The right really, really wants Obama to be their version of Jimmy Carter

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Barack Obama

The right really, really wants Obama to be Jimmy Carter

By Steve Kornacki

AP/Bob Daugherty

Jimmy Carter in 1978

On Wednesday, The Weekly Standard's Jay Cost likened President Obama's current political predicament to what Jimmy Carter faced at roughly this same point in his single term in office, when Carter delivered his "malaise speech." It's a pretty flimsy parallel, and if you're interested in why, Jonathan Bernstein did fine job picking apart Cost's argument.

What's interesting is how often we hear this from the right -- the idea that Obama's presidency represents the second coming of Carter's. Cost isn't even the first to invoke the "malaise" speech. Rush Limbaugh did it a year ago, claiming that Obama's message to the nation after the Gulf oil spill was "almost verbatim" what Carter had said back in 1979:

I tell you, it's second term of Jimmy Carter! And it's liberalism 100% through and through. Jimmy Carter, 1979, July 15th, gave the same speech.

Not that Rush was the first to go down this road, either. For instance, a week before that, Fox News' website ran a piece titled "Barack Obama = Jimmy Carter?" in which Jon Kraushar argued that a recent Obama speech on the economy was eerily similar to the "malaise" speech:

The apt comparison between Obama’s speech on the economy and Carter’s is that “a crisis of confidence” persists today. There is the same anxiety that in Barack Obama we have another Jimmy Carter—a self-righteous ideologue who is in over his head, championing policies that are not only unpopular but also destructive.

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Nor was Kraushar the first. Basically from the moment Obama took office, conservative media outlets have been relentlessly playing the Carter card, whether the topic is the economy or foreign policy. Take this editorial from the conservative Washington Times back in January, just after the Egyptian uprising began:

As Egypt’s regime totters on the verge of collapse, President Obama is looking less like Ronald Reagan and more like the Gipper’s predecessor, Jimmy Carter. The turmoil in Egypt is markedly similar to the revolution that gripped Iran 33 years ago. Egypt may be to Mr. Obama what Iran was to Mr. Carter.

Or this from a blogger at Red State when Obama delivered his Middle East speech at the State Department last month:

Charges that President Obama was the taller, suaver, better-looking version of the bitter, shrunken commie-sympathizing Jimmy Carter seemed a bit of a stretch. President Obama’s Middle East speech changed all that.

It’s official: President Obama is Jimmy Carter II.

Or this from Bahukutumbi Raman at Forbes. writing about Obama and North Korea back in May 2009:

During the U.S. Presidential primaries last year, I had expressed my misgivings that Barack Obama might turn out to be another Jimmy Carter, whose confused thinking and soft image paved the way for the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran....

The defiant action of North Korea in testing a long-range missile with military applications last month, and its latest act of defiance in reportedly carrying out an underground nuclear test on May 25, can be attributed--at least partly, if not fully--to its conviction that it will have nothing to fear from the Obama administration for its acts of defiance

And on and on it goes.

Now, it's true that Obama's rise in 2008 in some ways called to mind Carter's in 1976 -- especially when it came to devising smart primary season strategies (Carter by recognizing that recent reforms had shifted all of the action away from the convention, and Obama by targeting and racking up massive margins in small and mid-size caucus states). This is something I wrote about myself at the time.

But it's not hard to see why the right has been so intent on maintaining the comparison throughout Obama's presidency. It serves two purposes: stirring the passions of the GOP base and encouraging a negative association among swing voters.

To the conservative masses, the name "Carter" is a virtual curse word -- a symbol of everything they despise about the Democratic Party and liberalism in general.

Why the venom? Part of it has to do with the fact that Carter's presidency really was unsuccessful, and that it ended with painfully high unemployment, inflation, and interest rates, not to mention a prolonged hostage crisis. So they know that things were bad under Carter and that he was a Democrat, so therefore (in their view) his presidency serves as a model of what happens when Democrats control Washington.

Just as important, though, is the role Carter must necessarily play in one of the right's favorite past-times: Reagan mythologizing. The Gipper can't be America's savior if the president before him wasn't such so unspeakably terrible that that the country's very survival was in doubt.

So playing up the Obama-as-Carter concept help fill the GOP base with resentment and hostility, which translates into increased activism and turnout at the polls. Swing voters, meanwhile, don't need the mythology, but they too recognize -- either from memory or from what they've heard -- that Carter's term has become the modern standard by which failed presidencies are measured.

What's interesting here is how far the right's Carter caricature is from reality. Yes, he wasn't successful as president, but in their telling, this is usually because he was a radical, European-style socialist president -- just like Obama. But Carter, at least when he was president, was actually a very conservative Democrat, who often had as much trouble with his own party's members of Congress as with Republicans. I wrote about this a few months ago:

But the bigger issue was simply that Carter's entire presidency was a fluke. He was the only Democratic candidate in 1976 to fully grasp the significance of that year's massively expanded primary and caucus calendar; the party's more logical White House prospects still believed the old rules -- which allowed candidates to hold back until late in the primary season or just before the convention and still win -- still applied. By the time they figured things out, Carter had sealed the nomination -- with only 40 percent of all primary voters backing him and without the support of many of the party's traditional coalition components.

Those who only know Carter by his modern-day caricature (our first socialist president!) may not realize that his domestic economic policies were conservative and often hostile to organized labor and key Democratic interest groups. These groups and their members had, in most cases, never liked Carter in the first place and would have blocked his nomination if they'd known how to. Thus, the Democrats were split for almost all of Carter's presidency, ultimately leading to Ted Kennedy's 1980 primary challenge to the president.

To his credit, Cost seems to recognize this. In a follow-up post Friday morning, he noted Carter's struggles with his own party and conceded that Obama isn't facing anything like this. Then he argued that there's actually a better parallel: Obama isn't Jimmy Carter, he's actually ... Michael Dukakis.

• Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More: Steve Kornacki

June 14, 2011 at 20:54:28

Neocons Trade Medicare for War

From Consortium News

For decades now, America's neoconservatives have pushed for higher military spending and baited their political opponents as being "soft" on whatever the enemy-of-the-day was: Moscow, Nicaragua, Cuba in the 1980s; al-Qaeda, Iraq, Iran, Libya in recent years.

The neocons happily smeared Americans who opposed the huge Pentagon budgets, tagging them as anti-American or disloyal. They were people who would "blame America first," as Ronald Reagan's neocon Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously declared.

The neocons, who first rose to prominence under Reagan in the 1980s, also put fiscal responsibility in the back seat whenever the trade-off was more military spending. Indeed, Reagan's first budget director, David Stockman, has traced the origins of today's budget crisis, in part, to the neocon insistence on bloated Pentagon budgets.

Last year, in a New York Times op-ed entitled "Four Deformations of the Apocalypse," Stockman said one of those "deformations" resulted from the fact that "the neocons were pushing the military budget skyward."

Back then, however, Reagan could appease Washington's political factions, from Republicans wanting more tax cuts to Democrats defending social programs, by running big deficits. Reagan did target "welfare queens" and other unpopular groups for budget cuts but he essentially papered over the ideological differences with massive borrowing from foreign countries.

