Right Is Wrong -- How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America
By Arianna Huffington
The following is an excerpt from Arianna Huffington's new book, Right Is
Wrong.
The Radical Takeover
The most sweeping takeover of the new millennium didn't take place among
the
telecoms or the big oil companies, or in Silicon Valley. It took place in
Wa****ngton, but we can see and hear and feel its effects nationwide on our
televisions, radios, and computer screens. And America is much the worse
because of it. I'm talking about the takeover of the Republican Party by
its
own lunatic fringe, and the Right's hijacking of America.
Ronald Reagan's GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering, putrefied
party of Bush, Cheney, Rove, Limbaugh, and Coulter. Morning in America has
given way to Midnight in America.
Yes, the Republican Party has always had its far-right cowboys, its Jesse
Helmses and Spiro Agnews. Yet they were removed from the party's more
sober
core.
But these days, judging by the opinions and actions of the Republicans in
office and the party's candidates for president, it has become impossible
to
tell where this core stops and the fanatical fringe begins. Just look at
what the party is endorsing.
We have a Republican Party that continues to back the White House's
delusions about Iraq at the expense of our military, our treasure, our
safety, and our standing in the world.
We have a mainstream on the Right that sup****ts torture, that confirmed an
attorney general nominee who is officially agnostic on torture, and that
rallies behind a president who refuses to define what the very word
"torture" means.
We have a mainstream that sup****ts -- even applauds -- the behavior of
thuggish Blackwater mercenaries, that sup****ts the gutting of our civil
liberties, that opposes universal health care, and that has views on
immigration that wouldn't have been heard outside a John Birch Society
meeting ten years ago.
It can no longer be denied: The right-wing lunatics are running the
Republican asylum, and their madness has infected the entire country and
poisoned the world beyond.
And just look who the GOP settled on as its 2008 standard-bearer: the most
hawkish candidate in the running, who has said he wants the United States
to
stay in Iraq somewhere between one hundred years and ten thousand years --
John McCain.
Despite an avalanche of evidence showing that McCain the Maverick has long
ago been replaced by McCain the Pandering Pawn of the Party's Right Wing,
the press refuses to believe its own eyes. Right Is Wrong will show how
the
"Straight Talk Express" and its conductor have completely and cravenly
gone
off the tracks -- and how the media steadfastly refuse to notice.
Even those bastions of the so-called liberal media, the New Yorker and the
New York Times, have continued to ****tray McCain as a moderate who, in the
words of New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza, has "the rare op****tunity to
reinvent
what it means to be a Republican."
Let's see, over the last few years McCain has bowed to the party's lunatic
fringe on tax cuts, immigration, the intolerance of religious bigots, and
torture ... so you might wonder how is he reinventing what it means to be
a
Republican?
During the primary campaign, I waited in vain for one of the leading GOP
presidential candidates to step away from the twitchy ideologues who have
taken over their party, but instead they all held hands with Kristol,
Rove,
and Limbaugh and jumped. To a man, every one of the top-tier candidates --
Giuliani, Romney, McCain, Thompson, and Huckabee -- seemed intent on
competing to see who could out-Bush Bush. Not a single one of them tried
to
put any distance between himself and the president -- especially on
foreign
policy, the area of Bush's most catastrophic errors. Former Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee made a halfhearted attempt to speak out against an "arrogant
bunker mentality" at one point and was called out by Mitt Romney to
apologize. Huckabee promptly shut up, putting an end to any further
rebellious attempts to amble off the reservation. As conservative pundit
George F. Will put it, "They are, if anything, to the right of (Bush) on
foreign policy. There's a bidding war to see who can be more hawkish
toward
Iran."
The reign of Bush and Cheney and the rise of the neocons and the
"nea-cons"
(the "Neanderthal conservatives") have alienated traditional conservative
intellectuals like they have Bill Buckley, the godfather of modern
conservatism. In April of 2007, writing about Iraq, Buckley called public
opinion on the war "savagely decisive" and concluded, "There are grounds
for
wondering whether the Republican Party will survive this dilemma."
