They Hanged Julius Streicher Didn't They?

Editor's Note - I would like to take an opportunity to recommend a piece from a friend of mine, William Cormier who has written today on the complicity of the mouthpieces in the fascist propaganda machine in the crimes that they so eagerly encourage. Such an essay is especially important to bring awareness to with the $40 million a year ‘populist’ spokesman for the anti-American virulent Republican party form of dead-ender fascism that is the last bastion of scoundrels trying to save their think tank paymasters, the malefactors of great wealth who have subsidized their careers and purchased the media from which they belch their hate and bile. Now with the paymasters of the extremist right in The Homeland doing their damn level best to incite violence, revolution and a crusade against the hated libruls, brown-skinned devils, commies, gays and every other scapegoat that could be invoked at the snakepit of sin and stupidity that was this week’s CPAC bund conference it is imperative that we ask the forbidden question.

How complicit are the establishment hatemongers in the crimes that they have done so much to endorse and in many cases encourage? In my personal opinion, and I have brought this up recently in my own writings – the propagandists and the whores in the media should no longer be able to cower behind the defense of free-speech as a shield as they and the oligarchy that employs their sordid services use the First Amendment as a shield from behind which they can use their money as ‘free speech’ while seeking to destroy the rights of everybody else.

So without further adieu, I present the following with the request that it be taken into account just how complicit that the purveyors of hatred are in the crimes of those that they encourage to commit.

Denial is no excuse, not any longer, not when the stakes are this high. The smell from those smokestacks downwind from Auschwitz wasn’t from freshly baked apple pie.

Nuremberg Trials Provide Legal Precedent For Prosecuting Purveyors Of Hate

By William Cormier

During the Nuremberg Trials after World War II when Julius Streicher was convicted and subsequently hung for “Jew Baiting” we were provided with the legal precedent for prosecuting those that incite others to violence. I have been contemplating this essay for quite some time, but today I read a revealing article on Op-Ed News that provides direct proof that purveyors of hate can and are directly responsible for the deaths of innocent Americans! Those who agitate and constantly spew their hate and prejudice in print and on America’s airwaves constantly hide behind “Freedom of Speech.” However, it is already an established rule of law that if you yell “fire” in a crowded theater, Free Speech can and will not protect those who abuse this right which results in the harm of innocent civilians. Below is an excerpt from Wikipedia which details the trial of Julius Streicher, and please remember the circumstances of his conviction as you read the remainder of this essay:

Trial and execution

Julius Streicher was not a member of the military and did not take part in planning the Holocaust, or the invasion of other nations. Yet his pivotal role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the prosecutors’ judgment, to include him in the indictment of Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal – which sat, ironically, in Nuremberg, where Streicher had once been an unchallenged authority.

During the trial, Gustave Gilbert, an American Army psychologist, was allowed to examine the Nazi leaders who were tried at Nuremberg for war crimes. Among other tests, a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue IQ test was administered. Julius Streicher scored 106, the lowest among the Nazi leaders tested.

During his trial, Streicher displayed for the last time the flair for courtroom theatrics that had made him famous in the 1920s. He answered questions from his own defense attorney with diatribes against Jews, the Allies, and the court itself, and was frequently silenced by the court officers. Streicher was largely shunned by all of the other Nuremberg defendants, who thought him a vulgar, despicable man (Göering’s hostility toward him was well-established). He also peppered his testimony with references to passages of Jewish texts he had so often carefully selected and inserted (invariably out of context) into the pages of Der Stürmer.

Streicher was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946.[13] The judgment against him read, in part:

“…For his 25 years of speaking, writing, and preaching hatred of the Jews, Streicher was widely known as ‘Jew-Baiter Number One.’ In his speeches and articles, week after week, month after month, he infected the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism, and incited the German people to active persecution… Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes, as defined by the Charter, and constitutes a crime against humanity.”

Streicher was hanged in the early hours of October 16, 1946, along with the nine other condemned defendants from the first Nuremberg trial (Göering, Streicher’s nemesis, committed suicide only hours earlier). Streicher’s was the most melodramatic of the hangings carried out that night. At the bottom of the scaffold he cried out “Heil Hitler!” When he mounted the platform, he delivered his last sneering reference to Jewish scripture, snapping “Purim-Fest 1946!” The Jewish holiday Purim celebrates the escape by the Jews from extermination at the hands of Haman, an ancient Persian government official. At the end of the Purim story, Haman is hanged.[14] [15] Streicher’s final declaration before the hood went over his head was, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day!” MORE

Below is an excerpt from an excellent article authored by Rady Ananda. Please note the similarities, and in this instance, we can directly correlate the murder of innocent Americans based on the publication authored by Bernie Goldberg:

O’Reilly’s Hate Factor: ‘Venom Boys’ Blamed for Shooting Spree

The right wing hate machine fails to recognize its own hypocrisy. Even worse, its hate speech has been directly linked to a mass shooting.

Bernie Goldberg’s list of fans includes Jim David Adkisson, the nutjob who last year shot up a liberal church during a children’s musical. The killing was “symbolic” because he really wants to kill everyone mentioned in Goldberg’s Screwing up America book. I can’t imagine writing something that would inspire murder, but the right wing hatemongers do it all the time. Knoxville News Sentinel published the full manifesto, excerpted below:

“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals…. This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book.”

