Saturday, February 09, 2008

Ronald Reagan is Still Dead!

The GOP must be terribly disappointed in the way things are going so far. Mitt Romney, for example, built his campaign around two words: 'Ronald' and 'Reagan' just as Giuliani built his around 'nine' and 'eleven'. The party would make of Ronald Reagan a "savior". Failing live leadership, they would settle for dead heroes and in the end, a political rapture, a "second-coming" of Ronald Reagan! It didn't work. Reagan is still dead!

At another level, rank and file GOP understand that if deified Reagan should fall out of the Pantheon, the party itself is finished. Reagan was all they had left. In the blogosphere, Reagan defenders themselves are resurrected and more vehement than ever. To wit:
The lies of the left about Ronald Reagan stink up the blogosphere worse than a rest room at a Greyhound bus depot.
The GOP, of late, is most certainly expert in assessing the stalls at Greyhound or, for that matter, any place in which stalls and booths of some sort are frequented for various purposes. Therefore, I leave it to Larry Craig to write up that review.

The left, meanwhile, has been entirely too polite, too timid. If it were not for the blogosphere, the MSM would still be treating Bush as if he were a real and/or credible President. It depends upon what your definition of the word "is" is! If Bush is a real President, then he is the very worst President in American history. If he is not the President then he has dared to stink up the White House like Larry Craig's rest room stall!

It is not only the conduct of Larry Craig in a seedy stall or Bush's malfeasance in the Oval Office that shapes my opinion of the GOP. Although it is true that in both cases the place had been "stunk up". More worrisome is the party's adulation of Ronald Reagan. Until Ronald Reagan, I was tolerant of acquaintances who espoused the cult of gopperism. I owe a debt of gratitude to the ghost of Reagan. It was his Presidency that confirmed my opinion of the GOP. It is not a political party, it is, rather, a crime syndicate, a criminal conspiracy, a kooky cult! Reagan was precisely what the GOP needed at the time. A former movie star, he was a practiced Spellbinder.
In my book, Without Conscience, I argued that we live in a "camouflage society," a society in which some psychopathic traits- egocentricity, lack of concern for others, superficiality, style over substance, being "cool," manipulativeness, and so forth- increasingly are tolerated and even valued. With respect to the topic of this article, it is easy to see how both psychopaths and those with ASPD could blend in readily with groups holding antisocial or criminal values. It is more difficult to envisage how those with ASPD could hide out among more prosocial segments of society. Yet psychopaths have little difficulty infiltrating the domains of business, politics, law enforcement, government, academia and other social structures (Babiak). It is the egocentric, cold-blooded and remorseless psychopaths who blend into all aspects of society and have such devastating impacts on people around them who send chills down the spines of law enforcement officers.

[Hare, Robert D., Ph.D., Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Case of Diagnostic Confusion, Psychiatric Times, February 1996: Vol. XIII Issue 2]

-- The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil

There is enough probable cause in the public record alone to indict the leadership of the GOP for violations of various US Criminal Codes having to do with "criminal conspiracy". Now we know why the GOP is eager not only to keep Reagan alive, but to disprove the existence of conspiracies. If conspiracies did not exist, Ronald Reagan himself need not have worried about the opinion of Iran/Contra Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh who believed Reagan guilty of conspiring to arm an avowed enemy of the US while funneling money to a right-wing terrorist organization.
To the spellbinder, everything becomes subordinated to their conviction that they are exceptional, sometimes even messianic. An ideology can emerge from such individuals that is certainly partly true, and the value of which is claimed to be superior to all other ideologies. They believe they will find many converts to their ideology and when they discover that this is not the case, they are shocked and fume with “paramoral indignation.” The attitude of most normal people to such spellbinders is generally critical, pained and disturbed.

The spellbinder places on a high moral plane anyone who succumbs to his influence, and he will shower such people with attention and property and perks of all kinds. Critics are met with “moral” outrage and it will be claimed by the spellbinder that the compliant minority is actually a majority.

Such activity is always characterized by the inability to foresee its final results, something obvious from the psychological point of view, because its substratum contains pathological phenomena, and both spellbinding and self-charming make it impossible to perceive reality accurately enough to foresee results logically.

In a healthy society, the activities of spellbinders meet with criticism effective enough to stifle them quickly. However, when they are preceded by conditions operating destructively on common sense and social order - such as social injustice, cultural backwardness, or intellectually limited rulers manifesting pathological traits - spellbinders activities have led entire societies into large-scale human tragedy.

