by Alan Franklin
Let's take the long view on the events of the last few weeks for a moment, shall we?
The GOP recaptured the House of Representatives in 1994 with a set of promises they called the "Contract with America." They promised lower taxes, free trade and business deregulation as the tickets to limitless prosperity. Above all, they campaigned on a promise to adhere to the highest ethical standards in their campaigns, personal lives, and dealings with special interests-a contrast they were carefully framing between themselves and the sitting president.
They spent the next six years waging war on the personal character of Bill Clinton, while forcing through his weakened office innumerable rollbacks of consumer protections and social safety nets. The "reform" of welfare in 1996, for example, is now viewed even by most conservatives as problematic and significantly responsible for the decline in living conditions among American poor since 2000. The impeachment trial of President Clinton was either their greatest or most despicable act, depending on who you talk to. After years of investigations of the Clintons, some involving admittedly questionable business deals but mostly a tawdry expose of Bill Clinton's outsized libido, the righties thought they had him. On a lie to a grand jury about a blow-job from an intern.
By the time the Senate trial was over, not only had their "case" against the president collapsed entirely but the House GOP had decapitated their own leadership, with Rep. Bob Livingston resigning from his position as Majority Leader after it was disclosed that he had (wait for it) sex with an intern. That wasn't in the playbook, and neither was failing to obtain even a majority of votes in the Senate for conviction-let alone the two-thirds majority needed to remove Clinton from office. But as you'll see, there was a backup plan.
From Clinton's acquittal, our narrative can move pretty seamlessly into the election of 2000-the ultimate resolution to which would have been condemned by the United States had it occurred anywhere else in the world. Certainly it was the most corrupt election in this country since 1960, and possibly only rivaled by the "Rutherfraud B. Hayes" compromise of 1876. Despite their failure to remove the president from office two years earlier, the Republican tactical position moving into the 2000 elections was strong:
1) A significant percentage of Americans had irredeemably bought into the message that anybody with a 'D' after their name was amoral and corrupt. Religious and sexual wedge issues had divorced a large part of the electorate from matters of much clearer importance to their daily lives.
2) That message was driven home by a conservative media apparatus that by this time offered a complete and seamless array of delivery systems. In a way that had never really been possible up to this time, rank-and-file conservatives were conditioned to get their news only from designated sources like the Fox News Channel and shameless equivalents in print, the radio, and on the web. Keeping pace admirably with the explosion of new media, conservatives had built a closed loop of unaccountable propaganda that remains today the only source of news for millions of ardent Republican cadres.
3) The election process in what would emerge as the pivotal state of Florida was controlled by the chairwoman of the Bush campaign there, and the candidate's brother was the governor. When the chips were down this kind of time-honored old-school corruption meant everything.
What followed was, without hyperbole, a brute-force seizure of power by the right wing of this country. When the Republican Party sends thugs to disrupt the counting of ballots in Miami, when the chairman of the Bush campaign repeatedly attempts in her simultaneous capacity as Florida's Secretary of State to "certify" the results of the election when the counting hasn't finished yet, when 50,000 voters are wrongly thrown off the rolls before the election and the margin of eventual "victory" is 500, when the Supreme Court issues a divided ruling so flawed and blatantly partisan that they themselves declare that it cannot apply as precedent to future cases...this history is vitally instructive to what's happening today. George Bush lost the election of 2000, but managed to become president anyway; and our country has never been the same. Moreover, it was the culmination of years of jockeying to seize power regardless of the cost: it's accurate to assert that the 2000 elections began the moment Bush I lost in 1992.
Republicans, for whom none of this is reality (reference years of seamless propaganda delivery, above), often ask why we lefties have never 'gotten over' the 2000 election. Bush is president, they say, and it's time to move on. The chief reason for this is that subsequent events have proved out our worst fears. Democrats and Republicans united after the September 11th terrorist attacks, putting aside for a brief period questions about how we were so unprepared for them despite clear warnings. We put aside questions about the close association between the Bush administration and the home country of 15 of the 19 hijackers. We supported the invasion of Afghanistan as an appropriate response to 9/11, and believed the president when he told us that Osama bin Laden would be captured "dead or alive" no matter what.
For reasons I've never been able to understand, Republicans did not feel the same sense of betrayal we did when told the following spring that bin Laden was "not a priority" by the same George W. Bush we had rallied around after we were attacked. We watched in horror as our support for the war against terrorism was perverted into a drive to invade a country that had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks. As it became clear to the administration that the unity following 9/11 would not endure the arbitrary invasion of oil-rich Iraq and the clear ulterior motives that would expose, the solution was an avalanche of lies about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
A critical break occurred around this time between those willing to believe more or less anything they were told by the administration about Iraq and American policy generally, and those who realized they could no longer trust the assessments not only of the administration but also the supposedly "nonpartisan" intelligence and diplomatic communities. This had similar origins to the right's airtight message delivery to its base, but was much more insidious in terms of its effect on dissent against the war. Many people, including many Democratic leaders, were misled into supporting war with Iraq after 'trustworthy' men like Colin Powell made insistent claims about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Today, having seen the spectacular flameout of Michael Brown in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we have a better appreciation for what was going on in the "Office of Special Plans" at the Pentagon in the months before the invasion of Iraq.
