It nevertheless at times becomes tiresome, exhausting, and draining for Western leaders as they listen to windbaggery going on ad nauseam about how all the ills for the developing world stem from exploitative actions taken by the West during imperial wars of prior centuries. This became extremely apparent when POTUS had to field a question in Mexico from a reporter regarding this year’s military coup d’etat in Honduras. The journalist asked the President what is the responsibility of the US to re-install the deposed Honduran President because the US is in fact to blame in her mind that is in whole and not in part for both the former minister’s accession to and then removal from office as well as being responsible for Central American misery and under-development at large.

Stateside observers thus feel compelled to decry the lambasting from the world ex-US as a combination of what some regard as European envy, anti-Americanism, and an overall trans-Atlantic clash of superiority complexes exemplified by the statement from Europe during WWII that Americans are “overpaid,  overworked, over-sexed, and over here.” Going through London and various pockets of Western Europe from 2003 to 2008 was not an exercise in torture due to slowness or inefficiencies; it is a painful exercise resultant from the verbal assaults and discrimination that an American undergoes as a direct consequence of Republican Neorealism policies causing increases rather than decreases in anti-Americanism.   

The journo’s query had such a pure audacity and intellectual arrogance to it that it prompted a sharp rebuke from POTUS who directly told the interrogator that the developing world simply “cannot have it both ways” in perpetuating an entitlement-oriented state of mind whilst simultaneously demanding not only post-colonial reparations but also apologies for the alleged maleovelence of past Western colonialism. POTUS implied that he was “tired” of hearing the incessant whining every place he visited as the windbaggery  constitutes a veritable ghetto mentality which deifies the politics of grievance. Had the exchange taken place on the internet, one has to wonder whether or not another reply to the reporter may have simply been the acronym of STFU.

His comments in Mexico took place only a short time after he had to endure an almost ninety minute monologue and lecture from Putin who wove a long, long yarn under the identical thesis that the US had singularly been responsible for everything wrong in the world. More recently, the Chinese Premier delivered to POTUS a similar dissertation concerning US fiscal policy which really begs the intuitive follow-on as to why doesn’t the Premier just call in all the US debt obligations right now since their currency would not have to float at the same time thus giving them a double whammy in the Premier’s and PRC’s favor.

Professor Amy Chua of Yale in her book, World on Fire from a few years ago forecast the rise of the indigenous peoples in South America as part of a larger movement that would envelop the Andean natives revolt against the ruling mestiza minority in Bolivia among other places. Arguments have further surfaced on the Continent that the confiscation of haciendas ostensibly on behalf of the populace is not expropriation in the name of the state but rather reclamation of that which was previously taken by European settlers through the forcible use of black powder and the barrel of a gun. Likewise, in the US, some groups such as La Raza have occasionally spoken of la reconquista as the eventual re-conquest of the American Southwest back to geographic boundaries belonging to nation-states south of the US border.

These movements are known in comparative international legalese as irredentism where territories are re-aligned according to their original ethnic and political definitions prior to European colonization. Aside from what would it be like for the League of the South to get together in a friendly meeting with La Raza, is La Raza implicitly suggesting that a Second American Revolution and a Second US Civil War would lead to another Yugoslavia?

Scholars of international relations and political science are intimately familiar with assertions from the school of Realism that there is no plurality or commonality of mutual interests but rather that there is only the primacy and dominance of the national self-interest propagated into competition against other national and unitary interests of a disorganized global arena. By way of example, Neorealists point to the Chinese being the last holdouts as signatories to many multilateral statements as well as the inadequacies or failures of non-binding international agreements when contrasted against the quick efficacy, albeit wholly disagreable to the world at large, of unilateral action.

Disciples of such world views include Cheney who state that POTUS does not believe in the spreading of a Western system of values including democratization otherwise known as American exceptionalism, the origins of which stretch back to the Graeco-Roman and British Empires. Neorealists such as Charles Krauthammer point to a comment made by POTUS in Strasbourg where POTUS replied to a question regarding American exceptionalism that his belief in the doctrine was one which he held probably to the same extent that the Brits and the Greeks also believed in their own forms of exceptionalism.

Krauthammer implies that the response of POTUS was non-commital and what one would ascribe to a doctrine of moral relativism rather than the moral absolutism of Krauthammer’s like-minded thinkers in the thinning camps of American unipolarity. Krauthammer insinuates that only his concept of exceptionalism is acceptable because the answer expressed by POTUS in the mind of Krauthammer must be rebutted with, “if everyone is exceptional, no one is.” Other conditional clauses from Krauthammer include the doctrinal adherence to the contention that “if America wants stability, it will have to create it.” Primary to that conditionality is the necessity of using the military to create that peace through the waging of war whether it be from a just war or through a constant, forward presence in every theater throughout the globe.

Alternatives to Realism include International Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and an overall less Hobbesian view of man. Cheney’s twisted logic of a false choice implies that anything less than his own extraordinary renditions of Realism amount to the appeasement of a Neville Chamberlain a la Munich 1938 and the failed multilateralism of debating chambers with no teeth for enforcement purposes such as the Wilsonian-inspired League of Nations or the Oslo Accords that get violated and then reneged under Dubya and the Kyoto Protocol to which several countries with some of the largest carbon footprints are not signatories. The counter-argument to Cheney is that while the Persians invented the game of chess, Iran is still being afforded all opportunities through all diplomatic back channels to show for the record that everything was tried in earnest before anything more militaristic takes place.  

Realists felt vindicated in the moral supremacy of their methods both at the end of the Carter years and then again in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Their reason for doing so was the failure of detente and arms limitation talks to stop the spread of Communism and the Soviets when various treaties proved difficult to enforce and cheating was rampant as a backdrop against the Brezhnev Doctrine’s military interventionism into the crescent of crisis from Afghanistan all the way down into Angola and beyond. Hence the Reagan Doctrine was able to force the bankruptcy of the U.S.S.R at the expense of trebling the US national debt through an arms race and heightened use of covert action whilst these were all approaches eschewed by the moralizing and single-issue human rights orientation of Carter and Pat Darian at the State Department. Republicans are now conveniently arguing through doublespeak that POTUS needs to focus on human rights, the translation of which can only mean that they want a reincarnation of Carter and a strategy that they themselves would never seek.

Earlier this month, I attended a symposium where one of the panel’s moderators, Ileana Gordon representing her “democracy advocate NGO”, complained very loudly that dissident groups throughout the Middle East were “upset” that the same level of “support” was not flowing in their direction as much as it had been over the past seven years. The normal and customary domain of assistance to foreign dissident groups falls under the purview of the State Department and the CIA among other places but the implications of Gordon’s statement are multi-faceted. Aside from the obvious, a lateral takeaway is that in the case of another large scale attack along the lines of 9/11, the Neorealist opposition will seek to use that as justification for their level of interventionism and a replay in their minds of the Carter years when covert action and black ops were bad words.  

Post-9/11, the Bush Doctrine emerged as the means whereby pre-emptive war would serve as mechanisms for supposedly just wars that were waged to stop weapons proliferation and also spread democracy during the process of a civilizational clash foreseen by the late Professor Huntington fifteen years ago between the West and the Islamic World. At present, the alternative to Realism and Neorealism includes “soft power” and smart power as outlined by the chief architect of Neoliberalism, Professor Joseph Nye. Strangely, the rumor mill has abounded with unconfirmed allegations that Hillary Clinton was not permitted by the Administration to bring Nye onto her team although it was thought of by many to be one of her very early pre-conditions for accepting the appointment to Secretary of State.

Sketches and outlines for an Obama Doctrine of renewed multilateral engagement first came to light in the addresses he made in Cairo and elsewhere throughout that region earlier this year. Furthermore, the combinations of hard, soft, and smart power became that much more visible after Obama’s speech this week before the Nobel Committee. The first third of the speech had the sound of something that one would have attributed to a protege of Dubya and Cheney but substantiating the rules for engagement in a so-called just war and then being even-handed in the acknowledgement of Gitmo’s anathema was not something that one can ever expect to see or hear from the Neorealists. As he wrote it himself rather than an internal staff-based speechwriter, greater color on the Obama  Doctrine became clearer in what several have come to suggest as either pragmatic idealism or idealistic Realism.

Objectionable to the purely economic globalizers but still intrinsic with varying degree to the implementation of foreign policy, whether Neorealist or Neoliberal, is power projection where the military of a Great Power has a constant forward presence almost everywhere at all times such as Britain’s Royal Navy patrolling global waters in the last century. Neorealists of a US-centric, unipolar world in their minds such as Krauthammer’s describe the means to project power as “the ability to maintain a large military establishment capable of projecting power to all corners of the earth.” The slightest deviation and dilution of such a strategy is unacceptable to unthinking Neorealist thought leaders and any point of view not uniformly consistent with their version of reality cannot be tolerated. 

For the Neorealists, this translates into not only the most singular, certain, and over-riding component of all policy, foreign and domestic, but also that a permanent US military presence spread throughout the Middle East and everywhere else as part of a new Hundred Year War in civilizational clash between East and West that defines for them more than even globalization the epochal post-Cold War moment. Globalization is a side order but not the main dish for them.

The primacy of conflict rather than cooperation or global trade thus takes precedence in the minds of all Hobbesian Neorealists. A classic example of such interpretation is found even in a generation that preceded the legacy of Dubya with Jed Babbin, a former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense from the George H.W. Bush years. Despite the fact that Bush 41 spent time in China in an ambassadorial capacity, Babbin has published what he believes to be a serious treatise on…. pending armed conflict with China.

Neorealism thereby posits that there is no effective alternative to the primacy of a unilateral and unipolar stance in the strict context of bilateral relations where all matters are negotiated from the dictatorial position of a highly centralized and unitary executive  authority with civilizational clash being their over-arching driver behind all foreign policy and foreign affairs. A bizzare argumentation of  Krauthammer is that investment in energy-related infrastructure is “intervention” and a ”vast expansion of social services” that serves to “take away from defense spending.”

Therein lies the most outrageous double standard for the incongruencies of Republican Neorealist logic; it is acceptable to dispense and increase that dispensation for all expenditures of borrowed capital towards overseas militarism but it is not at all tolerable or admissible for any efforts to go towards a reformation in crony cartels of insurance companies protected by anti-trust exemptions while crumbling bridges and infrastructure derisively qualify under the misleading sloganeering-derived labels of “misguided industrial policy of central planning” and domestic welfare programs. In other words, despite the appalling and monopolistic inadequacies of unadulterated laissez-faire to the express benefit and sellout of the highest bidder, Republican Neorealism does not have the time of day for not only domestic policy of any kind but also anything at all outside the realm of the Pentagon’s adventurism in foreign lands and that truly is the most fantastically shocking and malignant neglect which Neorealism perpetrates and perpetuates at the expense of the bottom 99%.  

With Cheney, the spouting much less cleverly asserts that there is an obligation to export his own and only his own definition of American exceptionalism but with a Divine Providence-type of special and Godly dispensation to bring said exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny through coercion and force rather than the soft power approaches of the Sunshine Policy and globalization-induced movements where the liberalizing and opening up of markets through the expansion of free trade as first outlined by Adam Smith many centuries ago. It is even moreso out of this world figuratively speaking that a former speechwriter to Walter Mondale such as Krauthammer would take his inspiration to the level of saying that post-Dubya policy of an emerging Obama Doctrine has wilfully “forfeited the mandate from heaven.”

Reflect on that statement for a moment. Krauthammer implies that the singular US policy mandate, non-existent as far as dometic nation-building goes, is the foreign policy imperative and modern day version of the White Man’s Burden from several centuries in the past. Twenty years ago subsequent to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Krauthammer penned a piece entitled somewhere along the lines of, “Universal Dominion: The Path Towards Unipolarity”. It is, however, as a result of all the above that the more recent enunciations of Krauthammer caused his former cohort, Francis Fukuyama, to observe that Charles had become “strangely disconnected from reality.”

Krauthammer goes further to explicate that after saving Europe twice from its own wars and strife, America is “the rarest of geopolitical phenomena, the accidental hegemon, and the reluctant hegemon.” An unwillingness for a continuation of militarism that was so repudiated in the elections of 2006 and 2008 constitutes, in the mind of Krauthammer, constitutes the “demolition of the moral foundation of America.” Chuckie, what are you smokin’? Is it as illegal as the territorial-sovereignty violating aspirations of yesteryear that you wish to revive from a discredited and deceased hinterland of Neorealism unchecked?

In Krauthammer’s hallucinogenic world of American centrality and unipolarity, Asian ascendancy does not count because it is nothing more than a replay of the Japan rising pheonomenon from twenty years ago as Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center were being purchased by the Japanese – - just prior to the popping of the Japanese real estate and stockmarket bubbles culminating in the crash of Japan. Krauthammer opines further that European decline was “inevitable” due to the “civilizational suicide” of self-inflicted world wars that required American rescue whereas American decline is actively “chosen” by the detractors to Krauthammer’s ideology, a legacy of unquantifiable debt bequeathed to the Neoliberal succesors of Neorealist criminality. However, it is Neorealism and the likes of Krauthammer who have accelerated a decline that his philosophy helped to create two times over with statutory conditions satisfied for US federal bankruptcy in 1992 and then again in 2008. 

