BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

Could GOP Leaders Possibly Believe Their Own Rhetoric?

Is it possible that Republicans truly believe that President Obama is both a socialist, and a fascist, who wasn't born in the United States, and that providing affordable health-care to American families is a plot to destroy America? Could they possibly believe that Dick Cheney kept America safe, or that George Bush was protecting the American way of life? And is it possible that they consider their incendiary rhetoric simply innocent speech, and don't recognize that during this time of severe hardship they could very easily incite insurrection within the country? It's not likely.

Thus, it is way passed the time for anyone who truly loves America to realize that the Republican leadership is a threat to our way of life - and as always, I want to emphasize the huge distinction between true conservatives, and those currently running the Republican Party.

The current Republican leadership is a vastly different breed than anything we've ever seen in America before. Even during the Civil War, though wrongheaded, the insurrection of the South was led by people who truly believed in their ideals. But this group of insurrectionists have no ideals. This is a group that is perfectly willing to tear America apart for no other reason than to promote their own power and personal greed. In short, they're nothing less than common thugs engaged in a nationwide protection racket against the people of the United States.

In the recent contest in New York's 23rd Congressional District, we just saw that, contrary to Reagan conservatives' eleventh commandment of "Thou shall not speak badly of another Republican," that this group was more than willing to eat their own, against the will of the vast majority of Republican voters for what they consider "party purity." Where have we seen that before?

And the mere fact that the GOP is willing to espouse outrageous propositions, then use incendiary rhetoric to incite reactionary wingnuts to try to shove their agenda down America's throat, clearly demonstrates how dangerous the GOP has become as a political entity. It shows that they hold the intelligence of the American people in absolute disdain, and that they believe that propaganda, if repeated often and loudly enough, will overwhelm America's common sense. And again, it also betrays a chilling and grossly irresponsible willingness to throw America under the bus in an attempt to regain power during a time when the country needs solidarity more than ever.

The GOP has left President Obama with two wars, the worst financial decline since the Great Depression, and a national infrastructure that is literally falling apart. Yet, instead of responsibly stepping up to the plate to help find viable solutions for the hardships they've left on the American people, they're indulging in obstructionism, the protection of fat cats to the detriment of the average American, and the incitement of social bigotry through the use of subliminal messaging. These are clearly the actions of people who are totally devoid of any sense of Patriotism.

While the GOP claims to be fighting for "small government," that's transparently not the case. The fact is, while they want a government too small in its oversight capabilities to regulate their corruption and greed, they were more than willing to violate the law to ensure a government that was expansive enough to spy on American citizens. And while they claim to want lower taxes, they only want lower taxes for fat cats and corporations, while they fight to ensure that those very same corporations are allowed to, literally, "tax" the average citizen out of life and limb, by inflating the price of gas, food, housing, health-care, and every other staple of American life. So even if they do fight for lower taxes, it's only so they can transplant those funds from government coffers to their own.

They also claim to believe in state's rights, but they're only for a state's right to deprive the citizens of any rights that the corporations failed to abolish at the national level. That accounts for the proposed amendment allowing states to "opt-out" in the event that a public option is passed to health-care. The right to block affordable health-care at the state level would be their final opportunity to protect their cash cow - the insurance industry.

But the key to selling their bogus claims is dependent on deluding the American people into thinking that a huge grown swell of Americans support their fraudulent point of view. The GOP tries to do that by whipping some of the most undereducated people in the country into a frenzy, and then promoting raucous demonstrations as photo ops. By doing so, they're betting on the fact the American people are so dumb that they don't realize that with a population of 308 million people in the United States, it's easy for Fox News to squeeze enough people into a television screen to make virtually any issue seem like they have a ground swell of support from the masses. But through the use of that technique, one can even show a ground swell of support for child molestation.

There are 686,515 registered sex offenders in the United States. If the GOP could turn out (excuse the pun) all of those sex offenders before a camera, they could use that photo op to make the case that these sex offenders represent a majority of the American people. And that's exactly what they're doing, but instead of using sex offenders, they're enlisting Fox News to gather up every social bigot and wingnut they can find to squeeze before the camera.