Such an individual fishes an environment or society for people amenable to his influence, deepening their psychological weaknesses until they finally become a ponerogenic union.

-- The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil

Reagan apologists often attack Jimmy Carter because, like the predators they are, they smell weakness. It is a mistake. Carter, is in fact among the best Presidents in job creation and he is the only US President to have brokered a Middle East peace --the Camp David Accords. In the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Carter acted quickly. He replaced Kissenger's incremental, shuttle diplomacy with a comprehensive, multilateral approach that included reconvening the 1973 Geneva Conference to include a Palestinian delegation. The GOP feared to duplicate that approac. It might have succeeded. Democrats, meanwhile, should stop running away from what it means to be a Democrat. Get a spine! Stand up and be counted! You have nothing to fear from a gang of lying perverts, bigots and war mongers.
Reagan’s election in November 1980 also was welcomed in other quarters. His victory set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anti-communist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anti-communist action justified, no matter how brutal.

From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating from Ronald Reagan's White House.

--Robert Parry, Obama's Dubious Praise for Reagan

Hoping to deflect attention from the new Äugustus, Reagan worshipers claim that
Carter was responsible for "horrible inflation" and 20% interest rates. So what? Interest rates would be expected to decline under Reagan's depression as interest rates, in fact, decline in every recession or depression. During Reagan's depression, the GDP declined at a rate of 2.2 percent, quite possibly the biggest such decline since the Great Depression, most certainly it was the biggest decline in the more than twenty years between 1973 to the assumption of the White House by Bush. Millions lost jobs and homes. In any case, it was the Federal Reserve Board that slashed interest rates and expanded the money supply, thus reducing prices. Ronald Reagan had nothing whatsoever to do with it! It was the Fed --not Reagan --who was responsible for the following but short-lived recovery.

Under Carter, people were at work and productive. They were buying homes --not leaving them under the threat of imminent foreclosure as many, perhaps, millions are doing now.

That was not the case under Reagan who destroyed the trade unions, exported jobs and technology, and plunged the nation into a depression of two years ---the very worst since Herbert Hoover's Great Depression!

Before Reagan, America had a steel industry. After Reagan, it didn't. Before Reagan, America has a viable automotive industry. After Reagan, the US was buying its cars from Japan. Before Reagan, small retailers still existed. After Reagan, small stores had all but disappeared, giving way to huge corporate chains, and, in time, WalMart --an economic Kudzu vine that chokes out every flower in the garden.

Typically, Reagan would take credit for reforms begun under Carter. It was Carter who gave the rich a capital gains tax cut, even as he deregulated key industries like trucking and airlines. Carter also increased defense spending. I happen to think Carter ought not have done that! But, to his credit, he didn't muck it up nearly as much as did Reagan who sold his soul for the elite GOP base of robber barons and other vote buyers! The moral of the story is this: don't sell your soul to the GOP robber barons. They don't appreciate it and will support a card-carrying "seed pod" like Reagan or Bush anyway.

The era was largely characterized by the undo influence of corporate PACs which forced Congress to pass pro-business/anti-individual, anti-family legislation. Supply siders believed it would trickle down. Like Bush's war on Iraq, it didn't work out as planned. The nation was plunged into the worst depression since WWII.

The GOP would love to fight another cold war. The "commies" were shooting back like the misnamed "insurgents", "terrorists" or whatever they are called this week. Much is made of the demoralized military. What had they to be demoralized about? They were no longer slogging through the swamps in Viet Nam and they had to yet been sent to Lebanon by Ronald Reagan. All in all, the enlisted person, under Carter, had it a helluva lot better than do soldiers under either Ronald Reagan who dispatched them to Lebanon to be blown up in a Marine Barracks or under Bush who has them mired and dehumanized in Iraq. Has anyone bothered to check out the suicide rates of returning servicemen.
(CBS) Some of America's 25 million veterans face their biggest fight when they return home from the battlefield -- when they take on mental illness.

And, a CBS News analysis reveals they lose that battle, and take their own lives, at a clip described by various experts as "stunning" and "alarming," according to Chief Investigative Correspondent Armen Keteyian. One called it a "hidden epidemic."

He says no one had ever counted just how many suicides there are nationwide among those who had served in the military -- until now.

The five-month CBS News probe, based upon a detailed analysis of data obtained from death records from 2004 and 2005, found that veterans were more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets.

