‘The Big Con’

[Nati Ice]

[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/chapters/0923-1st-chait.html?ei=5124&en=4c81c1f85d3b90be&ex=1348113600&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink&pagewanted=all"]http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/books/ch...;pagewanted=all[/url]

[quote]First Chapter
‘The Big Con’
By JONATHAN CHAIT
Published: September 23, 2007

I have this problem. Whenever I try to explain what's happening in American politics-I mean, what's really happening-I wind up sounding a bit like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I'm not. My politics are actually quite moderate. (Most real lefties, in fact, think I'm a Washington establishment sellout.) So please give let me a chance to explain myself when I tell you the following: American politics has been hijacked by a tiny coterie of right-wing economic extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane. (Stay with me.)

The scope of their triumph is breathtaking. Over the course of the last three decades, they have moved from the right-wing fringe to the commanding heights of the national agenda. Notions that would have been laughed at a generation ago-that cutting taxes for the very rich is the best response to any and every economic circumstance, or that it is perfectly appropriate to turn the most rapacious and self-interested elements of the business lobby into essentially an arm of the federal government-are now so pervasive, they barely attract any notice.

The result has been a slow-motion disaster. Income inequality has approached levels normally associated with Third World oligarchies, not healthy Western democracies. The federal government has grown so encrusted with business lobbyists that it can no longer meet the great public challenges of our time. Not even many conservative voters or intellectuals find the result congenial. Government is no smaller-it is simply more debt-ridden and more beholden to wealthy elites.

And yet the right-wing ascendancy has continued inexorably despite continual public repudiation. The 2006 elections were only the latest electoral setback. The right has suffered deeper setbacks before, and all of them have proven temporary. In 1982, after the country had entered the deepest recession since the 1930s, Republicans were slaughtered in the midterm congressional races, losing twenty-seven seats in the House of Representatives. Ronald Reagan, whose election two years earlier had seemed to augur a new conservative era, trailed his likely 1984 Democratic challengers by double digits in the polls and seemed destined to be a lame duck. "What we are witnessing this January," wrote the esteemed Washington Post reporter David Broder in the first month of 1983, "is not the midpoint in the Reagan presidency, but its phase-out. 'Reaganism,' it is becoming increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon." We know what happened the next year.

And the conservative revolution has had its obituary written many times since. In 1986, Republicans lost the Senate, and shortly thereafter Reagan saw his approval ratings sink as he became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1992, Democrats won back the White House along with both chambers of Congress, and there was widespread talk of "a conservative crackup." It happened again after the public turned on the Republicans following their 1995 government shutdown, and once more after the public rebelled against the Clinton impeachment. By the late 1990s, the Republican revolution had again been written off.

And yet the Republican right keeps coming back, and back, and back. Their fortunes rise and then dip, but each peak is higher than the last peak, and each dip is higher than the last dip. Consider the present situation. Things have gone about as badly as they could have in George W. Bush's second term. A Republican administration started and lost a major war in Iraq; presided over an economy that has failed to deliver higher wages for most Americans; contributed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the near-wipeout of a major American city; launched a failed assault on Social Security, the most popular social program in the history of the United States; and saw its members suffer an almost unprecedented string of sexual and financial scandals. Still, Democrats find themselves holding only the slimmest of majorities in the House and Senate. Even if they hold their majorities in Congress and win the White House in 2008, the structural forces in Washington will make it nearly impossible to roll back any significant chunks of the Bush tax cuts, let alone take on crises like global warming or the forty-five million Americans lacking health insurance.

Global warming, come to think of it, may offer the best metaphor for understanding the conservative ascent. If you look at the temperature of the earth from month to month, it bounces up and down as seasons change and heat spells or cold snaps come and go. If you look at it over the course of many years, however, it is clear that it is moving inexorably in one direction. The arrival of winter does not mean the end of global warming. To confuse the short term blips with the long-term trend is to mistake the weather for the climate. The 2006 elections are one of those blips, a pause in the right's three-decade ascent.

Permanent partisan majorities are not possible in American politics. Power changes hands regularly. Sometimes the other party's president will preside over an economic boom or win a war. Sometimes yours will preside over a recession or sleep with an intern. Short-term fluctuations, often driven by events beyond the control of the party in power, are inevitable. So the way to win is not to win every election but to control the terms of the debate. The conservative movement's signal triumph is to have done just this, reshaping what is possible in American politics over the long term. This is not, therefore, a book about the political weather. It is a book about the political climate.

