A Gentleman’s view.

By Chauncey DeVega

1. Newt Gingrich puts Juan Williams “in his place” for daring to ask an unpleasant question during the South Carolina debate. This was the most pernicious example of old-school white racism at work in the 2012 Republican primary campaign. Newt Gingrich, a son of the South who grew up in the shadow of legendary Jim Crow racist Lester Maddox, is an expert on the language and practice of white racism (in both its subtle and obvious forms). He has ridden high with Republican audiences by suggesting that black people are lazy, and their children should be given mops and brooms in order to learn the value of hard work. With condescending pride, Gingrich has also stated that he would lecture the NAACP–one of America’s most storied civil rights organizations–that they ought to demand jobs and not food stamps from Barack Obama.

On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, under the Confederate flag, in the state of South Carolina, Gingrich defended his racist contempt for African Americans by putting Juan Williams, “that boy,” in his place. During the debate, Juan Williams had gotten uppity and was insufficiently deferential to Newt.

This dynamic was not lost on the almost exclusively white audience in attendance (nor on the white woman who congratulated Gingrich the following day for his “brave” deed). They howled with glee at the sight of a black man, one who dared to sass, being reminded of his rightful place at Newt’s knee. In another time, not too long ago, Juan Williams would have been driven out of town for such an offense, if he was lucky — the lynching tree awaited many black folks who did not submit to white authority.

The symbolism of Newt Gingrich’s hostility to black folks, on King’s birthday, and the personal contempt he demonstrated for Juan Williams, was a classic moment in contemporary Republican politics. This was the “scene of instruction,” when a black man was a proxy for a whole community, a stand-in for the country’s first black president, as Newt Gingrich showed just what he thinks about Barack Obama, specifically and about people of color, in general. In that moment, white conservatism’s contempt was palatable, undeniable and unapologetic.

2. Herman Cain, in one of the most grotesque performances in post-civil rights-era politics to date, deftly plays his designated role as an African-American advocate for some of the Tea Party and New Right’s most racist policy positions. Most notably, in numerous interviews Cain alluded to the Democratic Party as keeping African Americans on a “plantation,” and that black conservatives were “runaway slaves” who were uniquely positioned to “free” the minds of their brothers and sisters. The implication of his ahistorical and bizarre allusion to the Democratic Party and chattel slavery was clear: black Americans are stupid, childlike and incapable of making their own political decisions, as Cain publicly observed that “only thirty percent of black people are thinking for themselves.”

Doubling down, as a black conservative mascot for the fantasies of the Tea Party faithful, Herman Cain also suggested that anyone who accuses them of “racism” (ignoring all available evidence in support of this claim) were in fact anti-white, and the real racists.

Herman Cain’s disdain was not limited to the black public. He also argued that undocumented immigrants should be electrocuted at the U.S. border by security fences, and that Muslim Americans are inherently treasonous and should be excluded from government. Perhaps most troubling, Herman Cain advocated for extreme forms of racial profiling in which Muslims would have to carry special identification cards.

Racism and anti-black sentiment know no boundaries. Herman Cain demonstrates that some of its most deft practioners are (ironically) people of color.

3. Ron Paul argues that the landmark federal legislation that dismantled Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s was a moral evil and a violation of white people’s liberty. Ron Paul’s claim that the rights of black Americans are secondary to the “freedom” of whites to discriminate, is an almost perfect mirror for the logic of apartheid. Ron Paul’s white supremacist ethic is more than a dismissal of one of the crowning legislative achievements of the 20th century: it is the endorsement of a principle that conveniently allows white people to hate and discriminate in the public sphere at will–and without consequence–against people of color. This “freedom” is the living and bleeding heart of white racism.

4. Rick Santorum tells conservative voters that black people are parasites who live off hard-working white people. Santorum’s claim that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” is problematic in a number of ways. First, Santorum channels the white supremacist classic Birth of a Nation and its imagery of childlike free blacks who are a burden on white society. In addition, Santorum’s assumption that black people are a dependent class is skewed at its root. Why? Santorum presupposes that African Americans are uniquely pathological and lack self-sufficiency, ignores the black middle-class, and directly race-baits a white conservative audience by telling them that “the blacks” are coming for their money, jobs and resources. There is no mention of Red State America’s disproportionate dependence on public tax dollars, or how the (white) middle-class and the rich are subsidized by the federal government.

5. In keeping with the class warfare narrative, and as a way of proving their conservative bona fides, Republican candidates have crafted a strategy in which they repeatedly refer to the unemployed as lazy, unproductive citizens who would “be rich if they just went out and got a job.” In fact, as suggested by Mitt Romney, any discussion of the wealth and income gap in the United States (and the destruction of the middle class), should be done in a “quiet room,” as such truth-telling stokes mean-spirited resentment against the rich. Conservatives have an almost Orwellian gift for manipulating language. The financier class is reframed as “job creators.” Programs that workers pay for such as Social Security are equated with “welfare.” Americans who are victims of robber baron capitalism and structural unemployment are painted as dregs who want nothing more than to “live off of the system.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, unions are painted as bastions for the weak, the greedy, and those who hate capitalism.

Race is central here: Conservatives seeded this ground with their assault on the black poor. The invention of the welfare queen by Ronald Reagan became code for lazy, fat, black women who game the system at the expense of hard-working whites. The Right uses the same framing in order to attack immigrants as people who want to destroy the country and steal the scarce resources of “productive” white Americans.

