Extreme Makeover: GOP Edition
This past weekend, three things came to my attention that were – to put it mildly – completely unreal.
One.
A 'leak' from a GOP Congressional retreat detailing the strategy (with
example speeches!) to sell the phase-out of Social Security. Here
it is (via Kos) – a fairly large PDF document:
Social Security Phase-Out Playbook
Of course, this isn't surprising – it's par for the course.
Two.
The Los Angeles Times running an article detailing the marketing campaign for February (Black History Month): The GOP is the party of Civil Rights.Bush,
who keeps a bust of Lincoln prominently displayed in the Oval Office,
is making Civil War references a staple of his speeches promoting
democracy overseas and policy changes at home. And
a glossy, GOP-produced “2005 Republican Freedom Calendar,” spotlighting
key moments in the party's civil rights history, has been distributed
to party officials nationwide.
“We
started our party with the express intent of protecting the American
people from the Democrats' pro-slavery policies that expressly made
people inferior to the state,” Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach)
wrote in a letter printed on the calendar.
The
letter continued: “Today, the animating spirit of the Republican Party
is exactly the same as it was then: free people, free minds, free
markets, free expression, and unlimited individual opportunity.”
In order
to make inroads on this strategy, Sen. George Allen (R) is
co-sponsoring a bill condemning the Senate for filibustering
anti-lynching laws earlier in the century. Sen. Allen is hoping
that the association is made with the “Democratic Party” being
associated with this – working hard to avoid the reality that the prime
movers in such campaigns were people like then-Democrat,
soon-Dixiecrat, then-Republican Strom Thurmond.
Sen. Allen also has his own skeletons in the closet. (As little as four years ago…)
According
to the Associated Press in 2000, Allen was discovered to have been
displaying a hangman's noose and the confederate flag in his law
office. As governor, Allen “signed a Confederate Heritage Month
proclamation without denouncing slavery.” Allen also “opposed a state
holiday honoring Martin Luther King” and referred to the NAACP as an
“extremist group.”
According to reporters, Allen did not apologize, but instead “defended the flag and noose as mere decorations.”
Three.
On a related note, one of the best-selling 'conservative' books lately
has been a book titled “The Politically Incorrect Guide to American
History”. The New York Times Book Review published its take on the book:
If
you're going to call a book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to
American History,” readers will expect some serious carrying on about
race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and
bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v.
Board of Education. And he offers up
some curious views on the Civil War – or “the War of Northern
Aggression,” a name he calls “much more accurate.”
The
introduction bills the book as an effort to “set the record straight,”
but it is actually an attempt to push the record far to the right. More
than a history, it is a checklist of arch-conservative talking points.
The New Deal public works programs that helped millions survive the
Depression were a “disaster,” and Social Security “damaged the
economy.” The Marshall Plan, which lifted up devastated European
nations after World War II, was a “failed giveaway program.” And the
long-discredited theory of “nullification,” which held that states
could suspend federal laws, “isn't as crazy as it sounds.”
It
is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth
worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise. It is being snapped up
on college campuses and, helped along by plugs from Fox News and other
conservative media, it recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times
paperback nonfiction best-seller list. It is part of a boomlet
in far-right attacks on mainstream history that includes books like Jim
Powell's “FDR's Folly,” which argues that Franklin Roosevelt made the
Depression worse, and Michelle Malkin's “In Defense of Internment,” a
warm look back on the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during
World War II.
It
is not surprising, in the current political climate, that liberal
pieties are being challenged, and many of them ought to be. But
the latest revisionist histories are disturbing both because they are
so extreme – even Ronald Reagan called the Japanese internment a “grave
wrong” and signed a reparations law – and because they seem intent on
distorting the past to promote dangerous policies today. If
Social Security contributed to the Depression, it makes sense to get
rid of it now. If internment was a good thing in 1942, think what it
could do in 2005. And if the 14th Amendment, which guarantees
minorities “equal protection of the law,” was never properly ratified –
as Mr. Woods argues – racial discrimination may be constitutional after
all.
The author, Dr. Woods – also has a political group.
So,
given the perfect storm of all of these things – it seems that what was
once considered the lunatic fringe has now found a new home in the
'mainstream' in 2004 America.
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