Columnist David Brooks proves once again the intellectual bankruptcy of American "conservatism"

David Brooks "Two Cheers for Capitalism", New York Times July 31, 2015

"Masters of Delusion"
David Brooks & Alan Greenspan's Magical Thinking

David Books proves again that what is left of the conservative movement offers nothing but Goldwater-era slogans, wishful thinking and rank delusion. I’d say the “beauty” of Brooks’ conservatism is that it never has to answer to fact or reality.

Take Brooks’ statement on “oligarchy”. Indeed, he would have us believe that today’s corporate raiders, hedge-fund parasites, Donald Trumps and legion of Trump wannabe’s are some kind of “vanguard” bent on the destruction of America’s oligarchs. I’d have never guessed that the captains of Wall Street and Silicon Valley were so deeply suicidal. Poor babies! After all, it’s not the few shattered relics of the labor movement, hippie enviros or working moms that bought out Washington D.C.

Curiously, the overseas economic engines he cites as evidence of laissez-faire capitalism’s great success are hardly ‘laissez-faire’. China’s capitalist revolution is firmly under the guidance and control of Peking. South Korea’s corporate structure and government are symbiotic. Germany’s economy is infused with government planning and regulation. It appears that a well regulated economy and a tight partnership between government and capital in which government is primus-inter-pares has been the key to success.

It’s become a bit of a cliché to use the term “magic of the marketplace” today. Certainly no self-styled “intellectual” like David Brooks would use it. But of course that is precisely what he is referring to. He must have slept through the great crash a few years back. It’s not like it happened because there were too many regulations; what few there were (and are) were not enforced. The crash was not “creative”. We are worse for it, not better. It’s simply amazing that after all that, the tired and discredited economic “thinking” of a charlatan like Alan Greenspan is still credible. 

More fool us. More fool David Brooks.

Written by Gary Fitzsimmons

So what was the point?

Funny how long ago 2008 seems to be. Alas, it's not been quite seven years but the brutal battle between Hillary Clinton and a less-than-one-term Illinois Senator Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination had finally ended. I say "brutal battle" because for those of us in the trenches at the time it really was. The Clinton Democrats who controlled all of the organizational infrastructure of the party were apoplectic that their golden-girl was circling the drain. They were especially vicious as befits their brand of self-promoting political chicanery.

They didn't take loss very well. I spent a dreadful five hours "testifying" before a bunch of clowns that then Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Ritchie appointed to the State Credentials Committee defending black delegates from an attempt by the Clinton campaign to disenfranchise them. A Clinton operative, Janice Mattox, filed 130 challenges against Dallas African-American, Texas. Pretty galling when you consider she happened to be the sister of the late Jim Mattox, former Texas Attorney General, who used the very same black voters to propel his many campaigns for public office.

When one member of the committee accused her of mounting a racially motivated attack on black delegates, Mattox "lost it". Somehow it never occurred to her that filing challenges against entire delegations of black voters might be construed as, well....racist. Nor did that occur to Hillary Clinton's vice-chairman of the Credentials Committee Gary Horton: a pompous old boob from Galveston who just so happened to be residing in Mattox's beach house at the time.

Nevertheless, it was a bit of irony that the Clinton campaign did clue-in to how bad Mattox's challenges looked. Hillary 2008! later claimed no responsibility or even knowledge of the filing of the challenges. That's in spite of the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign flew three campaign staffers to Dallas to assist Mattox and even stayed in her home. And of course there was the little bit of lawyer-trash Clinton hired to represent the campaign at the credentials committee - conveniently seated on the opposite side of the dais from Mattox.

But if you thought that in the heady aftermath of Obama's victory dance his friends would be rewarded with access and progressive policy you'd be sadly mistaken. And after almost seven years, we weren't even rewarded with "good government".

Almost immediately after Barack Obama took office he jettisoned the Democrats who supported his candidacy. The anti-war Democrats who supported him back when he was running 9% in the polls keeping him viable were rewarded for their efforts with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. He later lavished them with drone strikes, an Afghanistan surge, and a global surveillance program.

The liberals were rewarded with a bevy of rank Wall Street whores appointed to Treasury and his council of economic advisors. Obama actually promoted the likes of street-hustler Larry Summers: the vile piece of filth drummed out as President of Harvard University who was one of the nation's great architects of the 2008 financial collapse. Environmentalists actually got an Interior Secretary sourced from the coal industry. Labor got rewarded with the appointment of an equally empty suited former Mayor of Dallas to push yet another job-killing trade agreement abortion.

After all the sturm-und-drang of the 2008 democratic primary fight turns out it was really nothing more than a fight over "who gets to go first". Pretty pathetic.

So now we've come full circle with Democrats poised to bring back the same corrupt team that we all thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history. That's the team that brought you "Welfare Reform", financial services deregulation, the tech bubble, bombing Baghdad every time the President needed a distraction from his grand jury testimony, NAFTA, triangulation, using the Oval Office as a brothel and the list goes on-and-on.

The point is there really is no point.

