Beautiful young shock troops for Bush

Salon ^ | 7/28/03 | Michelle Goldberg

[DPB101]

At a weekend pep rally in Washington, a thousand college Republicans clap, cheer and party -- and reveal a troubling dark side.

Just as presidential Svengali Karl Rove, dressed in a light-gray suit and mint-green striped tie, began to speak Friday at a gala dinner for college Republicans in Washington, piercing whistles sounded. A half-dozen protesters had made their way into the auditorium, and they began to chant something inaudible about George Bush and death. Security staffers ejected them within seconds, but even before they were out the door, hundreds of clean-cut collegians were on their feet, shouting "KARL! KARL! KARL!"

Then the chant changed, and they were screaming "USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!" their faces hard and triumphant atop blue suits and evening gowns as they belted out the letters. They screamed and screamed and then erupted in wild cheers.

It was the first night of the 55th biennial college Republican convention at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, and around 1,000 young people had gathered for three days to hear speakers like Rove, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, former U.S. Sen. Bob Barr and right-wing polemicist David Horowitz. On the Hilton's second floor they organized, plotted strategy for the 2004 election, and generally paid homage to President George W. Bush, whose grinning visage appeared on everything from T-shirts to handbags.

Even more, they gloried in Americanness, a state that many seem to regard as both quasi-religious and the exclusive provenance of their party.

College Republicans are the party's farm team. Stalwarts who got their start as College Republican leaders include Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and right-wing strategist par excellence; and Rove himself. Rove's speech was largely a reminiscence about driving around the country campaigning for the College Republican chairmanship with his campaign manager Lee Atwater, later famed as a right-wing attack dog and head of the Republican National Committee.

Again and again throughout the weekend convention, speakers emphasized that the eager young people before them were the future of the party of Hoover, Nixon and Reagan.

If that's true, the Republican Party of the future will be one firmly indoctrinated in the belief that the opposition is illegitimate. "As conservatives, we share a zeitgeist that is not shared by liberals," said speaker Paul Erickson, an operative who runs the "Daschle Accountability Project," an effort dedicated to undermining the reputation of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., in the 2004 campaign. Erickson has also worked for John Wayne Bobbit, he of the severed penis, whom Erickson booked on a "Love Hurts" tour in 1994.

"As conservatives, we don't hate America," Erickson told his young audience. "The life of a liberal is hell. It is not possible to have a debate, a discussion, with someone who at their root, at their core, hates everything this country stands for but doesn't hate it enough to leave."

Erickson was followed by Jack Abramoff, a powerful right-wing lobbyist and former College Republican chairman, who exhorted the next generation to fight hard, lest "the ascension of evil, the bad guys, the Bolsheviks, the Democrats return."

That equation -- evil = communist = Democrats -- was nearly axiomatic at the convention.

Ann Coulter's latest book, "Treason," which tarred virtually all Democrats as traitors, may have been denounced by conservative intellectuals, but its message has pervaded the party.

Gene McDonald, who sold "No Muslims = No Terrorists" bumper stickers at the Conservative Political Action Conference in January, was doing a brisk trade in "Bring Back the Blacklist" T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads. Coulter herself remains wildly popular -- Parker Stephenson, chairman of Ohio College Republicans, calls her "one of my favorite conservative thinkers."

Politicians speaking at the convention may not have accused their opponents of treason, but they came close. Following Abramoff, DeLay began his speech: "Good afternoon, or as John Kerry might say it, bonjour."

"The National Democrat [sic] party seems to have lost its marbles," said DeLay. "It's no longer a serious force in national debate. Its sole organizing principle is an irrational, all-encompassing roiling hatred of George W. Bush, because on every significant political issue since he came into office, he has beaten them like rented mules."

To gauge how "out of touch" the Democrats are, DeLay instructed, "close your eyes and try to imagine Ted Kennedy landing that Navy jet." The crowd chuckled obligingly.