It might be cathartic to say that "if we only knew then what we know now," things might have been different. But the fact is that we did know by the time of the 2004 elections that the Iraq war had been waged on fraudulent pretenses. By the time of the 2004 elections, we knew that this war had hopelessly diverted our attention from the original goal of finding Osama bin Laden and dismantling Al-Qaeda. We knew that the $200 billion we had spent by that time in Iraq had lined the pockets of corporations intimately tied to the President and Vice President personally, while contributing nothing to either America's security or the skyrocketing burden of domestic energy prices. And there were rumblings of future trouble for many Republican leaders in terms of personal involvement in various forms of corruption, like Tom DeLay's plan to consolidate permanent GOP hegemony in Texas.
But nothing stuck. Californians knew that major Republican ally Enron had bankrupted the state during the largely-artificial "power crisis" of 2001, but recalled Gray Davis and put Arnold
Schwarzenegger in charge anyway. As unease began to grow over the failure to find banned weapons or effectively stabilize Iraq (as indeed it is still growing), the right's propaganda machine fought the greatest delaying action in media history. The goal was not to disprove outright the skeptics of administration policy, but to muddy their arguments long enough to get Bush re-elected. That's why we were "going to find" those WMDs, despite all evidence to the contrary, all the way through November of 2004. That's how the message of Iraq's imminent threat switched in a day to "liberating the Iraqi people." It was the same unblinking Sean Hannity telling it to you, and he confronted his audience with the choice of "staying the course" or choosing the "un-American" way out. It worked: there was enough uncertainty on Election Day 2004 that millions of Americans who should have known better chose not to "switch presidents in the middle of a war."
You should have noticed by this point the three major themes that have emerged in the 11 years since the GOP began their long march to seemingly unrivaled power. The first is audacity: Republicans have demonstrated a willingness to take brash, risky moves in order to achieve their goals. While accusing their enemies of being the ones engaged in "historic abuses" like a presidential blow-job, they have convened specious impeachments, stolen elections, and manipulated horrific events like 9/11 towards their pre-existing objectives. While invoking Tammany Hall and Jimmy Hoffa they have sold their souls to plutocratic interests wholly at odds with their voting constituents.
The second is resiliency: their planning has survived numerous missteps and botched executions along the way. In some ways, GOP mistakes have exposed the real capabilities of corrupt leaders to manipulate events as somewhat less than the tinfoil-hat community imagines: the administration never planted WMDs in Iraq because they weren't capable of doing so in a way that would have passed scrutiny. We've seen no political violence in the United States because the killing of political candidates would not be tolerated (some light-plane anomalies uneasily aside). The chief weapon of the right when confronted with an uncomfortable fact today is an avalanche of misdirection and propaganda, with a little character assassination thrown in as necessary. It's a formula that has demonstrably worked for them time and time again, rendering the next logical Machiavellian step heretofore unnecessary.
The third theme is unaccountability, and this is the most important: the right's message machine is organic to a larger corporate media, which is in turn responsible for the dissemination of everything Americans believe about their government that they didn't learn a priori. The financial relationship between, for example, GE, NBC, and the contents of the average American's 401(k) portfolio cannot at some fundamental level be ignored. If, as some believe now, we're reaching a critical point where the right's malfeasance and corruption can no longer be concealed, you immediately face the potential chaos that could result from exposing the depth of that corruption to all Americans. Or the equally disturbing possibility that the preponderance of Americans will conclude the risks of confronting it are too great and continue to play along...
What we've seen in the last few weeks, though, is a slip: a whole bunch of stuff that was successfully obfuscated before last year's elections rupturing into full-blown crises for the Republican Party. The 'hurry up and bury it' approach the right's spinmeisters adopted to everything that confronted them before the election is blowing up in their face. They knew Tom DeLay would have big legal problems this year. They knew that Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby might have gone too far in trying to smear Joe Wilson and his CIA operative wife. They knew the public rationale for war in Iraq was unraveling before the eyes of the world, that their foolish designs there had run disastrously amok. They knew the percentage of Americans who understood they had been lied to was growing and would continue to grow. They knew there were ineffectual cronies in critical positions all over the government, that energy companies closely tied to the administration were bullying their way into ever-more unsustainable percentages of American household budgets while Republicans ran cover for them, that the gap between official pronouncements about the state of the economy and the facts of life for most Americans was growing...and now, less than a year later, the wheels are separating from the track.
You might say that it's been a long time coming. What happens now depends on what kind of self-reflection millions of Americans, today finding themselves unwittingly complicit in this disaster of a "Republican Revolution," are willing to undertake.
http://www.progressnowaction.org/page/community/post_group/ProgressNowStaff/CHGr
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