archived: 24 - 30 Sep, 2006 Back Next
GEORGE BROOKS
“RUN THIS”
The Republicans have given us a host of issues; the problem is how you communicate them to the public.
As we have experienced the corporate mainstream media is little hope, and who reads anyhow. A blunt message must be communicated in a form that our busy, disinterested, clueless and misinformed voting public can understand.
Everyone planning to vote for change should have stickers on their car bumpers and rear window that highlight the Bush administration’s incompetence and the disastrous direction it is taking America.
This is obviously not an original idea, but how else can you force a message down people’s throats, other than to post it where they can’t miss seeing it, driving behind someone in traffic. I have three on the upper part of my rear window.
“Bush spent your Social
Security on his war”
“We are being Lied to”
“If you are not outraged, you aren’t paying attention.”
At about $4 each, it’s cheap advertising and reaches hundreds, thousands of people who have plenty of time to ponder the meaning. If the gas station is on their list of stops, any negative Bush/Republican message will hit home.
The Dems must stir paranoia that people are being screwed. All three of the above do just that. If people see enough cars with stickers, they will conclude a groundswell for change is afoot.
I got my stickers at:
BUMPER ART
and
CAFÉ PRESS
ONE READER
“WHY”
I cannot understand why I don't see mention of the Project for New American Century (PNAC) in the Political Junkies or national newspaper/magazine press. This is the drummer the Bush admin marches to. Its ranks are loaded with PNAC people starting with VP Cheney. Their goal is world military and economic domination. Iraq, Iran, Syria, and N. Korea are its targets.
______
Junkie: We appreciate the inquiry which raises several points about TPJ.
First, TPJ has a SEARCH function on our side tab bar that is powered by Google. Most of our back issues to 2003 are searchable by key word(s).
Second, TPJ has run over 100 articles covering PNAC. Junkie Editor Michael Carmichael deserves substantial credit.
Carmichael started writing about the war plans of the PNAC when TPJ was an email newsletter service before launching as a web zine in March 2003. He was one of the early voices to initiate a serious discussion of PNAC’s role in Bush’s foreign policy. Dr. Steven Jonas, who joined TPJ as a Contributing Author in February 2004, has been equally committed in exposing PNAC’s influence on American policy, particularly the abridgement of cherished constitutional principles.
Carmichael’s early articles provoked stormy responses from Republicans and many Democrats. We believed that the body of evidence clearly supported Carmichael’s work. TPJ remained committed to making the case that Bush was fabricating the reasons for war in Iraq to implement the imperial policy designs of PNAC. Many of Carmichael and Dr. Jonas’ articles are being republished by other web sites in the United States and internationally.
The two major articles below represent some of the finest original works that Carmichael has produced for TPJ on the subject of PNAC. Both are well worth reading in their entirety.
“A STUNNING CONCATENATION OF EVIDENCE” (2004) remains one of the most brilliant analysis of Bush’s war in Iraq as implementing PNAC designs. Carmichael wrote: “The events leading up to 9/11 represent a stunning concatenation of criminal negligence, dereliction of duty - or something worse, potentially much worse, a premeditated search for a New Pearl Harbor predicated on the Project for a New American Century. The visionary right-wing agenda designed by William Kristol required a triggering event that he likened to "a new Pearl Harbor" designed to catapult America headlong into a fundamental reorientation of its social, political, constitutional and military cultures.”
“THE ANTI-AMERICAN CENTURY” (2005) is a stunning sweep of Carmichael’s precise vision of the consequences emerging from the interplay between the Republican Party and PNAC. He wrote:
PNAC is a Washington think tank established by the leading lights of neoconservativism: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Jeb Bush and Paul Wolfowitz. The ideological core of PNAC is defined in their highly publicized paper, “Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century,” which was published in September, 2000. The goals of PNAC are stark:
Establish a global American empire,
Secure it with military bases arrayed in an arc from Europe through the Middle East to South East Asia,
Under the banner of “modernization” launch an extravagantly expensive new arms race,
Develop the ultra-costly Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) known as ‘Star Wars’,
Weaponize outer space by placing nuclear bombs in orbit,
Control cyber space and all information on the internet and the traditional media by fiat from the White House,
In order to bankrupt all entitlement programs, increase defense spending to dizzyingly higher levels.
There are other, even more ominous elements to the PNAC agenda. One of the most troubling is for America to, “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.” Planning for the next major theater war against Iran is in a very advanced stage. Yet another is their declared longing for a catastrophic, “new Pearl Harbor,” which would function as a triggering event to accelerate the radicalization of America into an imperialistic superpower dedicated to the realization of neoconservativism. Coincidentally, 9/11 served as that triggering event. From the standpoint of the neoconservatives, another major terrorist atrocity on American soil would accelerate the process of radical transformation that they have advocated in print since 2000.
Today, the neoconservative agenda has been in power for more than four years. In that relatively short span of time it has wrought major changes in US policies. The media have been subjugated to the whims of the neoconservative national security agenda driving the Bush White House.
This subordination of the media is seen as a distasteful but necessary by-product of the war on terror. In the course of the transformation, the American people have been keenly attuned to the most finite nuances of terror. In effect, the American people have been brain-washed en masse into fearing for their very existence. The notorious system of Terror Alerts was designed to create Pavlovian responses in the American people on demand whenever it is deemed politically desirable to give them a massive injection of fear. Programmed to sweat bullets, bullied into genuflecting before every military and police uniform, goaded into braying for the blood of each and every demonic enemy of the American State, a solid cadre of circa 20% of the US population are now cowed into submission. These highly responsive neoconservative cadres are deeply devoted to their new roles as sponsors, supporters and slaves to the rhythm of terror and its neoconservative agenda.
