March 21, 2011--GOP Neo-Anarchists
He's a new neighbor and very nice, but we disagree about almost everything political. He is Dick Morris, the political strategist, FOX News commentator, and with his equally affable wife, a widely-read author.
In case CNN or MSNBC is more your place for news and comment, you may not know him very well. He began political life as a left-leaning Upper-West-Side-of-Manhattan liberal; then found his way to moderate Democrat Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas only to break with him to become a Republican political consultant before returning to Clinton when he was president and mired in the Monica Lewinsky affair, helping Clinton get reelected before he was forced to resign after getting tangled up in a scandal of his own; and now we find him back again in the very conservative GOP fold.
Dick Morris' career of peregrinations is enough to make your head spin.
So his new book (coauthored with his wife, Eileen McGann), Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs, is right down his current indeological alley.
The title says it all. The Revolt! replete with exclamation point, should even appeal to defeated Nevada Tea Party senatorial candidate, Karen Angle who, while losing to Harry Reid by six percentage points, spoke about "Second Amendment remedies" to Obama's "socialist" policies. The Second Amendment, of course, being the one that allows us to bear and presumably use firearms for more than hunting.
So before ordering a copy--I like to keep track of everyone's views, especially when they are good neighbors--I checked on Amazon to see how the book was doing. How it was selling (decently) and what readers were saying about it.
Reading dozens of readers' comments, I was surprised to see that an overwhelming number were very, very negative. And not from people of my ideological persuasion.
Dick and Eileen, who are at home in Fox World, were frequently accused of being socialists themselves!
To the untra-right they are essentially accomodationists because they support an agenda for social change and improvement. How to rein in, but not eliminate government. How to scale it back and make it more efficient. They want to curtail municipal workers unions, for example, but not fire all public workers and force them to work for private providers of public services. They do not call for the full privatization of public education, just its radical reform. They do not advocate privatizing police and firefighters, just eliminating their ability to bargain collectively while cutting taxpayers' contributions to their benefits packages.
Here's a sample from the Amazon Website. I warn you in advance that it is sadly typical of the lunatic-right's thinking and rhetoric and is thoroughly vulgar and distasteful:
We are in effect witnessing a lowest-common-denominator form of anarchism. There are lots of folks out there who are so frustrated and angry about how things are going in America (exemplified, of course by the fact that we have an African-American or, to the truly demented, African president) that they want none of it. Government that is.
Maybe it's OK to have a government-sponsored military--though I am not too sure about even that: the Second Amendment, after all, was to enable states to form their own militias--but to these radicals, pretty much everything else that the government does should either be eliminated entirely or turned over to a totally-unregulated private sector.
My poor neighbors. Talk about waking up one day and finding yourselves in bed with a lot of strange bedfellows. And what was it that Proverbs says about inheriting the wind?
In case CNN or MSNBC is more your place for news and comment, you may not know him very well. He began political life as a left-leaning Upper-West-Side-of-Manhattan liberal; then found his way to moderate Democrat Bill Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas only to break with him to become a Republican political consultant before returning to Clinton when he was president and mired in the Monica Lewinsky affair, helping Clinton get reelected before he was forced to resign after getting tangled up in a scandal of his own; and now we find him back again in the very conservative GOP fold.
Dick Morris' career of peregrinations is enough to make your head spin.
So his new book (coauthored with his wife, Eileen McGann), Revolt!: How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs, is right down his current indeological alley.
The title says it all. The Revolt! replete with exclamation point, should even appeal to defeated Nevada Tea Party senatorial candidate, Karen Angle who, while losing to Harry Reid by six percentage points, spoke about "Second Amendment remedies" to Obama's "socialist" policies. The Second Amendment, of course, being the one that allows us to bear and presumably use firearms for more than hunting.
So before ordering a copy--I like to keep track of everyone's views, especially when they are good neighbors--I checked on Amazon to see how the book was doing. How it was selling (decently) and what readers were saying about it.
Reading dozens of readers' comments, I was surprised to see that an overwhelming number were very, very negative. And not from people of my ideological persuasion.
Dick and Eileen, who are at home in Fox World, were frequently accused of being socialists themselves!
To the untra-right they are essentially accomodationists because they support an agenda for social change and improvement. How to rein in, but not eliminate government. How to scale it back and make it more efficient. They want to curtail municipal workers unions, for example, but not fire all public workers and force them to work for private providers of public services. They do not call for the full privatization of public education, just its radical reform. They do not advocate privatizing police and firefighters, just eliminating their ability to bargain collectively while cutting taxpayers' contributions to their benefits packages.
Here's a sample from the Amazon Website. I warn you in advance that it is sadly typical of the lunatic-right's thinking and rhetoric and is thoroughly vulgar and distasteful:
WE DON'T LIKE SOCIALISM. I don't care if it comes from Republicans or Democrats.....unfortunately, some of you are so busy humping a Republican's leg you can't see the big picture. I bet if told you that dog turd on the ground was a flower you would pick it up and smell it and put in your pocket and tell me thank you, huh? Just because I call it a flower doesn't make it one. Just because Dick Morris bashes Obama and his socialism doesn't make him a conservative. (Everything here is as written, including that which is illiterate. To view all the Amazon comments, see link below.)
We are in effect witnessing a lowest-common-denominator form of anarchism. There are lots of folks out there who are so frustrated and angry about how things are going in America (exemplified, of course by the fact that we have an African-American or, to the truly demented, African president) that they want none of it. Government that is.
Maybe it's OK to have a government-sponsored military--though I am not too sure about even that: the Second Amendment, after all, was to enable states to form their own militias--but to these radicals, pretty much everything else that the government does should either be eliminated entirely or turned over to a totally-unregulated private sector.
My poor neighbors. Talk about waking up one day and finding yourselves in bed with a lot of strange bedfellows. And what was it that Proverbs says about inheriting the wind?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
5:26 AM
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