IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, II: WHY DON’T THE DEMOCRATS?

Column No. 108 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - June 1, 2006

“Why Don’t the Democrats?”  This is a common plaint heard among left-wing Democrats, among old-style New Deal Democrats, among progressive Democrats, among many traditional liberal Democrats, among all sorts of Democrats that is, except the so-called “New Democrats,” lead by the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).  It was put together by certain sectors of the Party leadership in the 1980s.  In this column, I attempt to provide some answers to that question.

To begin that task we must first look at the DLC a bit.  It was designed to counter the identity-group Democratic Party politics that had developed in the 1960s that eventually lead to the Presidential nomination of George McGovern in 1972.  That nomination had been opposed by significant sectors of the Democratic Congressional leadership. The stone-faced visage of “Scoop” Jackson, the “Senator from Boeing” (nominally from the State of Washington) looking down upon the assembled throng on nomination night is forever etched in my memory.  Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey too, and a number of other center and center-right Democrats did not lift a finger for McGovern.

They were right about the dead-endedness of identity group politics.  You cannot win on a national scale by having a platform made up of pieces appealing to one identity group after another with nothing tying those pieces together.  This is surely not to say that equality for women, a peace-first/shoot-later multi-lateral foreign policy, civil rights, environment protection and preservation, labor rights, gay rights and protections, establishing an equitable and cost-effective national health care system, and so on and so forth are not among the most important central political objectives of any Democratic Party that it is to live up to its name and its history.

It is to say that the way they were put forth in the McGovern era, with no central bring-them-all-together themes a) didn’t work, and b) made them and the Democratic Party an easy target for the ever-rightward lurching Republicans, as well as for rightward-lurching leadership Democrats.

The first DLC candidate-in-fact although without the label and without the organization was that nice, totally inexperienced, one-term Southern governor, Jimmy Carter.  He was actually an accidental candidate.  The logical one for 1976 was Ted Kennedy, but the Chappaquidick tragedy had done him in.  The other logical candidate was Hubert Humphrey, who with his minuses also brought many plusses, including what it meant to be a New Deal/Great Society Democrat.

However, bladder cancer intervened and we were left with Jimmy.  It is notable that even in the post-Nixon, post-other-Republican scandals, Carter is principally remembered for just two things: presiding over the development of the Camp David Accords that brought peace between Egypt and Israel, and presiding over the development of the worst inflation that the nation had seen in the 20th century.  Hardly elements of the traditional Democratic agenda.   And so, Carter brought us Reagan, not a product per se of the Republican Religious Right (although definitely of the Goldwater right-wing of the Party), but the historical transition figure who brought his Party and the Nation directly to the RRR’s current control of the Federal government.

The DLC grew out of the era of the Carter Presidency.  It developed on the one hand in response the anti-Vietnam War movement both within and without the Party that bore a major responsibility for the nomination of Sen. McGovern.  On the other hand it developed in response to the identity-group politics that the Senator surely did not foster or even like very much, but whose constituents were instrumental in gaining the nomination for him.  And they dominated the then-liberal wing of the Party.  At that point, in the midst of the Reagan Presidency that was clearly taking the country to the Right, Democratic Party reform could have gone either to the Left, developing a New Deal-successor overarching public-service philosophy or to the Right.

The DLC took it to the Right.  In a posture that it still holds to today, they stood for two principal principles: in order to get elected in our public persona we have to look as much like Republicans as possible, except that we’re nicer, and we have to play “small ball,” not in the sense that those hateful single-issues that those very loud identity groups do, but in the sense that we have to go with issues at the secondary and tertiary levels of importance, preferably ones that won’t offend very many people who traditionally oppose us (although they may offend traditional Democrats) when we put them forth.

The DLC in fact had as a basic premise one that stands at the center of Religious Right Republicanism, so famously put by Bill Clinton in one of his most memorable State of the Union addresses: “The era of big government is over.”  And so the DLC took, and takes, the position which is at the center of contemporary far right Republicanism.  The functions of government are to be as limited as possible in doing the people’s business, infra-structure, health care, environment, public services, education, economic regulation, and etc., as “strong” as possible when it comes to oppression and repression and military might.  The government’s role in suppressing freedom of thought and personal action, so dear to the hearts of the Religious Right, the DLC just ignores.

Following in importance the two positions on whether we should actually have a Constitutional Democracy or a government by “Unitary Executive” (read dictatorship) running the country, the biggest difference between the Georgite Republican Party and the traditional Democratic Party in fact is over the role of government.  The Georgite Republicans, as I have written in this space many times, want to, in the immortal words of Grover Norquist referring to all the kinds of governmental functions called for by the Preamble to the Constitution, “shrink government to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bath tub.”  The DLC’s only President, Bill Clinton, functionally agreed with this view, as he said, although he would not use Norquist’s rhetoric. Traditional Democrats beg to differ.  We look to the Constitution and its Preamble*, which sets forth a broad and strong role for the Federal government in running the affairs of the nation as a whole.