Meanwhile, the false construct for Cheney is such that anything less than his own dispensation is necessarily declinist by definition and default which he then qualifies as a “post-American” and post-imperial condition that puts the republic at the risk of lowered “readiness” and subject to destruction by imminent threats. Meanwhile, the fallacies of Cheney’s diatribes do remind students of logic to re-examine the definition of a false syllogism. “Socrates is dead. All cats are mortals. Therefore Socrates is a cat.”

The rhetorical technique is used to firstly suppress debate and dissent and didactically leaves the impression that there is no alternative and not even a counter-argument to the one answer by dictat which they proffer through force. At many apparently irreconciliable levels, there can never really be any rapprochement between many econo-globalizers and national security hawks as a body because the former labels the latter as anti-globalizers which leads the hawks to lambast the free marketeers as deliberately weakening defense and counter-terrorist capabilities. Previously, nonetheless, globalizers were happy to accept the dual role of Cold Warrior and free marketeer but now eschew the activism of similarly armed engagement overseas.

What soft power and smart power bring to the table is that while personal piety can be indicative of both the Puritans or the Taliban, the alternative reformation of militancy is the antidote of modernity through exposure to the forces of capitalism and globalization  rather than invasions and occupations. But Krauthammer cannot accept that option because the classical Hobbesian choice, opting between the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers, is to select authoritarian absolutism and confrontation over their perceived natural state of complete disorder and utter anarchy in a decidedly unipolar and US-centric world.

Neorealists rebut that newly liberalized export markets are opened up more quickly through force rather than through soft and smart power so the endgame is still the same; the only difference is the methodology deployed to achieve the same outcome. Such an argument is akin to saying that an unwilling rape victim is a more cooperative puta at gunpoint rather than trying to persuade her nicely of the benefits for closer intimacy.      

Neorealism’s warped world of East versus West is where US foreign policy serves as the principled guardian of Western Civilization (although Krauthammer himself is a winner of the “Guardian of Zion” award from a non-US group), whilst contemporaneously spreading democratization through the offense of military tribunals, enemy combatants, invasions, occupations, and the once self-proclaimed but now moribund war on terror. By contrast, the current Administration has removed the phrases of enemy combatant and war on terror from all forms of discourse and policy.

Albeit having partly originated from the British texts of Hobbes and Hedley Bull, Neorealism in an American context more recently found its home in the militant anti-communism of Reaganites converted into neocon Neorealists; and after 1989, with the lack of an enemy, then an enemy must be created and with that, the Long War of James Woolsey. The morphing into militant militarism against the new enemy again seeks to project that forward military presence on a constant basis with an eye towards a permanent footing all across the globe, but most especially the Middle East. With soft power and smart power, however, one doesn’t seek to force feed democratization down someone’s throat; rather, the support for the opposition is first asked and only when requested does it becomes quietly offered through dissident groups who seek changes to their direct overseers in conjunction with the liberalization of previously closed trade markets.   

Vis-a-vis the Arab street, what is the impact of the Long War as both interpreted and persecuted by Neorealists? 

The use of force to coerce change as a means of creating peace through the waging of war also tries to marginalize extremist fringes within the Arab population. However, the strategy shows itself to have backfired in the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon as well as Hamas in the Occupied Territories which includes the world’s biggest concentrations camp of Gaza City. Contrary to the stated objective of pushing out Hezbollah into some area of intellectual purgatory, Neorealism has caused the groups to have widespread, mainstream acceptance throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah refashions itself as a political party with a complex and interdependent structure of elected Members of Parliament, TV stations, media outlets, “charities” alongside groupings of  ”governmental Non Governmental Organizations.”

Likewise in the case of Hamas, they are able to garner more electoral support than Fatah throughout a majority of areas despite its reputational heritage being more militant. Hamas is now the elected government of Palestine despite all the efforts to isolate Hamas as a fringe element. So militancy versus militancy fosters more dischord rather than more of Krauthammer’s version of stability. Thus the extreme which began underground has now integrated itself into the everyday social and institutional fabric of Arab life and the blame game gets more ammunition with all the one-way directional finger pointing from the likes of Putin’s 60 minute monologues concerning Western guilt.  

A Neorealist rebuttal is that an era of asymmetric warfare necessitates a response that is equally or more asymmetric. With Salafi Islam and Wahhabism where the alleged goals are violent jihadism exported globally, Neorealists such as Frank Gaffney and Daniel Pipes have popularized use of the term, ‘Islamofascism’ as a means to describe the aggressive, combative, hostile. and anti-Western stance taken by devotees of Salafism and separate but similar strains of later Wahhabi interpretations. Using the containment doctrine of preventing the spread of Communism first articulated by George Kennan in the mid to late 1940s, the rehabilitated Cold Warriors of today’s present Neorealists, seek the re-application of Kennan in a Second Cold War.  

Republican Neorealism thereby seeks to supplant all forms of soft and smart power whilst preserving a market that is not free with monopoly-enhancing anti-trust exemptions only granted elsewhere to the sport of American baseball. With a double standard that expands inequities which do not naturally self-correct through leave-it-alone negligence, Neorealism has no problem with off-budget, off-balance sheet appropriations of $3 trillion towards overseas warmongering but domestic nation-building at home is labeled as interventionist and expansionary towards unneeded social services. Neorealists such as Krauthammer will speak oodles of creative destruction and innovation but his addresses are intellectually bereft of the foundational assumptions that drive “innovation economics” which is now an area of focus for Democratic thinkers where Republican thought is nowhere to be found.

In saying that POTUS has assisted in providing comfort to the enemy, former VP Cheney has accused a sitting President of treason, an allegation of which begs the question as to why then Cheney does not therefore seek the prosecution of POTUS in federal court although Cheney himself is perfectly viable as a defendant for the Hague. US Army recruitment is at a thirty-five year high because guys who can’t get an apprenticeship, a living wage or health insurance from a cartel protected by anti-trust exemptions are able to find all of the aforementioned benefits when enlisting in the military. It can only be the incredibly most disturbing inequity of Neorealism that an 18-year old should never become eligible for an apprenticeship and also be denied the mere ability to purchase health insurance from an unregulated cartel no less while unlimited and unfettered misadventurism in global warmongering should be available unconditionally to the whimsical discretion of reticent imperial ambitions.  

Shooter Cheney’s Neorealism brings with it a new Hundred Year War or Long War as so labeled by former DCI James Woolsey while staffed with the fodder of a war machine continuously re-emergent from an American ghetto scene. Furthermore, when various Neorealists respond rhetorically, “What’s wrong with that?” to the question of their New Strategy for Securing the Realm stating that a primary focal point for US foreign policy is to ensure “that Israel is surrounded by democracies” as per the interview that took place between the late Tim Russert and Richard Perle seven years ago, additional inquiries are begged profusely such as earlier this decade when a very well-known former Republican presidential speechwriter asked why is it that the cavalry being sent off into the Middle and Near East are ”kids with names such as Murphy, McAllister, Gonzalez and Leroy Brown” but the war planners are known by the names of Perle, Wolfowitz, Kagan, and Feith?  

Shooter had so many deferments during the Vietnam Conflict that he has never had to serve at all in the armed forces. For the Neorealists to fully appreciate the world as they see it, it can only be done by bringing back the draft and employing a military of conscripts comprised with the privileged sons of syndicated columnists and think tank academics who write of the need for widespread multi-front foreign conflagrations from the air-conditioned comfort of their plush city offices. No deferments, no draft dodgers, and no exceptions would be available for even the most well-to-do with diabetes and other chronic diseases as even they would be sent into the bloodied Hobbesian fields of Republican Neorealism’s chosen wars of a multi-generational, civilizational clash and outright social de-evolution.

Tuesday of last week shows a reversal in New Jersey of fivefold and higher insofar as the plus five percentage points of independents who voted for Obama last year actually voted for the GOP candidate by a margin in the mid twenties. Virginia’s example demonstrates an even larger differential. Both states also had very low turnout in voters under the age of 30 as well as minorities, both demographics of which had been massively in favor of Obama in the Presidential Election. Anecdotally, Fairfax County, with the exceptions of Arlington and Alexandria and populated mostly by civil servants who lean Democratic, went to the GOP for the first time in quite a long time.

The 23rd Congressional District for New York, situated near the US-Canadian border, provided an eventful horserace. Last month, the GOP candidate was an incumbent state Senator, Dede Scozzafava, who received the blessings from the RNC and establishmentarian Republicans such as Gingrich. What ensued, however, is a far different story. As a result of the prospective GOP federal officeholder being a RINO or Republican In Name Only as well as a social liberal, a third party candidate soon emerged on a competing ticket under the label of the Conservative Party. The competitor, Hoffman, was backed by people such as Dick Armey and talk radio hosts including Limbaugh and Sean Hannity along with a group by the name of the Club for Growth.

Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal founded the Club ten years ago while he was at Cato. The Club is akin to the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce when it comes to philosophy but it takes a very special interest in the primary elections for Republican candidates. Its objective is to ensure that GOP candidates in the primaries are not mealy-mouthed and wishy-washy consolation prizes or RINOs. The Club wants all such candidates to be genuine supply-siders and their attacks on RINOs include Rockefeller Republicans from the Northeast and Midwest such as Olympia Snowe and George Voinovich, the latter of whom also represents a retiring Republican in next year’s mid-term election.

Limbaugh speaks of a desired self-destructive bestiality involving conjugal relations of sorts between RINOs and Blue Dawg Democrats. The very graphical imagery used by Limbaugh is unpleasant to put it mildly. 

Although she was given initial endorsements from DC-based GOP institutional names such as Gingrich and the Republican National Committee, Scozzafava came off as a liberal or “progressive” on virtually every issue despite her being an elected GOP state Senator in New York. The uproar became so loud that she removed herself from the race and Hoffman then took the quickly re-evaluated support from the RNC. However, because she was still on the ballot as of Tuesday, she ended up syphoning enough votes from Hoffman that the election was won by a Democrat for the first time in 150 years. Validating the thesis that American third party candidacies are not electable but they do destroy the incumbents, the independent gubernatorial candidate in New Jersey drew several percentage points and slightly more than the net difference between the incumbent Democratic Governor versus the GOP challenger, thereby helping to elect into office a new GOP governor. With New Jersey property taxes that have been rocketing higher and higher, the GOP candidate took the election by a factor of four percent.

The RINO phenomenon deserves further exploration and its development ultimately stems from the Bush Administration straying from the traditions of the Austrian School and supply-side economics. Although the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were fundamental reductions in most marginal rates, the wars were surreptitiously paid for with Emergency Spending Authorizations that were off-budget and off-balance sheet. Even with such an attempted masquerade, there was no disguising of a deficit that became a moonshot not too different from the deficits that affected George H.W. Bush in 1992 also during a recession. Last year, Bush acted to extend umemployment benefits by almost twice the statutory maximum of six months, a move of which necessitates more deficit spending at the state level and one of which is mandated at the federal level of oversight; Bush was paying people not to work and to stay in that capacity. In the latter years of the second Administration for Dubya, an unlikely rebirth of Keynes manifested itself with the one-off giveaway tax rebate stimulus checks to the tune of a number that exceeded $145 billion and was neither deficit-neutral nor revenue-enhancing.

Such a practice of rebate-style checks rather than reductions in marginal rates is antithetical to the doctrine of supply-side and is indeed reminiscent as well as typical of an approach that Carter deployed without any ROI in 1978. All of these actions explain why Cato, the Club for Growth, and other constituents within what used to be the base for the GOP all departed over the past half decade plus and now all find themselves once more as nomads inside the American two-party system. With this return of the Perotistas and the affiliated anger against the deficits and the debt, leaks have arised today that the State of the Union speech in just over two months time will declare a “war on deficits.” How much of that declaration and the follow-through (or lack thereof ) proves to be substantive rather than rhetorical will be the subject of a new debate for 2010.  

A truly Keynesian aspect of Dubya was his creation of Medicare Part D, a program designed to give prescription drug coverage to senior citizens. Medicare, in its original form from 1965, was invented by LBJ as part of his Great Society agenda. The unfunded mandates for LBJ’s Medicare Parts A and B are $40 trillion. Dubya’s Medicare Part D represents an additional unfunded mandate of $7 trillion. Republicans hence doubled the national debt in the first six years of this decade.  

Inadvertently working at times in concert with but also against the Club for Growth is the more recently founded Tea Party Express. Their activists represent a patchwork of citizens all over the map. Their presence was very apparent during a town hall gathering for  Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina earlier in the Fall. Stacked throughout the bleachers of a high school auditorium, many activists yelled at Graham that he was a war criminal and further that he was no conservative but that the only conservative and the true conservative was Ron Paul.

