Israel’s President. This action by Republicans is totally unprecedented. It is reprehensible for American politicians to support a foreign leader more than the American President. Imagine if the Republican Party had overtly supported Hitler over FDR during World War Two. The only reason Republicans are rejecting President Obama’s plan is because they cannot bring themselves to endorse any idea he suggests, even if it is a Republican one.

7. Gun Control) Republicans overwhelmingly reject any and all gun control measures today. Which is very strange considering Ronald Reagan himself supported the Brady Handgun Act. But, it’s still true. Republicans did indeed support gun control measures in the past. It’s different now. Today’s intolerant, prejudiced, and extremist Republican Party is only against gun control now because they believe there needs to be a war against liberals and minority groups. It’s all about fear and war.

8. Public Education) Even the Founding Fathers believed in education for all. Every Republican President in United States history has been supportive of the public education system in this country. Ronald Reagan campaigned on axing the Department of Education but not only did he NOT eliminate it, he amped up its budget. It is only now that President Obama seeks to improve the education system that Republicans are against public education. When President Bush sought to improve public education, Republicans were on board but now that Obama is President, Republicans have decided that all public schools are evil liberal institutions that must be destroyed.

9. Infrastructure Spending) Republicans have always believed in strong infrastructure, until now. Republicans used the power of the federal government to build the railroads in the 1860′s and 1870′s, the Panama Canal in the beginning of the 20th century, and the interstate highway system in the 1950′s. Yet when President Obama called for new infrastructure spending to improve America’s crumbling roads and bridges and to improve our rail lines, Republicans immediately reversed their long-held belief in a strong American infrastructure. Why? Because they hate President Obama and oppose everything he believes in, even if it was once a part of the Republican platform.

10. Child Labor Laws) This one is surprising. Republicans were the ones that championed child labor laws in the first place. Starting in 1852, in the once Republican state of Massachusetts, child labor laws have been fought for by both parties. The only opponent of child labor laws has traditionally been big business. Republicans tried to pass a Constitutional amendment in 1924 and it didn’t succeed. It wasn’t until Democrats passed the Fair Labor Standards Act that child labor laws became federal law. Republicans oppose child labor laws now because of their deep ties with corporations. The goal of the corporate world is to find cheap labor and because President Obama is against huge corporations, Republicans must stand with the corporations, even if that means killing child labor laws.

11. Civil Rights) Republicans were once the champions of civil rights as well. They ended slavery and adopted the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. They splintered over the Civil Rights Act in 1964, although it was a Republican led Supreme Court that ruled in the Brown v Board of Education case, and have become more and more opposed to civil rights ever since. President Obama has called for increased civil rights and because of that, Republicans now oppose civil rights for everyone except Christian white males.

12. Environmental Protection) Originally championed by Theodore Roosevelt, Republicans used to support efforts to protect the environment. Over the last century, however, that support has reversed. Republicans even once supported the environment in the 1970′s when Nixon created the EPA, but no longer. Republicans are now in complete support of the irresponsibility of the oil and coal industry and want to open the entire American coastline and even federally protected lands to drilling and mining.
Republicans even used to support cap-and-trade. The first George Bush signed legislation in 1990 that implemented the cap-and-trade system and many Republicans still do support cap-and-trade. But because President Obama supports it, most Republicans are now against it.

13. Deficit Spending) This one is big. Republicans have employed deficit spending since the Reagan years and abused it during the Bush administration to pass the conservative agenda and to fund wars. Reagan doubled the national debt and George W. Bush proceeded to double it again. But because Democrats controlled the White House and the Congress from 2008 to 2010, Republicans completely reversed their stance on deficit spending and still oppose deficit spending solely on the grounds that a Republican isn’t President. If a Republican were President right now, you can bet the farm that they would abuse deficit spending once again to slam the destructive anti-middle class, anti-poor, anti-women, and anti-America agenda through Congress with no thought about fiscal responsibility whatsoever.

14. Federal Reserve) The Federal Reserve is now a target for most Republicans, which is puzzling because it was a Republican idea. Proposed by Republican leader Nelson Aldrich to organize and regulate the banking system and to enforce monetary policy, and thus stabilize our financial system, the Federal Reserve Act was signed into law by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Republicans now want to dismantle or weaken the Federal Reserve because President Obama needs it to enforce Dodd-Frank which will make banks more responsible and accountable, and will protect consumers.

15. Women’s Rights) The women’s rights movement was born in and grew with the Republican Party in the mid 1800′s. Many Republicans supported voting rights for women although to pass the 19th Amendment it took women threatening to cause Republican losses in the 1920 Election to persuade them to help pass it in Congress. As women gained more equality, they also demanded equal pay for equal work and reproductive rights. Ronald Reagan legalized abortion as Governor of California in the 1960′s and a moderate conservative Supreme Court handed down the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. Today’s Republican Party is now waging a war against women and the harder Democrats and President Obama fight for women’s rights, the harder Republicans will fight to eliminate them because of orders from white Christian extremists.

