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The Eve of Destruction: Bush will stop at nothing until everybody and everything is ruined forever!
Village Voice ^ | January 18th, 2005 2:37 PM | Rick Perlstein

Posted on 01/19/2005 8:38:58 AM PST by dead

You might wonder—were you someone unfamiliar with or in denial about the ways of the Karl Rove Mafia—how George W. Bush could blunder into nominating someone as attorney general so obviously implicated in the most legally questionable and morally indefensible practices of his administration. You might wonder, too, how the administration seemed to be caught unawares by the bottomless pit of scandal in the past of its initial nominee for Homeland Security secretary.

Or you could realize that such nominations were not blunders, but intentional: that they were made not in spite of Alberto Gonzales's and Bernard Kerik's unsuitability for high office but precisely because of them. Keeping embarrassing facts on file about confederates is the best way to grip them into loyalty like a vise.

It would seem an incredible notion to contemplate, until you examine who it was Bush chose to replace Kerik once his nomination fell through: Michael Chertoff, who as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's criminal division engineered the plan to preventively detain immigrants of Arab descent after 9-11. In 2003, the Justice Department's own inspector general warned that the program raises serious legal liability questions, and Justice Department officials apparently recommended that Chertoff hire a lawyer. Now he's been promoted. Sopranos fans will recognize the maneuver: Taking someone with skeletons in his closet close to your breast is just like Tony's embrace of the apparently upstanding suburban New Jersey sporting goods dealer with the secret gambling addiction, specifically to have someone to pick clean when the necessity arose.

Forcing a guy who knows he's dirty but knows his bosses are dirtier to sweat out a congressional hearing is a perfect way to test his loyalty. It's also a great way to test Congress's mettle—to probe just how atrophied the opposition party's willingness to oppose has become. What's more, once you've got them through the ordeal, you've stockpiled one more scapegoat to toss into the fire in case Congress ever gets hot on the trail of the higher-ups who issued the orders. And it establishes a record for a future defense: Once Congress has confirmed a Gonzales or a Chertoff, how can it then turn around and call the things done by a Gonzales or a Chertoff unlawful?

Then there's the implicit dare, which frames the issue in the administration's favor whether they "win" or "lose" the proximate fight: Go ahead, Democrats, make our day. Vote against them. Then we can show you up as the obstructionists to America's national security you are.

The administration may even have made plans for when the bottom drops out—for when the inevitable indictable offenses see the light of day. That's where Alberto Gonzales, White House über-loyalist, comes in. Formally, any investigation of a federal criminal offense is conducted by the Justice Department, and no indictment can go forward without Gonzales's say-so. Under the old set of rules, we might have been able to count on political pressure to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, as occurred in the investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media. But that's exactly the set of rules this gang has set its sights on upending.

Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, welcome to the Next Four Years: to George Walker Bush's revolutionary second term, where nothing is done by accident, and no sin can be too brazen.

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"For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win . . . "

That phrase is a gun, and it's smoking. Written by Karl Rove deputy Peter Wehner in a leaked memo, it establishes as intention what administration officials have heretofore been most eager to cover up. What the Republican Party failed to do 60 years ago is to stop any federal program of guaranteed old-age insurance from existing. Social Security established a principle unacceptable to many Republicans: that government economic programs help people, and can become wildly popular. Now, however, Wehner writes, "We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government. . . . We can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of our country."

The smoking gun isn't pointed just at your grandmother.

When Americans have at a minimum almost a third of their retirement contribution in corporate investments—we now send 6.2 percent of our income to Social Security, and Bush's plan would have us putting four of those 6.2 points into the stock market—we will all be part of, in the apparently benign coinage of Republican propagandist Grover Norquist, the "investor class."

Blogger Nick Stoller describes the consequences thus:

"When someone like Eliot Spitzer uncovers a major corporate scandal, a Republican will be able to say, 'He's attacking your retirement fund.'

"When the employees of a company try to unionize, a Republican will be able to say, 'They are attacking your retirement fund.' " (He will also be able to say they are attacking their own retirement fund.)

