The American People Are being Flimflammed, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled by the GOP

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

The American People Are being Flimflammed, Bamboozled, and Hornswoggled by the GOP

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At the very outset I’d like to make an unequivocal assertion - entrusting our economy and the wellbeing of the poor and middle class to the GOP is like entrusting the well being of a child to a convicted child molester. If you think that’s hyperbole, simply ask yourself who was the last Republican president who didn’t drag our economy into a ditch. If you want to say Ronald Reagan, forget it. In spite of the fact that Reagan ran on a platform of limited government and economic responsibility, during his tenure he not only tripled the national debt, but did more spending than all of the presidents who preceded him - COMBINED.  In addition, he effectively destroyed our industrial base in the process.

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The GOP is only good at two things - propagandizing, or reframing their message to put the best face on their grossly malevolent agenda, and squandering our national resources in pursuit of that agenda. You see, they love the economy just the way it is - the rich are making money hand-over-fist, the government doesn’t have the resources to sufficiently regulate their activities, and the poor and middle class are in such dire straits that instead of making demands, they’re fighting among themselves for any crumbs that the rich are willing to throw at their feet.
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In short, the GOP is engaged in the process of lowering the standard of living of the American middle class in order to make their corporate friends more competitive in the new global economy. So if they have their way, our current condition will never change. In fact, they intend to make it a lot worse.
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And why shouldn’t they? After all, the recession isn’t having a negative impact on them or their corporate constituency - they’re doing better than ever. It’s only the poor and middle class that’s suffering, and once they get rid of Social Security, Medicare, and the unions, we’ll be totally dependent on the corporate class for our very survival. Then they’ll be right back up in the catbird seat, just like the good ole days, before they had all these pesky rules and regulations, and before that "socialist," Franklin Roosevelt, decided the American people needed to be protected. "Let ‘em protect themselves; that’s the American way, survival of the fittest - cope or die" It’s interesting to note, however, that they didn’t feel that way when their corporations were in trouble.
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It is in pursuit of this agenda that Grover Norquist, one of the most powerful men in the GOP - a man who’s gotten virtually every Republican in congress to sign a pledge to NEVER vote to raise taxes - indicated that he wanted a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Specifically, he said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
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Thus, the GOP wants a government just large enough to protect the interest of their corporate cronies around the word, send American youth to their death in pursuit of their corporate greed, and large enough to cover their gambling losses on the global market. But they want that same government to be too small to protect the American people from contaminated food, drugs, and water, and much too small to protect us from corporate manipulation, and safety, health, and fairness issues on the job - and they certainly want it too small to administer programs like Social Security and Medicare.
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This is a totally un-American and ruthless bunch. Norquist is also quoted as saying, "Our goal is to inflict pain. It is not good enough to win; it has to be a painful and devastating defeat. We're sending a message here. It is like when the king would take his opponent's head and spike it on a pole for everyone to see." The opponent that Norquist is talking about is the well being of the American people, and all those who advocate in their interest.
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Take a moment to consider the ramifications of his pledge to never raise taxes. That permanently protects the rich from having to pay their fair share of any burden, regardless of the national emergency. Thus, no matter what tragedy might befall this nation, if we can never raise taxes, that means that the burden of addressing that emergency must come out of the pocket of the poor and middle class in the form of fewer governmental services and protections. That’s their way of attacking the poor and middle class safety net. Since Social Security and Medicare are much too popular among the American people to attack head on, their strategy is to ravage the United States treasury in order to make them too expensive to fund.
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We currently see this strategy at work in congress as we speak. Republican House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, is refusing disaster relief funding for states hit by Hurricane Irene without being offset with spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. Talking Points Memo reports that Laene Fallon, a spokesperson for Cantor, said that "We aren't going to speculate on damage before it happens, period. But, as you know, Eric has consistently said that additional funds for federal disaster relief ought to be offset with spending cuts."