Still, DeLay was actually more magnanimous than some other speakers, suggesting that the opposition is more stupid than traitorous. "The Democrats' problem is not a lack of patriotism, it's a lack of seriousness," he said. "We're in the middle of a global conflict over good and evil and they're in the middle of a Michael Dukakis lookalike contest."

Half of the crowd filed out when Barr took the stage to celebrate Clinton's impeachment and warn against the administration's encroachment on privacy rights. The room filled up again, though, when Warrior, an ex-WWF wrestler who has built a second career as a mascot for the right, took the stage that afternoon. Warrior -- that's his full legal name -- spoke at the Conservative Political Action conference in January, and has been one of the most requested speakers among conservative organizations ever since.

Dressed in a blue pinstriped suit, his long, dirty-blond hair pulled into a ponytail, Warrior explained why he'd left the world of wrestling. "When it became degenerate and perverted," he said, "I dismissed myself from pursuing it as a career anymore."

The speech that followed contained references to thinkers from Socrates to Tom Paine, and perhaps it would require a scholar of the classics to discern its meaning. "America was founded on that primary premise, that America would survive only as long as its people live up to their means," Warrior thundered.

"Knowledge of good and evil is the best fruit on the tree of knowledge."

The conservative movement, he declared solemnly, "needs people ready to actualize the entirety of their human potential."

One message that was clear was a hatred of nuance or ambivalence. To defeat the "pervasive degeneracy, ignorance and destruction of soul" that prevails today, he said, "you must live to judge and be ready to be judged ... extremism in defense of moral behavior is no vice." The saying "there are two sides to every story," he told his audience, "brings your loved ones closer and closer to tyranny and outright annihilation."

"Mankind survives by our leaders," he concluded. "All leaders are warriors. Mankind survives by its warriors. Our Republic will truly survive by them as well."

The notion of a nation under siege by enemies both within and without was nearly universal at the College Republican convention, and gave vehemence to its nationalism. Beneath the patriotic bombast lay two distinct currents: There was religion, that old Reaganite sense of America as the city on the hill, poised to lead the world from darkness. And there was resentment -- toward the whining of minorities, the carping of lesser countries, the life chances the students say are circumscribed by an economy made stagnant by welfare freeloaders, swarming immigration and affirmative action.

Some attendees were driven by spiritual conviction that seamlessly encompassed faith in two messiahs, Jesus and Bush. For the true believers, Bush is a man of wonder-working powers. Jason Cole, a 22-year-old senior at the University of Iowa, grew enamored of Bush when he heard his earnest, simple talk of God during the 1999 presidential campaign. Cole says he has little interest in working in politics beyond the 2004 election. "I do it," he explained simply, "because I love President Bush."

If Bush and his successors remain in power for the next decade, Cole believes, we'll have a world "where leaders say what they mean and follow it up ... millions and millions will enjoy the freedoms that our forefathers fought for. Democracy will spread across the world. Iraq was a phenomenal start. In Africa, the United States is helping Liberia and giving AIDS relief. Soon, they'll be back on the economic track. People now living in squalor will experience a home-owning boom like that following World War II. Look at how Staten Island was developed ..."

The College Republican leadership echoed this pious optimism. Paul Gourley, the party's treasurer, is a chiseled, broad-shouldered 21-year-old from South Dakota. "I am religious, and my religious beliefs steer me towards this party," he says. Bush is somebody "students can identify with, somebody students can follow. His energy, his passion for America and freedom and his religious beliefs ... I think he's going to be one of history's great presidents. We're all honored to live during this presidency."

But the cult of personality surrounding Bush bewildered a group of French student conservatives who'd come on a trip funded by right-wing think tanks. Jean Martinez, a dashing 24-year-old who'd organized an 87,000-strong counter-demonstration against the strikes that crippled Paris in June, admires American free-market dynamism and social mobility. Yet he looked askance at the great piles of Bush paraphernalia being hawked at the conference, saying: "This whole iconography ... we don't have this in France."

