Remember Congressman Lowenstein (D-NY) from Nassau County? OK, how about the architect of the "Dump Johnson" movement in 1968 that ended the political career of one Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was then the sitting 37th president of the United States. That's the guy we need now.
Some courageous liberal Democrat in conventional, professional politics has to start the "Dump Obama" movement. What am I saying? Courageous, liberal, Democratic, professional politician ... isn't that an extinct species?
Sure, there was hell to pay back then. In 1971, Lowenstein, who became head of Americans for Democratic Action started the less-successful "Dump Nixon" campaign. And Lowenstein was eventually killed at 51 by a deranged man. A tragedy.
Oh, and Nixon, I wouldn't have voted for him (was too young, anyway), but today he looks like a liberal firebrand. Of course, his Republican Party political operatives (who, according to one Donald Segretti, called their work "ratfucking") were the guys who wrote the playbook for the neocons of the 1980s and the stolen election of 2000.
But think about it: Barack Obama vs. Michele Bachmann. Aiiiiieeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There has to be a better reasonable, Democratic Party choice than Barack Obama. A candidate who has the guts and the talent to stand for what he believes in and occasionally win one. A choice of someone who is not running for in-house counsel at Goldman, Sachs.
First things first, however. Let's Dump Obama.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Thursday, August 11, 2011
"Tea Party" folks, I hear ya ...
Somewhere between 1959 and 1979, the world changed for people who kept their noses clean and did what they were told. They were going to be Daddies and Mommies, make a living in some way similar to old Dad, buy a house, have two kids, a dog, a white picket fence and two cars, hopefully send the kids to college. Then came 1968.
The year that Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, that the Tet Offensive proved the Vietnam war was unwinnable, that segregationist and Goldwater-sympathizing George Wallace lost and election alongside "Clean Gene" McCarthy's children's crusade, that Czechoslovakia showed Soviet Europe was faltering, that ... so on and so forth.
An emblematic year of much more than the year, containing developments that came before it and after. Those who lived through it were never the same, just as those who lived through 1945 weren't and perhaps those who lived through 2001 may have been irrevocably changed.
For many of us it was the gateway to experimentation with hallucinogens and sex and philosophies that the Jesuits didn't teach.
For others it was a hugely confusing and disappointing time. This latter group, which includes some of the nicest people I have ever met, found that the factory and the church closed and Mom ran off to find herself and with other men have children named Granola and Sunshine.
They got angry.
Nothing they had learned fit. Dating wasn't as expected. Marriage wasn't even common for a while, until eventually it became the place for a minority of children to be born. Forget about the white picket fence. And God sure didn't rain thunderbolts on the bad people!
Not even Reagan and the two Bushes could set things aright. So that's why they think they're the "Tea Party."
I don't blame them. I just wish they could accept my sincere sense of pained understanding. Nothing turned out quite the same for anyone else, either. Neither Carter, nor Clinton nor Obama could take us back to Camelot. I hear ya.
The year that Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were killed, that the Tet Offensive proved the Vietnam war was unwinnable, that segregationist and Goldwater-sympathizing George Wallace lost and election alongside "Clean Gene" McCarthy's children's crusade, that Czechoslovakia showed Soviet Europe was faltering, that ... so on and so forth.
An emblematic year of much more than the year, containing developments that came before it and after. Those who lived through it were never the same, just as those who lived through 1945 weren't and perhaps those who lived through 2001 may have been irrevocably changed.
For many of us it was the gateway to experimentation with hallucinogens and sex and philosophies that the Jesuits didn't teach.
For others it was a hugely confusing and disappointing time. This latter group, which includes some of the nicest people I have ever met, found that the factory and the church closed and Mom ran off to find herself and with other men have children named Granola and Sunshine.
They got angry.
Nothing they had learned fit. Dating wasn't as expected. Marriage wasn't even common for a while, until eventually it became the place for a minority of children to be born. Forget about the white picket fence. And God sure didn't rain thunderbolts on the bad people!
Not even Reagan and the two Bushes could set things aright. So that's why they think they're the "Tea Party."
I don't blame them. I just wish they could accept my sincere sense of pained understanding. Nothing turned out quite the same for anyone else, either. Neither Carter, nor Clinton nor Obama could take us back to Camelot. I hear ya.