Sara Robinson provided this analysis, noting that “police searched Adkisson’s apartment and found it filled with books and newsletters penned by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and other right-wing hate talkers.”

She goes on to say: “Nicely done, Messrs. Hannity, Goldberg, Limbaugh, Savage and O’Reilly — and all your lesser brethren who keep the hate speech spewing 24/7/365 across every field and into every shop in the country. There is no more debate to be had, no more doubt about it: What you did in the name of ‘entertainment,’ and for the sake of the almighty ratings, raised and animated a monster like Jim Adkisson, gave him a list of targets … and was directly responsible for the deaths of two brave and decent people. Adkisson was clearly angry and crazy — but his ‘manifesto’ draws the clearest, brightest line possible between the media he consumed and his actions that terrible Sunday morning.” MUCH MORE

Furthermore, we must not forget the case of Matthew Shepard and other gays that have been beaten and murdered, often incited by America’s chief “hate purveyors, and sadly, that includes some of our most radical Evangelicals:”

10 Years After His Death, Matthew Shepard’s Mother Fights On

Ten years ago this month, University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was severely beaten, tied to a fence and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming. He died only a few days later from his injuries on October 12, 1998. His attackers, Russell Arthur Henderson and Aaron James McKinney are now serving consecutive life sentences. But although Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, says justice was served against her son’s killers, she still continues to fight on to protect the gay sons and daughters of other parents across the nation.

Matthew Shepard, son of Judy Shepard and Dennis Shepard, was a political science major at the University of Wyoming in October of 1998. On the night of October 6, Shepard accepted a ride from Russell Arthur Henderson and Aardon James McKinney, whom he had met in a local bar. McKinney and Henderson drove Shepard to a remote area, where he was beaten, tortured, robbed and finally tied to a fence and left to die. A passing cyclist discovered Shepard still tied to the fence 18 hours later. On October 12, Shepard was pronounced dead, never having awakened from a coma.

During the trial against McKinney and Henderson, both defendants attempted to claim a “gay panic” defense, claiming they had acted under “temporary insanity” in killing Shepard. They alleged that Shepard had made sexual advances toward them and they had reacted by killing him. However, their stories were inconsistent and the men’s girlfriends testified under oath that Henderson and McKinney had previously plotted to rob a ‘gay man.’ The prosecutor in the case claimed that McKinney and Henderson had pretended to be gay in order to lure Shepard into their car to be robbed. MORE

How many gays have been murdered or severely beaten because of the constant hate being espoused by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and rabid right-wing Evangelicals? We have laws against “hate crimes” and I am asserting that those who constantly “gay-bait” their respective audiences are complicit in the subsequent crimes that occur directly because of their public venting of their hatred and loathing of the Gay Community. I wrote an Op-Ed which was extremely popular titled: “Evidence Supports Reverend Wright’s Claim That AIDS Was Created By The Government.” I wrote this article for informational purposes, and then received comments that Justanothercoverup was a “Gay Site” and that I was also gay. I’m heterosexual, but to be honest, I really don’t care what people think - and if I were gay, I’d say so.

One thing is certain; I’m an American and believe in equal protection under the law, and that includes everyone, Black, Brown, Gay, Lesbian, you name it! People have a right to choose their own lifestyles, and regardless of whatever the purveyors of hate may say - if you support the rule of Law and our Constitution, then all people, no matter what their lifestyle is, as long as it’s legal, have the right to worship as they choose, and someone’s sex life is no one's business except for that individual. In the same breath, we don’t have to approve of another individual's lifestyle; however, when that disapproval becomes public and incites violence against any segment of our population, I believe that it’s an actionable crime against humanity.

One of the most shocking instances of fear-mongering and inciting people to violence was a segment on Fox News by Glenn Beck. Read it yourself and you be the judge; do we need this type of propaganda that incites people to violence? We do not need a civil war or a “revolution” to bring forth change - and in my opinion, Fox News is advocating revolution in America which will supply the Neo-conservatives with the violent actions they seem to advocate that will usher in martial law in the United States:

FOX News Suggests America is Doomed, Civil War May Be Justified

by News Hound Ellen Brodsky

Those “we like America” folks at FOX News sure have a funny way of showing their esteem sometimes. Take, for example, Glenn Beck’s February 20, 2009 show in which he did his darnedest to scare viewers into thinking that the country is on the road to Apocalypse. In a paranoid fantasy spun out over several segments, Beck and a series of guests set forth a number of dire “worst-case scenarios” for the United States in 2014. During each segment, Beck gave viewers the disclaimer that the apocalyptic visions he and his guests presented were not predictions of what would happen but merely what could happen. And yet Beck and his guests spoke as though the doomsday scenarios, including civil war, were a likelihood, if not a fait accompli.

In “Worst-Case Scenario” No. 1, Beck and his experts imagined the impact of a complete financial meltdown. In this scenario, as Beck described it, all the banks were nationalized, the Dow was at 2800, unemployment at 12%, the commericial real estate market collapsed, the USA’s credit rating was downgraded and government and unions control most businesses.

