Fox News, health care, and the right-wing nervous breakdown

Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform -- and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending, apocalyptic doom were becoming -- I was getting nervous that one of Fox News' more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Honestly, unless you've been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don't appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It's a mental and emotional collapse that's been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity -- an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! -- that's about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.

Listening to the calamitous warnings (i.e. "the end of America as we know it"), it's not that unreasonable to think that at some point one of the media mob leaders is going to suggest that life itself just is no longer worth living.

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three "days away from the United States of America being over as we've all known it," according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a "turning point," like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the "very hour" that America turned "completely towards socialism."

The Washington Times likened reform to the "Black Plague," and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was "RIP USA," because with the vote, America would become "occupied by a hostile foreign power." Indeed, a "socialist putsch" had been sprung and "America's Day of Wreckoning [sic]" was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats' health care legislation "will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage."

Not scared yet? Well, just keep in mind that "Fascist healthcare will destroy America," "civil unrest is coming," and President Obama is to blame. More? "Fascist House Democrats are preparing to euthanize America." And don't forget that Sunday's health care vote in Congress represented a "dark day for America, the worst since 9/11."

And, progressive politicians, heed this warning: "Democrats who crammed this unwarranted bill down the throats of the American people who clearly and overwhelmingly opposed it deserve to be drawn and quartered."

That's right, tortured.

As Jon Stewart noted last week while playing the straight man in a Daily Show bit about the increasingly unhinged, right-wing response, "The rhetoric seems completely divorced from reality." And that observation came before the weekend theatrics inside the Beltway, when self-described patriots, egged on by the right-wing media, rallied to "Kill the bill!" and in the process reportedly tossed racial and anti-gay epithets at Democratic members of the Congress. (The far-right reaction? So what if they did?)

Trust me. This televised, incoherent meltdown has gone way beyond sore loserdom. Or even sore loserdom on steroids. This hasn't just been more of the usual Democrats-are-crooks type of whining that Fox News has turned into an art form since Obama's inauguration. And it's gone far beyond the usual scare tactics that the cable channel has trademarked. (Recent on-screen graphics: "Will the health bill ruin the economy?" and "Does Obamacare mean millions more jobs destroyed?")

Instead, this bout of spastic lashing out has been unique even by the previous standard adopted by Beck, who, on the eve of the health care vote, likened Democrats to Al Qaeda terrorists who were trying to bring America to its knees from the inside.

Because apparently when conservatives lose consecutive nationwide election cycles, thereby allowing Democrats to set the legislative agenda, conservatives' objections render passing bills a criminal act, and "tyranny" threatens to topple our democracy.

Let's face facts. It's never pleasant when activists are confronted with their own political impotence. (Not to mention their abysmal vote-counting skills.) But that's exactly what happened over the weekend as Democratic members of Congress passed health care reform -- reform that the radical right had already pronounced dead. In fact, the GOP Noise Machine had spent weeks dancing on reform's grave and mocking Democrats' inability to act. So how did it all go so terribly wrong for health care haters?

My hunch is that over the past few months, the right-wing media, along with self-adoring Tea Party members, made the mistake of believing their own hype. They convinced themselves that not only did 2 million people take to the streets of the nation's capital last September to protest Obama (a number that was off by 1.9 million), but that "millions" more had marched coast-to-coast over the past 12 months (a number that was completely fabricated). They fastidiously constructed their own parallel universe and convinced themselves that last summer's mini-mobs at local town hall forums had defeated health care reform. They thought their rowdy show of force, complete with Nazi and Hitler posters, and even some protesters parading around with loaded guns, had changed the debate.

Listening to Limbaugh, they thought they were dictating the agenda. Watching Fox News, they though they reflected the mainstream. And reading right-wing blogs, they thought they had killed health care reform.

Wrong, wrong, and wrong. It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they'd spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we've seen play out in recent days. It's the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn't think we'd ever witness from a major political movement.

Indeed, imagine if this is how progressives and Democrats had behaved during the run-up to the Iraq war, the last time the country found itself in this kind of national public policy "debate." Imagine if the liberal pundits and opinion makers had reacted to the prospect of war not with thoughtful anti-war analysis (analysis that, it turned out, was dead on), but instead opted for tantrums and shameful vitriol, the way right-wing pundits have in recent days and weeks.

For instance, imagine if the anti-war movement, and its highest-profile media supporters, had attacked military families whose sons and daughters were fighting in Iraq as the invasion unfolded. That kind of abhorrent behavior would have been universally condemned as just being beyond the pale. Yet last week, as its opposition to reform grew increasingly futile, the GOP Noise Machine dedicated lots of time and energy to mocking and attacking cancer-stricken patients, as well as a motherless 11-year-old boy who had the audacity to speak out in favor of health care reform.

Limbaugh's immortal words to the boy: "Your mom would have still died, because Obamacare doesn't kick in until 2014."

To me, the attacks indicated a withering of the right-wing media's shrinking moral compass, not to mention common sense. (Mocking the seriously ill is a winning political strategy?) It was another tell-tale sign of the unfolding, and unstoppable, nervous breakdown.

Because how else do you describe this kind of erratic, disturbed behavior? And it's worth repeating: This wasn't coming from minor, fringe players. It's been coming from the supposed leading lights of the conservative media; leading lights who, blinded by paranoia, have suffered a collective collapse and can no longer make sense of their surroundings.

We're down to the wire here on financial reform. I can't think of a better time to put pressure on Wall Street and Washington to make sure there is adequate regulation to ensure that we never have another bailout. The AFL-CIO is about to have a protest at Wall Street on April 29th. Great, that makes sense. I'm sure the right-wing groups who are also upset about the bailouts will join them.

If you remember, the Tea Parties were originally formed to protest the bailouts. They were so mad at the Wall Street bankers who destroyed the economy and then took our hard earned money for their efforts.

So, they will take this opportunity, of course, to launch their own protest of Wall Street. They will protest the TARP money, the easy credit, the lack of regulation, the wild risk taking and the excessive bonuses paid with taxpayer money. They're really going to take the fight to them.

Just kidding. They're not going to do anything. They're going to sit out this fight on financial reform and put absolutely no pressure on Wall Street at all. Because they are tools easily manipulated by right-wing organizations funded by corporate America.

I really feel sorry for them. They're dupes. They think they are so fiercely independent when in fact they are the most easily manipulated people in the country. All that anger toward the power establishment and what happened? They were used by that same establishment to fight against health care reform and to try to protect the health insurance companies. Suckers.

Now, when it's time to fight the financial companies, where are they? Nowhere to be found. Why? Because FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity didn't organize any bus rides to Wall Street. They didn't manufacture the outrage they did in protecting the health care companies. They used the Tea Party protestors for their own purposes and then left them on the side of the road, only to be picked up again when they need to protect another company or industry.

I issued a challenge back in January to the Tea Party organizers to rally against Wall Street or even against the Obama administration (Tim Geithner in particular) for being too soft on them. And what's happened since then? Nada. Zilch. Zippo.

So, I was proven right -- they're never, ever going to protest Wall Street because they are ignorant dupes being led by the nose by their corporate overlords. And they think they're so tough and independent-minded. What a farce. The whole movement is a sad joke being played on its own members.

On The Young Turks we talked to former vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party, Wayne Allyn Root. He has spoken at countless Tea Party protests and considers himself a part of the movement. In the interview below, count how many times I asked him where the Wall Street protests were and how many times he evaded, dodged and ducked the question. That's because there are no such protests and there never will be:

It's pretty simple: They repeat the same thing over and over until everyone gets tired of correcting them
By Gene Lyons


Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

Has the Republican Party gone completely off into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or have its leading spokesmen simply decided to mimic the party's entertainment wing: trusting its loyal audience to believe even the most brazen falsehoods, and, equally important, to remember nothing?

Does unwillingness to engage reality signal an acceptance of minority status, or merely disdain for the GOP base?

After all, you can trick a cow with an empty feed bucket once or twice. By the third try, it won't even look at you.

GOP savants act as if Republican voters are more easily guided.

Consider Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. For weeks, McConnell has been trying to prevent action on pending financial-reform legislation by claiming that it would lead to "endless taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street banks."

In reality, the proposed law would do exactly the opposite: liquidating failed investment firms' assets through a process like the one used by the FDIC to shut down insolvent savings banks. Management would be fired and shareholders given nothing until creditors had been paid. Wall Street firms would be required to pay into a fund underwriting the arrangement. Taxpayer dollars wouldn't be used.

Even Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who helped draft the legislation, has pointedly contradicted McConnell's mischaracterization. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has characterized it as "possibly the most dishonest argument ever made in the history of politics."

(Really, professor? More dishonest than Hitler's "stab in the back" charge that Jews and Socialists conspired to make Germany lose World War I? More dishonest than the Tonkin Gulf resolution that dragged the United States into Vietnam?)

