Dick if you want to read a great history of the whole rightwing going back to the 1950s read Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm".

DDay, you have gotten me to ruminating on the conservatives again. The Bircher's have been around Texas politics since I was in high school, and their descendants still pollute the political environment here. So here's my thoughts.

I remember when my parents mentioned that the John Bircher's had a program to elect people to the Boards of prominent churches in my home town in Texas and take control of the churches. That was East Texas about 1960. It apparently did not work. But the Birchers I knew in those days were indistinguishable from KKK members and Texas Republicans. (But they had their own status hierarchy. They did not generally associate with the American Nazi Party members. Much.) The real political parties in Texas in those days were the conservative and liberal branches of the Democratic Party, and the important election was always the Democratic Primary. The Republicans and the Birchers were outside of that system.

These days the same political crazies here in Texas are generally militia members, Texas secessionists (Republic of Texas members,) anti-immigration activists, and conservative Republicans. Anti-Communism lives on in the older Republicans, who can be identified when the publicly call their opponents Socialists and privately call Democrats Communists. The spirit of John Welch lives on here. But it has allied itself with the evangelical crazies and conservatives who split the Southern Baptist Church in the 70's and led the conservative fundamentalists off into political alliance with the conservatives to take control of the Republican Party.

As I understand it, Karl Rove's real genius was to understand that he could use George W. Bush, with his father's connections to more mainstream Republicans nation wide, to join together the descendants of the Birchers, the Libertarians like Ron Paul, the anti-Civil Rights groups and the evangelical fundamentalists to gain control of the statewide Texas political offices, and then expand from that with Bush as the figurehead to the Presidency.

If somehow Rove and his acolytes could have included the capability to actually govern along with his ability to win political elections and power, then the problems he and his ilk created for Texas, for the U.S., and for the world generally would have been severely compounded. The only thing I see that kept the Bush 43 administration from being much worse was the conservative purity demand for politicians to actually govern as conservatives or be driven out of the Party.

As long as the Republicans have had both moderates and extremist right-wingers working together, they seem to have been able to actually run the national government, at least at a politically acceptable level. But that may have required the Cold War to hold them together. Under Ike, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41 somehow they kept the extremists under mostly cover. The extremists were only unleashed when America has had a Democratic President. That's probably a sort of muted terrorist tactic of creating ungovernable conditions for Democrats who are in charge as a selling point for the public to remove them.

Ideology has been important to the conservatives, and the Bircher's were a critical element of ideology creation and sales. But it took a lot of money to sell that ideology. Since the 50's the core of that money has primarily been supplied by wealthy ultra-rightists. Examples include the Texas Oil Men of the 50's (H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Roy Cullen, and Sid Richardson) followed by other super-wealthy right-wingers like Joseph Coors, Bob Perry and Richard Mellon Scaife. There is also former Amway CEO and co-founder Richard DeVos who provided funds to both right-wing extremists including the extremist evangelical Dominionist movement.

Speaking of the super-rich ultra rightists, Rupert Murdoch is part of the pattern. He is one of the class of super-rich whose focus is on defending his super-wealth and the social status the wealth supports from the predatory hands of the public in various democracies. Murdoch was brought to America specifically to create a right-wing propaganda network to support the conservatives. To make this work he was handed U.S. citizenship literally overnight so that he was legally allowed to buy the TV stations that made up the network.

Down in the trenches the conservatives have always had their connections with those who Dave Neiwert describes in his excellent book The Eliminationists. I suspect that it was the growth of right-wing talk radio that both led to many of the right-wing election victories in last decade, but talk radio at the same time forced the ideological purity tests on elected conservatives that drove out the moderate Republicans. That may explain the ability of the Bush 43 conservatives to win elections but simply not be able to govern.

The inability of the Republican Party to select a Presidential candidate all the conservative factions could support was one result of the Bush 43 inability to govern. Worse as far as the evangelicals were concerned was the general inability to deliver much politically to those religious groups. Rove had been able to assemble the national conservative coalition that elected Bush 43 because the winning history of Reagan and Bush 41, together with the effective destruction of much of Clinton's effectiveness as President after the failure of health care reform, gave all the elements of the coalition the confidence that they could get something out of supporting the Bush 43 election and administration. The failure of the Bush administration to succeed in any significant area, highlighted by the bungled Katrina response, destroyed that confidence. There was no "new" Rove in 2008 who could assemble a new conservative coalition to win the Presidency for the Republicans.

Now that the national Republicans are effectively out of power except to block governing initiatives by the Democrats, the only recourse the Republicans have to possibly regain power is to block all legislation that might solve the problems of Americans and to unleash the radical extremist crazies, some with guns to delegitimize government in the face of real problems. As we all know, they hope to be considered as "The Alternative" if the Democrats can be made to appear inept and incompetent when faced with big national problems. *

That's been the tactic that the John Birch Society has implemented since welsh created the organization in the 50's. Back then, though, the Birchers were just one more element the Republicans used to gain votes. Now the national Republicans have little else left to depend on besides the money of super-rich ultra-rightists and the publishing empire of Rupert Murdoch. It seems unlikely that the evangelicals will accept another Presidential candidate from the Wall Street or Money Republicans or from the far right like the Neocons. The only possible replacement for the evangelicals likely to be available to the Republicans appears to be the far right extremists who are driven in to vote by talk show hosts. Of course, if that's done too blatantly then the Independents will run for the hills - or the Democrats.

Without a major change in how the Republican conservative leadership thinks and operates, they seem to be on a rapid path to irrelevancy. But like the Japanese Kamikaze at the end of the war the conservative Republicans can do a lot of damage on the way to irrelevancy. The propaganda effort to "mainstream" the John Birchers is just another example of how desperate the conservatives are to get back into power.

* The failure of Democrats to deliver on health care will go a long way to give the Republicans what they desperately want - a dispirited and helpless Democratic Party to face in 2010 and especially 2012.

I'll agree with both of you. I know a few politicians, and except for each and every one of the more successful ones being a glory hog who loves the spotlight and being on stage most are very well-meaning. I just don't believe they are the real leaders. I see almost everyone of them as being puppets with the really powerful men pulling their strings.

The politicians at the very top seem to begin to control their own strings somewhat, but they still belong to those who got them to the top. That's just a social reality.

Max Baucus, for example, represents a very rural culture (Montana). But he has become a very powerful man in the Senate through seniority, and is making decisions on his own for a very urban nation. And he has little or no understanding of the urban culture and needs. Thus the clash between the rural culture dominated by individualism above all other things, and the urban need to depend on many unknown and unseen strangers just to get through the day and eat or find a place to live and sleep. The rural culture sees medicine as individual doctors, but in the urban reality medicine is big organizations that doctors join when they are permitted. It takes the big organizations to deal with strange new diseases rapidly or to handle an epidemic.

Baucus is so powerful that no one he disagrees with is allowed to influence him. That's just the nature of the Senate.

You, too, sweetie; smoke 'em if ya gottem!

Good idea. I went back to early Joan Baez recently. I had forgotten her earliest stuff in the pure Fold tradition before she went activist. Her voice was such a clear, silver soprano and her music was presented with so much emotion that I could find myself back in England or Ireland of history.

Then, of course, there is always Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. A lot happened between Baez' House of the Rising Sun and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.