Again, the guests bumped up “maybe” to “likely.” Former CIA officer Bob Baer described the “probability” scenarios as “prolonged depression,” and warned of trouble with Iran. According to Baer, the Gulf countries would suffer and Iran therefore would “move into the Gulf and take it. We have a hostile regime in control of our resources. That is not that far away (my emphasis).” A MUST READ ARTICLE!

Fox News is the propaganda arm of the GOP, and now that we know Republicans that have crossed the line to vote in favor of President Obama’s stimulus package are being punished by their own party, it is obvious that the Republicans in Congress are attempting to sabotage the Obama administration and are acting like a gang of criminals rather than responsible members of Congress. It is vital for the American public to remember that it was the Republican Congress that allowed the Bush administration to rob America blind - and now that their “Criminal in Chief” is out of office, they are stating that the stimulus was irresponsible; at best they are hypocrites - at worst, they are co-conspirators in helping to destroy the economy of the United States and allowed their corporate banking cronies to indulge themselves in the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the United States:

GOP punishing members who cross party lines

by Rachel Oswald

Determined to enforce the party line, the GOP has taken new steps to punish those members who have crossed the aisle in recent weeks to vote in support of the federal stimulus package and to send the message to any party moderates - turncoats will not be tolerated.

In a Monday interview with Fox News’ Neil Cavuto, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele said he was open to primary challenges to the three Republican senators who voted in favor of the federal stimulus package –Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania and the two senators from Maine, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Spector is up for re-election in 2010.

“My retribution is the retribution of the voters in their state. They’re going to have to go through a primary in their state,” Steele said, adding that the RNC would follow the lead of the state parties in choosing which Republicans to back with campaign money. “When the state party says we’re going to endorse a candidate, the RNC is behind them. When the state party says we have a problem with them, so does the RNC.” MUCH MORE

There is a difference between free speech and inciting people to violence. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Riley are prime examples of those who constantly agitate and promote hate in print and on our national airwaves. There are also several rabid “Evangelicals” who also promote hate and actually promote war in the Middle-East to bring forth the second coming of Christ so they can be “raptured” while the rest of us are “Left Behind.” Their religious beliefs are OK with me; however, some of these Evangelicals promote the violent takeover of the United States if they cannot achieve it through politics - and in my book, that’s treason! LINK LINK LINK LINK LINK

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican, Democrat, or an Independent; if you promote violence and hate and attempt to incite violence in these United States, in my opinion, you’re committing an actionable crime, and hiding under “Free Speech” should not be allowed! I vividly remember several statements made by Ann Coulter, and the article below lays-out another legal strategy and cites laws that are already on our books to prosecute those who promote violence; I am only posting a brief part of the article, however, it is excellent, and demonstrates why we need to stop the hate purveyors in our country before they can incite more violence and as Fox News seems to advocate, a civil war:

The True THREAT Of Ann Coulter And Her Ilk

by thepen

Judging intent in a criminal case often turns on a pattern of behavior. And here the record is not friendly to Ms. Coulter’s stance. She has a HISTORY of such statements, having previously cracked these other “jokes”, targeted at those she disagrees with politically:

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee.”

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

“We need to execute people like (John Walker Lindh) in order to physically intimidate liberals.”

The last quote is especially significant in the climate of fear which has deliberately been inflamed by the Cheney administration and the vast right wing echo chamber that the corporate media has become. We are constantly bullied with name-calling of the most offensive sort, for the sin of having a differing political opinions. And people like Coulter well know that their physical threats are a form of intimidation. ANOTHER MUST READ ARTICLE

I don’t want to sound like a broken-record. However, I cannot emphasize enough that violence is counter-productive to America in general, and falling into that trap is a guarantee of the Obama administration being forced to declare Martial Law. That act alone will guarantee that Americans will never again enjoy their personal freedom or liberties as guaranteed by our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

-William Cormier

http://justanothercoverup.com/

I am nothing more than a patriotic American that is doing whatever I can to further the cause of democracy, the rule of law, and am absolutely outraged on how the Bush administration is defying our Congress, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights! (more...)

Stick A Fork In Reagan's Ass

The Bastard's Dead

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

-Grand Prophet Ronald Reagan (mystically foreseeing TARP)

With the passage of the massive economic stimulus plan set to be signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday in Denver the dying squeals of Republican piggies grown fat on the failed policies of Ronald Wilson Reagan are becoming more shrill, psychotic and deafening. The stimulus plan, even as diluted as it is by the inclusion of all of those great tax cuts that have resulted only in proving that trickle down economics is nothing more than Gulliver pissing on the heads of the Lilliputians (translation: the working class) and doing so with sadistic mirth. What the stimulus package represents more than anything even including the ridiculous fucking tax cuts is that the end of an era is nigh and that the machinery of government is being slowly redirected to a previous form where it was not weaponized by overly wealthy pigs, Wall Street looter capitalists and avaricious corporations who only stand for, to borrow form the words of the late Hunter S. Thompson:

... the systematic destruction of everything this country claims to stand for except the rights of the rich to put saddles on the backs of the poor and use public funds to build jails for anybody who complained about it.”

