Now we are in the midst of a debt crisis that stems largely from Obama’s inability to accept the intransigence of his political opponents … I think if Obama had the sort of experience that Cold War presidents had in dealing with the Soviet Union or that corporate executives and union leaders had in negotiating labor contracts he wouldn’t have been so naïve about the Republicans, who have never hidden the fact that their only objective is defeating him next year regardless of the cost — Reaganite, Bruce Bartlett, now someone who couldn’t exist in the modern GOP
And the Obama appears recklessly unwilling to circumvent the debt ceiling, since it would eliminate his leverage for pushing through entitlement cuts.
Yet as we’ve discussed, the outcomes the players have committed themselves to are either shooting the economy or bleeding it to death..
Earlier in the month Bartlett explicitly painted the debt ceiling crisis as a security threat. Which, if you take it logically, means the GOP/Tea Party is a national security threat, a position I’ve held for months.
Extremists of all kinds, which I have an entire tab to here, often remain just annoying kooks for life. But some of them infrequently become very dangerous threats to national security. And a collection of them has now figured out how to render US government inoperable from a minority position.
Bartlett made the reasonable claim that the US military is an oil protection force. It’s not a historically unique argument. Nixon aide Kevin Phillips made a similar one in his book American Theocracy, now several years old.
(Phillips book’s observation was that American politics had become lethal and that the country was in danger of entering permanent decline. The book was not an easy read but it’s turned out to be fairly prescient. It preceded and did not foresee the arrival of the Tea Party but did spend about a third of its print space discussing the takeover of the GOP by rigid theocrats incompatible with working government. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, who didn’t politically exist at the time of Phillips’ book, a person who believes the US should go into default, is a banner example of American Theocracy’s arguments taken to their final destination.)
But back to Bartlett. In making the brief claim that the military was an oil protection force aimed at maintaining American security by guaranteeing the nation’s economic well-being through preservation of the flow of oil, Bartlett extended the reasoning to the debt ceiling. He argued that raising the debt ceiling was inextricably tied to the economic health of the nation, like oil, and therefore a security matter.
This was followed by a demand (or suggestion) that the President take charge and raise the debt ceiling through the 14th Amendment, rescuing the nation from a security threat. (That argument, at the New York Times, is here.)
The standee is in here, too. “If you don’t lower the corporate tax rate and give us more subsidies — will shoot what’s left of this mutt!” it reads.
The bioterror defense lobby is easy to view with scorn. It works hard to earn it.
A reader of DD blog points out an ugly matter if you follow how people within the Beltway use world events to push their personal and professional hobby horses.
On Tuesay, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius used Anders Breivik’s Norwegian slaughter to pimp a report having to do with chemical and bioterrorism, a pamphlet issued by Richard Danzig and a lot of et al at the Center for New American Security.
But Friday’s attack in Oslo by Anders Behring Breivik teaches some broader lessons, too: There are homicidal cults all over the world — some in Muslim countries and some in the heart of Europe. Some attackers will be found insane by courts, but others will have a diabolical logic and lucidity — and the world has to be ready for all of them.
Most important, the next time the weapons of choice may not be a bomb and a semiautomatic rifle, as in the case of the Oslo attacker who killed 76 people. Lunatics and sane plotters alike may have access to chemical and biological weapons that could kill thousands.
As in so many terrorist cases — and with al-Qaeda itself — this latest extremist didn’t sneak up on the world. He all but announced his anti-immigrant views on the Internet.
To understand the dangers posed by these borderline extremists, I recommend a new report by Richard Danzig and his colleagues at the Center for a New American Security. It’s a case study of the only terrorist group that has successfully used chemical and biological weapons on a mass scale — the Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo. It poisoned the Tokyo subway system with sarin, a deadly nerve gas, in 1995, causing 13 deaths and an astounding 6,252 injuries.
One can imagine this bit of opportunism just as it happened.
The Norway case is used as a convenient hook to carpetbag a report from the Center for New American Security into the news, a paper that under standard circumstances virtually nobody except some field experts and members of the bioterror defense lobby would read.
It’s transparently cynical, not only for what has been already mentioned, but for using the old Japanese attack by the Aum Shinrikyo group as an argument for stoking the usual fears as if these apply only to us.
Unfortunately, this tragedy is Norway’s and as for finger-pointing and lesson taking, and there has been some, parts of the twisted trail do not indicate much like the peculiar cult run by Shoko Asahara.