A recent Veteran Affairs Department estimate says some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year, largely as a result of mental health issues, and Keteyian says, "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

--CBS News: Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning"

Goppers have been known to opine: ...cleaning up after Carter's utter incompetence was messy. In fact, there was nothing to clean up. There was, in fact, nothing for Reagan to do but screw up and screw up he did! See my article: Reagan was no hero but he played one in a movie

Let's set the record straight about another pernicious myth. Ronald reagan had nothing to do with the fall of communism. A great statesman-- Mikhail Gorbachev deserves the credit for withdrawing nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe which he did entirely upon his own initiative. Gorbachev was the architect of Perestroika and, later, Glasnost. Reagan merely followed the leader. And, as I have pointed out: Ronald Reagan Blew the World's Last Chance for Peace! Rank and file goppers will find reasons not to believe anything unflattering about Reagan but that's not the same thing as refuting anything that I have ever written in my admittedly Quixotic quest to set the record straight. That's because, under Reagan, the GOP became not merely a crime syndicate, it became a kooky cult.
The methods that cults use can be used by anyone in any group setting and can be thought of as a "Management system" or a technique of motivation. Thus there is a benefit to applying this knowledge in other areas.

ISOLATION

An obvious way a cult does this is through isolation from other social networks. The extreme of a cult does not have to be applied. If this is applied to a work setting then the stated rule is "This is work. Leave the other parts of life at the door." Likewise the person can go home and leave work at work. The result is a "work personality" and a "home personality".

ENLIST THEM IN A CAUSE

Nothing is quite so motivating than to be involved in a glorious cause. To do this make the success of the group linked to the individuals success. Make the cause lofty and ideal and progressive always on the wave of the future.

DESCRIBE FOR THEM THE QUALITIES OF A "GOOD SOLDIER"

Once you've enlisted them in a cause you can now tell them how best to serve the cause. By describing the qualities of "good soldier" you create an ideal of behavior. On the one hand it's important to point out qualities that they already have to affirm their part in the cause. But it's also important to describe qualities that they will have to work to develop. These qualities can be actual behaviors or they can values that you wish to impose on them. Either way you are holding them to an ideal and letting them know that they play a vital role in the cause.

DRILL THE "GOOD SOLDIER" INTO EXISTENCE

A cult may do this process with intense drills and exercises that emphasize the qualities and values of a good soldier. They will create scenarios and situations where these qualities can be tested and followed up with feedback and correction when needed. You can do this in a management setting much the same way. The goal is to make them WANT to bring on this new personality and do it without prompting. This is done mostly by creating a high standard and through a subtle application of rewards and punishment.

CREATE A GROUP MYTH

Nothing will solidify the new personality than getting a group of "good soldiers" together and having them work with some great purpose in mind. By getting your employee, staff, cult member involved in a group and putting them into action as a group you help create an "esprit de corp" that unifies them and helps solidify the newly created personality. Thus, find tasks that your group can do together. It could be a project, a field trip or anything where they have to work together as a group.

Every one of these tactics can be used and applied in your business and social settings.

If your response to this is to recoil at the idea of using cult strategies then stop it. These strategies are used all the time in many different setting and situations. A good manager is a person who would make a good cult leader if they choose to do it.

The benefits of this strategy include highly motivated people who support the team and, when needed, can put work on hold to develop a personal life.

--How cults create an artificial personality in their followers

Having been brainwashed by a kooky cult, goppers will never hold the GOP to the standard that is applied to Democrats. The GOP does not merely lie about Reagan, its members lie to themselves. It makes them feel better about themselves.

18 comments:

Ed Encho said...

Right the fuck on! America will only be able to recover once the myth has been debunked once and for all and the malodorous stench of Reaganism has been fumigated and expunged from this land forever.

The looming economic collapse will be Reagan's enduring legacy along with an entire generation of the fucked and doomed who have been weaned on the legend of this charlatan.

We need to start a real Reagan Legacy Project that revises history accordingly to tell the truth about that loathsome excuse for a human being.

Just my two cents

EE

Unknown said...

Ed Encho said...

Right the fuck on! America will only be able to recover once the myth has been debunked once and for all and the malodorous stench of Reaganism has been fumigated and expunged from this land forever.

You are spot on, Ed! Your analogy, debunking the myth, can also be thought of as "breaking a spell". The GOP, as a party, is absolutely bonkers. Romney and Huckabee are insane. Paul is borderline. McCain is slick but a war hawk and a liar about his war record. And so it goes.

