Kill a Constitution for Christ
- Focusing fundamentalism to destroy democracyby arendt
....“Charlie Jarvis calls himself the "dynamite" that will blow
....up one of the biggest obstacles to partly privatizing Social
....Security: AARP, the powerful seniors' lobby that leads the
....opposition to privatization.
....But Jarvis has another motive: He wants to take business away
....from AARP for his own much smaller group, the United Seniors
....Association, also known as USA Next.”........
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/11211656.htm Constitutional structures, such as the Separation of Powers and Habeus Corpus, are the beams and girders of our government. All the other laws are suspended, like a skyscraper’s curtain walls, from these load-bearing members. Beginning with the New Deal, the structure of American democracy was elaborated to provide a sturdy shelter for a productive middle-class. In order to build a “taller” structure than ever before for the productive members of society, the government had to be built to withstand the increasingly strong force of Financial Gravity. Financial Gravity is the money power wielded by corporations that seek to pull down legitimate democratic limitations on their power and to enthrone a corporate plutocracy.
It is clear that our Founding Fathers and their New Deal descendants were good governmental engineers. The structure they designed a has been under assault since Ronald Reagan declared open season on government; yet it still stands - just barely. Not only has Financial Gravity been dramatically increased during that assault by the run-away growth in rich/poor polarization; but fundamentalist enemies of genuine democracy have been sabotaging the Constitutional pillars of our middle-class society.
THE THREAT
Fundamentalists are a clear and present danger to democracy. If they acknowledge any non-theocratic form of government, it is that the majority can do as it pleases, that minorities have no rights - unless, of course, they are “persecuted” fundamentalists. If fundamentalists ever had to build a governmental structure from scratch, they would build the equivalent of a mud hut. Fundamentalists do not respect the Constitution, and they hate the Enlightenment thinking that led to its intelligent design. If the Constitution gets in their way, they have demonstrated they are more than willing to demolish it. In fact, as the self-serving Charles Jarvis openly says, fundamentalists are nothing but social dynamite. They burn explosively with a violent emotionalism, and they are brutally insensitive to the damage they do.
Left to their own devices, these bloody-minded theocrats are like the 1992 WTC truck bombers. Those fanatics hurt a lot of people, but they did not succeed in blowing up even one of the main beams of the structure.
THE STRATEGIC PLAN
But, the fundamentalist masses were not left to their own devices. The money power saw this social dynamite as a cheap, pliant, and useful tool to achieve its agenda. So, beginning in the aftermath of Watergate and Viet Nam debacles, they instituted a three-stage plan:
1) Create a lot more of this social dynamite by increasing the misery of the lower classes while blaming it on the lawful government
That was a freebie, since the reactionary super-rich always seek to sweat labor. But, what was different is that the plan also included setting up centralized control and funding of the fundamentalist movement. Under that control, an unrepentant, anti-social, anti-science, anti-Enlightenment movement was created; a movement that signaled its coded support of Civil War racism and the Scopes Trial to appeal to its low-class, low-brow target demographic. The most important, and heavily-camoflaged, organization for super-rich control of the fundamentalist movement is the low-profile Council for National Policy, which vets reactionary candidates like Bush, in secret meetings.
2) Buy the free press and media and turn them into a centralized propaganda machine that cares nothing for truth, and everything for attacking moderate democratic institutions. (This machine has been aptly named “fraudcasting”.)
Demolish the firewalls put in place to prevent partisan use of the public airwaves, such as the Fairness Doctrine - repealed in 1988. This repeal allowed them to implant rabble-rousing provocateurs like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, and Coulter. These agitprop artists are the blasting caps that fire off the fundamentalist dynamite in a coordinated manner, giving a “shaped charge” effect to assaults on the structure of our democracy. This is a proven technique for de-stabilizing legitimate democracies. When the CIA used this technique against socialist and Communist governments, it was called “The Mighty Wurlitzer”. The technique’s effectiveness is increased by the fundamentalist assault on non-religious education and their stultifying control of their own children’s impressionable minds.
3) Use the dynamite, the blasting caps, and the media network for the controlled demolition of American democracy, relying on well-placed charges, fired in a planned sequence, to weaken the structure so that it will collapse under the pressure of Financial Gravity. And, because the control is so precise, it can be arranged that the collapse will not hurt the demolition team because the debris lands exclusively on the middle class still inside the building as it is brought down.