Most people under forty fail to grasp how different American politics looked three decades ago. For me, there is no better evidence of the rightward lurch than recalling that my father used to be a Republican. A liberal Republican, to be sure, but a Republican. By the time I was old enough to understand anything about politics, he had long since abandoned the GOP, and at first his former affiliation puzzled me. In the political world in which I came of age -Ronald Reagan left the White House during my junior year of high school-it seemed inconceivable that someone like my dad, who today resides well within the center of the Democratic Party, could identify in any way with the Republicans.

But, of course, as someone my age could not have guessed, the parties of a generation ago bore only a faint resemblance to their modern versions. After World War II, the Republicans accepted the new role of government in American life ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt. The decades after the war saw a great American consensus. Democrats were a bit looser with the purse strings, Republicans a bit tighter, but their general vision of the country was the same. This vision was expressed by the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower just before his inauguration when he declared, "There is, in our affairs at home, a middle way between untrammeled freedom of the individual and the demands for the welfare of the whole nation. This way must avoid government by bureaucracy as carefully as it avoids neglect of the helpless." This credo was the credo of the Republican Party my dad could identify with. He looked up to GOP moderates like Nelson Rockefeller and William Milliken, the long-time governor of our home state of Michigan-men born to privilege who used their power for the benefit of all, not just their own class.

Eisenhower left the top tax rate at a staggering 91 percent, and he repeatedly preached the virtues of budget balance. (When a colleague complained about this confiscatory rate, his treasury secretary, a wealthy former steel executive, replied acidly, "I pay 91 percent, and yet I don't complain and you do all the time." His line reflects a sense of social obligation totally alien to today's GOP.) This tradition of moderate Republicanism remained strong well into the 1970s. A Republican president, Gerald Ford, actually vetoed tax cuts proposed by Democrats as fiscally irresponsible.

There were, of course, Republicans of a more conservative bent in those days as well, but conservatism meant something altogether different from what it does today. Indeed, the whole face of American politics has changed. Opposition to deficits, which once made up the right wing of the partisan debate, is now closer to the left wing. ("I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans," Bill Clinton once noted wryly in a Cabinet meeting. "We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market.") Today's rightwing position-upper-bracket tax cuts wherever and whenever possible-was off the right edge of the political spectrum three decades ago.

The ground has shifted very far under our feet, and its manifestations are everywhere. In 1979, the highest-earning one-tenth of 1 percent of all taxpayers-the richest of the rich-took home only 3 percent of the national income. Today they take home 10 percent. And over that same span, their average tax rate has dropped from 32 to 23 percent. The minimum wage has lost nearly half its purchasing power. The health care plan proposed by Richard Nixon in 1974, if introduced in Congress today, would be considered radically liberal and probably could not gain the support of any but a handful of the most left-wing Democrats.

American politics has been transformed, yet in this change lies the deeper mystery. The public has not clamored for it. While it is true that, starting around the late 1960s, polls showed a growing backlash against the welfare state, that backlash petered out during the 1980s and actually began to reverse itself a few years later. Which is to say, the public has actually grown less receptive to conservatism in general, let alone the particular upper-class variety practiced by today's GOP.

How do I know this? Here's one example. The National Election Survey has been asking voters for many years whether they would prefer a larger government with more services or a smaller government with fewer services. In 1982, the first year of the poll, 32 percent favored smaller government, and 24 percent preferred larger government (with the remainder right in the middle or expressing no opinion). By 2004, it had completely flipped, with 43 percent preferring bigger government and just 20 percent wanting a smaller one. Other polls have showed that the public has turned away from its antigovernment mood of the 1970s and favored a more active government and more progressive taxes. The public has been moving steadily left for twenty years, while Washington has lurched rapidly in the opposite direction.

This isn't supposed to happen. Abraham Lincoln once said, "Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed." This is the core of the American civic religion. But over the last thirty years, something has happened that strikes at that core. The underpinnings of American democracy have slowly frayed, and in the place of the great moderate consensus that once prevailed we have seen the rise of an American plutocracy.