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This episode betrays much about the GOP mindset. First and foremost, it clearly demonstrates that the GOP leadership couldn’t care less about the welfare of the American people. Secondly, it clearly illustrates their gross hypocrisy. They claim that they’re so concerned about the national debt that they’re willing to deny disaster relief to Americans suffering the ravages of a hurricane, yet, they’re not so concerned that it prevents them from giving trillions of dollars away to the top 2% of the population.  Thus, by their demonstrated behavior, the GOP has betrayed their belief that subsidizing the wealth of the wealthy should take priority over relieving the suffering of poor and middle-class Americans - and these people are asking us to turn the government over to them? Please.  
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And Mr. President, the facts presented above are exactly why it’s so important that you refrain from confronting your base with terms and phrases like 'compromise,' 'bipartisan,' and 'shared sacrifice' for the rest of your days in office. Your base is sick to death of hearing them. We’re not stupid, and we understand that the American people have been compromised to the hilt. And engaging in bipartisanship with the GOP constitutes nothing less than consorting with the enemy of American democracy.
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As for "shared sacrifice," that’s really a joke. What you’re asking us to do is cut a pie into ten pieces, give the GOP nine of them, and then engage in negotiations over the sliver that's left. Give us a break, Mr. President. Stand up and fight. Give the American people a clear choice, and start lecturing the GOP like you did the Congressional Black Caucus.
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Oh, and one more thing. Get that quiver out your voice. We know you ain’t Martin Luther King, and we also know you’re in campaign mode, so don’t insult our intelligence. It’s disrespectful.
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Eric L. Wattree
http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.
　

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President Obama: Protect America From Economic Terrorists

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

President Obama: Protect America From Economic Terrorists

The primary reason that the American people are suffering is because President Obama is allowing the GOP to define our priorities. The very worst thing that could ever happen to the Republican Party is for the economy to improve, people to start going back to work, and for the American people to be happy during the next election. So the GOP has a vested interest in seeing to it that the American people are hungry, miserable, and divided until after the 2012 election. 
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In fact, the plan is to keep us hungry and miserable beyond the 2012 election, because the overall game plan is to lower the American middle-class standard of living to conform to the new global economy. Instead of enhancing economic uniformity by fighting for the rights of workers around the world, as we've done in the past, they've now decided that it would be easier and much more profitable to simply lower the American standard of living.
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The GOP is accomplishing this agenda by turning common sense on its head. They’ve been running around telling any and everyone who will listen that the way to improve the economy and create jobs is by funneling all of the nation’s wealth to the rich, and then cutting spending - that’s politispeak for cutting all programs that will put a dollar in the pocket of the poor and middle class. But that’s exactly what we don’t need, because jobs are not created by the rich. Jobs are created by the poor and middle class spending money on goods and services. That results in businesses having to hire workers to produce those goods and services.

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For this reason, Republicans are in Washington blocking any and everything the president does to stimulate the economy, and at the same time voting for every measure that they can come up with to keep money out of the hands of the American people. They’ve voted against extending benefits for the unemployed, they’ve voted against funding benefits for 9/11 first responders, and House Republican Leader, Eric Canter, has even threatened to block disaster relief for states hit by Hurricane Irene unless President Obama agrees to more budget cuts to offset any emergency funding. They know that as long as the American people don’t have money to spend on goods and services, unemployment will stay high and they’ll have a much better chance of regaining power. So essentially - no, literally - the GOP's best interest lies in engaging in economic guerilla warfare against America. Rush Limbaugh said it most plainly -"I want President Obama to fail." So in short, they want America to fail.

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The GOP is engaged in a confidence game against America, but a grossly uninformed American public keeps going for it over and over again. Once one generation finally catches on, the GOP will simply wait eight years and run the very same game all over again on the next generation. They’ve been running the very same game for at least a hundred years. They’re currently telling the American people the very same lie that Ronald Reagan told us thirty years ago.

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I pointed out the pattern in my article, "The GOP: A One Hundred Year Record of Swindling the American People":

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"One would think that conservatives would have seen the light, but their passion to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. Therefore, from the moment that the New Deal went into place, conservatives have been determined to dismantle it. The closest they've come to succeeding started during the Reagan administration with Supply-Side Economics, or, "Reaganomics" - and the battle is currently raging in Washington, D.C. as we speak.

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"Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan's vice president to be, called it "voodoo economics."