And so, we currently face this divide in the country, on Constitutional government to begin with, then on the role of government, then on the Iraq War, then on the drive to divide and conquer with homophobia, misogyny, racism, and etc. The DLC surely does not endorse extreme Georgite positions on all of these matters.  But they consistently try to find a “middle ground,” as on abortion rights, where there clearly is none.  On foreign policy for example, the DLC has just come out with a book entitled With All Our Might.  Our colleague Michael Carmichael has said of it: “Nowhere does the DLC volume present a serious critique of Bush administration foreign policy failures.  Quite the contrary, the authors would have the Democratic Party default to the PNAC (Project for the New American Century, read ‘neo-con’) positions on virtually every point of defense, military and foreign policy.”   Further, according to Michael the authors of the book spend a lot more time attacking fellow Democrats than they do attacking the Georgites.

Once again, on the War, on global warming, on other ravagings of the environment, health care, education, civil rights, civil wrongs, sexuality rights, on the nature of the Republican Party itself, in the context that Bush’s poll ratings are in the toilet, the question is asked “Why Don’t the Democrats?”  The first answer is because there is no THE Democrats.  The Party is obviously split, and I am hardly the first observer to come to that conclusion.  The question then is obviously “what do we do now?”  I will be getting to a consideration of that one in future columns in this series.  But let me conclude this one with the briefest examinations of why this is so.  Why does the DLC do what it does?  Are they stupid, or abstruse, or just plain shortsighted?  In my view none of the above.

First and most important, they actually like many of the Georgite polices, especially in the economic and military and even foreign policy arenas.  Why? As David Sirota says in his new book, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Take It Back, (quoting here from the BuzzFlash promo for the book), “If the opposition party becomes part of the corporate consensus, in effect part of a hostile takeover, then you have an entire political system where ordinary people’s interests are not even being represented in the debate, much less in public policy. . . . the middle and working class in America are being absolutely crushed everywhere they turn.”

Next the DLC seems to really believe, despite what the polls tell them, that there is some vast electoral middle out there when it comes to Georgite policy and plans for the country.  Third they focus on how they think the Democratic Party can win electorally using this issue or that, not using that other issue or this, rather than first on why the Democratic Party should win, then going on to the “how.”  Certain leading DLCers are actually saying “gee, maybe it would be better if we lost the mid-term elections so that we would have a better chance of winning (electorally) in 2008,” ignoring what further substantive harms will come to country and Constitutional government under another two years of total control of the Federal government by the Republican Religious Right and the Georgites.

As I said above, to be continued.

__________

*    Preamble: We the people of the United States, in order to form a more per­fect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the com­mon defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Consti­tution for the United States of America.

IDEAS FOR DEMOCRATS, I: THE VISION

Column No. 107 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - May 25, 2006

With this column I return to the subject of politics and the Democratic Party that I have addressed in two previous series, the one on the Kerry Campaign in the summer of 2004, and the one entitled “The Future of the Democratic Party” in the fall of 2005.  As with the classic bridal gown, there will be something(s) old, something(s) new, something(s) borrowed and something(s) blue, which is what we all be (actually much worse) should we be unable to derail the Georgite theocratic fascist juggernaut.  The first absolutely essential step in doing that will be to take over at least one house of Congress this fall, regardless of what Adam Nagourney had to say in the News of the Week in Review in The New York Times of May 14, 2006 (“Hey Democrats, Why Win?” a topic to which I shall return in a future column).

In a front page article in The New York Times on May 9, 2006 (“Optimistic, Democrats Debate the Party's Vision”) Robin Toner said:

“With Democrats increasingly optimistic about this year's midterm elections and the landscape for 2008, intellectuals in the center and on the left are debating how to sharpen the party's identity and present a clear alternative to the conservatism that has dominated political thought for a generation. . . . . But some of these analysts argue that the party needs something more than a pastiche of policy proposals. It needs a broader vision, a narrative, they say, to return to power and govern effectively.”  To which I say, Amen.

I also say that such statements are nothing new.  On the Op-Ed page of The New York Times of November 4, 2004, Andrei Cherny, a former senior staffer for both Sen. Gore and Sen. Kerry, wrote: “The overarching problem Democrats have today is the lack of a clear sense of what the party stands for. . . . Democrats have a collection of policy positions that are sensible and right. . . . What we don’t have and what we sorely need is . . . a worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.”

In The New York Times of May 26, 2003, there was a front-page story by my high school classmate Adam Clymer about the state of the Democratic Party.  Adam told us that what all of the Democratic Party leaders and outside observers alike, even the DLC people quoted, agreed upon is that what we need is: a new "clear identity," the ability "to think strategically" (Peter Hart), a "better message," to "stand for something" (Bob Strauss), to be able to "show that we can make progressive government work" (Will Marshall), "to move away from incremental new reforms to big and broad issues" (Bill Carrick).