One popular explanation for the triumph of right-wing economics, familiar to readers of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?, is that cultural issues have obscured pocketbook ones. Conservatives have tricked the masses into voting on the basis of social issues, thus ignoring their economic self-interest. It is certainly true that tens of millions of potential Democratic voters support the Republican Party on the basis of its opposition to abortion, gays, and the like. But the phenomenon of conservative elites using culture and patriotism to win support from the masses is an old one. Left-wing populism of the kind that Frank and others favor may have failed to take root because of working-class social conservatism. This does not, however, explain a slightly different question: how and why the economic right has gained so much strength over the last three decades. After all, by nearly any measure, the American public has grown more socially liberal over this span. Since 1977, the proportion of Americans believing gays should be allowed to teach in elementary school has doubled, from 27 to 54 percent. Those favoring gay adoption has risen from 14 to 49 percent. Since 1976, the proportion of Americans who believe women deserve an equal role in business and political life has nearly doubled, from 30 to 57 percent. The proportion who believe that a woman's place is in the home has collapsed from 10 to 2 percent.

If the public is not moving right on economics, and if it is not even moving right on social issues, then we cannot explain the rise of right-wing economics by looking at the voters. We can only understand it by examining Washington.

This book has two parts. The first half explains how the Republican Party my father admired, the party of social and fiscal responsibility, was transformed into the party of class warfare. It is an astonishing tale, and it begins in the mid-1970s with the rise of a sect of pseudo-economists known as the supply-siders. This small cult of fanatical tax-cutters managed, despite having been proven decisively wrong time after time, to get an iron grip on the ideological machinery of the conservative movement. The supply-siders were not maverick conservative economists, as you might assume; they were amateurs and cranks, convinced that their outsider status enabled them to reach conclusions that had escaped the scrutiny of professional economists. The most prominent among them spent their lives advocating a number of patently ludicrous ideas. (One supply-side guru compared Slobodan Milosevic to Abraham Lincoln. Another said that American upper-class women "are averse to science and technology and baffled by it.") While their other preposterous ideas went nowhere, the equally preposterous notion of supply-side economics took the political system by storm. Why? Because it attracted a powerful constituency: the rich.

An almost theological opposition to taxation quickly took hold within the GOP, opening up the opportunity for business lobbyists to hijack the party's agenda. And so they did, as described in chapter 2. Far from being ideological fanatics, these were the most coolly calculating men. Their distinguishing quality was cynicism. Some of them were flamboyant crooks, like the gangster wannabe Jack Abramoff. But most were crooks of a more respectable variety- the kind with seven-figure salaries and offices at prestigious law firms. All of them understood that the destruction of the old Republican ethos of restraint opened up the public coffers to them, and they have availed themselves and their clients of a massive looting of the Treasury.

Their takeover of the Republican Party took years to complete. The supply-siders and the business lobbyists had two internal obstacles to overcome before they could take full control: the Republican rank-and-file voting base, and the old Republican Washington establishment, both of which still clung to the old ethos of fiscal responsibility and public-mindedness. To deal with them there arose a new breed of ideological enforcer-propagandists, party organizers, lobbyists, or often (as in the case of prototypes like Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed) all of these things at once. They drove out the old party establishment and created a new party line that fused in a seamless web supply-side ideology with their own financial interests.

There is something distinctly cultlike about their thinking. Their canon is presumptively infallible, and any apparent failure must instead be seen as an impetus to recommit themselves to doctrinal purity. Last spring, in an example typical of this thinking, the Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel diagnosed the Republican Party's ailments thusly: "The base is in the dumps, disenchanted with a party that has lost sight of its economic moorings." The solution? Tax cuts, and lots of them. Strassel ran through how all the leading Republican presidential candidates had pledged their fealty to the governing supply-side faith. Each of them promised to make permanent all of Bush's tax cuts, but of course this was a given. The competition was between which candidate would promise even deeper cuts in upper-bracket rates.

As a diagnosis of what ails the Republicans today, this was, of course, insane. Bush signed a major tax cut each of the first six years of his presidency. Whatever the GOP's political liabilities may be, an insufficient commitment to tax-cutting is obviously not among them. To propose that the road to victory lies in recommitting the party to even more upper-bracket tax cuts requires a detachment from reality that would have been the envy of the Manson gang. But this is the sort of thinking that now predominates in conservative and Republican circles, and the obeisance of all the leading GOP presidential hopefuls shows just how deeply it has sunk in.[/quote]

[|BlackJesus|]

[b]Excellent article [/b]

[Homer_Rice]

This criticism might be unfair to the book as a whole, but from the portion offered here I think some qualifications are necessary.