Even so, Krugman's hyperbole is understandable. Say what you will about academia, in professorial debate so blatant a misrepresentation would be seen as a shameful confession of weakness. Somebody who can't win an argument without resorting to a simple "black is white" lie gets as little respect as he deserves.

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Elsewhere, Krugman puts the question in an appropriately Orwellian context: "Has there ever been a time in U.S. political history," he asks, "when one of the two major political parties was so addicted to doublethink, so committed to pretending that it's advocating the opposite of its actual agenda?"

Specifically, McConnell came up with the "bailout" fiction immediately after meeting with Wall Street high-rollers who a) want to keep placing risk-free bets with other people's money; and b) certainly don't want to pay for what amounts to bankruptcy insurance. Sympathetic to the McDuck point of view, McConnell evidently figures that if he can stall the bill for a while, he can get Uncle Scrooge (and eventually himself) a better deal.

Blogger Matt Yglesias fears that such tactics do nothing but work. "True or false," he writes, "the overwhelming evidence is that the media gets bored with these fact checks very quickly and that if you just put your head down and charge forward, you come out a couple of weeks later back into 'he said, she said' territory. The only real test for whether or not lying works is whether or not you can bring your ideological fellow travelers along. Will Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck echo your line? Will the Weekly Standard and National Review? Will the bulk of your legislative caucus? The answers are yes, yes, and yes."

Actually, we're already there. Just watch. Virtually every TV report on the financial-regulation bill you see will feature a sound bite from McConnell, who'll continue to shill for Citibank and Goldman Sachs while pretending to defend the little guy. Bailout, bailout, bailout. The fact that he's engaging in pure doublespeak is highly unlikely to be mentioned. Instead, you'll likely see a snippet from a Democrat making the opposite claim. For an awful lot of viewers, that's like flipping a coin.

For Fox News viewers and Limbaugh listeners, it's actually easier than that. Conditioned by decades of propaganda about liberal media bias, many react with overt hostility to any and all information from other sources. I must get 50 angry e-mails a week calling me a liar for citing some easily verifiable fact at odds with right-wing doctrine.

Recently, certain conservative intellectuals have begun to worry about whether this hasn't left the movement flying blind. "One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement," writes Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, "is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross-promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted."

The movement, hell. It's making the whole country as dumb as a brontosaurus in a blizzard. Because reality eventually asserts itself.

The GOP's "small government" tea party fraud

By Glenn Greenwald

There's a major political fraud underway: the GOP is once again donning their libertarian, limited-government masks in order to re-invent itself and, more important, to co-opt the energy and passion of the Ron-Paul-faction that spawned and sustains the "tea party" movement. The Party that spat contempt at Paul during the Bush years and was diametrically opposed to most of his platform now pretends to share his views. Standard-issue Republicans and Ron Paul libertarians are as incompatible as two factions can be -- recall that the most celebrated right-wing moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was when Rudy Giuliani all but accused Paul of being an America-hating Terrorist-lover for daring to suggest that America's conduct might contribute to Islamic radicalism -- yet the Republicans, aided by the media, are pretending that this is one unified, harmonious, "small government" political movement.

The Right is petrified that this fraud will be exposed and is thus bending over backwards to sustain the myth. Paul was not only invited to be a featured speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference but also won its presidential straw poll. Sarah Palin endorsed Ron Paul's son in the Kentucky Senate race. National Review is lavishly praising Paul, while Ann Coulter "felt compelled [in her CPAC speech] to give a shout out to Paul-mania, saying she agreed with everything he stands for outside of foreign policy -- a statement met with cheers." Glenn Beck -- who literally cheered for the Wall Street bailout and Bush's endlessly expanding surveillance state -- now parades around as though he shares the libertarians' contempt for them. Red State's Erick Erickson, defending the new so-called conservative "manifesto," touts the need for Congress to be confined to the express powers of Article I, Section 8, all while lauding a GOP Congress that supported countless intrusive laws -- from federalized restrictions on assisted suicide, marriage, gambling, abortion and drugs to intervention in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life state court proceeding -- nowhere to be found in that Constitutional clause. With the GOP out of power, Fox News suddenly started featuring anti-government libertarians such as John Stossel and Reason Magazine commentators, whereas, when Bush was in power, there was no government power too expanded or limitless for Fox propagandists to praise.

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This is what Republicans always do. When in power, they massively expand the power of the state in every realm. Deficit spending and the national debt skyrocket. The National Security State is bloated beyond description through wars and occupations, while no limits are tolerated on the Surveillance State. Then, when out of power, they suddenly pretend to re-discover their "small government principles." The very same Republicans who spent the 1990s vehemently opposing Bill Clinton's Terrorism-justified attempts to expand government surveillance and executive authority then, once in power, presided over the largest expansion in history of those very same powers. The last eight years of Republican rule was characterized by nothing other than endlessly expanded government power, even as they insisted -- both before they were empowered and again now -- that they are the standard-bearers of government restraint.

What makes this deceit particularly urgent for them now is that their only hope for re-branding and re-empowerment lies in a movement -- the tea partiers -- that has been (largely though not exclusively) dominated by libertarians, Paul followers, and other assorted idiosyncratic factions who are hostile to the GOP's actual approach to governing. This is a huge wedge waiting to be exposed -- to explode -- as the modern GOP establishment and the actual "small-government" libertarians that fuel the tea party are fundamentally incompatible. Right-wing mavens like Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin and National Review are suddenly feigning great respect for Ron Paul and like-minded activists because they're eager that the sham will be maintained: the blatant sham that the modern GOP and its movement conservatives are a coherent vehicle for those who believe in small government principles. The only evidence of a passionate movement urging GOP resurgence is from people whose views are antithetical to that Party. That's the dirty secret which right-wing polemicists are desperately trying to keep suppressed. Credit to Mike Huckabee for acknowledging this core incompatibility by saying he would not attend CPAC because of its "increasing libertarianism."

These fault lines began to emerge when Sarah Palin earlier this month delivered the keynote speech to the national tea party conference in Nashville, and stood there spitting out one platitude after the next which Paul-led libertarians despise: from neoconservative war-loving dogma and veneration of Israel to glorification of "War on Terror" domestic powers and the need of the state to enforce Palin's own religious and cultural values. Neocons (who still overwhelmingly dominate the GOP) and Paul-led libertarians are arch enemies, and the social conservatives on whom the GOP depends are barely viewed with greater affection. Sarah Palin and Ron Paul are about as far apart on most issues as one can get; the "tea party movement" can't possibly be about supporting each of their worldviews. Moreover, the GOP leadership is currently promising Wall Street even more loyal subservience than Democrats have given in exchange for support, thus bolstering the government/corporate axis which libertarians find so repugnant. And Coulter's manipulative claim that she "agrees with everything [Paul] stands for outside of foreign policy" is laughable; aside from the fact that "foreign policy" is a rather large issue in our political debates (Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia), they were on exactly the opposite sides of the most intense domestic controversies of the Bush era: torture, military commissions, habeas corpus, Guantanamo, CIA secrecy, telecom immunity, and warrantless eavesdropping.

Part of why this fraud has been sustainable thus far is that libertarians -- like everyone who doesn't view all politics through the mandated, distorting, suffocating Democrat v. GOP prism -- are typically dismissed as loons and nuts, and are thus eager for any means of achieving mainstream acceptance. Having the GOP embrace them is one way to achieve that (Karl Rove: some "see the tea party movement as a recruiting pool for volunteers for Ron Paul's next presidential bid . . . . The Republican Party and the tea party movement have many common interests"). Additionally, just as the Paul-faction of libertarians is in basic harmony with many progressives on issues of foreign policy and civil liberties, they do subscribe to the standard GOP rhetoric on domestic spending, social programs and the like.

But that GOP limited government rhetoric is simply never matched by that Party's conduct, especially when they wield power. The very idea that a political party dominated by neocons, warmongers, surveillance fetishists, and privacy-hating social conservatives will be a party of "limited government" is absurd on its face. There literally is no myth more transparent than the Republican Party's claim to believe in restrained government power. For that reason, it's only a matter of time before the fundamental incompatibility of the "tea party movement" and the political party cynically exploiting it is exposed.

"Filegate" judge: There's no there there -- and never was
At long last, federal Judge Royce Lamberth dismisses "Filegate." Let's not forget the fraud's keenest promoters
By Joe Conason



"Filegate" is a term that always deserved scare quotes, because the putative scandal concerning the misuse of FBI files in the Clinton White House was so clearly, from its very beginning in 1996, no scandal at all. But the obvious absence of any credible evidence that Bill or Hillary Clinton or any of their employees or associates had ordered up such files, or committed any abuse of them, did nothing to dissuade mainstream media, right-wing outlets, or Republican politicians from hysterically promoting the pseudo-scandal.

Today it is amazing to recall how significant this nothingness was once deemed to be, with nightly coverage on network newscasts. On Capitol Hill, Sen. Orrin Hatch demanded a fingerprint analysis to determine whether Hillary Clinton had touched the files (she hadn't) while lengthy investigations got under way in the Senate, the House and the Office of the Independent Counsel led by Kenneth Starr. Bob Dole, the Republican presidential candidate in 1996, compared "Filegate" with Nixon's Watergate scandal and asked: "Where's the outrage?"

