Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Neo-con

As anti-democratic scumbags go, neoconservatives have deep roots in American politics. And you thought they were the brain-fevered invention of Francis Fukuyama and Irving Krystal, drip-filtered through the neo-Platonism of Leo Strauss? Hell no; these guys are actually living, breathing monarchist fossils whose real political father in America is none other than Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton was a plotter, would-be military coup d'etat leader, and pre-emptive war monger extraordinaire. XYZ affair? He did it. Theft of presidential elections? Check his ballot-ink-stained hands. Back stabber? Just ask John Quincy Adams.

He may have co-authored the Federalist Papers, but he was also the author of the Federalist party, the forerunner of today's power-hungry Republicans, was a demagogue and a libelist, and an "Angloman," as a monarchist was termed circa 1789.

To verify his creds as a proto-neoconservtive, a simple checklist should suffice:

Hamilton compared with neoconservatives :

Bank of the United States.................IMF, WTO
Pre-emptive war ..............................Check
Authoritarian Executive ....................Check
Standing army ...................................Check
Massive federal debts ......................Check
Excessive military expenditures .......Check
Alien and Sedition Act .......................USA Patriot Act
Quasi-war with France .....................Iraq/Iran/Islam
Invasion of Florida ............................Afghanistan/Iraq

A Jeffersonian in Philidelphia reported early in February [1800] that "at no time ... that I can remember since 1776" have so many concluded that opposition to the national government "is a duty and obedience a crime."

The calendar advances, but a neo-con is still a thug.

Burn down the House

The country is in the advanced stages of moral decay. The Military Commissions Act is not a law at all; it is an expression of Congress’ intention to carry out war crimes against defenseless victims in their charge. The men who supported this bill should be held accountable for its inevitable and appalling consequences. - Mike Whitney

My jaw dropped when I saw the vote of the "detainee" bill just passed by both the House and the Senate, especially the scurrilous votes by the turncoat Democrats, especially Fuerher-worshiping Sen. Joe Lieberman.

It was only to be expected, I suppose, as the Democrats have basically disappeared on every issue that involves defending the Bill of Rights, from allowing Paleolithic judicial appointments to this present mockery of the Constitution with its arbitrary suspension of habeas corpus. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA)- who first pretended to oppose the bill, then turned around and voted for it - issued a mealy-mouthed statement claiming that the Supreme Court would excise the "bad" parts later. Well, asshole, instead of leaving it to the other guys, why didn't you excise the bad parts when you had the chance?

Tom Paine and Patrick Henry aren't spinning in their graves, they're pounding on their coffin lids. Timothy McVeigh, of course, has already made his opinion known, but sadly, I see no burning torches or outraged citizens in the streets.

Now - and this is no consolation - if you had been paying any attention at all, you would know that this has been coming for a long time. It's just the latest installment of the softening up process leading to the utter subjugation of the American people (with the help of the bought and paid for ignoramouses we keep electing), who are obviously not America's real leaders:

David Ray Griffin says: "Part of the reason we call the Nazi and Stalinist regimes evil, of course, is that many of their victims were killed deliberately. Do American leaders realize what they are doing?

"There is evidence that they do. For example, in 1947, George Kennan, who was Director of the Policy Planning Staff in the U.S. State Department, said in a "top secret" memo:

"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population . . . In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security."*

Reading between the lines, as Plato encouraged the elites to do, a disinterested observer might regard this as an evil statement. George Kennan - speaking from his catbird seat as an advisor to the Eastern Establishment authoritarian oligarchy - no doubt thought his statements quite reasonable. Kennan wasn't referring to you and me, though; he was referring to the 2% of Americans who now hold 90% of America's wealth, and it is their security he's referring to.

The escalation techniques of tyranny are quite old and well known - it's just that the American people have suffered from an abysmal educational system for too long, and stullified themselves with material luxury for so long, and most of our citizens are a generation or more removed from the immigrants who had first-hand experience of political oppression, including torture, indefinite confinement, and assassination, for them to understand what is happening to their country right now, today.

At this rate, they'll be experiencing the results of the suspension of habeas corpus, with no-knock, warrantless searches, and subsequent waterboarding first hand and all too soon.

So, at this point I say, forget about voting this November 6th; let's just burn down the fucking House.

----------
*George F. Kennan, "PPS/23: Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy." First published in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. 1, 509-529, it has been reprinted in Thomas H. Entzold and John Lewis Gaddis, eds., Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press), 226-28; the quoted passage is at 226-27.

Back from the beach

So there we were, stretched out in our aluminum lawn chair, ghetto blaster playing the Rolling Stones' recent beauty, "biggerbang," non-alcoholic pina colada pitcher ready to hand, and a pile of books to keep us distracted from the beach bunnies.

