Right Is Wrong -- How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America
By Arianna Huffington
Posted on May 22, 2008, Printed on May 22, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/85968/
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Ronald Reagan's GOP has been replaced by the dark, moldering,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long ago been replaced by McCain the Pandering Pawn of the Party's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."
And that's why it is vitally im****tant to recognize what has happened,
to see how the Right's radical ideas became ordinary, and to know how
to spot their remnants and echoes wherever they crop up. Regardless of
the outcome of this election, the lingering aftereffects of the
neaconservative ****ft will be with us for a very long time.
A key to understanding the fanatical Right's takeover of the
Republican Party and how these ideas spread to the rest of the country
is looking at the role of the media -- not the Fox News pseudo-newsmen
or the talk radio blowhards -- but the respectable, supposedly liberal
media. Without the enabling of the traditional media -- with their
obsession with "balance" and their pathological devotion to the idea
that truth is always found in the middle -- the radical Right would
never have been able to have its ideas taken seriously. If not for the
media's appeals to balance, movement conservatism would have been
laughed out of the court of public opinion long ago. And when the
press does attempt to dig into the ideological underpinnings of
debates about policy and current affairs, it becomes trapped by
another form of the media's bipolar disorder. Besides seeing two sides
to every issue, they insist on seeing most political battles through
the lens of right vs. left. By re****ting everything that's happening
in American politics through this prism, the media missed the big
story: the hijacking of America by the lunatic Right.
The other not-so-innocent bystanders to the Right's takeover are the
Democrats who have continued to tread far too lightly when it comes to
holding the GOP's fanatical core accountable. Time and time again, the
Democratic leader****p has allowed itself to get played, run over, or
distracted. Republicans wanted to deflect discussion of the war by
arguing over newspaper ads and radio comments? Okay, Democratic
leaders were game. Republicans wanted to avoid talking about children
without health care by whining about Democratic Rep. Pete Stark's
tough *****sment of the president and the Iraq war? ("President Bush's
statements about children's health shouldn't be taken any more
seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq," Stark said on the
House floor. "The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up.")
Sure, Democratic leaders were more than willing to take the GOP bait
and reprimand one of their own.
Democrats are in the majority today because the positions they
campaigned are in line with mainstream America. But if the lunatic
fringe group now known as the Republican Party is to be stopped in its
efforts to radically remake this country, Democrats are going to have
to step up and defend the mainstream that swept them into power in
2006. So far, they have shown little stomach for that fight.
The Republican race to replace George W. Bush turned into a
competition to see Who Could Be the Biggest Neanderthal. Who would
stay in Iraq the longest? Who would cut taxes the deepest? Who would
be all right with firing gay Americans from their jobs? Who would jump
for joy the highest if Roe v. Wade were reversed? Who would build the
biggest fence around America? Who would put an end to stem cell
research the fastest? Who would reject evolution most passionately?
The problem for the nea-con Right is not that it is at odds with my
views, but that it is at odds with the views of the American people.
By significant majorities, the American people believe in the science
of evolution, don't want Roe v. Wade overturned, don't want to turn
back the clock on job discrimination laws, and want to bring our
troops home from Iraq. The Right fla****ng back to the Reagan era is
one thing; the Right fla****ng back to the Dark Ages and trying to take
the country with it is quite another.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear
The Right's hijacking of America would not have been possible without
its masterful use of fear to sway a nation terrified by the 9/11
attacks. It's a symptom of just how sick the radical Right is that
their immediate response to 9/11 was to look for op****tunities to push
their agenda. Abroad, they saw a pretext for an attack on Iraq, a long-
cherished objective. At home, they saw a chance to solidify a
permanent Republican stranglehold on power if they could recast
themselves as the "party that will keep you safe" and then keep fear
alive. It worked for them in 2004, and they are trying it again in
2008.
Since 9/11, the Right's fear-mongering has been relentless and
revolting. It bottomed out during the 2004 presidential campaign with
a sewer-level attack ad against Democratic candidate John Kerry, put
together by a 527 group largely financed by a pair of longtime Bush
backers. The TV spot showed pictures of Osama bin Laden, 9/11 hijacker
Mohamed Atta, the Chechen school murderers, and the Madrid train
bombings and asked: "These people want to kill us. Would you trust
Kerry up against these fanatic killers?"
