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Liberals Ignore True Conservative Agenda

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A disastrous war in Iraq that had no 'valid" reason for being, monstrous budget deficits that many knowledgeable people consider a threat to the nation's survival, environmental degradation under conservative GOP government, allowing a great American city to be destroyed by a natural disaster, widespread government spying on patriotic Americans, eroding of our Constitutional freedoms and protections, out-of-control corruption and crime, and much more would appear to be failures on the part of the George W. Bush administration aided and abetted by a Republican Congress (now disposed) and conservative judiciary.

But such conclusions haven't taken into consideration the objectives of those in power and when we do that we see that there is little GOP failure and the Republican Party has been successful in pursuit of its true ~ but hidden ~ agenda. Among its greatest successes is learning to use Frank Luntz-created slogans to say one thing but which actually mean something else.

Republicans screamed in campaigning last fall that Democrats would "raise your taxes" if elected to Congress without offering any explaination how that could be accomplished when any bill to "raise taxes" would have to be signed into law by a president who claims his disastrous tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans should be made permanent. What is more problematic is that the Democratic Party offers no rebuttal to such nonsensical charges.

This preoccupation with "low taxes" offers a clue to conservative politicians' objectives because their "low taxes" have put the democratic American experiment at risk of financial ruin with a debt approaching $9 trillion and rising because the GOP Congress and President have long refused to address the problem. To understand the conservative Republican objectives, we need to have a clear knowledge of conservatism in America and its political history. And we need to keep in mind that the hallmark of the conservative mind is that it never wants to tolerate change or advancement. What change it may accept is to retreat to "the good old days" that exist only in the minds of those who didn't experience them.

Ever since mankind departed Eden, government has existed as organized toughs to keep a small elite segment of society in charge of everything and to oppress everyone else.

That started to change with America's Revolutionary War that the political right opposed. At that time, the 13 colonies had a population of 3.9 million ~ about half a million were hard-core conservatives, known then as Tories. The most famous right-winger of the time was Gen. Benedict Arnold. About 10 percent of the Tories followed Arnold and turned against the revolution, many taking up arms to battle colonial "freedom fighters." Their efforts to prevent independence failed and Americans are better off because of that failure.

What few conservative who were left a decade later, stood in opposition to the proposed Constitution. They wanted to prevent one unified nation and have two or three separate nations in order to preserve slavery in at least one of those nations. Again, they failed and the nation is better off with that they failed.

Not to give up hope, the political right opposed the Bill or Rights and again failed. The nation is better off because of that failure.

Conservatives rose anew to launch the Civil War tying to break apart the union, again to preserve slavery. Once more, they failed and the nation is better off because slavery was abolished and the union was preserved.

Conservatives saw opportunity to destroy democracy again in the Great Depression that grew out of the corruption of Warren Harding and economic policies of Calvin Coolidge (using tax cuts for the rich to feint prosperity) and which worsened as Herbert Hoover refusd to address the problem. Conservatives then and now have hated Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which is credited with saving capitalism when much of the world was flirting with communism as an alternative to a failed capitalism. One would think right wingers would appreciate the rescue of the capitalism they claim to adore. But they hate FDR because his programs also saved and strengthened the democracy they abhor, and the nation is better off for that.

It doesn't matter that those on the political right were Tories during the Revolutionary War era, were Democrats between the Civil War and World War I and have been Republicans since the civil-rights struggles; they have always hated democratic progress and decency. Their hatred is based in the fact that democracy is a product of progressive free-thinking intellectuals ~ also known as liberals ~ whom they also despise.

Conservatives have long credited Ronald Reagan ~ and only Reagan ~ for the destruction of the Soviet Union by forcing it into bankruptcy with an unparalleled arms race. Now extreme conservatives are trying to use the bankruptcy tactic to destroy the other nation they have so violently hated for more than two centuries ~ the democratic United States of America.

What should be clear to all Americans is that conservative extremists have never given up on their dream of destroying the democratic United States and reimposing the aristocracy that our Founding Fathers revolted against ~ with conservatives as the aristocrats, of course, and the rest of us their servants and serfs. Their hatred of the inheritance tax is symbolic of conservative desires because aristocracy depends on inherited wealth, position, prestige, power and class.

The new effort to destroy democracy began with Sen. Barry Goldwater, got into the political mainstream with Reagan and George H. W. Bush and hit its peak with George W. Bush.

The tactic of choice by the GOP is to use Enron Economics. Enron, the giant Texas energy company, destroyed itself by borrowing hundreds of millions of dollars and listing the borrowed money as income and profit to keep its stock price high so that top executives could sell the stock they got as options at cut-rate prices or use it as collateral to borrow from the company and enrich themselves. Since Enron didn't pay income taxes ~ the GOP has given free passes around taxation to its supporters ~ it got away with this deception until it was too far into debt to continue hiding the problem and the company collapsed. The Reagan-Bush-Bush tactic is to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars each year by the government, putting the borrowed money into the economy and claiming that as economic growth, knowing full well that the debt burden will eventually be too huge to sustain the nation any longer, at which time the democratic United States will go the way of the late Soviet Union. But before the US collapses, would-be aristocracy insiders will feed off the government in the form of tax breaks or holding Treasury instruments to line their own pockets just as Enron executives lined theirs. This is a modern wrinkle of the pre-Revolutionary War British practice of taxing commoners to support the aristocracy; exactly what our Founders revolted against.

Conservatives have long claimed to represent "small government." That is not true because they have always used government to benefit themselves and have practiced Big Brother or self-interest government. They have even advertised their true motives, such as tax activist Grover Norquist's noted dictum that the political right's objective is to shrink government to a size it can be "drowned in a bathtub." That is not a statement promoting "small government," that is saying the goal is to destroy that government and to use taxes as the weapon. That is subversion.

Conservative extremists have no shyness about suppressing voting or cheating on elections ~ even using blatant crimes to do so ~ because elections that are fair and open to all are vital for survival of democracy. How best to destroy democracy than to destroy fair elections, bankrupt the country and oppress its citizens hoping to start over with the system the Founding Fathers dispatched more than two centuries ago. For the past several decades right-wingers have constantly preached a "meritocracy" based on self-reliance for most of us while seeking an "aristocracy" based on inherited dependency for themselves.

It should be painfully clear that the Reagan-Bush-Bush extremist cabal has been overwhelmingly competent in camouflaging its visions and has been effective in advancing its goals by pursuing an anti-democracy philosophy. It's not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it's the extreme conservative agenda pushed by Bush.

GOP spin doctors claim that the Republican Party fell out of favor with American voters and lost congressional power in the 2006 elections because it was seduced by the inherent corruption of Washington, DC. Nonsense. The GOP was not corrupted by DC culture, it has been a fraud for several decades.

What troubling is that the Democratic Party doesn't seem capable of recognizing the true GOP agenda and trying to combat to it by alerting the population. And the only way "the media" could be considered allied with progressive politics is that the media have also been asleep regarding the true motives of regressive politics and a reluctance to say anything derogatory about the political right even when truthfulness is unquestionable. Should conservatives continue in power, future right-wing leaders will continue the Reagan-Bush-Bush drive to destroy a democratic America. They must be stopped once, again.

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***************************************************** Thomas Bonsell is a former newspaper editor (in Oregon, New York and Colorado) United States Air Force cryptanalyst and National Security Agency intelligence agent. He became one of (more...)
 
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