I'm a lifelong Democrat, less active than in my younger years, but I've been involved in every national campaign since the Carter reelection attempt in 1979/80, and in many local campaigns, too. During this time, I've met Senators and Congressmen, I am personal friends with two unsuccessful candidates for Governor (in Ohio and Pennslyvania), and a former business associate of a few other candidates for higher office. All of them, with one exception, have been Democrats. My Republican friend is similar to the sort described by Chait--an Eastern Establishment conservative of the old stripe.

I agree with, and more importantly, I probably better understand, the shift in political behavior outlined by Chait. The past 30 years [i]has[/i] seen a tidal change in our manner of conducting the public's affairs. And, like Chait, I think it is for the worse.

But.

If one is trying to be scrupulously honest, then one has to ask the obvious question: to what extent are Democrats and the Democratic party responsible for this change in climate? As you might imagine, what I have to suggest has not made me popular within Dem circles. There are two general themes under which my criticism of the Dems falls. And, like so much in this world, they are interactive and entwined, so, to some extent, this division is an artificial one.

1) Social/Cultural: The Democratic party has undergone a revolution, too, over the same time frame as has the Republican party. In fact, it's been going on a little longer, dating, imo, back to the period in which a (largely Democrat) legitimate anti-Vietnam War movement, combined with a vital Civil Rights Movement, morphed into an ineffective and anarchic motley bunch of environmentalists, single-issue activists around divisive and pluralistic issues, as well as complacent, self-entitled manchildren resting on the laurels of the work of their parents.

The specifics of this trend is quite interesting, and not always savory, but the bottom line is this: The Democratic party stopped being the party which represented the interests of the public at large, around universal issues that affect everyone, and became instead a polyglot grouping of tangential interests, unfied only in their opposition to the Republican "antiquarians." Or, said slightly differently, the party embraced the Age of Aquarius and abandoned the Age of Pisces.

Just one example. Why was Martin Luther King, Jr. murdered? Not because he was a charismatic advocate for blacks in America, but because he was a charismatic advocate for all Americans. Murdered at a young age, he was just beginning to recognize and act upon the power of his universal appeal to broad layers of the population. That man should have lived to become President and we'd be in a lot better shape today, imo. He knew how to provide hope in a period in which despair afflicted many folks. It's hard to describe just how demoralized the population was in the wake of Vietnam, various assassinations, etc... in the 60s. When that avenue of hopefulness was closed off, and MLK's murder was only part of that process, people closed in, becoming more localized and self-interested--more selfish, in part because the lesson was pretty blunt--caring about universal issues can get you killed. Just ask Malcolm X, who underwent a similar transformation a few years earlier, albeit slightly more on the fringe. Thus, in important ways, the capacity to realistically confront problems and injustice by actively undertaking the necessary changes to deal with those problems, became a liability, whereas before it had been a virtue.

2) Political/Economic: In the midst of all the craziness of the 60s, there was one bright light--the Apollo Program. We actually put people on the moon! Try to imagine the qualities necessary for such a magnificent endeavor. A huge project, it required tons of cooperation from many layers of the population, private, public, skilled, even unskilled. It required an underlying optimism about the future of the human race, not only for that generation, but for generations to come. We were going to make a better world. It was sufficient to be an American to support and take pride in that work, independent of party affiliation or political philosophical differences. Cohesive. Glue. It helped hold us together.

The Democratic party at that time was composed of a combination of old city-machines, some corrupt, others quite useful despite the corruption, as well as a youthful component of folks who resented some of the "staid plodders" running the party then. Actually, quite a potent combination: older leaders who had admin and social experience--they knew how to get things done--were counterposed by a bunch of impatient, idealistic youngsters who thought that the "Justice Train" was moving too slow. The tension caused some upheaval of a positive kind: for example, we had both the [i]know-how and the balls[/i] to shoot for the moon. (The Republican party had similar, if less striking elements within it.)