Somewhere -- and I don't think it's heaven -- Karl Rove's mentor Lee
Atwater was smiling.
During the 2004 race, there was an endless line of members of the
Right's establishment eager to parrot the "al Qaeda wants Kerry to
win" talking point -- including Sen. Orrin Hatch, who made the
despicable claim that terrorists "are going to throw everything they
can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry."
Even without a photoshopped photo of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi s****ting a
Kerry Edwards campaign button, this "terrorists for Democrats" routine
was laughable, loathsome, and a new low in American politics. It was
also patently untrue. Why in the world would the terrorists have
wanted to get rid of George Bush? He is their chief recruiter: a man
who has alienated our allies, isolated us, and united the Muslim world
against us.
The president's preemptive invasion of Iraq has been such a boon to al
Qaeda that in 2004 the British ambassador to Italy, Ivor Roberts,
called Bush the terrorist organization's "best recruiting sergeant."
My Name Is Arianna, and I Am a Former Republican
This is probably a good time to say a little something about the
transformation of my political views. It has been almost a dozen years
since I left the Grand Old Party -- years in which I have made my
opinions known in books, in newspaper columns, on TV, and, over the
last three years, on the Huffington Post. (Although I do still get the
intermittent Republican e-mail sent my way -- always good for a little
intel. Former member****p also has its privileges.)
I left the GOP just as the Right was fortifying its grip on the soul
of the party. But, I must admit, even as I left I didn't foresee just
how powerful -- and ultimately disastrous -- that sea change would
become.
People often ask me what caused me to change course so radically. In
truth, my "conversion" wasn't as dramatic as it might have appeared.
On all the so-called values issues -- abortion, gun control, gay
rights -- I have the exact same progressive positions today that I've
always had.
The biggest ****ft in my thinking has been in how I view the role of
government. I used to believe that the private sector would address
the problems of those in need. But then I saw firsthand =96 up close and
very personal -- that this wasn't going to happen. Newt Gingrich and
company talked a good game, but I soon came to see that despite all
the lofty talk about dealing with poverty and race, their heart was
never in it.
In fact, that's how I first became involved with Gingrich. He reached
out to me after he saw me on C-SPAN giving a speech challenging
conservatives to remember the Biblical admonition that we will be
judged by how we deal with the least among us -- and to bring this
admonition to the very heart of public policy.
If you read that speech now -- it's called "Can Conservatives Have a
Social Conscience?" -- you'll see that a progressive could easily have
given it. After watching it, Gingrich called me up and said, "This is
exactly what we should be doing." And when he later gave his first
speech as speaker of the House, it was full of those sentiments, about
how there was a greater "moral urgency" in "coming to grips with
what's happening to the poorest Americans" than in balancing the
budget.
I admit it: I was seduced, fooled, blinded, bamboozled -- call it what
you will. But it didn't take long before I recognized that the
Gingrich spiel was only empty rhetoric. And I saw how unfounded was my
belief that the private sector -- especially conservative
multibillionaires who wail about wanting less government involvement
-- would rise to the occasion and provide the funding needed to
replicate social programs that work, sustain them, and bring them to
market.
One of the changes in my thinking was born of the hard reality I
confronted when I tried to raise money for poverty-fighting groups and
community activists. I discovered how much easier it was raising money
for the opera or a fa****onable museum than for a homeless shelter or
free clinic. So I came to recognize that the task of overcoming
poverty is too monumental to be achieved without the raw power of
annual government appropriations.
But I also believe more fervently than ever that government dollars,
however many trillions of them, will never mend broken lives without
citizen engagement. What I've found, whether in South Central Los
Angeles or Anacostia in Wa****ngton, D.C., is the truth of what the
Rev. Henry Delaney, who took on the task of transforming boarded-up
crack houses in Savannah, Georgia, once told me: "I want to get people
involved in what we're doing. It's like putting a poker in the fire.
After a while, the fire gets in the poker too." It certainly does. So
you can blame my evolution on the fire getting in the poker.
At the same time my thinking was changing, so was the GOP, in ways I
couldn't have imagined. Indeed, many old friends from my Republican
days -- many of whom couldn't understand why I'd turned my back on the
party -- are now just as appalled as I am by the lunatic fringe's
takeover of the Right, and the Right's takeover of America.
Find more Arianna at The Huffington Post.
=A9 2008 All rights reserved.
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