Instead, we have other novel peculiarities, like the fascination with the Knights Templar, the writings of American right wing bloggers and one famous US woodsman terrorist fond of inside-the-shack-made bombs.
The reports to read, then, on understanding extremist terrorism were not by Richard Danzig et al and the Center for New American Security at all.
When looking at the Breivik slaughter, Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo aren’t the best match. There are no particular lessons here unless one takes the broadest strokes, that crazy and violent people sometimes but not often succeed spectacularly and that Aum Shinrikyo operated for a long time with Japanese authorities failing to act.
Neither of these are unique in the annals of terrorism. Really bad stuff happens and not very often. But when it does people are invariably taken by surprise even if in post-analysis it looks like they shouldn’t have been. To err is part of the human condition. Nothing can change it.
By the end of day [of Shinrikyo’s second attack], 15 subway stations in the world’s busiest subway system had been affected. Of these, stations along the Hbiya line were the most heavily affected, some with as many as 300 to 400 persons involved. The number injured in the attacks was just under 3,800. Of those, nearly 1,000 actually required hospitalization—some for no more than a few hours, some for many days. A very few are still hospitalized. And 12 people were dead.
Instead of using the Norway attack, instant worldwide news, as a convenience, the parties involved might have shown the good grace not to work it so.
As it stands, the Ignatius piece is noticeable for being flinch-worthy in its audacity. And for being a minor example/lesson on how people parked at national security think tanks view stuff.
James K. Galbraith, author of the book — The Predator State — I reread multiple times a couple years ago has a web piece. It speaks about the nihilist mania of those now trying to bring down the US government through a default.
Galbraith makes understanding this intellectual anti-matter — the alleged Constitutional-loving Tea Party/GOP hard at work violating the Constitution which guarantees the US absolutely must not renege on its debts — simple.
What is going on in Congress at this moment already violates that mandate. It is an effort to subvert the authority of the government to meet and therefore to incur obligations of every possible stripe. It is an attack on the concept of government itself – as the “Tea Party??? by its very name would no doubt agree.
It therefore paints those deficit hawks who are using the debt ceiling to take budget hostages as enemies of the United States Constitution.
He explains who are the predators. Naturally, these are the people featured in his book — “resource magnates, media magnates, banking magnates.”
The others are those who become the legion, often featured in this blog as the ammo-gold-and-pemmican crowd.
“Others have blinded themselves to the role government actually plays in sustaining the advanced networks, human protections and social systems that make up our lives, and imagine that one can go back to the world of subsistence farming, church charity and credit from the corner store,” he writes.
Finally, Galbraith serves up some criticism for the phonies abetting all this in the mainstream media. He singles out Howard Kurtz as an example:
Howard Kurtz wrote in optimistic terms of the prospects for a deficit bargain: “But away from the cameras, even sharp-tongued politicians recognize the imperative of avoiding the fate of Greece. It is a sign of the times that the Kabuki players of Washington may take a bow simply for averting catastrophe.???
Kurtz did not say that the big Kabuki here was his own notion that somehow the United States might face the fate of Greece – a small and overmatched member of a currency zone it cannot control. He did not say that the catastrophe he fears – a default on US government obligations – was entirely the product of treacherous politics, abetted by an irresolute President who seems not to grasp the danger of allowing the Constitution to fail.
Galbraith makes it clear the President absolutely must raise the debt ceiling.
Obama and the Socialist Democrats have brought us into a different era. We are no longer a unified people. We no longer have a government that is for all the people, only the select few, decided by Obama, a community organizer. When he was a community organizer in Chicago, he was for helping blacks only and that was to get votes for Democrats only. There is nothing more divisive then that. It’s class warfare at it’s best! It’s obvious to reasonable people, that he hates the rich and successful. That would include most all of business, large and small. He believes in penalizing instead of rewarding success and he does it by wanting to take from them and give it to the least successful.
A couple of days ago it was impeach the president because he faked his birth certificate stuff.
This is only important in terms of two things. First, as undiluted bigoted poison, a characteristic described yesterday by Hal Crowther at The Populist, referenced here:
The election of a non-white president has brought out the worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or that their worst was so awful?
Second, Randy Toman’s blog isn’t without a social cost. It’s provided a slate for the views of a guy now running for the school board of the Bethlehem School District in Pennsylvania.
