If there is one thing pundits are good at, it's mistaking empty gestures for moments of great weight. This latest wave of republican recantations as no more significance than Kerry's about-face or Dean's multiple positions on the Iraq Bloodbath. No one, partisan androids and pundit attack poodles excepted, takes any republicrat antiwar pronouncent seriously.

This isn't the fault of republicans or "rightwing" talk radio meisters or partisan political hacks - this is a failure of the New York Times, GE/NBC, The Washington Post, CNN, Newsweek and Time, ABC, CBS and reporters and talk show hosts and editors and producers who think that elections are arranged for their own personal entertainment and "fun" and think that candidates should be chosen according to who puts out the best food on the campaign plane or which candidate would be most fun to have a beer with or has the best wardrobe. This is the fault of the "fourth branch of government" the media, who are charged with producing the most honest and the fairest reportage they are capable of, which isn't much in the best of times, who are incapable of prioritizing, sorting and assessing the importance of news stories and differentiating between a fact and opinion, so they offer it all up as grist for the mill.

They knew that Bush was stupid, incompetent, a liar, a bully, corrupt and ignorant - in fact, they admired him for it - it made him one of them.

I suppose most "fellow travelers" weren't in favor of totalitarianism, just blinded by the promise of socialism. I don't see the right as blinded by their ideals to support someone who'd betray their ideals. Seems to me that Bush totally got with the program, and we're suffering from it.

John 

http://www.haberarts.com/

It seems to me that the analogy is false. The evil of Hitler was not that he went to war. The evil was how he treated citizens of his country and conquered countries.

The appeasement of Hitler and the disdain of it had nothing with controlling his evil. I am not aware of any statesman of the time saying: we have to stop Hitler to save the Jews. Indeed, I would think that to be anti-Churchillian.

Moreover, it could be argued that the Republican isolationists and the corporations (including Bush's relatives) had no quarrel with the Nazi's internal policies (they just wanted to make money).

The Democrats should really call Bush on this.

. . . it would have been perfectly right to ask what it was about the world view of Neville Chamberlain that led him to appease Hitler.

Rather a shame he didn't "appease Hitler" in September 1939. 1940 would have been a much better year all around.

As a gross misreading of history, Chamberlain's so-called appeasement of Hitler ranks right up there with the claim that the Maginot Line failed. 

Now, the question is, are any of the folks on the right prepared to do more than recant? Will any of them search their souls and premises for clues to the method in their madness? Are they prepared to acknowledge, understand, and renounce the Manichean mentality that led them to think that anything and anyone that gouged holes in liberalism was just fine with them? Will they stare long and hard at the servility that suited them so long? Are they curious at all about those blinders they wore as long as they suited them? What, after all, have they learned?

I certainly think you will grow very old waiting for acknowledgment from them on any of these points.  It is not in the nature of the right-wing authoritarian personality to even consider that the core beliefs are flawed .  They will just argue that the errors were in the President's execution of the policies.  This running away that we are seeing, while a tad comical to those of us who never swallowed the neocon kool-aid, is but a momentary ass-covering manuever for these people.  For their goal is not learn from mistakes in judgement, to continually grow by discussing and weighing alternative arguments or to seek compromises through shared interests and goals.  Their goal was and will continue to be the permanent elimination of any views or beliefs which are contrary to their larger global dominionist goals.  If anyone thinks there is any true penance or humility in their newly found "Come To Jesus" moment then they are truly fools.

Give these people no leeway.  They will come back with more fury and rage than ever when the next opportunity is presented.  Yes, they are learning something through this.  They are watching and what they are learning in retreat is exactly where the weak spots are in their opponents which can be exploited in the  future.

"It ain't over till it's over"

And even then I'm not so sure. 

Hi everyone.
I see very few people pointing out the Heart of the Beast. Corporatism. Stalin, Lenin, Hitler had nothing on these guys.

COMPANIES are running our govt. Ever hear someone complain about Gov. Regulation anymore, tell them it is the other way around. Big Business is Regulating our Government.

Bush and all these others are doing THEIR bidding...not some small cartel of theoreticians.
I know this is obvious, but c'mon. Business is their master, money is their shrine. Right down to the fat greasy republiscum salesmen here in podunk USA.

Republicans do not have a platform to renounce. It is whatever BBusiness wants today. That is their platform. And it has no solid planks, no timeless values or truths. It is whatever they want it to be.
Yes, we will hear a lot about bush sucks from rightwingers...they will say he abandonded a lot of conservative principles that we HAVE to return to. Crap.
He did NOT deviate from conservative principles. He embodied them. championed them. Cheated for them. Conservative Principles are letting (pay fer play) businesses Shear the Sheep. We are the sheep.

Anyone who tells you different is a liar or hopeless dupe. Plenty of those.
You may think you are conservative and that you Hew to an ideal....but it is crap. An illusion. These guys do not want your fiscal conservatism and your old-fashioned sensibilities. They want to rip your wallet out thru your throat and dispose of your body quietly.