But here's the rub. The old fuddy-duddys of the Democratic party, who understood the importance of such boring and mundane practices as picking up the trash on a regular basis, and taking care of constituents who had specific grievances within the community, as well as understanding the importance of bigger issues such as industrial might and its implications for the populace at-large, also got the blame for the injustices of the time. (And rightly so, in many ways.) So, in 1968 and especially in 72, the exhuberent youths, who didn't know how to run a smooth day to day operation, or even how to adequately prepare for a well planned future, tossed the baby out with the bathwater. Science and technology was seen as boring--besides, it got in the way of "doing our own thing."

And so, 30 years later, here we are.

We're dumber, we're insolvent, and we're so hollow that the next sharp wind is going to blow us over. Yes, the Republicans have a lot to do with our current weakness, but I'd argue that it is the weakness of the Democratic party which not only led the way, but also turned itself into a impotent bunch of namby-pambys who couldn't effectively stop the hijacking of our current policy framework.

To illustrate my point: if Global Warming is such a big deal (and I'm not yet convinced of the scientific veracity of such a claim), then why aren't people making an even more potent argument for getting out of this solar system over the next 500 years or so? After all, if the planet is toast, then where do we go to butter our bread? Back to the Stone Age or on to the Space Age?

[|Bengal Migration|]

[quote]The Democratic party stopped being the party which represented the interests of the public at large, around universal issues that affect everyone, and became instead a polyglot grouping of tangential interests, unfied only in their opposition to the Republican "antiquarians."[/quote]

Homer,

I don't disagree with this statement at all, but I also feel it describes the Republicans just as well.

"gun nuts"
"anti-abortion fanatics"
"bible thumpers"
"homophobes"
"fear mongers- the dems cannot protect us..."

etc, etc...

All voting republican in unity against those dirty liberals. So they keep voting in self-serving elitists who in all practicality do not have the people's greater interests in mind.

What am I saying? The whole damn system has become a giant fucking commercial. The talking heads and their allies in the press (for both parties) convince the masses of one thing, while doing another. The repubs sell their candidates by using fear. The dems sell hope. Only neither of them actually come through with anything that they promise, while accomplishing nothing more than a further looting of the treasury.

And it sucks.

[Homer_Rice]

You've got a point. I just wanted to state that some Dems think their shit doesn't stink sometimes, too.

Consider this, too: the so-called Reagan Revolution played a large role in transforming party composition. Lots of folks who previously were "native" old-fashioned Dems became Repubs for social/cultural reasons, in reaction to the kinds of phenomena I described. This is different from the other major shift in Repub electoral strategy in recent memory--that of the Nixonian Southern Strategy which essentially attracted disaffected anti-Civil rights southerners into the Repub fold.

I suspect we'll see another shift in party bloc-building as we head deeper into this economic crisis. It'll take some years. Could be good or bad, probably a combo of the two. depends on whether or not folks take the easy way out--a continued abrogation of their responsibilities as citizens, or if folks buckle down once again and go to work re those responsibilities. (I'm talking your everyday Joe and Josephine.)

[bengalrick]

part of the overall problem is displayed here...

when one party (or ideology) is being criticised, the knee jerk reaction is too point out how fucked up the other guys are... guess what, both sides are at least partly right or else the party or ideology would cease to exist, or at least there wouldn't very much power...

but when the dem's are criticised, all we do is say "well, the rep's do too"... which is true, but to fix the problem, the rep's need to change rep's and dem's need to change dem's... as soon as you "point out the ills on the other side" i personally think that that is the biggest cop out imaginable, and will help solve exactly nothing..

homer, i applaud your "balls" to stand up against your own party to make it better and your ability to avoid the easy answers...

btw whodeyUK, i'm not picking on your or trying to call only you out on this... i am guilty of this same problem, and often have to fight against my knee jerk reaction... we've both been manipulated to think the way we do...