In the process of transformation into a radicalized neoconservative society, America has sacrificed her commitment to fair and open elections. Technology has played a part in the disintegration of America’s political legitimacy. The introduction of paperless, computerized voting machines in the mid-1990s was the telltale symptom of what has become the eradication of America’s self-image as the gold standard of democracy.
On Saturday, a group of 300,000 Iraqis rallied in Baghdad’s Firdaus Square to denounce the American occupation. Carrying effigies of Saddam Hussein, George Bush and Tony Blair the largest public demonstration in the history of Iraq demanded the immediate withdrawal of all US forces and the return of full sovereignty and temporal power to the people. While the neoconservative bilge is being eagerly swallowed at home, it is being repudiated abroad.
The neoconservatives never realized that their design for a new American century based on oil, imperialism and military hegemony would actually result in the swift globalization of anti-Americanism.
If the global economy continues on its present course, in a few years time, we shall all have to learn to read and write and speak Chinese fluently in order to find jobs above the poverty level. The world has decided that it does not want the New American Century on offer from the neoconservatives. When will American voters wake up to the reality that they have helped to launch an Anti-American Century?
Dr. Steven Jonas has approached the issue of PNAC’s influence on the Democratic Party’s as a part of his call for our Party to base its existence on preserving constitutional democracy in the United States. "IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, II: WHY DON’T THE DEMOCRATS?” is a withering principled critique on the DLC by Dr. Jonas. He calls for the Democratic Party to abandon the DLC’s centrist policy stands as an appeasement to PNAC’s anti-constitutional principles. He wrote:
[O]n whether we should actually have a Constitutional Democracy or a government by “Unitary Executive” (read dictatorship) running the country, the biggest difference between the Georgite Republican Party and the traditional Democratic Party in fact is over the role of government. The Georgite Republicans, as I have written in this space many times, want to, in the immortal words of Grover Norquist referring to all the kinds of governmental functions called for by the Preamble to the Constitution, “shrink government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bath tub.” The DLC’s only President, Bill Clinton, functionally agreed with this view, as he said, although he would not use Norquist’s rhetoric. Traditional Democrats beg to differ. We look to the Constitution and its Preamble*, which sets forth a broad and strong role for the Federal government in running the affairs of the nation as a whole.
And so, we currently face this divide in the country, on Constitutional government to begin with, then on the role of government, then on the Iraq War, then on the drive to divide and conquer with homophobia, misogyny, racism, and etc. The DLC surely does not endorse extreme Georgite positions on all of these matters. But they consistently try to find a “middle ground,” as on abortion rights, where there clearly is none. On foreign policy for example, the DLC has just come out with a book entitled With All Our Might. Our colleague Michael Carmichael has said of it: “Nowhere does the DLC volume present a serious critique of Bush administration foreign policy failures. Quite the contrary, the authors would have the Democratic Party default to the PNAC (Project for the New American Century, read ‘neo-con’) positions on virtually every point of defense, military and foreign policy.” Further, according to Michael, the authors of the book spend a lot more time attacking fellow Democrats than they do attacking the Georgites.
Once again, on the War, on global warming, on other ravagings of the environment, health care, education, civil rights, civil wrongs, sexuality rights, on the nature of the Republican Party itself, in the context that Bush’s poll ratings are in the toilet, the question is asked “Why Don’t the Democrats?” The first answer is because there is no THE Democrats. The Party is obviously split, and I am hardly the first observer to come to that conclusion. The question then is obviously “what do we do now?” I will be getting to a consideration of that one in future columns in this series. But let me conclude this one with the briefest examinations of why this is so. Why does the DLC do what it does? Are they stupid, or abstruse, or just plain shortsighted? In my view none of the above.
First and most important, they actually like many of the Georgite polices, especially in the economic and military and even foreign policy arenas. Why? As David Sirota says in his new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, (quoting here from the BuzzFlash promo for the book), “If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. . . . the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.”
Next the DLC seems to really believe, despite what the polls tell them, that there is some vast electoral middle out there when it comes to Georgite policy and plans for the country. Third they focus on how they think the Democratic Party can win electorally using this issue or that, not using that other issue or this, rather than first on why the Democratic Party should win, then going on to the “how.” Certain leading DLCers are actually saying “gee, maybe it would be better if we lost the mid-term elections so that we would have a better chance of winning (electorally) in 2008,” ignoring what further substantive harms will come to country and Constitutional government under another two years of total control of the Federal government by the Republican Religious Right and the Georgites.
If TPJ’s response to the reader’s comment seems overly immodest, it stems from our pride in the hard and often unpopular work that Carmichael and Dr. Jonas have rendered to rebuild a Democratic Party that will keep our nation secure, play a responsible role in fostering the advance of true democratic principles and preserve the constitutional liberty of America’s citizens.
Both are among the most talented and forward thinkers in the Democratic Party today. They are gaining recognition far beyond their works in TPJ. Carmichael now has a wonderful web site in Europe, Planetary Movement, which is gaining increasing international attention. Carmichael’s works also regularly appear in Bush Watch. Dr. Jonas is now a regular and featured contributor to Buzz Flash.
Last Update: 09/30/2006