Yesterday the last wheeze of hype was squeezed from that old controversy, when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth dismissed the remaining civil lawsuit against former Clinton administration officials in the FBI files affair. Brought by eccentric attorney Larry Klayman, who became a favorite of cable television and conservative funders during the Clinton era, those costly lawsuits were described in the judge's decision as essentially baseless.

Summing up his findings, Lamberth wrote: "After years of litigation, endless depositions, the fictionalized portrayal of this lawsuit and its litigants on television, this court is left to conclude that with the lawsuit, to quote Gertrude Stein, 'there's no there there.'" A Reagan appointee once lauded by Klayman himself as "this great jurist," he showed a talent for understatement when he noted that "after ample opportunity," the plaintiffs "have not produced any evidence of the far-reaching conspiracy that sought to use intimate details from FBI files for political assassinations that they alleged. The only thing that they have demonstrated is that this unfortunate episode -- about which they do have cause to complain -- was exactly what the defendants claimed: a bureaucratic snafu."

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The judge's decision specifically exonerated the remaining civil defendants, former White House officials Craig Livingstone and Bernard Nussbaum. Perhaps forgotten now, they -- along with Hillary Clinton, the supposed mastermind of "Filegate" -- were accused of felonies by top Republicans on Capitol Hill and maligned countless times by right-wing figures in the media and many mainstream journalists as well.

Of Livingstone, a low-level White House official who resigned immediately when he learned that FBI background summaries had been mishandled, the judge wrote: "There has been no evidence that Craig Livingstone sought to obtain the plaintiffs' FBI summary background reports for any improper purpose, political or otherwise." Concerning Nussbaum, an honorable attorney who also left the White House under a cloud, Lamberth noted, "There has been no evidence that Mr. Nussbaum made these requests himself and as the court has noted earlier, there has been no evidence presented that there was a conspiracy to request the plaintiffs' summary background reports for political purposes, let alone that Mr. Nussbaum was involved in it." In short, Nussbaum was wholly innocent even of responsibility for the "bureaucratic snafu."

In passing, the judge also mentioned his opinion of the House Government Operations Committee report on "Filegate," compiled when Congress was in the hands of Republicans who believed that their purpose in Washington was solely to obstruct the Clinton administration, mainly by concocting and conducting bogus investigations. (Their history of irresponsibility and frivolousness offer a preview of the Republican agenda should they win control next fall.) Lamberth wrote that the House report was inaccurate and not "sufficiently trustworthy" to be relied upon for factual information, and therefore "inadmissible" as evidence in the case.

Now that the moldy remnants of "Filegate" have at last been properly trashed, can anything relevant be learned from its distasteful history? Certain of the most assiduous promoters of the phony scandal are dead or retired from public life. But others are still around, exaggerating in the same old style when attacking the Obama White House, ACORN, and Democrats in Congress. So the pronouncements of all those responsible for pushing the bogus FBI file controversy are forever subject to the deepest doubt. Googling the term "Filegate" brings up stories that should embarrass the Wall Street Journal editorial page; the Media Research Center, whose chief wingnut Brent Bozell continued to flog this discredited fake as late as November 2007; National Review Online; WorldNetDaily; Fox News Channel, then in its noisome infancy; and indeed, nearly every other organ-grinder and kazoo-blower of the Republican noise machine.

It took Judge Lamberth a long time to say so, but when these people (and their gullible friends in the mainstream media) cry scandal, it is safe to assume that there is no there there.

The impeccable bipartisan pedigree of "deem and pass"
Pelosi's plan outrages Republicans, but they used "deem and pass" well over a hundred times
By Joe Conason



When congressional Republicans predict ominously that Democratic deployment of a self-executing rule (or "deem-and-pass") will encourage them to engage in similar behavior someday, they forget to mention how many times they’ve already done it.

For the sake of anyone troubled by the ranting over this trivial matter, the historical record is indisputable. During the years when the Republicans controlled the House, they set records for the use of such "rarely used" maneuvers. Although their bogus sanctimony should no longer surprise anyone, the utter fraudulence of these latest outbursts has been held up to deserved ridicule by impeccably nonpartisan and even conservative sources. On the American Enterprise Institute blog, for instance, congressional expert Norm Ornstein writes:

Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status, and vice versa. But I can’t recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of "deem and pass."

That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration.

To be fair, Ornstein prefers the "regular order" and thus won’t endorse the use of a self-executing rule by the Democrats to pass health care reform. "But even so," he asks, "is there no shame anymore?"

For those who wish we could all just get along, the use of the self-executing rule is among the few things that can be honestly called "bipartisan." So says Donald Wolfensberger, who served on the Republican staff of the House Rules Committee for nearly two decades and as its chief of staff during the 104th Congress, after Newt Gingrich became speaker, in a brief but detailed column that he wrote for Roll Call.

He also posted that essay on the Web site of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where he runs the Congress Project:

When Republicans were in the minority, they railed against self-executing rules as being anti-deliberative because they undermined and perverted the work of committees and also prevented the House from having a separate debate and vote on the majority’s preferred changes. From the 95th to 98th Congresses (1977-84), there were only eight self-executing rules making up just 1 percent of the 857 total rules granted. However, in Speaker Tip O’Neill’s (D-Mass.) final term in the 99th Congress, there were 20 self-executing rules (12 percent). In Rep. Jim Wright’s (D-Texas) only full term as Speaker, in the 100th Congress, there were 18 self-executing rules (17 percent). They reached a high point of 30 under Speaker Tom Foley (D-Wash.) during the final Democratic Congress, the 103rd, for 22 percent of all rules.

When Republicans took power in 1995, they soon lost their aversion to self-executing rules and proceeded to set new records under Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.). [Naturally, Gingrich can now be seen everywhere on cable television complaining about such mischief.] There were 38 and 52 self-executing rules in the 104th and 105th Congresses (1995-1998), making up 25 percent and 35 percent of all rules, respectively. Under Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) there were 40, 42 and 30 self-executing rules in the 106th, 107th and 108th Congresses (22 percent, 37 percent and 22 percent, respectively). Thus far in the 109th Congress, self-executing rules make up about 16 percent of all rules.

Wolfensberger was inspired by a 2006 episode when the Republican majority -- in order to secure their own loophole-ridden, watered-down version of ethics and lobbying reform -- used not just one but three self-executing rules on a single bill.

Those convoluted moves were necessary to remove previously approved provisions that would have mandated disclosure of lobbyists’ contacts with members and staff, and lobbyists’ solicitation and transmission of campaign contributions to candidates, as well as a third amendment ordering the Government Accountability Office to study lobbyist employment contracts.

Four years ago is not ancient history. The same Republican leaders now roaring furiously about the self-executing rule were in the GOP leadership that used it so vigorously when they held power, including, of course, John Boehner. If we add up Wolfensberger’s numbers, Boehner’s team used the self-executing rule -- which he now denounces as a "twisted scheme" -- well over 100 times.

Rampant patriotism breaches on America's right
Glenn Greenwald



During the Bush years, the Bush-following Right's Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, frequently accused opponents of the Iraq War of being "unpatriotic," endangering the Troops, and committing treason: "They're not so much 'antiwar' as just on the other side," he often wrote. Today, the same Glenn Reynolds wrote (emphasis added):

If I were the Israelis, not only would I bomb Iran, but I'd do so in such a way as to create as much trouble for China, Russia, Europe and the United States as possible.

Calling on a foreign country to act in a way that creates "as much trouble as possible" for your own country seems to be the very definition of being "on the other side," does it not? (and his cover sentence -- "Are the Israelis less obnoxious than me? I guess we’ll find out soon enough . . . ." -- changes nothing). That's especially true since the action Reynolds is endorsing -- Israel's bombing of Iran -- likely would, according to America's top military official, directly result in the deaths of American soldiers:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, warned last Thursday that an Israeli attack on Iran might lead to escalation, undermine the region's stability and endanger the lives of Americans in the Persian Gulf "who are under the threat envelope right now."

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By Reynolds' own standards, blithely endorsing such outcomes would seem, definitively, to place one "on the other side." But over the last week, as the U.S./Israel dispute has blossomed, the American Right generally has engaged in much conduct that they have always denounced as disloyal and treasonous. Almost unanimously, they have adopted what Jeanne Kirkpatrick famously condemned as a "Blame America First" attitude, with super-patriots such as National Review and Charles Krauthammer, among many others, heaping all blame on America and siding with the foreign government. According to these Arbiters of Patriotism, this dispute is The Fault of America; indeed, when it comes to American conflicts with Israel generally, as Kirkpatrick put it in her famous refrain: "somehow, they always Blame America First."