But when I said “nothing new,” I really meant “nothing new.” In a New York Times article on September 25, 1987, the journalist E.J. Dionne wrote:  “All Democrats have been searching for language to call America away from the individualism of the Reagan years to a new sense of community.”  We Democrats have not found that language yet.  If we had, we have won the Presidency the last time around, despite the Georgite cheating machine.  In an article in The Washington Post of Nov. 9, 2004 (yes, although I have been reading the Times since I was age 7, I do see other papers from time to time), Dionne pointed out that a significant number of people who agreed with the Democrats and disagreed with Bush on individual policy issues voted for him anyway, in part because of the lack of an overall vision on the part of the Democrats and the presence of one (although we would strongly disagree with its content) on the part of the Georgites.  Finally finding that vision will be crucially important for beginning the Democratic comeback in 2006 that will be necessary if our country is to be saved from the worst outcomes of Georgite policies down the road of history.

As some of you know, in 1992, I published a book entitled The New Americanism: How the Democratic Party Can Win the Presidency. In the book, I proposed a “broad, embracing, expansive vision” for the Democratic Party, for its then present and the nation’s future.  I believe that it is still very much what the doctor ordered for the Democratic Party.  In brief, it is a simple concept with a precise mission: to find the new grand vision for the Democratic Party, to find the bed-rock foundation upon which both the traditional agenda and the 21st century agenda of the Democratic Party can be established, to find the language and the civil weapons that our nation needs if the determined Georgite assault on, yes, American Constitutional Democracy as we have known it for 200 years, is to be halted in its tracks.

Ever since the New Deal, the principal political divide between Democrats and Republicans has been over the role of government in our nation and our national policy.  Republicans want it as small as possible in dealing with the economy, as big as possible in controlling and restricting personal rights and liberties. Democrats generally take the opposite view.  Previously both sides have had some shadings on their positions.  Georgite Republicanism has none.  Not only have they adopted the Grover Norquist “sink it to the size of a bathtub and then drown it in the bathtub” program for any positive functions of government, but they also most obviously want to establish a government of, by, and for the repression and oppression of any citizens of our great nation who oppose their social, their economic, or their foreign polices. I originally envisioned The New Americanism as a sort of elegant marketing program for the traditional Democratic agenda.  Now the struggle is clearly over whether the United States will continue as a Constitutional Democracy or not.  Thus, with all immodesty, I now view my proposal as the first political weapon which should be put onto the field of political battle in order to stop the Georgites once and for all.

The New Americanism finds the proposed “Vision for the Democrats” in the very founding documents of our great nation. The New Americanism projects a grand, integrated, overarching, forward-looking domestic and foreign policy based upon the principles of, yes, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Together they provide the Statement of Purpose for our nation, the Statement of Purpose of our National Government, and the Primary Functions of that Government in achieving in the stated Purpose.

Our National Purpose is made clear by the Declaration: to demonstrate unequivocally that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness . . .”

The primary Purpose of our National Government is also made clear in the Declaration: “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men.”

The Primary functions of our National Government in achieving this purpose are spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Why this is enough to make a strict constructionist out of anyone (other than the Georgites, of course)!  And so I present to you, dear reader, my proposal for, as Andrei Cherny put it, “a [Democratic] worldview that makes a thematic argument about where America is headed and where we want to take it.”  I do hope that it may prove useful.

ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Column No. 106 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH -  May 18, 2006

In his New York Times column of May 4, 2006, “The Paranoid Style,” David Brooks let loose a strong critique of Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy: Tying Religion and Politics to an Impending U.S. Decline.  He accused Phillips of engaging in “conspiracy theorizing” focused on the Republican Right and Republican Administrations, in both the foreign and domestic policy arenas.  “When the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips” he said. “Conspiracy theory” is a charge that the Republican Right just loves to trot out whenever they are faced with analyses by their critics that a) lay bare various plots and plans they have engaged in about which they have not been, shall we say, fully forthcoming, and b) for which they have little to respond with in dealing with the substance of the critiques.

As Paul Krugman pointed out in his New York Times column of May 8, 2006, “Some people say that bizarre conspiracy theories play a disturbingly large role in current American political discourse. And they're right. For example, many conservative politicians and pundits seem to agree with James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has declared that ‘man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’“

Krugman went on: “For the last few years, the term ‘conspiracy theory’ has been used primarily to belittle critics of the Bush administration — in particular, anyone suggesting that the Bush administration used 9/11 as and excuse to fight an unrelated war in Iraq. . . . The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like ‘loopy conspiracy theories’ are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review's Web site, want to ‘confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree.’ Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.”

Brooks falls into this latter category, and like all of the right-wing scriveners who use the term, fails to define it. Krugman cites the Wikipedia which defines “conspiracy theories” as “attempts to explain the cause of an event as a secret, and often deceptive, plot by a covert alliance.” One can also note that from its Latin root the word “conspiracy” means literally (and simply) “with a secret.” In English usage, it refers to a secret plan, developed and implemented by a secret group.  Further, if and when the desired outcome is achieved, the secret plan always includes a basis for claiming that that outcome is not the result of any conspiracy.  Public deniability is an absolutely essential element of such efforts.  In this light, let us consider some foreign policy actions undertaken by Republican administrations since the 1950s.