Someday we may actually thank Bush. Bush is so bad that he may have blown the GOP cover. Let's hope --for good!

We need to start a real Reagan Legacy Project that revises history accordingly to tell the truth about that loathsome excuse for a human being.

Absolutely!! A foundation grant would get this "truth squad" underway! Are you reading this, George Soros?

I have been revising this post, perhaps as your commented. I've was able to track down the excerpts from The Role of the Psychopath in the Generation of Global Evil. It's amazing accurate they are.

Ed Encho said...

"Someday we may actually thank Bush. Bush is so bad that he may have blown the GOP cover. Let's hope --for good!"

Yes, this is great irony isn't it? The reign of the Bushreich has been so absolutely abhorrent and has so corrupted every aspect of American society that they have actually given the whole game away.

Their crushing of dissent, control of the media, their propaganda and their lies have energized an army of independent researchers, writers and polemicists to expose the entire global criminal syndicate that has feasted on us at least since the end of WW II.

I just say keep fucking pouring it on and shining the light into these fetid and foul nests of cockroaches.

We are all the essayists and pamphleteers of the modern era and it is up to us to expose and to educate.

Saving the country one mind at a time I say...

EE

Anonymous said...

Reagan sold missiles to the Ayatollah.

Never forget that. And never miss a chance to throw that back in their faces. Their hero was a traitor. Period.

Linda-Sama said...

Len, I named you as one of my ten fave blogs, as I got tagged myself.

thanks for writing....

Unknown said...

Wow...great comments, Ed, Linda, and anonymous.

Indeed, anonymnous, Reagan committed HIGH TREASON, arming what the State Department had designated an enemy of the US. See: Reagan was no hero but he played one in a movie Did Reagan arm them knowing that the State Department was lying? Or was Iran, in fact, an enemy of the US and Reagan decided to arm them anyway! Either way, either Ronnie or the State Department, or both are TRAITORS!

Thanks, Linda! And keep up the great work. There are days when I indulge a persistent intuition that we will win, perhaps, ARE winning!

Unknown said...

Blogger Ed Encho said...

I just say keep fucking pouring it on and shining the light into these fetid and foul nests of cockroaches.

Cockroaches succumb to Boric Acid! If that information had been widely circulated, the nation might have been spared Tom DeLay's reign of gerrymander terror!

SadButTrue said...

In the GOP universe reality can be changed through the process of denial and force of will. I wouldn't be surprised to find that Reagan is not dead at all, as determined by a vote of the Supreme Court. Split along party lines of course.

Unknown said...

Good one, Sad. But if Ronnie still lives, we can fall back on my own mathematical proof that the universe itself does not exist.

It goes like this: if space and time are equivalent as Einstein "proved", then matter can only manifest itself in infinitely divisible instances, at last, nothing at all!

Movies, for example, exist in "instances" of 1/24th of a second. Reality is infinitely divisible to instances --the duration of which approach zero.

Anonymous said...

Fuzzflash sez...

Superb post, Len, on the mass psychology of fascism.

LH: "Until Ronald Reagan, I was tolerant of acquaintances who espoused the cult of gopperism."

Well it's a one for the Gipper,
Two for the show
Three for the goppers
Them scum gotta go

So let's go
Step on their Diebold shoes
If we do anything
Gotta step on their Diebold shoes.

He who counts unscrutinised ballots
controls the election outcome.
--------------------------------

Obama put the fear of losing into Billary today. If elected, Obama would take his own team to D.C. The DEM-MICs(Team Billary)would not be able to handle this outcome. Freak ‘em right out it would.
Kinda get the feeling that The Kid's gonna whup all comers till those with the most to lose, the dreaded GOP-MIC godfathers, have the uppity junior senator from Illinois whacked. Goppers would be in a state of perpetual apoplexy under President Obama, and they wouldn’t cope with that too well at all. We know these people(MICsters) and their form. The swine would lose primo access to the trough. Unconscionable!
Take a look at who among political movers and shakers have been whacked in the last half century.
They have been predominantly either Democrats or African-Americans.

As you say, Len, Goppers are an outfit with a mob mentality. The Kid's living on borrowed time, the rubes are living in FantasyLand. The rest of Americans may well say:
"Oh no, that couldn't possibly happen here!"
But they know in their hearts that it's bullshit.

Anonymous said...