And the views and opinions on the blog show the practice of publishing free speech. But it also shows he’s totally unfit for any political position which has influence over the educational environment of children.
However, extremists get elected in the US. It happens when the mainstream press refuses to do its job and the people who vote go into booths blind about the beliefs and values of those whose names are on the ballots.
That’s the sophisticated insult, one among many, written into “Ayn Rand: The Right’s Weirdest Idol of All,” an essay by Hal Crowther at Populist.com here.
Crowther points out that Fabian, among other bad examples, did have an audience once. And it’s part of a personal reflection on Rand and GOP/Tea Party idolatry of her.
Crowther’s description of Rand’s arrival at his boarding school many years ago is spectacularly painful:
Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.
What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.
The description follows a preamble on the current Republican party, made even harder hitting by the current backdrop of of Dem politicians, including the President, scurrying to appease them just so the country won’t be forced into default. (The very latest, New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, cringing on MSNBC whilst making a plea for the GOP to say “yes.” Sniveling is not too strong a word for his behavior.)
Crowther writes:
Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when “conservatives??? fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo’s holster? I’ve reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I’ve never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner. The election of a non-white president has brought out the worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or that their worst was so awful?
“Any political party that pretends to integrate [Christianity and belief in Rand’s ‘wolverine capitalism’ is] a party of liars, and doomed,” he concludes.
But before that happens they’re determined to take everyone else down with them.
The Tea Party and GOP exhibit all the traits of an extremist cult. This isn’t much of a surprise if you’ve read DD blog, or even the old Crypt Newsletter.
One perfect example has been the mainstreaming of Ted Nugent.
There’s nothing reasonable or sane about him but he was perfectly fit just to be hard rock guitarist. However, he’s totally unfit for public discourse or informing about what might be good government and national policy in a reasonable society.
However, the latter is now one of his regular money gigs. Nugent is more famous as an irrational extremist portrayed as a normal, if slightly more colorful than usual, pundit.
[There] is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.
You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will …
And yes, I think this is a moral issue.
Yesterday, Krugman called John Boehner’s counter-Obama speech “vile.”
That’s a word one can usually use to describe all cults as well as their principals.
An idle mind is the devil’s playground. That’s a flip way to describe the recent intersection of stupid Dept. of Justice lawyers and the continuing mainstream media interest in anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins. Throw in the mythology surrounding the dead man’s case. It will never die. Stir vigorously.
So the latest new skin mole with hair growing out of it comes courtesy of civil case lawyers at the Dept. of Justice, legal men apparently not really up on the fine details of what the FBI’s arguments were against the man. But dead set on trying to find a reason to explain why the US government not be found liable in the death of Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim.
Once they had botched their case by filing materials in it incongruent with the FBI’s findings, they “rushed to correct [these things],” reported Scott Shane of the New York Times.
Lawyers for the department’s civil division wrote in the July 15 filing that the Army’s biodefense center at Fort Detrick, Md., “did not have the specialized equipment in a containment laboratory that would be required to prepare the dried spore preparations that were used in the letters.???
But on Tuesday, the department sent the court a list of corrections to its documents in the Florida lawsuit, filed by the family of Robert Stevens, a tabloid photo editor and one of five people killed in the anthrax attacks. What the filing should have said, the department wrote, was that while the Army lab did not have a lyophilizer, a freeze-drying machine, in the space where Dr. Ivins usually worked, there was a lyophilizer and other equipment in the building that he could have used to dry the anthrax into powder.
This news set off the cult of anthrax denial, a small but rather loud and partially effective group of conspiracy theorists working continuously to exonerate Ivins.
A month ago, it was weaponization and the alleged use of silicon in mailed anthrax preparations. This, it was said, proved Ivins could not have done it. All picked up by the McClatchy new service.
And, again via McClatchy, the current news of stumblebum DoJ lawyers who readers can presume were quite loudly read the riot act behind closed doors over their initial filing in the Stevens imbroglio. In addition to having thrown away the case through professional incompetence, they may have also quietly flushed their jobs down the toilet once this particular moment is over.
In the mainstream press, the news post-Ivins suicide now revolves around publicizing what are minor mistakes and inconsistencies in the FBI case. They rely on a well-earned suspicion of the government and the simple fact that editors and lay readers now simply can’t remember all the fine details of the FBI’s lay out against Ivins.