In 1953 the government of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, was overthrown in a coup secretly organized by Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit, working for the CIA.  The coup was claimed to be indigenous at the time. The formerly pro-Nazi Shah was re-installed on his throne and an essentially fascist regime was established.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1954, the French Indo-Chinese War was brought to a peaceful end by the Geneva Agreement, guaranteed by Great Britain and the Soviet Union.  The U.S. was not a party to it.  Under the agreement the nation was temporarily divided into two parts, North and South (Pres. Reagan to the contrary notwithstanding, this was an entirely artificial creation that had no roots anywhere in Indo-Chinese history). A national election was to be held by 1956.  It was widely assumed by all parties that the Vietnamese Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, would be elected president. Secretly, the Eisenhower Administration, with the Dulles brothers, Allen at the CIA and John Foster at State, encouraged the temporary government in the South to cause the election plan to be aborted.  (That kind of abortion, the Republican Right likes.) That they were never held, lead directly to the U.S.-Vietnam War.  The U.S. always officially denied that any such interference in Vietnamese domestic affairs ever took place. The U.S. role in all of this could not possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1954, the democratically elected government of Guatemala’s Pres. Jacopo Arbenz was overthrown by a military coup secretly organized by the CIA (another Allen Dulles “triumph”), although it was claimed to be indigenous at the time.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1973, the democratically elected government of President Salvadore Allende of Chile was overthrown in a military coup secretly organized by the U.S., under the leadership of the then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Richard Helms, Director of the CIA. At the time, any and all U.S. participation was denied, even though Kissinger had started a secret anti-Allende campaign even before he took office in 1970.  The secret U.S. involvement couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

In 1984, The Reagan Administration secretly began organizing an armed opposition aimed at overthrowing the left-wing government of Nicaragua that had taken power following the overthrow of the widely detested dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle.  Since any such support was prohibited by U.S. law, Reagan’s boy Ollie North secretly arranged to sell arms for Iran (at the time on the State Department’s own “any-contacts-prohibition” list) in order to raise money “off-the-books” to support the so-called “Contras.”   The “Iran-Contra” deal and its spawn couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, could it?

The Georgite invasion of Iraq cannot be properly called a conspiracy for it was based upon a not-so-secret plan for Middle East dominance and petroleum-supply security drawn up by Project for the New American Century in the mid-1990s.  However, it was nevertheless not acknowledged as having anything to do with the Iraq invasion, and certainly the highly sophisticated plans that were developed to mis-lead the American people as to the true reasons for the U.S. do indeed constitute a conspiracy, by definition.  But according to Brooks, the fact that Administration knew it was lying couldn’t possibly be termed a conspiracy, now could it?

One must fairly point out that it has not been only Republican administrations that have engaged in secret foreign policy adventures that qualify under the definition above as conspiracies, but couldn’t possibly be either, just the product of “loopy left-wing imaginations.”  There was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, planned under Eisenhower, but approved by John Kennedy.  There was the unannounced assemblage of an invasion fleet along the Southeast coast of the Untied States in the summer of 1962, presumably aimed at Cuba (although one cannot be sure; Grenada, perhaps?), the invasion plan (if there was one) subsequently aborted by the agreement that ended the Cuban Missile Crisis.  In 1962, the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic was overthrown, and he was replaced by a democratically elected President, Juan Bosch, a moderate left-winger.  A military coup unseated Bosch in 1963.  It was in turn over-turned in 1965.  But a second military coup, in that year, was secretly supported by Lyndon Johnson and was successful.  In 1964, Johnson secretly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Brazil, Joao Goulart.  According to Brooks, none of these plans hatched in secret, implemented at first in secret, with subsequent Administration denials of involvement in public, could possibly be defined as conspiracies.

From this review, surely are we forced to come to the same conclusion as David Brooks: “when the left feels disinherited, liberals seize upon the conspiracy fantasies of Kevin Phillips.” Aren’t we?  No, neither Republican nor Democratic administrations ever participate in foreign policy conspiracies, now do they?  No conspiracies there, not even under the bed.  These conspiracy theories are all just fantasies.  Aren’t they?  Let’s re-look at Mr. Phillips’ book in the light of the history briefly reviewed above, I say.  Go get ‘em, David Brooks.

