Diane Alden
Wednesday, June 8, 2005

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  Novak also provides a history lesson:

"Bush is the only Republican president since the 1920s to enjoy protracted control of both houses of Congress by his own party. Yet, he seems less able to direct the legislative branch than Republican predecessors who had to handle a Democratic-controlled Congress. With Congress in its lengthy Memorial Day recess, GOP legislators and lobbyists tabulated the scorecard on items large and small."

Novak names some items that don't sound conservative to me but are items that Bush is not promoting. Some on Novak's list are things most conservatives would support.

Novak includes congressional failure to hold the conservative line on stem cell research as the Republicans in Congress bulldoze a stem cell bill through in order to get Democrats to agree on the budget. Additionally, Republicans have gone along with billions of dollars being pumped into a highway program we can't afford. Individual congressmen, like John Thune, are promising to hold up the appointment of John Bolton to the U.N. post so he can retain one of the bases to be closed in his home state.

Given all this disarray among Republicans, the wishful thinkers among Republican cheerleaders do not want to recognize that it isn't the Democrats on the ropes as a party, it is the Republicans.

The moderate Republican tail – McCain, Chafee, Warner, Snowe, Collins, etc. – is wagging the big dog from the red-zone conservative heartland. Seven "moderate" Republicans decided to compromise on Senate rules regarding filibuster and judicial appointments, thus, at the very least, giving the Democrats a PR victory.

The failure of Bush or Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to control dissension in the ranks is indicative of how split and clueless the Republican Party really is. There is no leadership, no plan, no direction. The party seems to prefer moderates and blow-dried nice guys instead of street fighters who can get the job done.

There is not even a rehash of an old plan, like the "Contract with America." Gone and forgotten are the promises to downsize government and get rid of some superfluous government agencies.

In fact, what we have gotten from the GOP is more money spent on federal programs that have failed – education being one of them, the Commerce Department being another. Instead, like Godzilla, both have grown exponentially under Republican leadership. Add the immense funds going into drug benefits that we can't afford, and small-government, fiscally responsible Republicanism is a hoax.

Now the White House is pushing for an expansion of "mental health" screening for every child, woman and man in the U.S. Forced drugging of those whom they decide are "nuts," "depressed" or dysfunctional is a real possibility.

Don't forget, it is a Republican administration offering more money to bribe terrorist organizations like Hamas and the PLA while asking Israel to commit geographical suicide.

Meantime, the military is being nickel-and-dimed to death as Rumsfeld plays war games, remaking the size of the military and turning to technology that more often than not does not work, while strategy and tactics of our G.I. Jane special ops forces are supposed to be our "plan" to fight some phantom future war.

All that drives this conservative nuts. I may need the Soma drugs they have planned for the rank and file who pay taxes and obey the law but don't want to go along with their program.

In fact, what finally broke me as an apologist for all things Republican was their failure to save one powerless, brain-disabled U.S. citizen in Florida from judicial homicide by starvation and dehydration. From the top down, the GOP allowed a petty little tyrant in Pinellas County, Florida, to disallow ice chips for the dried, cracked lips of the starving and dehydrated woman.

The Republican-appointed 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta deferred to the actions of the petty tyrant and lower courts. Judicial appointments by Republicans isn't the problem, the problem is the system. The corker came when Senator Bill Frist stated, following the death of Terri Schiavo, that the courts, judges and system had worked well.

In God's name, where do we get these people? Where do they get the guts to refer to themselves as conservative, let alone Christian?

I should not have been surprised, given the craven behavior and preferrence for moderates and leftists in leadership and congressional positions. It should not have surprised me that the Republican Party is afraid to lead. When Republicans do lead, it is to pass laws and regulations that could have been as easily passed by any Democrat. When they lead, they lead as economic globalists out of touch with U.S. interests.

In any event, there is a schism in the party of Lincoln. It is a schism that may never be healed with a "big tent" or "compassionate conservatism" or one more cheerleading effort by Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity.

The Man Behind the Curtain Is Not the Wizard

I get a lot of flak from true, believing Republicans who don't want "no bad news." They don't want to hear that their man in the Beltway is not the answer to a conservative's prayer. They don't want to hear that post-Cold War leadership in the U.S. is about as incompetent and short-sighted as any in our history.