It is the entire American fascist system that has been so painstakingly and expensively constructed over the last half-century this is now at stake, the bullshit war on the American middle class that was cloaked in anti-communism, sanctified by Senator McCarthy’s witch hunts, cemented into place by the resentment politics of Richard M. Nixon and writ into religion by the cult or Reagan is in serious jeopardy. The withering attacks of the minority Republicans along with their ugly public tantrums promoted by a plethora of pocket media kingmakers and a propaganda machine still owned by the ruling classes are nothing more than a siege on the Alamo battle to preserve the false legacy of their false prophet Saint Ronnie of Pleasantville, USA.

I: The Cult of Reagan Idolatry

He was always a fraud! There wasn’t a legitimate bone in the man’s body, he was a failed movie star who hit the political jackpot when he slithered into the Republican party and onto the ultimate stage of national politics. From the beginning Ronald Reagan was a phony, a bad B movie actor who found his place as a pitchman for the conservative movement. Reagan was a rat bastard and a fink who sold out his Hollywood peers to the anti Communist rage of the McCarthy witch hunts of the fifties and used his tenure as leader of the Screen Actors Guild as a springboard to launch his political career.

His presidency was the result of an America struggling against itself to come to terms with societal contradictions brought on as a result of the civil rights movement, the counterculture of the sixties, Vietnam and Watergate and none other than William F. Buckley himself put it best when he used the following description in a column regarding Saint Ronnie: .. “a bumpkin with oratorical gifts pandering to American self-esteem”. Reagan was a man who put forth a strong daddy image and was able to reduce complex issues to their simplest terms, the better for a populace slowly undergoing the chronic dumbing down perpetuated by the cable and satellite television explosion of the 1980s.

Nearly every one of the serious problems that America faces today and that newly crowned President Barack Obama faces had its roots during the Reagan era. The rich got richer and the rest, well let them go eat some fucking government surplus cheese, especially the goddamned welfare queens. The Reagan administration was a breeding ground for the delusional, non-reality based crony capitalists and Ayn Rand worshipping ‘free-market’ fanatics whose worship at the altar of laissez-faire economics still has them out prospecting for fool’s gold in Galt’s Gulch. It was Reagan appointee Alan Greenspan who actually hung out with Rand along with a gaggle of ghouls and assorted other weirdos in a group known as The Collective during the period that the holy tome Atlas Shrugged was being written. The canonization of Rand and the greedy and callous selfishness called objectivism and the absorption of the absurd crock of horseshit came to become dogma in America where monopoly and the destruction of economies are the end result of this sort of sociopathic behavior. When boiling all of this misbegotten and ultimately ruinous junk science down to its very essence it is an unwritten rule that for every fucker there are tenfold of fuckees, that is what capitalism is when it becomes cancerous and co-opted by the rentier class and the sleazy operators who rapaciously wring every last penny of profitability out even if it means offshoring millions of jobs and creating a permanent underclass who are born into this world without any shot at the mythical American Dream.

Now as the entire big con game becomes more apparent, we can all thank Ronald Reagan and the slavish devotees to the grand myth for the era of sloth, stupidity and scumbags that produced a generation of toxic shit that has set America back a century and set the nation on a course towards insolvency. The ugly lie of Reaganism must be exposed, stripped naked and laid out on an autopsy table, a bit of skillful use of a scalpel utilized to peel back the rotten flesh and expose the diseased organs. In less graphic terms, the legend itself needs to be debunked. The signs of desperation in the Republican ranks are encouraging as well as the books that are beginning to be written, books like Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth, the first of what I hope will be an attempt to strip away the revisionist history of the past three decades or so and allow for a national rejuvenation along to a return to true American values of economic fairness, equality and compassion that have been buried under a mountain of manure.

In order to roll back the creeping tide of fascism that has become so much a part of all that is American in early 2009 it is of utmost importance that Reaganism be recognized as the product of right-wing crackpots who in a mere quarter century have gutted this country in the name of voodoo economics and promoted an authoritarian dogma that served as a springboard for the rule of the Bush-Cheney-Rove Axis of Evil and the corruption of every relevant institution that has been staffed by fascism enabling cronies, zealots, crooks, grifters, con-artists, jack booted thugs and flim flam men. Such is the system as it exists today and as we now slowly begin to sift through the wreckage it is the mutated capitalist strain virus of Reaganism that infected the body, destroyed the immune system once known as checks and balances and then metastasized further into the global financial system which is now in freefall and widespread unrest threatens to bring down entire governments.

As with alcoholics and drug addicts, the recognition of a problem is the first step to recovery and the canonization of doddering Dutch as some sort of iconic national father figure needs to be exposed as the heretical think tank folderol that it always has been since its initial rollout as a product in the aftermath of one of the darkest and most tumultuous eras in our history. The Reagan administration went for the throat right out of the gates, organized labor was attacked with vigor with the firing of striking air traffic controllers and destruction of their union, the Sherman antitrust act became irrelevant and the fairness doctrine was eliminated to allow for the right-wing to use their limitless resources to propagandize the media. The return of the wealthy elite and robber barons to power and prominence was facilitated by the ability to distract and deceive. Karl Marx was only partially right when he stated that religion was the opiate of the masses, it is but that was prior to the advent of television and when the two are combined the potency is jacked up to the highest possible level. The power brokers knew this and with his Hollywood background Ronald Wilson Reagan was the perfect front man for the myriad of their ideological schemes that would wage war on progressive society and deal a staggering blow to economic fairness and equality in the land of plenty.