----
We have witnessed this plan in action wherever the GOP has gained power. They appoint democracy-hating sickos, like the self-mortifying, press-banning, theocrat Antonin Scalia and the totally unqualified hypocrite and Scalia sycophant Clarence Thomas, to the highest courts they can. They appoint insider crooks like Harvey Pitt to have the SEC look the other way while corporations like Enron loot America. Finally, to cover their sorry asses, they appoint blue-nosed fanatics like John Ashcroft to make sure that none of these appointed bums ever gets prosecuted for violating the public trust.
If anyone objects to these policies or appointments, it merely offers the Reactionary Shadow Government an opportunity to apply some more dynamite to the Constitution. The policies or agencies in play indicate where the explosives are to be applied. The blasting caps are then fired off by the radio rant network, and fundamentalist wrath smashes another piece of our government with its unreasoning, destructive hatred.
After 25 years of this strategy, the reactionaries have literally demolished their opposition. They have neutered the free press and established a corporate/religious propaganda juggernaut that uses character assassination, slanted news, and outright lies to attack the political opposition with Gingrich-speak: sick, pathetic, traitors.
The GOP has rejected the idea of a loyal opposition, of rational debate. The Democratic opposition desperately clings to the false hope that politics is still a gentlemanly competition of ideas. In reality, the Republicans, having lost the contest of political ideas, declared total war. Politics is now one-sided political murder on a grand scale. Scandal is the preferred weapon, and the media hate-bombing system is only fired at non-GOP victims. GOP phonies and hypocrites get a free pass for drug abuse (Limbaugh, Noel Bush), gross sexual misconduct (Mayor of Bridgeport, Bill O’Reilly, Gannon/Guckert, and countless fundamentalist ministers), compulsive gambling (phony moralizer Bill Bennett), and corporate looting (Enron is never in the news, just Martha Stewart. Haliburton’s repeated reprimands for overcharges never trigger the mandated legal action of withholding payment).
The outcome of the trivialization, personalization, and emotionalization of politics by the corporate media is that the GOP can proceed with the demolition of democracy without anyone disturbing them. And, in fact, a heavy barrage of hate bombs is being directed upon the main supports of our society’s structure. But you would never know that from the self-righteous, sanctimonious hypocrisy projected by the phony Christians and phony patriots of the delusion right and their enablers in the corporate media.
THE TARGETS
If you have any doubts that fundamentalism is antithetical to democracy, ask a fundamentalist if he supports or even comprehends the following basic principles of the Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition and the American Constitution, the answers will be scary:
1) Habeus Corpus
Do you know that this basic principle of democracy dates to the thirteenth century in Britain? Do you understand that its purpose is to prevent the arbitrary and indefinite detention of citizens? Do you understand that the Supreme Court has ruled the Patriot Act provisions of executive detention to be unconstitutional? Do you know the Bush junta is still failing to comply with the clear judgment of the nation’s highest court on this matter? We won’t even get into justifying torture.
2) Freedom of Speech
Do you understand that anti-Bush demonstrators are not only kept as far from Bush’s sight as possible, but that people are arrested for merely not following arbitrary police orders fast enough? Do you understand that the most basic democratic freedom is the freedom to dissent? You seem to get that about Terry Schiavo or Gay Marriage. Why don’t you get that for a ruinous war started with lies to line the pockets of crooks like Haliburton? Are you aware that $9 Billion of your tax dollars went “unaccounted for” in Iraq last year?
3) Separation of Powers
Do you understand that our form of government is not simply majority rule? Do you understand that Tom Delay’s interference in the Schiavo case is a dramatically unconstitutional intervention in a single case of law? Do you understand that this case that already went to the Florida Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court? Do you have the slightest shred of compassion for the husband who is trying to do what his conscience and his wife’s wishes are telling him to do?
In the coming fight over the re-nomination of unqualified ideologues to the Federal Bench, do you care about the imminent destruction of the senatorial Filibuster? Are you aware that this mainstay served a Republican minority for decades under Democratic dominance?
4) Separation of Church and State
Do you understand that it was the considered and deliberate intention of its authors that the word “God” appears nowhere in the Constitution, and that the only mention of “religion” is to prevent its establishment? Do you know that the founding fathers were Deists and Freemasons?
Do you care that your tax dollars are being given away without substantive oversight to any Tom, Dick, or Zebediah that swears fealty to the Ayatollah Bush? Do you ever consider that actions like trying to label all Moslem charity as “support for terrorism” or trying to take away the charitable status of the Unitarian Church fly in the face of two hundred years of tolerance in America? Do you comprehend that these are really bad precedents to set unless your intention is to institutionalize religious civil war?