Corporatism. Organized Crime meets Totalitarianism meets Haliburton and the Carlyle Group.
Please people, stop fumbling around....feeling for clues and answers that will soothe you. The rise of the corporation has happened. They OWN the playing field. We have created Super Predators that live forever and accrete power and holdings and leverage. And they have to feed.

Think Regionally. Act Regionally

A side topic, but it seems to me there's a devastatingly simple response to the GOP's attempt to equate the current struggle with the war against the fascist Axis:

If they really believe what they are saying, if this really is the same kind of conflict in scale and importance, why aren't they calling for the same kind of national mobilization and sacrifice we had then? Why tax cuts rather than paying our way? Above all, where's the draft? If this really is that kind of conflict, why do they continue to treat it as if it isn't?

There is one obvious answer: It's Clinton's fault.

Actually, it probably is.

In 2000, the GOP really had a problem providing a candidate that compared favorably on conservative idealism to what Clinton achieved. The whole fiscally responsible, national security meme couldn't work - Clinton was running a surplus and had reasonably good national security credentials and decent international relations ones. Bush had to push against Clinton 'nation building' which many in the GOP now realize Bush is doing, and other issues that also didn't play out.

For the election, they needed a new kind of conservative to contrast against Gore/Clinton so they invented GWB. If the GOP had advanced a true conservative, they would have looked too much like Clinton and Gore could have won due to familiarity and a continuation of polcies that the GOP would almost have to admit were working. So, from 2000, the GOP had to rally around Bush in a cult-of-personality way. In that spirit, they attack Clinton in the same way. It's not his policies that they oppose, it's that he was too centrist for a proper conservative to step up.

Anyone else catch Bill Maher last week?

Congressman Issa was on. His comments on Iraq were for th emost part very reaosanble and really coudl have come right out of the mouth of Murtha or Pelosi.

One thing really struck me, he made a poitn of saying he never voted to authorize the war in Iraq. he was merely voting to give the president the authority so he could negotiate with everything on the table and so on.

Gee I seem to remember a certain prominent Democratic Senator makign the exact same argument when he ran for president! Issa used nearly the exact same words as Kerry. Wow congressman where were you when your party used this to label Kerry as an unserious thinker and flip-flopper?

True believers in Bush's foriegn policy are dangerous idiots. Wankers like Issa and other Republicans who now are coming out left and right as having "never supported" Bush are simply lying ass-holes and traitors.

Todd: As a college student, I loved your book "The Sixties". And one thing I thought was made pretty clear in that book is that people who are disposed towards the radical fringe in American political life tend to stay there, even if they sometimes leap from one fringe to the opposite one.

How many of the fashionable lefter-than-thou Marxists who destroyed SDS really thoroughly examined the problems with their ways of thinking - the contempt for procedure, for evidence, and for rational debate which led an older generation of liberals to see them as akin to fascists? Didn't they instead rather tend to vanish from political life, nursing paranoid grudges, or, like David Horowitz, to leap desperately to the vicious irrational fringe of the opposite camp? True, some did mature into bedrock liberalism - Bernadine Mohr comes to mind. But didn't they tend to be those who were under 25 in 1970? And, of the repentant Nixonians, how many besides Dean turned to reason and moderation, rather than to Christ or the Laffer Curve? Isn't it significant that Dean was the youngest of the gang?

It just doesn't seem likely to me that the Malkins and John Yoos of this world are going to do any serious navel-gazing. It's even less likely for right-wing radicals than it was for left-wing ones. But that doesn't mean one can't happily make political and intellectual hay out of their continuing failure to do so.

"All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." - I.F. Stone

I did catch that (Issa: "I'm one of the people who voted to authorize the President's diplomacy to include the tool of the U.S. military"), and had much the same thought. Rep. Issa looked a bit apprehensive when Bill Maher launched his, "I'm glad you said that" response agreeing that the vote to authorize the use of force was not in fact a "vote for war". I can only imagine what he would have looked like, had he been challenged as taking the very position the Republicans mocked when taken by John Kerry, and further challenged as to why it took him five years to clearly state his position on the Iraq war and to endorse Kerry's stance.

Republicans like Issa who appear eager to distance themselves from Bush, particularly in relation to the war in Iraq, also appear intent on achieving that distance by avoiding (or rewriting) history. But the media lets them get away with it - and in some cases is actively complicit in the revision.

As he is far too often. At this stage in his career, his blunders far outnumber his triumphs.

Interesting.

Reminds me of a popular Phil Ochs song from that era:

Once I was young and impulsive I wore every conceivable pin Even went to the socialist meetings Learned all the old union hymns But I've grown older and wiser And that's why I'm turning you in So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

You're so vain, you think this song is about you...

Not everybody from that generation gave up and joined EITHER the Republicans OR the Democrats.