Fred Barnes Takes Neocon Stupidity to a New Height

Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard, “Bush and the Republicans aren’t dominant. They’re a minority, but an unusually effective one. One measure of this: At the end of 2007, there will be more American troops in Iraq than when Democrats took over Congress in January.”

From the link:

“the poll numbers for the Democratic Congress are anemic (13 percent approval in the Zogby poll). ”

This is another example of the Republican Noise Machine in action. (Read David Brock’s excellent book of the same name.) Notice that when he’s talking about poor approval numbers now, he uses the word “Democratic”. (Two-fold purpose: 1) blame the Democrats, and 2) finally do what they always asked and use the correct term, instead of saying the “Democrat Congress”.) I’m willing to bet that over the previous six years, if he ever referred to Congress’s low approval ratings (Congress almost always gets low approval ratings), he didn’t call them the “Republican Congress”, just “Congress”.

And another “measure” of his: “Democrats have momentum on no domestic issue, not even health care.” I think this is a flat out lie, and I also think he’s getting paid by the healthcare and/or insurance industries to say it. (No, I have no proof, but I do know Barnes is sleazy when it comes to making arguments.)

Furthermore,

Here’s how Republican Polster Frank Luntz measures success. From the L.A. Times…

• The electorate is the most pessimistic in a generation. Just 19% of Americans believe that the country is headed in the right direction, while 75% believe that things are “off on the wrong track,” according to a “CBS News” national survey conducted last month. Most of the country is in a nasty, irritable mood, and incumbent parties are historically tossed out of power when expectations turn so ugly.

• The president’s approval ratings are barely hovering in the upper 20s, an all-time low, having plummeted since his reelection less than three years ago. In the last 50 years, only Richard Nixon had a lower approval score. And not since Harry Truman in 1948 has a political party maintained the White House with an incumbent so personally unpopular.

• When asked what party they will vote for in the 2008 presidential election — a “generic ballot” question that does not include any candidate names — voters choose the Democrats by a sizable 18 percentage points, according to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey. We haven’t seen such a one-party advantage since the Watergate era.

But then....

I believe that people are now ready to embrace a “peace agenda” (especially the largest bloc of people today - the Baby Boomers). We “should have” learned the lessons of Vietnam but we, obviously, didn’t and have essentially repeated them verbatim in Iraq. When will we learn?

I find this fact fascinating, however: We fought in Vietnam to keep communism influence out of that country (i.e. The Russians are coming/cold war) and now a communist country, China, owns well over 30% of our national debt, which basically means that they own one third of this country. How hypocritical can we, as a nation, get? Amazing stupidity and turn-about, isn’t it? Of course, the Iraq war made all of this possible.

Some years ago a candidate like Dennis Kucinich as his peace agenda would have been derided beyond belief but I am seeing that he is far from chided for his peace beliefs; in fact, I believe that a good percentage of people (those unaffected by fear, that is) are recognizing that it is the ONLY answer to today’s global situation.

War should always be a “last resort” and ONLY if the security of our country is at stake. Clearly, Vietnam and Iraq were imperialistic, offensive attacks - in countries who had nothing to do with our national security whatsoever. Of course, for years the Bush Cabal attempted to spin the drivel that Saddam had something to do with 911 when, in fact, they knew all along that he did not. (They’d have to since it was an inside job, at least to some degree.)

So, the question remains: Have we, as a nation, learned the lesson of war? Have we yet realized that it’s amoral and accomplishes little or nothing? Have we discovered the sad truth about ourselves that, when we allow fear into the equation, we trade our power for the illusion of security and lose both - security and power??

Time will tell but I’m optimistic that what I see out there in the small communities all across this country, is, indeed, the movement of the critical mass of peace consciousness….and it’s moving like a tsunami toward 1600 Penn. avenue.

We know who the traitors to this constitution are. We know what they’ve done to this democracy. And the people will bring them to the justice they deserve soon.

There is no other way when The People flex their collective muscle and take back this flagging democracy.