"When a community refuses to let a Wal-Mart build in their neighborhood, a Republican will be able to say, 'They're attacking your retirement fund.' "

Environmental regulations will be framed as an attack on your retirement fund. Liability law, too. Corporate taxes, certainly. Maybe even, someday, child labor laws (that's the brazenness: Conservatives never shy from putting forth agendas that seemed unimaginable a year ago). People will presume it is in their interest for the companies in which they hold a temporary position to goose their stock no matter the long-term cost to the corporation, to our institutions, to society as a whole—no matter the long-term cost for all the other classes we belong to, as consumers, as workers, as citizens. All but a tiny group of big-ticket investors would benefit far more on a net basis, as they do now, from the maintenance of a strong welfare state. No matter: The propaganda may prove irresistible.

Breaking Social Security is central to passing Bush's "tax reforms," which will remove taxes on investment income and shift the tax burden to wage earners who can't afford to save any money—thereby creating newly outraged tax-hating constituencies bent on decimating government's legitimacy yet further. Absent unrelenting Democratic resistance, in fact, the next four years will establish the leverage to fulfill another of Grover Norquist's coinages: to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

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That's just how the Bushies do things: They plan. Every action is calculated to set in motion a cascade of consequences, to change the world. Take "No Child Left Behind," the education "reform" so brilliantly named you can't be against it without betraying some perverse desire to, well, leave children behind. It is a stone hustle, meant to lay the groundwork to destroy the entire American public school system.

Look at it this way. You've heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the one that produces those anguished news reports every four years about all the countries American schoolchildren lag behind in basic skills. But according to the TIMSS, if Minnesota were a country, it would have the second-best science scores and the seventh best in math. By No Child Left Behind's statutorily required benchmarks of "Adequate Yearly Progress," however, only 42 percent of Minnesota fourth-graders were proficient in math. And NCLB's test targets increase every year. So by one estimate, in 2014, some 80 percent of the schools in Minnesota's world-class education system will be rated "failures."

The benchmarks are insane, you see. If one group within a school out of the 37 categories NCLB measures "fails," the entire school does. Which means, according to the president of the American Educational Research Association, 12th-graders should be proficient in math in exactly 166 years.

Which serves the administration's purpose admirably. Failure, glorious failure: In Chicago, the city must now offer 200,000 students the chance to move out of "failed" schools—but there are only 500 spaces in which to place them elsewhere. So now the public school system must be destroyed.

It's only politics. It was the first George Bush who tried to initiate the privatization of American education but failed; in 2000, Michigan and California pro-voucher ballot initiatives lost by at least two to one. But that was back when 43 percent of American parents gave their children's schools a grade of "A" or "B." By 2004, that number was cut in half. "The tests mandated by NCLB had ripped back the curtain and exposed a major national problem," explains Phyllis Schlafly—even, apparently, in noble Minnesota.

The money has already begun changing hands. "Classroom methods long believed to work are tossed out in favor of those that a few selected groups have tested and approved," The Nation recently reported in a story buried—it's hard to get people to pay attention—on the magazine's website. Bush's multibillion-dollar reading grants, the weekly found, are doled out by "a panel that includes many people with ties to various commercial curriculums."

Public education "is an ossified government monopoly," explains conservative intellectual Chester Finn. So it is time to drown it in the bathtub.

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The fantasy of total control has emerged as central to the Bush administration imagination. It comes out in the unguarded utterances: the aide who blurts to a New York Times reporter that he was just one more sad-sack member of the "reality-based community." ("That's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.") The president demanding during the Iraq debate to congressional leaders, "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." A White House aide, to a congregation of Pentecostal ministers, the "current government is engaged in cultural, economic, and social struggle on every level."

It shows up in the tautological narcissism of Bush's National Security Strategy document, which actually uses the phrase "the best defense is a good offense," and artfully constructs a vision in which whatever the United States does to preserve its interest is always already "peaceful," even when it requires war, is always already "democratic," even when it requires installing governments by fiat, is always already selfless, even as it establishes only two categories of states, those who cooperate and those who do not, in a situation of crisis defined unilaterally and whose time horizon stretches to infinity.

"In the new world we have entered," it avers, "the only path to peace and security is the path of action." The manifesto takes on ominous overtones when read alongside the famous post-9-11 draft Pentagon report that establishes a royalist conception of "sweeping" executive power as the only way to keep us safe: because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action to characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

"Unity in Purpose, Energy in Action"—more than one commentator has noted its resemblance to slogans of fascist movements throughout history.

And of course out of fantasies of perfect control have always sprung the world's greatest human catastrophes. There will always be things even the most energetic executive cannot come even close to controlling. Conservatives used to warn us about the dangers of such utopianism—of the unintended consequences of hubristic attempts to "socially engineer" brave new worlds conjured in the heads of liberal intellectuals. Now Americans are once again learning that lesson, but the perpetrators are . . . conservatives.