Scene from the Tea Party Fascist Rally Saturday October 12

This photo pretty much sums up the fascist underpinnings of the Tea Party movement. Like the fascist movements of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the Tea Party typically consists of retirees and pensioners, rural or exurban residents, and persons without a strong connection to mainstream organizations; that is "atomized" persons. Most of all, the demographic is characterized by a strong status anxiety which describes its core demographic: white men between the ages of 45 and 65.

Fascist movements find fertile soil where the masses have become un-moored from social and economic institutions or when those institutions have lost credibility. Charismatic leaders prey on the status anxiety that accompanies that economic and institutional change. Fascist leaders speak of "restoration" or national or moral renewal that will revive the fortunes of the nation or tribe and with it the status of those who have lost it. A mythic antiquarianism and the resuscitation of symbolic imagery from the past is employed to create a meta narrative and a corresponding political program
which drives the movement.

Fascist movements attack the foundation of traditional institutional life because institutions are a fundamental threat to the meta narratives these movements depend on. There is a profound difference between "meaning" as found in institutional authority and "meaning" created by charismatic leaders and reactionary movements. Institutional authority is built over time and represents the sum of that institution's experience with reality. An institution's understanding of reality and it's "meaning", though perhaps wrong in its particulars, is still rooted in an experience with it.

Charismatic reactionaries create "meaning" out of pure fabrication based on symbolic imagery shorn of historical context. That imagery is arranged into a political ideology of "conspiracy and destiny". Simply put, it posits that the tribe, whether nation, race, ethnic group or party, which was once great has been led astray and laid low by a cabal of insidious foreign parasites. These parasites seek to control and despoil the tribe by "contaminating" it with foreign elements whether racial, religious or cultural. As a consequence, the tribe is unable to realize its "true destiny" and has become lost. The political program of these reactionary groups always involves calling on the tribe to "wake up" and cleanse it of these parasitical elements.

The beauty of these reactionary ideologies is that they are not subject to the ordinary pressures of reason and rationality. They are not shaped by any experience with "reality". Because the underlying meta narrative is a belief in a secret conspiracy of hidden actors, the charismatic leader is free to shape his interpretation of events without reference to 'expert' opinion or verification. Contrary facts are dismissed with impunity and interpretations connected to facts are understood as manifestations of the conspiracy.

American Fascist Leader Glenn Beck Calls for Destruction of Political Opponents

Glenn's Vision of a Spiritually Cleansed America

It's never been a secret what Glenn Beck is. For those who have watched him on his personal network "The Blaze" know him to be the Joseph Goebbels of the Tea Party. This is the man who shamelessly invents the most vile and outlandish conspiracies and blood libels his "progressive" opponents.

However, today he went one step closer to proudly wearing the swastika on his right arm - he asked his troglodytic acolytes to "destroy progressive ideas". For those of us with even a smidgen of familiarity with 20th century history know what that means.

Josef Stalin declared "kill the man, kill the idea". Where Stalin murdered with the connivance of special courts, Hitler never waited for a court order. He murdered the ideas in their beds at night or in the dark recesses of an internment camp.

Glenn Beck can't argue his case - ignorance and pomposity have no argument. So like his spiritual gurus Hitler and Stalin, Beck pines for the day when book burnings and internment camps for "socialists", "marxists", "leftys" and "progressives" will be the law of the land.

Patriotism Means Defending American Values and the American Way of Life

The title of this post is what the blog is all about: defending American values and our way of life by exposing fascist conspirators and Theocrat sedition. America is truly under attack today and our core values of freedom and liberty are being threatened by a cabal of plutocrats who fund fake "grassroots movements" and fundamentalist extremism. The fascist demagogues making war on our nation are known by many names: Rush Limbaugh, Bryan Fisher, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachmann just to name a few.

But these are only the bitter, rotten fruit of a diseased tree whose roots stretch back to the Business Plot of 1933 that sought to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt in a coup d'etat. Make no mistake, the corporate parasites who brought the nation to its knees during the Great Depression and tried to seize the state are doing the same thing today. Their goal is still the same: to overthrow representative democracy and enslave the American people to corporate their oligarchy.

Who are these parasites?  They are legion; found in virtually every community throughout the nation. Some of them are well known like the criminal syndicate "Koch Industries" run by the fraternal leeches David and Charles Koch:

Traitors Dave & Chuck Koch

Meet your would-be corporate masters; the grinning faces of sedition grown fat off the labor of the 'little people'. They hate government, not because it limits freedom, but because it limits their freedom to exploit whoever, whatever, and however they want. Government tells the Koch's they can't pay their employees less than a minimum wage costing them millions in profits and dividends because Lord knows $33.3 billion is not enough for these blood suckers to live on. Government tells the Koch boys they can't despoil and pollute the land we live on, the air we breathe, the food we eat and the water we drink. Government tells these corpulent kings of Mammon that they have to give something back to the community from which they have stolen so much.

Behind every right-wing whore in congress, on television or radio are fascist pimps like Dave and Chuck Koch using them to crush the life out our freedom, our liberty and our very humanity. Dave and Chuck Koch are traitors, guilty of sedition and conspiracy against the constitution and lawful governance. They should be indicted, tried for treason and sentenced to forced labor while their stolen billions are used to re-build the communities their criminality have destroyed.