Alexandre Pesey, a 28-year-old French conservative writing a Ph.D. thesis on the conservative movement in America, England and Germany, admires Bush's honesty and was pleased with the reception his American comrades had given him. But "some are a bit simple," he mused. "You can find strange people with American-flag ties."

The bellicose religiosity of the event, with group prayers before every meal, also puzzled him. "That we cannot understand," he says. "Religion is private."

The Frenchmen weren't the only conservatives put off by right-wing religious piety. "The thing ruining the Republican Party is the religious right," says Rosanne Ferruggia, a 19-year-old junior at George Washington University and the publisher of the GW Patriot, a conservative student newspaper. "I don't want Jerry Falwell out there speaking for me. The religious right people in College Republicans are not taken seriously.

"My family members are religious fanatics," says Ferruggia. "Two out of three of their pastors have been convicted of embezzlement." An agnostic, she doesn't oppose gay marriage and thinks Phyllis Schlafly is a "nut job." For Ferruggia and her friends, rancor rather than religion seems to fuel politics. They're ardent but not idealistic.

Ferruggia was sitting in the Capitol Hilton's lobby bar shortly after Rove's speech. There were three others with her -- another blond 19-year-old Georgetown student, Chris Sibeni, chairman of Hofstra College Republicans, and Jeffrey Chen, a recent Johns Hopkins graduate. Sibeni and Chen puffed on Fuente cigars.

"I'm a Republican because liberals make me sick," said Sibeni, spitting out the words. "I don't like whiny people and tree-huggers."

"You're a tree-hugger, but the tree you're hugging is the money tree," joked Chen, a jocular 22-year-old who plans to attend law school next year at either Boston University or Tulane.

After a cocktail, the foursome retired to Sibeni and Chen's disheveled room, where the hosts made the girls fuzzy navels with orange juice and peach schnapps. At which point all let loose their political ids.

Sibeni, who had spiky hair, glasses and a long face, is high-strung and given to rash pronouncements. He denounced assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for "dividing the country" and trying to help African-Americans "advance over the white society," and defended American support of the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile. Chen, who went to high school with Sibeni in Great Neck, Long Island, is easy-going and quick to concede Republican mistakes, mocking his friend's more outré arguments.

While Sibeni declared that Bill Clinton had been more dangerous to America than Osama bin Laden, Chen defended the ex-president's economic program. "Without him," Chen argued, "we would not have had globalization. He took a Republican idea, used it as a Democratic idea, and used it to become the most popular president of all time."

Chen seemed so mild and centrist that at one point I called him a closet Democrat. Taken aback, he replied: "How am I a closet Democrat? I'm racist, I love guns and I hate welfare."

He wasn't kidding. "I'm racist against anybody who doesn't work for a living," said Chen, whose family comes from Taiwan.

"We're in Washington D.C. You can guess who that is." He's no fan of religion, but says he's less bothered about paying tax dollars to faith-based programs than to "crack whores who have eight kids because it's easier than working."

"I wish there could be racial equality," said Sibeni, who, while in high school, refused to attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations. "The number one reason there's racial inequality is because of hip-hop."

"For young black men, it glorifies something they try to live up to, and they end up dead or in jail," says Ferruggia, sipping her drink.

Before the Supreme Court's decision upholding affirmative action last month, "I couldn't admit I'm a racist," Chen said. "They admitted they're racist, so now I can too."

All four of them believe they have lost opportunities to affirmative action. "I applied to NYU and I didn't get in," says Sibeni. "My SAT scores weren't the greatest ..."

"You were just another white guy from Long Island," says Ferruggia. "The only person you can really discriminate against anymore is white men."