_____

This column is based in part on a column of mine that appeared on the webmagazine BuzzFlash (http://www.buzzflash.com) on May 8, 2006.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TONY SNOW JOB

Column No. 105 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH -  May 11, 2006

Fascism** engulfs nations by different routes.  It can come by military conquest and overthrow of a democratically elected government, as in Franco Spain.  It can come by conversion of a Constitutional Monarchy, with the acquiescence if not the open support of the monarch, as in Italy and Japan.  It can come in a Constitutional Democracy through the on-the-surface legal use of Constitutional processes by a political party that first takes control of the executive branch and then proceeds to establish its dictatorship.  The prime example of this is of course Nazi Germany (see my columns, “Bush is Not Hitler, I and the two-part Reichstag Fire/9-11 series).  Unless the Georgites are somehow stopped, the United States will become the second major historical example of this route to fascism.

History teaches us that in a Constitutional Democracy, such as the German Weimar Republic of 1919-1933, a party or a political movement intent upon establishing a fascist dictatorship must first gain control of the executive branch of the government.  To be able to establish full control over all the organs of the state over the long run they must then deal with the other two branches of the government, the legislative and the judicial.  They must also deal with the single most important organ of civil society outside of government that, functioning properly, is essential to the continuance of Constitutional Democracy: the free communications media.  A free press (in the generic sense of the term) is anathema to fascism.  In fact, the latter cannot exist in the presence of the former.  For at the center of the fascist approach to dealing with public information is the Big Lie Technique, something a free press will always eventually give the lie to.

An essential element of Georgite Republicanism has been the campaign to both devalue and take over the independent judiciary, especially at the Federal level.  The tools are first a constant propaganda campaign that the judiciary is “overstepping its bounds,” is “legislating from the bench,” is “standing in the way of the will of the people,” is “in need of being reigned in.” Second, is the political campaign to remove a variety of major political-social issues from the jurisdiction of the bench through a variety of means. Third, there is the direct route of putting an ever-increasing number of Georgite judges on the bench.  (Think the classic movie, “Judgment at Nuremberg.” It was about the trial not of any famous Nazis but of a group of senior judges who were adjudged to have been active collaborators and promoters of the Nazi form of “justice.”)  Prominent Georgite appointees at all three levels of the Federal bench are outstanding examples of the use of this tool.  In a variation fro the Nazi example, in the US the first step taken within institutions of the Federal government was the takeover of the legislative branch by proto-fascists.  That started with the “Gingrich Revolution” of 1994.

Interestingly enough the element essential to the eventual fascist takeover in the U.S. that has been in place the longest is the Republican assault on the independent media.  It began symbolically with the famous Nixon quote after his loss in the California governor’s race in 1962.  He said to the media at the press conference after his concession speech “Now you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.” Nixon clearly made those media elements that reported facts about him and his doings into “the enemy.”  He was an early developer of the classic Republican Rightist tool of attack on the media: don’t respond to the message; kill the messenger.  The Georgites have developed this technique to a very high level of sophistication.

Reagan used lying, intimidation, charm.  His constant message, through the media to a gullible public taken in by a combination of his charm and his underlying, but clear racism, was “don’t trust them; trust me.”  A constant message of O’RHannibaugh from the Reagan/Bush I era has been that the “mainstream media are all ‘liberals,’ and never tell you the truth.”  George Bush obviously cannot stand the media personally.  Then Rove makes sure that they are both shut out and intimidated to the greatest extent possible, while his boss goes “over their heads to connect directly with the people” (through those oh-so-carefully stage-managed “town meetings”).

Where does the appointment of Fox "News" Channel (F"N"C) propagandist Tony Snow as White House Press Secretary fit into all of this?  It has aroused much comment. For example, very early on, the Center for American Progress drew attention to the fact that for some time now Snow has been a critic of Bush, from the Right. The question was raised, how does that make sense, how could Snow do the job, which supposedly includes defending the President?

In answering that question and indeed establishing a broad understanding of the meaning of the appointment, it first comes down to defining exactly which job Snow was hired to do. First: let us consider what the job is surely not, based on how the various Georgite operatives occupying the position have handled it up to now. The job is surely not to answer questions forthrightly, honestly, and openly. It is surely not to establish a cooperative relationship between the White House and the media. It is surely not to increase the amount of information made available to the American people about the Executive Branch of their government, how it operates, and what it is doing.

If we know what it is not, just what is it? There is a series of answers to that question, not all of which will be covered in this space. But in my view it is important to understand that the choice of Snow is neither accidental nor foolish, in terms of the march towards fascism.  It does represent a significant ramping up of the attack of the independent media, with the ultimate objective of destroying it that is essential if the goal of establishing fascism is to be achieved.  It helps to understand this appointment if it is seen in that context.

1. First, Snow is to revive the old CNN political show “Crossfire," where yelling and screaming was substituted for rational discussion and disagreement over significant political issues. Reduce reporters to jelly by yelling at them, literally or figuratively, whether they yell back or not, is job one.

2. Further demean and disdain the media, treating them as untrustworthy and unimportant. Obfuscate, conceal, distract, distort, and lie, with more skill than any previous holder of the position.  Step one is the proposal to eliminate or curtail the televising of the daily media briefings.

3. Begin the merger of the Privatized Ministry of Propaganda, of which the F"N"C is the prime property, into the government.