Efforts to shrink “big government” are closely related to the Right’s observation that the federal government employs “too many” blacks. The Republican Party refined its Ayn Rand-inspired shock doctrine and disaster capitalism through decades of practice on black and brown Americans. The racist tactics that were once used to justify the evisceration of programs aimed at helping the urban poor are now being applied to white folks on Main Street USA during the Great Recession.

6. Mitt Romney wants to “keep America America.” The dropping of one letter from the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan, “Keep America American,” does not remove the intent behind Romney’s repeated use of such a virulently bigoted phrase. While Mitt Romney can claim ignorance of the slogan’s origins, he is intentionally channeling its energy. In the Age of Obama, the Republican Party is drunk on the tonic of nativism. From remarks about “the real America,” to supporting the mass deportation of Latinos and Hispanics, a hostility to any designated Other is central to the 21st-century know-nothing politics of the Tea Party-driven GOP. Romney’s slogan, “Keep America America” begs the obvious question: just who is American? Who gets to decide? And should there be moats and electric fences to keep the undesirables out of the country?

7. Rick Perry’s nostalgic memories of his family’s ranch, “Niggerhead.” You cannot choose your parents (or decide what your ancestors will christen the family retreat before your birth). You can, however, choose to rename the family ranch something other than the ugliest word in the English language.

The world that spawned and nurtured Rick Perry’s Niggerhead was none too kind to black people. Jim and Jane Crow were the rule of the land; it was enforced through violence, threats and intimidation. Moreover, Rick Perry grew up in a “sundown town.” These were communities from which blacks were banished by violence, and where white authorities made sure that African Americans would never again be allowed in the area. The whiteness of memory and nostalgia is blinding. While he has finally dropped out of the race, the Niggerhead episode is emblematic of Rick Perry’s obsession with states’ rights, and a broader fondness for the Confederacy and secession. These are traits he shares in abundance with the remaining Republican presidential candidates.

8. Former candidate Michele Bachmann suggests that the black family was stronger during slavery than in freedom. Her claim is not just a simple misunderstanding of history and the importance of family in the Black Experience. No, she is signaling to a tired, white supremacist, slavery-apologist narrative which opines that African Americans were/are not yet ready for freedom, and could only “flourish” under the benign guidance of the Southern Slaveocracy.

In a moment when states such as Arizona and Texas are outlawing ethnic studies programs, and when the Tea Party and its allies are leading an assault on educational programs that are not sufficiently “pro-American,” Bachmann’s claims are part of a broader effort to literally whitewash U.S. history.

When married to her belief in a willful lie that the framers of the United States Constitution were abolitionists who fought tirelessly to eliminate slavery (in reality, both Jefferson and Washington were slaveowners), and a defense of slaveholding Christian whites who “loved their slaves,” Bachmann’s ignorance of the facts transcends mere stupidity and slips over to enabling white supremacy.

9. The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates’ near-silence about how the Great Recession has destroyed the African American and Latino middle-class. This speaks volumes about just how selectively inclusive the Republican Party—which markets itself as the defender of the “American Dream” and of an “opportunity society”—really is. During the Ronald Reagan-Politico debate, the Republican candidates were asked what they would do to address the gross and disparate impact of the Great Recession on black and brown communities. While whites are suffering with an official unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, African Americans have struggled with a rate that is almost two to three times as high. In addition, the black and brown middle-class has seen its income, assets and wealth gutted by the Great Recession, where in 2011, whites have almost 20 times the average net worth of African Americans. As always, when White America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu…or worse.

In that awkward moment, only Rick Perry chimed in and proceeded to recycle the same tired rhetoric about “growing the economy” as a vague cure for all ills. One must ask: how would the Republican candidates have responded if the white middle-class had been devastated in the same manner, and to the same degree, as the black and brown middle-class? I would suggest that for the former, it would be treated as a crisis of epic proportions; for the latter, it is a mere curiosity and inconvenient fact.

Politics is about a sense of imagined community. The Ronald Reagan-Politico debate made clear that while the African American and Latino middle-class is being destroyed, the Republican Party has little concern or interest in remedying such a tragic event. It would seem that the Republican Party’s “big tent” has no room for “those people.”

10. The echo chamber that is Fox News, right-wing talk radio, the conservative blogosphere, and Republican elected officials daily stoke the politics of white racial resentment, bigotry and fear. Ultimately, the Republican candidates would not use racism as a weapon if it were not rewarded by their voters, and encouraged by the party’s leadership. An army travels on its stomach; it needs foot soldiers and shock troops to advance its aims. From the ugly, race-based conspiracy fantasies of Birtherism to the astroturf politics of the Tea Party to a news network whose guests routinely disparage Barack Obama with such labels as “ghetto crackhead” to the bloviating racist utterances by opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh, to the common bigotry on display at right-wing Web sites that use monkey, ape, gorilla, pimp, and watermelon imagery to depict the United States’ first black president and his family, it is clear that racism “works” for the Republican Party. To ignore the attraction of rank-and-file white conservatives to such ugliness is to overlook the driving force behind the Republican nominees’ behavior.