Congressman Paul describes the present political landscape as one of oxymoronic conservative Keynesians versus liberal Keynesians with a dearth of Austrian alternatives. Such a statement is an eery reminder of Nixon’s comment in 1971, “We’re all Keynesians now ” and thus stands in marked contrast to GOP Congressman Paul Ryan’s statement, “We are not Keynesians.” There is yet another  coincidence from the same period. Congressman Ryan, it is rather moreso that we are all Japanese now and the Emperor still has no clothes. Where’s the growth outside of ZIRP?

By the mid-1970s, Jack Kemp stood alone by himself as the sole person to offer supply-side economics as an alternative. Almost exactly at the same time, the core and hard line constituencies within the base of the GOP rallied behind an effort to nominate Reagan as the challenger to Gerald Ford during the 1976 primaries. These dynamics have yet to fully play out at present but the Tea Party Express coupled with movements of independents towards the right and then reinforced with the Club for Growth‘s actions are increasing the number of third party candidates. Rather than immediately creating the potential for a newly resurgent GOP, there is some fratricidal bloodletting at work that has the short-term effect of electing the opposition but ultimately also provides the Darwinian flush of ex-communicating the Keynesians. 

Because of the outcome in New York’s 23rd District having occurred multiple times over the years, retired GOP Congressman Tom Davis has referred to the Club as the “Club for Democratic Growth”. His opinion stems from the assertion that the influence of the Club serves to split the Republican vote and elect, by default, a Democrat. The matter becomes further complicated by the a place where the Club faces it next test.   

The incumbent Republican governor in Florida, Charlie Crist, faces a primary battle in next year’s race for the open Senate seat. His challenger is Marco Rubio, the young and former House speaker from within the Florida House of Representatives. A Miami-born  Cuban-American, Rubio gained huge traction in supply-side circles when he pounded the table with legislative proposals for the abolition of the personal property tax on primary residences in exchange for a flat consumption tax in the state of Florida. Rubio now officially has the backing of not only the Club for Growth but also CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. Problematic to all these guys however and all American supply-siders for that matter is how hopeless they all are when it comes to a VAT or a consumption-based gas tax of any kind which further exacerbates their utter lack of credibility related to all forms of accretive revenue-gathering.

The Internal Revenue Code of the US gets so pillaged through rebates, credits, depreciation allowances, and deductions that in spite of higher American marginal rates for either personal income or corporate taxes compared to Australia and a number of other competing nations, the US collects a lower percentage of GDP in tax revenues! The Administration, with the assistance of Volcker, is assaulting the myriad of deductions within the IRC along with the private sector’s ability to complete debt offerings in capital markets and then expense the capital raise as a means of paying an effectively lower corporate income tax rate. 

But the Florida race becomes still ever more divided due to the fact just this week that the Tea Party has now registered in Florida as a third party. Consequently, the conservative or Republican vote is now split three ways with the GOP, the Club for Growth, and the newly formed Tea Party. To wit, Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964 allowed for the base to reconstitute itself by the time of the next  Presidential election. The only difference with 1976 is that Ford did not get his arse kicked nearly as hard as Goldwater. Gallup polling data now shows a 10-point shift towards the GOP in going from a deficit of six points  against them to four points in their favor over a timeframe from the summer until now. Independents also now indicate a positive bias towards the GOP  exceeding 20 points based on Gallup polls which matches the moves that independents exercised towards the victorious Virginia and New Jersey GOP candidates.

These times similarly necessitate reflection on that which is analagous to the last occurrence when reported unemployment soared into the double digits, the 1982 mid-term elections when Reagan lost a couple dozen seats in the House. Probabilites right now point to an expectation of something almost identical for next year’s mid-terms vis-a-vis the Democrats. Also reinforcing such a forecast is where the present “Misery Index” would be right now as opposed to when Carter had to face it. Thirty years ago, the combination of the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate yielded a number that was in the mid-20s. Take the U-6 unemployment rate in the upper teens and then add to it the decline in median family income over the past decade and today’s Misery Index is actually worse on some levels.

Take that Misery Index; look into the camera and ask, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”      

Reagan’s momentum in 1980 and movement towards him in the polls came immediately after he posed that question. These moves will come into play next year and then again in 2012.  Likewise, a revival of over-arching pocketbook issues is thus now supplanting the more tertiary agenda of green energy and climate change although the Chamber of Commerce is conceding that they will support a carbon tax in lieu of cap-and-trade.      

Conventional wisdom posits that pragmatism and compromise require the acceptance of what is attainable in the here and now versus the ethereal ideal that proves more elusive. As such, ideologues and partisans are told that the waters have to be muddied for the sake of political expediency. In effect, they argue, to luxuriate in the purity of one’s irrelevance is to accomplish nothing whilst maintaining steadfastly held positions which they believe to be tactically counter-productive.

With Keynes having provided the theoretical underpinnings for the Administration’s approach with Dr. Summers and Dr. Romer, the Administration has lately revealed its fear of a 1937-style double-dip recession within a Depression. These views became particularly self-evident after the publication of Dr. Romer’s op-ed in The Economist where she articulated that very concern in more diplomatic tones. They argue that an Austrian approach of non-intervention on behalf of the public sector would lead to catastrophic crashes equating something along the lines of the 16th Century and martial law as per Hank Paulson’s two page TARP memo from last year. For these reasons, they seek no premature withdrawal of any fiscal or monetary stimuli which runs contrary to the now expected announcement in January of a “war on deficits.”

Alas, however, we have established earlier that it is not possible to be a little bit pregnant; you either are Keynesian or you are Austrian but you cannot be both at the same time lest you become a deviant by-product of Limbaugh’s fantasies. Even the buggery of one John Maynard K would see such a combination as heretical.

Anyone there?                                                                      Is anybody home?

                                 Echo…echo…echo.

A tone deaf and deafening silence have characterized several factions inside of that which remains of contemporary American conservatism. Contrary to the assertion that it is only a fringe and not the norm, elected conservatives have closely allied themselves with all teabaggers as opposed to disaggregating those whom are hoisting pictures of chimpanzees with messages saying, “Go back to Africa.” Such a failure to move away from and marginalize the extreme elements flies in the face of the disengagement that was effectuated between the GOP and the John Birch Society nearly a half century ago courtesy of and at the initiation of the late Bill Buckley. A veritable coarsening of the dialogue and something lacking in civil discourse has become daily fare at the same time that the histrionics and theatrics do well for Nielsen ratings.

The deaths of Bill Buckley, Bob Novak and William Safire among others in recent times have brought into question whether or not there are any deep thinkers left within either the GOP or more broadly, as proponents of conservative thought at large. The resultant vacuum has been filled with a cacophonous din that overtakes anything and everything substantive. As such, the dearth of intellectuals in the realm of conservative thought has prompted publications such as The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus as well as a piece in The Washington Post by Steven F. Hayward, also of the American Enterprise Institute, entitled, Is Conservatism Brain Dead?    

Admittedly, George Will and a handful of others are still out stumping in defense of sometimes Republicans and more often sometimes  conservatives but the question remains relevant as to where in the world are their modern thought leaders. Extremism lacking intelligence has been so prominent this year that it prompts the query as to whether today’s Republicans and conservatives have both descended to the level of unthinking morons where the slightest of word association triggers emotive responses equivalent to a group of zombies running amok amidst crumbling bridges and erstwhile bringing nothing to the table in the way of solutions. These days, however, and contrary to the wiser pragmatism of Buckley, various elected GOP officials openly cavort with and pander to the most  radical of tea baggers. Similar to the birthers of today who shout that POTUS was born in Mombasa and yet when pressed, will not call for his legally-required deportation in a case where such an allegation proved to be factual, several members of the John Birch Society repeatedly accused Eisenhower of being an agent for the former USSR.

Where’s their Jack Kemp? Where’s their open tent? Do they have a conscience?

There are no open arms and their world keeps getting smaller.

To explore the inquiry of Mr. Hayward, one must ask wherefore dost thou and thine school of thought become wayward? 

Secondarily, with US manufacturing eviscerated as the natural fungibility of capital seeks the absolutely lowest unit cost of labor, what is the role of industrial policy for a developed economy? If so, please expound. What precisely is that role?

Traditional Republican orthodoxy understandably replies that building stuff for export is misguided in the developed world because it is perpetually cheaper to do so and therefore with fatter profit margins when that assembly gets done with less cost throughout developing countries. The correct answer concurs that labor-intensive work does indeed reside most perfectly in emerging markets which is exactly where conservative doctrine stops advocacy of anything further that would be productive for the debate. The missing follow-on posits that the Western world is more appropriately situated for research-intensive activity such as molecular science, life sciences  in addition to R&D more generally; yet the conservative response seems to articulate none of the above and only the abstracts of an already applied laissez-faire doctrine accompanied by the not so unequivocally beneficial but still invisible hand of Adam Smith and an unfettered, unbridled Mr. Market.

In light of the above, when the US has huge shortages of engineers and scientists and as many as 50% of the PhD candidates in the hard sciences at some universities ultimately repatriate to their respective countries of origin, what is the role of US public policy and educational policy in seeking to address competitive disadvantages and inefficiencies of an American model that lacks graduates in math and science?

The conservative response is the unconstructive ambiguity of a sloganeering-driven phrase such as market-based solutions with the once in a while specificity of opining for school vouchers, all of which formulates a non-answer. They then go so far as to say that with the Department of Education having no constitutional justification that it should therefore be removed in its entirety; as a monstrosity in their eyes of Carter’s malfeasance in the realm of federal encroachment upon the liberties of individuals, their stance posits that the behemoth of any federal agency is more detrimental than ameliorative in any area with the singular exception of national defense.  Lacking constitutionality in the areas of domestic policy becomes a convenient hiding place for conservative rationale to do nothing.

It thus begs as to whether they have any ideas, answers or people as related to the burning and most pressing issues of the day. To first oppose and then propose would usually be the normal parliamentarian route but the former reigns singularly dominant as the party of rejectionism and obstructionism says nothing but no, no and no. Intellectually bereft and absent of any genuine suggestions, conservative thought leaves a vacuum of being out of touch where not being responsive to much of the day-to-day minutiae that affects an angry and pissed off middle class.

Hayward correctly implies that conservatism should not necessarily be the exclusivity of Republicans and indeed it is not in the case given Clinton’s transitional moves towards centrism by the mid-1990s further exemplified by his passage into codified law of welfare reform. In point of fact, the would-be father of Reagan’s supply-side economics, Art Laffer, ironically said that the best supply-side President he voted for twice was Bubba as opposed to the Old Gipper although the Clinton tax cuts of 1997 were driven by a Republican Congress. Likewise, JFK was a supply-sider so the monopoly on good ideas or concentration of supply-side does not reside with one camp.

Around the start of this decade, an Englishman was making a sales pitch to me about a Tory representative whom would likely morph into a leader of a resurgent Tory majority in the UK from his perspective. I listened intently for the duration of the pitch. At the end and to the incredulous amazement of the person seeking my conversion, I was obliged to say that I could not tell the difference between Labour and the Tories from the standpoint of a foreigner looking at all of it from a far distance. In either case, it was six or one half dozen of another. Centrism, triangulation and the recurring dilemmas of seemingly insoluble magnitude over extended periods make sparring groups appear as no better than the Hatfields and the McCoys where the Bank Party and the Corn Party look to be  hardly different at all for the cynic.

The pejoratively-labeled Loony Left of post-war Britain, characterized for some by the likes of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill, had disappeared and Labour was no longer purely Socialist as they had come to embrace some market forces as a consequence of the Thatcher Revolution moving Labour closer to the center. The ability to delineate and clearly demarcate the available choices for the sake of being able to differentiate the primary participants in a two-party system. A contemporary and analagous American equivalent  would imply that American conservatives and Republicans must therefore move closer to the center. The planks of a political platform are interchangeable which means that there is neither a monopolistic nor ideological attachment to one party or one philosophy when it comes to tax cuts. Revelatory to that end is the purported leak of the Administration’s considering of tax cuts at some point although only in the form of a possible payroll tax holiday combined with small business tax credit hiring incentives.  

There is a profoundly asinine idiocy to the obfuscating misdirect and false dichotomy of solutions framed in the context of right versus left. Partisan operatives and hacks would have us believe that a Democrat is a technocratically-inclined and lifetime-employed civil servant incapable of being weaned from a perpetually public tit and whose academic major concentrated somewhere between sociology and anthropology with an idealistic bias towards saving the world from itself but never having been in the employ of a private for-profit business. By contrast, the Republican represents establishmentarian and corporatist cronies as defenders of a plutonomy that engineers a routinely rapacious robbery in a state-supported multi-generational transfer of resources for the delight and benefit of the top 1%. In all fairness, the likelihood of someone toiling tirelessly under the tutelage with success at that of a poor man has the similar probability of finding a post-modern and well functioning toilet in the South Pole. With privatized profits and the federal backstopping of socialized losses, the truth lies someplace in the middle.  