[|Bengal Migration|]

[quote name='bengalrick' post='556807' date='Sep 24 2007, 07:37 PM']part of the overall problem is displayed here...

when one party (or ideology) is being criticised, the knee jerk reaction is too point out how fucked up the other guys are... guess what, both sides are at least partly right or else the party or ideology would cease to exist, or at least there wouldn't very much power...

but when the dem's are criticised, all we do is say "well, the rep's do too"... which is true, but to fix the problem, the rep's need to change rep's and dem's need to change dem's... as soon as you "point out the ills on the other side" i personally think that that is the biggest cop out imaginable, and will help solve exactly nothing..

homer, i applaud your "balls" to stand up against your own party to make it better and your ability to avoid the easy answers...

btw whodeyUK, i'm not picking on your or trying to call only you out on this... i am guilty of this same problem, and often have to fight against my knee jerk reaction... we've both been manipulated to think the way we do...[/quote]
No worries. But nor was I giving a knee jerk reaction. Just trying to sum up the situation by pointing out that as much as they might try to convince us they are different, both parties are actually very much the same. (and both right of center if you ever read your Chomsky )

I am not a fan of either party. The only time I ever voted Dem was to vote against the current asshat in chief. And my point was the same as yours, both parties suck. They are both playing people for fools. And unfortunately, as a nation, we are letting them do it.

[Homer_Rice]

Don't get me started on Chomsky! It's not that I mind his politics so much, he's a useful voice. It is that his ideas about language/linguistics strike me as being epistemologically mistaken.

I agree with both of you to a great extent, as far as you go. Party organization is not what it used to be; but the flaws specific to each on must be dealt with internally, for the most part. The biggest problem, imo, is the money factor as it translates into lobbyists, etc. One virtue of the old-style Dem organization is that it had to keep its ear to the ground and really pay attention to regular folks--and address their needs. That's not to say that coalitions aren't important--they are. But, if you consider just what it is about the two parties that makes them seem so alike, part of the answer has to come from the insular nature (or limited circle or however you want to describe it) of the groups that influence party behavior.

It's natural for parties to reach out to selected portions of their constituency, with degrees of effectiveness that ebbs and flows over time. But in some important respects, parties are now "virtual" parties which share a common methodological problem: when policy push comes to legislative shove, they each rely too much on insiders. It isn't the ideological bent of lobbyists that represent the problem here, it's the fact that the current system is a Red-Light District, with the lobbyists as pimps and various layers of elected and other officials as whores.

There was a thread here once in which some folks argued (including myself) for some changes and streamlining in media costs for campaigns. I'd add one more element to federal election reform: a candidate could only raise money from within his or her constituency. This wouldn't effect Prez elections so much as it would Senate and House of Rep elections. Of course, the rejoinder to this is: but Congress deals with national issues outside the local interests of their specific constituencies. Yes, but what of it? I'm not talking about restricting what our Reps and Senators think about and formulate policy on--I'm talking about ways in which we can remove the whore factor so we have a fair chance of electing the best (and hopefully most wise) representives from each local constituency. I suspect that pols would be relieved, too, in some respects. The pressure to raise money is a daily concern and keeps many decent folks from attending to business; for the lesser among them, the system corrupts them.

Okay. To turn again towards the original intent of my responding to the Chait excerpt, While I've talked about the Dem party, I also want to suggest that the problem with the politics of the last 30 years has as much to do with generational trends as it does to do with party affiliation. Both parties are enablers of society as a whole, just emphasizing different segments of it. But the deeper problem is that we are dumber, softer, and more complaisant then we rightfully ought to be. We are going to have our hat handed to us, historically speaking, in the not too distant future. It is not inevitable, but it is probable. Thucycides knew it for the Greeks, Cicero knew it for the Romans, and deep down, you know it (or at least ought to) for the US. Perhaps, once our industrial and economic might has been dissipated, which will remove us from the scene as the preeminent world power, the US can retain (regain?) some aspects of its claim to moral authority as the first among modern nations to organize itself around (little r) republican principles.

Athens was brought down by extending democracy to crazy and ineffective extremes; Rome was brought down as it became the play-thing of various subsets of the oligarchy. The US, ironically enough, suffers from both tendencies. It's become "Politics Gone Wild" in which too many people suffering from too many deleterious influences, flash their political and cultural knockers and engage in other exhibitionist behavior, while the elites of this nation encourage such behavior while the more clever of these power loci manipulate it to their own ends.

[Homer_Rice]

[url="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ellsberg.php?articleid=11674"]I think Ellsberg is a little closer than Chait about the dangers.[/url]

[Jamie_B]

[quote name='Homer_Rice' post='558220' date='Sep 27 2007, 09:53 AM'][url="http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ellsberg.php?articleid=11674"]I think Ellsberg is a little closer than Chait about the dangers.[/url][/quote]


I hope he's wrong.





I dont want to have to hide my co-worker in my attic.