Today, however, as those deficits reach a crisis point, hard choices are finally being forced on the American political system. Yet, the neocons retain their place of extraordinary influence in Washington and are determined to keep military spending "skyward."

To do that, today's neocons are ready to make trade-offs that would shrink the social safety net for millions of Americans, including senior citizens whose lives depend on Medicare. For instance, Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the leading neocons in Congress, has proposed raising the eligibility requirement for Medicare from 65 to 67.

While Lieberman suggests the change is a modest one, what it means for many Americans is that they will either face exorbitant fees from private insurers after turning 65 or go without insurance altogether and hope their health holds up for another two years.

As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has noted , "Not every 65- or 66-year-old denied Medicare would be able to get private coverage -- in fact, many would find themselves uninsured. So what would these seniors do?

"Well, as the health economists Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll document, right now Americans in their early 60s without health insurance routinely delay needed care, only to become very expensive Medicare recipients once they reach 65.

"This pattern would be even stronger and more destructive if Medicare eligibility were delayed. As a result, Mr. Frakt and Mr. Carroll suggest, Medicare spending might actually go up, not down, under Mr. Lieberman's proposal."

Life or Death

But let's state this predicament more directly: What does it mean for a 65-year-old to postpone needed medical treatment and then get emergency care for acute problems once he or she finally qualifies for Medicare two years later? It means the person is going to survive in a much reduced condition -- or die.

A person who postpones treatment of a chronic illness like diabetes, hypertension or cancer can expect to face surgery, amputations, incapacity or early death. In other words, the neocons are willing to trade your health and your life for their higher military spending.

Like the old explanation of how the Nazis eliminated one group after another, you might say that the neocons first came for the welfare queens and since you weren't a welfare queen, you didn't protest; then they came for the people who needed subsidized housing or food stamps and since you weren't one of them, you stayed silent; and now they are coming for those of us who need Medicare and -- by now -- we are so divided and deluded that our protests can be overridden and ignored.

But why, you might ask, are the neocons so determined to maintain U.S. military spending at record levels -- even as the United States spends nearly as much on war and armaments as the rest of the world combined? Why must that spending be protected even at the cost of vital services for Americans?

On one level, the answer is self-interest. Many of the top think tanks, lobbying shops and law firms -- where prominent neocons earn fat salaries when they're not working in the government -- get gobs of money from military contractors, either as generous donations or hefty fees. It's never wise to bite the hand that feeds you.

Plus, when the neocons rotate back into government -- as they hope to under a new Republican president in 2013 -- they want to control a robust military that can shove around global adversaries. What's the fun in having to negotiate?

Some neocons also are deeply committed to the interests of Israel and see the proper role of the U.S. military as taking down Israeli adversaries that are beyond the capability even of the top-notch Israeli Defense Forces.

While Israel is capable of thrashing the Palestinians in Gaza or blasting apart Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, it couldn't reach out hundreds of miles and eliminate Muslim enemies like Iraq's Saddam Hussein, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi or Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That requires the nonpareil U.S. military.

Getting Iran

And, with Hussein now gone and Gaddafi under siege, that leaves Iran as Israel's pre-eminent threat, and it is not within easy range of Israel's air force. So, some neocons are quite open about the need to maintain high levels of U.S. military spending in case Israel decides to attack Iran and its nuclear program.

The Washington Post, which has evolved into the neocons' flagship newspaper, has warned that any significant reduction in the U.S. military budget would jeopardize the power needed to confront Iran and other "rogue" states.

In a Tuesday editorial praising Defense Secretary Robert Gates for chastising NATO allies over their reduced military spending, the Post also noted that President Barack Obama was sliding in a similarly dangerous direction.

The Post editors wrote: "Despite an ongoing war in Afghanistan and the growing threat from rogue states such as Iran, Mr. Gates noted, European defense spending has fallen 15 percent since 2001, even as that of the United States has doubled.

"The American portion of NATO defense spending, which hovered around 50 percent during the Cold War, is now 75 percent." Mr. Gates rightly blamed European governments for being "apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.'"

The Post continued: "The secretary's sermon was well-justified. But we couldn't help wondering if the assembled European ministers would find some irony in his lessons. The Obama administration, after all, is pressing for big defense cuts of its own -- up to $400 billion over the next dozen years, on top of savings of a similar amount already identified by Mr. Gates.

"That will mean, the Pentagon chief said in a speech last month, 'a smaller military' that 'will be able to go fewer places and do fewer things.'"

Beyond criticizing the notion of limiting the Pentagon budget, the Post chastised Obama for withdrawing U.S. strike aircraft from the Libya campaign and for considering a significant draw-down in the 100,000 U.S. troops now in Afghanistan.

The Post cited, nervously, "some reports suggesting that senior White House aides are again pushing to abandon the mission of creating an Afghan government and army capable of defending the country by 2014."

"It's hard to see Europeans responding to appeals like that of Mr. Gates at a time when the United States is reducing its military capabilities, scaling back its objectives [in Afghanistan] and insisting on taking a back seat during a war [in Libya]."

The Post concluded, "It may be that NATO has a dim future, but if so it's not only because its smaller members are shirking their responsibilities. It's also because its dominant member leader is eschewing its indispensable role of leadership."

Easing Out Obama

In other words, the Washington Post -- the capital's most powerful newspaper -- is rejecting any significant reductions in U.S. military spending even as vital domestic programs, such as Medicare, are under extreme pressure.

Already, the Republicans in Washington have caved to these neocon demands by sparing the Pentagon from any budget cuts as the GOP would replace Medicare with a privatized voucher system that would shift costs heavily onto the sick elderly.

As Reagan's budget director Stockman noted in another New York Times op-ed, congressional Republicans and their supposedly deficit-hawk budget chairman, Rep. Paul Ryan, backed away from challenging the neocons on military spending.

"Ingratiating himself with the neocons, Mr. Ryan has put the $700 billion defense and security budget off limits," Stockman wrote.

Ryan's surrender on military spending cuts, combined with the Right's insistence on further tax cuts for the rich, skewed the Republican budget plan toward far more severe domestic spending cuts, including ending Medicare as a government-run insurance program.

Still, between the continued high military spending and the new rounds of tax cuts, Ryan's budget would not project a balanced federal budget for nearly three decades -- and would achieve that primarily by shifting health-care costs onto seniors.

But Ryan's budget deal with the neocons is nothing new. It represents a cornerstone of the Right's alliance dating back to the late 1970s when the Republicans, the neocons and the Religious Right came together to push Ronald Reagan into the White House.

As Stockman noted then, what the neocons wanted was "skyward" military spending, which also fit with the desire of Israel's Likud leadership to take a harder line against Arab militants who then were seen as allied with the Soviet Union.

"Regime Change'

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the neocons began adjusting their strategies to focus more directly on Israel's foes in the Muslim world. A neocon theory emerged that "regime change" in places like Iraq, Syria and Iran would deprive Israel's closer-in enemies, such as Lebanon's Hezbollah and Palestine's Hamas, of financial and military support and thus enable Israel to dictate peace terms.