Cloudiness between two schools of thought ultimately begs for clarity and conservatives at least in the clothing of the GOP will be attempting something of this nature very soon. Out of the playbook from the 1994 mid-terms, a revived and enhanced Contract with America will emerge from the GOP in 2010. One has to presume that the recurring key tenets would include the standard fare of HSAs or Health Savings Accounts, lower marginal tax rates, cuts in capital gains tax rates and business capital investment tax credit incentives as well as private sector payroll expanding carrots of one form or another. The HSA model is hopelessly inadequate towards the real problems pertaining to insurance practices and affordability. And how much would a revived and revised CWA really resonate with the median Joe Sixpack?  

Being the group with the answers sanctifies the party of ideas which was most definitely the case during the Reagan and Thatcher Revolutions when privatization and liberalizing economies took hold with victory in the Cold War and the acceptance in near universality of capitalism as the preferred global system of governance. Through multiple polling venues, the word, capitalism, now has negative connotations in the Occidental world given the events of the past two years whereas the word, entrepreneur, does not track nearly as poorly. Problematic as well to progress is a two party system where the useless labels of a pseudo-science leaves a battlefield strewn with the casualties and character assasination work of the Hatfields and McCoys to the extreme that improvement and outcome-oriented solutions prove elusive but stagnating in a quagmire of false accusations is explained as the customary way of doing business and maintaining a status quo.

What about the obscenely large percentage of the US economy that is dedicated to housing, construction and downstream ancillary sectors as opposed to a greatly diversified base of multi-farious industries, science-based and otherwise?   

Again there is virtually nothing in response from the GOP or conservatives here with the exception of Peter Schiff who offers blunt critiques of American economic inadequacies and inefficiencies from a decidedly Austrian perspective.

Along similar lines, with US consumption at 70% of GDP and in the process of reverting to a lower median several points yonder, the shortfall differential is a gap of $800 billion per annum. What are the repercussions of that move and what is entailed in the transition?

Volcker and Greenspan are calling for a VAT. Pelosi is keeping it on the table as something that would be considered at some point. Cap-and-trade, enumerated as anti-growth by the right of center, has also emerged from a House Committee and is presently tracked for the Senate in 2010. But after 9/11, Dubya was seen on television saying, “Go shopping and spend money” as his answer for maintaining and stimulating growth. Supply-side wants the structural reductions in marginal rates while the other side says something markedly different. The ex-communication of a Reaganite such as Bruce Bartlett from conservative circles for openly questioning the inability of supply-side to provide the growth needed in eliminating fiscal deficits has proved further emblematic of the cathartic gyrations  within modern conservatism. There is no resolution in sight for that internal strife.

An easy target, however, does surface in the reincarnation of Keynes for the first time either since the early 1990s or the 1970s depending on whom you are and how you measure it. But the easiest conservative rebuttal, effervescent but not omnipresent, would be that the Emperor has no clothes once the veneer of a Japanese-style ZIRP masquerading as growth, (zero interest rate policy), gets removed and pressure on the walls of a damn renews strength. In other words, where’s the real growth outside of ZIRP?  

In foreign policy, some conservatives continue to argue for the exportation of American exceptionalism as defined by the unipolarity  espoused by neocons such as Charles Krauthammer irrespective of the fact that POTUS has popularity rankings in foreign countries which are not only higher than the ratings for those respective heads of state, but as much as 800% higher than the very same ranking for Dubya in those countries. To wit, POTUS wins the Nobel Prize and seals the deal on the international legacy of neocons terminally rotting in the carcinogenic bowels of ill repute. Meanwhile, paleocons such as Buchanan frame Af-Pak in the context that not giving a blank cheque to the Pentagon constitutes defeat despite the reality that this is exactly what Dubya did for the past eight years where the role of the State Department as servile to the primacy of DoD became more than apparent.

Neocon interpretation eschews empiricism in favor of revisionism. Quoted on MSNBC, Liz Cheney is reported to have said that the U.S. military should have been given the Nobel prize because the American military is the world’s greatest peacekeeping force. By the stroke of that same flourish, POTUS still deserves the Nobel by bringing the peace that arrived through relegating with finality to the hinterland of yesteryear the applications of neoconservative theory. This type of mentality goes so far as to suggest that had Westmoreland been granted the additional 200,000 troops he wanted in Vietnam, then the conflict would have been won because it was only lost due to inadequate resourcing and an incorrect strategy. Neocon intransigence and haughty intellectual arrogance concomitant with the conservative defeats of 2006 and 2008 has no regard at all for the fact that public polling revolted against them like an oncoming freight train and noticeably similar to the back-to-back consecutive defeats of 1968 and 1972 which generationally affected their opponents.

Classically echoing the sentiment of Cheney, Bill Kristol, son of Irving Kristol who was the late father of neoconservatism, rhetorically stated on Cluster Fox that the Nobel Prize winner should have been General Petraeus by bringing peace through “winning a war.” Neoconservatism seeks to make acceptable now the most militaristic of roles in what would later become a mea culpa moment in the likes of McNamara. Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Kristol, how has that unipolar unilateralism been working out for you lately?

Albeit an Anglo-Saxon cousin, English Toryism has never had to contend with the same competing constituencies of God, guns and a radical right driven by intelligence-lacking conspiracy theories and World Net Daily among others. Similarities, particularly for the neocons, however, center around the build-out and deconstruction of empire and with that, the intrinsic roles of such driving dogma as Greek, British and then American exceptionalism.  

What of and wherefore regulation?

The reflexively axiomatic response from conservatives is doubly that government is bad and regulation is just as bad. Greenspan went so far as to cite the fallacy, inspired to him by Ayn Rand, that regulatory competition which amounts to charter flipping and a race to the bottom with no uniformity of standards is best for the private sector in that the industry should be able to shop for the best regulator; more outlandishly, he asserts that fraud is self-correcting so that in his mind that it cannot be legislated against through oversight, management, supervision or even the rule of law itself. Deified ideology supplanting real world solutions is a death knell for any longer range application of political philosophy.

Grover Norquist, a longtime head of Americans for Tax Reform, and huge mover in conservative circles for the past three decades has some interesting views, one of which is to reduce government to such a size that it can be “drowned inside a bathtub.” The statement becomes more anecdotally disconcerting in light of the boa constrictor that he kept as a pet in his D.C. office for a number of years. The snake, Lysander, was named after a 19th Century anarchist in Europe; it was removed from the office not too long ago after sentiment concluded that its size had grown large enough to consume a small human.

Prominent Democrat and mid-1970s rescuer of NYC, Felix Rohatyn, has elucidated what the value-added benefit would be of a  National Infrastructure Bank as something which would redress the under-developed American system where bridges collapse and roads crumble with an aged power grid dating back more than five decades. Republican rebuttals and unimaginative thinking offer no viable alternative except when one examines the proposals of T. Boone Pickens vis-a-vis such topics as the many uses for domestically drilled natural gas in the transportation sectors.

Let’s take another scenario. A few hundred thousand guys who have spent the past few decades putting bolts into car panels are now undergoing an occupationally existential crisis with a coffee barista and retail sales clerk positions being the presently available  alternatives. Such downwardly mobile moves entail as much as a two thirds reduction from the previous income. Mr. Hayward, how would you, AEI, Heritage, Cato, Rand, Hoover or conservatives at large address that trend? What do you do? What of and wherefore the oft-touted proposal from the left of center, the living wage?

A conservative reply decries the supposedly misguided interference of bleeding heart-inspired social engineering efforts into the dismal science of economics. The addendum from ABCT or Austrian Business Cycle Theory, the diametric opponent to Keynes, is that the self-correcting gale of creative destructionism just sorts it all out in the end a la Darwin. It’s not so much that the lack of solution offered is politicized; it’s moreso an unconditional and unimaginative devotion to ideology. The true answer rests with the continuing education of upgrading skill-sets to accomodate a higher paying and more upwardly mobile research-intensive occupational environment. So, compared against other think tanks such as Brookings and John Podesta’s operation, who offers the best solutions either right now or permanently?

Mr. Hayward does highlight a part of the ivory tower network that is consistently responsible for producing very accomplished  conservative scholars and that is Hillsdale College in Michigan. In addition to Americans of Hayward’s acquaintance, scholars such as Madsen Pirie, founder of London’s Adam Smith Institute with his doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, is very familiar within Britain’s Tory-affiliated circles and spent some years teaching at Hillsdale before reverse migrating  back to the UK in the late 1970s.   

Addressing Hayward’s original question as to whether or not conservatism is brain-dead prompts the additional question; is there anything exculpatory or evidentiary to suggest otherwise?

Distopian world views and conspiracies of planetary totalitarianism encapsulate the lower IQ arguments on the far right, notably with the shock jocks of talk radio such as Alex Jones and Glenn Beck. From the accepted mainstream, Lou Dobbs of CNN acquiesces to the sublime Amero-dollar theories that prognosticate a cross-border merging of Canada, the US and Mexico into one supranational nation-state. Dominated by kooks, cranks, shills, theologians, theocrats and extremists, there is neither a discernible nor intelligible coalition of conservative intellectuals when the only enunciation being heard is one of a bellicose and dogmatically doctrinal truculence with demagoguery as the side dish. When the most visibly highest level intellects external to a dwindling number of columnists are personified in the birthers, truthers, tea baggers of John Birch Part Deux, an affirmative response to Hayward’s query is the only honest answer.  Furthermore, any reformation and renaissance is never feasible in any immediately foreseeable sense when poisoned with the toxicity of neoconservatism and the inability to tolerate the open forums of dissension in the ranks.

Statistician Nate Silver of www.fivethirtyeight.com , who nailed the exact Electoral College numbers ahead of the actual vote last year, pegged the chances last month of the GOP taking back the House of Representatives at between a one in four to one in three probability for now. Likewise, the Intrade contract in Dublin comes right up the middle with a probability of 30%. Meanwhile, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at UVA is presently forecasting a net gain of between 21 to 30 seats in the House for the GOP. The high and low of those thresholds also correspond with the gains that the Democrats made in the 2006 mid-term elections padded onto the gains from last year’s Presidential election as well. In a body that is comprised of 435 Members with 256 Members being Democrats and 178 as Republicans, the GOP could take the House with a net increase of 40 currently Democratic seats being reversed. The NRCC, National Republican Congressional Committee, has understandably begun to salivate at the aforementioned prospects and is accordingly targeting 70 seats that they perceive to be vulnerable. Those in the sights are known as Democrats in Red states which is another way of saying conservative Democrats or Blue Dogs in traditionally Republican states.

With 60 Senators out of 100 in the Senate, a net loss of -3 could take effect there thus potentially reducing the Democrats’  supermajority down to a majority of 57 with vulnerable seats including Majority Leader Reid of Nevada in addition to Chris Dodd of Connecticut. Where Democratic Governors retain those positions at the moment, near term gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts would serve as canaries in the coal mine and fodder for the fire in cases where the GOP candidates can prove victorious.

1994 is described by some as the year of the angry white male when both the House and the Senate turned over and became Republican as part of Gingrich’s Contract on America. Certain dynamics at play make next year looking like what Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report describes as the year of the “angry white senior.” Cook elucidates how Obama won two out of every three young voters under the age of 30 but he garnered less than half of all voters of retirement age and older. The differential or gap with older voters who have higher voter participation rates during mid-term elections is massively much more severe than what Clinton or Gore were able to capture in 1992 and 2000.

Cook argues further that Democratic majorities could be in graver danger because African-Americans and Hispanics do not tend to show up at mid-term elections with the same percentages as older white voters. Given that the town halls have featured many older Americans concerned about rationing of Medicare in addition to the Tea Party Express having a wider breadth and depth, the senior citizen demographic remains the most vociferous segment and they will exert the most influence on the final outcome. Water cannons had to be deployed yesterday by law enforcement as a means of conflict resolution and crowd control in various tea parties. Cook’s math for the time being is looking for a net Republican gain in the House of 10 to 25 seats with his caveat that the magnitude of 1994′s watershed was never properly foreseen as of 1993. 

Cook still sees a larger opportunity or disaster at stake for the Democrats which comes down to the middle of the electorate. Independent voters, who were neither affiliated nor registered as either Republicans or Democrats, comprised a large portion of Obama’s victory last year as well as the 2006 mid-terms where the level of disenchantment and anger against the war in Iraq and Republicans cemented the revolutions of the Legislative Branch and Executive Branch to the Democrats. However, the approval ratings of the independents for Obama have suffered a precipitous drop from the mid 60s and higher down to the mid-40s. When the middle is never represented by Brooklyn or San Francisco but it is indicative of the majority, it therefore commands that much more of a premium in how one caters to it since the middle thus has the power to enable or remove the leaders.

As he simultaneously writes for a periodical that is profoundly Republican with that magazine being the National Journal, it seems obligatory to take Cook with a pinch of salt and there are a number of rebuttals that come to mind. The tactic of triangulation first came to light in the 1996 re-election of Clinton where Dick Morris recommended to the President that he move to the center as a way to disarm the opposition and thereby blur the distinctions between Democrats and Republicans. Under such a scenario, Obama can be expected to partly jettison the left of the Democratic Majority which translates into the Progressive Caucus, a group that is threatening to kill any health care reform bill which fails to include a public option. The Senate is also a very difficult proving ground for the agenda of change with Obama. Health care reform becomes health insurance reform in the event that anything at all can make it. EFCA, the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow for mass unionizing arrived in the Senate as dead on arrival. By the same token, the environmental initiative of cap-and-trade has yet to be seen anywhere in the Senate after eeking it through the House.  Financial services regulation as far as a diluted revival of Glass-Steagall will be re-addressed on Monday when the President speaks in Manhattan.  