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"Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planned.
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"Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 - 15 years before the Great Depression.

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"And what about Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what does the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals was their "contract with America," a capital gains tax cut - for the rich.

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But what’s so curious about the current situation is, this time, even though we have extensive video and internet documentation of the disaster that took place under both Ronald Reagan, and later, George W. Bush, both Obama, and the news media, are simply ignoring it as though it doesn’t exist. They’re simply sitting around debating this Republican scheme as though it's a perfectly legitimate and viable option, while they have unequivocal proof that's it's nothing but a scam against the American people, and has been proven as such time and time again for decades.

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They could blow GOP claims completely out of the water with just one carefully edited video. They don't even need a video - everything the GOP is proposing was in place during the Bush administration, yet Bush's eight-year reign created the biggest economic disaster since the Great Depression. So it’s extremely curious to me why neither Obama, nor the news media, will simply say, these people are running a game on you - look. 

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While I’m not prone to buying into conspiracy theories, this an issue that we really need to take a look at. Why are both political parties, and the media, going out of their way to completely ignore facts that are so glaring that we have to shield our eyes to keep from going blind?

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Eric L. Wattree
Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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The Democratic Party is Either Asleep at the Switch, Intimidated, or in Collusion with the Domestic Enemies of America

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

The Democratic Party is Either Asleep at the Switch, Intimidated, or in Collusion with the Domestic Enemies of America

Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Democratic Party as the party of the people. Its primary mandate became protecting the average American from all those who sought to do them harm. But the current Democratic party is falling down in that regard in a very big way. When historians look back upon this period - and due to the election of the nation’s first Black president, they’re definitely going to scrutinize this period like no other - history is going to reflect that during one of the most brutal internal assaults on America since the Civil War Democrats were more interested in their individual careers than they were the American people. So at this point I’m going to do something that I’ve never done in print before - I’m going to speak strictly as a Black man.

I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster every since Barack Obama appeared on the American scene. I’ve gone from being hopeful when he threw his hat into the ring, to ecstatic when it became clear that he was a viable candidate. I then went from disappointed when he backslid on FISA, to solemn when America elected him. Then I became angry when he failed to adhere to the law and make Bush and Cheney answer for their “alleged” war crimes. Now the only word suitable to reflect the way I feel is embarrassed. I’m embarrassed that while Americans are under one of the greatest threats from a domestic enemy in our history, the most persistent word coming from the mouth of the nation’s first Black President’s is “compromise.”

Neville Chamberlain demonstrated conclusively leading up to WWII that you cannot compromise with a malevolent enemy, and that’s exactly what the GOP has become. They’ve demonstrated unequivocally that they have absolutely no regard for the American people, and they’re on a single-minded mission to utterly destroy the American middle class. Irrefutable evidence of that is in less than six months they’ve tried to throw America’s unemployed under the bus, along with first responders, police, firefighters, teachers, nurses and poor and middle-class children, while at the very same time they’re giving tax cuts, subsidies, and preferential treatment to the most profitable multinational corporations in the world.

While in terms of policy, I expect our presidents to simply be American and not cater to any particular racial, ethnic, or special interest group, I also expect them to bring the benefit of their life experience to the way they approach their job - after all, that’s why most Black people worked so hard to elect a Black president, so we would finally have someone in office who understood the Black experience in this country. But it seems that President Obama is so afraid that Rush Limbaugh is going to accuse him of liking Black people that he’s walking on eggshells. So not only is Obama NOT catering to Black people, but he’s overcompensating by going out of his way to negate his experience as a Black man.  As a result he’s doing a gross disservice to the American people as a whole.

Obama’s experience as a Black man would be invaluable in addressing the situation that the nation is currently facing. It has become clear that the GOP is undoubtedly on a mission to destroy the American middle class. To be graphically frank, the GOP leadership is on a fascist-inspired mission to make ALL of the poor and middle class, of every race, the new niggas.

