Month: August 2011

The World: U.S. Democracy Is Based On Gridlock, Self-Preservation

Buck Banks

democracy-challengeFor most of its history, the United States has prided itself on its democracy as one of its most endearing and distinguishing characteristics. Indeed, we think so highly of our democratic system of governance that we will go to war to inflict it on other countries and cultures.

But from elsewhere on the globe, the U.S. democratic system doesn’t look so great these days, as Robert Grenier notes in Al Jazeera in English:

Americans like to think of themselves and their country as a model for the world. Indeed, this attitude of self-congratulation is one of the least attractive aspects of US culture when viewed from abroad, even if Americans themselves are barely aware of it. For most Americans, this common faith in the superiority of many aspects of their society – from popular entertainment, to higher education, to the judicial system, and so on – is part of the web of shared assumptions that underlie US culture. And among these, nothing is so firmly fixed in the American mind than the inherent superiority of their democratic political system.

….

No, to understand the core of the problem in the US system one must look deeper, at the nature of the system itself. Those in the Middle East who are currently struggling to democratise their systems of governance would do well to take a hard look to the US model: Not just to copy its positive aspects – and there are many – but to avoid its palpable weaknesses. As I used to note for younger cadres who suffered under my years of management in government, one should not doubt the value of a negative model. For students and proponents of democracy there is much to be learned from the US, even if the nature of those lessons is not always what most Americans would anticipate.

Anti-Perry Ad Digs for Sex Dirt

Buck Banks

Have you ever had sex with Rick Perry? Are you a stripper, an escort, or just a ‘young hottie’ impressed by an arrogant, entitled governor of Texas? … we will help you publicize your direct dealings with a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, ‘family values’ hypocrite and fraud.

— A Texas supporter of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), who has taken out a full-page ad in an Austin alternative weekly newspaper publicly seeking women (or men) who have slept with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, reported by Salon.

In 1981 Interview, ‘Rove’s Brain’ Lee Atwater Connects the Dots Between Jim Crow Racist Policies and GOP’s Push for Budget Cuts

Jon Ponder

Lee Atwater
Lee Atwater
In 1981, the late Lee Atwater, political mentor to Karl Rove and George W. Bush and one of the originators of today’s Republican propaganda attack machine, was interviewed anonymously by political scientist Alexander P. Lamis for his book, Two-Party South. In the interview, Atwater explained how the GOP, in its appeal to Southern voters starting with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, reconfigured overtly racist policies from the Jim Crow era into Reagan-era economic policies, including particularly budget cuts targeting the poor:

LEE ATWATER: As to the whole Southern strategy that [Nixon political strategist] Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

QUESTIONER: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

ATWATER: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

(Sources: Hullaballoo, New York Times)