Along those lines, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman yesterday formally condemned Gen. David Petraeus for warning that Israel's conflict with the Palestinians increases anti-American hatred and endangers American troops due to a "perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel." Foxman attacked Petraeus' remarks as "dangerous and counterproductive" -- and, indeed, they are: "dangerous and counterproductive," that is, for those (like Foxman and the neocon Right) who want the U.S. to blindly support Israeli actions even when doing so directly harms American interests. As Andrew Bacevich explained in Salon yesterday, the fact that Petraeus has now linked U.S. support for Israel to harm to U.S. interests will make it impossible for Israel-centric neocons to stigmatize that linkage ever again, and is thus "likely to discomfit those Americans committed to the proposition that the United States and Israel face the same threats and are bound together by identical interests." Isn't it Barack Obama's overriding duty as Commander-in-Chief to listen to his military commanders and take aggressive action against anything which undermines America's war effort and Endangers the Troops -- including Israel's settlement expansions?

Beyond that, wasn't it only recently that attacking Gen. David Petraeus the way the ADL has done was deemed so unpatriotic that it merited formal, bipartisan Congressional condemnation? As Joan Walsh proposed yesterday, shouldn't Congress now be preparing to condemn the ADL and Foxman for their attack on Petraeus, launched at him as he commands brave American men and women in harm's way, fighting for our country? After all, Petraeus is responsible for the safety of those troops and is trying to alert government leaders about policies which endanger those troops and undermine the American war effort. What kind of person would attack Gen. Petreaus for doing that, all in the name of serving the interests of a foreign government? One hasn't seen attacks on Gen. Petraeus this vicious since he condemned torture and called for the closing of Guantanamo, thereby provoking the unhinged wrath of America's Right.

And then we have what I thought was the patriotic standard that one should not attack the President in his conduct of foreign policy during a time of war. What happened to Joe Lieberman's solemn 2005 warning that "in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril"? This is the same Joe Lieberman who, along with his conjoined twin, John McCain, this week went to the Senate floor to rail against President Obama for the crime of Excess Criticism of Israel. Isn't Al Qaeda going to be emboldened if they see the Commander-in-Chief being weakened and attacked by these U.S. Senators as inept and our country riddled with internal divisions of this sort? That was the argument made by these same right-wing super-patriots for years (and, indeed, is now being echoed -- not ironically but earnestly -- by their mirror images on the dissent-hating, Beltway version of the "Left," such as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter). But for the neocon Right, that uber-patriotic standard seems to have been suspended as of January 20, 2009, and (like so many standards) is revoked altogether when it comes to Israel.

Whatever else is true, the American Right is now openly siding with a foreign government against their own, and bitterly Blaming America for these problems. They're protecting this foreign government's actions even though our top Generals say those actions undermine our war effort and directly endanger American troops. They're advocating policies -- such as the Israeli bombing of Iran -- which America's Joint Chiefs Chairman has gravely warned will seriously impede our wars and lead to the deaths of our soldiers. They're demeaning the top American General with command responsibility for two theaters of war. And, in a Time of War, they're attacking the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief -- and relentlessly depicting him as weak and inept -- all because he's prioritizing American interests over those of a foreign country. All of that seems to severely breach the standards of Patriotism they have long advocated and which have long prevailed, to put that rather mildly.

* * * * *

Perhaps most notably, all of this is taking place as a new poll of Israelis finds that "a sweeping majority of Israelis think [Obama's] treatment of [their] country is friendly and fair"; "most Israelis don't believe politicians who call Obama anti-Semitic or hostile to Israel"; and "more [Israelis] said Netanyahu's behavior [in this conflict] was irresponsible than said he acted responsibly." Put another way, the American neocon Right is demanding a level of American loyalty to Israel far higher than Israelis themselves expect, and (as usual) the American neocon Right is far more blindly supportive of the Israeli Government than Israelis themselves are.

James Zogby
Frightening GOP Behavior
Before dashing off to celebrate a hard fought victory in achieving health care reform, it is important to reflect on a deeply disturbing aspect of the debate that I believe spells danger ahead.

A Republican talking point repeated ad nauseam during yesterday's debate pounded on the theme that they, and they alone, had the right to speak for "the will of the American people." This took different forms: "the American people have spoken," or "you (Democrats) are ignoring/imposing your views on the American people" or "the American people have sent a message," etc. All making the same point -- that the GOP speaks for the American people.

Of course, the American people have spoken, and in November 2008 elected a Democratic White House and Senate and House of Representatives. But, elections and the workings of our democracy including the idea that the losing party respect the outcome of elections appear to be alien concepts to today's GOP.

The idea that the minority party represents the "will of the people" (not some of the people, but "the people") is the seedling of a totalitarian mindset. In this mindset -- democracy doesn't matter, ideas are not to be discussed, and opposing views are not to respected. What matters is that they alone have truth, they alone are metaphysically connected to the "mind of the people" can interpret their will, and because they have truth and speak for the people, others represent a threat and must be silenced and stopped.

This was a major concern last summer as violent demonstrators disrupted "town meetings" -- with angry chanting mobs claiming to represent the "will of the people" arrayed against the elected Congresspeople and their constituents who had freely assembled to discuss issues. The mobs didn't come to discuss or even debate. They were mobilized to disrupt discussion and silence debate.

Listening to the rhetorical excesses of last summer's demonstrators, or those who mobilized to chant slurs at Democrats over the weekend, or to the radio and TV personalities who incite with hate and fear ("that we are losing our country"), or the GOP Congressional leadership who charge much the same and incite in similar ways -- I hear echoes of last century's history. The behavior fits a frightening pattern and ought to be of concern.

GOP Applies for Health Care for Self-Inflicted Wounds
Putting all your eggs in one basket is a good thing when it's Easter. In politics, though? Not so much.

The Republican Party put all its eggs in the "Tear Down President Barack Obama and Defeat Health Care Reform" basket. This was a questionable action at best. At worst, they could end up breaking their own kneecaps.

Unanimously fighting health care reform was questionable at best because few in America didn't think the health care system had to be fixed in at least some way.

But at worst - yipes.

Yipes, because the President of the United States won the election campaigning on it. Both houses of Congress won majorities campaigning on it. And from the start, polls showed that the majority of the public wanted some kind of health care reform. Including a public option.

Yet in the face of all this, the Republican Party in Congress put every single one of its fragile eggs in a single basket and chose to unanimously fight health care reform.

The bill contained over 200 Republican proposals, and Republicans still unanimously voted against it.

The GOP was simply going to do whatever they could - unanimously - to defeat health care reform and bring down President Obama. Turn "Yes, We Can" into "No, He Can't." Republicans didn't just want the seats a party out of power traditionally picks up in an off-year election. They wanted it all. Majorities in 2010. The White House in 2012. At any cost. They got greedy. They were going all in - holding just a lowly pair of threes. Everything in one basket, no matter how flimsy that basket was.

Blinded by hatred, fear and pure politics, Republicans saw only their improbable reward. They ignored the profound risk.

No doubt the Republican Party thought things were going well. They had road blocks all over health care reform. They broke the Democrats' 60-vote super majority. Polls showed the American public unhappy with gridlock in Washington, unhappy too with the health care bill - as presented to them by the GOP Message Machine.

All the eggs were in one basket.

And the basket crumbled. And all the eggs crashed.

The problem is that Republican leadership believed their own lies. They forgot that they knew there weren't actually Death Panels in the bill, that it was still illegal to get federally-funded abortions, that everyone can really keep their private insurance, that the new proposals actually brought deficit down - by eventually trillions of dollars. And forgot that the public was, in fact, for health care reform. And for the public option.

When polls showed that Americans were unhappy with the health care reform bill, GOP leadership forgot that some were unhappy because It Didn't Go Far Enough. And others were unhappy because they simply didn't understand the bill. When similar polls explained the bill, the results showed that the public was... in favor of it! Just like at the beginning.

But more, Republicans thought they had an ace up their sleeve. They ignored that they didn't even have a sleeve.

Republicans thought that once the health care reform bill passed, they could campaign on repealing it. "It" being a bill the American public supported. Because it improved their health care. Republicans thought this plan was A Winner.

Winner?

Imagine giving a new kidney to someone, and then later saying, "We'd like it back."

Campaigning on repealing health care reform would be like campaigning to repeal Social Security, Medicare or Civil Rights. Even the most radically-reactionary Republicans aren't foolish enough to do that.

Once people have health care reform - even many who were against the bill - they will be loathe to give it up. Benefits will be seen immediately. Like reduced costs of prescription medication. Like small businesses getting tax credit. Covering all children. Not allowing insurance companies to drop you because you got sick. Like letting young people stay on their parent's policy until they're 26. Right now, this year. Give that up? Take back health care reform, once someone has it? Republicans actually, really, seriously want to campaign on this.

And so they may well have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Where once the GOP saw dreams of a majority in November, they may be lucky now to squeak by with that traditional handful of new seats.