But as the Tea Party clearly demonstrates, many White people can’t even visualize such a thing happening in America. Black people are under no illusions, however. We clearly see what’s going on. While most White people can’t even imagine a totalitarian situation being established in America, Black people not only know that it can happen, but that it’s happened before on a selective basis, because we’ve lived under Jim Crow. So by negating the benefit of his perspective, and his unique source of knowledge, Obama is doing the American people a very grave disservice. He’s not speaking out on a looming threat to American in fear of people misinterpreting his concern as a “Black thing” - or Black paranoia.

Thus, instead of saying “We should look forward, and not Back” with regard to Bush and Cheney’s war crimes in Iraq, as a Black man with a knowledge of the Black experience in America, Obama should have been in the very forefront of the fight to initiate an investigation, then prosecuting both Bush, Cheney, and everyone in the administration involved in that atrocity. Because by illegally instructing his attorney general to “not to look back,” Obama effectively relegated Bush and Cheney to a class that is above the law.

As both a Black man, and a constitutional lawyer, Obama should have recognized that the failure to follow the rule of law, and the establishment of a class that is above the law, is what led directly to Black people being lynched with impunity in the South. Now, as a direct result of his failure to take decisive action, the Republican congress, essentially, has an entire religion on trial as “Islamofascists.” That’s a very slippery slope. How far will it go? First, they rightly went after terrorists, but then it became all Muslims. Next it may be Black Muslims, then Black people as a whole, then liberals, then anyone who disagrees with them at all.

The GOP has a hidden agenda. That’s become abundantly clear by their concerted assault on middle-class workers across the country. They claim that their primary concern is the deficit and the welfare of the American people, yet they held the very survival of the families of unemployed Americans hostage to force a tax cut for the top 2% of the population that will exceed $4 trillion over the next ten years. They also claim that they’re for smaller government, yet Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan has hatched a plan to takeover every town and city in the state by installing “Emergency Managers” with the authority to cancel labor agreements and overrule the people by firing elected officials. And they say that they are for a strict constructionist interpretation of the constitution, yet the Republican congress has passed a bill saying that it will become law even without being ratified by the Democratic senate.

Every one of those actions are grossly un-American, and constitutes totalitarianism. Even the Tea party is beginning to see it, so where is the Democratic outrage?

So it’s time for the American unengaged to wake up, turn off Entertainment Tonight, and read a history book. It’s also time for the Democrats, including Barack Obama and his cheerleaders, to look past the next election and think about America for a change. That would be a change we could believe in.



Eric L. Wattree

http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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A Lesson in Republican Hypocrisy and Distortions

Beneath the Spin * Eric L. Wattree

A Lesson in Republican Hypocrisy and Distortions

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Is the modern Republican Party really “the party of Lincoln,” and responsible for freeing the slaves? I don’t think so. But the GOP regularly, routinely, and with a straight face makes that claim. One Black Republican recently told me the following:
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"Black people weren't lynched in the South because they were Black, but because they refused to vote Democratic."
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And yet another Republican told me:

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"It was Republicans who beat Democrats in the Civil War, thus freeing the slaves. It was Democrats who started the KKK as its military wing to intimidate the (largely black) Republican party who were running the south after the war. Can a leopard change its spots?? Are the Democrats now the party FOR the black people after being against them for so long? So many of you are duped by the Devil's trickery. a few table scraps from massa's table and you run right back to his side. The Democrat is the racist."

The above assertion is a prime example of how many Republicans can take a kernel of truth and create a banquet of lies. The truth is, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and so was Frederick Douglass and Dr. Martin Luther King. But since the Civil War the Republican and Democratic parties have completely changed their relative political positions, so relative to their political philosophy, the modern Republican party bears absolutely no relationship to its predecessor.

Prior to the Civil War the Republican Party was made up of big business interests and Northern aristocrats, and the Democratic Party was made up of Dixiecratcs and Southern agrarian interests - farmers and slave owners. Thus, the Republicans were progressive liberals and the Democrats (or Dixiecrats) were Southern conservative slave owners.

But that began to change during the Great Depression when Democratic President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, came out against the corporations and to the aid of the poor with his "New Deal for the American People." With the “New Deal,” Democrats ushered in workers’ rights. They created Social Security so the elderly wouldn't have to go to the "Poor House" or become a burden on their children when they became too old to work.