It's time for America to wake up (liberal and conservative alike) and put a stop to these people. They're gradually chipping away at American ideals and replacing them with their own. In eight short years they've amended the American ideal that torture is un-American to read, "Well, that depends;" that America should only invade a sovereign nation in self-defense to, "Unless we don't like them;" and that all Americans have the right to privacy and due process under the law to, "accept if some bureaucrat decides that ain't cool."

The behavior of the GOP suggests that they believe the following:

1."The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
2. " I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator . . ."
3."The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force."
4."The [Republican party] should not become a constable of public opinion, but must dominate it. It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master!"
5."Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a great man be 'discovered' by an election."

All of the above quotations come directly from Adolph Hitler and his book,  Mien Kampf.

So this is not just an exercise in hyperbole. It is essential that Americans take this assault on our way of life seriously. It is incumbent upon all Americans - again, both liberal and conservative - to look back at how far we've drifted away from our ideals during the Bush era. Even Bush himself said, "I have no problem with a dictatorship. Just as long as I'm the dictator." Just imagine the kind of firestorm that would result if President Obama said something like that.

So if you're a liberal, consider the gross assault that the GOP mounted against our constitution and civil rights. If conservative, consider the GOP's reckless waste of the nation's resources as they passed billions of dollars out to their cronies without a shred of accountability. And at the same time, they were forcing our troops who were wounded in battle to pay for their equipment left on the battlefield, and requiring them to pay for their own meals while lying wounded in the hospital. And this, by people who, almost to the man, moved hell and Earth to avoid their own military service. Dick Cheney had five (5) deferments.

And their agenda? Here's a note to Rush Limbaugh from Rep. Michele Bachmann before her anti-healthcare rally, as reported by thinkprogress.org: "We'll have a meet-up at the Capitol steps and then the insurgency begins."

So it is past time for all Americans to put their differences aside to fight an internal enemy that is much more insidious than Al Qaeda. It's time to recognize that it CAN happen here - and if we don't wake up soon, it will.

 

 Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com  

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

TWITTER

Wattree

Let's see how long it takes for the Republicans to try to twist the Fort Hood Shootings into a political attack on Obama.12:39 PM Nov 5th from web

Wattree

Yesterday I said let's see how long before wingnuts blame shooting on Obama. Well... http://bit.ly/uLhxS2 minutes ago from web

　

HOMELAND INSECURITY

Shooter advised Obama transition
Fort Hood triggerman aided team on Homeland Security task force

Posted: November 06, 2009
9:21 am Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

NEW YORK - Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter in yesterday's massacre at Fort Hood, played a homeland security advisory role in President Barack Obama's transition into the White House, according to a key university policy institute document.

The Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University published a document May 19, entitled "Thinking Anew - Security Priorities for the Next Administration: Proceedings Report of the HSPI Presidential Transition Task Force, April 2008 - January 2009," in which Hasan of the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine is listed on page 29 of the document as a Task Force Event Participant.

DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU? IT'S A LIE.

 

Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com  

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE

Could Obama Fall Victim to a Change We Can't Believe in?

At this point Obama's presidency could go either way - he can either become one of the greatest presidents this country has ever known, or go down as an exciting experiment that went bad. It's all up to how he handles the expectations of Independents.

The biggest problem that Obama currently faces is becoming a victim of his own effectiveness. During the campaign he raised the nation's expectation so high that just being a good president won't do. He promised a change that we can believe in, which led many of us to believe that he intended to trash the way business is done in Washington, but that promise seems to be totally inconsistent with what seems to be his irrepressible desire to hold hands and sing Kum By Ya with the very Republican leaders from which we wanted a change.

This has fueled the growing suspicion by many that both parties are beholding to the same cabal of power, and only feign to have differing philosophies toward governance. That suspicion lies very close to the surface for many Independents - after all, that's why they're Independents in the first place.

And President Obama hasn't helped himself in that regard. For a man who is ordinarily so politically astute, even before he became president he did a curious flip-flop on the FISA issue. According to Greenchange.org, on October 24, 2007, Bill Burton of the Obama campaign indicated, "To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." But by June 20, 2008, Obama issued a statement reversing his position, indicating that our national security needs were more important than his objections.