You see, that whole "gridlocked Congress" and "Democrats had a majority and couldn't get anything done" thing - it's now gone. Out the window. The Democrats broke the Republican-forced gridlock. They passed the first-ever, comprehensive health care reform bill. By themselves. With no Republican support.

Republicans had a chance to claim a share of the reform. But they cut themselves out. By choice. They never even offered an alternate bill! Because they were putting all their eggs in one basket.

And the basket crumbled.

The public will now see the Democrats as alone being able to provide deeply-needed reform. And the public will now see the Republicans as the block that wants to take it away.

While Republicans are campaigning to repeal health care reform, Democrats will make the case, "Yes, the bill isn't perfect. So, elect more Democrats to get the improvements and also get the public option. That you want. If you elect Republicans, they will take away what you now have - they've told you so!"

But it's actually worse than that for Republicans. Because Republicans, who are usually so good at coming up with fake catch-phrases like "Death Taxes" made their biggest gaffe of all. Gargantuan.

You see...for the past year, Republicans have called this bill (say it all together now) - "ObamaCare."

Health care reform is now known to everyone - thanks to Republican Talking Points - forevermore as ObamaCare.

They gave President Barack Obama full name credit.

ObamaCare. ObamaCare. ObamaCare. ObamaCare.

Care.

President Barack Obama - cares.

And the Republican Party is the one who told you, who drilled it deep into your consciousness.

And the Republican Party in its blocking unanimity released Barack Obama. Faced with the reality of zero Republican support, the president finally took to the road and energized the Democratic Party. And energized himself. He kept his word to the public. He got a health care bill. And "Yes, we can" was proven. His Gallup poll numbers have already improved seven points.

The Republicans did it all to themselves. They put all their eggs in one basket. And in the end, the eggs were rotten. And the basket crumbled.

Why do Republicans hate America? They spent eight years under “w” destroying our security, our honor to the Constitution and the economy and now that Obama was elected they decided why not continue by preventing him and the incompetent Democratic Congress from doing anything positive.



They think the public won’t notice that they have obstructed and stymied everything the supermajority attempted to do. The sad thing is they’re probably right. I agree that the Democrats in Congress are pathetic. With a huge supermajority they should be able to ram anything they want through but they are too weak of will to do it. Even though I totally disagreed with what “w” and the repus did in their years at least the Democrats helped them push through all their policies. They were truly bipartisan and if they didn’t go along with “w” the repus and media would claim the Dems were unpatriotic and anti-American. Why don’t they do that to the Republicans today?



Unlike the Dems under “w” the Repus march in lock step to stop anything Obama wants like healthcare reform. Do you honestly think that if the Republicans had a 60 vote majority in the Senate and the big majority in the House that the Democrats would, as a group without dissent, block what they insisted on doing? The facts bear out the truth of the matter.



Republicans have brought this country to a standstill so that no progress can be made to resolve the economic problems we face. They just want political advantage rather than to help the people of this country who are suffering. They are repus first and

Americans second. They rail and vote against deficit spending for stimulus to pull us out of the near depression they caused and then when defeated on the bill they fight tooth and nail for the stimulus money for their state. How hypocritical is that?



Newt and the repus did the same to Clinton in the 90’s by shutting down the government and they are doing it again now. The public wants healthcare reform and a big jobs creation bill but Republicans are preventing it from happening. Millions of people are without any or very little coverage and millions will go bankrupt even with insurance if they encounter a major illness. Do the Republicans care? Of course not. Their only concern is to take away a person’s right to sue for malpractice but their message to those without is tough luck. They only represent the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the people secure enough to have good jobs with healthcare already. Their message is “Deal with it losers.” That is not what the American public wants regardless what FOX frauds tell you.



The Republicans don’t represent the average person in America. They never have and never will. They represent the powerful corporate and wealthy interests and if they gain a majority, expect the same that we got during “w’s” two terms. They are not populists. They are corporatists just like many of the conservative Democrats like Evan Bayh. I’m glad to see him go. I just wish more conservative Dems would also resign to let real populists take their place. Tea baggers claim to be just that but they are being used as usual by hypocrite Republicans. I am an independent and I wish we had more truly independent politicians that aren’t bought and paid for by lobbyists from corporate America. If something doesn’t change soon we will all be knee-deep in rancid repu tea bags

Objective observations over the last several months only confirm the well known truth that right-wing conservatives are much more adept at whining about political issues than actually doing anything constructive about them. Ever since President Obama took office from the most pathetically incompetent president and pathologically demented vice president of the last century, all right-wingers can do is practice revisionist history and pretend their policies and actions had nothing to do with the mess Obama inherited.



Right wingers complain that Obama is increasing the deficit as though doing nothing is the desired answer to righting our economic quagmire. If "w" would have left Obama with a huge budget surplus and healthy economy the way Clinton did for him rather than two wars, the largest deficit and worst economy since the great depression they may have a legitimate complaint but they ignore reality as usual. Like most delusional right-wingers, their mouths are bigger than their brains. They can go on FOX TV and rail against the evil liberals all they want but when it comes to actually governing right-wingers have no clue. They continue to claim that torture is no big deal but won't be water-boarded themselves and put their money where their big mouths are. What happened to that tough-guy attitude? Remember "Bring it on?" Why not bring on the water-boarding for right-wing right-to-life terrorists here in America? After the last eight years right-wingers have proven they can't govern and have no logical or rational ideas about how to correct this country's problems. Their endless lies and fear-mongering over the last 8 years got us nowhere. The public knows how pathetically bankrupt of answers they truly are. They won't even give Obama a couple of years to enact what needs to be done before they try to destroy him and pray for his failure. When the roles were reversed eight years ago they claimed anyone not fully supporting "w" was unpatriotic and un-American. How pathetically hypocritical is that in light of their actions since January?



Their leaders are blow-hard drug-addict talk show clowns and they demagogue the issues adinfinitum. They practice hate-speech toward their opponents and distort the issues then stand back and claim their violent incitement (by calling doctors "baby killers") of the easily manipulated low-intelligence-violent-NRA-faction-white-supremacist mentality in our society, had nothing to do with the murder of said doctor. It is one thing for an individual to be against something that they think is wrong or sinful. If you are against it, don't do it; that's what I do. But it's another to force your religious views on others that disagree with you and then contribute to the climate of violence that leads to their killing.



When is someone in the Republican party going to stand up to these insane religious extremists in their party who feel it is their duty to kill anyone that doesn't agree with them in the name of God? That sounds like the Taliban or Al Qeada. I am disgusted by continuously hearing Christians say they are glad a doctor was killed for doing his job or that homosexuals and illegal immigrants deserve to die. That is sick. You can't force others to follow your religion through the law. Try reading the U.S. Constitution. It is none of my business what a citizen does with their body or what they and their doctor decide is best for the health and life of their patients. When doctors are intimidated, threatened and killed for practicing legally under the law and it is condoned by the police and politicians then anarchy rules. That is not liberty. That is religious tyranny, a Theocracy, or as our founders feared, the End of the American Constitutional Republic. Keep our civil Constitution and government separate from religious megalomaniacs and institutions that desire to destroy our freedoms by forcing religious uniformity through a Fundamentalist Theocracy.

For all the local FOX right-wingers that respond to my comments like Pavlov's dog, I don't think you understand what the definition of freedom and liberty truly is. Why is it that you insist on dictating your views of morality on to other freedom loving Americans that don't see things as you do? It was my understanding that traditional conservatives thought the government should stay out of the personal lives of its citizens. I know that is what liberals like me believe. When it comes to my personal life and religious convictions the government should mind their own business. I don’t need the government in my bedroom or doctor’s office with me. Somehow FOX right-wingers think that it is their duty to impose their religion and morality on all citizens through the law. You can be a religious extremist all you want. You’re free to do that but don't try to force me to adhere to your religion. That, by definition is not liberty or freedom. That is a "Forced Theocracy".



I choose to live by my own religious convictions and will not yield to the government forcing someone else's on me through the law. Now that is real freedom and liberty as elaborated in the Constitution. This country guarantees freedom of, for and from religion. Our Constitution is a secular document and was never intended to be used as a tool or weapon by any particular religion to force their beliefs on others. I thank God for this great country of ours and for the genius of our founders to keep government and religion separate. That is what makes both religion and our government in America free and dynamic. Don't succumb to FOX right-wing dictator totalitarianism and arrogant talk show sycophant mentality. Read, study and understand the U.S. Constitution thoroughly. It puts any right-wing blow-hard talk show host to shame.



Happy 4th of July to all freedom and liberty - loving Americans

Based on what I hear from my local right-wing friends there are definitely two totally different ways of looking at current events. One is from the standpoint of inhabitants of planet Foxoid and the other is from normal people back here on earth. In delusional Foxoid world President Obama stole the election and is intent on destroying America, bankrupting our capitalist system and the Christian religion. To those of us here on mother earth President Obama is an intelligent and honorable American, duly elected overwhelmingly, trying his best to help restore our economy, rebuild our integrity and improve our international standing throughout the world.