The 1980’s and the coming of Reagan’s cutthroat neoliberalism gave rise to the mantra of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” in a decade where corporate raiders became role models and unfettered Wall Street uber capitalism became the driving force of our social order. It was the great national regeneration decade and that fabulous and almighty leader was our champion, the iconic president who would make things right, who would deal harshly with those bastards in Iran unlike his milquetoast predecessor, who would restore the national glory and make us that shining city on the hill.

It was morning in America again.

A couple of ambitious young Republican gangsters Grover Norquist and Jack Abramoff who would contribute largely to the decimation of America long after the hallowed Ronnie had left the building. The story of these two scumbags who would along with a cast of thousands turn the entire government into a spoils system with a ruthless cadre of fixers to ensure compliance is told very well by author Thomas Frank (What’s the Matter With Kansas?) in his latest book called The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. I excerpt the following from Frank’s lengthy piece in a recent issue of Harpers Magazine similarly entitled The wrecking crew: How a gang of right-wing con men destroyed Washington and made a killing:

The story begins in 1980, the year of the “Reagan Revolution,” when there appeared on the national scene a phenomenon that bewildered political observers: legions of politicized, energetic college students who were conservatives rather than liberals or radicals, as had been typical in the two decades previous. And not only were their politics deeply square but the idol of this unlikely youth craze was the oldest president ever. Reagan’s entire Pennsylvania campaign, for example, was run by a lad of twenty. In 1984, the aged actor won 60 percent of the college-student vote. The historical turnabout was irresistible, and Reagan Youth became one of the great journalistic clichés of the period, powering hundreds of newspaper columns and at least one beloved TV sitcom.

These sons of Reagan had a strong sense of generational self-awareness, and they loudly told the world how they had come by it. In the midst of the interminable Iran hostage crisis, a crowd of them at one college campus were supposedly so moved by a showing of Patton that they demonstrated spontaneously in favor of a nuclear attack on that country, shaking the ivory tower with chants of “First strike now!” Another well-known story of the era was how a bunch of privileged kids at Dartmouth College, a traditional fortress of privilege, decided that embracing the traditional politics of privilege and mimicking the traditional manners of the privileged were actually acts of great daring, exposing them to persecution by tyrannical liberals. Then there was Jack Abramoff, a College Republican leader in the Boston area who gained, according to the John Birch Society’s Review of the News, a “reputation as one of the most innovative of the national Conservative youth leaders” after he mounted such a massive grassroots push for Reagan in 1980 that he almost single-handedly shifted Massachusetts into the Republican column.

Abramoff, a burly fellow from Beverly Hills, came to Washington in 1981 to assume the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee. Back in the Vietnam days it had been leftists who fought the power, he explained to reporters. But “now we’re the campus radicals.” His newly energized College Republicans (CRs) fanned out across the nation, instructing clean-cut kids on how to use the tactics of the Sixties left for their own causes. A snapshot of Abramoff using a bullhorn to rally a conservative throng was proudly reproduced in the CRs’ Annual Report for 1983, just across the page from a photo of Ralph Reed, who was then Abramoff’s right-hand man, pumping his fist at the head of a swarm of angry, sign-waving conservatives. In both instances the young men had gone into action wearing neckties.

It was Abramoff’s friend Grover Norquist, then a recent graduate of Harvard Business School, who came up with a plan for changing the very nature of the College Republicans. Norquist made a study of the CRs, developing a scheme to transform them from “a resume-padding social club,” as one account puts it, into “an ideological, grassroots organization.” Abramoff made Nor-quist the College Republicans’ executive director, and the two put Norquist’s theory into action. They purged the “old guard.” They amended the group’s constitution, establishing a structure that made the Washington office more powerful, and rewarded proselytizing on campus.

What the rising conservative sensibility of those years treasured above all else was “confrontation” with the left. It called for a quasi-military victory over liberalism; it would have no truck with civility or fair play; and it made heroes out of outrage-courting lib-fighters like Reagan’s communications director Pat Buchanan, the organizer Howard Phillips, and the young Jack Abramoff.

The first and most noticeable characteristic of this new militancy was an air of swaggering truculence. There are, of course, bullies from every walk of life and every political persuasion, but on the right bullying holds a special, exalted position. It is no accident that two of the movement’s greatest heroes—Tom DeLay and Oliver North—had the same nickname: “the Hammer.”

Jack Abramoff filled this bill perfectly. He had reportedly been something of a bully in high school and had now grown into a “hard-charging” and “dynamic” leader, in the assessment of conservative magazines, an ass-kicking weight lifter who could quiet the commies with his fists if they got out of line. The gangster fetish of his later years is by now familiar to the whole world—his constant references to The Godfather, his black trench coat and fedora, his Meyer Lansky memorabilia, the murderer argot that will no doubt serve him and his friends well during their prison years.