And what a pile of books it was: we burned through Oswald Spengler's two volume masterpiece, The Decline of the West - a mother of a macro-theory of social change, and a rebuke to Marx and Hegel. Spengler is the first Western philosopher of history to understand that true History does not begin with the Garden of Eden, thank you, but much, much earlier, and that the Asian, Middle Eastern, Western, and Meso-America civilizations were separate and unique products of human thought and religious aspirations; John Dean's Conservatives Without A Conscience explicates an interesting theory of personality rampant inside the Beltway right now - authoritarianism - with George W Bush the leading authoritarian asshole; an unhappy Philip Gold's Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Betrayed the Conservative Movement (self-explanatory title).

We then read Imposter: How George W Bush Bankrupted America, by Bruce Bartlett(a died-in-the-crib Reaganite and the mastermind behind trickle-down theory), then followed that up with The Neocon Reader, edited by Irwin Stelzer, a neoconservative apologist of the first water. Selected articles by various right-wingers (including Margaret Thatcher!) reveal how fucking smart the neocons think they are; published before the recent decline in Iraq's glorious democratic prospects and Bush's plunging approval ratings, there's not a hint of their present implosion, not that they're paying attention anyway.

On the lighter side, we nearly spilt our drink reading James Wolcott's Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants; hilarious, informative and scary all at the same time. Not so humorously, we were agog at the sheer length of the lists in Bushit!: An A-Z Guide to the Bush Attack on Truth, by Jack Huberman. Bloggers, take note: almost every reference is to a website or blog; you could be a quoted source!

We managed to cram in New Orleans native son James Lee Burke's Heartwood and Bitterroot. Keeping us up past bedtime was critically-acclaimed author David Masiel’s The Western Limit of the World, a soul-cringing anti-morality tale of high-seas piracy and the abandonment of civilization.

For a little historical perspective, we returned to the scene of the American presidential election of 1800, which pitted the first-ever American political parties - Thomas Jefferson's Democratic Republicans (today called simply, the Democrats) against John Q. Adams and Alexander Hamilton's Federalists (the forerunners of todays neocons, embracing almost identical policies of executive power and pre-emptive war) with Adams vs. Jefferson, by John Ferling. Adam's presidency - and Hamilton's monarchial scheming - had brought on the Quasi War with France, the XYZ affair, and the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the political heat was high. As the first election contested by political parties, it featured a virulently partisan press, ballot stuffing - and theft - and an ideological struggle so intense that our young nation was brought close to the edge of civil war. Spoiler alert: Jefferson's Democrats won.

For more recent history disguised as fiction, we polished off the pina coladas and the book pile with Tears of Autumn, the real story of the Kennedy assassination, as puzzled out by real-life CIA agent, Charles McCarry. No, Virginia, the Mob didn't have nothin' to do wid it.

Whew.

And that's what we did on our vacation, thank you. Now the lawn chair is back in the garage, the computer is warmed up, and it's back to the blog!


LA Times may remain a real newspaper

Recently the Los Angeles Times ran a tiny piece in its business section noting that its decidedly non-liberal parent corporation, the Chicago-based Tribune Corporation, is raving how the Times is hemmoraging value (actually, stockjobber Monopoly money – its stock price has dropped a tad recently), and how are the stockholders gonna get rich if they have to keep paying reporters’ salaries when they need to buy some new high-speed advertising insert machines and also make way for the full four-color possibilities of double-page-spread advertising special editions? Hmm?

Which says almost everything you really need to know about why the press – our fantasy ‘liberal media’ – screwed the pooch in its exorable reportage of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, as well as the miserable coverage of this administration's complete mismanagement of everything they have touched. As we suspected all along, the media is not in the business of reporting the news; they are in the business of delivering advertising, or, alternately – as the CEO of Clear Channel so eloquently put it – of “acquiring bandwidth.”

Further, what “news” corporate media does disseminate is pure government propaganda. As Vanity Fair culture critic and author of Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants James Wolcott so succinctly put it, “Fox News is an arm of the government.”

To be sure, along with The New York Times and The Washington Post, the LA Times has been among the rare exceptions in the rush by most metros to turn their heritage into Daily Shopper clones. For instance, these three metros are the only American newspapers to still maintain press facilities in Baghdad, all others having fled the scene, claiming an indifferent readership.

This last is pure bull, of course, as polls commissioned by the Los Angeles management have revealed, to wit: fully half (46-54%) of LA's readers want national and international reporting. In short, we want less color rotogravures of Ikea furniture and more news of the screwups in Iraq - and elsewhere - and somebody please tell us what the hell those a-holes in Washington are doing.

Presently the Tribune Company is arguing with LA management about the future composition of the newsroom, threatening to cut the news staff from 1,200 to 950 or so, and this has led to speculation that the TribCo may sell the Times soon.

This last bit is Good News, as several local buyers are apparently waiting in the wings, ready to return the paper to local ownership and keep the editorial mission intact, much to the relief of its readership, yours truly included.