Posted on 09/08/2009 4:46:11 PM PDT by pissant
Nope. No Worries. No Siree Bob!
Mr. Franks needs to remember that the wave doesn’t
CARE what he thinks about it.
The wave also doesn’t CARE if it
was started by a soft breeze
or by a volcanic eruption but
when it engulfs you
THEN there is a difference.
America had ignored the creeping tendrils of socialism
for a long time, but that time is OVER! Kind of like
athelets foot, you ignore it and scratch
until you really look at it, then WHAM you take action and wipe the stuff out as fast as possible.
America isn’t asleep any longer.
These folks have been sucessfully pulling the wool
over America’s eyes for years and now
their hubris and distain for
so called common folk is going be the cause
of their long overdue demise.
Thomas Franks is The Wall Street Journal’s token liberal journalist. I can’t stand his thinking. Never made any sense.
Anyone who writes this stuff isn’t very intelligent.
1) The banking system that failed is largely a product of the New Deal. Attempts to reform it to match new and modern economic realities were met with fierce resistence from the left, as if it were some kind of progressive holy graile, a relic of FDR worship instead of the life blood of our economy.
2) We’ve been down the Keynesian road before and it doesn’t provide the kinds of economic freedom and opporunity that real freedom does. Just check out historical DOW data from inception to now. Even indexed for inflation there is a stark contrast in performance between the Keynesian period and new classical period starting about 1985.
3) Socialism/Communism/Fascism is a proven failure as economic policy. It has failed everywhere it’s been tried. Each and every time the government becomes a major player in any market that market experiences major failure. Of course this author isn’t trying to suggest that Fannie and Freddie aren’t government entities, or is he? And what about Lehman, Bear, Countrywide and WaMu that were joined at the hip with them? They found out the hard way what happens to the cronies.
4) While capitalism has its own set of issues, which more than likely originate from problems in managing the money supply (market failure injected by the government monoply on money?? go figure) it is by far the most productive system yet.
These idiots really need to come up with something better than stale, tried and failed pages out of the Keynseian playbook. Until they do, they are just driving in the last few nails on our economic coffin and are more of a problem than a cure.
If it cheats like a socialist, if it lies like a socialist, if it schemes like a socialist, if it lusts for power like a socialist, if it is full of meanness and hate like a socialist, and most of all, if it *denies* it is a socialist, it is probably a socialist.
But let's read what AMAZON.COM says about his book, OK?
-----------------------
Following up on his masterly examination of the paradox under which Red Staters consistently vote Republican against their own economic self-interest (WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS?), Thomas Frank sets out to trace the present-day conservative Republican approach to government in THE WRECKING CREW. What he demonstrates is deeply disturbing even though it has remained on display virtually every day of the entire Bush II administration.
According to Frank, the conservative worldview is totally committed to "the ideal of laissez faire, meaning minimal government interference in the marketplace, along with hostility to taxation, regulation, organized labor, state ownership, and all the business community's other enemies. "The conservative movement promotes the interests of business exclusively over all else in accordance with the motto, "More business in government, less government in business." So-called "big government," also tagged as the liberal state, is the enemy; in fact, virtually all government is the enemy, other than the national defense.
Mr. Frank follows the conservative movement from the turn of the Twentieth Century through the Depression and New Deal, focusing most heavily on the movement's rebirth under Ronald Reagan and on into the new millennium. Along the way, he discusses the growth of lobbying as a major force in converting the nation's capital into a massive feeding ground for corporate special interests. Frank also highlights the manner in which conservatives have repeatedly run the country into huge spending deficits in order to "defund the left" while simultaneously politicizing government management positions by favoring ideology over competence. The end result under Republican conservative stewardship is government that demonstrates itself as ineffectual and incompetent, offering but further proof that big government is inherently incapable of working and needs to be outsourced to private, professional concerns who can do the job correctly (and then inevitably failing to do so).
THE WRECKING CREW is filled with fascinating side observations, such as its note that the movement has always lionized bullies, from Joe McCarthy to Bill O'Reilly, from Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay to George Allen and Michelle Malkin (whom Frank describes hilariously as "a pundit with the appearance of a Bratz doll but the soul of Chucky"). The book's most effective and outrage-generating section has to be its chapter on the Marianas Island of Saipan. Frank casts Saipan, with all its corruption, nepotism, income inequity, slave labor sweatshops, and local political control exercised in the name of big business as the perfect and ultimate model of the conservative movement ideal, a truly horrific prospect. He also notes, properly, that the morass that is today's Iraq is equally a product of the attempt to force fit these same free market ideals to a foreign country, implemented (so the Bush Administration hoped) by inexperienced, wet-behind-the-ears young idealogues, home-schooled ultra-Christians with college degrees from the likes of Patrick Henry College, Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and Pat Robertson's Regent University. Saipan and Iraq constituted "laboratories of liberty," modern-day "capitalists' dreams" whose realizations are (or at least should be) shameful American nightmares.
There is little good news in THE WRECKING CREW. Author Frank shows that our national government has been hollowed out under Republican conservative control, savaged into an ineffectual husk. Furthermore, he illustrates clearly that this was no mistake, that it is part of a deliberate process not just to privatize government and eradicate government regulation but to make these changes permanent by destroying the liberal left (and with it, of course, the Democratic Party). Frank demonstrates well that present day politics has truly become, to invert von Clausiwitz's famous maxim, "a continuation of war by other means." Regrettably, one side of the battle continues to play the game as politics, as elections won or lost and citizens swayed or not, while the other side approaches it as an act of war, a no-holds-barred contest in which the only goal is the complete and utter destruction of the other side.
THE WRECKING CREW is compelling and informative even as it paints a bleak picture of an America being driven rightward and increasingly toward the excesses and inequities of the pre-New Deal era. We all know how that era ended in October, 1929.
He’s a man whose heart and soul lies in Manhattan, or Seattle, or Santa Cruz.
But see, he’s from KANSAS —he was around normal people his WHOLE LIFE, growing up.
This has left him a bubbling bouillabaisse of vitriolic hatred, and in this article he’s groping for some sense of catharsis.
If you guys up in Portland can stand this scum-bag, he’s appearing tomorrow night for some stupid function, and you could show up and belch, or something:
PORTLAND, OR
Wednesday, Sept. 9
7:00 PM
Powell’s (Cedar Hills Location)
3415 SW Cedar Hills Blvd
Beaverton, OR
We look at the same evidence...and arrive at totally different conclusions as to its meaning. What are self-evident facts to us are rabid, nonsensical opinions to them. What is absolute dogma to them is a delusional vision to us.
Frank prides himself on "knowing conservatives inside out". Yet, with this piece (as with "What's The Matter With Kansas"), he proves he knows literally nothing about anything...and sees much that simply isn't there.
Wrong title, should say:
Conservatives Announce Reds Infiltration - Useful Idiots Try to Belittle Conservatives.
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