On planet Foxoid President Obama’s birth certificate proves he wasn’t born in America, is a Socialist, and is a 2nd Amendment hating atheist who will not rest until all that is good and righteous in America has been eliminated. The rest of us think that adhering to the Constitution and respecting our laws are what good citizens and leaders strive to do. Doctor killing and liberal hating Foxoidians believe that Obama is the antithesis of morality in all respects while rational people think a man who loves his wife and children and has his mother-in-law living with him in the White House, is the epitome of real family values.



Why inhabitants of planet Foxoid are so paranoid of a good man who is attempting to straighten out the horrendous mess of terrorism acts ignored, two wars (one which was based on lies), endless debt and an economic depression that was thrust upon the country by a group of irresponsible ultra-conservative neo-con sycophants, is beyond me.



But for the good common sense of the average voting citizens of planet earth we could well be in the grasp of an ever expanding cosmic vacuum black hole of debt and death led by a novice Alaskan barracuda beauty queen that winks and flirts her way into a right-wing, talk-show Foxoidian political utopia. Thank goodness a supreme power is watching out for us and keeping us from going completely out of political orbit. The change we need won’t come over night but at least we are headed in the right direction now. Give change a chance.

What is it about today’s Republicans that cause them to give up on reasoned debate and instead just distort and lie concerning the issues? The issues should be debated on merit, not lies. Case in point is the Health Care Bill presently in Congress. The ignorance and histrionics surrounding this issue is typical of right-wing talk show methods. It is a fact that Rush, FOX news and the like control and lead conservative Republican thought in this country. No right-thinking Republican elected official will dare contradict anything said by right-wing media sources for fear of national humiliation on the airwaves. How many Republican politicians have gone on Rush’s program and apologized on bended knees for having the audacity to disagree with his views? It’s a sad day in American politics when an unelected drug-addicted blow-hard talk show host runs one of our two major political parties but that is the case in today’s essentially all-white rural fundamentalist Southern regional Republican Party cult.



Republicans are in such disarray and have no constructive ideas on how to resolve the myriad of problems they created over the last eight years that their only recourse is to just try to destroy and obstruct any effort put forth by our President to resolve them. The ignorance by which they do this is astounding. The Democrats should stop trying to compromise with them and just create their own program. It is futile to try and work with a group that is dead set against any health care plan. One comment from a recent Republican critic said, “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” as though he had no idea that Medicare was a government program. That ignorant view is much like driving cross country to protest the highway system. The heath care insurance and pharmaceutical industry are so desperate to derail the health care program they have resorted to the same scare tactics and lies they used in 92 and the 60’s against Medicare and Medicaid programs. It’s interesting to note that the administrative costs of private insurance companies are 20% while the administrative cost for Medicare is only 3%. Now, you tell me which one is more efficient and cost effective.



Not to be outdone by the health insurance industry, politicians like Sara Palin and other simple-minded Republicans have hysterically claimed that the government will force death panels and make euthanasia mandatory for the elderly and disabled. That is the most blatant lie perpetrated so far but the conspiracy theorists on the right fall for this kind of tactic every time. When you can’t win the debate on the facts just lie, demagogue and scare people that don’t know any better. They continuously do this on issues like abortion and the Presidents birth certificate. Anti-abortion extremists act as though abortion wasn’t even around until 1973, ignoring the fact that countless women were maimed and died from back-alley botched abortions for decades prior to 1973. That is why it was legalized in the first place. Another lie perpetrated by the right is that the government funds abortions. This is a blatant lie but it doesn’t keep right-wing zealot nutcases from repeating it ad infinitum. Are these the kind of people you want dictating to you and your doctor if you can use birth control pills or not? On the one hand they are against abortion for any and all reasons and on the other they rail against welfare mothers who live off the government by having child after child irresponsibly. They cater to illogical reactionaries and paranoid NRA types.



These right-wing Republican domestic terrorists incite violence in unstable people and that is why so many doctors and leaders from their ideological enemy’s lists are threatened and killed with guns or anthrax. For a political party that still insists Saddam was involved in 911 and that he had weapons of mass destruction what else do you expect? Until right-wingers address the issues honestly and stop all the lying and scare tactics they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. Otherwise they should be called what they are. Dare I say it? Ignorant and dishonest. 2nd letter below



Huckabee is doing nothing else but bashing Obama and, by extension, American foreign policy while on foreign soil. And that's quite obviously precisely how it's being perceived by the Israeli press.

But in branding what I wrote as "not just inaccurate -- it is a purposed lie," Huckabee doesn't even bother to address his Obama-bashing comments which I cited.

Huckabee doesn't even bother to address his Obama-bashing comments which I cited. Instead, he simply attributes the argument to "some in the left wing of the press" (an odd way to describe the conservative Jerusalem Post) and then assumes (correctly) that his followers will do the rest of the work: anything that doesn't come out of the collective mouth of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh is presumptively false.



The Republican base lives in its own alternative, (planet) or insular reality and any unpleasant or negative facts can be waved away not by refuting them, but by attributing them to the work of "the liberal media."



His denial is totally incoherent and substance-free -- it just tosses around the word "lie" and "left-wing press" without addressing any of the evidence I cited -- but in the warped right-wing cocoon he inhabits that is all that is necessary to dispense with facts. That's why roughly 30% of the country lives in its own world and possesses its own set of realities.



Criticizing American foreign policy while on Foreign Soil) which the Right has long insisted was a terrible sin:

Remember the Dixie Chicks in London or Al Gore in Saudi Arabia or Obama in Europe? They called all three of the above mentioned treasonous. How quickly the right forgets its patriotic principals. Why is no one on the right condemning Huckabee?





2nd letter



It’s so interesting to watch and listen to right-wing extremists at Town Hall meetings and those writing conspiracy theory op-eds with ridiculous references to Nazi’s these days. I noticed a crippled lady with a life threatening disease struggle to stand up talking about how she had been consistently denied insurance coverage by her private insurance company countless times and had exhausted her life savings. So many people that are fortunate enough to even have private insurance have also been dropped because of their condition and most can’t get private insurance because of pre-existing conditions. The tragedy of this story is that while the women struggles to stand with her crutches and tell her story another loud mouth tea bagger nut-case behind her a few rows back screams, her face distorted and ugly in it's anger, ignorance and selfishness, "I shouldn’t have to pay for your health care!" And these are normal, patriotic, "concerned" citizens?”



Tell me our present system is not a sick health care policy. It is what those who are against Obama’s plan want to continue. Doing nothing is not an option. These right-wing protesters are the ones lying, abusing disabled people, hanging people in effigy, destroying property, depicting Obama as Hitler and making death threats while ignoring essential medical needs of fellow citizens. These are the kinds of people Republicans are counting on to destroy Obama’s health care plans by lying to them and provoking them with fear mongering about death panels and forced euthanasia. Our present Medicare system doesn’t require that and the proposed system doesn’t either. Purposely lying about the proposed health care insurance system is sick and so is our political discourse today.

I keep hearing how GOP lawmakers are lying about and provoking their less discerning constituents by claiming America will become Socialist if we have a health care system that allows for a public option. Many tea baggers claim they want the same excellent health-care our Congressmen have and nothing less. Well, if going to a government run hospital is so horrible why do all these Republicans that rail against it go to the very hospitals they want you to reject? Case in point: Mitch McConnell went to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a very successful elective coronary artery bypass and he didn’t have to wait. He received the best care available. John McCain had surgery at Bethesda for a cancerous melanoma. No problems. Kit Bond, senator from Missouri, went to Bethesda for hip replacement surgery. Great results! He received the best care possible. No complains from him about government run health-care. George Voinovich, senator from Ohio went to Bethesda for heart surgery and a pacemaker. Perfect outcome. No complaints. Most all government officials use government run hospitals for the best care available.

And last but not least when a grad student at a town hall meeting told G.O.P. Chairman Michael Steele that his mother couldn’t afford medication and recently died of cancer, Steele turned his back to him and the crowd of right-wingers cheered and applauded. That says a lot about who really cares about your welfare and health concerns. Politicians saying one thing and doing another and the GOP Chairman and his sycophants ignoring those Americans in need of basic health care. Now who do you trust to do what’s best for the American public? The very poor have Medicaid. Veterans have veteran’s healthcare. The retired have Medicare. The employed have private healthcare. Those who are in need are the working poor who work in jobs that don’t provide health coverage, the unemployed / laid off and their children. Since when did America reject anyone as being undeserving of the basic needs of life as listed in the Declaration of Independence?