Something else problematic with doomsday forecasts for the Democrats arises from the assertion that the center would reflexively move to the Republicans as a default reaction away from Democrats. Such a claim predicates itself on independents moving like an amoeba and jello towards whatever capriciously suits their fancy from one moment to the next. The Tea Party Express has reinvigorated a moribund Republican base; however, since less than one quarter of the population self-identifies with that political party, there is not too much to brag about there. The doubts are enhanced when elected Republicans failed attempt to co-opt the tea parties and they get booed off the stage before they can even try to grab the microphone. Such events raise the chances of third parties coming to the surface in 2012 similar to the candidacies of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan in 1992 in addition to Ralph Nader eight years later. Third party candidacies for 2012 to the right of the GOP would include something more isolationist and libertarian whereas to the left, one would face the potential of an American Progressive-type platform for those whom felt abandoned by Obama. The Ed Show on MSNBC incresingly reflects those rumblings inside the Progressive Caucus.

Thematically, there are also some challenges for Republicans when it comes to a dearth of thought leaders and deep thinkers along the lines of a Jack Kemp or a Bill Buckley. They effectively have nobody to offer in that area. Often cited as an up-and-comer, Paul Ryan looks like a young Ronald Reagan but he lacks the Gipper’s stentorian voice needed for broadcasting and telegenic purposes. Gingrich was definitely an intellectual but from a prior generation and also someone with “high negatives”, meaning that he doesn’t attract large, wide and deep swaths of the eligible electorate. More damaging to the cause of the GOP and by way of example, one need only look at their information sources insofar as where they go for opinion and news. Conservative websites such as WorldNet Daily focus entirely on conspiracy theories and when combined with the use of Nazi imagery and icons at town halls, it is all collectively reminiscent of the McCarthyism and John Birch Societies of the 1950s when Eisenhower was accused of being a Communist and he was, after all, a Republican! Furthermore, it seems something greater than coincidental that McCain won 78/100 of the least educated counties whereas Obama won 78/100 of the most educated areas. Perchance even more crystallizing as an image of where a tenuos coalescence between the teabaggers and the GOP really stands is a sign which was displayed for massive throngs of people on Saturday. The sign reads, “We know you’re behind the terror and the police state and plan to murder 80% to 90% of the world’s population.”  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42406957@N04/sets/72157622225596987/

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Hence the rope-a-dope and fading which comes from POTUS as he responds to the signage of the opposition serves to Deep Six the Dr. No’s as they go off the rails and off the deep end in a 21st Century reincarnation of the John Birch Society. For these reasons and phenomena, the GOP appears as a headless and thoughtless entity led by ideologues, extremist cranks and shills who seek to purify the middle and center from their thinning ranks. That looks more like a recipe for self-destruction and implosion from within while lacking cohesion at the same time. With no signs of any contemporary Buckleys or Kemps, they truly are relegated to the wilderness and hinterland of their own profligacy and scandal-related malfeasance. Geographically, the only region of the country that is solidly Republican remains the Deep South. Every other region is marked as competitive, toss-up, firmly Democratic or leaning Democratic and that is an intensely new development. Similarly, on a generational basis as far as previous historical precedent is concerned, the 1968 and 1972 Democratic defeats marked 20 and 40 year cycles of minority status for those whom were defeated. The modern day analogies are the consecutively back-to-back Republican defeats of 2006 and 2008.

A few teabaggers exclaimed on the Fixed News Channel that they believed their Judeo-Christian mores and value systems to be under assault from a socialistic agenda. While evangelicals and theologians do make up an active constituency within the electorate, Pat Buchanan lamented in his book from almost a decade ago, The Death of the West, a dual de-Christianizing of the country enhanced by a secularizing of the nation at the same time. The latest exit polling data does show on a national basis that atheists and agnostics are increasing as voters and at the expense of declines in the evangelicals. Should one accordingly bid farewell to the culture warriors?

With contentious allegations that the Austrian School has been eclipsed in the rebirth of a neo-Keynesian approach, an intriguing development pertains to the growing likelihood that Peter Schiff may indeed challenge the Senate Banking Chairman, Chris Dodd of Connecticut in next year’s Senate race. Fundraising for Schiff managed to take out the seven figure mark for the first time, a development that has generously surpassed his initial goals and objectives. Schiff will make a decision regarding whether or not to run very soon but in all likelihood, he will run and I believe, win in the Primary at which point he would face Dodd in next year’s race.  Schiff is hugely entertaining when it comes to bombastic vitriol that grabs headlines better than almost anyone. In speaking about a federal state of bankruptcy and a currency that consequently collapses as a new form of “Americatina” a la Argentina, Schiff simultaneously forecasts rolling blackouts and food shortages similar to Barton Biggs’ book about an end of civilization during the first half of this century. Similar to financier Jimmy Rogers, Biggs espouses the ownership of farm land but adds that ammunition is needed to protect one’s property and “fire warning shots over the heads of the advancing brigands.” The difference between these guys and WorldNet Daily is that Schiff and Biggs actually both have a pulse and an intellect.     

In all fairness, though, the median distilled from the two brackets offered by Cook and Sabato generates an average loss for the Democrats in the House of about two dozen seats and the Democratic Senate plurality subtracting by three to 57 from 60. Foreshadowing nuances will also materialize with whomever is able to win the gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Cook also makes an exceedingly valid point about the middle and the center when it comes to the independents and whether or not their transient malleability can be hijacked or co-opted by the GOP. However, triangulation and centrism allow for the majority and incumbents to leave behind the more marginal elements of their coalition in exchange for a win, whether narrow or broad.

There are also genuine opportunities for third party candidates simply based on one trend. The deficit and debt are captivating more people’s attention than at any time since Ross Perot’s candidacy in 1992 and as was the case then, the two party system comes under fire due to a perceived lack of credibility in dealing with these intractable problems. The anger and disenchantment can be fully expected to spike higher and higher with no end in sight over the near term. Informal White House advisors such as Paul Krugman find themselves completely taken aback at the rising angst from sections of the public and that could prove to be the comeuppance for the neo-Keynesians. Regardless, Cook argues that 1994′s landslide and sea change were multiples larger than the best of gaming expectations in late 1993 but given the absence of anything evidentiary to substantiate such talk, I find the statement’s insinuation to be unrealistic and bordering on the hyperbolic.

The Republican side of the Gang of Six on the Senate Finance Committee has been problematic to substantive forward movement in the area of what is largely known now as health insurance reform. Grassley is raising funds for anti-health care reform movements in his bid for re-election next year. A tad more productive perhaps is Mike Enzi from Wyoming who has made public comments that his objective is to see that certain things are not included in any bill as opposed to being part of any new laws and regulatory framework that is currently non-existent. Rockefeller Republican Olympia Snowe from Maine, however, has been in constant negotations with the White House about feasible components of a compromise that has yet to leave the Senate Finance Committee despite all other relevant committees such as the Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee having produced potential legislation for consideration. In lieu of a public option regarded as a non-starter by several in the Senate, Snowe is seeking a trigger option in the bill that would be used as a carrot-stick and a threat to force the private sector’s health insurers to enact reforms within a certain deadline or else the trigger would enact a public option that has the capability of crowding out and nationalizing the health insurers.  

Saleable ideas include a market based exchange where people can bid on different policies as they do now for auto insurance. Various areas of the country right now are monopolies where only one insurance company controls 90% of that region’s health insurance market. Likewise, other business practices which are uncompetitive include annual and lifetime caps on medical care for patients as well as the right for an insurance company to deny coverage when there are pre-existing conditions in addition to the ability for insurance companies to drop policyholders while they are in the middle of treatment such as chemotherapy. Banning such practices were deemed as “must-haves” rather than “should-haves” by the President. Some of these practices have also led to insurance companies putting a lien on policyholders’ primary residences and real estate after disputes escalate into lawsuits. A carrot-stick laid out for the opposition is the possibility of including malpractice reform in the field of caps on punitive but not compensatory damages when it comes to lawsuits against doctors whom have consequently been run out of the business due to exorbitant malpractice insurance premiums that they have to pay in order to stay in business.

All of this will still be contentious and perhaps even more than people having their fingers bitten off during fisticuffs altercations at town hall meetings over the past month. Malpractice reform means confronting the ATLA, American Trial Lawyers Association which is a very key and influential constituency of the Democratic Party. Taxing Cadillac-style health insurance plans for employees of Fortune 500 corporations has run into resistance from organized labor and the AFL-CIO. Concessions will be required from all interested parties and pressure groups. The rancour to be seen could easily exceed what has already taken place. Meanwhile, now that they have succeeded in stripping away any real public plan, the opposition will deploy the same counter-insurgency tactics in removing the employer mandate followed by then extracting the individual mandate from the proposals which emerge from the Senate Finance Committee; that is the role of parliamentarian as saboteur. Nevertheless, similar to some LBJ-style arm twisting from the 1960s, there is the prospect of VP Joe Biden being unleashed into the Senate for some constructive cajoling in the interest of getting a deal done this year.  

In the event of a failure to garner 60 votes in the Senate, the choice still exists of ramming it through with a simple majority of 51. Limitations would exist in that scenario where the law is passed using budget reconciliation as the conduit because only smaller reforms can be part of any such bill with 51 votes. Tomorrow includes a meeting between the President and the Blue Dog Democrats whom are known as the most conservative within the House Democratic caucus. His conference call last week with the more liberal Progressive Caucus had an edgy tone at times where he told them in so many words that their insistence on the singular issue of the public option was defeatist in the broader picture of accepting incremental changes now with a later goal of seeking more change going forward in the future.

The anecdotal situations are really awful for many citizens and do represent a genuine crisis. Pensioners receiving $2,000 per month are paying more than 50% of that income every month in health insurance premiums. In Coconut Grove last month, we saw a case involving a small business owner whom was told that he could get a policy for $1,500 per month but there would be a 24-month exclusion for his pre-existing conditions which included a cardiovascular problem. That is insane. In the past few weeks, he suffered a massive and violent heart attack. He is dead now as medical care was denied to him and since he was under the age of 65, he never qualified for Medicare. 

This is the only developed and industrialized OECD nation where the lack of universal health coverage for the populace coupled with disgraceful business practices characterize a debate which is framed by the opposition in the misleading and false construct as well as misnomer and misdirect of “socialized medicine.” How many ideologues in the minority want to go down as having been obstructionists in the face of these travesties that happen on a daily basis? A number of them will come to regret their naysaying when a deal is struck and through future years and decades, their record will have reflected voting in favor of a status quo that is literally responsible for bankrupting and killing people on a continuous basis.

Although his interviews on the Fixed News Channel are akin to a teenage fan interviewing the Jonas Brothers, Shooter insinuated during the latest exchange with Cluster Fox that the Executive Branch has no statutory accountability under the law because it effectively has the discretion and privilege to operate above the law, irrespective of the constitution’s separation of powers deliberately designed to limit a concentration and tyrannical abuse of power by the Executive Branch. The first thing that comes to mind here is Archibald Cox. One of the special prosecutors appointed to lead the Watergate investigations, Cox ultimately uncovered a trail that led to the very top itself. Hmmm…Shooter better look out for what might be coming his way!

With Shooter on the Dark Side as the most unpopular sitting VP in the age of polling but also inline with similar ratings for Spiro Agnew, repetitive use of executive privilege is a distinctly Republican tendency with unsavory consequences for the executive except in the example of Iran-Contra where the net result was inconsequential. The statement of “We don’t look at polls” from Shooter implies an intellectual arrogance on top of and in addition to the defense of the Executive Branch as exempt from constitutional compliance and third party oversight. However, the mid-term trouncing in 2006 followed by the blowout from last year provided a huge modicum of oversight in a different manner than intervention through the conduit of a Congressional Committee.

Some of Shooter’s thoughts stem from the assertion that anything less than his stance would have compromised “readiness” as often referred to in the parlance of national security hawks. He cites KSM or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed singing like a bird after getting dunked underwater a hundred times or so. He further states that several specific attacks on the American homeland as well as against the Brits at Heathrow were directly prevented as a result of not some but all torture techniques. Moreover, the Carter Administration’s arguably excessive and ineffectual reliance on detente coupled with the intelligence community being somewhat disallowed from aggressively using covert action among other methods against the Soviets, led to the “crescent of crisis” with Soviet-led invasions and insurgencies throughout most of the Continents in the 1970s.

I personally remember being regaled by the stories of retired Colonel Lawrence Tracy where he described battles via facsimile and memorandum between himself and Pat Derian at the Department of State during the late 1970s when he was based in Latin America and Derian was responsible for the single issue mantra of human rights as a primary foreign policy determinant during the Carter Administration at the expense of the bigger picture. The similarity here still remains what single issue obsessiveness can do to misguide conduct in foreign affairs. 