The early outlines of this concept for violently remaking the Middle East emerged in 1996 when a group of American neocons, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, went to work for Israeli Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu during his campaign for prime minister.

The neocon strategy paper, called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," advanced the idea that only regime change in hostile Muslim countries could achieve the necessary "clean break" from the diplomatic standoffs that had followed inconclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Under the "clean break," Israel would no longer seek peace through mutual understanding and compromise, but rather through confrontation, including the violent removal of leaders such as Iraq's Saddam Hussein.

The plan called Hussein's ouster "an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right," but also one that would destabilize the Assad dynasty in Syria and thus topple the power dominoes into Lebanon, where Hezbollah might soon find itself without its key Syrian ally. Iran also could find itself in the cross-hairs of "regime change."

But what the "clean break" needed was the military might of the United States, since some of the targets like Iraq were too far away and too powerful to be defeated even by Israel's highly efficient military. The cost in Israeli lives and to Israel's economy from such overreach would have been staggering.

In 1998, the U.S. neocon brain trust pushed the "clean break" plan another step forward with the creation of the Project for the New American Century, which urged President Bill Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

However, Clinton would only go so far, maintaining a harsh embargo on Iraq and enforcing a "no-fly zone" which involved U.S. aircraft conducting periodic bombing raids. Still, with Clinton or his heir apparent, Al Gore, in the White House, a full-scale invasion of Iraq appeared out of the question.

The first key political obstacle was removed when the neocons helped engineer George W. Bush's ascension to the presidency in Election 2000. However, the path was not fully cleared until al-Qaeda terrorists attacked New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, creating a political climate across America for war and revenge.

In March 2003, surrounded by neocon advisers, Bush ordered an unprovoked invasion of Iraq. Though the war had other motives besides Israeli security -- from Bush's personal animus toward Saddam Hussein to controlling Iraq's oil resources -- a principal goal of the neocons was the projection of American power deep into the Muslim world, to strike at enemy states beyond Israel's limited military reach.

Of course, the geopolitical motives were rarely mentioned publicly. Instead, the American people were fed falsehoods about Iraq's WMDs and Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda.

Neocon Failure

The neocon plan might have worked, except that the violent resistance in Iraq to the U.S. occupation soon made it clear that the neocons' grander plan of extending "regime change" to Syria and Iran had to be put on hold.

With the bloody Iraq War eroding George W. Bush's political support by mid-decade and the rise of Barack Obama in 2008, the neocons found themselves shunted out of government power centers but not out of Washington's opinion circles. The neocons also retained allies in the State Department and the U.S. military.

But the neocons needed to buy time as the Democrats gained control of the White House and Congress in 2009. So the savvy neocons conducted what amounted to a delaying action as they worked to dirty up and weaken Obama.

And the young president fell into their trap. To show his commitment to bipartisanship, Obama retained key figures from Bush's national security team, including Defense Secretary Gates and Central Command chief, Gen. David Petraeus, both neocon favorites. Obama also appointed a neocon-lite Democrat, Hillary Clinton, to be Secretary of State.

Within months, Obama found himself hemmed in by these advisers as they sought to push him toward a major escalation in the Afghan War. They did so by limiting his war options on the inside, while the neocons on the outside built elite political support for the extra troops.

In late 2009, Obama finally gave in to the Pentagon demands, but he thought he had extracted an agreement for a withdrawal beginning in July 2011. However, once he agreed to the extra troops, he found himself under neocon criticism for any actual plan to withdraw them.

Meanwhile, the Afghan War escalation alienated Obama from his liberal "base." Many disillusioned progressives sat out the 2010 congressional elections, which saw the Republicans regain control of the House and strengthen their hand in the Senate.

Now, as Obama's reelection prospects decline -- amid a struggling economy, continued Republican obstructionism and mounting criticism of his leadership skills -- the neocons can see the end of the four-year tunnel.

All the neocons have to do is continue harassing Obama for another 16 months, using their influence in Official Washington to demean any foreign policy adjustments that might win him back favor with his liberal "base."

Already, the talking points are in play if the President goes in that direction: Obama doesn't believe in "American exceptionalism"; Obama is a "declinist": Obama "apologizes" for America; he is "weak" on American power. The neocons might as well trot out Jeane Kirkpatrick's old line and accuse Obama of wanting to "blame America first."

Having fended off a challenge to their warlike foreign policy -- and to their readiness to put American troops in harm's way for geopolitical goals -- the neocons can now look forward to a Republican restoration to the White House in 2013 and getting their hands back on the levers of American military might.

http://www.consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at more...)

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On Again, Off Again: The growing rift between Republicans and Wall Street

On Again, Off Again

The growing rift between Republicans and Wall Street.

David Callahan | June 10, 2011 | web only

Do Republican leaders in Congress answer to Tea Party activists or to Wall Street? That question will be answered in the next few weeks as the debt-ceiling fight comes to a head. The choice that GOP leaders make will influence more than fiscal policy or the financial markets; it will also shape the 2012 election and reveal the true identity of today’s Republican Party.

(Flickr/pinksherbert)

Wall Street has been urging Republicans to approve more government borrowing for months, arguing that it is too risky to use the debt-ceiling cap as a hostage in the budget battle. That message was delivered during a series of meetings in April between GOP leaders and top Wall Street executives and has been repeated often by the finance sector’s ubiquitous lobbyists on Capitol Hill. As Rep. Michael Grimm, a Republican from Staten Island told The Wall Street Journal: “Wall Street understands that if we default on our obligations, our markets are going to crash. … They’re doing their job and talking to a lot of members.”

So far, these pleas for prudence haven’t gotten much traction. This isn’t surprising. Wall Street and the Republican Party have long been drifting apart, and the GOP has been leaning more and more toward the Tea Party, which demands that the debt ceiling not be raised without drastic reductions to government spending.

Tea Party supporters have turned this issue into a fealty test, threatening to mount primary challenges against Speaker John Boehner and other top House Republicans if they vote to raise the debt ceiling without huge budget cuts. William Temple, chair of the Tea Party Founding Fathers, has said that his group will grade Republican members of Congress on only one issue this year: their position on the debt ceiling.

Disagreement over the debt ceiling is yet more evidence that Wall Street and the Republican Party increasingly inhabit separate worlds. Over the past 15 years, the Republican Party has become ever more dependent on downscale voters from rural and small-town America, as well as more beholden to the religious right. In contrast, the financial industry - which is largely based in the most cosmopolitan parts of blue America - has become a more complex and global business that is increasingly dominated by highly educated leaders with postgraduate degrees from elite universities.

While John Boehner grew up working in his father’s bar and got a B.A. at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan grew up as a broker’s son on Park Avenue before earning degrees from Tufts and Harvard Business School. The two top Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee - Spencer Bachus and Randy Neugebauer - were small-business men in the South before going into politics. Wall Street’s top hedge-fund managers, meanwhile, include a number of PhDs such as former math professor James Simons and the computer scientist David Shaw.