Most do not want to know that good legislators usually end up leaving the milieu of the Beltway. The Beltway refugees understand that all the conservative principles in the world cannot overthrow the power of Beltway politics or the system. Good intentions and plans to change things do not mean much in a world where connections and connectivity create direction and policy.

The Iron Triangle – the interconnected system of K-Street corporate and foreign government lobbyists, the groups that give information and advice and investment opportunities – holds the real power in Washington.

Bored by policy and issues that make your eyes roll to the back of your head, the liberal and conservative media prefer scandal, gossip, car wrecks and silly partisan arguments to uncovering the monsters in their midst.

The cultural Marxists and corporate sympathizers who control the Democratic Party always put America last, prefer the U.N. and an international court to U.S. laws and the Constitution of the United States, and are willing to believe that America never does anything right. Even so, the Democrats keep party discipline and toe the line, and because they do, the power stays in their hands. Sadly, so does the direction of the nation.

All the while, Republicans remain stupid and clueless and afraid to get their hair mussed, preferring nicely coifed nonconfrontational types over street fighters and principled men and women. As the guy said, "Democrats are the evil party and Republicans are the stupid party."

Quite a few faithful Republicans and conservatives do not want to think that the last several election cycles have given us a choice between the evil of two lessers. After Reagan we got the ultimate insider in George H.W. Bush. With Clinton we had a big-government insider who knew Georgetown as well as he knew Little Rock.

Kind of reminded me of the old movie with Andy Griffith, "A Face in the Crowd." A cornpone good old boy, ultimately an unprincipled insider, comes to town and wins over people while hiding his terrible, amoral nature. In Bill Clinton's case, he never knew a big government or leftist program he didn't like. In his mindset everything was negotiable, including U.S. national security and economic best interests.

As further punishment, we got Mrs. Opportunist "Face in the Crowd," Hillary Rodham. Meanwhile, Bill Cornpone didn't think it was beneath him to take large sums from corporate and foreign donors while he played the middle class, minorities, women and intellectuals for saps. His party doted on him as he sold them and this nation to the highest bidder.

In 1996, Republican faithful got the throwaway candidacy of Bob Dole, another Beltway professional politician who was a nice man but not strong enough or young enough to beat Bill Clinton. Have you ever noticed how none of them ever go back to Kansas or South Dakota or Arkansas? Why do you suppose that is?

By 2000, we were presented with someone the conservative media and leftist press described as a "conservative" candidate. Unfortunately, George W. Bush was the quintessential choice of the plutocracy, i.e., the establishment. The establishment is not really about loyalty to a political party with core beliefs – they use political parties. For the most part, they don't have much loyalty to the U.S. or its status as a nation-state, except when it advances their interests.

The label Republican or conservative allows them to amass money and votes and coalesce power from many sources and groups of people. Usually the buzzwords they use are sufficient to get the money and the votes. Buzzwords like tax cuts, strong military, war on terrorism, free market, less government, pro-life, strong family values, Supreme Court nominations, yada, yada.

The power brokers of the Republican establishment evolved from the same kind of cultural and economic stewpot that Teddy Roosevelt warned about in more than one speech and essay. Whatever brings them into the connectivity of power, money, family or influence, the ultimate goal is to get and keep power and expand it.

The power brokers of the establishment, aka the Iron Triangle, pretty much hand-pick the candidates through subtle and not-so-subtle support. The power brokers supported Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania. They supported anyone over Tom Coburn in Oklahoma or Tom Tancredo in Colorado.

Honest-to-gosh conservatives with a shot at national office get no support from the brokers. Men like Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., J.D. Hayworth, R-Ariz., and a few other actual conservatives cannot count on the support of establishment Republicans, who swim in the waters of the Iron Triangle.

(Iron Triangle is the intermix and connections of power between government, business, lobbying groups, and sometimes the military and academe. These are people to whom party labels don't mean much; connections do. Eisenhower referred to them as the "military-industrial complex," but that was kind of simplistic because these days they are more often than not financial elites buying politicians' influence through campaign contributions and goodies and trips here and there. The possiblity of employment is also part of the big picture in the Triangle.}

The denizens of the Triangle want politicians who don't know much, or who do and who will toe their line and policy anyway. The line that evolves out of think tanks and centers for policy as the Club For Growth or CFR, Harvard or Goldman Sachs, or Kissinger and Associates and dozens of other "groups" from Carlyle to Livingston.