After reading the predictable Republican comments toward my letter recently, it seems that some local conservatives are in denial about their plight in today’s political wilderness. After eight years of total failure in governing both at the executive and legislative level they can’t even admit their countless errors. I sit and listen to Republican leaders like Rudolf Giuliani and Dick Cheney lie with impunity about there being no terrorist attacks during their eight years in charge, yet they ignore the fact that they were responsible for the worst terrorist attack in American history on 911, and numerous terrorist killings from doctor murders to anthrax poisonings and shoe bombers on U.S. planes and soil. This doesn’t even include the endless bombings of Americans worldwide by terrorists over the last eight years. Neo-Cons orchestrated the collapse of our capitalistic economic system by blowing the Clinton surplus, conducting two wars on credit cards, spending needlessly with borrowed money for bridges to nowhere and refusing to regulate or offer any oversight of our banks and financial institutions. This has resulted in the worst economic decline in the last century yet they now whine constantly about the Obama team’s effort to correct these problems and get people back to work. Right-wingers would apparently prefer that Obama do nothing in response to the problems they inherited and just allow the economy to tank into a full-blown depression so they can use it in their political attacks as a means of getting elected.

To listen to my critics’ complaints, their aloof, pompous and erudite attitudes show they are detached from reality when it comes to those citizens who have no jobs or medical coverage. Could it be that is why less than 20% of our population identify themselves as Republicans? Is it any surprise that Republicans have done nothing constructive during Obama’s first year in office? They have not cooperated in any way with the new president and have voted in lock step against everything he has proposed. They are the epitome of obstructionism and seek only to gain partisan political power rather than do anything that will help Americans in their time of need. They only represent corporate and moneyed interests yet claim to be common populists. They claim not to be racists but have no black Congressmen and always vote against any minority helping bills. They walk in lock step to Fox and Rush propaganda but don’t even blush when they claim “Fair and balanced reporting.” They try to savage Senator Harry Reid and claim his recent comments were much worst than Trent Lott’s wish that the famous racist, Strom Thurman would have been elected president. That’s just a pathetically ridiculous comparison. I think most African Americans care more about what a politician does for them than any misspoken comments and on that count Republicans are very much lacking. If hypocrisy were a disease they would have a terminal malignancy.

As an independent, I for one am happy to see that Senator Kennedy’s old seat has gone to the challenger in Massachusetts. It’s about time the Dems wake up to what working class people want in this country. Hopefully Obama will learn a lesson from it. It will be interesting to see if Mr. Brown will actually be an “independent and different kind of Republican” or the same old corporate, McConnell-like sycophant who cow tows to the whims of any big money interest typical of DC Repus. If not he will be gone in two years when he is up for reelection.

Prior to Obama we had eight years of nothing but incompetence, lying, unregulated greed and needless war. I expect Obama to change more of the way Washington operates in his remaining 3 years. He has only been there for one year and has had some good successes but I feel he has been way too accommodating to corporate interests and Wall Street bankers. Now that he is listening to Paul Volcker on financial matters rather than Tim Geitner, hopefully he will reinstitute the Glass Segal Act so the “too big to fail” Banks will be reigned in and kept from practicing the same high-risk financial games with derivatives that got us into the horrible mess that Bush allowed during his time in office. That brought us to the brink of a world-wide depression and employment is still suffering terribly because of Republican irresponsibility.

The Dems have also failed in delivering health care so far because of corporate interest and political games played by conservatives in their own party. Why the unemployed and those who have no health insurance can’t be added to Medicare I can’t understand. It is shameful that thousands of people die every day as a result of having no medical insurance in this country. We can’t continue to go on as we have in the past. Health care is costing a larger percentage of families budgets each year and it must be contained. At least the Dems have tried to resolve the issue. Republicans did nothing under Clinton and Bush and have been nothing but obstructionists under Obama. They stopped reform in all areas. They could care less about those without health insurance. They only think of the haves and ignore the have-nots. The conservative Supreme Court also helps corporate and repu interests by allowing unlimited spending by business on political campaigns.

Until the Democratic Party becomes what it has always claimed to be; a party for the average person they will flounder. They are just Republican-lite in many ways. If Obama can become more of a populist I think he can succeed in doing what he said he wanted to do but in this country nothing happens without money behind it. Selling out to corporate interests will be viewed as moving to the Right and help him succeed but he will lose the hearts of those who believed he was different than other politicians. We’ll see. If he moves to help working people who really need it, the loss in Massachusetts will have been worth it.

The key to understanding the populist right's accusations that Obama is a socialist

By Michael Lind

The tea party movement may have been started by Washington lobbyists, but it has tapped into a powerful strain of American political culture — a strain that has always presented an obstacle to reform in the United States.

American political culture was British before it was American. During the English civil war of the 17th century, two themes crystallized — and have influenced American public discourse to this day. One was the idea of the Ancient Constitution. The other was the idea of the True Religion.

Many British opponents of the Stuart monarchs claimed that they were defending an ancient, unwritten English constitution against corruption in the service of tyranny. Sometimes this ancient constitution was identified with the laws of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, and contrasted with the "Norman yoke" imposed on freedom-loving English people by William the Conqueror and his despotic successors after the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066. As history, this was nonsense, but as political mythology this narrative had enormous appeal. History was viewed as a gradual decline into tyranny, a long fall following a golden age of English liberty in the distant past.

This myth of primordial English liberty rhymed neatly with radical Protestantism. According to dissenting Protestants, the true church was the earliest church. Christianity had been corrupted over time, and Reformation required a restoration of the early, pure practices and beliefs of the apostles.

Put the myths of the ancient constitution and the early church together, and you have a view of history as decline from an original state of perfection, in politics and also in religion. Innovation is equated with tyranny in politics and heresy in religion. Virtue consists of defending what is left of the old, more perfect system and, if possible, restoring the original government or church. Progress is redefined as regress — movement away from the wicked present toward the pure and uncorrupted past.

This way of thinking is more or less extinct in Britain, its original home, but it became an important part of the political culture of the British North American colonies that won their independence from the mother country. Having become Americans, the former British colonists found it easy to replace the ancient constitution of the virtuous Anglo-Saxons with the 1787 constitution of the virtuous Founding Fathers, who were quickly elevated to the status of demigods like the legendary King Alfred.

Anglo-American Protestants viewed Catholicism as the chief enemy of the "true religion" of Protestant Christianity well into the 20th century, and some still do. But in the mythology of the reactionary right, the United Nations has long since replaced the Vatican as the center of global conspiracies, and the alleged Catholic threat to Protestantism has been replaced by the alleged "secular humanist" threat to the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. "King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen" becomes "Barack Obama is promoting socialism" — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It's hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

Nevertheless, progressives cannot cede the high ground of debate over first principles to this kind of reactionary, paranoid populism and fight instead in the swampy terrain of utilitarian social science. In a debate for the hearts and minds of the American people, Ron Paul will defeat Peter Orszag every time.

Against this backward-looking version of Americanism, rooted in early modern British fantasies about the ancient constitution and true religion, progressives must deploy a counter-narrative that is equally rooted in American values. The ideas of natural rights and popular sovereignty are, if anything, more fundamental to American political culture than the idea of political or religious golden ages in an idealized past. But natural rights and popular sovereignty can be invoked on behalf of reform. The history of basing civil rights on natural rights is one of improvement over time, not one of decline. The abolition of slavery by the 13th Amendment and the nationalization of civil rights by the 14th improved the U.S. Constitution, and Franklin Roosevelt's notion of economic rights marks a further advance.

Likewise, the idea of popular sovereignty, though it dates back to John Locke in the 17th century, need not inspire reactionary reverence for existing institutions, much less a desire to restore an alleged golden age. On the contrary, the sovereign people have the right to remake their political and social order every generation or two, in order to achieve their perennial goals in changing conditions.

This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said in his Second Annual Message to Congress: "As our case is new, we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country." And it was the view of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 in his Commonwealth Club Address: "Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demand that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract."

At the high level of public philosophy, the debate between the tea party right and progressives boils down to this: Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?

To put it another way: The American Revolution was a beginning, not an end. The real equivalents today of the American revolutionaries are those who view the republic, not as an 18th-century utopia to be restored with archaeological exactitude, but as a work in progress to which every generation of Americans can contribute.

Let the debate begin.

Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: December 3, 2009

Health care reform hangs in the balance. Its fate rests with a handful of “centrist” senators — senators who claim to be mainly worried about whether the proposed legislation is fiscally responsible.

Skip to next paragraph But if they’re really concerned with fiscal responsibility, they shouldn’t be worried about what would happen if health reform passes. They should, instead, be worried about what would happen if it doesn’t pass. For America can’t get control of its budget without controlling health care costs — and this is our last, best chance to deal with these costs in a rational way.

Some background: Long-term fiscal projections for the United States paint a grim picture. Unless there are major policy changes, expenditure will consistently grow faster than revenue, eventually leading to a debt crisis.

What’s behind these projections? An aging population, which will raise the cost of Social Security, is part of the story. But the main driver of future deficits is the ever-rising cost of Medicare and Medicaid. If health care costs rise in the future as they have in the past, fiscal catastrophe awaits.

You might think, given this picture, that extending coverage to those who would otherwise be uninsured would exacerbate the problem. But you’d be wrong, for two reasons.

First, the uninsured in America are, on average, relatively young and healthy; covering them wouldn’t raise overall health care costs very much.