Morale within the intelligence community, as a result, sinks as they are demonized and emasculated by the Church Committee hearings of the late 1970s or other forms of oversight and ex post facto investigations. Regardless, prosecutors have an obligation to pursue the law in spite of where such pursuit may lead. A shouting match reportedly took place between Leon Panetta and the White House related to the prospect of the Attorney General pursuing any such investigations. Understandably, the DCI would be expected to take a position that defends his particular area of turf; otherwise, the DCI would have the appearance of someone who could be walked all over by Congress and the Executive Branch.

Extraordinary rendition, where suspects are taken to overseas locations such as Albania, can still take place under current and past practice. In fact, presently, there may be exclusive autonomy reserved for only the Executive Branch in the use of extraordinary rendition. In the event that this leads to operational management taking place in D.C. rather than through the Directorate of Operations at CIA, that could arguably create a serious can of worms in any future mishaps for the White House. Previous precedents have utilized private sector contractors to execute the implementation which purportedly removes governmental agencies from culpability in a contingency where everything goes wrong.

This is commonly known as plausible deniability in using a third party as the fall guy and Blackwater is in the midst of such a case right now in federal court. Paradoxically, though, Blackwater is trying to argue that as a government contractor, they are not accountable for anything such as war crimes, murder, extra judicial killings because they were acting under a contract with federal agencies and therefore the current Attorney General and federal government should be the appropriate defendant rather than Blackwater itself! Ironically, the Act which allows for Blackwater to initially attempt such a legal defense became codified law during the second Reagan Administration.

Many partisan ideologues and strategists alike on both sides of the aisle are rejoicing at the prospect of having the Attorney General as part of investigations into past Administrations because now the door is opened for this tool to be used again on a repetitive basis in the future. Additionally, the tactic can be put into play by Congressman Ron Paul with regard to his attempts at opening inquiries into the dealings of the U.S Federal Reserve and foreign central banks where those interactions are not strictly relevant to monetary policy. Paul’s efforts are gaining many signatories in the House of Representatives. Interestingly, though, the Congressman said that there will be Senatorial attempts to quash the entire initiative and he has further implied that said attempts are being driven by certain participants in the White House.  

Published three years ago, former Nixon aide, John Dean, wrote Conservatives Without Conscience to document transitions that had taken effect in a party that he used to be affiliated with during the 1960s and 1970s. Dean describes a conversation he had with Barry Goldwater a long time ago where he asked the late Senator what his opinion was on the condition of the GOP and its direction. Goldwater told Dean that he thought the “preachers” were taking over the party in all ways and that the libertarian wing with which he had been affiliated, was now disaffected, disenfranchised and alienated from the party structure.

Dean delineates Republican managerial styles from others in isolating itself as a centralized and hierarchical structure that refuses to embrace any form of open debate. Consensus building is neither practiced nor embraced. Such an older style is also increasingly indicative of autocratic authoritarianism that relies upon a “unitary executive who has virtually exclusive and unlimited powers in foreign affairs as commander-in-chief.” Some of those very same conservatives seek to blur any separation of powers in believing that “America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles and that there is nothing in the Constitution creating a wall of separation between Church and State.” That last trait becomes very noticeable with former Arkansas GOP Governor Mike Huckabee who has said that God does not need to be modified in order to suit the Constitution but rather the Constitution needs to be changed so that it can more easily accomodate God.

While autocratic authoritarianism may be culturally acceptable for a city-state such as Singapore under Lee Kwan Yew, it is not supposed to fly in an Occidental constitutional republic. Shooter may be upset that he was not allowed to pull the trigger as often after 2004 as he was after 9/11, but in the eyes of the law, the PR-driven damage control can still face its own legal reckoning.

The end of the Cold War two decades ago supposedly represented for some the victory of Western secular free market democracy as the globally accepted modality of governance; as such, the development signified the “end of history”. Vanquishing one challenge with that being the former USSR and propelling in its place a plethora of new issues such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons coupled with the highly correlated subject matter of technology transfer presented a novel set of dilemmas. The case involving Li Fang Wei exemplifies that post-Cold War environment but it may be really overshadowed by what the late Samuel P. Huntington presciently forecast in his book from 13 years ago, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

One of the dynamics prognosticated by Huntington concerned a multitude of antagonistic bilateral relationships which would begin to boil between the West and the Islamic world. Likewise, a Chinese national self-interest motivated by a natural desire to increase its status would inexorably seek more hegemonic influence upon economic and military affairs throughout the course of its growth as a means to enhance its standing both regionally and globally. By way of example, the PRC’s trade with Pakistan in the area of nuclear weaponry is cited along with the arms dealing being perceived as vindication for Western neoconservatives who militantly espoused the occupation of Iraq in order to prevent non-proliferation and to stop the spread of Islamic terrorism. Furthermore, neocons argue that the current instance of Sino-Iranian trade serves to be even moreso indicative of the failures characteristic of multilateral efforts to accomplish what sometimes can only be accomplished through a unilaterally Bismarckian form of Realpolitik where the outcomes are immediate, pragmatic and tangible.

Interestingly, the would-be father of neoconservative thought, Francis Fukuyama loudly proclaimed his voting for Barack Obama with a statement that implied any continuation of the previous status quo was intellectually unjustifiable in the face of what he saw as an unnecessary war coupled with an uncharacteristic state of fiscal profligacy normally not associated with his conception of the GOP.  Despite Fukuyama being instrumental to the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine concerning containment and covert action, his stance is in marked contrast to the thesis of pre-emptive and preventive war central to the Bush Doctrine.    

Contingency planners have to examine various simulations that can arise in the face of multiple bilateral conflicts. One such worst case scenario involves a four-front war which draws the reluctant global policeman of the US into Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.  Something, however, that flies in the face of such intractability was the published report that the Bush Administration denied a request from Israel’s PM Olmert to back an Israeli-initiated bombing of Iran. On the other hand, there is the more recent news that Director of Central Intelligence Leon Panetta reportedly went to Tel Aviv a few months ago to expressly state or request that no bombing take place before notifying Washington first. A highly contentious topic surrounding Huntington’s thesis and recent wars concerns the  assertion that secular free market democracy is a misnomer due to the Western-Islamic conflict having a religious aspect to it. 

Escalating that very debate during the earlier part of this decade was Richard Perle’s response to the late Tim Russert of NBC where Perle affirmatively stated that one of his paper’s primary objectives, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, also published in 1996, was to ensure that “Israel is surrounded by democracies”. Moreover, when Western and Eastern religions seek the active recruitment of others and their own sanctimonious exportations of exceptionalism from their respective standpoints, conflict is the unequivocal result. Similarly, Huntington’s thesis raises the declinist assertion of relative Western decline in that potential Sino-American disputes would arise from a zero-sum transfer of wealth to the Orient from the Occidental world; contentiousness then becomes reinforced by stark cultural and political differences such as American rugged individualism juxtaposed against a more top-down and centralized Confucian structure. Protectionism consequently arises as one outcome albeit in less overt forms compared to the trade wars of the 19th Century and the Depression-era Smoot-Hawley tariff bills while the benefits of globalization lack an optimal distribution, thus further stoking the flames of discontent.

In US Treasury bond auctions of late, foreign central bank participation, as indirect bidders or otherwise, comprises a very large percentage of the transactional volume that takes place. During the first half of the year, dealers were gaming the US central bank by offering as much as three times the supply that the Federal Reserve wanted to monetize and yields virtually doubled as a result. The Chinese have begun demanding more in Treasury Inflation Protected Securities as a dollar hedge while also not renewing and rolling over as much of their holdings as those come to mature. Whereas a century ago, the British pound sterling was the reserve currency of the world; all of the aforementioned brings into question the same status vis-a-vis the US dollar even though a complete transition to the renminbi would require much deeper and more liquid credit and debt markets in mainland China compared to their development at this moment in time.

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria interview with China’s Premier Wen Jiabao was broadcast less than one week ago. A familiar Western request was made by Zakaria whereby the Chinese would be more actively engaged with North Korea as part of a larger responsibility on a bilateral basis and furthermore that all such duties fall under the purview of a superpower’s responsibilities. Quickly rejecting what he regarded as a mischaracterization, the Premier replied that China has unbalanced development between rural and urban areas and as such, is still a developing nation. Wen Jiabao argued that China can therefore not be regarded as a superpower. The Premier also went to some length to state that Chinese relations with North Korea are not bilateral but really moreso specific to the Six Party Talks. However, one could argue that in parts of the US Rust Belt where reported unemployment rates approach 20% and Public Service Announcements routinely broadcast the locations of food banks coupled with a de-industrialization of moving away from manufacturing as a large component of the American economy; all of that represents the US as a developing nation. The exchange between the journalist and the Premier showed the difficulty of trying to bilaterally engage or delegate when the multilateral roles can be used for cover.        

Indubitably, the lack of singular bipolarity in a post-Cold War environment proves challenging to manage given multiplicitous  dynamics at play. A partial rebuttal to the declinist thesis and its morbidly Hobbesian qualities vis-a-vis the US fiscal situation  including all unfunded mandates and any off-balance sheet exposure would be where the Supreme Court, through constitutional authority and an amendment, overrides all other authorities and introduces austerity into the mix. Nevertheless, Huntington deserves credit for having forecast that a Sino-Islamic set of relationships would ultimately serve to foment the proliferation of nuclear weapons into the Middle East and Indian subcontinent.

When posed the question as to whether or not a public option would effectuate a “crowding out” (as economists refer to it) of the private health insurance industry, POTUS responded affirmatively and agreed with the premise of the question that surreptitious piecemeal nationalization was indeed a longer term possibility. His concurring with the questioner would have likely been driven by legitimate feasibility studies which were presented to him by White House-based staff. Intellectual honesty is a highly admirable quality and doubly so for those in elected office; however, when one answers in such a manner as to confirm a stance that is ostensibly against a primary tenet of health care reform, the President is automatically put on the defensive. Humility may be honorable but argumentatively conceding to the opposition without simultaneously reserving any qualifiers is an unconditional misstep.  

Prosecutorial cross-examinations and salesmen alike will often employ a technique designed to put those being deposed into ”yes mode” where the defendant or prospective customer is posed a series of closed probe questions to which one can only answer in the affirmative or negative. A sequence of positive replies to self-incriminating queries can very quickly put those being interrogated into a compromising position. There is, nonethless, an alternative tactic that one can utilize as part of a defensive offense to these types of queries.

In boxing and martial arts, an effective counter-striker will backpedal while taking hits from the opponent. As he moves backwards towards the ropes, he has the option to pivot and swivel before his back hits the rope, thereby leaving the stalker now up against the wall as it were or the counter-striker has an alternative choice with the same intention in mind. The essential objective is to draw the boxer moving forward into the pocket. As the boxer moves forward into the short range, he is now vulnerable. The counter-striker is thus able to capitalize with an uppercut, a straight jab, a hook or combinations thereof as the aggressively positioned boxer creates openings where his chin is not down and his shoulders are not raised to protect the head. Being knocked out unconscious or onto the floor often results as the counter-striker now delivers a series of close range uppercuts or a jarring roundabout hook to the jawline beneath the ear where everything goes “lights out” in mid-air. Chuck Liddell was the UFC’s hallmark counter-striker for many years until his retirement earlier this year. Muay thai martial arts strikers will likewise circle counter-clockwise and move back as the opponent moves towards closing the gap. The muay thai clinch is then deployed as the opponent becomes trapped with clasped hands behind the base of the neck and flying knees are delivered to the opponent’s face and torso, thus rendering him knocked out or at the very least, semi-unconscious and on the mat. Anderson Silva from Brazil has perfected this technique since 2006 in several title defenses.

Indicative of consummate debating knowledge, Bill Clinton’s ability to switch an accusatory question back to the reporter where he would lay the blame or inadequacy with the opposition or the electorate’s failure to mobilize and harmoniously work with him towards a perceived common goal of the population at large is a skill that rarely meets its match for the loquacious types. Rarely long-winded, Clinton would succintly and concisely crush the question summarily even in cases where some may have thought his technique to be evasive and diversionary. Therein lies the lesson. When the opposition chooses to fight facts with feelings and sensationalism along with hyperbolic shills of McCarthyism such as Palin’s usage of the words, ”death panels”, it is counter-productive to contine arguing ad nauseam feelings with still more facts.  

Disinformation is a series of deliberate lies that gets disseminated in the form of CI or counter-intelligence by intelligence agencies to their enemy counter-parts throughout non-allied nation-states all over the globe. The CI serves to mislead and confuse the opposition, slowing down the enemy from progress and advance. Domestically, what has taken place equals CI and a rebirth of McCarthyist screaming no different than the John Birch Society of half a century ago accusing Eisenhower of being a Communist. Getting the Democrats to waste resources and time on efforts to disspell the new mythologies of a nascent McCarthyism is part of the sabotage at work courtesy of counter-insurgency elements within establishmentarian and GOP interests. Once more than 50% of the population begins to buy into believing the CI, then game over becomes ever closer. At such elevated levels of stoked animus where, in extreme cases, the raucous boister begins to sear the very paint from the walls of town halls, alternative and additional messages are needed to first escalate but then quell the derisive finger wagging.    

