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Posted on 01/11/2004 1:45:15 AM PST by disturbed
Edited on 01/11/2004 1:55:15 AM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
WASHINGTON — Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons and we're certainly seeing it with the Bushes. Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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There is no evidence to suggest that the events of Sept. 11 could have been prevented or discovered ahead of time had someone other than a Bush been president.
What he meant:
"There is no evidence to suggest that the events of Sept. 11 could have been prevented or discovered ahead of time had someone other than a Bush been president ... but I'm going to write this in a manner that makes it so that you can't help but to believe that Bush was remotely piloting all four 9-11 planes from the oval office while on conference call with Osama Bin Laden."
Kevin Phillips is not a Republican. He's an apostate conservative. Yawn.
But to the thread at hand. I was actually going to post something about this book myself after I saw it for the first time Thursday night. It is really a pounding.
Kevin Phillips is the well known stategist for Nixon, some would even say his Karl Rove. He wrote The Emerging Republican Majority and The Cousins War.
Like many old style Republicans of the sixties, he was what passed for a learned conservative.
However, Reagan was not his man...he dispaired of an actor and an interloper to the Washington scence it appears. He has become more, and more a critic of conservatism that the media loves to play as a conservative, critical of conservatives.
He wrote The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath another weighty analysis. The new book on Bush is not a Molly Ivans screed of something that can be dismissed that easily.
It is far from consiratorial, but instead is a well documented history of Bush's antecedents and then an assignment of motives that are fairly, McCain style, damning from my quick skimming of some chapters.
To give you a sense of the man, lets jump into an interview with Bill Moyers, the PBS icon where Kevin is answering a question:
KEVIN PHILLIPS: I think partly because they're so interested in raising money that they can't see their soul in the mirror.So you see, a fellow that obviously read Burke, and knows how foundational Equality of Opportunity is in preserving Equality Before the Law, downplaying its foundational Whig heritage and making it a Beard driven economic analysis that the ecomonic basis of conservatism is the true root of all its thinking.BILL MOYERS: What has happened to the word equality? When you and I were young men in politics it was a common reference in our political discourse. Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, a lot of others too, but you don't hear it in the political lexicon anymore.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: You hear it in twisted ways. There is a view in some conservative circles that it doesn't matter much what concentrations of wealth you have or disparities of income. It's equality of consumption. It's the right to have Nike shoes, to listen to a boom box, to take a plane ride. And ...
BILL MOYERS: Nothing wrong with that.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, no, but on the other hand, that didn't solve problems in a depression when you had the right to watch a plane fly over Kansas. Or turn on the radio. So you've got these different ledgers that are kept. And people that try to say "consumption is the yardstick" usually have it in mind that democracy is not ... that income differentials are not, they stand for a different philosophy.
BILL MOYERS: Didn't the word "equality" disappear because the people who believe in inequality won the elections?
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Well, there's a certain truth to that. And going back to the time when we were both in politics on different sides of the aisle, the ... one of the great weaknesses, in my opinion, in liberal politics, was to start talking about social equality in a way that had never really occurred in the United States. People came to this country as immigrants and they ... they suffered all kinds of hardships and "no Irish need apply" and everything you could name. Nobody ever tried to draw blueprints for bussing the Irish around Boston ...
BILL MOYERS: Mm-hm.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: ... or things like that. And there was a sense that equality in the social sense could be obtained through government, that became powerful in the '60s. And in my opinion, that was the beginning of the tending of the idea of equality in the sense of ... of economics. Now, conservatives will still say all that matters is equality of opportunity.
BILL MOYERS: The market will produce the equality.
KEVIN PHILLIPS: Yes, exactly.
This book will influence persons that the Ivans, Carville and similar idiot crowd would never touch.
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