4. Mollify the right-wing base by having a “Bush critic" in place, a highly visible one. Doing so also makes Bush appear as if he can be subject to criticism, while all the while he is being pushed towards even more far-out positions that in his gut he would actually like to take, but has not yet taken publicly (e.g., his sudden conversion to the “English-only” versi0on o the old British drinking song know since 184 as the Star Spangled Banner)

5. Snow is not a “newsman." He is a voice of Radical Right-wing Republicanism. Hiring him clearly demonstrates what the Georgites think that “news" is all about --- as made so clear every day by the F"N"C (which I do watch, folks): PROPAGANDA.

The Volkischer Beobachter (the Nazi Party’s daily “newspaper") is right around the corner.

Author’s Note: This column is based in part on “A Commentary on the Tony Snow Job, A BuzzFlash Guest Contribution, (http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/04/con06169.html) that was published on April 29, 2006.

*           Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

**          My short definition of fascism: ““Fascism is a politico-economic system in which there is: total executive branch control of both the legislative and administrative powers of government; no independent judiciary; no Constitution that embodies the Rule of Law standing above the people who run the government; no inherent personal rights or liberties; a single national ideology that first demonizes and then criminalizes all political, religious, and ideological opposition to it; and total corporate determination of economic, fiscal, and regulatory policy.”   (If you would like to see my longer definitions, please refer to my columns of May 27, 2004 “On Fascism -- And The Georgites,” Jan 27, 2005 “Comparing George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler”, and February 10, 2006, “The Georgite Version of ‘Freedom and Democracy’.”)

BUSH IS NOT HITLER, II

Column No. 104 By Steven Jonas, M.D., M.P.H. - May 3, 2006

Last week I noted that as the Georgite machine rumbles towards the installation of frank theocratic fascism in the United States (e.g., see “The Rise of Fascism in America,” Gary Alan Scott, CommonDreams.org, 4/12/06), a controversy rages with increasing intensity: are comparisons claiming that George Bush and Adolf Hitler have much in common valid?  As you know, I have previously published several columns in this space taking the position that they are (e.g., “Fascism and the Georgites,” May 27, 2004; “Comparing Bush and Hitler,” Jan. 27, 2005,” and the recent re-run of my 9/11-Reichstag Fire comparo series).  However, as I noted, recently I have done a good bit of thinking on this subject and I have now come to the conclusion, which may surprise some of you, that such comparisons are unfair.  Indeed Bush is not Hitler.

Last week I published seven examples of differences between the two to prove that case.  In column I present eleven more.

8. Hitler, upon taking power, established a Ministry of Propaganda (MoP) right in the government. True to their ideology, the Georgite MoP is privatized, through the thousands of right-wing religious radio and TV stations, the hundreds of right-wing radio and TV talk show hosts, the Fox”News”Channel, and their “semi-official” (as they say of Al-Ahram in Egypt and the New China News Agency) newspaper, the Washington Times.  There are a couple of exceptions. The Georgites do use government funds to “buy news” at home and abroad, but that’s a small-scale (if growing) operation.  And as of this writing they were about to bring into the government one of their principal privatized MoP mouthpieces, Tony Snow, to be the official White House mouthpiece, an example of cross-over.  But the Georgites (as of yet, anyway) have nothing to rival Goebbels’ official MoP.

9. Hitler’s first foreign military adventure, the re-militarization of the Rhineland in 1936, was a success; as were his second, his intervention in the Spanish Civil War beginning in 1937; his third, the annexation of Austria (the “Anschluss”) in March 1938; his fourth, the annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in Sept. 1938; his fifth, the conquest of the balance of Czechoslovakia with the establishment of a separate fascist Slovakia in March, 1939; his sixth, the conquest of Poland in Sept., 1939; and his seventh, the conquest of France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway, in the late Spring of 1940. His unbeaten success streak ended with these “Lucky Seven” His eighth and ninth foreign military adventures, the Battle of Britain, late 1940, and the invasion of the Soviet Union, June 1941, eventually lead to his defeat.

Bush’s first foreign military adventure, the invasion of Afghanistan, did not achieve its principal originally advertised objective, the capture of Osama bin Laden, nor its second, the total destruction of the Taliban, which now, under the still-alive Mullah Omar, appears to be making a significant comeback.  His second, the War on Iraq, is a disaster-in-the-making on a variety of dimensions, and may become a major factor in the downfall of Georgitism, if that eventually happens.

10. Hitler had a muddled approach to religion. He was born a Catholic. Early on in his reign he made an arrangement with the Catholic Church to leave them alone if they left him alone. His own religious beliefs, however, are quite uncertain. He did use the slogan “Gott Mit Uns” (God is with us) for his military. He had strong support among the old Protestant clergy in Germany. He appealed to Christians across the board for his attacks, rhetorical and real, on “Godless Communism.” But there was also the Nazi “Religion of the Blood,” which harked back to the paganism of the German/Nordic founding myths.