The Democrats also created unemployment insurance so people would have something to fall back on if they lost their jobs, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set rules of conduct for corporations that allowed workers to work with some semblance of dignity. The new law set a minium wage, overtime pay, child labor standards, and many other regulations protecting workers.

Prior to the FLSA corporations could work employees for as many hours as they liked, and they often set wages so low that families had to send their children to work just to survive - and many of those children were maimed or killed because they had to work under the most horrific conditions, such as in coal mines and the like.

But after President Roosevelt brought relief to the people with these “big government, socialist programs,” the Democratic Party began to become associated with the common man, and the Republican party embarked upon a single-minded mission to reverse these "bleeding heart liberal" policies and return America to what had previously been the status quo.

Then during the fifties the Democratic Party came out in support of the Civil Rights Movement. As a result, during the fifties and sixties the Southern Dixiecrats became disenchanted with the Democrats and migrated to the Republican Party. At the same time, many Southern Blacks began leaving the Republican Party to become Democrats.

Thus, the Republican Party is now a coalition of three separate constituencies with confluent interests. The first group is made up of traditional conservatives. These are highly patriotic Americans who believe in limited government, the primacy of the people over government, and fiscal responsibility. But the other two groups that have coalesced within the GOP are much more malevolent - international business interests, and social bigots.

It is the former of these two, international business, that controls the GOP. It's made up of wealthy and highly educated individuals with huge amounts of monetary resources, and thus, political influence - and they use every bit of that leverage to manipulate what has become their citizen army - the social bigots. These are the people who hate any and everybody who doesn’t look, think, and act like themselves.

The social bigots are the people we see armed to the teeth at presidential speeches, disrupting town hall meetings, and fighting against their own interests. In short, these are the “Joe the Plumbers” of the world who are being deluded by corporatist propaganda. Also among their ranks are the diehard racists who are still fighting to promote a segregationist agenda.

But the social bigots are merely the soldiers of the party. The corporatists, who control the GOP, have never lost sight of their seventy-year-old mission to undo the New Deal. But they've found that the safety-net that President Roosevelt provided for the people is much too popular to attack head on, so they had to devise a plan to chip away at it.

Then came 9/11, so they decided to used the war in Iraq to ravage the national treasury. They then gave themselves a $4 trillion taxcut to further deplete the treasury, and now they're telling the poor and middle class, "Sorry, but we no longer have the revenue to fund the programs that you've come to depend on for the past seventy years. And in the meantime, Gov. Scott Walker is hard at work in Wisconsin trying to dismantle the Fair Labor Standards Act.

So, can a leopard change its spots? Yes it can - and with regard to the Democratic and Republican parties, the leopard has changed in a very big way. But the modern GOP has never been prone to allowing the facts to distort a well-crafted lie. That's why they have such a fierce aversion to a well-educated electorate.

Thus, the facts dictate that the modern GOP’s claim to have any connection with President Lincoln whatsoever - other than the enemy of everything he stood for - is not only a gross misrepresentation of history, but a blatant lie. The fact is, if the Civil War was being fought today, the GOP would be the Confederacy.
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So don't get it twisted. Conservatives have ALWAYS been this nation's bigots, regardless to what party they were in, and they currently populate the GOP in huge numbers.

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PORTRAIT OF A BLACK CONSERVATIVE

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. . . Don’t mention it, Abe. I got this.
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Conservatives and Lower IQ

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Do Racism, Conservatism, and Low I.Q. Go Hand in Hand?

Lower cognitive abilities predict greater prejudice through right-wing ideology.