Believe me when I tell you they do not like conservatives: they use them, but they don't like them. The candidates: Bush or Clinton, Hillary or Laura or Condi, Newt or Kerry, Coleman or Obama, these are the candidates who will promote their interests. Those interests include the continued growth of government and government power to advance corporate and the needs of the Triangle.

One and all will fail to secure our borders, negotiate decent trade deals, reduce government. Meanwhile, they will advance the police powers of the State and continue the destruction of the middle class. They have learned to misuse language, will use ridicule, ignore or marginalize those who disagree. On the left, they will deconstruct us through the U.N. or some other international body. The economic right will do it through trade treaties and unrestricted immigration.

You can count on them to ignore the voices of concern and understanding for what faces the Republic in the next generation. The voices they will ignore or silence will be those of men like Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, William Hawkins, Jeremy Rabkin, Sam Huntington, George Borjas, Dana Rohrabacher, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, J.D. Hackworth, Tom Coburn, the late David Hackworth, and the much-maligned CNN journalist/economist Lou Dobbs.

Head Games

Mostly the powers-that-be mess with our heads in what the Sci-Fi channel would dub a kind of psy corps strategy. Even the conservative media are used for that purpose in order to set up the conflict, ergo, the "other" side is worse. It very well may be, but only by a few degrees.

These same game players count on the fact that dissidents and whistleblowers who know and understand what is going on will get burned out and discouraged and go back to Georgia or Montana. In fact, it is very discouraging to conclude that your political party and ideological heroes have been taken over like some zombie character from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

The head games used often come from education and psychology conferences and studies. The techniques have been around for awhile, but they work. The left are masters at technique, but the economic or establishment right is catching on fast.

The technique is called cognitive dissonance. It is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe and a new information or interpretation as offered by those seeking to get people to think a certain way.

Cognitive dissonance occurs when there is a need to accommodate new ideas or, in the case of the feckless leadership establishment, to convince enough Americans that conservative ideas or those who insist on maintaining the spirit of the Constitution are somehow silly, stupid, or out of the loop, as they impede "progress."

In that regard, why doesn't it surprise me that President George W. Bush is promoting a mental health screening for every single American child and school employee? That amounts to about 62 million Americans. This effort will include treatment for anyone exhibiting "symptoms" of dysfunction.

Something is seriously wrong with the thinking of those who call themselves Christian or conservative when they are pushing a program wherein the State or its flunkies can claim someone is nuts or dysfunctional. Think Gulag, think Chinese laogai, think sci-fi movies staring Arnold.

The latest Big Brother fantasy, courtesy of a Republican administration, is something called The New Freedom Commission, or Texas Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP). Our great intellects and bureaucrats use calculus and flow charts to connect symptoms with what the powers-that-be think are "mental disorders" or social dysfunctions. If you have A symptom and B symptom, take C medication.

This program came out of the University of Texas to "fix" the mental health and corrections system in Texas.

President Bush and those supporting this "new freedom" have taken it upon themselves to tell American citizens that their children must be screened for mental health and receive enforced treatment. It is a grand way to control people through drugs or threats of being labeled a nut unfit to raise your kids or hold a job.

This indicates to me that either George W. Bush does not pay attention to much besides the war on terrorism, or he knows about this kind of monstrosity and it is fine by him. Either way, someone needs to give him a clue. At the rate he is going he will alienate every conservative and screw up any chance for Republicans to get elected in the future.

Establishment practitioners of cognitive dissonance on the economic right lump about a quarter of the conservative movement into the "fringe right," "religious right," nativists, xenophobes, racists, or tin hat wearer categories.

Practitioners of cognitive dissonance insinuate that old line conservatives believe space aliens have taken over the British Royal Family; chem trails are killing us; and black helicopters are waiting to take us to concentration camps in the woods of Oregon.

This is a tactic the left used against the right for decades. These days it is also a tactic being used by quite a few Republicans in leadership, some in the "conservative" media, against those who do not follow what is known as the "Washington Consensus," aka the Bush Doctrine, or whatever the Beltway folks are pushing these days.

The Gospel According to the Republican Establishment is creating a cognitive dissonance for many conservatives. An intellectual wedge is being driven between "learners" (us knuckle-dragging conservatives – and our current beliefs) and "reality."