I live in a navy town where they love reaganomics...spend on the military and fuck our childrens future..."let them pay our bills" attitude runs rampant.

I understand that people need to support their families and shipyard workers make bank, but at what cost?

Nobody in our area is willing to stand up against the Bush Administration-Reps and Senators alike, because of all the money being funneled into the puget sound shipyards.

I dont work in the shipyard, so Im not blinded by the 20 pieces of silver that these people sold their souls and the childrens future for.

Increasing military spending, giving tax breaks to the rich, and cutting social services are not the way to prosperity, only bankruptcy.

Foriegn countries are using our debt to them to buy our companies and buildings and land. Soon we wont even own our own country anymore. Our debt will swallow it up.

Can you imagine the foreclosure crisis that so many people lost their homes evolving into foriegn countries calling in their debts and demanding gold or land? Nobody wants the dollar anymore! Actually more and more I hear of companies wanting to be paid in foriegn currency, not dollars!!!

I can see it coming!!!

Anonymous said...

Sofar the best and the most un-settelling post you've made!

I love to play with words.

And with and with-in the notions of time, a time, the past, the now and the future!

Comparable with good bad and ugly!

We stand in this WORLD as people, as a people, in our owned cultural and moral rights to proclame ourselves individual and in connection with other people's cultures who ac-claim such and own theyr freedoms by theyr own chosen form of independence!

How about that?

WHY DID THE FATHERS MAKE THANKS-GIVING MORE IMPORTANT THAN INDEPENDENCE DAY!!!!!!

And there you are, in the/that middle(muddle) of it,

Like the peasants who came to see Mary Antoinette eet cake.

Psycholosists, Psychiatrists, alike come to theyr questions (and conclusions) through unsurtain messures and EGO'S that fit them.

ITS A BUY$INESS!!!

SO FAR WE ARE!

EVOLUTION, meiner liebe gott, EVOLUTION, apes make bissiness, we buy things, we think we have a choice! We think we have a right to make a choice! We proclame our choices through buyïng SHIT! And means of/and kinds of irrational tranportations wich clogg our sanity and hopes on sanity.

I'm not better (or worst) than any of the 6.3 billion PEOPLE on EARTH!

BUT SOME ARE REALY EVIL.

Anonymous said...

Dear Len,

Please go to haloscan to make the 'comments' freeër!

I'm from the netherlands and used to some ease in makin 'comments'!

WILL YOU PLEASE?

THANK YOU!

Anonymous said...

Larissa is finally saying enough! following Bush's indictment of Ben Kuehne, a prominent and universally respected Miami lawyer who served as president of the bar association. Keuhne's "crime", essentially, was that he had provided a legal opinion to his client. This is, of course, in direct conflict with the Bush ethos "you are either with us or you are with the terrorists". Following on from the Don Siegelman case it is now abundantly clear that respected politicians and lawyers are being subject to blatantly trumped up criminal charges just for opposing the GOP and Bush. It's out in the open. Larissa says that the ONLY relevant political issue now is impeachment.

Her examination of Mukasey's law is also telling. Mukasey has told Congress that he would not allow the Justice Department to investigate whether crimes were committed when the CIA used water boarding. His defense is the classic Nazi "just following orders" bullshit which has no legal force at all under international and US law. There is a similar long-standing principle in commercial law that's worth considering here. If I offer to pay X $5000 to murder Y then X cannot sue me for the money if they fulfill their part of the bargain. Quite simply, the law does not recognize any contracts that involve agreements to breach criminal law. You can't legally contract with someone to commit a crime. In the same way, the Dept Justice advisors (Yoo and Addington) had no legal authority to authorise CIA officials to torture prisoners. And Mukasey simply has no legal authority to declare such actions as legal. It may be mitigating at sentencing to claim that they were mislead, but CIA officials still committed criminal offenses, and their superiors who ordered those crimes are equally guilty. And Mukasey is guilty of obstructing justice.

The current political debates are meaningless. There's over a million dead in Afghanistan, Bush is rejecting Congress's laws, authorizing torture and jailing political opponents. What's it going to take to bring on impeachment?

Unknown said...

Hey Len,

I haven't been here for awhile and when I drop back by, wow, look at the energetic discussion going on here.

BermertonGreg, I am a Seattle cohort and I grew up Military before making the Emerald City my home a quarter-century ago.