And their utopia, heaven help them, is Iraq.

What comes next there? For the subject who fantasizes total control, chaos is only an injunction to more radically confident maneuvers that enlarge the struggle for control. As always, the parallel is Vietnam. "The administration's reluctance to recognize the Iraqi resistance as largely homegrown pushes it to exaggerate the role of foreign terrorists, to blame anti-American feeling on meddlers from abroad," which spells expansion of the conflict into Syria and Iran, according to Thomas Powers in The New York Review of Books. A "radical map change," he convincingly speculates, this American encirclement of the world's productive oil resources could unify all our present allies against us in a conflict that "might last fifty years."

The next four years? Anticipate another possible terrorist attack, certainly. Tommy Thompson, leaving his post as secretary of Health and Human Services, used his newfound freedom to wonder aloud why his bosses hadn't done anything to prevent an attack on "our food supply, because it's so easy to do." The EPA said an attack on any of 123 chemical plants would threaten over a million people—then the Department of Homeland Security took over the job, changed the measurements, and found that only two would do that. The chemical industry gives a hell of a lot of money to the Republicans.

Although the wholesale collapse of the American economy would be worse. Nikita Khrushchev used to call the divided city of Berlin, because of its military strategic value, "the testicles of the West," which he only need squeeze to make America scream. Now the testicles of the U.S. are the billions of dollars of American currency held in reserve by countries that do not necessarily wish us well, like China—in effect, it's the money we borrow to keep our economy afloat. China is one of those countries that would likely object to our encirclement of the world's petroleum supplies. Soon enough, China's oil demand will approach our own. If Beijing chooses to call in its loans to us and make the dollar a worthless currency, sensible folks might be looking for someone to impeach. Would Bush's kept Congress be able to do the job?

At that pass, reflects John Dean, Richard Nixon's legal counsel, who served time for Watergate, "only the attorney general can select a special counsel to prosecute." Which takes us back to the beginning, and last week's hearings. "As attorney general," Dean says, "Gonzales can resist any and all efforts to prosecute high officials of the Bush administration, absent photographs of Dick Cheney choking Condi Rice and dangling her off the Memorial Bridge for messing with his policies."

Welcome to the eve of destruction.


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To: dead
They had the media and academia on their side, so how could they fail? But new media has risen up....

INFORMATION IS POWER !!! And in 2004 the MSM and the democrats with them went over the cliff.
The Soros' millions, the Bush bashing book of the month, the Rather machinations along with the daily drumbeat of negativity from the NYT...all in vain ...THE POWER WAS GONE.

It's gone and it's gone forever. Indeed, if you are a liberal like this idiot, there is no explanation for your crumbling power base than a superior conspiracy. Time to PANIC,weenie!
101 posted on 01/19/2005 6:09:18 PM PST by UltraKonservativen (( YOU CAN'T FIX STUPID ))
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To: dead

>This whole article is just a junior league, DU-soaked paranoid screed<

Are you sure you don't mean "The League of Women Voters"?

Yesterday I composed the following:

Sorry, fellow FReepers, but I've yet to see any sign than our president will deliver on any of his promises, other than continued open borders, and favoritism for illegal immigrants which American citizens are so against. I sincerely pray that I am entirely mistaken about this. Sadly, I cannot but believe my "lying eyes".

Now his appointee to the AG, Gonzales caves to the gunbanese. Frist caves to the judiciary. Unfortunately, if the Illinois GOP can be infiltrated by the far left, why should anyone be shocked that many of our Republicans in Washington DC have also sold their souls to the Socialists? I have been a conservative Republican registered voter since 1952, and have sadly watched the drift to the left of that august party.

I realize GWB has yet to be inaugurated, but I question his naivety on Russia and China, not to speak of France. Wishy-washy isn't going to cut it in the world today. It really never has. Let us hope the President is only wearing a velvet glove over an iron hand. The other guys are playing bloody down, ddirty and for keeps. Be wary, Mr. President.

In the campaign for relection, his devoted supporters, you and me, with stars in our eyes, slaved, prayed and payed to elect him over the disingenuous "war hero"-Communist, John Kerry, thinking we have saved the nation. We were, and are, celebrating the election of a true patriot. I pray with everything within me that we have done just that.
But consider the following.