To be sure, there are plenty of hardcore conservatives on Wall Street. But most in the finance world are more pragmatic than ideological. Many Wall Street leaders saw tax increases as inevitable as the Bush presidency came to a close, and didn’t have a problem with Obama’s proposal to raise rates on the wealthy. Bankers also believe that government has an important role to play in managing the economy and making investments in education, science, infrastructure, and other areas.

Once upon a time, the Republican Party took a pragmatic view of taxes - Reagan rolled back 40 percent of his tax cuts - and saw a role for government. But those days are long gone. And the ideological rigidity of today’s GOP is unnerving to Wall Streeters who view the world as inherently complex.

In turn, with anti-elite populism surging in conservative states, Republicans see major risks in getting too close to Wall Street - even as the party quietly does the Street’s bidding on a host of regulatory issues. Many of the Republicans who backed the Troubled Asset Relief Program have now spent three years abjectly apologizing for their vote or were ousted by primary challenges from the right.

The first two years of the Obama administration did help bring Wall Street and the Republicans closer together again. But according to campaign records, there has not actually been a seismic shift of Wall Street money to the GOP. Democrats only narrowly raised less money than Republicans from the securities and investment sector in the 2010 election cycle.

If Republicans go to the brink or beyond on the debt ceiling, they will likely lose whatever ground they have regained with Wall Street amid an anti-Obama backlash. This could have big implications for fundraising in the 2012 election. After the legal profession, no industry gives more in political donations than financial services. The GOP’s disadvantage here hurt the party not just in 2008 but also in 2006 when the Democrats regained the Congress.

By taking an absolutist stance on the debt ceiling, the GOP is handing the advantage back to Democratic Party fundraisers. Wall Street may not be a haven of liberalism. But it is more likely to back a Democratic Party that wants to raise taxes on the rich and impose new regulations than to support Republicans who are crazy enough up to blow up the economy on principle.

AlterNet.org

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

Consortium News / By Robert Parry

The GOP's CIA Playbook: Destabilize Country to Sweep Back Into Power

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available.

June 9, 2011 |

Photo Credit: Fibonacci Blue

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

To stop this spread of “socialism,” nearly anything goes. Take, for example, Chile in the early 1970s when socialist President Salvador Allende won an election and took steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.

Under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dispatched to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.”

U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher.

Worsening joblessness could then be spun by the CIA-financed news outlets as proof that Allende’s policies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social programs. When Allende compromised with the Right, that had the additional benefit of causing friction between him and some of his supporters who wanted even more radical change.

As Chile became increasingly ungovernable, the stage was set for the violent overthrow of Allende, the installation of a rightist dictatorship, and the imposition of “free-market” economics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their American corporate backers.

Though the Allende case in Chile is perhaps the best known example of this intelligence strategy (because it was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach frequently around the world. Sometimes the target government is removed without violence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.

Home to Roost

So, it is perhaps fitting that a comparable approach to politics would eventually come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the propaganda funding comes from outside sources (think of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.

When a Democrat somehow does manage to get into the White House, Republicans in Congress (and even in the Courts) are ready to do their part in the destabilization campaign. Rather than grant traditional “honeymoon” periods of cooperation with the president’s early policies, the battle lines are drawn immediately.

In late 1992, for instance, Bill Clinton complained that his “honeymoon” didn’t even last through the transition, the two-plus months before a new president takes office. He found himself facing especially harsh hazing from the Washington press corps, as the mainstream media – seeking to shed its “liberal” label and goaded by the right-wing media – tried to demonstrate that it would be tougher on a Democrat than any Republican.

The mainstream press hyped minor “scandals” about Clinton’s Whitewater real estate investment and Travel-gate, a flap about some routine firings at the White House travel office. Meanwhile, the Right’s rapidly growing media was spreading false stories implicating Clinton in the death of White House aide Vince Foster and other “mysterious deaths.”

Republicans in Congress did all they could to feed the press hysteria, holding hearings and demanding that special prosecutors be appointed. When the Clinton administration relented, the choice of prosecutors was handed over to right-wing Republican Appeals Court Judge David Sentelle, who consciously picked political enemies of Clinton to oversee zealous investigations.

Finally Winning

The use of scandal-mongering to destabilize the Clinton administration finally peaked in late 1998 and early 1999 when the Republican-controlled House voted impeachment and Clinton had to endure (but survive) a humiliating trial in the Senate.

The Republican strategy, however, continued into Campaign 2000 with Vice President Al Gore facing attacks on his character and integrity. Gore was falsely painted as a delusional braggart, as both right-wing and mainstream media outlets freely misquoted him and subjected him to ridicule (while simultaneously bowing and scraping before Republican candidate George W. Bush).

When Gore managed to win the national popular vote anyway – and would have carried the key state of Florida if all legally cast ballots were counted – the Republicans and the Right rose up in fury demanding that the Florida count be stopped before Bush’s tiny lead completely disappeared. Starting a minor riot in Miami, the Republicans showed how far they would go to claim the White House again.

Five Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court – wanting to ensure that the new president would keep their side in control of the courts and recognizing that their party was prepared to spread disorder if Gore prevailed – stopped the counting of votes and made Bush the “winner.” [For details, see the book, Neck Deep.]

Despite this partisan ruling, Gore and the Democrats stepped back from the political confrontation. The right-wing press cheered and gloated, while the mainstream news media urged the people to accept Bush as “legitimate” for the good of the country.

For most of Bush’s disastrous presidency, this dynamic remained the same. Though barely able to complete a coherent sentence, Bush was treated with great deference, even when he failed to protect the country from the 9/11 attacks and led the nation into an unprovoked war with Iraq. There were no combative investigations of Bush like those that surrounded Clinton.

Even at the end of Bush’s presidency – when his policies of deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and massive budget deficits combined to create the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression – the prevailing message from the Establishment was that it was unfair to lay too much blame on Bush.

Shortly after Barack Obama took office in 2009, a Republican/right-wing talking point was to complain when anyone took note of the mess that Bush had left behind: “There you go again, blaming Bush.”

Getting Obama

Immediately, too, the Republicans and the Right set to work demonizing and destroying Obama’s presidency. Instead of allowing the Democrats to enact legislation aimed at addressing the financial and economic crisis, the Senate Republicans launched filibuster after filibuster.

When Obama and the Democrats did push through emergency legislation, such as the $787 billion stimulus package, they had to water it down to reach the 60-vote super-majority. The Republicans and the Right then quickly laid the blame for high unemployment on the “failed” stimulus.

There also were waves of propaganda pounding Obama’s legitimacy. The Right’s news media pressed bogus accusations that Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was not constitutionally eligible to be president. He was denounced as a socialist, a Muslim, a fascist, an enemy of Israel, and pretty much any other charge that might hit some American hot button.

When Obama welcomed American students back to school in 2009, the Right organized against his simple message – urging young people to work hard – as if it were some form of totalitarian mind control. His attempt to address the growing crisis in American health care was denounced as taking away freedoms and imposing “death panels.”