Ferruggia, the daughter of a pharmaceutical salesman, was valedictorian of her Southwest Florida high school. "I had the highest SAT scores in between five and 10 years" at her school, she says, and feels affirmative action cheated her out of scholarships. "I watched minority after minority after minority accept these awards ... I'm tired of people whining that I'm taking away from them."

"A lot of poor white people in the trenches of Appalachia, they don't complain, they go out and work," said Ferruggia's blond friend, who sat quietly next to her for most of the evening. "Black people have been given a lot of chances ..."

"And they always screw it up," said Sibeni.

Despite his high school rebellion against Martin Luther King, Chen said Sibeni used to be a "docile, pacifist kid" who others picked on. Sometimes, Chen said, he even joined in.

Then something happened to Sibeni in 2000.

He was walking on campus one night and "two African-American males came up to me," he recalled. "They said, 'Yo, nigga, can I get a dollar?' Being the affable person I am, I took out my wallet. They grabbed the wallet, but I took it back. I saw one of them reaching in his pants. He had two circular bandsaw blades. I took off."

Sibeni had the remote-control keys to his Pathfinder, and he said he used them to set the car alarm off. Then he ran to a friend's room and started drinking.

Later that night, he continued, two Estonian exchange students were robbed and "almost beaten to death." Sibeni's attempted muggers confessed to the crime and were given two years in juvenile detention.

After that, Sibeni got into guns. He now owns an assault rifle, a shotgun and a hunting rifle that he always keeps loaded.

Looking at Sibeni sitting cross-legged on his bed, Chen said: "You used to get beat up. Now you're the one beating people up."

Sibeni has brief charitable impulses -- he considered donating his ticket to the Rove dinner to a homeless person, so he could enjoy a free steak. But the idea of being forced to contribute to a broader civic good makes him livid. Taxes, he insisted, should be abolished. Who, then, will build things like roads? "Coca Cola should be building roads just to get exposure," Sibeni said.

"Who's going to build a road in inner-city Baltimore?" asked Chen.

"It's not my problem," said Sibeni.

[Arthur Wildfire! March]

..Half of the crowd filed out when Barr took the stage to celebrate Clinton's impeachment and warn against the administration's encroachment on privacy rights. The room filled up again, though, when Warrior, an ex-WWF wrestler who has built a second career as a mascot for the right, took the stage that afternoon...
[We still have a lot of work to do, explaining how we essentially arrested Al Capone for tax evasion with the impeachment process. We all know about Monica, the tax evasion aspect, but that is never tied into the strange death of Betty Curry's brother.]

[swilhelm73]

Yeah when George Bush blames 9/11 on Mike Moore, you let me know ok?

These libs oh so conviently have no memory. One conservative writer calls Dems traitors and the Reps are the party of hate. The venom the left continally spits out though? Oh that's nothing I guess.

Has Ms Goldberg ever publically questioned Alec Bladwin for his death threats? Clinton for his tawdry and expedient blame mongering? Moore for his wish that 9/11 would have killed more conservatives?

[dedicated]

sounds like Slate is jealous... conservatives and the conservative core of the GOP is a Party of Conviction and a Party of Morality and they are scared that we have a direction and raising a generation of conservatives who know who the enemy are.

[tictoc]

This is kind of off-topic but I have been noticing a worrisome trend on the Yahoo message boards.

(I monitor Yahoo from time to time because they have the biggest number of participants, far more than FreeRepublic.)

A year ago, they were more or less 50-50 conservative/liburls.

Now, it seems there is at least a 3 to 1 numerical advantage of Liburls. They're stupid, hysterical, shrieking mindless idiots, but their numbers seem to be growing.

I wonder what this portends for the 2004 elections.

[DPB101]

Ms Goldberg and other liberals are rattled. The know the country is moving right and they have no way of fighting it. No more media monopoly, no more forcing every child in America into a government school, no more waging class warfare when over 50% of Americans own stock in those corporations liberals love to hate.