The arguments spring from the fertile earth of paranoid assumption that everyone at the FBI was incompetent. And that various small holes and misinterpretations of difficult to understand science found because the case was not 100 percent air tight forensically exonerate the man.
Except it never quite happens. Is there some blockbuster item as yet unpublished that will destroy the FBI’s case? Perhaps, but I doubt it.
Anyway, it has not yet been unearthed. In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The FBI largely appeared to fill that requirement. The critics of it, as of yet, haven’t really.
And no amount of publishing in the mainstream press, essentially just nibbling around the edges, will re-open the case barring that.
The mythology will continue. And the next item bubbling under is that some consultant who furnished psychological testimony on Ivins to the FBI relied on a person now being painted as a crackpot.
My feelings for this man are based on true facts. Here is a man raised by avowed communist/socialist, America-hating parents; surrounded by avowed socialist/communist America-hating terrorists like Bill Ayers; attending an America-hating church; being preached to and married by a vicious, America-hating maniac; implementing proven economy- and America-destroying fundamental transformation policies; promising to cause our energy costs to skyrocket; and following the (Richard) Cloward/(Frances) Piven playbook on how to take down America. I’ll tell you what I think of people like the president. I am convinced he is the enemy of America, the enemy of freedom and the enemy of our Constitution. He is a bad, evil, rotten human being.
Your take on the tea party?
The tea party is pure America good. It is blatantly obvious that the tea party movement is a long-overdue return to We the People taking back our country from power-abusing, corrupt, unaccountable bureaucrats that have clearly lost their way. The tea party may be America’s only hope.
I am surrounded by the nicest, hardest-working, most intensely dedicated, productive human beings on earth. These Americans will simply not let the Mao Tse Tung fan club complete its disastrous fundamental transformation of the greatest quality-of-life country in the history of mankind. I still believe that the good people of America still outnumber the slovenly, gluttonous crybabies that support another shot at communism by Obama and his gang of America haters.
With little variation in tempo or style, a few artistic lulls were inevitable. The worst moments came during “I Still Believe.??? It sounded like an intentional parody of an ill-conceived patriotic song.
Unfortunately, Nugent wasn’t joking. A couple of dodgy songs weren’t enough to sink the set. Sung by original vocalist Derek St. Holmes, “Hey Baby,??? the evening’s sole nod to pop music, was the night’s most rewarding song.
When St. Holmes wasn’t acting as the lead vocalist, Nugent peppered most songs with interjections and asides. While initially amusing, Nugent’s constant chatter had lost much of its appeal by the end of the show.
He resembled a profane preacher … And when he repeatedly referred to himself as “Uncle Ted,??? Nugent’s tone suggested a deranged host of a children’s TV program.
Nugent’s political commentary was limited but venomous.
Hunters across the country routinely dump their woes on him regarding overregulation and wildlife officer harassment, he said.
Maybe that’s a product of the hunters he attracts with his love for baiting and whacking and stacking large numbers of critters and slinging lead with semiauto and even automatic weapons.
In my hunting camp, we hoist a toast at the end of the rare day when we get checked by a wildlife enforcement officer. We play by the rules and we wish more officers were in the field making sure other hunters are doing the same.
During the Fred Bear song in his concert, The Nuge is featured in a video skewering about a dozen whitetail bucks with arrows, pumping his arms in victory and screaming with joy after each one.
“I’m an entertainer,” he said, explaining why he should be excused for his hyperbole …
“I rock and roll all summer long,” he screams to his concert crowds.
“The rest of the year I just kill (rhymes with fit).”
Infrequently I return to Randy Toman, the ol’ Tea Party blogger at the Lehigh Valley Conservative.
He’s the Pennsy ex-union anti-union goldbug, equipped with the Bible and scripture, judging and shaking his head at all the heathens ruining America.
Normally, this wouldn’t matter.
But Toman is running for school board in Bethlehem School District. And his views make him totally unfit for any elected office, particularly any one involved in shaping the environment in which children are educated.
Anybody that has read anything about the school districts around the country knows the gathering of students to pray or discuss God and Christianity are discouraged, challenged and shut down from happening.
The attempt to teach creationism or intelligent design will close a school district down and bring out the Darwin supporters along with the ACLU.
The extremists get elected when the local media — in the Lehigh Valley, two fairly bad newspapers, The Morning Call and the Easton Express — fall down on the job and neglect to inform people on what the names on the local ballots really believe in.