The reality the establishment is creating is a post-Cold War intention of remaking the world to their liking. Their liking means: open borders, residential status as opposed to citizenship, nations turned into a blob of regional trading states, and remaking the military to accommodate ‘The New Pentagon Map.'

The "map" is a somewhat recent "reality" being imposed on and by the Pentagon of Donald Rumsfeld. Nonetheless, it has been on the drawing board since the end of the Cold War. Bush announced part of the "plan" in May. It is to form a corps of bureaucrats who will be sent to pacified countries we have invaded in order to remake their society into a "civil society." The paper shufflers and zoning ordinance folks, the water works engineers, the road builders, one and all will make sure that the invaded are so busy filling out forms in triplicate they won't have time or inclination for insurgency.

The "map" means that Third World "gap" countries must fit in with the needs and desires of the "core" nations. Core nations are those that trade and spend vacations in each other's nice places. Included in the core are the U.S., Britain and Japan and soon the Chinese and Indians, to name a few.

Oddly, this vision is coming from a conservative administration by a man who claims to be a Christian. As I see it, the vision is centered around economic man, pacified, unified, homogenized. Wrapped in forms in triplicate, life is therefore stable for transnational corporations and government bureaucrats and assorted cultural Marxists as well as the odd compassionate conservative.

Policy magazines have been full of our future for over a decade. The ultimate end of all this is that sooner or later they will cram the need for global governance down our throats. Oddly, they may believe the U.S. will be the first among equals. How eccentric: they just don't see that a 5,000-year-old civilization – the Chinese, for instance – are going to kick our butts and our plans into the ash heap of history.

Meantime, our leaders and ourselves will be sitting around wondering how come it didn't go according to the "plan."

In any event, one of the horrors the establishment has allowed in its quest for the world according to them: acceptance of dual citizenship and allowing transnational corporations to promote what John Fonte of the Hudson Institute refers to as "transnational progressivism."

Transnational progressivism, utopia, or New World Order, same stuff different day. The intention is the same. What it amounts to is a sinister combination of socialism and capitalism, NGOs and identiy politics unified by global governance, possibly a polyglot religion of feel-good New Age crap, directed by some weird corporate political bureaucratic combo.

Only the dippy Beltway elite and policy wonks have so much time on their hands they devise this garbage as a possible future.

On an international scale, it smacks of biblical doomsday and the "beast."

Two wise churchmen have warned about that "beast."

On July 25, 1920, Pope Benedict XV delivered an encyclical, Bonum Sane, in which he warned: "The coming of a world state is longed for, by all the worst and most distorted elements. This state, based on the principles of absolute equality of men and a community of possessions, would banish all national loyalties. In it no acknowledgment would be made of the authority of a father over his children, or of God over human society. If these ideas are put into practice, there will inevitably follow a reign of unheard-of terror."

On February 8, 1992, Cardinal Ratzinger delivered a speech at the Catholic University of Milan that was critical of President George H.W. Bush's "new world order." In the speech, Cardinal Ratzinger recalled Robert Hugh Benson's 1907 book, "Lord of the World," and said it described "a similar unified civilization and its power to destroy the spirit. The anti-Christ is represented as the great carrier of peace in a similar new world order."

The warning from the two Pope Benedicts ought to be sufficient, but the power players have chosen to ignore them. They have also forgotten why they hold power and by whose authority. In the process they are selling us out to control freaks and economic/cultural/political elites. Each day they create a system to remake America and Americans and perhaps humanity itself.

At the end of the Cold War, one of the elite's prominent intellectuals, Francis Fukayama, wrote that the world and the U.S. were at the End of History. If we continue with the leadership we have, if they remain blind guides, globalists without a clue, yes, indeed, we will be at the end of history – our own.

Next: Crisis in Leadership – The Military

Check out Diane Alden and Steve Farrell and Friends, at www.libertyletters.blogspot.com or join me for a turn at culture and philosophy at www.saintsandstrangers.blogspot.com.

Editor's note:
Pope Benedict XVI – Find Out What He Really Believes – Click Here Now
Heroes of 1942 – the year that turned the tide in World War II
Is liberalism a mental disorder? Michael Savage thinks so – Click Here for more!