Active duty cop: ‘The war on drugs is a war on people’ By Stephen C. Webster

Speaking to Raw Story recently, an active duty police officer who asked not to be named threw down the gauntlet over the part of his job he hates most: the drug war.

“I did not get in law enforcement to destroy a person’s future because that person had marijuana or a pill in their pocket,” the officer explained. “Why would you want to destroy that person’s future and cause them great harm because of that? It’s not worth it.”

Like many Americans, the reality of the drug war was was nothing like what he’d been taught to believe in his youth. But statistics like a citizen being arrested for drugs every 19 seconds in 2010, and 1.6 million people incarcerated over drugs in 2009, were nothing compared to what he actually experienced in the front lines of the drug war on America’s users.

But for those officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect the public from dangerous, violent criminals, the drug war isn’t always just another part of the job. For this officer in particular, it’s much more than that: “The war on drugs is a war on people,” he claimed.

“I just didn’t see problems from illegal drug users that I’d been led to believe,” the officer explained. “Most of the calls that we get on drug use, as police, are alcohol related. Alcohol is a serious drug that can be abused, but I just didn’t see the calls on other drugs like I had been led to believe. I didn’t see these drug-crazed people out there doing crazy things… Even growing up before entering law enforcement, I was always led to believe that the drug war was meant to stop all these people from doing crazy things. But on the street, that’s not what you see. That’s a lie.”

In his view, the officer said that the American public would be much better off if the government would “regulate drugs and keep the control out of the hands of the black market criminals.”

“The cartels have been running a serious drug operation in America for decades, and I don’t think most Americans are really aware of it,” he said. “The money comes from the prohibition of drugs. These criminals are making their money because of the prohibition. If you legalize and regulate it, their profits go to zero.”

For more than two decades in law enforcement, he said that he’s carried an immense guilt: his first drug arrest.

“I was in training, on ‘the other side of the tracks,’ for lack of better words, and we pulled a vehicle over,” he explained. “The guy, I think he had a defective taillight or something. He was sober, polite, respectful, no problems, and my training officer said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s gonna have drugs.’ So, I asked if we could search his vehicle and he gave me permission. Within no time, I found a small amount of (hard) drugs, so he was facing a serious charge. The whole time I was thinking, ‘This is not right. This guy’s keeping to himself, not hurting nobody, he’s a peaceful person.’ I instinctively knew this was wrong. I changed my perspective immediately. This was not the war on drugs that I thought it would be.”

Carrying this guilt for his participation in such a system, he got away from making narcotics arrests and received a transfer to another division. There he worked for years, until one day in 2006. Acting on a whim, he ran a Google search for the peculiar terms, “cops against the drug war,” and rather abruptly found a new calling: an activist group called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He’s followed their work ever since, and in 2012, the officer finally decided that he too must raise his voice against the drug war.

Today, he’s acquired a unique extra-curricular activity: an anonymous blog served up by LEAP, examining the innards of the drug war from a perspective rarely put on public display. If his superiors knew, he explained, “I would probably be terminated.”

And, he claims, it’s not just him that’s come to some stark, personal conclusions on the drug war: fellow officers are coming around as well — especially those who’ve been doing it for a while.

“I remember a case just here recently when an officer was trying to find marijuana on one guy, and another officer started looking around in this area where there’s actual crime, and he was kind of making fun of him for wasting time,” he said. “There’s plenty of officers that do want to get away from the petty, small drug arrests that distract them from fighting real crime, which is what a lot of them get into law enforcement for individually.”

Right-Wing Lunacy: The Shameless Lies Conservative Media Tell Their Audience

One benefit of the prolonged campaign for the Republican presidential nomination has been the revelation that most of the 20 or 30 percent of Americans who describe themselves as conservatives live in a fantasy world.  In their imaginations, Barack Obama, a centrist Democrat with roots in Eisenhower Republicanism rather than Rooseveltian liberalism, is a radical figure trying to take America down the path of “European socialism.” The signature healthcare reform of Obama and the Democratic Congress, modeled on Mitt Romney’s insurance-friendly Massachusetts healthcare program and closely resembling a proposal by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is described as “statist,” “socialist” or “fascist” (as though Hitler came to power with the goal of providing subsidies to private health insurance companies).

How can otherwise sane people believe such lunacy?  The answer is that members of the right-wing counterculture are brainwashed — that is the only appropriate term — by  the apocalyptic propaganda ground out constantly by the conservative media establishment. A perfect example is a recent essay by Philip Klein, a senior editorial writer of the Washington Examiner, the right-wing newspaper owned by the billionaire Philip Anshutz:  “The Welfare State Is Destroying America.”

Klein begins, typically, with the fall from grace of America under the sinister Franklin Roosevelt, who presided over the establishment of Social Security: “But Roosevelt was dead wrong that the program would help the nation avoid deep debt.  Social Security and the entitlement programs that followed its legacy of seeking to protect citizens from the ‘hazards and vicissitudes of life,’ turned out to be fiscal disasters.”

In the real world, of course, today’s national debt has nothing to do with Social Security, whose trust fund has a surplus that will last for decades, with the precise date of the trust fund’s exhaustion depending on the rate of general economic growth. True, the federal government has to raise the tax revenue to repay the money it borrowed from the trust fund — but then, the federal government has to repay all of its creditors, domestic and foreign.  What’s wrong with that?