Published on April 22, 2013 by Goal Auzeen Saedi, Ph.D. in Millennial Media

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/millennial-media/201304/do-racism-conservatism-and-low-iq-go-hand-in-hand

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Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer | January 26, 2012 10:29am ET 

http://www.livescience.com/18132-intelligence-social-conservatism-racism.html

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Eric L. Wattree
http://wattree.blogspot.com/
Ewattree@Gmail.com
Citizens Against Reckless Middle-Class Abuse (CARMA)

Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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ODE TO A BLEEDING HEART

BENEATH THE SPIN • ERIC L. WATTREE ODE TO A BLEEDING HEART The one factor that contributed most to the downfall of the Democratic Party during the seventies and eighties was allowing conservative Republicans to seize control of the political rhetoric. The Democrats simply sat back and allowed themselves, their constituency and their agenda to be redefined in the eyes of the American people by conservative "spin doctors" without rebuttal.  As a direct result, they've allowed the term "liberal" to become a bad word in the political lexicon. When you consider how methodically the conservatives went about mounting their assault on the liberal agenda you can't help but recognize that it was a stroke of genius. Ironically, the conservatives took the Democratic Party's strength and made it a political liability. First they took the party's penchant for being concern with the plight of the downtrodden and coined phrases such as "bleeding heart liberals" and "tax and spend Democrats." They then played on the frustration of the middle class by tying civil rights legislation, welfare, and crime into one neat bundle as the source of middle class woes; then they attributed all of these problems to what they called the Democrat's tendency to be " bleeding heart liberals". Once the connection was made between minorities, welfare, crime, and the liberal agenda, it was just a matter of repeatedly hammering the message home. In addition, conservatives used such tactics as spitting out the word "liberal" as though they were saying rapist. In this way they not only implanted a negative attitude toward liberalism in the mind of the voter, but it was said in such a way that the implication was made that it went without saying that all the negative stereotyping of liberalism was true. In other words, their attitude seems to suggest, "I could substantiate what I'm saying about liberals, but I don't think it's necessary since we all know what they're like." And in the election that spawned the "Republican revolution" the voters said, yes, we do. Through these strategies conservatives accomplished three goals with one ingenious stroke -- they defined minorities as slovenly criminals, they define liberal Democrats as "soft on crime", and they allowed themselves the freedom to place these thoughts in the American psyche without having to substantiate their facts. Moreover, they accomplish all this in every sound bite, and without seeming to be racist, with the use of just one word, "liberal." In fact, conservatives have been so thorough in their disparagement of liberalism that at this point the word "liberal" is treated like vulgarity, and simply referred to as "the L word." One would think that Democrats would be up in arms in defense of their liberal tradition. It would seem that they would be falling all over one another in an attempt to debate this issue. But instead, these people are falling over one another trying to put distance between themselves and the liberal tradition. Where are their backbones? Where is that one Democrat willing to say, wait a minute! Read your history! It was the "bleeding heart liberal" policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that brought this country back from the brink of disaster. *******　 In 1921 -- eight years before the great depression -- Republicans took over the helm of this nation for 12 years. During that time there were three Republican administrations, the first of which was the administration of Warren G. Harding. History remembers Harding's administration for one thing more than anything other -- scandal. It was during Harding's presidency that the Teapot Dome Scandal erupted. His administration was considered the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States -- until Nixon's, and then Reagan's. Next, in 1923, came Calvin Coolidge, the president that Ronald Reagan is said to have most admired. Coolidge's policies of large tax cuts, allowing business a free-rein, and his encouragement of stock speculation contributed greatly to the impending stock market crash and the great depression that was to come. Then in 1929 Herbert Hoover came to power. During his administration the stock market crashed, starting the great depression. In spite of the fact that by 1933 the unemployment rate was at 33.3% with 16 million people out of work, the Republican, Hoover, just sat, thinking that the economy would eventually rejuvenate itself. During Hoover's administration 15,000 WWI veterans marched on Washington demanding that they be paid what they were owed by the government. Hoover responded by calling in federal troops to throw these ex-servicemen off government property. Finally in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a liberal democrat, was elected overwhelmingly. He immediately surrounded himself with a group of the finest minds in the country, including Columbia professors Adolph A. Berle, Jr., Rexford G. Tugwell, and Raymond Moley, known at the time as the "Brain Trust." After assembling these men and others he went about the business of developing a" New Deal" for the working class people of this country. The New Deal had two components -- one to help the economy to recover from the effects of the great depression, and a second component to give relief to the American people