GWB now has a free hand. He doesn't have to answer to anyone again because he cannot serve a third term (at this point in time). The mandate he claims may not be the one we gave him, but one those behind the scenes may have scripted for him. We look hopefully for signs that he will do what is truly best for our great Republic. We look to him to select Federal judges who will adhere to the Constitution, not enact laws from the bench; that he will work toward banishing abortion, and that our borders will be at last secured. The months ahead will tell the tale.


A HIDEOUS SCENARIO:

Good looking, God fearing GWB is chosen by those behind the scenes to run and be elected in order to ensure a smooth transition to the New World Order down the line. During his first term GWB charms us, increasing the ranks behind him.

On 9-11-01 a terrorist attack on the World Trade Buildings stuns our nation! Around 3000 innocent souls are dead! The President springs into action, doing all the things a good president should do. War on terrorism ensues, and rightfully so! So does the the bodily search of innoocent American air travellers become commonplace as illegal immigrants stream across our borders, both North and South. More suveillance cameras are set up on corners across the country. Privacy and other freedoms are given up for "security purposes." Trained National Guard personel are deployed out of the country.

"Hate crimes" spring into being, by homosexuals, for one group. Gjn banning raises it's ugly head again the the hallowed halls of Congress. The gap between conservatives and liberals widens as passions intensify. Christianity is thrown out of Federal schools, and off the walls of Court Houses; Christmas becomes "Winter Holiday", carols are not allowed to be sung in public, while Islam, "the religion of peace" is taught at length in those schools. Christians are thrown into jail for preaching redemption on the street corners while pornography is considered "free speech", man-boy love a civil right (?), and immorality, bad language, and unutterable violence parades across our television screens 24-7.

The news media has been taken over by far left wingeres who hate this country, and are intent on making their own news. Academe focuses on further indoctinating our brightest and out best.

Illegal immigrants and terrorists continue to flood into the country. A network of help for these people becomes lucrative, and subversive camps are set up in strategic locations for terrorists. Americans are unable to find work as farmers, restaurant owners, filling statiions, contractors, ranchers, factories and corporations hire illegals at vrery low wages. Teachers are required, in many instances, to teach in languages other than in English, which would benefit them immensely. Social Security, SSI, rent subsidies, and food stamps are given the illegals, becoming a serious drain on our economy.

It is becoming more and more an "us and them" nation. A nation divided in so many ways! There were red flags leading up to what is written above, waving brazenly in the wind, bur few were to notice. After all, there was nothing THEY could do about it, was there? No time. No bother.

And so to all the men and women throughout history who have given their lives to keep the people in America free and safe under the finest government ever devised by man and God, what do we say: What do we do? We are a generous people! We do not hesitate to help where ever help is needed. Yet the question remains. What do we do here? What do we do now?

END OF HIDEOUS SCENARIO

Much has been left out of the above, in the interest of "brevity." However each point made is straight out of the Communist hand book

A beginning: Repent your sins and change your ways. Pray to Almighty God for direction and guidance. Be still and listen to that quiet inner voice. And, FReepers, I know you will keep your eyes and ears open. GOD BLESS AMERICA.


102 posted on 01/19/2005 6:10:01 PM PST by Paperdoll
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To: kcvl

And they call us slack jawed hillbillies. LOL He looks like he is going to start dribbling spit at any moment.


103 posted on 01/19/2005 6:11:38 PM PST by beckysueb (God bless America and President Bush.)
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To: dead
[Perlstein] was an unrepentant (a term loaded with religious overtones, just to scare him) liberal who wrote a very comprehensive overview of Barry Goldwater’s lasting effect on American politics. It was an insightful and sober reflection on the birth of the modern conservative movement and modern politics in general. And it had none of this ridiculous screeching and paranoia.

I give Rick all the credit in the world for his Goldwater book. It was superbly done.

What I can't fathom, though, is that he apparently learned nothing from it.

How does one do that? Research and write a scholarly book, then erase everything you had to learn and understand in order to complete the project.

104 posted on 01/19/2005 6:13:10 PM PST by okie01 (The Mainstream Media: IGNORANCE ON PARADE)
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To: dead
Bush will stop at nothing until everybody and everything is ruined forever!

