Conservatives Keep Mangling American History - Maybe That is Why Their Agenda is Anti-American

Conservatives Keep Mangling American History - Maybe That is Why Their Agenda is Anti-American

The mortgage crisis began in 2006 and it’s all President Obama’s fault—at least according to Fox News host Sean Hannity. Hannity recently blamed [1] Obama—“his policies, his economic plan, his fault”—for the mortgage crisis, ignoring who was actually president (that would be George W. Bush) as the housing market slipped [2].

Hannity’s is just one example of the selective memory and historical revision frequently on display in the conservative movement. Right-wing pundits, politicians and pseudo-historians are nibbling away at objective historical truths to rewrite history for present-day purposes, and hardly any topic is off-limits: glorifying the “Reagan Revolution” to children, sugarcoating the Jim Crow South and revising textbooks to offer a favorable view on Phyllis Schlafly—among many others.

Below, read about eight ways in which conservatives try to rewrite, sugarcoat or ignore aspects of American history.

1. Michele Bachmann on the founding fathers and slavery. Propelled to the front of the Republican field after her victory in the Iowa straw poll, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann’s historical views are notoriously error-prone. In one her infamous gaffes, she said [3] the founding fathers “work[ed] tirelessly to end slavery” (in fact, George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves) and that John Quincy Adams [4] was a founding father—he was born in 1767.

Bachmann was a research assistant to John Eidsmoe for his 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution: The Faith of our Founding Fathers, in which Eidsmoe wrote, “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God. In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

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2. Secession was fine, dandy and legal. Texas Governor and Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry is fond of pro-secession comments [7]; in 2009, he joked [8] that “we can leave anytime we want. So we’re kind of thinking about that again.”

In his dreams. In fact, these attempts at humor sidestep what secession actually leads to: a nullification crisis, a Civil War, hundreds of thousands of casualties and the federal government as the victor anyway. And secession is illegal. In 1866 the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White [9] that Texas’s ordinance of secession was “absolutely null.”

...3. Forgetting September 11? Conservatives have an uncanny ability to misremember when the September 11 attacks occurred. In July, Fox News [12] host Eric Bolling said “we were certainly safe between 2000 and 2008?—?I don’t remember any terrorist attacks on American soil during that period of time.” (In his “apology [13],” he accepted no blame: “Yesterday, I misspoke when saying that there were no US terror attacks during the Bush years. Obviously, I meant in the aftermath of 9/11, but that is when the radical liberal left pounced on us…. thank you liberals for reminding me how petty you can be.”)

A surprising slip came from ex–New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In January 2010 he claimed [14] that “we had no domestic attacks under Bush.”

.....4. Mike Huckabee’s “Learn Our History.” Mike Huckabee’s cartoon history series is whitewashing American history. While claiming to engage children in an easy-to-digest format without “misrepresentations…historical inaccuracies, personal biases and political correctness,” personal biases somehow make an appearance [17]. Each video is produced with consultation from Learn Our History’s “Council of Masters;” one “Master,” Larry Schweikart, is the author of 48 Liberal Lies About American History, including “Lie #45: LBJ’s Great Society Had a Positive Impact on the Poor.”

In a DVD [18] on the “Reagan Revolution,” viewers are invited to “journey to a time when America suffered from financial, international and moral crisis:” Washington, DC, 1977. A knife-wielding African-American man demands “gimme yo’ money!” Ronald Reagan’s arrival—against triumphant music playing and a caption reading “one man transformed the nation…and the world”—changed all that for the better, the DVD suggests.

5. The New Deal did harm. Anti–New Deal views have long reverberated among Republicans. Bachmann [19] blamed FDR for turning a recession into a depression by passing “Hoot-Smalley Tariff” (never mind that it’s Smoot-Hawley and it was passed three years prior to Roosevelt’s inauguration). And a barrage of recent books, including FDR’s Folly, by Jim Powell of the Cato Institute, and Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man, blame FDR and the New Deal for prolonging the Depression. Newt Gingrich has praised [20] The Forgotten Man, with its anti-stimulus message, as a blueprint for a return to “Whig-style free-market liberalism.”

6. David Barton. An amateur-turned-“historian,” Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, a pseudo-historical organization “with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” says its website. One of his revisions [21] insists that John Adams claimed that government cannot exist without the Holy Ghost. In his presentations of the subject, Barton misunderstands Adams’s mocking statement about fervent believers in the Holy Ghost as historical truth, omitting succeeding sentences wherein Adams describes those beliefs to be “Artifice and Cunning.”