As if to concede that there is no Social Security crisis in the near future, Klein engages in three intellectually dishonest maneuvers typical of right-wing propagandists. First, he talks about medium-term and long-term problems as though they were present-day emergencies. Second, he blurs the distinction between Social Security’s long-term fiscal challenges, which are minor, and those caused by rising healthcare costs, in order to make Social Security seem worse off than it is in reality. Third, he implies that “the growing debt burden” of the United States is primarily caused by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, ignoring tax cuts, wars and the effects of a near-depression:

With health care costs rising and the population aging, America’s welfare-state obligations are bringing the country to its financial knees. If left unchecked, the growing debt burden will not only trigger runaway inflation and stifling taxes, but it will also threaten national security.

By now readers of the Washington Examiner must assume that Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson deliberately designed Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to be paid for by federal borrowing.  Why shouldn’t Klein’s audience leap to that false conclusion?  After all, Klein has not mentioned the funding streams that pay for these programs:  payroll taxes (Social Security), payroll taxes and general revenues (Medicare) and general revenues (Medicaid).

If Klein were honest with his readers, he would point out that the main causes of federal deficits in the last generation have been the Reagan and Bush tax cuts, plus the fiscal aftereffects of the Great Recession, in the form of falling tax revenues and increased spending on unemployment insurance and stimulus programs.  But that would distract from the false impression that Klein is seeking to convey.

So far in this classic of polemical literature, “The Welfare State Is Destroying America,” Philip Klein has relied solely on rhetoric.  In the next few paragraphs he uses a few numbers, all of which have been cherry-picked to paint a picture of imminent national economic collapse, and all of which are misleading.

Here is misleading argument No. 1:

Spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare alone currently account for 46 percent — or nearly half of — federal spending, excluding interest payments. Over the next 25 years, that percentage will explode to 66 percent, or close to two-thirds, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Ooh, scary!  These numbers may frighten readers, but they are meaningless. The only number that conceivably would matter would be the overall federal-state-local spending as a share of GDP, which in the U.S. is well below the average for industrial democracies that are just as competitive and prosperous. Saying that the share of federal spending that is devoted to Social Security and healthcare spending will grow over 25 years from 46 to 66 percent does not support Klein’s case that the welfare state will “destroy” America. These are just irrelevant numbers, thrown out to impress the ignorant reader of the Washington Examiner.

Misleading argument No. 2 follows:

Numbers associated with the nation’s debt crisis are almost too staggering to comprehend. Last month, total U.S. debt surpassed $15 trillion. But a recent analysis by Boston University economics professor Laurence Kotlikoff found that when long-term entitlement obligations are considered, the true fiscal gap is $211 trillion.

What Klein fails to point out is that Kotlikoff’s calculation for unfunded entitlement obligations is for the period between now and infinity. Even if Kotlikoff and Klein used the briefer time span of, say, 2012-2100, there would be no cause for alarm, because nobody is going to present the federal government with a check for advance payment of all projected entitlement payments in the remainder of the 21st century, due tomorrow.  In other words, saying the U.S. has a “fiscal gap” is like saying that you are in danger of bankruptcy from a “personal fiscal gap,” because you could not pay off the entire house or car mortgage today. As long as you can make the installment payments at a reasonable interest rate, you, like the nation, are fine.

The abstract “fiscal gap” arises almost entirely from the minor projected shortfall of payroll tax funding for Social Security and, more important, from the estimated out-of-control growth of healthcare costs in decades to come.  Change the variables, by means of new taxes for Social Security, benefit cuts or control of excessive costs in the U.S. medical industry, and the Big Scary Fiscal Gap disappears or shrinks dramatically, depriving right-wing hacks and left-wing deficit hawks of a club used to beat Social Security and Medicare.

Does Klein tell his readers this? Of course not.  He’s just throwing out scary-sounding statistics to stampede the yahoos.

On to misleading argument No. 3:

Greece, with an economy 1/50th the size of the U.S., is threatening the economic standing of the rest of Europe because of its growing debt burden, which hit 143 percent of its gross domestic product in 2010.

The U.S. is on pace to match that dubious distinction in under 20 years, according to the CBO, and to soar to 716 percent by 2080. Sustaining such debt would require raising marginal tax rates to as high as 88 percent, the CBO has told The Washington Examiner.

Shame on the CBO for misleading the public in this way. The experts of the CBO know perfectly well that the United States is never going to have a national debt of 716 percent of GDP or marginal tax rates of 88 percent.  Long before anything like these absurd numbers were reached, policies would be changed to cut costs in medical spending. Long-term projections like these are just scary stories told to frighten the public into fiscal sobriety, in the same spirit that a parent would tell an overweight child that if she or he kept eating, then according to a straight-line computer projection, by the age of 40 she or he would weigh 23 tons.

As it happens, the CBO’s own rigorous work undercuts the apocalyptic narrative set forth by conservatives like Philip Klein.  Here, from a CBO report of a few years back (the long-term projections have not significantly changed),  is Box 2, “The Effect of the Aging of the Population on Spending on Medicare and Medicaid.”

This one graph disproves practically everything American conservatives say about the alleged unaffordability of entitlements. Note that the aging of the American population alone would only raise the share of GDP spent on Medicare and Medicaid slightly between now and 2082.  The projected increase is almost entirely the result of excess cost growth in America’s dysfunctional medical-industrial sector and has next to nothing to do with aging. Now look at Figure 4, “Projected Spending on Health Care as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product.”