16. End Of Life Counseling) Republicans referred to this as “death panels” in 2009 in response to President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. But Republicans wholeheartedly supported end of life counseling in their own 2003 Medicare bill. Both of the Bush Presidents supported end of life counseling and even Sarah Palin herself supported it before she suddenly turned against it. In fact, Republicans had supported end of life counseling for decades. So what happened? Easy. President Obama supports it, so Republicans are now against it. It’s really that simple. And petty.

17. Financial Disclosure) Republicans were all for this in 2002 when they passed and President Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law. Campaign financing laws have always been supported by Republicans and Democrats alike, until now. Because of their hatred of President Obama, who supports campaign finance laws, and their desperation for absolute power and authority, Republicans are now completely against financial disclosure. They have allied themselves with the corporate world over the American people in their effort to steer elections their direction and do that, campaign finance laws must not exist. That is why the activist conservative Supreme Court struck down the laws to begin with.

18. Minimum Wage) The way Republicans have been talking about abolishing the minimum wage, you would think they’ve always been against it, right? Wrong. 82 House Republicans and 39 Senate Republicans joined the Democratic majority in passing the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. President Bush signed the bill into law. It is only now that President Obama stands with the American workers that Republicans oppose the minimum wage on behalf of their corporate masters, most notably, Koch Industries. If Republicans were so against the minimum wage, they would not have voted to raise it. Three times.

19. Military Intervention In The Middle East) This should really convince you that Republicans are simply opposing policies because a black President supports them. Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 all supported military intervention in the Middle East yet when President Obama uses the military to intervene in Libya, Republicans all of a sudden become doves? They’ve really revealed themselves with this policy reversal. The fact that under President Obama, Libya successfully overthrew their dictator without one American life being lost must infuriate the GOP.

20. Abortion) It may sound really far-fetched but there are many pro-choice conservatives out there and some politicians are part of that group. Take Ronald Reagan for instance. He made abortion legal in California as Governor of the state. And most recently, it was discovered that extreme right-winger Rick Santorum’s wife had an abortion to save her own life. In my opinion, that means Santorum is for the procedure when his wife’s life is on the line, but every other woman needs to die rather than exercise their right to an abortion which was ruled to exist in Roe v Wade by a conservative leaning court in 1973.

21. Economic Development Administration) Never heard of this you say? This program provides grants to local projects which have created jobs. Republicans such as Susan Collins, Chuck Grassely, and even John Cornyn have supported it in the past. Cornyn stated in March 2010 that funds from an EDA grant “would pave the way for the creation of new jobs and business opportunities, which will strengthen the region’s economy,” according to a local East Texas NBC news affiliate. But now that the GOP plan to crash the economy on purpose is in full swing, Republicans are now calling for an end to the EDA.

22. Lower Taxes) Republican do support lower taxes, except they only support them for the wealthy, NOT the rest of us. Even as they crusade to eliminate taxes on corporations and the wealthy, Republicans fully support a new proposal that would actually raise taxes on the rest of us. And guess who opposes it? That’s right. President Obama. Republicans usually crusaded for lower taxes for everyone, but since they support class warfare now, they have partly reversed themselves.

23. Medicare) I’m aware that Republicans initially opposed Medicare when it was passed, but since its passage into law, Republicans have largely defended it, especially when they try to pander to senior citizens for votes. But if Republicans really wanted to kill Medicare, they would have actually done it when Ronald Reagan was in office. Reagan opposed Medicare when it was created but then did something quite unexpected as President. He saved it. By saving Medicare, Republicans practically endorsed it. Even Theodore Roosevelt supported national health care. And now the GOP has come full circle once again by opposing it, and are trying to slaughter it and the millions of seniors that rely on the popular health care program. Why? Because President Obama is in favor of keeping Medicare around for a very long time and Medicare represents just how popular government-run universal health care can be. So technically speaking, Republicans were against Medicare before they were for it before they were against it.

24. Social Security) Social Security is popular with everybody, even the staunchest right wingers. Ronald Reagan and Milton Freidman supported the New Deal programs of the 1930′s and even Ayn Rand collected Social Security up to her dying breath. Ronald Reagan even saved this program too by raising payroll taxes. This action also saved Medicare as it is part of the Social Security Act. The idea to privatize Social Security has popped up many times but has been met with negative reactions by a majority of the people so those ideas usually die in infancy. President Bush wanted to privatize it, but never did. Republicans had control of Congress and the White House from 2001-2006. If they had wanted to kill Social Security, they would have done so. But now all of a sudden they feel now is the time to privatize it, even as big bankers have proven that they are untrustworthy with money. Oh, and President Obama supports Social Security. Just another reason for Republicans to hate it.