And Michael Gerson, once Bush's top speechwriter, offered this gloomy 2007
*****sment of the state of the GOP: "The party is in a funk. There is a
lack
of creativity, very little domestic policy energy. I think it's going to
be
a problem." Of course, along with being one of the party's brightest
thinkers, Gerson is a Bush loyalist, so his calling it "a problem" can be
translated as "a disaster." If the Republican Party in its current form
loses the next general election and ends up fading into obscurity and
irrelevancy, we can use the words of Don Rumsfeld (trying to sugarcoat a
different debacle) for its epitaph: "The dead-enders are still with us,
those remnants of the defeated regimes who'll go on fighting long after
their cause is lost."
http://www.alternet.org/stories/85968/?page=entire
This has been the most inept administration in the history of our country.
Either that or it was their goal all along to collapse the dollar, baloon
the deficit, break the army and trash our leader****p, image and moral high
ground in the world.
In a full scale transfer from taxpayers (our treasury) to cor****ations and
cronies, what we are witnessing is no less than a heist. It's no
coincidence
that the very industries CheneyBu$hCo emerged from are the very ones who
are
reaping the windfall of a bogus war based on lies, cherry picked
intelligence and fear mongering.
Every one of these warmongers somehow evaded combat when it was their time
to put it on the line, Cheney through deferments (he had other
priorities),
and Bush through privilege. Only Colin Powell actually faced combat, and
he
couldn't be backpedaling faster to distance himself from the way this
misadministration carried out their war of choice.
What makes their lack of combat service an issue is the cynical way they
used an attack on our soil, completely preventable with the intel
available
to them that they completely ignored (from a CIA Director running around
with his hair on fire to PDB's named 'BinLaden Determined To Attack Inside
US'), and then fixed the facts around the policy to set their sites on a
country completely unrelated to the attack. They played it straight out of
the PNAC playbook. They have lied so much about everything that now I look
to them as a negative barometer of truth.
Using ever-****fting rationales and retroactive pretexts, we were bulldozed
into an unholy occupation of Muslim holy land, led by corrupt one-party
rule
and an invertebrate 'opposition party'. Freedom Of Information Act efforts
after years have yielded the knowledge that Iraq oil maps were on the
table
at Cheney's 'secret energy policy' meetings, only solidifying the
realization that, whatever they said, this war was fought for greed rather
than necessity. Even Cheney said back in 1993 that attacking Iraq would
lead
to endless quagmire, the only difference 10 years later was the value of
stocks he owned in Halliburton. I wonder how much they made in no-bid
contracts so far? War is big business. The point of the war in Iraq was to
have a war in Iraq.
Never mind a real war hero/General/President Eisenhower's warning to
beware
the military industrial complex. This president is little more than a
cor****ation in a suit. They've sold out our national security, our middle
class, our treasury, every environmental agency, and every facet of our
government for 30 pieces of silver. Now Bush has ripped the lid off of
Pandora's Box and then peed in the soup. There is no going back. Now we
strengthen Iran by taking out their military counterbalance, reduced a
country to rubble, radicalize a generation, provide the perfect jihadist
recruiting tool and training ground, and 'liberate' a country that may
well
elect a Bin Laden if he was on the ticket. We provide a surge to give time
for political reconciliation, and what do they do? They go on vacation for
a
month. So now whose death squads do we endorse?
The middle class has already been displaced, all due to the decisions of
one
man mesmerized by the neocon playbook. Military suicides are at a fever
pitch, vets are ill-cared for, troops are under-equipped, all while
Rumsfeld
glibly said something about going to war with the army we have, not one we
wish to have sometime in the future. Cheney said 'Reagan proved deficits
don't matter'. Yeah, right.
They spent like drunken sailors BEFORE they started this bogus war, but
now
we spend $5-6,000 PER SECOND, off budget and borrowed from China to watch
it
disapper down an unaccountable black hole, paying people who were recently
shooting at us, as corrupt Iraqi offuicials and war profiteers make out
like
bandits. Believe me, the people who were meant to benefit from this war
are
becoming obscenely rich on blood money....but don't get me started.
Thank you Arianna.
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