Whilst a cerebral and clinical knowledge of process and policy is impressive to the wonks, the rhetorical rebuttal here would be to suggest to Republican lawmakers that since they regard every attempt of reform as subversive socialized medicine, then the logic of their own refusal deems it congruently necessary for them to advocate the abolition of VA which is publicly subsidized health care for veterans and they would concurrently have to abolish Medicare, the national health insurance that exists expressly for senior citizens. Furthermore, as civil servants, they themselves benefit from health insurance and health care plans that allow them to go to any hospital of their choice in the country, irrespective of the severely localized restrictions that private sector workers have to contend with inside the borders of many tiny states. Hence the public sector servants coupled with GOP legislators would need to contemporaneously forsake their own privilege of national health insurance as well whilst torching the untouchable Third Rail of health care for seniors and veterans into the oblivion of ‘Guns and Butter’ run amok amid a crony capitalist’s duopolistic plutocracy.

It is precisely along these lines that the Senate can force a vote requiring not a plurality of 60 votes for passage but rather a simple majority through reconciliation of 51 where the GOP accordingly responds with several weeks of filibuster and the potential for eventual failure is laid back again at the feet of the GOP. The spectacle and theater of GOP Senators bringing in their cots and sleeping bags while they read aloud from the Bible for weeks on end as a stalling measure would backfire in the longer term as the inability to assist in the creation of reform would be the fault of the Republicans.

The irony of it all came to light when Grassley was angrily asked by a constituent why that private sector worker could not have access to the same insurance that Grassley had; the Senator replied that the worker could get such access and that the worker simply needed to “come work for the Federal Government” as per Grassley’s retort. What a joke but also an opportunity to enhance the message. Otherwise, it is hypocritical and illogical for the GOP to make arguably spurious claims of nationalization yet still incongruently support the Great Society, the Veterans Administration and Cadillac health insurance for themselves. Force the issue but not with more discussions and details about process and policy. The rhetoric calls for more rhetoric and didactically proves educational whilst also entertaining to an electorate whom does not gravitate very often at all towards the more verbose explanations, especially when attention spans can only focus on soundbites and durations of concentrating that do not exceed 8 seconds of time.

Upon closer examination, the truth, to almost no surprise, is stranger than fiction unless we are so inured to it by now that we don’t even notice it anymore which essentially amounts to apathy and a condition of that which may be entirely desirable for some of those whom formulate public policy and regulation. Notwithstanding humongous campaign contributions to the two GOP Congressmen, the Lewin Group is a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth, the country’s largest health insurance company by most measures. UNH also serves as one of only two possible choices for health insurance in several parts of the country.

Cited as a high probability statistical misfortune given what the House bill has written, the shell company is asserting that one third of the American populace amounting to a figure of 100 million people would lose their private health insurance. Their logic posits that the private sector would simply choose to opt out of offering health insurance altogether and thereby shift the costs of insuring employees to a public sector-financed plan. The perverse incentive of exclusively employer-based plans is precisely why a firefighter making $45,000 has what is known as a Cadillac insurance policy for himself and his dependents with an equivalent value and cost of $15,000. Incidentally, the equivalent ratios for a Goldman Sachs employee are larger by a factor of three.

What becomes more skewed is not only the inability to comparatively and competitively shop for other insurance plans as one would do with auto, home or life insurance but also something else. Unions and non-union employee candidates in several industries begin their negotiations not with base and variable compensation but much moreso with a bias towards the quality of the health insurance available to the prospective worker. Behavioral stances of this kind come about as a consequence of those whom are not necessarily uninsured even for catastrophic coverage but rather as a result of those whom have experienced the disaster of discovering, after it is too late, that one is underinsured.

In other words, American health insurance policies, particularly those that are associated with small businesses, have tremendously high deductibles that are designed to reduce the expense to the insurer and the employer whilst shifting the out of pocket burden to the employee. Small businesses don’t have the number of employees that allow for greater bargaining power when dealing with and creating health insurance programs for the employees which leaves those people as underinsured for many types of medical care.

The bipartisan duo of Wyden-Bennett in the Senate is seeking to break this hegemony of large employer-based health insurance. Private coverage would become similar to the aforementioned practice of being able to purchase policies through internet-based exchanges as one commonly does right now with auto, home and life insurance. Otherwise, without that flexibility, the Cadillac plans persist as not a choice but the misguided perversion of a system that largely compels people to seek gainful employment only with the stodgiest and biggest firms. That is where innovation begins to inadvertently get stifled because nobody wants to run the risk of not having adequate coverage. Compounding the highly corporate nature of all these phenomena are restrictions that prevent the portability of a policy from one employer to the next. So, not only are people obliged to be on the payroll of the most gigantic entities, but in the event that they are stuck in a dead end job, they are not able to leave because they cannot take their insurance with them!          

Thus areas of possible agreement between the House and the Senate would include portability along with one being able to purchase coverage that is not part of an employer-based plan. Furthermore, the latest email from David Axelrod confirms long-standing suspicions that a public option will not be created along with something else that raises some query. The word, care, which, since last year, had been preceding the word, reform, is now replaced with insurance, substantiating the argument that health care reform was too ambitious a phrase for the American temperament. There had been a compromise in the works vis-a-vis the public option which may now be scuppered. The concept at hand was to have a co-op which would have operated as a non-profit medical program in regional and decentralized context throughout the entire country. Kent Conrad, the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee whilst coterminously serving on the Senate Finance Committee, was one of several fans when it came to the co-op. Localized co-ops that still do not have interstate portability are regarded by many as noncompetitive with and a nonthreat to UNH.

With more overarching authority in the reconciliation process is the Senate Finance Committee. The Chair of that Committee, Max Baucus of Montana, has repeatedly stated that he can only support a bill that has a chance of successful passage when that bill has bipartisan support. He is referring to the ranking minority member on the Committee, GOP Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa. Over a ten year period, the two of them have only failed to agree on one occasion. a disagreement that then failed to produce a new law. Despite the progressives’ claim that Baucus has self-flaggelated himself into servile submission, Grassley now has a great deal of leverage at his disposal. It becomes more enhanced with additional comments that the Iowa Senator made when he said that he will not sign a bill that has a public option but also that he will only support a proposal that is simultaneously backed by another ranking minority member on the Committee, Senator Mike Enzi of Wyoming. Grassley hence has the entire prospect of reformation or lack thereof in his hands.

The itinerary of the White House between now and the end of the month conveniently reflects these geographic concentrations of influence. The President’s next town halls will be in Montana and then Wyoming over the next several days so the focus is squarely on Baucus and Enzi. Because Grassley just had a town hall in Iowa, the PR-related concern was too much repetition in one locale but now, the President will zero in on those states in addition to Colorado and the Southwest. Grassley is up for re-election next year so one can expect more posturing which includes the threat to walk away from negotiations as Orrin Hatch did earlier in the summer. The Iowa Senator is thus masterfully situated because he can triangulate a number of different ways and still consolidate his own position at the same time.

Culturally, the Confederacy of the South had prided itself on a unique heritage with autonomy that never had to deal with much in the way of intrusion and intervention on behalf of D.C.-based oversight agencies. Reconstruction subsequent to the American Civil War became a new federal mandate with far reaching supervisory controls over the South and the abolition of slavery was the primary immediate result. With the consequential reaction being one of resentment against Republican management emanating from a Northern city, Southerners took refuge as Democrats. Seeking to limit the effects of more centralized and federal controls, Southern state legislatures enacted new state laws that imposed poll taxes and literacy tests upon whom came to be known as “freedmen” or African-Americans as a means to prevent the newly emancipated slave population from participating in the processes of voting and elections. As such, blacks would neither be able to vote nor become elected officials in a system engineered and controlled by what some described as the Southern Protestant “white male power structure”.   

The American ability for state legislatures to have a certain level of discretionary authority under the auspices of states’ rights is constitutionally protected under the Tenth Amendment to the Bill of Rights. States’ rights in the contemporary sense, however, is regarded by some as code for opposition to national enforcement of civil rights’ acts.

Spearheaded in part by Northern Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s represented a grand threat to the systemically entrenched establishmentarian interests of segregationist Southern white Democrats. The middle part of that second decade marked a profound turning point with the passage into national law of 1964′s Civil Rights Act. The new law proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back insofar as Southern loyalty to the Democrats. A form of strife ensued between Democrats from the North such as the Kennedy brothers who were in favor of civil rights as well as voting rights for blacks and Southern Democrats whom were largely opposed to any such initiatives.

Furthermore, as candidate for President on the Republican ticket in 1964, Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act coupled with his stated advocacy for states’ rights and limited federal role proved to be a magnet for alienated Southern white Democrats. Goldwater consequently accomplished a nearly clean sweep of the Deep South’s electoral votes for the first time in a century and he was the very first Republican Presidential candidate to do so since Reconstruction. Nonetheless, LBJ won a landslide victory that year by taking the rest of the country while the only other state that Goldwater won was his homestate of Arizona. Likewise, even Clinton’s re-election in 1996 also occurred with almost no Southern support despite his being a native of Arkansas.    

1968 brought this dynamic to a higher level. Nixon worked with strategist Kevin Phillips on the ”Southern Strategy” where the primary objective was to win the angry white Southern vote that had previously been voting for Democrats. Hence, key slogans for Nixon’s campaign became states’ rights, small government as well as “law and order”. Given the violence associated with the massive protest movements during the late 1960s, some have suggested that all three slogans were subtle methods for appealing to Southern whites who were concerned not only about their legacy and institutions but also their personal and economic security. For the record, it should be noted that Pat Buchanan, who is self-proclaimed as the “co-architect” of Nixon’s campaign, has also repeatedly said that race was never a motivational influence in his strategizing. Stay tuned for much more on that to follow later in this piece, all of which contradicts Buchanan’s cognitive dissonance.

Very rapidly, the Southern body politic shifted allegiance from the Democrats to the GOP and this transition took place across the overwhelming majority of Congressional elections along with local, city, state and municipal elected offices. Although George Wallace’s opposition to desegregation, integration, busing and black civil rights precluded Nixon from taking the entire South in 1968, Nixon’s landslide re-election of 1972 consolidated and added to prior gains. Phillips had now actualized the thesis for his book, The Emerging Republican Majority and, unlike the period from 1932 until 1968, the GOP held power for 28 out of the next 40 years not to mention intermittent majorities in Congress, the gubernatorial seats and the state legislatures.  

Having lived in the Deep South a few years ago, I have to say that it was a place of the most polite, friendly and well-mannered Americans whom I have ever known throughout my entire U.S.-based life, diametrically opposed to the Northeastern cities of NYC, Baltimore or Philadelphia. I remember one particular event that took place right before the 2006 mid-term elections. An older man with the palpable look of trepidation in his eyes and face, stormed into the branch and yelled, “What’s gonna happen if the Demo-crats win both the House and the Senate?!”

We told him that the pharmaceutical, health insurance and oil stocks would get slammed short-term as a knee jerk reaction due to the fear of increased regulatory supervision and higher rates of taxation. He thanked everyone kindly for the insight and counsel as he trailblazed his way to the lobby’s terminal and phone, presumably to take some form of action based on the Q & A. However, something almost more memorable took place on a regularly occurring basis. A certain customer would be seen in the branch quite often. After inquiring as to who he was, the reply, ever so matter-of-factly, responded, “Oh, him, he’s *********, the former Grand Dragon of the KKK and a frequent guest on the Howard Stern show.”     

At the annual Stone Mountain festival in the Fall of that year, an esteemed and former colleague as well as a native son of the Peachtree State, exclaimed, “That’s why we lost the Civil War” after bearing witness to one of the main events where grown men race twenty yard sprints with flailing dead trouts in their mouths.

To fully appreciate the Southern Strategy, one has to simultaneously understand the culture wars that are part and parcel to it. The GOP marketed itself as the only party to be representative of and appropriate for so-called family values which included opposition to abortion rights but also support for domestic pressure groups including evangelical causes and groups such as the Christian Coalition as well as the Family Research Council. Conflicting with and against this constituency nevertheless are the more libertarian free marketeers of less government and lower taxes, a group of which has normally been part of the GOP’s base. As this group also advocates free trade and the economic benefits of globalization, the civil war inside the GOP begins to unfold.

In addition to the Brimelow brothers from England, Jared Taylor and the late Samuel Francis, Patrick Buchanan is a paleocon. Paleoconservatives lament Euro-centric demographic declines and the perceived fall of Western civilization. Buchanan published The Death of the West as testimony to this central concern. Exporting Anglo-American conservatism or culture for that matter as a form of imperial empire construction is anathema to the paleocons not to mention the militaristically colonial misadventures peculiar to neoconservative thought which paleoocons find abhorrent as does arguably most of the entire world. Free trade that does not sanctify the protection of American manufacturing and the American working class is equally objectionable to the paleocons who oppose unfettered globalization as a consequence. Southern heritage and culture are also due protection under paleconservative influence as part of the Anglo-American traditions that founded the country several hundred years ago. 