Soon, billionaires like oil man David Koch and media mogul Murdoch were promoting a “grassroots” rebellion against Obama called the Tea Party. Activists were showing up at presidential speeches with guns and brandishing weapons at rallies near Washington.

The high-decibel disruptions and the “screaming” economy created the impression of political chaos. Largely ignoring the role of the Republicans, the press faulted Obama for failing to live up to his campaign promise to bring greater bipartisanship to Washington.

Hearing the discord framed that way, many average Americans also blamed Obama; many of the President’s supporters grew demoralized; and, as happened with Allende in Chile, some on the Left turned against Obama for not doing more, faster.

By November 2010, the stage was set for a big Republican comeback. The party swept to victory in the House and fell just short in the Senate. But Congress was not the Republicans’ true goal. What they really want is the White House with all its executive powers.

However, following Obama’s success in killing Osama bin Laden on May 2 and with what is widely regarded as a weak Republican presidential field, the Right’s best hope for regaining complete control of the U.S. government in 2012 is to sink the U.S. economy.

Already, the Republican success in limiting the scope of the stimulus package and then labeling it a failure – combined with deep cuts in local, state and federal government spending – have helped push the economy back to the brink where a double-dip recession is now a serious concern.

Despite these worries – and a warning from Moody’s about a possible downgrade on U.S. debt if Congress delays action on raising the debt limit – the Republicans are vowing more brinksmanship over the debt-limit vote. Before acting, they are demanding major reductions in government spending (while refusing to raise taxes on the rich).

A Conundrum

So, Obama and the Democrats face another conundrum. If they slash spending too much, they will further stall the recovery. However, if they refuse to submit to this latest round of Republican blackmail, they risk a debt crisis that could have devastating consequences for the U.S. economy for years – even decades – to come.

Either way, the right-wing media and much of the mainstream press will put the blame on Obama and the Democrats. They will be held accountable for failing to govern.

The Republican propaganda machine will tell the American people that they must throw Obama and the Democrats out of office for stability to return. There will be assurances about how the “magic of the market” will bring back the bright days of prosperity.

Of course, the reality of a new Republican administration, especially with a GOP Congress, would be the return of the old right-wing nostrums: more tax cuts for the rich, less regulation of corporations, more military spending, and more privatization of social programs.

Any budget balancing will come at the expense of labor rights for union employees and shifting the costs for health care onto the backs of the elderly. Yet, all this will be surrounded by intense propaganda explaining the public pain as a hangover from misguided government “social engineering.”

There is, of course, the possibility that the American people will see through today’s Republican CIA-style strategy of “making the economy scream.” Americans might come to recognize the role of the pseudo-populist propagandists on Fox News and talk radio.

Or Republicans might have second thoughts about playing chicken on the debt limit and running the risk of a global depression. Such a gamble could redound against them. And, it’s hard to believe that even their most ardent billionaire-backers would find destruction of their stock portfolios that appealing.

But there can be a momentum to madness. We have seen throughout history that events can get out of hand, that thoroughly propagandized true believers can truly believe. Sometimes, they don’t understand they are simply being manipulated for a lesser goal. Once the chaos starts, it is hard to restore order.

That has been another bloody lesson from the CIA’s operations in countries around the world. These covert actions can have excessive or unintended consequences.

Ousting Allende turned Chile into a fascist dictatorship that sent assassins far and wide, including Washington, D.C. Ousting Mossadegh in Iran led to the tyranny of the Shah and ultimately to an extreme Islamist backlash. Ousting Arbenz in Guatemala led to the butchery of some 200,000 people and the rise of a narco-state. Such examples can go on and on.

However, these CIA-type techniques can be very seductive, both to U.S. presidents looking for a quick fix to some international problem and to a political party trying to gain a decisive edge for winning. These methods can be especially dangerous when the other side doesn’t organize effectively to counter them.

The hard reality in the United States today is that the Republicans and the Right are now fully organized, armed with a potent propaganda machine and possessing an extraordinary political will. They are well-positioned to roll the U.S. economy off the cliff and blame the catastrophe on Obama.

Indeed, that may be their best hope for winning Election 2012.

Robert Parry's new book is Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq."

The Fascinating Story of How Shameless Right-Wing Lies Came to Rule Our Politics

AlterNet.org

TEA PARTY AND THE RIGHT

Mother Jones / By Rick Perlstein

The Fascinating Story of How Shameless Right-Wing Lies Came to Rule Our Politics

From Nixon's plumbers to James O'Keefe's video smears: How political lying became normal.

May 26, 2011 |

The following article first appeared in Mother Jones. For more great content from Mother Jones, sign up for their free email updates here.

It takes two things to make a political lie work: a powerful person or institution willing to utter it, and another set of powerful institutions to amplify it. The former has always been with us: Kings, corporate executives, politicians, and ideologues from both sides of the aisle have been entirely willing to bend the truth when they felt it necessary or convenient. So why does it seem as if we're living in a time of overwhelmingly brazen deception? What's changed?

Today's marquee fibs almost always evolve the same way: A tree falls in the forest -- say, the claim that Saddam Hussein has "weapons of mass destruction," or that Barack Obama has an infernal scheme to parade our nation's senior citizens before death panels. But then a network of media enablers helps it to make a sound -- until enough people believe the untruth to make the lie an operative part of our political discourse.

For the past 15 years, I've spent much of my time deeply researching three historic periods -- the birth of the modern conservative movement around the Barry Goldwater campaign, the Nixon era, and the Reagan years -- that together have shaped the modern political lie. Here's how we got to where we are.

PROLOGUE: Just Making Stuff Up

When an explosion sunk the USS Maine off the coast of Havana on February 15, 1898, the New York Journal claimed two days later, "Maine Destroyed By Spanish: This Proved Absolutely By Discovery of the Torpedo Hole." There was no torpedo hole. The Journal had already claimed that a Spanish armored cruiser, "capable, naval men say, of demolishing the great part of New York in less than two hours," was on its way. "WAR! SURE!" a banner headline announced.

The instigator was a politically ambitious publisher, William Randolph Hearst. Kicked out of Harvard for partying, and eager to make a name for himself outside the shadow of his mining-magnate father, he made his way to New York, where he led the way in a sensationalist new style of newspaper publication -- "yellow journalism." In a fearsome rivalry with Joseph Pulitzer, he chose as his vehicle the sort of manly imperialism to which the Washington elites of the day were certainly sympathetic -- although far too cautiously for Hearst's taste. "You furnish the pictures," he supposedly telegraphed a reporter, "and I'll furnish the war." The tail wagged the dog. At a time when the only way to communicate rapidly across long distances was via telegraph, it proved easy to make up physical facts.