Barton’s claims about the religious roots of the country have been debunked from academics, even from Christian colleges. John Fea, chair of the history department at Messiah College, wrote [22], “Barton claims to be a historian. He is not. He has just enough historical knowledge, and just enough charisma, to be very dangerous.”

7. Texas Textbook Revisions. Last year the Texas Board of Education revised public school textbooks, expanding [23]discussion of Ronald Reagan at the expense of public figures like Justice Sonia Sotomayor, omitting reference to Thomas Jefferson as an Enlightenment thinker in favor of Protestant leader John Calvin, and offering favorable views [24] on Senator Joseph McCarthy, women’s rights opponent Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation.

Many historians opposed [25] the changes—but the board voted along party lines [26] to approve of the revisions. Nearly 5 million Texas students live with the result.

8. Jim Crow wasn’t that bad. Last December, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi sugarcoated Jim Crow–era Mississippi, saying [27] of his native Yazoo County, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad,” and, “You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders.”

In reality, 1960s Mississippi was 42 percent black, of which only 2 percent were registered to vote, according to the nonprofit African-American Registry [28]. Civil rights activists were murdered [29] and students rioted [30] against integration. “Not bad” indeed! 

The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were both based on Liberal political theory. Democracy itself is a liberal concept. As is small-r republicanism. The latter is tricky, trying to find the balance between individual rights and the other extreme where everyone, citing their individual rights, does anything they please. Conservatives plainly do not believe in balance. They believe the financial elite should have all the power and run the country instead of the people.

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

Please Vote for Romney The Corporate Socialist

During the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney has lashed out at the Obama administration’s taxpayer subsidized grants to clean energy start-up companies. “The U.S. government shouldn’t be playing venture capitalist,” wrote Romney in October. “The very process invites cronyism and outright corruption.” But public records show that Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, repeatedly persuaded the government to play venture capitalist when it came to its own portfolio of companies.

News outlets have recently focused attention on Romney’s history as a businessman at Bain, which he founded in 1984. What hasn’t been reported, or fully explained by the candidate, is how Romney often got ahead in the private sector by using government help.

The likely GOP nominee made much of his estimated $250 million fortune buying companies, reorganizing them, and selling them for a profit. Though Romney, whose only government experience is his one term as Massachusetts governor, is quick to claim that he turned around investments using sound management and data-driven strategies, he does not mention one aspect of his success. Bain Capital owned companies that padded their profits using millions in public subsidies. In other cases, firms owned by Bain employed K Street lobbying firms to pursue lucrative government programs.

Gosh, are you as shocked as I am. Conservatives say they are all self-made, pulled themselves up by their own boot straps types and always get ahead by hard work. here we have Romney, just one among many conservatives who used big government, de facto tax payer subsidized money, special favors and inside contacts to get ahead - kind of like the Russian mob.

Starting in 2007, Bain Capital began retaining various  lobbying firms to pressure lawmakers to keep open a loophole that allows much of the earnings by private equity managers to be taxed as capital gains rather than the top income bracket of 35 percent. Given Romney’s profit-sharing retirement deal, the campaign to extend the loophole, which still hasn’t been closed, likely boosted the candidate’s fortune. (Romney has refused to release his tax return, leaving questions about his income.)

As Romney pillories Obama for using the government to fix problems in society (health reform, the auto bailout, etc.), he invites a closer examination of his own career. A balanced view of the Romney record shows he has never had any qualms about government help when it came to his own bottom line. Whether through hiring insider lobbyists or funneling taxpayer subsidies to his companies, government assistance has been part and parcel to the rise of Romney.

Is Romney's middle name Marx or Mao or Gov'mint Welfare Baby. He and his comrades are the ones who fed at the trough like pigs and bankrupted the country. Isn't that just the kind of twisted immoral crook America needs as its next president. You know, since G.W. Bush is ineligible to run again.

America's Crazy Drug War - Why Are Cops Losing Their Jobs for Questioning the Drug War?

America's Crazy Drug War - Why Are Cops Losing Their Jobs for Questioning the Drug War?

With so much bloodshed, hundreds of thousands incarcerated, and millions of families torn apart, one would have to be blind not to question the failed war on drugs. Given their close proximity to the devastation it has wrought, it’s only natural that the police and Border Patrol officers tasked with executing the drug war for the last four decades would have the strongest views. Yet, around the country, some have been fired for criticizing the drug war as well as supporting drug decriminalization.