So what's wrong with that? That's why I voted for him!
105 posted on 01/19/2005 6:19:21 PM PST by Nataku X (You've heard, "Be more like Jesus." But have you ever heard, "Be more like Mohammad"?)
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To: Paperdoll

I agree with alot of your post. But George Bush loves America and he is probably our last patriotic President we will ever have. The drain on our economy from illegals cashing in on government services is made worse by the fact that millions, possibly billions of American dollars are being taken out of the economy every year and sent to Mexico in the form of money orders.


106 posted on 01/19/2005 6:33:31 PM PST by beckysueb (God bless America and President Bush.)
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To: Darksheare; dead
The nerve of some people.. trying to get a zot when zots are reserved for trolls.. *grumbling*

It's perverted is what it is.

Some people should just stick to latex.

107 posted on 01/19/2005 6:50:28 PM PST by stands2reason
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To: dead

Wow! Interesting read.

I haven't seen this many strawmen since that three day ride through Nebraska . . .


108 posted on 01/19/2005 7:06:49 PM PST by BraveMan (FBI, Vincent Foster, Ron Brown, clinton, Monica, Promis software, boys on the railroad tracks, Mena)
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To: BraveMan

. . . these many . . .


109 posted on 01/19/2005 7:22:26 PM PST by BraveMan (FBI, Vincent Foster, Ron Brown, clinton, Monica, Promis software, boys on the railroad tracks, Mena)
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To: dead
"When someone like Eliot Spitzer uncovers a major corporate scandal, a Republican will be able to say, 'He's attacking your retirement fund.' "When the employees of a company try to unionize, a Republican will be able to say, 'They are attacking your retirement fund.' " (He will also be able to say they are attacking their own retirement fund.) "When a community refuses to let a Wal-Mart build in their neighborhood, a Republican will be able to say, 'They're attacking your retirement fund.' " Environmental regulations will be framed as an attack on your retirement fund. Liability law, too

If Prez Bush "really" want's to do that, than I am all for it. Look at it; those 3 anathema's are the pillars of our ailing society, stifling growth,opportunity, and yes, freedom of expression, not to mention crass invasion in ones property rights.

If privatizing a portion of the SS contributions will do that,... holly cow we are in good shape. ( no need for tort reform, reign in on the environmental wackos, clamp the "friendly" union tugs, God, a dream comes true...)

110 posted on 01/19/2005 7:36:59 PM PST by danmar ("Reason obeys itself, and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it" Thomas Paine)
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To: beckysueb
And they call us slack jawed hillbillies. LOL He looks like he is going to start dribbling spit at any moment.

ROFLOL!

111 posted on 01/19/2005 10:28:04 PM PST by kcvl
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To: cripplecreek
I got your note that Perlstein sent you a Freep mail. He sent me one too. I hate Freepmail, so here is his comment:

About Teddy Kennedy and No Child Left Behind: you know the White House utterly reneged on the pledges they made to him about the law.
-Perlstein

and my response to it:

Of course Teddy complained. He was a utterly shocked, as was I and most conservatives, when Bush completely signed off on his asinine big government education plan. But then Teddy disingenously realized he could just bitch about it anyway and try to make it an issue in the campaign. It didn't work.

Besides, all Teddy's whinging about the NCLB act has been in regards to funding he claims Bush never produced. Maybe Teddy's right, maybe he's wrong, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the testing complaints you brought up.

The only citation you give for your complaint is from the American Educational Research Association - a liberal thinktank dedicated to eradicating the world of homeschoolers (that might be a bit hyperbolic, but they are by no means an unbiased news source.) They are against absolutely anything that might hold public schools accountable for the billions sent their way each year.

112 posted on 01/21/2005 8:10:59 AM PST by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: cripplecreek; Perlstein
I didn’t send Perlstein the following quote I found from Stanford University professor and American Educational Research Association leader, Rob Reich, but I include it here:

“When conflicts about the education of children arise, parents cannot wield a trump card based solely on their own understanding of their child's best interests.”
- Rob Reich, "Testing the Boundaries of Parental Authority Over Education: The Case of Homeschooling."

Just gives you some indication of their agenda. They're perfectly entitled to their opinions, but people should know about their motivations when weighing the value of the statistics they make up.

113 posted on 01/21/2005 8:14:37 AM PST by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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To: All
This article is mentioned in the introduction to Mark Steyn’s latest:

He's a worldbeater, all right (Mark Steyn beats up on the Dems!)

114 posted on 01/23/2005 9:19:26 AM PST by dead (I've got my eye out for Mullah Omar.)
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