The Iron Triangle has many people hooked in through their livelihoods. That is why, for example, McCain can campaign as a staunchly pro-war candidate and do so well, even though everyone is burned out on Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not just Bremerton either, as you know. The Iron Triangle has strong roots in many states, and in the South especially, where military contracting for subsidiaries of GE, Westinghouse, Raytheon, and the rest keep communities afloat in what would otherwise be depressed economies.

It's similar to the battle over logging we have had here in the Northwest. While of course no one wants to see families and towns suffer economically, the industry itself is unsustainable, at least the way it has been traditionally pursued.

When families in places like Birmingham AL, Decatur, GA and many other places in the South, whose income is dependent on weapons system manufacturing, hear candidates talk pro-war to them it means a home in the Sunbelt, career security, that their kids and family can grow up normally in the Sunbelt, and their retirement is secure. That's what war means to them. The cost in human suffering can be tolerated. That is handled by helping families mourn and get through funerals when their kids suffer an early fate halfway around the world. They make the artifacts of war, and many times these are also military people who view fighting in war as simply a necessary, unavoidable duty they have to do.

It's a mentality that not only benefits from the war industry, but sees war itself as a central part of human life. Someone like McCain speaks directly to these people, and that's what he's banking on. In fact, except for being rich, he's very much like one of them, who has fought in war and made his civilian living off the war industry.

It's easy to rant and rave against the Bushmafia/IronTriangle/MurdochMedia machine, lord knows I have done a lot of it myself on this and other blogs, but in reality we are up against an entrenched world view, and the real battle is to educate people and start opening up new viewpoints to them.

In other words we have to fight back against the "propaganda war" with our own "real information war".

Unknown said...

Bremertongreg said...

I live in a navy town where they love reaganomics...spend on the military and fuck our childrens future..."let them pay our bills" attitude runs rampant.

They're just kidding themselves. That's not Reaganomics. That's just ol' fashion "pork", more akin to Keynesianism than Reaganomics. Nevertheless, the GOP, I must admit, have always favored "pork" whenever it benefits their own.

OBLOMOV said...

Dear Len, Please go to haloscan to make the 'comments' freeër!

Oblomov, I haven't had time to check out haloscan. How is it easier? I'm in favor of anything that improves the blog.


Fuzzflash sez...

Well it's a one for the Gipper,
Two for the show
Three for the goppers
Them scum gotta go


I am reminded of the "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag".

Damien said...

The current political debates are meaningless. There's over a million dead in Afghanistan, Bush is rejecting Congress's laws, authorizing torture and jailing political opponents. What's it going to take to bring on impeachment?

Before the Bush dictatorship, politicians might try to get away with ignoring folk with varying success. That nothing done by anyone at any time has moderated this regime in any way whatsoever is proof that the US had become a brutal and absolutely uncaring dictatorship.

I will be surprised if Bush allows elections to take place? Why should he? No one has restrained him --certainly not Congress. And the Courts have all but bent over for him. Bush had joked about staying. But was he joking?

Anonymous said...

Sofar the best and the most un-settelling post you've made!

When Reagan's evil regime ended, I breathed a premature sign of relief. Even Clinton dissapointed. Waco was an act of official murder for which Janet Reno was never held to account. There is no probable cause whatsoever that David Koresh ever committed a crime. If so, he could have been peaceably arrested at any time but wasn't.

And the destruction of the Murrah Bldg is not explained by yet another official cover story.

Yogi 's Music World said...

Hey Len, I haven't been here for awhile and when I drop back by, wow, look at the energetic discussion going on here.

Welcome back Yogi. You're right. We have to fight back. Reagan's corpse is all the GOP has going for them and that's not much. But all we have going for us is the blogosphere. No wonder it is hated by the GOP.

Anonymous said...

You are leaving out the Alternative Energy policy of Carter, with the aim of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil. In 1979 and 1980, America enjoyed it's ONLY years of reduced imports of oil.

Reagan, of course, immediately ended the program.

So, in a very real sense, Reagan committed America to obtaining it's energy sources from those the GOP now labels "terrorists."

Don't believe me, please check the Energy Department for the chart. It was even on that CIA-laden blog known as DKos.

farang

Unknown said...

Anonymous said...

You are leaving out the Alternative Energy policy of Carter, with the aim of reducing America's dependence on foreign oil. In 1979 and 1980, America enjoyed it's ONLY years of reduced imports of oil.

That's grist for a book. Indeed, Carter's initiatives in this area were the source of much teeth gnashing among the oil industry and the the oil whores of the GOP.