On April 13, 2009, 26-year-old Bryan Gonzalez was patrolling the U.S.–Mexican border near Deming, New Mexico, when he pulled up next to fellow agent Shawn Montoya for a break. The two began a casual discussion about the drug-related violence in Mexico, at which point Gonzalez shared his belief that drug legalization would end both the drug war and the cartel violence. When Montoya asked why Mexicans cross the border and steal jobs, Gonzalez responded that Mexicans came to the United States due to a lack of available jobs in Mexico.

Although he was born in the United States, Gonzalez informed Montoya that he had dual U.S.–Mexican citizenship until the age of 18, which gave him a unique understanding and sympathy for the migrants who cross the border. Gonzalez also mentioned Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, an organization of mostly retired law enforcement officials opposed to the drug war.

Little did Gonzalez know that know that voicing his beliefs would cost him his job. According to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, he was reported to his supervisor, who sent word of the exchange to the Joint Intake Command in Washington, D.C., which launched an investigation into the matter.

In October 2009, after two years as a officer with excellent reviews from his employer, Gonzalez received a letter of termination from the Border Patrol, citing his “personal views that were contrary to the core characteristics of Border Patrol agents, which are patriotism, dedication, and esprit de corps.”

“I was terminated not because my service was inadequate, but because I hold certain opinions that are shared by millions of my fellow Americans,” Gonzalez is quoted as saying in an ACLU press release. “I am no less patriotic or dedicated to excellence in my work because I respectfully disagree with some of our current border enforcement policies. It was wrong for the U.S. Border Patrol to retaliate against me for exercising my free speech rights guaranteed by the very Constitution I swore to uphold.”

Micah McCoy, communications specialist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Mexico, told AlterNet, “People don’t give up the right to have a political opinion when they put on a uniform of a government agency.” McCoy specified that Gonzalez was not expressing his view as a representative of the border patrol.  “It’s not like he was going on TV and saying all drugs should be legalized. He was having a casual conversation with a coworker that was reported to a supervisor by a third party who wasn’t even present during the conversation. And Bryan subsequently got fired for it.”

In January, the ACLU of New Mexico filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Gonzalez. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is trying to have the case thrown out on behalf of the Border Patrol because Gonzalez has already lost a discrimination complaint filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which backed the Border Patrol’s position that Gonzalez could no longer be trusted to uphold the law.

The more disturbing element to this story is that the retaliation against Gonzalez for his critical view of the drug war is not an isolated incident. Several law enforcement officers have faced similar reprisals for questioning the wisdom of U.S. drug policies. 

Its shame that outdated drug law policy cannot even be questioned. Making drugs such as marijuana legal would remove that completely from the costly court and jail system. Making the penalties for other drugs much lower would remove the very element of risk that inflates the costs that gives some pretty awful people motivation to commit more serious violent crime to protect their profits.

Solely For the Sake of Political Grand Standing, Republicans Are Holding The Country Hostage for The Second Time in Four Months, This Time Over Disaster Relief

Solely For the Sake of Political Grand Standing Republican Are Holding The Country Hostage for The Second Time in Four Months, This Time Over Disaster Relief

Sometime next week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will officially run out of money if Congress doesn’t act. Unprecedented demands and gamesmanship by Republicans in the House of Representatives are threatening a funding bill for the agency, along with disaster relief for Americans affected by the recent hurricanes. Watching the spectacle unfold, it’s impossible not to marvel at short Republican memories—it wasn’t that long ago that playing politics with FEMA proved disastrous for the GOP.

By many accounts, the federal government’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans was a turning point in George W. Bush’s presidency. His administration was shown to be incapable of even basic functions of government—helping desperate citizens in desperate need following a natural disaster. After they left the White House, several Bush aides acknowledged that this was the moment that the Bush presidency was irredeemably lost:

    Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: Politically, it was the final nail in the coffin.

    Matthew Dowd, Bush’s pollster and chief strategist for the 2004 presidential campaign: Katrina to me was the tipping point. The president broke his bond with the public. Once that bond was broken, he no longer had the capacity to talk to the American public. State of the Union addresses? It didn’t matter. Legislative initiatives? It didn’t matter. P.R.? It didn’t matter. Travel? It didn’t matter. I knew when Katrina—I was like, man, you know, this is it, man. We’re done.

    

In the weeks and months after the disaster, FEMA and Bush’s appointee to lead it, Michael Brown, quickly became the focal point of the botched administration response. Brown was the former head of the International Arabian Horse Association before coming to the agency, which needless to say didn’t give him much experience in dealing with natural disaster response. But he was a close ally to Bush during his political career, and that’s what counted.