and to insure that they were never be placed in a position of total destitution again. To help heal the economy Roosevelt created programs that regulated business, controlled inflation, and brought about price stabilization; to bring relief to the people he signed The National Labor Relations Act which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining, and he created the Social Security Administration to guarantee workers some sort of income once they became too old to work. He also signed the Fair Labor Standards Act which protected workers rights and set a minimum wage for workers. With his New Deal in place Franklin Delano Roosevelt, this "bleeding heart liberal", not only led this country out of the worst, Republican generated, crisis that this country has ever faced, but went on to lead the free world in victory over Hitler in WWII. He then ushered in the most sustained prosperity that the world has ever known. One would think that conservatives would have seen the light, but their passion to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the middle and lower classes seems to supersede all logic. Therefore, from the moment that the New Deal went into place, conservatives have been determined to dismantle it. The closest they've come to succeeding started during the Reagan administration with Supply-Side Economics, or, "Reaganomics" -- and the battle is currently raging in Washington D.C. as we speak. Supply- Side Economics was a scheme hatch by U.S.C. economist Arthur Laffer and the Reagan crowd which was supposed to cut the deficit and balance the budget. The theory behind Reaganomics was ostensibly, if you cut taxes for business and people in the upper tax brackets, and then deregulated business of such nuisances as safety regulations and environmental safeguards, the beneficiaries would invest their savings into creating new jobs. In that way the money would eventually "trickle down" to the rest of us. The resulting broadened tax base would not only help to bring down the deficit, but also subsidize the tremendously high defense budget. When the plan was first floated, even George Bush, Reagan's vice president to be, called it "voodoo economics." Reaganomics, for the most part, sought to undo many of the safeguards put into place during the Roosevelt era and create a business environment similar to that which was in place during the Coolidge Administration. What actually took place, however, was even more like the Coolidge era than planed. Instead of taking the money and investing it into creating new jobs, the money was used in wild schemes and stock market speculation. One of these schemes, the leveraged buy out, involved buying up large companies with borrowed funds secured by the company's assets, then paying off the loan by selling off the assets of the purchased company. This practice cost the citizens of this country its industrial base. In addition, the bottom fell out of the stock market. On Monday, October 19, 1987 the Dow-Jones Average fell 508.32 points. It was the greatest one-day decline since 1914 - 15 years before the Great Depression. And what about Ronald Reagan's promise to balance the budget and lower the deficit? By the time he left office he was not only the most prolific spender of any president, but he also added more to the deficit than all of the other presidents from George Washington to his own administration combined. And what does the Republican Party propose to do about that? One of the Republican proposals in their "contract with America" is a capitol gains tax cut -- for the rich. History is clear. The conservative Republicans don't mind spending money, they just don't want to spend it on those who need it -- us. Remember, they're the party of Alexander Hamilton, one of this country's founding fathers who believed that only those who owned property should even be allowed to vote. He also said: All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of the people.... The people are turbulant and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Debates of the Federalist Convention (May 14-September 17, 1787). So, let's set the record straight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that "bleeding heart liberal", not only brought the nation back from the Great Depression and saved the world from Hitler during his life, but his "New Deal" for the American people gave us the greatest prosperity we've ever known, and allowed him to reach back from the grave to save the nation from Ronald Reagan 50 years after his death. That isn't to say that the liberal Democratic philosophy corners the market on what is in the best interest of the nation -- it is clear that both parties have had illustrious moments in the past -- but rather, this is one of those defining issues in American politics that determines whether this is to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, or a government where the citizens or nothing more than disposable resources for big business. In the past the Democratic Party has always been there to draw a line in the sand on this issue, but in recent history the liberal philosophy has been distorted to the point that even Democrats are distancing themselves from their own political philosophy. But what makes America great, are those dramatic moments in American politics when that one individual has the courage to put everything on the line to defend, protect, and save the American people disaster. And the annals of modern American history will clearly show that during those moments, it was a "bleeding heart liberal" that stepped up to the plate. First FDR, then Bill Clinton, and now Barack Hussein Obama. Thus, future historians will record that there is nothing more honorable in American politics than a bleeding heart . . . Because those hearts bleed for America. Listen to this heart bleed: 　 Eric L. Wattree wattree.blogspot.com   Religious bigotry: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does.

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