5) States Rights
Have you lost your memory of the constant invocation of States Rights by reactionaries from the Confederacy to George Wallace to the post-Nixon GOP? How do you square support for States Rights with the 2000 Supreme Court coup d’etat that installed Bush? Why are you not outraged by Ashcroft’s assault on the twice-passed Oregon assisted suicide laws, the California medical marijuana law, and the many Florida state court decision in the Schiavo case?
6) Civilian Control of Foreign Policy
As people who object to Big Government and Big Brother, why do you silently acquiesce as the Pentagon takes for itself the right to attack anyone IT considers a POTENTIAL enemy? How is that democracy? Why do we remove oversight from Pentagon spy operations at the exact moment when Rumsfeld has taken them to new levels of provocation and potential acts of war? Isn’t starting wars something the Constitution strictly grants to Congress? Not the President; and certainly not the Secretary of Defense.
7) Tax Progressivity
Why do you support the warping of progressive taxation into the same tax structure that led to the French Revolution - namely no taxes on a super-rich, parasitic, paper-entrepreneurial aristocracy coupled with increasing fees and taxes on the productive workers? Why do you support punitive bankruptcy laws on everyone except Trust Fund babies when the credit card companies are making record profits?
8) Social Security and Medicare
Why do the GOP find it necessary to destroy a program whose financial record is the standard for the whole world and which is solvent for forty years, when they are absolutely unconcerned about a climate change threat in the same time period? Why, when opposed by senior citizens do they instantaneously drop a totally false and totally irrelevant hate bomb, calling them traitors and gay lovers? Could it be because they have no leg to stand on and can only win by hysteria and character assassination?
Why did the GOP withhold the true costs of the Medicare private accounts and ram through the bill with documented bribery and intimidation on the floor of Congress in an unprecedented holding open of a vote for three hours in the middle of the night? What kind of thuggery and lying will you not tolerate from the GOP?
BOMB DAMAGE ASSESSMENT
If even a few of the supports just listed are taken out, America democracy will collapse under the financial assault on the middle class. America will become a theocracy with a super-rich, untaxed elite. Religious indoctrination will replace secular education and science, and the military-intelligence-secret police state that is already under construction will be activated.
In spite of the direct, obvious, and rapidly escalating attack on the basic principles of American democracy, clearly orchestrated by the most radical minority of the GOP and abetted the corporate media, the Democrats remain craven cowards; and the vast majority of the sorry remains of the American middle class is, at best, “confused” about its own self-interest. Apparently, the public has marinated in media unreality so long that it will take theocratic Brownshirts roaming the streets (can you say “Schiavo hospice mobs”?) plus a new Great Depression before they stir themselves from their SUVs and home theatres to ask why their super-sized pizza delivery is late.
Still, in the last two months, there are some signs that the timing of what was supposed to be the final, post-second-stolen-election, demolition sequence seems to have misfired. The public is massively rejecting the need to destroy social security in order to save it, and the GOP response of attacking the AARP with its standard gutter tactics has played poorly.
Then, with Tom Delay under heavy investigation for illegal campaign contributions, the GOP tried to use the hate-bomb on the long-tormented Michael Schiavo. Once again, the public bestirred itself long enough to say loud and clear that this was totally inappropriate and a shameless piece of political pandering to fundamentalist whack jobs.
Even though they are largely clueless about just how many basic principles of our Constitution were assaulted by this shameless pile of sick and delusional ranting, the public has been sensitized to the fundamental lawlessness of today’s GOP. This offers the Democrats a base upon which to resist the GOP packing of the courts with already-rejected hard-core ideologues, masquerading as judges.
Of course, the GOP has already announced plans to destroy the Senatorial filibuster if they meet even token opposition on judges, thereby weakening one of the last remaining genuinely conservative power centers in our government - the six-year term, long-winded upper chamber of the Congress.
I’m not optimistic that anyone can stop the trainwreck orchestrated by the GOP and carried out by their mindless fundamentalist hate bombers, but at least there is some sign of common sense and self-preservation stirring in the remnants of the American middle class. They might actually be conscious at their own execution.
As for the progressives, they must recognize that the dynamite and blasting caps are already in place. Their only hope is to rip out the media wiring that is trying to blow us into a corporate theocratic hell. It will take a several Dirty Dozens to do that job. So get out there and support Howard Dean and his Dean Dozens.
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