Observe that the cancerous growth of healthcare costs occurs chiefly in private sector healthcare spending — not in Medicare and Medicaid.  In other words, the cost problem is one of the entire U.S. medical industry, private and public alike.  It is not a problem caused by “entitlements.”

Debating the solutions would take us too far from the subject, although it should be noted that most other countries control healthcare costs by means of “all-payer regulation” — that is, government-imposed price controls — not by means of market competition, the right’s unrealistic panacea, which no other nation uses, for the reason that simple market economics does not work in the healthcare sector.  For the purposes of this discussion, it is sufficient to reproduce a final chart from the CBO report, Figure 5, “Federal Spending for Medicare and Medicaid as a Percentage of Gross Domestic Product Under Different Assumptions About Excess Cost Growth.”

Note that if the excess cost growth problem is solved, then the nightmare scenario never materializes, either in the near future or the distant future.  Indeed, in the last few years, partly because of the loss of employer-based healthcare by the unemployed, and partly because of reforms in medical provision, healthcare cost growth in the U.S. has slowed.  If that trend continues, then conservatives will no longer be able to claim that healthcare in general (not just Medicare and Medicaid) will eat up half the economy in 2082.  The right will have to use other arguments to discredit Social Security and Medicare, like the hoary old claim that these programs are fascist or communist — an argument that has never persuaded the growing number of American voters who depend on Social Security and Medicare for their retirements and for protecting their physical health.

Philip Klein concludes his Op-Ed about how the welfare state is destroying America with further nonsense (you can’t claim he isn’t consistent).  Reciting yet another right-wing myth, Klein asserts that because of Social Security and Medicare, the bond markets in general and the Chinese government in particular will stop lending America money and interest rates will skyrocket, destroying the American economy, yadda yadda yadda:

Just this past August, Standard and Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt for the first time in American history. Once bond holders abandon America, the nation will either have to dramatically cut spending, raise taxes steeply, or print money to buy up the debt — which would trigger massive inflation.

Where has he been since last August?  Even a senior editorial writer at the Washington Examiner should be aware that the downgrading of America’s credit rating was followed by a rush of money into American bonds, not out of them, in defiance of the predictions of the deficit hawks. Evidently the bond markets think America is the world’s safe haven and are not terribly worried about long-term American entitlement costs.

The growing debt burden is also a national security risk, because it reduces America’s leverage against nations such as China, which owns a substantial amount of U.S. debt. And the fiscal crunch will force devastating cuts to our military — far beyond anything contemplated today.

Somebody should tell Klein that China’s export-oriented growth model depends on keeping its currency undervalued and accumulating dollars, which it then uses to buy dollar-denominated debt like U.S. Treasury bonds.  If China revalued its currency, it would stop buying bonds to the detriment of its industries and to the benefit of many American exporters.  If this were to happen, the U.S. deficit would shrink and we would need less external financing.  Hurrah! In the long run there doubtless will be increases in U.S. interest rates, but they are unlikely to come about for the reasons that Klein and other apocalyptics on the right predict.

As for the Pentagon, the chief threat to the future of the U.S. military is neither the American welfare state nor the Chinese financial authorities, but the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which prefers round after round of tax cuts for the rich to the taxes that would permit the U.S. to fund both an adequate military and an affordable welfare state.

Klein concludes inescapably:

Thus, the conclusion is inescapable that, if America doesn’t end the welfare state as we have known it since 1935, it will end America as we know it today.

It may seem cruel to pick on Philip Klein, who is, after all, simply one of many minor hacks in the right-wing media machine controlled by billionaires like Anshutz and the Koch brothers.  But it is worth reading the right’s propaganda now and then, just to find out how it is that so many of our conservative fellow citizens can have been so deceived.

Michael Lind’s 

The Republicans: They Are Who We Thought They Were By Bryian Revoner

After watching this latest Republican Debate on Fox News, one thing becomes clear, and that is the very real split between the insane and the reasonable. For whatever reason, there just does not seem to be any middle-ground in this GOP nomination grouping or the conservative trademark overall. This is why the conservative voters have had such a difficult time trying to find their perfect candidate, which in itself speaks volumes about the rationale of the GOP mindset.

One of the worst things about being crazy is being too crazy to realize that you’re crazy, and that is the conservative ideology in a political nutshell. For the GOP voters to ask a candidate to be just crazy enough to satisfy their conservative dreams of going rogue through manifest destiny with 2nd Amendment remedies attached to conservatively friendly, Americanized Christianity, while at the same time being reasonable enough, moderate enough, and politically appealing enough to draw the interests of Independents, Reagan-Democrats, and dissatisfied President Obama supporters,  is definitely beyond the limits of absurdity.

When you peel back all of the rhetoric and all of the political ballyhooing, you are left with one of two choices as a Republican/conservative. One choice is based on what candidates like Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich like to refer to as a consistent conservative, and the other choice is based on the only conservative alternative, which is what pundits like Glenn Beck like to call the progressive Republicans.