Undoubtedly, one could add even more to the list but now you know what policies Republicans once supported and why they are now against those very same policies. If we take Republican claims to love America and their claims that the Founders were Republicans seriously, we could also now say that Republicans were for America before they were against her.

A few observations (5:38 minutes video)

Video opens…

I. ( 0 – 52 seconds) Ron Paul speaks about Patriot Act. Paul speaks from the heart and he correctly states the case against acts such as the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act served its purpose, may have been abused by Cheney, and has run it course. Gingrich ceased an opportunity to tear into Paul with an emotional attack. Paul demurs and looks as if chastised by an elder. Paul’s affect just does not work, if there is anything to be said about appearing “presidential.”

II. (52 – 1:15 seconds) Santorum’s obvious racism exudes his standard message, “Muslims are at the root of all terrorism.” So, profiling is the only way to go. Blitzer had actually setup the group via asking about ‘profiling.’ Paul, obviously coached by CNN to avoid interruption, appears like an impatient bystander. Paul’s demeanor is just terrible!

III. (1:15 – 2:05) Cain follows with his version of support for “profiling.” After giving a ‘Rah, Rah, Rah,’ statement and avoiding the questions, Blitzer pressed for a real answer. Note: Blitzer was referred to as “BLITZ”. When Cain goes off script and outside of his preset emphasis points, he blows it consistently.

IV. (2:05 – 2:15 seconds) Romney. Did Romney smoothly stumble on our place in time? I thought I heard 21st Century possibly modified to 20th Century.

V. (2:15 – 2:40 seconds) Bachmann. “Too Nuclear to Fail” (Interesting phraseology, after 30 seconds of “What did she say?” Blitzer asked about aid to Pakistan. Bachmann’s first few answer seconds ticked off like a real intelligence committee professional. Unlike, my Mother, her Mother must not have told her that, ”a fool is less likely to be discovered a fool, if his mouth is closed.”

Bachmann commented about President Obama’s “fingers crossed on Pakistan” was an example of weak politicking with no basis in fact. How about the Bush Administration and its support of the past Pakistani Administration: Musharraf?

VI. (2:40 – 2:53) Perry lies about financial aid to Pakistan. He will make no significant change in dealing with Pakistan. At least the Obama security professionals has leveraged opportunity to take-out many Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Paksitan.

VII. (2:53 – 3:45 seconds) Gingrich. Adroitly states the case about Pakistan. The presidential candidate used one solid minute of The Guardian’s 5:28 minutes video). At the risk of being considered a ‘hawk’ among liberals, Newt spoke succinctly and correctly about how the U.S. should deal with Pakistan. If they allow AL Qaeda safe haven, they should not complain about attacks on those murderers. And yes, the horror are the innocents who are victims of Al Qaeda tactical methods of disguise; hiding among non-combatants.

VIII. (3:45 – 4:11 seconds) Perry. Sanctioning the Iran Bank! Poppycock!. How will Perry convince Russia and China to do same. also Iran exports oil. How many oil import nations will join the US in Perry’s scheme?

IX. (4:11 – 4:32 seconds) Romney accomplishes an antsy ‘quick speak’ about spending. he ends with the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act via use of the derisive term “Obamacare.” One would think that after installing such a program in Massachusetts, a candidate would avoid such. Romney should also tread carefully on Obama Administration spending. Much of the president’s spending has been in efforts to recoup from the Bush Years. granted Healthcare reform and Afghanistan are Obama’s expenditures but other spending has been to bring the economy around.

Blitzes pivots to Paul, and he performs his typical, frankly, speak. He makes the point all of his opponents are simply talking about cuts and he implies, the cuts will not happen. TRUE!

X. (4:33 – 5:14 seconds) Bachmann’s asinine rambling about China. The nation has been in hock to China for many years and her President Bush, shoveled more into China than any president in history. Gingrich launches on an obvious general election strategy aimed at Hispanics and Latinos. Gingrich will probably do some for of clarification or retraction after the EIB Network and Fox News goes to work on his comments. But, he succeeded in delivering a zinger to the voting public.

XI. (5:16 – End of video) Huntsman. The candidate looked presidential, sounded presidential and was saved by the developers of the video to law. One has to wonder why.

Politifacts.com Fact Check

Compliments to CNN and Wolf Blitzer! The debate was, again, well produced, properly moderated, and planned for effectiveness.

A requiem for the losers. Even in the Guardian’s five-minute, Santorum and Huntsmann were rare sightings, and Paul was used pretty much as a ‘punching bag”, despite making sense on a few points.

I wish I could say I am looking forward to Debate #14.