Second, the proposed health care reform links the expansion of coverage to serious cost-control measures for Medicare. Think of it as a grand bargain: coverage for (almost) everyone, tied to an effort to ensure that health care dollars are well spent.

Are we talking about real savings, or just window dressing? Well, the health care economists I respect are seriously impressed by the cost-control measures in the Senate bill, which include efforts to improve incentives for cost-effective care, the use of medical research to guide doctors toward treatments that actually work, and more. This is “the best effort anyone has made,” says Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A letter signed by 23 prominent health care experts — including Mark McClellan, who headed Medicare under the Bush administration — declares that the bill’s cost-control measures “will reduce long-term deficits.”

The fact that we’re seeing the first really serious attempt to control health care costs as part of a bill that tries to cover the uninsured seems to confirm what would-be reformers have been saying for years: The path to cost control runs through universality. We can only tackle out-of-control costs as part of a deal that also provides Americans with the security of guaranteed health care.

That observation in itself should make anyone concerned with fiscal responsibility support this reform. Over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office has concluded, the proposed legislation would reduce, not increase, the budget deficit. And by giving us a chance, finally, to rein in the ever-growing spending of Medicare, it would greatly improve our long-run fiscal prospects.

But there’s another reason failure to pass reform would be devastating — namely, the nature of the opposition.

The Republican campaign against health care reform has rested in part on the traditional arguments, arguments that go back to the days when Ronald Reagan was trying to scare Americans into opposing Medicare — denunciations of “socialized medicine,” claims that universal health coverage is the road to tyranny, etc.

But in the closing rounds of the health care fight, the G.O.P. has focused more and more on an effort to demonize cost-control efforts. The Senate bill would impose “draconian cuts” on Medicare, says Senator John McCain, who proposed much deeper cuts just last year as part of his presidential campaign. “If you’re a senior and you’re on Medicare, you better be afraid of this bill,” says Senator Tom Coburn.

If these tactics work, and health reform fails, think of the message this would convey: It would signal that any effort to deal with the biggest budget problem we face will be successfully played by political opponents as an attack on older Americans. It would be a long time before anyone was willing to take on the challenge again; remember that after the failure of the Clinton effort, it was 16 years before the next try at health reform.

That’s why anyone who is truly concerned about fiscal policy should be anxious to see health reform succeed. If it fails, the demagogues will have won, and we probably won’t deal with our biggest fiscal problem until we’re forced into action by a nasty debt crisis.

So to the centrists still sitting on the fence over health reform: If you care about fiscal responsibility, you better be afraid of what will happen if reform fails.

For right-wing Republicans, the presidency of George W. Bush began as a dream come true. People calling themselves "conservatives" ran everything in Washington. Even before the GOP won both houses in 2002, Congress gave Bush everything he asked for. Republican apparatchiks controlled every agency from the Pentagon to the Treasury Department. Fox News savants expressed intermittent outrage that dissent was permitted. Rush Limbaugh's interviews of Dick Cheney sounded like a high-school girl gushing over the Jonas Brothers.

To rational minds, the resultant disaster could hardly have been more comprehensive: a lagging economy (the worst job creation since Hoover), yawning budget deficits (Bush doubled the national debt in eight years); two unfinished wars, costing thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars -- one completely unnecessary, the other so forgetfully prosecuted that Gen. Stanley McChrystal warns the United States and NATO could yet lose it.

Meanwhile, if Pakistani terrorists had done to New Orleans what Bush's hapless FEMA appointees did after Katrina, he'd have invaded Iran. Staffing regulatory agencies with See-No-Evil disciples of Ayn Rand made them feckless spectators of the banking crisis that damn near destroyed the nation's financial system, dragging the economy into the deepest recession since (again) Herbert Hoover.

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By the time the make-believe cowboy retired not to Photo-Op Ranch, but to the Dallas suburbs, his approval ratings hovered in the mid-20s. That they were so high testified to GOP team spirit. But what on earth were Republicans smoking?



Courtesy of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Limbaugh and a passel of pusillanimous GOP congressmen, we're definitely finding out. With the alternatives being rethink or go crazy, much of the GOP base has chosen the comforts of delusion.

Bachmann's recent Tea Party gathering on the Capitol steps provided a veritable carnival sideshow of politically deranged crackpots and loons. The throng was bused to Washington by Americans for Prosperity, one of those Scrooge McDuck-style outfits dedicated to preserving every nickel the rugged individualists who founded it inherited from their daddies.

Crazy has a pedigree: The founder of Koch Industries, the Wichita oil and gas conglomerate behind it, also helped found the John Birch Society. His sons also support Washington's Cato Institute, whose "resident scholars" churn out screeds favoring McDuckism, global-warming denial, etc. It's basically a term-paper-writing service for tycoons.

Prominent among the throng at Bachmann's gathering were persons expressing every form of Obama mania extant: questioning the president's citizenship, depicting him as Little Black Sambo, and equating him to such innovators in the art of governance as Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung. One guy held a sign proclaiming that "Obama 'takes his orders' from the Rothschilds," making him simultaneously a Nazi and a member of the Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy. It must have been a lively bus trip.

Froot Loops at the Tea Party was hardly news. Rational citizens noticed that even as Bachmann's legions were marching, Obama announced that both the American Medical Association and the AARP had endorsed the administration's healthcare legislation.

Unfortunately, virtually the entire House Republican leadership was outside on the Capitol steps pandering to the throng: Minority Leader John Boehner, whip Eric Cantor of Virginia, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Mike Pence of Indiana, etc. Needless to say, the Texas delegation was there with spurs on.

Last time I checked, Cantor professed to be a Jew. Directly in front of the podium where he spoke, a protester held a sign reading "National Socialist Health Care -- Dachau, Germany 1945," over a large photograph of stacked naked corpses at a Nazi death camp. Sheer political pornography: equating health-insurance reform with the worst crime in human history. This from the party that went into paroxysms of phony outrage whenever some publicity-seeking nonentity like professor Ward Churchill said Americans had it coming on 9/11.

Personally, I'm fed up with these ritual demands for apology. What's a forced apology worth anyway? Besides, it's not me Cantor shamed; it's himself. He did give a TV interview regretting the Dachau image, but he complained that Democratic extremism had driven the Tea Partiers to it, poor things.

Currently, the GOP's de facto leaders are Beck and Limbaugh, ex-disc jockeys peddling half-baked conspiracy theories for fun and profit. Every day, I get earnest communications from citizens who wouldn't know a derivative from a dog biscuit asserting that Barney Frank and mighty ACORN brought down Citigroup and Bank of America. People who couldn't find Nebraska on a world map are certain that global warming's a left-wing hoax.

Meanwhile, Michelle Bachmann, a smarter, better-educated (her crazy comes in paragraphs) and more photogenic Sarah Palin, is definitely somebody to watch. The big question is whether indulging lunacy will do more damage to the Republican Party or the country. Nobody familiar with 20th-century history can be entirely confident that reason will prevail. In troubled times, even great nations can go stark, raving mad.

© 2009, Gene Lyons

The Jerusalem District Prosecutor's Office on Thursday charged alleged Jewish terrorist Yaakov (Jack) Teitel with two murders, three attempted murders and other acts of violence.

"It was a pleasure and an honor to serve my God," said Teitel at the Jerusalem courthouse. "I have no regret and no doubt that God is pleased."

Teitel also denied recent reports that he had operated as an undercover Shin Bet agent. .. . The indictment also lists Teitel's efforts for more than a decade to harm Arabs, gays and lesbians, leftists, police officers and messianic Jews.

From Terror in the mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence:

Are there any broad lessons to be drawn from these acts of religion-inspired terrorism? Do they tell us anything about Judaism or Christianity itself? How about other similar examples from both religions?

Joe Lieberman and others have called for investigations into why an Islamic extremist was allowed to remain in the U.S. military. Earlier this year, it was documented how white supremacists and Neo-Nazis were being allowed to openly serve in the U.S. military, likely due to recruitment shortages for our various wars. A former Blackwater employee alleges that CEO Erik Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's company -- responsible for horrific massacres of civilians -- "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." Numerous reports have documented that Christian fanaticism is rampant in the U.S. military, including high-pressure evangelizing both within the military and in Muslim countries we occupy, and even violence justified by religious doctrine. Also it has been documented that groups within the military have emerged that view allegiance to Christianity as superior to allegiance to the Constitution or orders from superiors. [The Israeli military is burdened by the same problem: "Recent reports of atrocities committed by Israeli soldiers in the course of the intervention in Gaza have described the incitement of conscripts and reservists by military rabbis who characterized the battle as a holy war for the expulsion of non-Jews from Jewish land" and religious soldiers who refuse to follow orders to evict settlers because they perceive their religious duties as paramount.] Will Joe Lieberman's "investigations" include these problems? Should they? If not it would display the hypocrisy of Judeo-Christian political extremism which is so rampant in today’s America and Israel.