More than six decades later, that still seemed to be the case. "Some of our boys are floating around in the water," Lyndon Johnson told congressmen to goad them into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing war in 1964, after a supposed attack on an American PT boat. "Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish," LBJ observed later, after the deed was done. That resolution inaugurated a decade of official American military activities in Southeast Asia (unofficially, we had been carrying out secret acts of war for years). A full-scale air war began the following February, after the enemy shelled the barracks of 23,000 American "advisers" in a South Vietnamese town called Pleiku. But that was just a pretext. "Pleikus are like streetcars," LBJ's national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, said -- if you miss one, you can always just hop on another. The bombing targets had been in the can for months, even as LBJ was telling voters on the campaign trail, "We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

It would have been possible all along for some intrepid soul to drop the dime on the whole thing. There were many who knew or suspected the truth, but with a villain as universally feared as communism was during the Cold War years, denying the facts felt like the only patriotic thing to do.

Then everything changed.

The '70s: Question Authority

Walter Cronkite traveled to Saigon after the Tet Offensive in 1968, saw things with his own eyes, and told the truth: The Vietnam War was stuck in a disastrous stalemate, no matter what the government said. That was a watershed. By 1969, none other than former Marine Commandant David M. Shoup endorsed a book on the war called Truth Is the First Casualty. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, the Department of Defense study that plainly revealed that just about everything Americans had been told about Southeast Asia was flat-out untrue. When the Nixon administration ordered the newspapers not to publish the Papers, Supreme Court Justice Hugo* Black thundered back that "for the first time in the 182 years since the founding of the Republic, the federal courts are asked to hold that the First Amendment does not mean what it says." The searing melodrama of the Watergate investigation exposed new Nixon lies every day.

America, it seemed, had had enough. In the mid-'70s, the investigating committees of Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike revealed to a riveted public that the CIA had secretly assassinated foreign leaders and the FBI had spied on citizens. Ralph Nader became a celebrity by exposing corporate lies. The mood of the Cold War had been steeped in American exceptionalism: The things America did were noble because they were done by America. Now, it appeared that America just might be susceptible to the same cruel compromises and corruptions as every other empire the world has known. Truth-telling became patriotic -- and the more highly placed the liar, the more heroic the whistleblower.

The investigative reporter became a sexy new kind of hero -- a shaggy-haired loner, too inquisitive for his own good, played by Warren Beatty and Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, swooped in from nowhere to take the White House on the strength of the modest slogan "I'll never lie to you." And during his presidency, one of the grand, founding lies of western civilization itself -- that there need be no limits to humans' domination of the Earth -- was questioned as never before.

The truth hurt, but the incredible thing was that the citizenry seemed willing to bear the pain. All sorts of American institutions -- Congress, municipal governments, even the intelligence community (the daring honesty of CIA Director William Colby about past agency sins was what helped fuel the Church and Pike investigations) -- launched searching reconstructions of their normal ways of doing business. Alongside all the disco, the kidnapped heiresses, and the macramé, another keynote of 1970s culture was something quite more mature: a willingness to acknowledge that America might no longer be invincible, and that any realistic assessment of how we could prosper and thrive in the future had to reckon with that hard-won lesson.

Then along came Reagan.

The '80s: Don't Worry, Be Happy

In researching this period, I've been surprised to discover the extent to which Ronald Reagan explicitly built his appeal around the notion that it was time to stop challenging the powerful. A new sort of lie took over: that the villains were not those deceiving the nation, but those exposing the deceit -- those, as Reagan put it in his 1980 acceptance speech, who "say that the United States has had its day in the sun, that our nation has passed its zenith." They were just so, so negative. According to the argument Reagan consistently made, Watergate revealed nothing essential about American politicians and institutions -- the conspirators "were not criminals at heart." In 1975, upon the humiliating fall of Saigon, he paraphrased Pope Pius XII to make the point that Vietnam had in fact been a noble cause: "America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind."

The Gipper's inauguration ushered in the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" era of political lying. But it took a deeper trend to accelerate the cultural shift away from truth-telling-as-patriotism to a full-scale epistemological implosion.

Reagan rode into office accompanied by a generation of conservative professional janissaries convinced they were defending civilization against the forces of barbarism. And like many revolutionaries, they possessed an instrumental relationship to the truth: Lies could be necessary and proper, so long as they served the right side of history.

This virulent strain of political utilitarianism was already well apparent by the time the Plumbers were breaking into the Democratic National Committee: "Although I was aware they were illegal," White House staffer Jeb Stuart Magruder told the Watergate investigating committee, "we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a legitimate cause."

Even conservatives who were not allied with the White House had learned to think like Watergate conspirators. To them, the takeaway from the scandal was that Nixon had been willing to bend the rules for the cause. The New Right pioneer M. Stanton Evans once told me, "I didn't like Nixon until Watergate."

Though many in the New Right proclaimed their contempt for Richard Nixon, a number of its key operatives and spokesmen in fact came directly from the Watergate milieu. Two minor Watergate figures, bagman Kenneth Rietz (who ran Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign) and saboteur Roger Stone (last seen promoting a gubernatorial bid by the woman who claimed to have been Eliot Spitzer's madam) were rehabilitated into politics through staff positions in Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign. G. Gordon Liddy became a right-wing radio superstar.

"We ought to see clearly that the end does justify the means," wrote evangelist C. Peter Wagner in 1981. "If the method I am using accomplishes the goal I am aiming at, it is for that reason a good method." Jerry Falwell once said his goal was to destroy the public schools. In 1998, confronted with the quote, he denied making it by claiming he'd had nothing to do with the book in which it appeared. The author of the book was Jerry Falwell.

Direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie made a fortune bombarding grassroots activists with letters shrieking things like "Babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood." As Richard Nixon told his chief of staff on Easter Sunday, 1973, "Remember, you're doing the right thing. That's what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi."

1990-Present: False Equivalencies

Conservatives hardly have a monopoly on dissembling, of course -- consider "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Progressives' response has always been that right-wing mendacity -- cover-ups of constitutional violations like Iran-Contra; institutionalized truth-corroding tactics like when the Republican National Committee circulates fliers claiming that Democrats seek to outlaw the Bible -- is more systematic. But the deeper problem is a fundamental redefinition of the morality involved: Rather than being celebrated, calling out a lie is now classified as "uncivil." How did that happen?

Back in the days when network news was the only game in town, grave-faced, gravelly voiced commentators like David Brinkley and Eric Sevareid -- and on extraordinary occasions anchors like Walter Cronkite -- told people what to think about the passing events of the day. Much of the time, these privileged men unquestioningly passed on the government's distortions. At their best, however, they used their moral authority to call out lies with a kind of Old Testament authority -- think Cronkite reporting from Saigon. It drove Johnson out of office, and it drove the right berserk.

On November 3, 1969, Richard Nixon gave a speech claiming he had a plan to wind down the war. The commentators went on the air immediately afterward and told the truth as they saw it: that he had said nothing new. Ten days later, the White House announced that Vice President Spiro Agnew was about to give a speech that it expected all three networks to cover -- live.