It turned out that FEMA had been hollowed out as part of deliberate strategy—one based on the conservative philosophy that the federal government simply shouldn’t have a large role in people’s lives, even if it meant rescuing those lives from disaster. Bush’s first appointee to head FEMA, Joe Allbaugh, told the Senate during his confirmation process that “Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management…. Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.” As the years went on, career FEMA employees complained that “our professional staff are being systematically replaced by politically connected novices and contractors.” The deliberate neglect culminated in Brown’s appointment, followed by hundreds and hundreds of potentially unnecessary deaths in a major American city.

This anti–federal government philosophy led to both a human and political disaster. Yet today, Republicans in the House of Representatives are less than seventy-two hours away from leaving FEMA without any money to operate as they continue a crusade against federal spending.

When Hurricane Irene walloped twelve states in late August, FEMA took emergency measures to divert funding from many other projects to respond to the destruction. Now, the agency has only $215 million on hand, which is far below the $1 billion the agency wants to have access to at all times in case disaster should strike again. It could completely run out of money as soon as Monday.

Over the past couple of weeks, a non-controversial bill to extend government funding through mid-November suddenly heated up when Republicans refused to allow the additional FEMA funding without also including offsetting cuts from other programs, which is an unprecedented move—there has generally always been bipartisan agreement on providing immediate disaster aid. But Republicans passed a bill last night that offsets some of the disaster aid with $1.5 billion in cuts from a loan program for energy efficient vehicle production, along with rescinding $100 million in loans to the scandal-plagued company Solyndra.

The Senate has already passed—with the help of ten Republicans—a bill that provides the disaster relief with no strings attached, and majority leader Harry Reid has already pledged to kill the House bill.

House Republicans knew the Senate would not accept their bill, but are intent on catering to the hardline fiscal conservatives. “Change like this is hard,” House majority leader Eric Cantor defiantly said Wednesday. “We’ll find a way forward so that we can reflect expectations that taxpayers have that we are going to begin to start spending their money more prudently.”

Clearly, Republicans don’t find it “prudent” to ensure money for fundamental government functions like helping citizens after natural disasters. As Ben Adler has noted, the GOP candidates running for president show a similar contempt for the role of the federal government. The party was bitten badly by this philosophy once before—but clearly they drew no lessons from it.

Conservatives like to claim government can do no good. They were very hard to make sure that becomes the new reality. Americans are a proud bunch and like to do as much on their own as possible, but everyone runs into some situation eventually that is a little overwhelming. Hurricanes, floods and tornadoes are such events. They can cripple and even destroy small towns and individual lives. Conservative Republicans seem to be OK with that.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley(R) Signs On To Republican Plan to Destroy Democracy One Step At a Time

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley(R) Signs On To Republican Plan to Destroy Democracy One Step At a Time

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley(R) has a unique solution to the problem she created by signing a law in May that will require voters to present a government-issued photo ID at the polls — she will personally drive you to the DMV. As with any voter ID requirement, Haley’s law could have the effect of suppressing the vote of thousands of people who don’t currently have South Carolina IDs, especially minorities, college students, rural voters, and the elderly. For these people, it is often difficult or impossible to travel to the DMV to obtain a license, so many wind up not being able to cast a ballot come Election Day.

But Haley isn’t worried because she has a plan. “Find me those people that think that this is invading their rights,” she told a local Fox affiliate, “And I will go take them to the DMV myself and help them get that picture ID.”

So, assuming Haley’s offer is genuine, how many rides will the governor be giving? South Carolina’s election commission estimates that 178,000 of the state’s voters lack the ID necessary to allow them to exercise their right to vote. Google Maps estimates that it will take 11 minutes for Nikki Haley to drive from the governor’s mansion to the nearest branch of the state DMV:

That DMV branch is open five days a week for 8.5 hours a day. Assuming Haley wants to save some time and gas, we’ll assume that her car can fit four passengers. That means that if every single one of these 178,000 voters were to present themselves to the governor’s mansion and request the free ride Haley just offered them, it would take just over 7 years, 4 months, 3 weeks and 5 days if she spends every single minute that the DMV is open doing nothing but playing taxi driver. That’s nearly two full terms — assuming there’s no traffic.

A simpler solution: Don’t jeopardize peoples’ right to vote in the first place.

Haley belongs to the correct party. She is neck deep in corruption and along with the South Carolina's conservative legislature is determined to have government by and for the elite and special interests.