Abramoff himself derided the moderates he had ousted from control of the CRs as “wishy-washy country-clubbers” and insisted that he had transformed the organization into an “ideological, well-trained, aggressive, conservative” outfit. “Fighting the Left with a goal of victory” became the official, stated purpose of his College Republican cadres, according to an essay Abramoff wrote for the group’s 1983 Annual Report. The CRs were “fighting America’s last stand,” he blustered; they would “defund the enemy wherever possible,” one of his lieutenants added. According to the journalist Nina Easton, CR officers had their underlings memorize the gory opening monologue from the movie Patton, only with the word “Demo crat” standing in for the word “Nazi.” Other young rightists of the period went a step further. J. Michael Waller, the editor of the Sequent, a student paper at George Washington University, actually took breaks from red-baiting professors in order to zip down to Central America and hang out with the Nicaraguan Contras and the death-squad faction in El Salvador.

War was the order of the day, from President Reagan’s fight with the air-traffic controllers right down to the college campus, where Abramoff became famous for his declaration: “It is not our job to seek peaceful coexistence with the Left. Our job is to remove them from power permanently.” War plus revolution, actually. Abramoff liked to describe his CRs as “the sword and shield of the Reagan Revolution,” and in 1984 the young firebrand used his moment at the rostrum of the G.O.P. convention in Dallas to lecture the assembled small-business types on revolutionary theory.

That notorious chickenshits like Abramoff and Norquist sought to cloak their assault on America in militarist terms while not serving themselves is basically a requirement for entry into the fascist Republican party. Hell, what could be more Republican than using whatever means possible to weasel out of actual military service and then send others to die for your smug arrogance and the freedom to shit on all that is American. The list is long, too long of those sort of neocons, the adult versions of the nerd pack who used to huddle in the high school library conquering the world by Avalon Hill board games and the always popular Risk. Sure there are some who actually have served such as George W. Bush who flew a desk in a reserve unit until his coke habit got out of hand and the media creation that is John McCain whose recklessness as a Make Believe Maverick ironically resulted in his being shot down in Vietnam and winning a stay in the infamous Hanoi Hilton that he would use as the launch pad for his national political career – but the list of those who have actually had the guts to serve and serve honorably is short and bereft. Of course there is General David Petraeus but that ass kissing little chickenshit is a story for another time and ties into a much deeper and more disturbing fixation with the culture of the glorification of militarism here in the Homeland.

II: Adrift in the Land of the Angry White Male

It was always absurd, this idea of a savage campaign against “elites” being led by a poofy wordsmith like Rush Limbaugh, a Harvard fatty like Grover Norquist, a dickless academic like Newt Gingrich, and a diaper-dumping oligarch like George W. Bush. They were just another band of mischievous aristocrats who played at being the voice of the common man - these new wingers sold themselves as the champions of the fucked-over little guy, in this case the terminally frustrated boobus Americanus, who for decades had been made to sit idly by while ethnics stole his job, evil liberals mocked his religion and his simple way of life, and media “elitists” shut out his views and sent porn and married queers into his living room via the television set.

-Matt Taibbi

In their rise the brink of conquest the Republican party became masters at harnessing backlash politics or the politics of resentment as a basis for duping befuddled and angry Americans into voting against their own economic self-interests out of a need for revenge against minorities and the great liberal conspiarcy of the cultural elites. The dark master Richard Nixon was of course a criminal mastermind and practically wrote the book on the politics of divsion. Tricky Dick excelled in using red-baiting, race-baiting and whatever divisive tactic would allow him to rise to power. The best study of Nixonian tactics is in Rick Perlstein’s brilliant Nixonland where it is also noted that Ronald Reagan built his own political career on a similar strategy. It was during Reagan’s reign as Governor of California during the tumultuous period of societal unrest during the 1960s that Reagan became a right-wing hero. His denunciations of the hippies, "look like Tarzan, walk like Jane, and smell like Cheetah" and the hated University of Cal-Berkeley, "a hotbed of communism and homosexuality" made him into a rising star. When the now infamous Powell Memorandum laid the blueprint for the think tanks, the media takeover and the preservation of the status quo it was only a matter of time until the actor Reagan could be rolled out as the smooth talking frontman for the product of oligarchy and imperialism.

Of course the hippies would have to be demonized, turned into cartoon characters as would the effete snob liberals who would stand in the way of the new fascism and it's avuncular face, that of the great communicator, the strident anti-communist warrior king. The failure of the Vietnam war would be blamed on the liberals and the media and the seeds of white populist resentment would be sown as the farm crisis decimated the American heartland and a porcine loser named Rush Hudson Limbaugh III was plucked from obscurity and transformed into a modern day Father Coughlin. Evangelical Christian churches would be subverted by well financed, politically connected fanatics to wage the culture wars and to become the foot soldiers of the Reagan (and later Bush) Revolution. The hostility level had to be cranked up in order for the Republicans to succeed in remaking America in the image of the same jokers who once glorified the uber fascist Benito Mussolini by featuring him on the cover of Fortune Magazine while singing the praises of the efficiency of his business model. There was the ugly and some might say outright treasonous takedown of Bill Clinton over his sexual dalliances which provided rocket fuel for the extremist reactionary right's hate machine, and on the morning of September 11th 2001 that fuel became nuclear.

But I digress....