But when it’s time to cut some program not called defense, they all turn into small government Jekyll, but whenever they decide to invade, destroy, occupy, and then rebuild another country like Iraq, most of them will then turn into big-government Hyde; leaving behind political dysfunction for the dreamy, conservative voters seeking the perfect candidate in the middle. And unlike Glenn Beck’s analogy, to real progressives it seems like the only difference between consistent conservatives and progressive conservatives is the issue and which side of the political aisle that issue benefits.

For example, candidates like Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum will all harp heavily on the ‘less-government-in-our-lives’ train to help big businesses and sleazy fat cats inch as close as they possibly can to a zero percent tax rate by stripping away regulations, only to revert back to the good, old standby of ‘big-government’ when it’s time to go to war with Iran to destroy what they think could be there or to try to retrieve what they know is there in our lame-duck, downed drone. Now ask yourself if any of this sounds like the party that’s honestly determined to cut spending.

As former Arizona Cardinals football coach Dennis Green said to the media about the Chicago Bears after they defeated him on Monday Night Football, “They are who we thought they were,” and no sentiment rings more truly when applied to the feelings that all voters should have about the Republican Party, because they are who most of us thought they were, and the debates have done nothing to alter that perception. If anything, the debates have only reinforced it.

If you still don’t have a clearer picture of the dangerously insane vs. the reasonable, consider this. Gingrich and Bachmann actually had the nerve to look a nationally televised audience in the eye and assertively suggest that wiping out certain judiciaries and judicial decisions, especially those that are prone to be more left-leaning judiciaries and judicial decisions, like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should be the job of big-government Hyde.

In simple terms, less-government Gingrich, with support from less-government Bachmann, stated his unwavering desire to wield the right to strike down any piece of judicial legislation that he didn’t agree with while in the Oval Office. He even talked about dragging non-conservative, activist judges in front of Congress to be lectured on the grounds of ineptitude. Now isn’t that a Timothy McVeigh calling a Osama bin Laden a terrorist!

So based on this overall point of view, if the court system–including the Supreme Court–didn’t declare something like Obamacare unconstitutional, a Republican led Congress would reserve the right to overrule that decision, even though within the next 2 to 4 years a Democratic led Congress could come into power and restore those courts and their decisions right back into political prominence. Now ask yourself if any of this sounds like the party that is looking to get big government out your life.

To the sane, responsible conservative, if they still exist, the only viable candidates based on a reasonable grasp of reality, whether that’s based on governing or trying to win the general election, are Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul. Now that isn’t saying very much, but you have to recognize who the rest of the field consists of. Compared to Santorum, Gingrich, and Bachmann, even the recently departed Herman Cain seems more reasonable.

For example, Jon Huntsman contributed one of the smartest lines of the night when he again promised not to sign any goofball, “He-Man Woman-haters Club,” wedge pledges. Romney talked about his ability to seek out and conjoin with Democrats in a bipartisanship effort to get things done, and Paul accused the conservative, war-machine of propping up the Iranian, nuclear weapons of mass destruction act, which is a recycled, left-over re-run from the Bush 43 era, to try to drum up Middle Eastern, Islamic fears to help persuade the U.S. to go into Iran to pursue ‘Operation Iraqi Occupation’ the Iranian sequel!

Despite the limited understandings of the gung-ho, conservative voters, there is a huge difference between being a consistent conservative and being a formidable, general election candidate. And until they are willing to remove their party blinders, they won’t ever be able to embrace the candidate who has the best chance to give President Obama a run for his electoral money.

And as bad as conservatives claim that they want Obama gone in 2012, what will it say about them if they purposely decide not to choose the candidate that gives them the best chance to do so? Does that say more about their alleged concerns over Obama’s policies, or does it say more about their crazed, disingenuous, agenda-driven lust for power? To the reasonable deductions of basic, GOP, politics; the agenda-driven lust for power is much more feasible than any fairytale concern over socialized medicine! When it comes to the GOP, they are who we thought they were.

RYAN J. REILLY JANUARY 27, 2012, 6:10 AM 3175 28

Less than a week after 36-year-old Kevin Harpham was arrested for allegedly attempting a racially motivated bombing of a 2011 Martin Luther King Jr. parade in Spokane, white supremacist leader Glenn Miller sent him a letter offering to help start a legal fund on his behalf.

“Keep your chin up and stay strong,” Miller wrote in a letter dated March 14, telling Harpham that he and other members of an online white supremacist forum believed he’d “been set up.”

Ten months later — despite the array of evidence against Harpham and the fact that he pled guilty last month — Miller remains convinced of his innocence. In a half-hour conversation with TPM — interrupted only by Miller’s questions for this reporter (“What do you think of Ron Paul’s treatment by the media?” and “Are you a Jew, by the way?”) — Miller explained his relationship with Harpham and why he thought he was too smart to commit the hate crime he’s accused of.

“I don’t believe he was guilty of that, but I believe he was convinced by his attorneys and prosecutors and common sense that he would be convicted no matter what,” Miller, 71, told TPM in a phone interview from his home. “It just happens so frequently to people who are involved in the white rights movement.”

Federal prosecutors used Miller’s jailhouse letter and Harpham’s response — in which he said he might have Miller screen individuals as he looked for “someone to house sit for a while” — as one of the factors that “supports the imposition of a sentence that will maximize the time the Defendant is incarcerated and subject to judicial oversight.”