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
We've seen the ideology of Norway´s shooter and it's right here at home
Upon reading 2083: a European Declaration of Independence, the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the July 22 Oslo murderer, I knew I had seen this movie before. I flashed back to my university research in the early 1970s on the political theory origins of Franco's Spain where — presto! — there were a whole series of connections that fit perfectly.
Essentially, Breivik's harkening to medieval Christian Europe — with his reinvention of the Knights Templar — ties back to a rather broad stream of European political thought last popular in the 1920s and 30s that looks back to a golden age of Christendom, of which a former Hitler Jugend, one Joseph Ratzinger (aka the pope), is also fond as a basis for a revised unified Europe.
In Spain, the movement that Generalissimo Francisco Franco used but discarded — Franco was always a pragmatic Franquist and little else — known as the Falange Española y de las JONS, combined three streams of thought common to the right-wing ideologies of the time.
First, there was authoritarianism, the notion that Spain (put Italy and Germany here and you'll see it fits with minor modifications) was traditionally a society of order that was ruled by one monarch and one faith and one social order.
Second, democracy was a newfangled, humanist, relativist idea that had put individual opinion above the capital-T dogmatic Truth handed down in holy writ and interpreted by the Holy Mother Church, who guarded it, and enshrined it in the upward gazing society of Gothic cathedrals.
Third, the history of the last 500 years is that of a silent siege by a vast, insidiously concealed army hankering to impose a progression of heresies and perversions leading to the money-changers' capitalism and its stepchild, communism.
Never mind the bad history and worse theology — nor the scapegoating of the usual suspects (heretics, Jews, Marxists) as well as laissez faire capitalists and bohemians of various stripes.
None of this was alien to Norway, any more than it was to Germany, Italy and Spain. Remember Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who in 1940 helped Nazi Germany occupy his country without firing a shot so he could be top dog? His name has become synonymous with treason.
Nor, as Stieg Larsson's most entertaining fictional trilogy showed, was it alien to that other Scandinavian paradise, Sweden. Indeed, the whole Wikileaks episode, and now the Breivik affair, seem taken from one of his novels.
Nor, finally, is it that alien to the United States. We have a so-called "Tea Party" — largely an invention of K Street corridor corporate lobbying firms and Fox News — that stamps its boots in the Weimar Reichstag that the U.S. Congress has become, trying desperately to push the country economically off a cliff, so a popular clamor for order will usher in a Cromwellian regime.
Essentially, Breivik's harkening to medieval Christian Europe — with his reinvention of the Knights Templar — ties back to a rather broad stream of European political thought last popular in the 1920s and 30s that looks back to a golden age of Christendom, of which a former Hitler Jugend, one Joseph Ratzinger (aka the pope), is also fond as a basis for a revised unified Europe.
In Spain, the movement that Generalissimo Francisco Franco used but discarded — Franco was always a pragmatic Franquist and little else — known as the Falange Española y de las JONS, combined three streams of thought common to the right-wing ideologies of the time.
First, there was authoritarianism, the notion that Spain (put Italy and Germany here and you'll see it fits with minor modifications) was traditionally a society of order that was ruled by one monarch and one faith and one social order.
Second, democracy was a newfangled, humanist, relativist idea that had put individual opinion above the capital-T dogmatic Truth handed down in holy writ and interpreted by the Holy Mother Church, who guarded it, and enshrined it in the upward gazing society of Gothic cathedrals.
Third, the history of the last 500 years is that of a silent siege by a vast, insidiously concealed army hankering to impose a progression of heresies and perversions leading to the money-changers' capitalism and its stepchild, communism.
Never mind the bad history and worse theology — nor the scapegoating of the usual suspects (heretics, Jews, Marxists) as well as laissez faire capitalists and bohemians of various stripes.
None of this was alien to Norway, any more than it was to Germany, Italy and Spain. Remember Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who in 1940 helped Nazi Germany occupy his country without firing a shot so he could be top dog? His name has become synonymous with treason.
Nor, as Stieg Larsson's most entertaining fictional trilogy showed, was it alien to that other Scandinavian paradise, Sweden. Indeed, the whole Wikileaks episode, and now the Breivik affair, seem taken from one of his novels.
Nor, finally, is it that alien to the United States. We have a so-called "Tea Party" — largely an invention of K Street corridor corporate lobbying firms and Fox News — that stamps its boots in the Weimar Reichstag that the U.S. Congress has become, trying desperately to push the country economically off a cliff, so a popular clamor for order will usher in a Cromwellian regime.
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