The conditions on the ground in early 2009, the beginning of the era of Barack Obama and the end of the lie of Reaganism are those of unmitigated fury as the right confronts the greatest threat to the supremacy of their cancerous capitalism since the days of the hated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The battlefield is overrun by the defenders of failed dogma and by the well paid servants who stand to lose their meal tickets. Already, in the early weeks of the Obama administration the Republicans have squealed like stuck pigs, outraged at the massive jacking up of the debt to somehow staunch the bleeding and to create jobs for the jobless. Of course they never gave a rat’s asshole when Lord Bush was robbing from their grandchildren to build the police state infrastructure, wage illegal wars of aggression where trillions of dollars were sucked down a black hole inhabited by the slime creatures that are blood barters and war profiteers.

One would figure that the Republican fascist party would have been somewhat humbled after their mangy asses were taken to the woodshed by voters back in November but that would be naïve. Hitler never stopped after his failed beer hall putsch and neither will the devil-spawn of McCarthy, Nixon Reagan and the Bush family. Despite a silly and childish attempt at crafting some sort of bi-partisanship by the Obama administration they were shanked in the back by a dirty pack of double-dealing, jack-booted, America hating vermin who damn near succeeded in derailing the stimulus. Not that it won’t fall anyway after the king of capitulation Harry Reid and his fellow Democrat assclowns in the Senate allowed the poison pill of hundreds of billion dollars in those wonderful tax cuts that have worked so well at destabilizing the country by destroying the middle class to be inserted into the goddamned thing. The most unsurprising kick in the balls to Obama came from media darling and reputed ‘maverick’ John McCain (you may remember him as Sarah Palin’s running-mate) who spat on the new president’s outstretched hand. Of course McCain is also the self-admitted former war criminal who dropped napalm on civilians and then when his plane was shot down in Nam went on to make propaganda pieces for those dirty communists. But yet in this land of the dumb it is Jane Fonda who is still vilified decades after that filthy illegal murderous war ended with America slinking off after igniting the entire region, killing millions and allowing a rogue faction of the intelligence sector to establish a massive drug trafficking network, some of the profits of which would fund Reagan’s bloody little soirees into Central America to prop up despots and their vile torturing regimes.

The Republican party has long been a haven for reactionary thugs, neo-Nazis, out and out fascists, perverts, pederasts, braggarts, loudmouths, authority worshippers and the same sort of immoral degenerates, the dregs of society that Hitler used to much success in populating the ranks of his Sturmabteilung (SA). It worked out so well that Der Führer had to ultimately undertake an intervention to prevent them from turning on him that is famously known as the Night of the Long Knives. In any sort of normally functioning political system a similar purge would have occurred in a failed reactionary party after having their clocks cleaned but America post-9/11 is anything but a normally functioning society. If nothing else the remnants of the disciples of the false god Reagan have dug in even deeper, real dead enders, like the Japanese who had to be literally burned out of their caves and tunnels even after defeat was a certainty. One gets an idea of just how demented that this particular party is when one member, Pete Sessions of Texas proudly compared his party to the Taliban when being interview about strategy during the Obama era. What the fuck is up with that? Didn’t the Taliban become the enemy after that oh so glorious and politically serendipitous day of 9/11/01? Isn’t America at war with the Taliban for allegedly aiding and abetting the great bogeyman Osama bin Laden? Did Sessions really just come out and say that he and his party are studying the methods of terrorists? Such a thing would have been cause for an extraordinary rendition under the Bush-Cheney junta, perhaps closing Gitmo is premature because we have an admitted fifth column waging war against America from within and being far more successful than al-CIAda could have ever hoped to be in even their wildest of wet dreams.

And there is also opportunity in undermining Obama and allowing the economy to continue to deteriorate so that he can be blamed in 2010. A rising star is a guy named Eric Cantor, a bespectacled little snake whose role model is none other than Newt Gingrich is a rising power in the neo-Confederate rump that is still beholden to the preservation of the Reagan temple of greed and has emerged as a particularly virulent critic of President Obama’s attempts to save capitalism from itself. Hanoi John along with his loyal sidekick Lindsey ‘five rugs for five bucks’ Graham, the South Carolina Senator least likely to surprise anyone were he found in the men’s room of a rest area off of I-95 with a cock in his mouth ala Larry Craig."If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country's screwed" lisped Graham in his Gomer Pyle singsong, a longtime trademark of the three headed monster of McCain-Lieberman-Graham (although the wandering Jew has been somewhat chastened after his fall betrayal didn't result in the loss of his Heimiat Security Committee chair). You have to love the way that the fascist Republican party is now crying like stuck pigs, wasn’t this the criminal syndicate that once boasted as a national leader a slimy little greaseball from Texas named Tom DeLay who once allegedly said on bi-partisanship “Fuck that, it’s time for all out war?”.