Evidently Harpham’s lawyers soon informed him it probably wasn’t a good idea to be sending letters to a well-known white supremacist while in jail accused of a hate crime, as he didn’t respond to any of Miller’s follow up letters.

“He’s kind of let me know he doesn’t want anything to do with me,” Miller said. “It’s not in his self interest to associate with me, and I can understand that, can’t you?”

Miller is speaking from experience here. Back in the 80’s he went on the run after violating a court order (which stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center) to stop operating a paramilitary organization. He served three years in jail and testified against 14 other leading white supremacists in a 1988 sedition trial. Miller has since written a book and been active in the white power movement online. He said he wrote about three letters to Harpham suggesting various forms of help, including serving as a character witness.

“In one letter I suggested that I could maybe be a witness for him and testify that, you know, I’d been conversing with him on the Internet for years, he contributed to my newspaper project — proving that he wanted to work within the system, legal action, legal activity,” Miller said.

“He sent me hundreds of dollars to help out with that, which in my mind proves he wanted to be legal. And he was an intelligent guy, he’s not no dummy. He was an intelligent man. Brilliant, you might even say. I had a very strong opinion of his intellect, and most other people did on our VNN forum,” Miller said, referring to the Vanguard News Network white supremacist forum.

Miller also said he doesn’t believe Harpham would have targeted African-Americans.

“He was more of an anti-Semite than an anti-black racist,” Miller said. “He focused on what the Jews were doing to us, rather than what blacks do to us. Blacks, they have little power except what the Jews allow them to have. Jews call the shots. But white people, we have no power at all. We have nobody representing us, we have no leaders, we have no organization, we have no unity, no solidarity, we’re not even allowed to complain about our extinction.”

Harpham was ultimately sentenced to 32 years in jail on Dec. 20. But since then his defense team has been trying to withdraw his guilty plea because a new expert says the device didn’t fit the technical definition of a weapon of mass destruction.

Federal judge Justin L. Quackenbus this week shot down the motion, which was filed because a “new ‘expert’, Frederic Whitehurst argued that the backpack device “is not a bomb, grenade or missile but a ‘firearm’.” Whitehurst did not respond to TPM’s request for comment through the National Whistleblowers Center, which lists him as a speaker.

Friends and family of Harpham, who was tracked down because Wal-Mart turned over data on the sales of fishing weights that were used in the attack, had told a judge that the hateful man described in evidence doesn’t match up with the Kevin Harpham they knew. Much of the information — including the photos in this post of Harpham at parade and various white supremacist literature found in his home — was included in filings recently made public in the case, which had been mostly conducted under seal.

His aunt described him as a “well-behaved and well mannered” boy who enjoyed snowboarding and paragliding. His mom said he loved animals from “the time he was old enough to know what animals were.” The mother of his high school friend said Harpham had an “adversity to conflict.”

His brother Carmen said Harpham was “not one to brag on himself” but that he helped out his dad and elderly neighbor with various errands. He couldn’t understand what went wrong.

“There are many things that I have heard over the past nine months regarding my brother’s actions that I cannot explain,” Carmen Harpham wrote in a letter to a federal judge ahead of his sentencing. “While I know we do not share a common philosophy about race, I am puzzled at what brought my brother to this point in his life.”

Prosecutors disagreed. “His views are known to his family members as well other professed racist organizers,” they wrote in a court filing before he was sentenced. They argued that the court had the “unique opportunity to send a message to other white supremacists who may be contemplating acting out on their intolerant, racist views.”

Describing Harpham’s history and characteristics as “vexing,” they said it was important for the public “to know that the Federal courts will not condone conduct like that of the Defendant,” especially in the Spokane area which “has in recent years been a hot bed for white supremacists.”

Miller said that entrapment, as he believes may have happened in the Harpham case, “dominates the minds” of the white power movement.

“Everybody’s terrified to even join anything of an activist nature, they all want to be net warriors, anonymous pussies who run their mouths on the Internet but wouldn’t say who they are, where they are, contact information or nothing,” Miller said. “They just sit and squat and type anonymously what they claim they believe. They wouldn’t even put their real name beside what they say they believe, even in cyberspace.”

So would Miller support Harpham’s actions?

“I certainly wouldn’t advocate it publicly. I wouldn’t even advocate that any other way, that’s a stupid thing to do, a Marin Luther King parade, what the hell good is that gonna do?” Miller said. “And that’s why it didn’t happen, he’s innocent. He’s not that stupid, he’s an intelligent man.”

Deconstructing a Demagogue By TIMOTHY EGAN

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.

The idea hit Eric Bress and Allie Menna as soon as they saw the path for Joe Paterno’s processional: What if Paterno’s fans linked arms along the path, from, say, the library to Paterno’s statue outside the football stadium, as his body was driven through on the way to the cemetery? So they started a campaign on Facebook entitled “Guide Joe Paterno home.’’

The idea caught fire. In the end, people lined both sides of the street, arm in arm, and it extended all the way downtown.

“He’s done so much for this school,” Bress said Thursday at the Hub, the student union, where another Paterno ceremony was shown on large TVs. “Everyone just wanted to catch a glimpse.”

Yes. But how do you resolve all he had done in his career with the way it all ended for Paterno, in disgrace?

“It’s mixed emotions,” Bress said. “In the end, it was the right move to fire him. You can’t just hide from something like that.”

