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March 24, 2006 – It is so central to their nature, you knew
this would come. And yet, it is being allowed to occur without
comment or retort.
The Bush/Limbaugh Republican Conservatives came to power based on
their platform of “blame-and-lie.” That is their entire platform
and their central natures. Two top-level Bush officials – Clarke
and O’Neil – pointed this out when they left office, that there is
no policy apparatus only a PR machine. The conversion of all of AM
radio and most of TV to unabashed dishonest Bush/Limbaugh propaganda
makes it clear how dependent they are on blaming and lying.
Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently gave his
assessment of what is really going wrong in Iraq, as reported by
Reuters via ABC News (and most other media outlets):
“The United States lags
dangerously behind al Qaeda and other enemies in getting out
information in the digital media age and must update its
old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on
Friday.
“Modernization is crucial to
winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are
bombarded with negative images of the West, Rumsfeld told the
Council on Foreign Relations.
“The Pentagon chief said today's
weapons of war included e-mail, Blackberries, instant messaging,
digital cameras and Web logs, or blogs.
"Our enemies have skillfully
adapted to fighting wars in today's media age, but … our country
has not adapted," Rumsfeld said. “
In other words, the only thing we
are doing wrong – as he says we otherwise are doing just fine – is
not having enough propaganda. Just like O’Neil and Clarke said,
they don’t think to change policy, they just think that they need to
change what lie is said or who is blamed.
And as we’ve seen, this only
increases in the face of failure and disaster. After Katrina, they
blamed and lied. When fires broke out in the West a couple years
back, they blamed environmentalists and used it as an excuse to gut
forest protection, even though the fires were brush and had nothing
to do with environmentalists. And of course, when they failed to
prevent 9/11, they blamed and lied and created more mess.
So it is expected that, now that
America has seen Conservative and Republican policies wreck the
economy, the nation’s standing in the world, lead us into disasters
abroad and at home, and continue to let disasters, such as Global
Warming, foment and fester unabated, that the GOP and Conservatives
would fall back on old faithful. Rather than admitting they and
their policies were wrong and accepting responsibility, it is now a
full court press of blaming and lying. And it is so blatant that it
would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous.
Conservatives, who have been given
carte blanche to write the Bush administration’s policies for the
last five years – with rubber-stamp approval of the Republican-run
Congress – are now claiming the problem is that the Republicans
and/or Bush have not listened to Conservatives or followed
Conservative policies.
As a recent Weekly Standard article
claims,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/011/991nmrow.asp :
“social conservatives remain
second class citizens under the Republican tent. During the 2004
Republican convention, they were virtually confined to the party's
attic, kept off the main stage, treated like slightly lunatic
children.”
As all of America and the world
knows, the idea of keeping them off the stage was a fraud to help
get someone who espoused their “lunatic” views into office. Once
there, we all know the story – it was exactly these Conservatives
who have been allowed to write the policies that have run our nation
for the last five years.
This article continues:
“Republican lobbyist Michael
Scanlon's infamous candid comment--"The wackos get their
information [from] the Christian right [and] Christian
radio"--suggests a common opinion among the dominant "K Street"
Republicans toward their coalition allies.”
Yes, the Christian right is trying
to pretend that they have had nothing to do with what is occurring,
that they have been ignored and neglected.
There is no question that the
Christian right and Christian radio has run our government under the
Bush administration. Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh,
what America has gotten has been exactly what they and their social
Conservative, Christian right brethren have asked for.
But now that America can see that
their policies are entirely flawed and lead only to disaster, debt,
and endless war, they are blaming and lying, blaming the Republican
Party for, if you can imagine, not listening to conservatives, lying
to pretend that it was some other group’s policies that have been
implemented. Which group would that be? The left asked for war in
Iraq? The Democrats wanted the massive debt-creating tax cuts? Was
it the liberals who shot down the Kyoto protocol and tried to make
pollution even worse rather than dealing with the looming disaster
of Global Warming? Was it the left that pushed and passed massive
“faith-based” spending?
And of course they try to say Bush
is not following Reagan’s mantle, claiming current Republicans,
“…squander the revolutionary political legacy of Ronald Reagan.” In
fact, they are following it exactly, with only one difference. When
Ronald Reagan’s disastrous economic policies created all sorts of
debt and attempted to slash spending until infrastructure was
Katrinaesquely neglected, he had a Democratic Congress to pretend
was responsible for the debt his absurd tax cuts created and to
prevent him from gutting things to the point they have been under
the current GOP. The only difference between Reagan and Bush is
that Bush has been able to implement the Reagan agenda without
impediment, and so we get to see what a mess it creates. And
secondly, constant war was accepted and expected under Reagan.
Under Bush, there is no “Cold War”-like taste for or acceptance of
it.
So, following in Reagan’s tradition,
being given free reign to write the laws and policies of the nation
by the Bush administration and rubber stamp GOP Conservative-led
Congress, the Conservatives of America have been given everything
they’ve asked for.
Yet now, they turn to the nation and
say, ‘The problem is they didn’t listen to us.’ ‘The problem is
Conservatives and the Christian Right were ignored and betrayed.’
The rest of the media may let them
get away with this. But at The Moderate Independent, we call pansy
BS what it is. You, real Conservatives, have gotten everything
you’ve asked for for the last half decade. And the mess America has
is exactly the result of it. America’s solution is to realize you
are the misguided, dishonest blame-and-liars you are. We’ve
experienced life under your lead, and it doesn’t work.
Furthermore, the second big lie
circulating at the moment is the GOP and Bush administration trying
to say Americans are only unhappy because of Iraq. President Bush
in his conference and his appointees and spinners are saying it is
Iraq and only Iraq that is weighing down his presidency. This
administration likes to talk about people who have a “pre-9/11
mentality.”
Well, trying to claim everything
about Iraq is a pre-Katrina mentality. To do so is an obvious ploy
to pretend its not about the debt and Schiavo and Katrina and the
now most important issue following the Katrina disaster, Global
Warming.
Though the GOP may only notice Iraq,
the nation saw Katrina, and they saw the numerous Florida hurricanes
the year before, and they saw the record-breaking number of
hurricanes last year, and they see the reality, as talked about in
articles like this one (from
MSNBC) and they realize two things: 1), Global Warming is
serious, very dangerous, and underway; and 2) that the Republicans
in charge are never going to do anything about it.
America sees this and they feel
helpless. There is no spin about Iraq – which never was a threat
and still isn’t – that will change America’s new realization that
this administration has never and never will act with foresight to
prevent disasters before they happen. Katrina was a wake-up call
that all that “whining” on the part of liberals and Democrats isn’t
just empty whining after all. And that just because the
Conservatives lie and say they know better than all of the world’s
top scientists, it probably isn’t true.
So let the Conservatives blame the
Bush administration and GOP-run Congress for ‘not listening to
Conservatives.’ And let the Bush administration try and get
everyone to just focus on Iraq and pretend that is the only thing
America is upset with them about.
When Americans say they don’t trust
the President, the GOP may want to pretend it is only because of how
Iraq is going. But it is much deeper than that. Americans know our
very nation and indeed planet immediately require serious action by
honest people, and that Conservatives and Republicans don’t care and
will let thousands perish, only thinking about who to blame and how
to lie afterwards.
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