On top of that, Treason is making them come even more unglued. The terms of the debate have shifted. Conservatives are not explaining how they are not racists, don't hate gays, how some of their best friends are Jewish, how opposing Affirmative Action doesn't mean they want blacks to be second class citizens, how they didn't stop beating their wife because they never beat her to being with.

Now Democrats are forced to explain that they are not really traitors, that they do love America and that, no, they don't support every enemy America faces.

A letter to the editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune this morning illustrates how off-balance and flustered liberals are

Stop crying 'treason' and think

This responds to a recent letter that accuses Democratic presidential hopefuls of aiding and abetting our enemies when they dare to criticize the foreign policy of our president.

Our enemies do not need the critiques of Democratic presidential candidates to be delighted -- they only need to consider that we still cannot find Saddam, bin Laden, or Mullah Omar; that the lack of planning for a postwar Iraq is now obvious; that our ground troops are stretched paper- thin; that many Iraqis see us as occupiers; that this elective war has fattened the coffers of al-Qaida and brought it new recruits; that we did not finish the job in Afghanistan and are starving it for funds; that we have underfunded domestic security while cutting taxes for the wealthiest among us; and that our president and his advisers almost aggressively do not seem to be interested in understanding the culture, the peoples, and the history of the region in which we are militarily engaged.

If accusations of treason are slung around by the likes of Ann Coulter and the neo- conservative propaganda machine, serious charges could also be laid at the feet of Mr. Bush, who led us into a war while hyping nonexistent or ambiguous intelligence and has cynically used the tragedy of 9/11 to get his way. As the letter writer suggested, the American people do indeed see through garbage, and that is attested by the steadily declining trust they place in their president. This is why neo-conservatives (who are not conservatives at all since true conservatives support America's values, which include the duty of citizens to criticize their government) desperately spew out their message of hate increasingly more shrilly as the American people become disillusioned by the adventurist policies of this administration.
Erwin A. Taurke
Bradenton

We have a "duty to criticize" our government? Even if we agree with our government? Bet Erwin didn't feel that way when Clinton was impeached. Erwin doesn't want to be called a traitor and then goes on to prove to any rational person that he is, if not technically a traitor, pretty darn close.

[Caipirabob]

He denounced assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. for "dividing the country" and trying to help African-Americans "advance over the white society,"

My impression of King was that he truly fought for equality between the races. It was those who followed who corrupted his message. Prior to King, wasn't there separate bathroom and water fountains and such? At the least there was a high degree of segregattion. In the end, with the help of conservatives, he freed his people.

Those who followed perverted the message and turned it into a subsidy-mill. They pushed the "more than equal...YOU OWE ME" message to the point where it has nearly destroyed the black community. The results of such effort? something like 90% single parent households, massive divorce rate if marraige occurs at all and RAP Music.

M.L.King just hit 1,000 RPMs...

[swilhelm73]

One thing I see that is interesting, is in much the same manner they have redefined racism and racial discrimination*, liberals are trying to redefine hate.

For example, disagreeing with liberals views is now called hate. As are the more normal ad hominem arguments, scapegoating, and bigotry when applied to leftist groups.

However, disagreeing with conservatives, or using ad hominem arguments, scapegoating, and bigotry against them are *not* counted as hate by the leftists and their press.

So, Coulter is a hater - along with Bush, and hell, Mother Theresa when she was alive. OTOH, Moore and Baldwin are engaging in their right to criticize and speak up.

The Republicans are certainly the stupid party...but the Democrats have become the hypocrite party.

[longtermmemmory]

on your last point. There is a difference between constructive criticism and knee jerk contrarians.

[longtermmemmory]

note on same line of reasoning: the NAAlCP is trying to define racism as just being white. I have only heard of ONE hate crime being charge against a black person and that one was tossed on a plea agreement. (black man called a cop a cracker before hitting him.)