That deeply disappointed many Independents, since a citizen's right to sue a telecommunications company for invading his or her privacy in violation of the law has nothing to do with national security. Those are the very constitutional rights that we're trying to keep secure. But while many Independents have kept that in mind, at least Obama had the integrity to take that stand prior to our making the decision on whether or not to vote for him.

But then once he was elected President, Obama made another curious statement with regard to the criminal activities and alleged war crimes committed by the Bush administration. In spite of the fact that there are strong allegations and prima facie evidence of torture, and some of the most unconscionable violations of the Geneva Convention since the Nuremberg trials, President Obama stated that he wanted to move the nation forward, and not look back.

Many Independents have two problems with that. First of all, President Obama seems much too willing to move forward with regard to the fat cats, while lower-ranking personnel are rotting in prison. That's in direct conflict with the American ideal of equal justice under the law. And secondly, since most of these atrocities were committed against the citizens of other nations, it is the height of arrogance for us to be "the deciders" of whether or not those responsible should be held accountable. That also runs contrary to American ideals, and the concept of "a shining city on the hill."

And now we're talking about sending thousands of more troops to Afghanistan. The question is, why? The nation has yet to be provided with a reasonable explanation of why we should be meddling, once again, in another country's internal affairs. One would think we would have learned something about the futility of that by now. It's a recipe for disaster.

There's only two legitimate reasons to have our troops in that part of the world. The first is obvious - to make damn sure the nuclear missiles in Pakistan don't fall into the hands of Al Qaeda. The second reason is to bring Osama Bin Laden to justice. So why can't we just deploy enough troops in Pakistan to protect the missiles, and let the CIA and law enforcement deal with Osama? That way we save both treasure and lives, and we're not creating more enemies for the United States by killing innocent people.

But many Independents suspect that there's another agenda afoot. Actually, Cheney's giving it away. Independents recognize that Dick Cheney has absolutely no integrity, so when he gets passionate over an issue we know to follow either the money or power. Thus, many Independents suspect that what's actually behind Cheney's insistence that we go recklessly rushing into Afghanistan has much more to do with Halliburton's bottom line than it does America's best interest. And while Obama has shown himself to be an excellent president in many ways, his one shortcoming - and a shortcoming that may very well bring him down in the end - is his tendency to try to appease the stupidity and greed of the GOP.

The President needs to recognize that there is nothing he can do that's going to make him acceptable to the GOP - that is, unless he agrees to appoint a Republican vice president, then resign. By now it should be clear that even while he's asleep, the GOP is trying to hatch plans to destroy him. So by spending more time thinking about them than he is his base, he's playing right into their hands.

I mentioned power as one of the reasons that Cheney's trying to rush the president into Afghanistan. I wonder if the president has considered the fact that Cheney just might be trying to get him to make the same kind of mistake in Afghanistan that the Bush Administration made in Iraq in order to take the Iraq issue off the table for the 2012 election? If during the 2012 campaign America is bogged down in Afghanistan with the useless death of thousands of U.S. troops, all of a sudden, Bush, Cheney, and the GOP won't look all that bad. The president should think about that possibility, since the mechinations of Dick Cheney makes Machiavelli look like a trainee.

On the other hand, if the president would have the CIA go after Osama Bin Laden (through the use of intelligence, instead of blindly shooting at rocks), then pull out of Afghanistan, and make an agreement with the government of Pakistan to help them protect their nuclear arsenal, he'll be looking pretty good in 2012, and he won't have the deaths of thousands of U.S. troops to have to justify.

And he'd look even better if he allowed Attorney General Holder to do his job with respect to the Bush administration's war crimes. First, he'd firm up his base by restoring their confidence that he stands for the rule of law, and he would also allay the fear that he might be a puppet, controlled by some powerful cabal.

Another upside to that is that once Holder begins his investigation into the Bush administration, there's absolutely no doubt that he's going to find criminality, cronyism, and corruption seeping so deep within the GOP that Republicans will be so busy snitching on one another, and covering their own asses, that they won't have the time to plot against either him, or the American people.

Now, THAT, would be a change that we could believe in.

  Eric L. Wattree

wattree.blogspot.com  

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.