The speech was an excoriation of those very networks and their Stern White Men -- "this little group of men who not only enjoy a right of instant rebuttal to every presidential address, but more importantly, wield a free hand in selecting, presenting, and interpreting the great issues of our nation.... The American people would rightly not tolerate this kind of concentration of power in government. Is it not fair and relevant to question its concentration in the hands of a tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one, and enjoying a monopoly sanctioned and licensed by government?" Those in the habit of exposing the sins of the powerful were no longer independent arbiters -- they were liberals. Such was the bias, Agnew argued, of "commentators and producers [who] live and work in the geographical and intellectual confines of Washington, DC, or New York City," who "bask in their own provincialism, their own parochialism."

Foreshadowing Reagan's framing of reform-minded truth-telling as a brand of elitist meddling, Agnew singled out for opprobrium the kind of reporting that "made 'hunger' and 'black lung' disease national issues overnight" (quotation marks his). TV reporting from Vietnam had done "what no other medium could have done in terms of dramatizing the horrors of war" -- and that, too, was evidence of liberal bias.

Agnew's remarks reinforced a mood that had been building since at least the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when many viewers complained about the media images of police beating protesters. By the 1980s the trend was fully apparent: News became fluffier, hosts became airier -- less assured of their own moral authority. (Around this same time, TV news lost its exceptional status within the networks -- once accepted as a "loss leader" intended to burnish their prestige, it was increasingly subject to bottom-line pressures.)

There evolved a new media definition of civility that privileged "balance" over truth-telling -- even when one side was lying. It's a real and profound change -- one stunningly obvious when you review a 1973 PBS news panel hosted by Bill Moyers and featuring National Review editor George Will, both excoriating the administration's "Watergate morality." Such a panel today on, say, global warming would not be complete without a complement of conservatives, one of them probably George Will, lambasting the "liberal" contention that scientific facts are facts -- and anyone daring to call them out for lying would be instantly censured. It's happened to me more than once -- on public radio, no less.

In the same vein, when the Obama administration accused Fox News of not being a legitimate news source, the DC journalism elite rushed to admonish the White House. Granted, they were partly defending Major Garrett, the network's since-departed White House correspondent and a solid journalist -- but in the process, few acknowledged that under Roger Ailes, another Nixon veteran, management has enforced an ideological line top to bottom.

The protective bubble of the "civility" mandate also seems to extend to the propagandists whose absurdly doctored stories and videos continue to fool the mainstream media. From blogger Pamela Geller, originator of the "Ground Zero mosque" falsehood, to Andrew Breitbart's video attack on Shirley Sherrod -- who lost her job after her anti-discrimination speech was deceptively edited to make her sound like a racist -- to James O'Keefe's fraudulent sting against National Public Radio, right-wing ideologues "lie without consequence," as a desperate Vincent Foster put it in his suicide note nearly two decades ago. But they only succeed because they are amplified by "balanced" outlets that frame each smear as just another he-said-she-said "controversy."

And here, in the end, is the difference between the untruths told by William Randolph Hearst and Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the ones inundating us now: Today, it's not just the most powerful men who can lie and get away with it. It's just about anyone -- a congressional back-bencher, an ideology-driven hack, a guy with a video camera -- who can inject deception into the news cycle and the political discourse on a grand scale.

Sure, there will always be liars in positions of influence -- that's stipulated, as the lawyers say. And the media, God knows, have never been ideal watchdogs -- the battleships that crossed the seas to avenge the sinking of the Maine attest to that. What's new is the way the liars and their enablers now work hand in glove. That I call a mendocracy, and it is the regime that governs us now.

AlterNet.org

ECONOMY

Consortium News / By Robert Parry

Siding With the Billionaires: How the Right Is Waging a Class War Against All But the Wealthiest Americans

America's Right -- from the NFL lockout to Rep. Paul Ryan's budget to climate change -- side with the billionaires in what amounts to an escalating class war.

May 31, 2011 |

If American football fans end up facing a fall without NFL games, they probably won’t blame George W. Bush and other Republican presidents for packing the federal courts with right-wing judges, but it was two Bush appointees who reversed a District Court ruling that would have ended the lockout of players.

The Appeals Court judgment encouraged the NFL’s hardline billionaire owners to resist making the kinds of compromises that a few less intransigent owners recognize could easily resolve the impasse.

Now, the hardliners simply assume that Republican judges will keep siding with the NFL owners and thus enable them to beat down the players, eventually assuring the billionaire owners a bigger piece of the revenue pie – even if that means losing some or all of the 2011 season.

What many average Americans, especially white guys, don’t seem to understand is that whatever the populist-styled rhetoric of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, the Right’s default position is to side with the billionaires – and to show little or no regard for the fate of anyone else, whether NFL players or sick senior citizens.

Still, one must give the Right credit for having worked hard refining how to phrase its arguments. Right-wingers even have turned the term “class warfare” against the Left by shouting the phrase in a mocking fashion whenever anyone tries to blunt the “class warfare” that the billionaires have been waging against the middle class and the poor for decades.

On right-wing TV and talk radio across the country, there are tag teams of macho men pretending that ”class warfare” exists only in the fevered imagination of the Left. But billionaire investor Warren Buffett has acknowledged the truth: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The right-wing propagandists further earn their keep by disparaging science as “elitist.” So, even as the dire predictions from climate-change experts that global warming will generate more extreme weather seem to be coming true, many Americans who have listened to the “climate-change-deniers” for years still reject the scientific warnings.

While no single weather event can be connected to the broader trend of climate change, the warnings about what might happen when the earth’s atmosphere heats up and absorbs more moisture seem to be applicable to the historic flooding in some parts of the world, droughts in others, and the outbreak of particularly violent storms.

Heat and moisture are especially dangerous ingredients for hurricanes and tornadoes.

Ironically, the parts of the United States hardest hit by this severe weather are those represented predominately by Republicans who have been at the forefront of obstructing government efforts to address the global-warming crisis.

Flooding, hurricanes and tornadoes have inflicted horrendous damage on Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri and Oklahoma – all part of the Republican base.

God’s Punishment?

If televangelist Pat Robertson were a left-winger instead of a right-winger, he might be saying that God is punishing these “red states” for doubting the science of global warming.

However, even as the U.S. news obsesses over the violent weather, mainstream media stars have steered clear of whether global warming might be a factor. It’s as if they know that they’d only be inviting career-damaging attacks from the Right if they did anything to connect the dots.

The Right also is not eager to explain how these catastrophes will require emergency funding and rebuilding assistance from the federal government. After all, you don’t want Republican voters to understand that sometimes “self-reliance” alone doesn’t cut it; sometimes, we all need help and the government must be part of that assistance.

In the case of the killer tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, House Republicans, without a hint of irony, are extracting the funds for disaster relief from green energy programs, which remain a favorite GOP target since many Republicans still insist there is no such thing as global warming.

At both state and national levels, Republican leaders have lined up behind climate-change deniers, with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty just the latest GOP presidential hopeful to apologize for his past support of a cap-and-trade system aimed at reducing global-warming gases.

Any serious move toward alternative energies would, of course, be costly to the giant oil companies and their billionaire owners, like David Koch of Koch Industries who has spent millions of dollars funding right-wing organizations, such as the Tea Party. The Right’s media/political operatives know better than to bite the hand that feeds them.

