Tag: Reactionaries

Jan 24 2013

Reagan Is Obama’s Touchstone

Like Reagan, Obama hopes to usher in a long-term electoral realignment – in Obama’s case toward the moderate left, thereby reversing the 40th president’s political legacy. The Reagan metaphor helps explain the tone of Obama’s inaugural address, built not on a contrived call to an impossible bipartisanship but on a philosophical argument for a progressive vision of the country rooted in our history. Reagan used his first inaugural to make an unabashed case for conservatism.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/re…

Does E. J. Dionne not know that words have meaning?

Reagan was never remotely a conservative, let alone any kind of thinker.  His silly “shining city on a hill” should provide a clue.  The one-time union leader and aging philanderer was clearly a reactionary.  He had more in common with LBJ than most any other president though Reagan’s achievements were enormously destructive while LBJ, despite his enormous flaws, managed the monumental civil rights achievement that reverberates so today.

Both were mainly good at jawboning, something totally beyond Obama’s ken.

One great story involving Al D’Amato, “Senator Pothole,” is illustrative.  I think it was Michael Kinsley, every winger’s liberal so naturally he wasn’t, who told the story.

Al D’Amato was at a private dinner in a restaurant when a waiter told D’Amato he had a call.

When D’Amato got to the phone, Reagan started into his pitch for a vote on approving another missile funding that was hanging in the balance, D’Amato exploded, “Will you quit calling me, you fucking son of a bitch?”  D’Amato had been receiving nuisance calls from some stalker.

When Reagan somehow convinced the fine senator from New York that Al was talking to the President, D’Amato quickly agreed to vote for the missile funding, forgetting entirely about his lengthy shopping list in his embarrassment.

How I wish there were a recording of that conversation as there is with at least some calls by LBJ to some Southern segregationists seeking approval of Johnson’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

Best,  Terry

Mar 29 2010

Tea Party Madness: Old School Prejudice’s Last Stand

At the outset of the Tea Party demonstrations, comparisons were made to The Civil War by myself and other people. In retrospect, this was far too generous a comparison to make. I hardly wish to grant such people so high a compliment, even one rendered ignobly. In much more eloquent terms than I, people have recently dissected the motives and behavior of the mob, and fortunately its crackpot ideology is not as widespread as was the secessionist sentiment in the South in 1860. Those times were the apex of more than two decade’s worth of upheaval and violence, the likes of which we have yet to see since, and which I hope to never see again. It takes more than just one unpopular bill to give people cause to most citizens to arm themselves en masse in open rebellion. Many may not support health care reform, but they feel no compulsion to vandalize offices, spit on legislators, and hurl epithets. These are merely the actions of a few reactionary imbeciles.

The behavior of the Republican Party towards the Teabaggers, by contrast, is what I find most reprehensible. Never was a mutually parasitic relationship more shockingly transparent. The GOP sees the Tea Party as its meal ticket back to power and will never condemn its tactics outright since doing so risks losing its endorsement. However, it is a slippery slope that Republicans are scaling here, and making a Faustian bargain has proven to be the eventual undoing of many. Fear of change and fear of the unknown is the energy source of this movement, but it goes much deeper than this, too.

Dec 08 2008

Obama’s Team of Reactionaries

Original article, by Tom Eley, via World Socialist Web Site:

In recent weeks, numerous media accounts have referred to President-elect Barack Obama’s cabinet selections as a “team of rivals.” The reference is to a book of the same name by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on Abraham Lincoln’s choices for key cabinet posts after his victory in the 1860 election, when he confronted the secession crisis and then the Civil War.