There is just such contradiction, confusion and conflict surrounding Paterno. Even the guy who arranged a touching tribute thinks they had to fire him.

And how about the school’s contradiction? Penn State officials fired Paterno for not living up to his moral responsibilities, not using his power to make sure that Jerry Sandusky stopped his alleged rapes and sexual assaults on kids. They even banned Paterno’s wife, Sue, from going on her early-morning swims in a school pool. Then, Penn State arranged for a week of celebrations for Paterno after he died of lung cancer.

The processional and private funeral were on Wednesday. On Thursday, at least 10,000 people filled the Bryce Jordan Center to hear testimonials from former players, dignitaries, family members. Mostly, it was about Paterno’s integrity as a coach and man. Some people, though, were there for a fight.

“It turns out he gave full disclosure to his superiors (when he was told about Sandusky), information that went up the chain to the head of the campus police and the president … with an outstanding national reputation,” said Phil Knight, chairman of Nike, who said that Paterno was his hero.

“Whatever the details of the investigation are, this much is clear to me: If there is a villain in this tragedy, it lies in that investigation, not in Joe Paterno’s response to it.”

The crowd at the stadium stood, screamed and applauded. Same with the hundreds at the Hub.

These days, everything is a fight, a debate. Everything is polarized: right or wrong, left or right, good or bad. It’s easier that way, and doesn’t take thought. You fall into a track and just ride it to your beliefs.

I was not at this service for the fight, but to actually look for some truth. The thing is, Paterno spent 60 years known as the example of virtue. But the story had such a shocking, and then abrupt ending. And the truth is, as a father of two children roughly the age of Sandusky’s accusers, it is not easy to just celebrate Paterno’s decades of greatness.

You cannot deny the high graduation rates, the loyalty Paterno showed to his family and to his school. He created an image for Happy Valley, of all sunshine and blue skies and picket fences. And it’s something that people believed in and tried to live by.

It was raining all day in Happy Valley on Thursday. I didn’t know it rained here.

People are complex. We’re all mixed bags. But somehow, we’re also dying to create a hero, dying to find someone to build a statue for.

You wonder how much of what Paterno actually built was even real. Maybe all of it was, who knows? We can’t get answers from him.

In the morning Thursday, I met Jack Harris, a retired Air Force colonel from Colorado, in the hotel lobby over breakfast. He graduated from Penn State in 1969, and talked about meeting with Paterno. It was 1966, Harris’ sophomore year, and he was homesick and a little lost at Penn State. His mother, worried he would drop out of school, had called an adviser to keep an eye on him.

Then one day, he was walking to the football game and, “All of a sudden, I hear this high, squeaky voice,” Harris said, “‘Hey, where you going?’”

Harris said he and Paterno walked together for half an hour, by happenstance. And Harris talked about missing home, getting a pep talk from Paterno. Harris credited that moment, in part, for turning him around, showing him that someone cared about him.

Even if it was a football coach he would never talk to again.

Eventually, Harris went on to his career in the Air Force, he said, and always made a point to talk with young soldiers to help.

Harris was in Alabama for a meeting on Tuesday, when he called his wife and said he wanted to go to State College. She said to go because she knew what Paterno meant to him.

He started crying as he told that story. He didn’t have a ticket for Thursday’s ceremony, and didn’t know where would be a good place to watch on TV. He just had to be there.

That’s real.

But how do you resolve that with how it ended? Harris acknowledged that Paterno had let people down, and probably let himself down, too. But this wasn’t the time to talk about that, or think about it.

Maybe not. But in some ways, it seems that people in, or from, Happy Valley live in a bubble, and don’t see what Paterno really did (or didn’t do). You can’t just ignore how it ended. And you can’t fix it.

All day, I kept wondering what the alleged victims were thinking, to see a weeklong celebration of Paterno’s life. The victims and their parents. It is hard enough for victims of sexual abuse to speak out.

I also kept thinking about my kids.

Well, during the ceremony Thursday, a player spoke from each decade Paterno coached. Michael Robinson, the Seattle Seahawks fullback, was at a practice for the Pro Bowl on Wednesday in Hawaii, and then left so he could speak about Paterno on Thursday.

“I actually told the league, ‘Don’t make me choose,’ ” he said. “‘I’ll be (in State College).’”

Robinson said he was a boy when he arrived at Penn State, upset that Paterno would put him at positions other than quarterback. He talked about getting into trouble once. And he said that Paterno guided him through, made him a man.

“He’s in all of us,” Robinson said. “Thank you.”

There was a lot of talk about Paterno’s legacy. What is it? A few speakers said it is in his former players, and in what they’re doing now.

Paterno never had a chance to redeem himself, or even to explain. He tried, speaking with Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post in the final days before he died. He said something about not understanding about rape and men. It’s hard to believe he was that ignorant, honestly.

He said that he had gone to his superiors with the allegations. But that wasn’t enough. Paterno was the person of power in this town, at this university. He could have been forceful about stopping Sandusky.

Why didn’t he do more? He said he didn’t really know.

The truth is, he was a dying, 85-year-old man trying to defend himself in that interview. It’s hard to say if he was even of sound mind. Was he trying to protect the image of his football team? Was he just misguided? Paterno had spent his life helping kids.

There is no explanation. His legacy is complex. But it’s honest now.

Great and bad, it’s real.

by Greg Couch