GOP orthodoxy also disdains tax increases on the rich or even elimination of tax breaks for the oil industry. The Republican insistence on low tax rates for the wealthy, in turn, has forced consideration of other policy proposals to achieve savings from services for average Americans.

That is why congressional Republicans have targeted Medicare with a plan that would end the current health program for the elderly and replace it with a scheme that would give subsidies to senior citizens who would then have to sign up for health insurance from private industry, which has proven itself far less efficient in providing health care than the government.

The GOP budget, drafted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, would impose the Medicare changes on seniors beginning in 10 years.

Most attention on the Ryan plan has focused on estimates that it would cost the average senior citizen more than $6,000 extra per year, but the proposal also has the effect of privatizing Medicare, meaning that the government would make direct “premium support” payments to profit-making insurance companies whose interest is in maximizing profits, not providing the best possible care for old people.

While the Ryan plan would achieve budget “savings” by shifting the burden of health-care costs onto the elderly, Ryan’s budget also would lower tax rates for the wealthiest Americans even more, from 35 percent to 25 percent. Partly because of that tax cut, Ryan’s budget would still not be balanced for almost three decades.

Class Warfare

Thus, the battle lines of America’s “class warfare” are getting more sharply drawn. The conflict is now over the Right’s determination to concentrate even more money and power in the hands of the rich by hobbling any government capability to protect the people’s general welfare.

If the Right wins, individual Americans will be left essentially defenseless in the face of unbridled corporate power.

Ryan’s Medicare plan may be just the most striking example because it envisions sick old people trying to pick their way through a thicket of private insurance plans with all their confusing language designed to create excuses for denying coverage. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ryan’s tight-fisted Medicare plan could consign millions of Americans to a premature death.

The Right’s priorities hit home at a town hall meeting held by Rep. Rob Woodall, R-Georgia, when he chastised one of his constituents who worried that Ryan’s plan would leave Americans like her, whose employer doesn’t extend health benefits to retirees, out of luck.

“Hear yourself, ma’am. Hear yourself,” Woodall lectured the woman. “You want the government to take care of you, because your employer decided not to take care of you. My question is, ‘When do I decide I’m going to take care of me?’”

However, another constituent noted that Woodall accepted government-paid-for health insurance for himself.

“You are not obligated to take that if you don’t want to,” the woman said. “Why aren’t you going out on the free market in the state where you’re a resident and buy your own health care? Be an example. …

“Go and get it in a single-subscriber plan, like you want everybody else to have, because you want to end employer-sponsored health plans and government-sponsored health plans. … Decline the government health plan and go to Blue Cross/Blue Shield or whoever, and get one for yourself and see how tough it is.”

Woodall answered that he was taking his government health insurance “because it’s free. It’s because it’s free.”

Self-reliance, it seems, is easier to preach to others than to practice yourself.

Woodall’s explanation recalled the hypocrisy of free-market heroine Ayn Rand, whom Rep. Ryan has cited as his political inspiration. In her influential writings, Rand ranted against social programs that enabled the “parasites” among the middle-class and the poor to sap the strength from the admirable rich, but she secretly accepted the benefits of Medicare after she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

A two-pack-a-day smoker, Rand had denied the medical science about the dangers of cigarettes, much as her acolytes today reject the science of global warming. However, when she developed lung cancer, she connived to have Evva Pryor, an employee of Rand’s law firm, arrange Social Security and Medicare benefits for Ann O’Connor, Ayn Rand using her husband’s last name.

In 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand, Scott McConnell, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute’s media department, quoted Pryor as saying: “Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out.”

So, when push came to shove, even Ayn Rand wasn’t above getting help from the “despised government.” However, her followers, including Rep. Ryan, now want to strip those guaranteed benefits from other Americans of more modest means than Ayn Rand.

It seems it’s okay for average Americans to be wiped out.

Hypocrisy, Hypocrisy

While the Right’s penchant for hypocrisy is well-known (note how many Republicans involved in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton had their own extra-marital affairs), the bigger mystery is why so many average-guy Americans volunteer to fight for the rich in the trenches of the Right’s class warfare.

Clearly, the Right’s propaganda with its endless repetition is very effective, especially given the failure of the American Left to invest significantly in a competing message machine. The Right also has adopted the tone of populism, albeit in support of a well-to-do economic elite.

Yet, perhaps most importantly, the Right has stuck with its battle plan for rallying a significant percentage of middle-class Americans against their own interests.

Four decades ago, President Richard Nixon and his subordinates won elections by demonizing “hippies,” “welfare queens” and the “liberal media.”

Then, in the late 1970s, a tripartite coalition took shape consisting of the Republican Establishment, neoconservatives and the leaders of the Christian Right. Each group had its priorities.

The rich Republicans wanted deep tax cuts and less business regulation; the neocons wanted big increases in military spending and a freer hand to wage wars; and the Christian Right agreed to supply political foot soldiers in exchange for concessions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Ultimately, each part of the coalition got a chunk of what it wanted.

From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the rich got their taxes slashed, saw regulations rolled back and gained a larger share of the nation’s wealth and political power. The neocons got massive military spending and the chance to dispatch U.S. soldiers to kill Israel’s Muslim enemies. The Christian Right got help in restricting abortions and punishing gays.

But what did the American middle-class get?

Over those three decades, the middle-class has stagnated or slipped backward. Labor unions were busted; jobs were shipped overseas; personal debt soared; education grew more expensive, along with medical care. People were working harder and longer – for less. Or they couldn’t find jobs at all.

With today’s Tea Party and the Ryan budget, the Right’s coalition is staying on the offensive. If the House budget were passed in total, tax rates for the rich would be reduced another 10 percentage points; military spending would remain high to please the neocons (who foresee a possible war with Iran); and Planned Parenthood and other pet targets of the Christian Right would be zeroed out.

Yet, with the proposed elimination of traditional Medicare, the Ryan budget has lifted the curtain on what the Right’s “free market” has in mind for most average Americans, who could expect to find their lives not only more brutish but shorter.

The real-life-and-death consequences of the Right’s tax cuts, military spending and culture wars are finally coming into focus. If you’re not rich – and can’t afford to pick up the higher tab on health care – you’re likely to die younger. Or your kids might have to dig into their pockets to help you out.

Less extreme but still troubling, another consequence of the Right’s remarkable success over the past three decades might become apparent on your TV screens this fall.

Thanks to all those right-wing judges packed onto federal appeals courts by Reagan and the two Bushes, American football fans might not have the NFL to watch.

The NFL’s lockout of its players seemed to be ending several weeks ago when a lower-court judge ruled against the billionaire owners, but the NFL’s lawyers confidently filed an appeal to a three-judge panel on the Eighth Circuit, knowing that they would surely get one dominated by Republican judges.

They did. Steven Colloton and Duane Benton, two Republicans appointed by George W. Bush, constituted the majority on the panel and reflexively sided with the NFL’s owners.

The ruling should have surprised no one. After all, the Right’s default position is almost always to side with the billionaires.

[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book set for the discount price of only $19. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.