Bush is totally politically loyal to and personally believes in U.S. Right-Wing Christian Fundamentalism. He believes “God”, as defined by this movement, is personally guiding him. He may be a Millenialist of some sort also, but that is unclear.

11. Hitler created a concentration camp system to imprison German citizen opponents almost immediately upon taking power. Bush may be only just now starting one for the potential imprisonment of US citizen opponents.

12. Hitler faced the worst Depression the world had ever known. Principally by massive re-arming, he got German industry to spend their capital and achieved a decent economic turnaround.

Bush took a flourishing economy with a Federal budget surplus and a declining national debt and put them all into reverse.

13. Hitler left the League of Nations. Bush can say only that the man he sent to the United Nations to represent the United States has only advocated the withdrawal of the US from that body.

14. Hitler’s foreign policy was complex: driven by anti-Semitism, anti-Slavism, the drive for more farmland, the destruction of Soviet Communism. To encourage him in achieving the latter goal, until 9/1/39 he had the covert support of the UK and to a lesser extent France. He also focused on the acquisition of adequate oil supplies, primarily to support the German military.

Bush’s foreign policy is in part driven by oil. But unlike Hitler, the motivation is to produce ever-increasing oil company profits. Georgite foreign policy is also driven by the ever-intensifying practice of the major U.S. corporations to export capital, the needs of the Israeli Right, and some vague campaign to establish U.S. “hegemony” around the world. The UK is an ally; France is not.

15. Hitler used both psychological and physical terror to cement his dictatorial powers. Bush so far has used only psychological terror at home (although it appears as if he is training a cadre of physical terror practitioners abroad for possible future use at home).

16. Hitler dealt with his principal rivals/enemies within his own Party by killing them (most notably on the “Night of the Long Knives,” June 30, 1934). So far Bush has dealt with his enemies within his own party only by doing things like threatening to cut off their campaign funds.

17. Hitler acquired support from major German industrialists after his Party had announced their platform/ideology and had begun to implement it. Hitler came first; his industrialist support came second. Bush is the creation of major U.S. industrial interests.

18.  Finally, there is the matter of the Holocaust, and the estimated additional 44,000,000 deaths that resulted from World War II.  Critics of the Bush-is-like-Hitler comparo are quite correct.  Bush has done nothing along these lines.  He hasn’t even come close.  However, to be fair to Bush, one must give him time.  Hitler did not start what became World War II until he had been in power for 6 ½ years, the Holocaust itself in fits and starts another year or so after that.  (The Holocaust was not formally organized until the Wansee Conference of January, 1942.)  Bush has been in power only a little over five years.  And after all, with his threatened use of nuclear weapons and actual planning for their use against Iran, Bush has the potential to destroy civilization around the world as we know it.  However, that’s all in the future.

In conclusion, we have to recognize that there are obviously significant differences between Bush and Hitler. Indeed, based on the examples in this list, Bush is not only not Hitler, but something of a piker by comparison.  However, in deference to those who hold that yes, the two do have much in common, we must give Bush time, just give him time and he may well get there, a few details aside.

BUSH IS NOT HITLER, I

Column No. 103 By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - April 27, 2006

The Georgite political/propaganda machine is rumbling towards the installation of frank theocratic fascism in the United States (e.g., see “The Rise of Fascism in America,” Gary Alan Scott, CommonDreams.org, 4/12/06).  A controversy rages with increasing intensity: are comparisons claiming that George Bush and Adolf Hitler have much in common valid?  Is it appropriate for the subject even to be considered in polite society?  For example, back in March, a Colorado teacher, Jay Bennish, raised the issue in his classroom.  At the time he did so he also asked students if they thought that other countries had the right to poison US tobacco fields in response to the export of tobacco products by the US, called the US invasion of Iraq illegal, and stated that from the Palestinian point of view, it is the Israelis who are the real terrorists.

Part of his presentation was recorded by the son of an ardent devotee of Right-Wing talk radio.  Dad peddled the tape to a number of such sources and finally got one in Colorado to pick it up.  The controversy eventually made its way onto the O’RHannibaugh Privatized Ministry of Propaganda network with, of course, demands for firing the Mr. Bennish for making such statements, in a classroom no less.  Mr. Bennish was suspended by his school district with pay and an investigation undertaken.  During the investigation, a significant number of his students went to the school Administration to defend him.

In the course of the investigation it came out that the tape-recording student must have run out of tape or something, because there was a second part of Mr. Ennis’s presentation that, for reasons that are unclear, just happened not to be recorded.  And so neither was it distributed on that “fair and balanced” Privatized Ministry of Propaganda network.  In that part the teacher told his students that they had an optional assignment: to write about what he had said, analyzing and if they chose to do so, criticizing his remarks.  Any paper, pro or con, that did a decent job of analysis according to standards previously set forth by Mr. Bennish, regardless of the position taken, would get extra credit for the writer.