[ppaul]

The life of a liberal is hell. It is not possible to have a debate, a discussion, with someone who at their root, at their core, hates everything this country stands for but doesn't hate it enough to leave".....That equation -- evil = communist = Democrats -- was nearly axiomatic at the convention.

Well, they're right!
That's why the left is having a meltdown.

[L.N. Smithee]

(I monitor Yahoo from time to time because they have the biggest number of participants, far more than FreeRepublic.) A year ago, they were more or less 50-50 conservative/liburls. Now, it seems there is at least a 3 to 1 numerical advantage of Liburls. They're stupid, hysterical, shrieking mindless idiots, but their numbers seem to be growing.

I stay away from the Yahoo message boards, particularly the ones attached to news stories. The worst extremists from both ends of the spectrum gather there, with scatological, violent, racist insults zipping around like bees from a disturbed hive.

[Wonder Warthog]

"If that's true, the Republican Party of the future will be one firmly indoctrinated in the belief that the opposition is illegitimate."

Pot, kettle, black. If the above "is" true, then the Republicans are only reaching a state of attitude that the socialist Democrats reached YEARS AGO.

[William McKinley]

And the writer said this without the slightest inclination of any irony:

one firmly indoctrinated in the belief that the opposition is illegitimate

[johnboy]

think it was a doonesbury cartoon:

college president talking to an aid:

"they asked for their own dormitory, and i gave it to them."

"they asked for their own student union, and i gave it to them."

"they asked for their own studies department, and i gave it to them."

"however, i am NOT going to give them their own drinking fountains."

[L.N. Smithee]

Ferruggia was sitting in the Capitol Hilton's lobby bar shortly after Rove's speech. There were three others with her ... After a cocktail, the foursome retired to Sibeni and Chen's disheveled room, where the hosts made the girls fuzzy navels with orange juice and peach schnapps. At which point all let loose their political ids.

Well, this is a nice journalistic exercise. Be with the right-wingers as they get drunk so you can cajole them into saying something racist.

I would love to hear from these young people how the author represented herself. If they are as conservative as they are presented, they probably are aware of Salon, and would blow her off if she said that's where this piece would be printed.

[Miss Marple]

evil = communists = Democrats

Apparently the writer thinks this is an incorrect equation.

[weegee]

This article requires that the Salon Stock Deathwatch:

They closed at 3 cents yesterday.

[weegee]

The venom the left continally spits out though? Oh that's nothing I guess.

Andrew Sullivan: They think Bush is worse than the Baghdad bullies

And immediately, of course, pundits started to criticise the American action as “extra-judicial”, as a violation of the law against assassination, and so on. Their immediate impulse on hearing this terrific news was: how can we spin this against Blair and Bush? Commentators on the popular American left-wing website Democratic Underground were more explicit about how they felt: “Doesn’t a part of you wish that Queasy and Duh-day were alive? I’ll admit they’re scum and rightfully so, but anything that lands even more humiliation on W’s grotesque shrivelled face is that much the better.

“It’s sad, really, that as despicable as they are, Saddam’s family seems to be the lesser of two evils when you compare them to the wretched little bastard occupying the White House and destroying America in the process . . .”

To be fair, this guy was upbraided by other contributors to the site. But he wasn’t alone. Here are two others: “What I really hate about the way our government has been taken over is that I’m at the point where I almost don’t want anything good to happen in Iraq, I want them to screw up, I want them to fail.”

Another vented: “Bush and his ilk are far, far worse than Saddam and his two degenerate brats, and that’s saying a lot.”

[weegee]

Those who followed perverted the message and turned it into a subsidy-mill. They pushed the "more than equal...YOU OWE ME" message to the point where it has nearly destroyed the black community. The results of such effort? something like 90% single parent households, massive divorce rate if marraige occurs at all and RAP Music.

James Brown has worked within the black community (and continues to do so) to keep kids from dropping out. He has also continued to push for a messsage of self reliance, not hand outs/set asides.