The losers of November’s election were out hitting the Sunday morning horseshit circuit in force decrying the lack of deference from Obama and the supine twits in Harry Reid’s Senate when it came to honoring the spirit of Reaganism, what’s next, they exhume the old bastard’s rotting corpse and haul it around like some ghoulish sequel to Weekend at Bernie’s? The house still sets the rules too, the media is still bought and paid for, this much is already evident with this beautiful little example: Obama's use of fear card may backfire. So Obama is now a fear-monger despite not one fucking peep about the eight year reign of terror by the Bush regime during which Americans were conditioned to see swarthy Arab terrorists in every dark corner, under their beds and as a result turned into the world’s largest coward colony courtesy of apocalyptic conjecture about smoking mushroom clouds, manipulation of the infamous threat level matrix for political means and the canonization of Jack Bauer, a man who would rip the testicles off of a toddler with a pair of pliers in front of it's mother for god and country. Obama is going to have a rough time taking on the consolidated fascist media colossus and the highly paid celebrity whores who pass themselves off as journalists. Operation Mockingbird is alive and well and even more dangerous now that the entire national media is owned by a handful of corporations with interlocking directorates. Now there has been talk about reinstating the Fairness Doctrine which might not be a bad idea in leveling the playing field against the sort of fascists that former Roosevelt Vice President Henry A. Wallace once so accurately pegged:

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

But any reinstatement of such rules in the current era of systemic rot and deterioration would only be selectively enforced to keep out those who question the state and the system itself. You will never see the Fairness Doctrine used to offset Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly and any number of other demagogic clones. While this is a popular idea with many liberals it is only going to be eventually turned on them and other alternative media voices including bloggers who dare to question the legitimacy of the oligarchic status quo. The guardians of big money and the oligarchy will suffer nary one bit - at least not until changes are made and the Bush criminals are prosecuted. But back to the fact the media is a huge problem and the onslaught of propaganda pumped out to prevent even a diluted bucket of horse piss of a stimulus package illustrates that any sort of return of the government from its current role of protector of corporate interests and the wealthy will be fought tooth, fang and claw in a destructive battle of attrition that will continue to transform families and friends into warring factions that can be exploited by the same ruthless scum who have rigged the tables so successfully, some could say too successfully.

How this is all going to end up is impossible to tell, the American eugenics project to create the perfect Idiocracy, a reverse master-race has any sort of reformer like Obama facing some seriously nasty odds, just think of the Detroit Lions hoisting the Lombardi Trophy after next year's Super Bowl and you get the general idea. Frank Rich of the damned liberal New York Times wrote a piece this weekend entitled They Sure Showed That Obama that would tend to create some optimism in those readers less cynical than I. It was this line that killed me though and only further underlines the ongoing demographic problems facing Obama and anyone else who tries to change the system. Rich refers to: The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Herein lies the problem, despite what may have happened during the election this is a nightmare block of the population and not one to be trifled with because old prejudices die hard and as always liberals have shown a proclivity in overestimating their ability to reach those who within their thick, Neanderthal skulls have banned logic and reason. I'll put in a plug for a big favorite of mine, the moral beacon in this sick land of denial and dumbness and that would be for the brilliant writer Joe Bageant and his book Deer Hunting With Jesus, trust me, it's a must read.

Now I may not be a hunter (personally I think it’s fucking slaughter) but I am one hell of a beefy, beer-drinking white dude, a military veteran and have 11 tattoos as well if that is any sort of an added qualification to the shithack D.C. conventional wisdom. Despite that I am smart enough to not be hoodwinked by a bunch of pampered, elitist, chickenhawk charlatans trying to bait folks like American Me into voting against my own economic self interests. My grandfather was a Romanian immigrant who joined a union to go work at a meat packing house (but only after at 15 he filled his pockets full of ball bearings to qualify for the job required weight), fought in World War II in the Pacific in some of the most vicious of cleanup operations and as an FDR democrat hated the sleazy, fascist snake oil salesmen that were Republicans. Thank God that he died before that fraudulent piece of crap Ronald Reagan was President but my grandmother who survived him by nearly thirty years cursed the Gipper and that punk assed borderline retard George W. Bush until her dying breath. The point is that most people from that particular era (never mind the 'greatest generation' hogwash) weren't so easily duped, and their ability to own a home, raise a family, take vacations on one income are a testament to they way that things used to be in this country before the rats and chiselers hijacked the system.

So as one of the manly men who are largely supposed to buy into the anti-elite propaganda peddled by the fifty-million dollar a year degenerate child fucking dope addict I have always taken great offense at just how fucking stupid that the average American beer swilling, swinging dick angry white male can be. Hell, I love drinking beer (and lots of it), shooting guns (although not at unarmed animals), watching football, driving fast, hating the insipid tyranny of political correctness and ogling nekkid women but I also don’t get suckered into that anti-intellectual horseshit that makes one of those clueless, testosterone and alcohol fueled dopes who are as mad as hell but too fucking dumb to realize that they should be really mad at the millionaire lardasses like Limbaugh who are very well paid to dupe these knuckle-draggers into consistently voting AGAINST their own economic well being. Listen dudes, there is nothing macho in being stupid and unless y’all get a clue your sex lives will continue to be comprised of drinking a twelve pack of cheap malt liquor and whacking off over the latest issue of Penthouse or whatever other fuckrag that you pick up at your local convenience store's jack rack. Stop fantasizing about coming on Sarah Palin’s tits, stop reveling in the falsehood that everyman Joe the Plumber is a working class hero and pick up a book once in awhile, the mind that you save may be your own.

And maybe, just maybe the inhabitants of this land of shame, sin and sorrow can finally shrink the legacy of Ronald Wilson Reagan to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. In a time when even the maestro Greenspan openly admits that he fucked up big time then I suppose that anything is possible.

By Ed Encho