And so we have the beginning stages of a splintering and fragmentation of the GOP. Single issue social conservatives take turns at war with each other and the neocons at the same time that they fail to reconcile or find any common ground with the free market globalizers. But there is still much more to the internal strife at play here.

For a very long time, Samuel Francis was a key figure associated with Gordon Baum’s Council of Conservative Citizens. The CCC was an outgrowth from the White Citizens Council, an institution that was indigenous to the South during the first half of the last century. To this very day, one of the CCC’s main and enumerated planks is that “no mixing of the races” should ever take place. The paleocons, apart from being culture warriors, thus embrace eugenics whilst arbitrarily adopting only certain components of Darwin’s evolutionary theory; there is an obsessive focus on racialist pigmentation which displays a uniquely American example of ethnocentrism.

In a 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Samuel P. Huntington described it all as “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” He veered into the realm of Francis Fukuyama and the neocons by then saying it was obligatory to export Western thought and practice throughout like-minded countries, a practice of which alienates Buchanan and Francis. Furthermore, the exportation of “American exceptionalism” perpetrated and perpetuated by a neocon cabal as a sanctimoniously high-minded and misguided sympton of a Pax Romana’s spasmodically convulsive and penultimate dying gasp is what the paleocon finds to be equally objectionable. Paleocons stress that a clash of civilizations leads to its very own existential crisis and decline. Journals that publish their work include American Renaissance and The Occidental Quarterly. The Southern Poverty Law Center has vehemently labeled the paleocons as white supremacists.

Sam Francis remained a deputy managing editor at The Washington Times until his speeches became so explicit that shades of Enoch Powell ran through all of them to the point that Dinesh D’Souza marginalized Francis with the managing editor, Wes Pruden, ultimately leading to Francis being fired from the newspaper in the Fall of 1995. Regardless, Francis continued to publish and speak for the next decade until his death four years ago in a Washington, D.C.-area hospital.     

As continual efforts to perpetuate race-baiting right now, Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly used the word “reparations” to describe the reasons, as he chooses to see it, behind the agenda of the current President. His audience remains over 20 million people when it comes to listeners who follow his radio show. The mere fact that the audience is not declining would suggest that elements of his messaging do resonate with almost 10% of the American population. Democratic strategists saw an opening and have referred to Rush as the “head of the Republican Party” prompting Limbaugh to declare very recently that he “resign as titular head of the GOP.”

The SCOTUS nominee hearings for Sotomayor were painfully technical, abstract, evasive and academic in the cat-and-mouse game that customarily takes place between the Senate Judiciary Committe and the nominee. “Wise latina” was a phrase from several of her speeches that got raised over and over again with the phrase-related questioning directed at her exclusively from the Republican Senators on the Committee. The sheer repetition was so overt that Maureen Dowd’s caption for her syndicated column was ”White Man’s Last Stand“. She characterized the exchange as a “gaggle of white Republican men fearing their extinction.” Senator Coburn went so far as to do an impromptu impersonation of the “I Love Lucy“ Hispanic character husband known as Ricky when Coburn jested to the SCOTUS nominee, “You would have some splaining to do.” Sotomayor responded in such a manner to show that she knew exactly what the Senatorial resident of the C Street Fellowship was doing.

Hence the leitmotiv emerges as a twofold combination of white resentment and white anxiety manifesting itself in many ways. In perpetuating their existence as culture warriors, paleocons likewise zero in on the trend known as the “majority-minority” states such as Hawaii, New Mexico, California and Texas where whites are less than 50% of the population. Actuarial forecasts on demographic trends suggest an acceleration in the number of states that will catapult into this category over the near term including the states of Maryland or Georgia among others. Paleocons thus reactively recoil at the prospect of majority-minority characterizing the entire country within the first half of this century.  

The divide-and-conquer tactic of Kevin Phillips has decidedly waned for the GOP as of the mid-term elections of 2006 and last year’s Presidential election. This reversal in trend started with Obama’s primary wins being largely predicated on gigantic turnouts in younger voters. Phillips’ twofold approach rested on the ability to bank on low voter turnout for blacks whilst courting Southern whites at the same time.

James Carville posits in “40 More Years” that Hispanics being forecast to outnumber African-Americans in addition to a falling percentage of white male voters and then reinforced by single voters all comprise the changing demographics which favor Democrats much moreso than the GOP. Several critics had suggested last year that Hispanics would never vote for a black candidate and therefore the GOP had nothing to worry about in this category. The GOP could not have been more wrong with that assumption.

Polling data does show that the Democrats made gains in every demographic group except for one in particular with that being voters whom attend Church on a regular basis. So the evangelicals solidly remain with the GOP but Carville has no interest or need in trying to switch their allegiance as far as he sees it. Another set of notable polling statistics from last year is that Obama won 78 out of 100 of the most educated counties in the country, (i.e.) most of the university and college towns, whereas the same ratio for the least educated counties voted for McCain.

Palin is attempting to deploy an old school and classically Nixonian tactic in her latest address. Catering or pandering only to the rural areas, she took shots specifically at N.Y., D.C., and L.A. as a means of isolating them from what Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly refers to under the code word of “traditional” family values and gun rights. This serves as another episode in the internecine cultural wars of the GOP. It has reached levels where disciples of Milton Friedman such as Michelle Caruso-Cabrera have implored the GOP to drop the social agenda but that is entirely in vain because evangelicals harbor a visceral repulsion towards Democrats who tend to be much more secular; thus the family value planks as almost exclusively defined by the Christian Coalition will always be fundamental to the GOP’s platform and that is why Carville seeks to go after single, unmarried and younger voters. Spike Lee commented in the Fall of last year that he didn’t seen anyone who looked older than the age of 25 in the Chicago HQ for Obama’s campaign.

Anecdotally, the sister of a former boss of mine has worked with national Democratic campaigns for more than twenty years. She told me that Obama’s campaign was the most well-organized machine that she had ever encountered in her life. The whole enterprise ran harmoniously and smoothly along with massively localized support and coherent direction.

Some changing dynamics for the GOP are indubitably occurring. Maryland’s former Lieutenant-Governor and an African-American, Michael Steele became head of the RNC. He made the statement that he wants to secure the vote of the hip-hop generation. It’s difficult to see any follow through since then from that remark. More noteworthy was an opinion expressed by former Reaganite and longtime head of the ATR, Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist. In looking at younger candidates whom are more representative of ongoing shifts in demographics, Norquist stated that ”Bobby Jindal will be the next Republican President. The only question is what year.”

Norquist bases his opinion on the Louisiana Governor’s potential from a few traits. Jindal is an accomplished scholar with outstanding academic credentials similar to Bill Clinton and Obama. Jindal is a young candidate aged only in his late 30s so there’s time for him to grow as a national candidate, (or be groomed and captured by one of the two Beltway Parties as some cynics would see it). Jindal is American by birth but he hails from the Indian Subcontinent in terms of his ethnicity so as a minority, the GOP would seek to market him at a national level. The paleocons must be loving that. Jindal’s posturing at the moment yields different signals. At the beginning of the year, he hinted that he would rather not run until 2016 and possibly thereby allow by default a second term for Obama which would leave 2016 as what would become his first run for somebody of the same age as the current President is right now. Lately, however, Jindal has been all over the map of the country which would imply that he’s testing the national stage and may make a run in 2012, particularly in the event that 2011 and 2012 see large rises in the misery index.     

The culture wars can never really subside in any case because they are so temporarily brilliant for ratings that spike when the primordial flames are stoked. McCain’s concession speech last year had the statement that he didn’t know what else he could have done. Echos from the Arizona-based audience grumbled, “Ayers, Ayers”. The rehashing of affiliations with Jeremiah Wright and Ayers gained no traction whatsoever and fell on more than deaf ears during the entire campaign. So some aspect of post-racial is definitely there. G. Gordon Liddy is attempting to revive the birther conspiracy theories nonetheless with sworn depositions from Mombasa but Cluster Fox and the Fixed News Channel have no interest. However, some of the elected C Street theologians and fornicators are trying to keep it all alive with the basis for a cosmetic House Resolution of one form or another.  

Causing disenchanted and disaffected paleocons to attempt a third party would be something that Carville welcomes with open arms;  by way of example, splitting the conservative vote along the lines of Ross Perot’s candidacy and Buchanan’s campaigns in 1992, Democrats then capitalize by securing the entire election. Nader’s candidacy eight years later was perceived by many as almost equally detrimental to Gore’s campaign.

Exacerbating matters further for the GOP is the percentage of the electorate whom now self-identify as Republicans. This number has reached a near all-time low and nadir oscillating somewhere between one fifth and less than one quarter of eligible voters. However, Gallup polling data shows stronger support for conservative predilections in voters. For Democrats, 40% identify themselves as moderate while 38% identify as liberal or what is now being called “progressive” as efforts to attempt the erasure of the word, ”liberal” from the lexicon remain underway. 22% of those Democrats self-identify as conservative. With Republicans, 40% self-identify as conservative while 35% self-identify as moderate and a rather large 21% respond as liberal.

Republicans victoriously approached the data with the stance that, in both parties, pluralities over 60% and 70% respectively indicated a consensus of moderate conservatives for either camp any which way the data gets sliced; as such, the mainstream body politic is center-right and not center-left which, on the face of it, would be a circumstance that benefits Republicans rather than hinders the GOP. This is their true opportunity as some within the GOP see it; in effect, that the American mainstream is never liberal. Problematic, nonetheless, to these somewhat useless labels is the condition of governance that fails to offer ideas and solutions to generationally structural imbalances and this is precisely where an opposition tries to fill the voids.

Voinovich also came to some fame years ago when he broke down in tears at the prospect of neocon, John Bolton becoming the UN Ambassador. Moderates such as Voinovich, Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar get categorized as Rockefeller Republicans, a classification of which delineates Northern Republicans rather than Southerners. Additionally, the GOP Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe have almost insinuated that more defections along the lines of Specter may take place in the future due to their feeling that there is little to no room for a moderate in their caucus and party. I would have fully expected the DSSC, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to commence the courtship process based on those statements.    

The fear trade seeks to work therefore either as a form of reclamation for what was taken from somebody or alternatively, to preserve that which is purportedly already there for certain people and interests such as property rights and contract law. Mid-term elections invariably are opportunities that narrow the majorities rather than increase them. Consequently, the GOP is targeting several dozen House seats where they think that they have the highest probabilities of taking out incumbents on the other side of the aisle. Selected elements within the opposition feel that they have a replay of 1993 and 1994 closer at hand. The efforts will also include several gubernatorial elections in many states as well as almost a double digit number of Senate seats.

Opposition planning and implementation will seek to paint the Democrats as a group whom will have to reneg and backpedal on the no new middle class tax pledge in order to pay the bills of future American aspirations as well as current obligations. The degree to which any of that sticks will manifest itself over the next few months through the polling data, focus groups, and approval ratings in addition to popular sentiment. To date in years of late, the GOP has had little ability to connect with challenges of the purse facing the average citizen coupled with the horror of craven corporatist interests in addition to neocon-inspired warmongering overseas.  

Some interpret the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman to have observed from his point of view that a toxic cocktail ensues when combining a welfare state with open borders, a condition of which serves as causal to an outcome of contractionary conditions, no growth, high unemployment and huge deficits. Paleocons cite such examples as to why a mixing bowl is a misnomer in their mind due to a lack of wilful integration. They elucidate the supposed refusal of immigrant populations to integrate, moves of which lead to salad bowl conditions where conflict arises in every aspect of culture with the extreme cases and net outcomes being first a civilizational crisis ultimately followed by something along the lines of the former Yugoslavia despite the fact that one civil war has already occurred. 

What is assimilation and how does one define it? What is obligatory under the expectation of assimilation vis-a-vis integration for the immigrant and refugee? These are burning questions that are levied at French and American policymaking on a routine basis. 

The paleocons’ contention, however, that homogeneous societies are the solution proves wholly unrealistic for virtually the entire developed world, particularly outside of places such as Scandinavia. Paleocons thus reactively raise all of the most introspective and rearguard defenses as measures against the heterogenous composition of the Western Hemisphere.    

Getting back to Voinovich’s original statement, Southerners would, in response, point the Ohio Republican towards the lyrics of a legacy Southern rock song from a few decades ago: “New York City is a thousand miles away. And if you’d ask me, I’d say that’s OK. I don’t mean to put the Big Apple down. They don’t need a man like me around.” Similar exchanges took place during the Vietnam War between the Northern singer, Neil Young where the vocalist took a critical stance against the South and the Southern band replied accordingly with an equal amount of lyrical critique where they suggested their being exempt from Northern opinion.

There is no reconciliation between competing factions such as the single issue moralizers, the Rockefeller Republicans of the North and Southern conservatives. Thus doubt is raised in some spots that anything can ever completely transcend differences of heritage and culture that go back centuries in time. Coalitions reconstitute and coalesce anew only through the force of responding to exogenous shocks and festering domestic issues including, but not limited to those of the pocketbook and access.