Subsequently Mr. Bennish was re-instated with the simple instruction that he needed to be sure to follow the district’s guidelines on the presentation of controversial subjects, with no public indication of whether or not the district had concluded that he had ever violated them.  But the point here is, just by raising the Bush-Hitler comparison issue in an obscure Colorado classroom a national firestorm was raised.  It included raging demands for sacking the teacher for having the temerity to even pose such a question to high school students.

While one could consider the process at great length, focusing in the first instance on just what the Georgites mean by “democracy,” in this space we will visit the substance of the matter further.  As you know, I have previously published several TPJ columns taking the position that the comparisons are valid (e.g., “Fascism and the Georgites,” May 27, 2004; “Comparing Bush and Hitler,” Jan. 27, 2005,” and the recent re-run of my 9/11-Reichstag Fire series).  However, I do have to tell you that most recently I have done a good bit of thinking on the matter and I have now come to the conclusion, which may surprise some of you, that such comparisons are unfair.  Indeed Bush is not Hitler.  In the balance of this column and next week’s as well I will present a series of examples to support my new position.

1. Bush had two Time covers, Hitler only one.

2. Hitler obtained an explicit Constitutional Amendment in the German Reichstag, the Enabling Act, to establish his dictatorial powers.  The language was clear and unequivocal, e.g., Article I said in part: “In addition to the procedure prescribed by the constitution, laws of the Reich may also be enacted by the government [that is the office of the Reichs Chancellor, Hitler] of the Reich; Article II said in part: “Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat [a body representing the German regions];” Article III said in part: “Laws enacted by the Reich government shall be issued by the Chancellor and announced in the Reich Law Gazette. They shall take effect on the day following the announcement, unless they prescribe a different date. Articles 68 to 77 of the constitution do not apply to laws enacted by the Reich government. [Articles 68 to 77 stipulated the procedures for enacting legislation in the Reichstag].”

Bush is not developing his dictatorial powers by obtaining a Constitutional Amendment, rather more difficult to secure under the US Constitution than under the Weimar Constitution of Hitler’s time. Rather Bush is using a creative reading of the US Constitution as to what “Commander-in-Chief” means, to start with. Then, he is broadly interpreting a particular (“Use of Force”) resolution of Congress -- one that has no language establishing a dictatorship -- an act of Congress, the USA “Patriot Act” that, itself, violates the Constitution by vitiating the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and is explicitly ignoring the provisions of another act of Congress, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that  among other things requires warrants, secret though they may be, for all searches carried out under its authority.  Bush, unlike Hitler, is not using Constitutional law to establish his dictatorship.  He is just doing it.

3. To obtain the 2/3s majority needed in the Reichstag to obtain passage of the Enabling Act on March 23, 1933, Hitler had his private Army, the Sturmabteiliung (“Storm Division,” S.A.) arrest all the Communist deputies who had not left the country when he became Chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933 and immediately began hunting down the Communist leadership, arrested or forced the emigration of certain Socialist deputies, had all the Nazi Reichstag deputies dress in S.A. uniforms at the time of the vote, and ringed the hall with other S.A. men.

Bush already has a majority of both Houses of Congress (some possibly elected fraudulently, as he was), his majority in the House of Representatives solidified by an un-Constitutional redistricting in Texas. But Bush has a legislative body that combines docility and impotence.  He doesn’t have to terrorize anyone.  Further, with two possible exceptions, no opposition legislators were killed along the road to the establishment of the right-wing domination of Congress, nor were any forced to emigrate.

4. Hitler used the Reichstag Fire (see my columns of Feb. 16 and 22, 2006) to create a “national emergency” enabling him to obtain dictatorial powers from the Reichstag. He produced documents purporting to show that the German Communist Party set the fire. These were later proven to be forgeries. The fire was clearly set by a deranged person acting alone, just as the Berlin police had told Hitler at the time. Hitler simply took advantage of an event he clearly had nothing to do with.

The book is far from closed on Bush and 9/11. Bush may have just used it, but there is suspicion in many quarters that he either knew something was coming and let it happen, or even played an active part in creating the tragedy (e.g., see the International Conference sponsored by www.911truth.org and the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth www.mujca.com, Chicago, Illinois June 2-4, 2006).

5. The primary racial targets of the both Bush and Hitler are of Semitic origin. But there the similarity ends. For Hitler it was the Jews. For Bush the target is being developed, but does include the Arab members of the Muslim religion, the object of burgeoning Islamophobia.  While Arabs are indeed Semites, Bush is obviously painting with a much broader racialist brush than did Hitler.

6. Hitler came to power with a small, under-armed national military, the Reichswehr. It had only 100,000 men and a paucity of aircraft and heavy weapons.  He built it into what became the world’s most powerful military for a time, the Wehrmacht.  Bush started with the world’s most powerful military and is in the process of running it into the ground.

I hope that it is becoming clear that all these claims of unfairness in making Bush-Hitler comparisons are well taken.  There are just too many non-parallels.  We will continue presenting the evidence to support this position next week, in Part II of this series.